In 1774-1776, she sailed from Burntisland in Fife board The Jamaica Packet to St. Kitts and Antigua, in the West Indies, then to North and South Carolina, returning to Edinburgh via Portugal in 1776. She kept a journal of her travels which was discovered in the British Library in 1904 and published as Journal of a Lady of Quality Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal in the Years 1774 -1776. On her travels she would experience storms at sea off Fair Isle, compare the slave-laboured sugar plantations to the improving East Lothian farms, witness the onset of the American Revolution in Cape Fear, and its effects on her family and friends, and marvel at the Christmas pageantry and processions in Portugal.