ABSTRACT
David Hume, who grew up a few miles inland from the small North Sea port of Berwick-upon-Tweed, and whose most westerly adventure was in the course of an expedition to the French port of Lorient, is at first sight a distinctively unAtlantic figure. He was large and plump and indolent; his greatest pleasures were having conversations with women, reflecting on his own sentiments, and ‘reading and sauntering and lownging and dozing, which I call thinking’.1 He was dressed, in the portrait by Allan Ramsay which hung in his house in Edinburgh, and which is now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, in a vast red and gold brocade coat; an elaborate, antiquated, unAtlantic sort of coat.
