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Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2021
You must prepare yourself, my dear Angus, for a piece of intelligence which I am sure will surprise you – I am to be married in August to one of my fellow passengers in the Anthony! It is needless to state how the attachment began or give an account of its rise and progress, the upshot of the matter is that the sweetness and modesty (I shall say nothing of beauty) of Katherine van Beusechem completely captivated me – I fancy she possesses all the qualities I have always wished for in a wife, and I am certain of her devotion and attachment to me.
Gillian Maclaine boarded a Dutch frigate, the Anthony, in Rotterdam in the middle of February 1832, and after what he reckoned to be a relatively swift passage to the Indies, arrived off Batavia early in June. For Maclaine personally, and for the business that he had co-founded in Batavia some five years earlier, the voyage was a momentous one. At one and the same time, he found both a wife and a very substantial entry into Dutch official circles in the colony.
Maclaine's projected marriage to Catherina van Beusechem had been the subject, so it would appear, of considerable heart-searching on her future husband's part (of her own feelings, little has survived beyond a formulaic letter to her mother-in-law). There was, of course, the matter of the disparity of their ages, ‘she being only 18 and I alas! nearly 34 – nearly double hers’. More to the point, would his family at Ardtornish be dismayed that he had not married a fellow Scot?
– I think I hear my mother or uncle say ‘We thought Gillian had Home more deeply engraved on his heart than to think of a Foreign connection – or more firmness of mind or purpose, than to get married before settling in his native country or arranging his affairs – Poor Fellow! He has been captivated by the personal attractions of that cunning Dutch girl – merely from being cooped up in the same ship with her – on shore he would never have thought of her.
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