Solvathius Forbes, IV

As the West family was supposed to have shot to prominence in the early Eighteenth Century, the author put a lot of research into finding people they would have been likely to marry. From the beginnings of our experience as British colonies, certain families emerged as the local high societies. There were the First Families of Virginia, the First Families of South Carolina, and so forth. Today, there is even a National Society Daughters of the American Colonists. The Boston Brahmins are sort of in this category of groups, although many of the major Boston families came to prominence after the American Revolution and during the slave trade or tea trade with China. One of those families were the Forbes of Boston. Now, the first Forbes ancestor was not in what would become the United States until 1740, but while researching the family, the author came across the name Solvathius. Solvathius just sounded like a name that needed resurrection.

In initial drafts of the first volume, Intrusion (1711) and The Indian Wars (1711-1715) chapters existed in a very different format. Instead of having Matthew West decide to interfere in Intrusion and then having the story taken up by Thomas Ramsey, Intrusion had a name to encompass the whole of the Tuscarora War. After deciding to act, Matthew West got together a train of his Westron Blacks loaded with rifles, powder, bullets, etc. and rode into the capital of the North Carolina Colony to volunteer his services in leading the army against the Tuscarora. The first person he encounters as he is riding into town is Solvathius Forbes, IV, an immigrant from Aberdeenshire who happens to stand six-foot-six-inches tall and have red hair. Since West is six-foot-eight with red hair, they hit it off quickly, and Forbes winds up as one of West's officers and later as his son-in-law. The author was never satisfied with those chapters, and eventually rewrote them into their current format. Forbes is mentioned in The Indian Wars and again in later chapters.

Solvathius Forbes, IV is wholly fictional. Although the name is based on a legendary ancestor of the Forbes family, to the author’s knowledge, the name Solvathius was not used by any of the Forbes after the ninth century. There is an apparently recessive set of genes running through some Scots families that will produce very tall children occasionally, as happened with William Wallace and with other people the author has known.

So, who was Solvathius Forbes, IV? He immigrated to North Carolina Colony from Aberdeenshire, Scotland as a young man. He was in Bath, NC by age nineteen when he met Matthew West. As already mentioned, he became one of West’s officers during the Indian Wars and later joined him in adventures against the Spanish that would earn West his British titles. He also taught at the Fortress after that institution was opened, as can be seen in the Engineering a New Tomorrow (1728) chapter in the first volume. He married West’s eldest daughter, Lydia. He died at the age of forty-one, leaving behind nine children, one of whom was Solvathius Forbes, V, known to the family as Quintus, thus continuing a nifty name that will be passed on to many of his descendents and the children of other West family members upon whom Solvathius Forbes, IV had an influence.