Further documents will be posted if readers wish. Hunting the invisible Gilbert Imlay is one of the almost impossible challenges of Wollstonecraft biography, but he makes an unexpected appearance in a letter from Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, to an associate of Imlay’s London agent Mr Cowie. The latter had funded Mary Wollstonecraft on the basis of her expectations from the silver ship, the only Imlay venture in which she participated. The letter contains surprising information about big money due to be recovered from a venture that supposedly went wrong. A vital clue in the attempt to unravel the mystery of what happened to the silver. Joel Barlow, the American poet, was Imlay’s business associate, and participated in the mystery of the silver ship. An earlier letter to a stranger, written from Paris as one gentleman to another, shows Barlow selling frontier land to French dupes, and salving his conscience by asking assistance for them from this stranger who has no real inducement to offer it.
