"The Fair American" in Deal 1757, English novel 1767, Ohio immigration 1795-1830

[TropiConsul]

From The London Chronicle, February 10, 1757:  "Ship News. Deal, Feb. 7. Wind S.W. Came down his Majesty's Sloop Badger; the Fair American, Currie, A Transport for America; the Adventure, Hossack...

Questions:
1. By "transport" are we to understand a ship on which one booked passage, or a forcible transportation of prisoners? 
2. From whence does the owner obtain the name "The Fair American"?   Do you know where the name comes from? In 1767 the English novelist Arthur Young wrote "The Adventures of Emmera, or the Fair American." In this novel Arthur Young depicted the Ohio territory as a kind of paradise of beautiful landscape and agricultural bounty. Six years later he wrote "Observations on the Present State of the Waste Lands of Great Britain, Published on the Occasion of a New Colony on the Ohio". Arthur Young never crossed the Atlantic, but he might have contributed to the creation of a land rush that could be compared to those that later took place in Texas, California, and Oklahoma.  "Twenty-first-century scholarship has established that Emmera is part derivative fantasy, part nostalgic projection, concocted by a man who never stepped foot in the American colonies, eighteenth-century readers could have imagined otherwise. Furthermore, the novel had eighteenth-century readers in the colonies as well as in England—on the eve of the American Revolution, this novel celebrating America as an idealized space still open to the kind of small, independent farmers who were fast disappearing in England circulated in the American colonies (in English-produced copies) shortly after its publication in England. When Lewis Nicola opened the first commercial lending library in Philadelphia on September 10, 1767, for example, he advertised the work as newly
arrived from London and available for borrowing (Wolf 1988,193). The conclusion of Emmera, like Kimber’s Mr. Anderson, imagines that some colonials might choose America in preference to a return to England.” -- The Beginnings of the American Novel by Melissa J. Homestead (2008).

At the following link you will find many references to ships named “The Fair American” and none of them predate 1776.  I can only assume the phrase assumed popularity in some published fashion.

http://www.shipindex.org/ships/fair_american

[TropiConsul]

“The Adventures of Emmera”.  The novel may be virtually unknown today, but it was big stuff in its heyday.  The novel was reviewed by James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, and by Tobias Smollet, the Scottish author of “Roderick Random”.  Smollet was famous for being a violently contentious author and reviewer.  In one of his last works he was particularly scathing in his opposition to the emigration of Scots to America.  In his view, the intelligence and industry of Scots would be better employed in the reconstruction of their native economy.  Sir Walter Scott wrote of Smollet:

"Smollett's warmth of temper involved him in an unpleasant embarrassment. A person, called Peter Gordon, after having been saved by Smollett's humanity from imprisonment and ruin, and after having prevailed upon him to interpose his credit in his behalf to an inconvenient extent, withdrew within the verge of the court, set his creditors at defiance, and treated his benefactor with so much personal insolence, that Smollett chastised him by a beating. A prosecution was commenced by Gordon, and his counsel, Mr. Home Campbell, whether in indulgence of his natural rudeness and impetuosity, of which he had a great share, or whether moved by some special enmity against Smollett, opened the case with an unusual torrent of violence and misrepresentation. But the good sense and impartiality of the jury acquitted Smollett of the assault, and he was no sooner cleared of the charge than he sent an angry remonstrance to Mr. Home Campbell, demanding that he should retract what he had said to his disadvantage. It does not appear how the affair was settled, but Smollett's manifesto, as a literary curiosity, is inserted in the Appendix to this Memoir. Besides that this expostulation is too long for the occasion, and far too violent to be dignified, Smollett imputes to Campbell the improbable charge, that he was desirous to revenge himself upon the author of Ferdinand Count Fathom, because he had satirized the profession of the law. Lawyers are seldom very sensitive on this head, and if they were, they would have constant exercise for their irritability; since scarce a satirical author, of whatsoever description, has concluded his work, without giving cause to the gentlemen of the robe for some such offence, as Smollett supposes Campbell to have taken in the present instance. The manifesto of Smollett contains, however, some just censure on the prevailing, mode in which witnesses are treated in the courts of justice in England, who, far from being considered as persons brought there to speak the truth in a matter wherein they have no concern, and who are therefore entitled to civil treatment, and to the protection of the court, on the contrary are often regarded as men standing forward to perjure themselves, and are therefore condemned beforehand to a species of moral pillory, where they are pelted with all the foul jests which the wit of their interrogators can suggest."