When the young Scotsman George Marly arrives in Jamaica in 1816, his only ambition is to recover his inheritance. But before long he falls in love with the daughter of Simon McFathom, the unscrupulous attorney whose sharp practices have deprived him of his ancestral estate. Will Marly be able to win back his grandfather's plantation of Happy Fortune and secure the hand of the beauteous Miss McFathom? Written by a Scotsman who had experienced life on a sugar estate at first hand, the novel (originally published in Glasgow at the height of the British debate about colonial slavery) offers us vivid details of the complexities of Jamaican society in the last years of Emancipation.