In what character he had visited the West Indies was a matter about which his contemporaries differed.

His friends said that he had been a missionary; his enemies that he had been a buccaneer.

He seems to have been gifted by nature with fertile invention, an ardent temperament and great powers of persuasion, and to have acquired somewhere in the course of his vagrant life a perfect knowledge of accounts.
This man submitted to the government, in 1691, a plan of a national bank; and his plan was favourably received both by statesmen and by merchants.

But years passed away; and nothing was done, till, in the spring of 1694, it became absolutely necessary to find some new mode of defraying the charges of the war.

Then at length the scheme devised by the poor and obscure Scottish adventurer was taken up in earnest by Montague.