P_10433_2735 – Thomas Gowland

D.O.B: 1728 D.O.D:

Thomas Gowland (1728-1779), London merchant, creditor of estates in Jamaica including Springfield in Westmoreland, and sole owner of a slaving voyage from London by the Tartar to Bonny and Jamaica in 1769. This was the West India merchant of the same name ‘conversant in the Jamaica trade ever since the year 1764’, previously captain of a ship trading to Jamaica since 1756, who gave evidence to the Parliamentary enquiry of 1778 into rum contracts in the Americas. His first wife Emma Chamberlayne was the second cousin once removed of Jane Austen. Their son Thomas Gowland Chamberlayne (who appears in his father’s will as Thomas Gowland and to whom his father left £1000 based on his likely support from the Chamberlayne family) became an important English merchant in Buenos Aires.