On Thursday, 2 July 1767, the Swallow sighted an island in the Pacific, according to their reckoning, in latitude 20° 2′S. and longitude 133° 21′ W. ‘It is so high,’ wrote Captain Carteret, ‘that we saw it at the distance of more than fifteen leagues; and it having been discovered by a young gentleman, son to Major Pitcairn of the marines … we called it Pitcairn's Island.’ The Swallow paid off in May 1769, and Pitcairn appears to have joined the Aurora, which sailed from England on 30 Sept. After touching at the Cape of Good Hope she was never heard of, and it was supposed that she went down in a cyclone near Mauritius in January or February 1770. Pitcairn's name does not appear in her pay-book, but it is quite possible that he was entered very shortly before she sailed, and was not reported to the admiralty, or that he was a supernumerary for disposal. Carteret stated that Pitcairn was lost in her in a subsequently published ‘Journal’ of the voyage of the Swallow. The island which Pitcairn discovered could not afterwards be found, the reported latitude and longitude being erroneous; but it has been very generally, and no doubt correctly, identified with the island to which the mutineers of the Bounty retired in 1789, and where the survivors and their descendants were found in 1808 and again in 1814 [see Adams, John 1760?–1829]. This is now known as Pitcairn Island.
[Carteret's Journal in Hawkesworth's Voyages, i. 561.]
PITCAIRN, ROBERT (1793–1855), antiquary and miscellaneous writer, second son of Robert Pitcairn, W.S., was born in Edinburgh in 1793. After a sound general education, he was apprenticed to William Patrick, writer to the signet, Edinburgh, and was admitted writer to the signet on 21 Nov. 1815. He was long an assistant to Thomas Thomson, deputy clerk register in her majesty's register house, and in 1853 he was appointed one of the four official searchers of records for incumbrances in that institution. In 1833 appeared an elaborate and exhaustive treatise by Pitcairn, entitled ‘Trials and other Proceedings in Matters Criminal before the High Court of Justice in Scotland,’ 3 vols. 4to. Pitcairn's antiquarian tastes and literary bias commended him to Scott, who was stimulated by one of the narratives in his ‘Criminal Trials’ to write his ‘Ayrshire Tragedy’ (Lockhart, Life of Scott, vii. 202). Scott reviewed the earlier portion of Pitcairn's massive work in the ‘Quarterly Review’ for 1831, lauding his friend's ‘enduring and patient toil,’ and thanking him for his ‘self-denying exertions’ in producing ‘a most extraordinary picture of manners,’ calculated to be ‘highly valuable in a philosophical point of view,’ and containing much that would ‘greatly interest the jurist and the moralist’ (Scott, Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. xxi.) Pitcairn died suddenly of heart-disease in Edinburgh on 11 July 1855.
On 4 Sept. 1839 Pitcairn married Hester Hine, daughter of Henry Hunt, merchant, London.
An industrious and accurate worker, Pitcairn also published:
- ‘Collections relative to the Funeralls of Mary Queen of Scots,’ 1822.
- An edition of ‘Chronicon Cœnobii Sanctæ Crucis Edinburgensis,’ 1828 (Bannatyne Club).
- ‘Families of the Name of Kennedy,’ 1830.
- James Melvill's ‘Diary,’ 1842.
[Edinburgh Evening Courant, 12 July 1855; Scotsman, 14 July 1855; Lockhart's Life of Scott; Hist. of the Society of Writers to H. M. Signet; information from Mr. G. Stronach, Advocates' Library, Edinburgh.]
PITCAIRN, WILLIAM, M.D. (1711–1791), physician, eldest son of David Pitcairn, minister of Dysart, Fifeshire, was born at Dysart in 1711. He studied at the university of Leyden, where he entered on the physic line on 15 Oct. 1734, and attended the lectures of Boerhaave. He took the degree of M.D. at Rheims. His mother, Catherine, belonged to the Hamilton family, and he became private tutor to James, sixth duke of Hamilton, stayed with him at Oxford, and travelled abroad with him in 1742. The university of Oxford gave him the degree of M.D. at the opening of the Radcliffe Library in April 1749. Soon after he began practice in London, and was elected a fellow of the College of Physicians on 25 June 1750. In 1752 he was Gulstonian lecturer, and in 1753, 1755, 1759, and 1762 a censor. He was elected president in 1775, and every year till he resigned in 1785. He was elected physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital on 22 Feb. 1750, and resigned on 3 Feb. 1780. He lived in Warwick Court, near the old College of Physicians in Warwick Lane, in the city of London, and had a very large practice as a physician. On 4 March 1784 he was elected treasurer of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and thenceforward lived in the treasurer's house in the hospital. He had a country residence, with a botanical garden of five acres, in Upper Street, Islington. He was long remembered in St. Bartholomew's, where a ward is still called after him. His sagacious use of opium in fevers was remarkable, and in enteric fever, the entity of which was not then recognised, he no doubt saved many lives which had other--
