Semple Lisle, James George:

$1,750 · Offered by William Reese Company

THE LIFE OF MAJOR J.G. SEMPLE LISLE; CONTAINING A FAITHFUL NARRATIVE OF HIS ALTERNATE VICISSITUDES OF SPLENDOR AND MISFORTUNE.... Second edition, after the first of 1799. The scarce memoirs of a great scoundrel and adventurer, "including a full account of the mutiny on the Lady Shore, in which he was being carried as a convict to New South Wales, and of the adventures of the landing party in their journey to Rio de Janeiro" (Ferguson). James George Semple, who laid claim to the extinct French title of Viscount Lisle, was born in 1759 in Ayrshire, Scotland, the son of a former excise man. In 1775 he left to serve in America, where he was captured in 1776 and soon released. Upon his return to Great Britain in 1777, Semple befriended novelist Eliza Gooch, who chronicled their meeting in her memoirs, "though," he writes, "not quite correctly" (p.3). In 1778, Semple departed for the Continent with the "notorious" Duchess of Kingston, whose goddaughter he had just married, and proceeded, he claims, to have accompanied Frederick the Great on his 1778 campaign, met with Catherine the Great, traveled with Prince Potemkin to the Crimea, and designed a uniform for the Russian Army. After additional travels in Denmark and Prussia, Semple returned to England and was arrested and sentenced to seven years' transportation for "obtaining goods by false pretenses" (DNB). His sentence was commuted with the provision that he leave England, and he soon found himself in Paris, serving on General B

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