Sir Robert Baird, 1st Baronet

[7] Baird was Dean of Guild in Edinburgh in 1674 and sent convicted persons to work in the Correction House spinning and carding wool under the supervision of Robert Stansfield, a member of a textile making family from Wakefield in West Yorkshire.

[13] In November 1666, the Burgh Council of Edinburgh asked Robert Baird to consult on Captain Tennent's bill to transport vagabonds to Virginia.

[14] In 1669 Robert Baird was a partner with the architect William Bruce and others in a planned voyage to New York with two ships, the Hope and the James of Leith.

The owners of the Hope planned to transport "strong and idle beggars, vagabonds, egyptians, common and notorious whores, thieves and other dissolute and loose persons" voluntarily recruited from prisoners held in the tolbooths of Scotland.

[17] Baird issued money to settlers, mostly recruited in south-west Scotland,[18] and to Patrick Crawford, a mariner who was sent to Carolina to make a survey and map of the coast and area around the Ashley River for the undertakers or investors.

[21] This scheme was abandoned partly as an indirect result of the discovery of the Rye House Plot, as some of the undertakers and partners of the Carolina Company including John Cochrane of Ochiltree, George Campbell of Cessnock, and Patrick Hume of Polwarth fell under suspicion.

[26] In 1684, a short-lived Scottish colony was founded called "Stuarts Town" possibly near Beaufort, South Carolina or Port Royal Island.

[28][29][30] One of the Scots colonists, William Dunlop, negotiated with a Yamasee leader Matamaha and in May 1686 recommended the importation of enslaved African people from Barbados.