Sir Arthur Dobbs was the Royal Governor of North Carolina but he was born the son of a Protestant refugee at the Scottish port of Girvan in 1689.
In his lifetime he would become prominent as a political figure, an economic analyst, a scientist and a naturalist.
But his story starts with the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite Wars in Ireland.
The Dobbs family home at Castle Dobbs, Carrickfergus, overlooks Belfast Lough, from which could have been seen the fleet of William III’s army making its way towards Whitehouse in June 1690.
William of Orange stepped ashore at the harbour in Carrick on June 14, to be welcomed by the townsfolk.
It had been a different story prior to the successful siege of the castle, held by Jacobite forces until Schomberg’s arrival in 1689.
Prior to that Arthur Dobb’s father Richard had been among the gentlemen of the County Antrim Association plotting to capture the castle, but their plans had come to nothing.
As a consequence of his stance, Captain Dobbs sent his young pregnant wife Mary Stewart to Scotland, where many other women and children from County Antrim were congregating for safety.
The Dobbs family originated in the borders of Chester, Derbyshire and Lancashire and the first to come to Ulster was John, who arrived in 1599 as an officer in the Elizabethan army. John married Margaret Dalway and built a small castle known as Castle Dobbs.
Nearly a century later, momentous events had shaken the British Isles.
The outcome of the Williamite war – a political earthquake for James II and the Jacobite cause – allowed Mrs. Dobbs and her baby to return. A different result would have changed history at a high level and Arthur Dobbs could easily have been lost to the historical record.
But as it transpired an eventful life lay ahead.
When Arthur was seven Jonathan Swift was ministering at Kilroot and Ballynure and he probably attended church along with other members of the Dobbs household, who would have made up the congregation in the strongly Presbyterian hinterland. Dobb’s biographer Desmond Clarke also speculates that it is probable that some of his earlier education was entrusted to Swift.
The young Dobbs had a short army career and acquired a knowledge of engineering and construction which enabled him to engage in mineral prospecting in the Carrick area and also along the Antrim coast where he discovered some workable coal seams.
He also had a considerable interest in astronomy and meteorology. He also methodically studied the life cycle and habits of the honeybee. In September 1725 Dobbs also witnessed, over three separate nights, the aurora borealis from Castle Dobbs, describing it in great scientific detail in a letter to his brother Rev. Richard Dobbs in Dublin and speculating on the phenomenon.
In 1720 Dobbs was appointed High Sheriff of County Antrim and he was subsequently elected Mayor of Carrickfergus, being re-elected in 1728. The previous year he successfully contested the Carrickfergus seat in the Dublin parliament, becoming an MP.
His public life was dominated by his support for improving Ireland’s trade, advocating for an Act of Union, and by encouraging the development of the American colonies.
In 1735 he put forward plans for settling Protestant families from Ireland in North Carolina, and the government took up his ideas. 60,000 acres of land on the Black River were bought and over the next few years considerable tracts were disposed of to speculators including Dobbs.
In 1745 he and Colonel John Selwyn purchased 400,000 acres of land in what includes the present Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Dobbs encouraged tenants in Carrick and Kildare to move across the Atlantic and helped defray the cost of transport as well as on at least one occasion chartering a ship to take emigrants across the Atlantic.
Not surprisingly, Dobbs was appointed the Royal Governor of North Carolina and Clarke says he “…embarked upon his career as Governor with a lively zeal and a genuine desire to do what he could for the good of the colony…He stressed the need for more clergy ‘to instil good principles and morality into the inhabitants and proper schoolmasters to instruct their youth’. He drew attention to the utterly defenceless state of the province, the lack of forts, arms and munitions, and the long undefended coastline. Trade he pointed out, was considerably retarded by a lack of sufficient harbours from which large ships could remove lumber and other exportable products.”
Dobbs purchased a property near Brunswick on the Cape Fear River and built a two-storey structure there and farmed the 60 acres of land. It was here that he excited some notice and ridicule when he married his second wife, 15 year-old Justina Davis in 1762. He was in his seventies. His biographer says that “Despite the gross disparity of age and the certain knowledge of the ridicule their marriage would inspire, Dobbs and his young wife were happy, and her companionship was a solace in his lonely old age.” Three years later, a short time before he planned a return to Carrickfergus to spend his retirement, he suffered a seizure and died two days later in his wife’s arms.
The Dobbs family name continued through the children of his first marriage and he was succeeded by his son Conway Richard Dobbs.
During an eventful life, he had also sought to find the North West Passage to the Pacific Ocean on two separate expeditions. Although unsuccessful in that regard it was as a result of his efforts that the Hudson Bay was thoroughly explored and mapped.
He was, says Desmond Clarke, “an Irishman with a very marked and definite interest in the land of his birth, and he was an economist with ideas much in advance of his times. He was a zealous reformer, a projector, imperialist, and colonial administrator. He was many other things – an engineer and architect, a soldier and a leader, a student and a practical and progressive agriculturalist…”
“He was a thoroughgoing Protestant, and a patriotic Briton who believed implicitly in the constitutional authority of the Crown; the Revolution, the Toleration Act, and the Bill of Rights were his guiding principles.”
Although he failed to find the elusive North West Passage, Dobbs does have a major claim to fame involving the natural world.
The Carrickfergus man discovered the Venus Flytrap, a carnivorous plant which is native to subtropical wetlands on the east coast of the United States in North Carolina and South Carolina. It famously catches its prey—chiefly insects and arachnids—with a trapping structure formed by the terminal portion of each of the plant’s leaves, which is triggered by tiny hairs (called “trigger hairs” or “sensitive hairs”) on their inner surfaces.
When an insect or spider crawling along the leaves contacts a hair, the trap prepares to close, but it only snaps shut if another contact occurs within approximately twenty seconds of the first strike.
On 2 April 1759, the colonial governor, Dobbs penned the first written description of the plant in a letter to English botanist Peter Collinson. In the letter he wrote: “We have a kind of Catch Fly Sensitive which closes upon anything that touches it. I will try to save the seed here.” A year later, Dobbs went into greater detail about the plant in a letter to Collinson dated Brunswick, 24 January 1760:
“The great wonder of the vegetable kingdom is a very curious unknown species of Sensitive. It is a dwarf plant. The leaves are like a narrow segment of a sphere, consisting of two parts, like the cap of a spring purse, the concave part outwards, each of which falls back with indented edges (like an iron spring fox-trap); upon anything touching the leaves, or falling between them, they instantly close like a spring trap, and confine any insect or anything that falls between them. It bears a white flower. To this surprising plant I have given the name of Fly trap Sensitive”.
In 1768 Carl Linneaus, with whom Dobbs was also in contact, came up with the name that has survived best: Venus’s Flytrap.
But it was the Protestant refuge whose Williamite mother was sent to Ayrshire for safety to whom the honours are due…
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