Historian James Cant is exploring whether the fair-skinned residents of Treasure Beach, Jamaica, descend from Scottish sailors whose ship sank offshore in the 1830s.
Cant, piecing together what might have happened from oral history, speculates: "The Scottish sailors - perhaps understandably - decided that settling in this area and marrying beautiful Jamaican women was preferable ... . So they stayed, they settled and they married - thus giving so many of the people of Treasure Beach their distinctive features."
"Dialect, in particular, will be fascinating to look at and I expect that much of the dialect in Treasure Beach will be linked back to the kind of Lowland Scots' dialect that was spoken in Scotland two hundred years ago." [Link]
