Ayrshire > Volume 2

128 HISTORY OF AYRSHIRE
The first of the Annick Lodge branch, Alexander
Montgomerie, was the second surviving son of Alexander
Montgomerie of Skelmorlie and Coilsfield, and Lillias
Montgomerie, heiress of Skelmorlie, and was born in
1744. The second Laird, who succeeded his father in
1802, was Lieutenant-Colonel of the Ayrshire Yeomanry
Cavalry, and a magistrate and deputy-lieutenant of
Ayrshire. His second son, John Eglinton, entered the
naval service, was present at the capture of the Imperial
Chinese camps at Shanghai, 1854, an d assisted at the
destruction of a large body of pirates at Coulan, in the
island of Tylon, the same year. Captain O'Callaghan,
reporting on his conduct, says, " Lieutenant Mont-
gomerie, senior lieutenant of my own ship, is an officer
in whom I can place the greatest confidence, and I
selected him in consequence for the peculiar and difficult
duty of searching for the pirates at Coulan, in the
execution of which there was much danger of the innocent
suffering. I also, when I thought it was my duty to
quit my ship, felt at my ease, knowing he was on board."
From Lieutenant he rose to be Captain. That he was a
man of varied gifts is evident from the fact that he was
the author of a vocabulary of the American Indians in
the neighbourhood of the Columbia river and Puget's
Sound. Captain Montgomerie's brother, Thomas George,
was a Captain in the Bengal Engineers. When he was
a cadet in 1849 at tne Addiscombe Military Seminary he
won the Pollock Prize, a valuable gold medal presented
by the British inhabitants of Calcutta to the most
distinguished cadet of the season. In 1859 ne was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
The Skelmorlie branch came off the main stock as
early as the middle of the fifteenth century. In the
male line the direct succession went on for three hundred
years, when the estate fell to an heiress, who carried it
on her marriage to her kinsman of Coilsfield, from which
marriage the present Earl of Eglinton is descended.
The sixth and the seventh Lairds were both notable
fighters in the feud. It is said to have been the former