Robert Charles Dallas

Robert Charles was born illegitimate, and his parents eventually married in 1769, in England, after John Hewitt's death.

[5] Robert Charles Dallas was educated at Musselburgh, in Scotland, and under James Elphinston at Kensington, London.

He entered the Inner Temple, but on coming of age went to Jamaica to take possession of the estates which he had inherited, and became an official there.

[1] Dallas lived on the continent of Europe, moving to the United States of America when the French Revolution occurred.

In part a general history of Jamaica, which was written by John Browne Cutting,[8] the book concentrated on the Second Maroon War and the subsequent deportations of the Jamaican Maroons of Cudjoe's Town (Trelawny Town) to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

[9][10] James Robertson the surveyor and cartographer made a map of the Cockpit Country for the book.

[6] Dallas has been identified as also the author of the anonymous travel book A Short Journey in the West Indies (1790), mainly about Jamaica, which makes anti-slavery and anti-planter remarks.

[2] The Monthly Review commented that the author was cashing in on public interest in the slavery question, and had exaggerated the hardships.

[13] James Stephen, who was aware of Dallas's authorship of A Short Journey, regarded The History of the Maroons as a defence of slavery against his own book The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies (1802).

[1] Extracts from the Recollections appeared in The Courier, in November 1824, but about a month behind Thomas Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron.

[6] There was a French version, and his son Alexander Dallas had the book published in 1825, in Paris, beyond the English court's jurisdiction, if also much changed.

[1] Dallas married Sarah, daughter of Benjamin Harding of Hacton House, Essex; Rev.