As Lawrence’s condition deteriorated, he decided to gamble on a trip to Barbados, hoping the tropical warmth would revive him; at the time, people with consumption flocked to Barbados as an open-air sanatorium. Because Lawrence’s wife had just given birth to a daughter, it again fell upon George, nineteen, to accompany his thirty-three-year-old brother, acting as both nursemaid and companion. So grave was Lawrence’s prognosis that the brothers braved a season of severe hurricanes in the West Indies. On the boat to Barbados, George kept a ship’s log, in which he documented heaving seas and blustery weather. After an exceptionally rough thirty-seven-day passage, the ship docked at Barbados on November 3, 1751. In short order, Lawrence was examined by a Dr. William Hillary, who delivered the hopeful opinion that Lawrence could be saved.

This reprieve provided a fleeting opportunity for George to relish his only trip outside of North America. As the two brothers rode outside of town in “the cool of the evening” to seek their new lodgings, George seemed enraptured by the profuse tropical flowers and foliage and extolled the “beautiful prospects which on every side presented to our view the fields of cane, corn, fruit trees etc. in a delightful green.”³⁶ His senses came alive to the island’s sights and sounds. He savored avocado and pineapple for the first time and marveled at the most gargantuan collection of fruits he had ever seen heaped on a dinner table. When he attended a melodrama by George Lillo entitled The London Merchant, it was probably his first taste of a professional stage production, marking the start of a lasting fondness for theater.

The two brothers rented rooms outside Bridgetown from a Captain Croftan, the commander of Fort James, who introduced them to island society. Aside from early morning rides with George, Lawrence was too debilitated to engage in much activity. In his despondent letters home, he bewailed their situation—“We soon tire of the same prospect. We have no bodily diversions but dancing”—even as George was enchanted by the social whirl.³⁷ From his window, the young man surveyed ships gliding by in Carlisle Bay and watched soldiers execute drills. He also appraised the island’s fort with the critical eye of a future general. “It’s pretty strongly fortified,” he wrote in his diary, “and mounts about 36 guns within the fortifications.”³⁸

Even amid the trip’s escapist pleasures, George had a conspicuous habit of improving himself, turning everything into an educational opportunity. He took copious notes on a multitude of topics. Curiously, the sole reference to slavery concerned the sensational trial of a slave owner, Colonel Benjamin Charnock, who was acquitted of raping his maid. George bore little sympathy for Charnock, as revealed by his reference to him as a man of “opulent fortune and infamous character.”³⁹ The most intriguing diary entry contains shrewd observations on the leadership style of the Barbados governor, with George noting that “as he avoids the errors of his predecessor, he give[s] no handle for complaint. But, at the same time, by declining much familiarity, [he] is not overzealously beloved.”⁴⁰ The proper degree of familiarity between governors and the governed would be an absorbing preoccupation throughout his career. George Washington, too, would decline familiarity and sometimes inspire more respect than outright love.

Just two weeks after arriving on Barbados, George started running a high fever and contracted a savage headache, evidence that he had been “strongly attacked with the smallpox,” as he noted in his diary.⁴¹ Within a few days ghastly red pustules erupted across his forehead and scalp. For three weeks the feverish young man, confined to bed, was nursed back to health by the “very constant” presence of Dr. John Lanahan.⁴² Before long, the pustules turned to scabs, then dropped off altogether, leaving a smattering of reddish-brown spots. For the rest of his life, George’s nose was lightly pitted with pockmarks, a defect discreetly edited from many sanitized portraits. The smallpox siege ended with his complete recovery on December 12, 1751. In retrospect, George’s brush with a mild case of smallpox was a fantastic stroke of luck, furnishing him with immunity to the most virulent scourge of eighteenth-century armies.

Exactly one week after his recovery, George returned home to Virginia aboard a ship, the Industry, and endured yet another wrenching, storm-tossed journey. To compound his woes, as he succumbed to seasickness, a seaman filched his money while he lay dozing. By the time his ship made landfall in Yorktown in late January, George must have had an aversion to sea voyages, for he never essayed one again. He stopped off in Williamsburg, armed with letters of reference to Robert Dinwiddie, the new lieutenant governor, who invited him to dine and was to emerge as a prominent new mentor. George then hurried off to Mount Vernon to relay to Ann the dreadful news that Lawrence still languished in Barbados with no relief from his illness. Lawrence clung to one last wispy hope: that a stay in Bermuda would work the magic that had failed to materialize in Barbados, and he compared himself grimly to “a criminal condemned, though not without hopes of reprieve.”⁴³

With his brother marooned in Bermuda, George returned to surveying near his Bullskin Plantation in northern Frederick County and further supplemented his holdings there. Perhaps because his immune system was compromised after his bout of smallpox, George suffered yet another frightening illness, a “violent pleurisy” that must have petrified him with the prospect that he, too, had developed tuberculosis.⁴⁴ Though an exceptionally muscular and vigorous young man, he was susceptible to the many illnesses that ran freely in eighteenth-century Virginia.

In a bizarre piece of timing, George attempted a bit of courtship from his sick-bed. He sought to win the hand of sixteen-year-old Elizabeth “Betsy” Fauntleroy, whose father was a luminary in Richmond County. The adolescent George seemed to daydream about one rich, unattainable girl after another. Having now recovered from the charms of the “Low Land Beauty,” he was stalking bigger game. From a letter that he wrote to William Fauntleroy, Betsy’s father, we can see that the girl had already rejected his advances. As George apprised the father, he intended “as soon as I recover my strength to wait on Miss Betsy in hopes of a revocation of the former, cruel sentence and see if I can meet with any alteration in my favor.”⁴⁵ Unfortunately we do not have the father’s response to this letter, leaving us to wonder whether Fauntleroy scoffed at George as a bumptious parvenu who aspired above his social rank.

Fate was about to hand George some advantages that would bring such a lofty marriage within his grasp. Lawrence’s hope that Bermuda would rejuvenate him turned out to be his last illusion: returning to Virginia, he died at Mount Vernon on July 26, 1752. For George, his brother’s death at age thirty-four was emotionally equivalent to the death of a second father and possibly more devastating. He had identified with Lawrence, shared in his professional life, and participated intimately in his terminal illness. Lawrence left his affairs in such a disorderly state that George, as an executor, bewailed their being in “the utmost confusion.”⁴⁶ Luckily, the debts proved manageable, and Lawrence’s death provided another bonanza for George, on whom windfalls showered at the most implausible moments. In his will, Lawrence bequeathed to him three parcels of land in Fredericksburg. Far more consequential was a clause stipulating that, if Ann and their infant daughter died without an heir, George would inherit the 2,500 acres of Mount Vernon and adjoining properties “in consideration of the natural love and affection” which Lawrence had borne “unto his loving brother George Washington.”⁴⁷ At the time of Lawrence’s death, this eventuality seemed a distant prospect, many decades away, if ever.