Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936) was born in London to Anne Elizabeth Elphinstone Fleeming (1828–1925), and Major William Cunningham Bontine [sic] (1825–83), scions of Scotland’s landed patriciate. His principal family inheritance had come through his greatgreat-grandfather, Robert Graham of Gartmore (1735–97), who had made his fortune in Jamaica, and who owned the estates of Gartmore, Ardoch, and Finlaystone. Through various advantageous marriages he was related to several important naval, political, and commercial families, but as a result of inheritances and entails, his family was subject to an array of seemingly interchangeable surnames.

Graham’s father, William, who had received a severe head injury during military service in Ireland, slowly became more disturbed, and by the summer of 1866, after attacking his wife with a sword, he had been put under restraint, but not before he had run up enormous debts. In 1870, at the age of seventeen, Robert, who had been educated at Harrow School and in Brussels, sailed for Argentina in an attempt to rescue his family’s fortunes by cattle ranching, and found himself in the midst of a revolution. This was the first of three abortive business ventures in South America. The second, in 1873, found him in Paraguay, where he sought opportunities in cultivating the yerba-maté plant, the ingredient of a popular local infusion, but his explorations into the interior led to the discovery of abandoned Jesuit missions, which he described in his book A Vanished Arcadia (1901).

After his return to Europe in 1874, and further travels, in 1876 Graham sailed to Uruguay, with the intention of buying horses and selling them to the Brazilian Army, described in his novella Cruz Alta (1900). This enterprise also came to nothing, but subsequently, back in Europe, he met a young woman who styled herself ‘Gabriela de la Balmondière’, a Chilean poetess. They married in London and sailed for the United States in an attempt to set up a mule-breeding enterprise, but after a perilous journey into Mexico by wagon train, their Texan ranch was apparently burned down by Apaches. They returned to Europe in 1881, and lived quietly in Spain and Hampshire, prior to inheriting the family seat of Gartmore on William’s death in 1883.