found his income insufficient. Whiston says that Gordon having been found deficient in his accounts was dismissed from the Society for the Encouragement of Learning, and his effects seized on. However this may be, he sailed for South Carolina in August 1741, as secretary to James Glen, F.S.A., the newly appointed governor of that province. There he eventually prospered. From the recorded copy of a deed still extant at Charleston it appears that one Hamerton, the registrar of the province, farmed out his office to Gordon, and by this deed appointed him his attorney to transact all the business and receive all the fees of the office. There is also among the recorded conveyances one of a large lot of land in Charleston to him, dated 28 March 1746; and in his will he devised to his son and daughter a lot of land in Ansonborough, South Carolina, and all the houses erected thereon. He still kept up a desultory correspondence with Sir John Clerk (Stukeley, i. 439, iii. 434), to whom he confessed himself ‘vastly weary’ of colonial life. To the Royal Society he sent an elaborate description of the natural history of South Carolina, which was not read until 25 May 1758 (ib. iii. 476). Nor was it printed in the ‘Philosophical Transactions.’ On 22 Aug. 1754 Gordon, ‘being sick and weak of body,’ made his will at Charleston. To his son, Alexander, an attorney of Charleston, he bequeathed his own portrait, painted by himself, together with other of his paintings. He also strictly enjoined him to publish his manuscript ‘Essay towards illustrating the History of … the Ancient Egyptians.’ The essay was never printed, and is preserved in the British Museum, Addit. MS. 8834, having been purchased in March 1831. Gordon's wife is not mentioned in his will. He died before 23 July 1755, when the devisees under his will executed a conveyance of land in South Carolina. His daughter, Frances Charlotte Gordon, appears to have been married, on 30 May 1763, to John Troup, a Charleston attorney. None of his descendants are now known to survive in South Carolina. The traditions of the Penicuick family represent Gordon as a grave man, of formal habits, tall, lean, and usually taciturn. Beaupré Bell [q. v.] made a bust of him after an original given by Gordon to Sir Andrew Fountaine's niece (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. v. 280).
The ‘Itinerarium,’ the vade mecum of all Roman antiquaries of that day, was a favourite with Sir Walter Scott, who has immortalised it in ‘The Antiquary’ as that prized folio which Jonathan Oldbuck undid from its brown paper wrapper in the Hawes fly or Queensferry diligence.
[Wilson and Laing's Papers in Proceedings of Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, x. 363–82; Wilson's Alexander Gordon, the Antiquary; Chalmers's Biog. Dict., xvi. 104–5; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. vii. 514, viii. 279; Addit. MSS., 4308, 4046, 6190, 6211, f. 51.]
GORDON, Sir ALEXANDER (1786–1815), lieutenant-colonel, was third son of George Gordon, lord Haddo, and grandson of George Gordon, third earl of Aberdeen. His mother was Charlotte, youngest daughter of William Baird of Newbyth, and sister of Sir David Baird. He was brother of George Hamilton Gordon, fourth earl of Aberdeen [q. v.], of the Right Hon. Sir Robert Gordon, diplomatist [q. v.], and of Lieutenant-colonel the Hon. Sir Charles Gordon 42nd highlanders, who died at Geneva 30 Sept. 1835 (see Gent. Mag. new Ser. iv. 667). He was born in 1786, educated at Eton, and in 1803 was appointed ensign in the 3rd foot guards (now Scots guards), in which be became captain and lieutenant-colonel on 23 Aug. 1813. He served as aide-de-camp to his maternal uncle, General Sir David Baird [q. v.], at the recapture of the Cape of Good Hope in 1806, and to General Beresford with the force sent from the Cape to the Rio Plata [see Beresford, William Carr, Viscount]. He was employed by Beresford to treat with the Spanish authorities at Buenos Ayres. Afterwards he was again aide-de-camp to Baird at the capture of Copenhagen in 1807, and in Spain in 1808-9, including the battle of Corunna. In 1810 he was appointed aide-de-camp to Lord Wellington, in which capacity his brother Charles, then likewise a subaltern in the 3rd foot guards, also was employed for a time. Gordon served throughout the Peninsular campaigns. He brought home the despatches announcing the fall of Ciudad Rodrigo and was frequently mentioned in the despatches on other occasions (see Gurwood, vols. iii. iv. and v.) He received ten medals for general actions, and was made K.C.B. He was aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington in Belgium, and received a mortal wound (thigh shattered) while rallying a battalion of Brunswickers, near La Haye Sainte, on 18 June 1815. He died a few hours after. Wellington alludes to him as an officer of great promise and a serious loss to the army (ib. viii. 154). Gordon appears to have been a great favourite in Brussels, and the principal residents in the city desired to bear the cost of the column erected to his memory on the field of Waterloo by his surviving sister and brothers.
