And one of the characters is also a predecessor of yours.

So our main character is a young scientist who was signed up to go by the first Geographer Royal for Scotland.

And I'm the sixth Geographer Royal for Scotland.

And so we wrote the book as a series of letters from our character, Dr. James Wallace, to the first Geographer Royal, Robert Sybald, and also to his wife, Eliza, who was going to join him in a later expedition.

That was the mechanism.

The vision came from one man, Mr William Paterson.

Mr Paterson had already proved himself a noble leader in his founding of the Bank of England.

Mm-hmm.

And it went wrong, but more than that, they'd kind of bet the house on it, hadn't they?

Yeah, I mean, people got so enthusiastic about Paterson's idea.

I mean, he was a really good salesman and he had this great vision that...

I mean, he was kind of a man ahead of his time that global trade would provide wealth for everyone.

Everyone would benefit.

I mean, I think with hindsight, we might now look at those sorts of overseas expansion with a different eye.

But at that point, there was that sense that this could provide wealth for everyone.

What do you think?

Ah.

Uh, at the moment, you know, we can look back, we read the history books, and we think, "This happened in Derry, therefore we had union, therefore Scotland's never quite strong enough to go it alone.

We've carried that with us ever since." But you look at the moment, and there's so many small things that could easily have tipped that story into a different direction.

And I think it, I think it's quite powerful because it, it opens up history.

It opens up possibility.

It challenges that idea that there was an inevitability to us being where we are at the moment.

Yeah.

... it's like something out of Robert Louis Stevenson, and God knows Robert Louis Stevenson was one of our greatest writers.