Darien E-Book

John McKendrick

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 575

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Company of Scotland and its attempts to establish the colony of Caledonia on the inhospitable isthmus of Panama in the late seventeenth century is one of the most tragic moments of Scottish history. Devised by William Paterson, the stratagem was to create a major trading station between Europe and the East. It could have been a triumph, but inadequate preparation and organization ensured it was a catastrophe - of the 3000 settlers who set sail in 1688 and 1699, only a handful returned, the rest having succumbed to disease, and the enormous financial loss was a key factor in ensuring union with England in 1707. Based on archive research in the UK and Panama, as well as extensive travelling in Darien itself, John McKendrick explores this fascinating and seminal moment in Scottish history and uncovers fascinating new information from New World archives about the role of the English and Spanish, and about the identities of the settlers themselves.

Leseprobe

DARIEN

First published in 2016 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © John McKendrick 2016

The moral right of John McKendrick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored or transmitted in any form without the expresswritten permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 78027 320 4eISBN 978 0 85790 261 0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, NewtonmorePrinted and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta

For

VLADIMIR ANTONIO

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of the Major Ships

Map

1.

Introduction

2.

A Plan Is Formed

3.

The Company of Scotland

4.

From the Old World to the New

5.

Tierra Firma

6.

The Republic of Panama

7.

Settling In

8.

Darien

9.

The First Expedition Departs

10.

Hope Reborn: The Second Expedition

11.

The Caribbean

12.

The Fall of Caledonia

13.

South Carolina and Georgia

Epilogue

The Historical Context

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The beach at Punta Escocés

Punta Escocés from the bay

Arriving by plane to the Kuna Yala

The island of Mulutupu

Mulutupu houses

By cayuco to Punta Escocés

View of the bay from New Edinburgh

The site of Fort St Andrew

The defensive canal dug by the Caledonians

Artefacts recovered at the site of Caledonia

Aerial view of Punta Escocés

Port Royal, Kingston, Jamaica

St Andrew Parish Church, Jamaica

Admiral John Benbow

The gravestone of Admiral Benbow, Kingston

A water tank in Darien, Georgia

James Island Church, Charleston, South Carolina

The Stobo Bible

Carlos II

The author in the Darien province of Panama

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people to thank who helped me to write this book. I would particuarly like to thank the editorial team at Birlinn: Andrew, Deborah and Helen. I would also like to thank the staff of the National Archives in Panama City for their patience and the staff at the National Archives of Scotland. Jim Malcolm deserves a huge thanks for his encouragement in Panama and since, and particular thanks for the use of his stunning photographs. Thank you also to the staff at the South Carolina Historical Society. I would also like to particularly thank the people on the island of Jamaica, who never failed to smile and the people of the isthmus of Panama, who whilst not always friendly, deserve my gratitude. Thanks also to my mother and father and Vladimir, who all encouraged and inspired me in different ways.

LIST OF THE MAJOR SHIPS

FIRST EXPEDITION

Saint Andrew, captained by Robert PennecuikCaledonia, captained by Robert DrummondUnicorn, captained by Robert PinkertonDolphin, captained by Thomas FullartonEndeavour, captained by John Malloch

SECOND EXPEDITION

Rising Sun, captained by James GibsonDuke of Hamilton, captained by Walter DuncanHope of Bo’ness, captained by Richard DallingHope, captained by James Miller

A SELECTION OF THE RELIEF SHIPS

Ann of CaledoniaDispatchOlive BranchHopeful Binning

ONE

INTRODUCTION

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;Round man-y western islands have I beenWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.Oft of one wide expanse had I been toldThat deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;Yet did I never breathe its pure sereneTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:Then felt I like some watcher of the skiesWhen a new planet swims into his ken;Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyesHe star’d at the Pacific – and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmise –Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

There has always been confusion about Darien. John Keats made the unforgivable mistake of placing the wrong sharp-eyed conquistador upon a peak in Darien in his poem ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. If Panamanians read romantic English poetry (most don’t) they would be horrified: Balboa stood on that slippery peak, not Cortez, and is revered in Panama as the country’s founding father, immortalised by having not only the currency named after him, but more importantly a local beer.

Who knows if Keats, writing in 1816, knew much about the Scots clambering around the same hills in Darien, but his sonnet could have been written for them. Keats was staggered by his reading of Homer’s Odyssey and Odysseus’s journey, and so too were the Scots staggered by their own journey around ‘western isles’ to ‘stand upon a peak in Darien’ in what they very much hoped would be for them ‘the realms of gold’. Darien was home to the shortlived Scottish colony: the Darien project or the ‘Darien Disaster’ as the late seventeenth-century Scottish colonial venture is often termed. That one-time lonely outpost of Scotland, Caledonia, is no longer in Darien; according to modern Panamanian political geography it is now in the Comarca de Kuna Yala, and there are good grounds to consider it far removed from being a disaster. The failures that befell the Scots in the green jungles of Darien were to push the reluctant Scots down another path, a very different odyssey, that would lead them to greater fame, greater trade and greater riches: the Act of Union. Not all about the Darien Disaster is as it seems.

The story of the Scots and Darien is now well known, if not a stalwart of the history syllabus, and many people have heard of the energetic William Paterson: Caribbean merchant; financier; and author of the Scots’ ‘disaster’ at Darien. His project, on paper at least, was a brilliant one. He planned to establish a trading company in Scotland; to found a colony on the Caribbean side of the isthmus of Panama; to facilitate the exchange of goods between east and west; and create a centre of international trade and commerce and a hub for buying and selling. In the impoverished late seventeenth century, Scots enthusiastically bought into this tropical dream and in doing so heavily mortgaged the nation’s future in Paterson’s scheme. In the face of English commercial opposition to the project, nationalism stirred the patriotism of Scots to considerable heights and the expectations that sailed with the first fleet were as high as the depths of disappointment and despair the very same people would experience shortly thereafter, when the painfully thin survivors limped home from American and Caribbean staging posts. They were the lucky ones. All but one of the once magnificent ships lost, over 2,000 Scots dead and all hope of financial success left lying, rotting in the hot, steamy jungles of Darien.

The first expedition set sail from Leith in 1698 with four ships and one thousand two hundred men. They founded Caledonia, only to abandon it six months later, in the hope of returning home to Scotland, not victims of Spanish aggression, but of disease, ill-discipline and poor leadership. The second expedition arrived six weeks later in mid 1699 to find the deserted settlement. Initially bolstered by a small military victory against the Spaniards at Tubuganti, the colony soon faced the same problems and found itself fatally weakened when the Spanish moved in to dislodge them in early 1700. Caledonia was not to be the panacea for Scotland’s chronic poverty and the underachievement of several centuries. After the heady excitement, the launch of the great undertaking, it must have been with a humiliating sense of foreboding that Scots anticipated from where they might next find salvation.

After the publication of several (now out-of-print) books in the early twentieth century, Darien was largely forgotten, but a resurgence of interest in the Scots colony gathered pace in the late twentieth century. An expedition to the ruins, led by the Royal Geographical Society, took place in 1978; the republication of John Prebble’s book The Darien Disaster in 1999; a BBC documentary in 2003;1 a museum exhibition displayed around Scotland in the 1990s which eventually made it to Panama City in 2005; and the publication of Douglas Watt’s excellent economic history, The Price of Scotland. Darien was also much discussed by those with a historical and political interest in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate. But it has not shed its image of disaster. For many, there can be no other way to see it. Not only did Scotland’s major attempt to compete as an equal with her European rivals end in total disaster (why not attempt if other small nations, such as Holland and Portugal, could succeed?), but worse was to come as the nation’s leadership stumbled forward, heads hung low, into parliamentary union with England – for many a disaster for Scottish identity and public life. For those involved the experience of Darien was distressing and tragic; it financially ruined Scotland and everyone knew someone – a brother, cousin or neighbour – who lost his (or her) life in Darien, or lost their money backing it.

After Darien, Scotland was weakened, vindictive and sore. There was no greater manifestation of this than the hanging of the crew of the Worcester – unfortunates unfairly accused of piracy against the designers of the Darien colonial scheme, the Company of Scotland off the African coast – whose real crime was to be English. The Scots were bitter and blamed English treachery above all for the calamity which befell them.

But in the early eighteenth century, these tumultuous years led to reflection in Scotland, and with reflection came realism and with realism, inevitably, Union. When Scotland dissolved its ancient parliament, she had one fifth of the population of her larger neighbour, but only one fortieth of its economy. She was a European weakling. Darien had brutally demonstrated the shortcomings of Scottish society. When Scotland collectively looked in the mirror, there was a deceptive profile: it had more literate people than almost any other in Europe; the Scots produced good doctors and lawyers, and had more than double the number of English universities, but all the hard work and learning did not instil in the Scots the commercial common sense found in abundance in London or Lisbon, Amsterdam or Antwerp. Scottish trade to the Baltics or London was not large-scale colonial trade and the naivety of those involved in the heady years in Edinburgh leading up to 1698 would soon be replaced by harder men whose experience of English colonial trading would utterly transform Scotland over the next 100 years.

It is hard to imagine the changes that took place in Scottish society between 1680 and 1780: from witchcraft trials and persecution to David Hume and the Enlightenment; from the run-rig farms and poverty to the ‘wealth of nations’ and the riches of the tobacco trade. Scotland was utterly transformed. This was not all due to the Union, and the Union did not come about solely because of the effects of the failure of Darien, but Darien was the defining event during the lives of those who united Scotland with England. These great men had challenged the political order of the times, the English parliament and King William. The English commercial establishment was opposed to the Company of Scotland and reputation and liberty had been risked and political capital lost to support the scheme. Those who determined Scotland’s future were only too well aware of the limitations of continuing alone.

This book is not all history. It partly relies upon other people’s historical research to tell a story. Every historian or writer of this period must rely on the pioneering work of Dr George Pratt Insh, a Scottish academic at the University of Glasgow in the early to mid twentieth century. He wrote extensively on Scotland and her place in the modern world and personally rescued from obscurity many of the papers of the Company of Scotland. Historian’s Odyssey is the title of Insh’s description of his own adventure to put together the documents and create a history of The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. The fruits of his history have largely provided us today with our knowledge of the Company of Scotland. He has been an essential guide for my own mini odyssey. Little did I know as a school boy in Scotland twenty years ago, when I sat in darkened classrooms getting my head around the iambic pentameters of John Keats’ verdant poetry, that I, too, would embark upon my own journey to Darien. This book tells the story of the Scots in Darien with the help of these works and unpublished manuscripts found in Edinburgh and Panama City. It has new insights and relies upon previously unused materials, mostly found in the Panamanian National Archives.2 It sets out the depth of Spanish opposition to Caledonia and the impossibilities of the scheme ever succeeding. It reveals for the first time that the English helped the Caledonians and defended the colony from a military strike by the Spanish Armada de Barlovento (called ‘the Windward fleet’).

This book retraces the steps of those Scots involved in the Darien Scheme, whether it was as directors in Edinburgh, sailors on the voyage to the Panamanian coast, gentleman volunteers arriving at Golden Island, Scots living on the Panamanian isthmus, prisoners in Cartagena, survivors in Jamaica, missionaries in South Carolina, lost interpreters in Cuba or even just young Scots keen to embark on a new adventure. The beholding of these places adds something to the sorry tale of the Caledonians; so much of their history was related to their environment, to the weather, the jungle, the sheer distances involved in their venture. The retracing of the steps is a sorry odyssey leading from the pages of old manuscripts, textbooks and desperate journals to the very same wonders of nature and culture that enthralled and defeated the Caledonians.

I arrived in Panama for the first time in the late summer of 2003. I knew very little about Darien – it was a blurred image of a shady memory of a half-understood history lesson from years before. Ostensibly I had been backpacking around Colombia and Venezuela in the hope of learning some Spanish. In the Venezuelan Andes I led a monastic life in a simple home, spending mornings practising Spanish verbs and afternoons napping and walking. My evenings revolved around inflicting my fledgling Spanish on locals in run-down shops and stuffy cantinas. From the Andes by bus to Caracas and onwards to Ciudad Bolivar (or Angostura as it was known in the days of Bolivar’s British irregulars) my summer was a blur of new towns, air-conditioned buses and minor adventures. I kayaked up to the Angel Falls in a cayuko, wandered around the mighty tepuis and played chess at what seemed like the end of earth: the claustrophobic Venezuelan–Brazilian border, towns like islands in a sea of swamping jungle, incongruously decorated with plastic flowers. In metropolitan Caracas I enjoyed the fleshpots of the city with a friend: parties; meeting diplomats and journalists, all of whom loathed the dangerous Venezuelan capital; and hearty carbohydrate-heavy criollo food. Everywhere loomed the larger-than-life figure of Chavez, part general, part messiah, part crook, part provocateur, all rolled into one all-dominating political and social force; Venezuela was on the edge.

If Caracas was the barracks, they said in Bolivar’s day, Bogotá in Colombia was the university (and Quito in Ecuador the church). The sprawling Colombian capital, airily lodged on the Sabana de Bogotá is cool and cerebral. Ten years ago it was also intense, tumultuous and heavily armed but noted for its progressive policies and fantastic culture. From the capital of Latin America’s most beautiful country I ventured forth: visiting churches and museums; horse-riding in Antioquia; working on a coffee farm in Quindio; supporting the local football team in Medellín and ending up in a small hotel in Santa Marta in northern Colombia. On my birthday I called home, and after wishing me a happy birthday my mother launched into an anxiety-filled tirade against the dangers of travelling in Colombia – her next-door neighbour had hidden insights to share with her about Colombian guerrilla movements. As is so often the case, mothers are right and eight foreign tourists were kidnapped by the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) only days after the call and only a few miles from where I was staying. My luck had run out and my mother’s patience was not to be tried any longer. Unsure where to go, I flew to Panama.

I had not expected to go to Panama. I viewed it as no more than a longish transit, less than three days before heading by bus to Managua, the torpid Nicaraguan capital, but I was there long enough to understand a return visit was a must. Panama City is derided as the Milton Keynes of Latin America, but the reality is somewhat different. A cosmopolitan atmosphere pervades, providing the backdrop to a green city divided between bland high-rise towers and narrow cobbled streets corralled by once-elegant colonial homes. Panama is much more than the sum of its physical parts, this small isthmian country reeks of international espionage and the murky shiftiness for which it has become too well known. In the city, empty, darkened tower blocks populated by invented tenants paying astronomical, money-laundering rents are everywhere; powerful, well-connected law firms discreetly solve their off-shore clients’ problems; expensive restaurants are patronised by Colombians doing deals with Taiwanese businessmen; and floating around the edges of all this, the watchful eyes and ever-listening presence of a large diplomatic community.

Panama is, above all, international. Of course, the Scots know this: it was their idea. William Paterson’s pioneer trading post, rotten in its damp, ill-thought-out foundations is alive and well, if somewhat further along the coast. Panama is still the ‘door to the seas and the key to the universe’ – its canal ensures this, perhaps even more dramatically than the Caledonians could have conceived. Despite the fact that the canal seems to become smaller every day, and eagerly awaits the expansion of its mighty locks, it remains the key shortcut for shipping lanes and the rapid increase in port facilities, banking and other canal and maritime-related services and a large free-trade zone, cast Panama, more or less, as the entrepôt economy the Scots once looked to for national salvation. A strange coincidence then, that Panama celebrated the centenary of its canal in the same year the Scots voted on whether to return to their pre-Darien disaster sovereignty.

My distant history classes probably did not touch upon Darien, but the small panel in the back of my shabby guidebook, which briefly told the tale of Caledonia, whetted my appetite and all around was the development of the idea, touching upon every aspect of Panama’s booming economy. As Keats reminds us, for years odysseys have been launched from the new world to the old: conquistadors and Caledonians; canal constructions workers; traders; bankers; even tailors. The pages that follow pay tribute to the brave steps of the original Caledonians and today’s much less courageous ones in their pursuit.

TWO

A PLAN IS FORMED

It is with regret that Scots must record the invitation sent to a young English would-be surgeon, Lionel Wafer, inviting him to join his brother, then living in Port Royal, Jamaica, in the spring of 1679. Wafer, who had tasted life overseas in the East Indies, needed little convincing and left as soon as he could put together the cost of his passage, and installed himself in his brother’s Port Royal home. On the island he began to develop his limited practice in surgery, or as he might have put it ‘administering Physick and Phlebotomy’. Despite the professionalism of his new career and elevated status, the boredom of life on the island and the excitement of the lives of the buccaneers who regularly sailed to and from this English colonial outpost, tempted Wafer to join them on one of their frequent sorties against the Spanish Main.

It was on one such trip that he was injured and forced to remain with the Indians of Darien for some months. Later escaping and returning to England, he published A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America in 1699, the early, unprinted edition of which fell into the hands of William Paterson, who found what he wanted to read in this exotic account of a jungle paradise and would use it in time to convince himself, and crucially the directors of the Company of Scotland, of the soundness of locating a trading colony on the isthmus of Panama. At the outset there was no inevitability that Panama would be the destination of the Company of Scotland’s trading efforts. Wafer’s text persuaded Paterson, and Paterson persuaded the Edinburgh-based directors of the Company. Wafer’s text changed the course of British history. Wafer’s text was instrumental in creating Great Britain.

The Governor of Jamaica had until recently been the notorious Sir Thomas Moodyford, who had grown rich turning a blind eye to the buccaneers and encouraging privateering against Spanish commercial interests (he would later serve a spell in the Tower of London for his wilful negligence). Spain persisted in its doomed and pointless mercantilist policies outlawing all trade between foreign nations (particularly the heretical English) and its American possessions. Trade was officially limited to a small number of Spanish merchants based in Cadiz and Seville. This stifled competitive pricing and unsurprisingly contraband trade and piracy soon raged across the Caribbean and down the Pacific coast of modern-day Peru and Chile. The English, French and Dutch plundered at will, reaping great rewards with limited risks because of the cumbersome nature of Spanish colonial administration and the poor quality of military defences.

Wafer, having left his island-based medical practice, found himself, in early 1680, on a mission to raid the Spanish Main, with the intention of making off with sacks of Spanish gold and wealthy hostages. A motley crew of buccaneers had appointed him as their doctor. The pirates, some 400 of them, congregated on a little island off the Darien shore and, leaving some men to protect the ships, set off across the isthmus on foot with the intention of attacking the gold-washing station of Santa Maria on the southern Pacific side of modern-day Panama.

Unlike Henry Morgan’s adventures on the isthmus ten years earlier, which pirates thereafter sought to emulate, this lot were to meet with little luck: the Spaniards having heard of their approach had fled from Santa Maria with anything of value, and when the plan was altered to sack the newly founded Panama City, the Spaniards there had also been warned and ships sailed from the town to engage the pirates. As usual the treasure-driven corsairs had the best of it against five ships and three barques and succeeded in capturing the Spanish warship La Santissima Trinidad, yet they appear not to have landed. The pirates were beset with leadership difficulties and their captain, Coxon, in a fit of pique, set back across the isthmus when rumours of his cowardice in joining the Spaniards in battle off the coast of Panama reached him. His replacement, Captain Sawkins, did not last long: he was killed in an attempt to take Puebla Nueva, and facing so many obstacles the pirates became disorganised and split again, with another group returning across the isthmus whilst another, led by Bartholomew Sharp, sailed south to attack the shipping off the coast of the Vice-Royalties of Lima and Gran Colombia.

Wafer was sorely disappointed. As the surgeon he was kept busy as the body-count mounted, and yet he was no closer to the riches he had dreamed of. He chose to remain in the Pacific to see what else might turn up and was accompanied by another famous pirate, William Dampier, who wrote more extensively of his trips than Wafer.1 Dampier is the better known of the two, partly thanks to his claim to have discovered Australia around a hundred years before James Cook and partly because of his descriptions of the Galapagos Islands one hundred and fifty years before Charles Darwin arrived to write about evolution. Dampier was the more seasoned pirate and had toughened himself up by spending some time with logwood cutters in the Bay of Campeche logging dye-rich trees. In 1776 a hurricane struck the bay and Dampier, determined to make his fortune, reasoned the hard work was not worth the returns and threw his hat in with the pirates. Wafer and Dampier found themselves together with no real prospects on the Pacific coast and joined the others to return across the isthmus in late April 1681 after the relative failure of their privateering activities. They had fruitlessly sailed down the coast of modern-day Ecuador and Peru, but met with little success and too much attention from the Spaniards. A good pirate in those days took a long view of the profit opportunities and so, with the democracy of decision-making for which they are famed, the pirates returned to the warmer waters of the Caribbean and home. The return involved crossing the isthmus of Panama on foot. They had narrowly missed Panama’s dry season and found the going exceptionally tough underfoot, with relentless rain both day and night adding to their discomfort. May is one of the most unpleasant months in Panama as the dry season ends and the rains begin. Dampier, knowing they would be hunted down by the Spaniards, had warned that anyone falling behind would be shot to ensure they did not reveal the direction and strength of the pirates as they hurried back to the Caribbean.

Wafer was aware of this when, during the journey, his knee was badly injured by a fellow pirate’s carelessness drying gunpowder by a naked flame: it exploded and burnt Wafer’s knee down to the bone. With the aid of slaves carrying his possessions he hobbled on until the pain overcame him and he was left at an Indian settlement with two others too fatigued to continue in the sodden jungle. Dampier’s threat was quietly forgotten and as a result Wafer would spend several months in Darien with the Indians, researching the manuscript that would eventually so influence William Paterson. Under the care of the Indians, Wafer’s health improved. They masticated a selection of herbs and placed them with a large plantain leaf over his burnt knee and, so he writes, he was better within twenty days, excepting a slight weakness to the knee. He was delighted and impressed by the knowledge of the natives.

Despite his treatment the Indians were cautious. They decided if their compatriots who had left with the other pirates did not return within ten days they would kill Wafer and his colleagues – they would be burned alive. The threat was never carried out and soon afterwards Wafer and the others were purportedly marched across to the Caribbean by Indian guides. However, when supplies ran out the Indians retuned to their settlement and after several days of half-starved attempts to find the Caribbean coast, Wafer, much to his disgust but relief, returned to the Indian village from where he had started. Tired from his incessant travels and weakened from his injury, he was content to remain with the Indians for some time and so he began to fall into the daily routine of hunter-gatherer life on the isthmus.

He had also fallen into favour with their chief, a wise Indian called Lancets. With his medical skill he had cured the chief’s wife of fever by drawing blood from her arm and so was granted freedom and privileges. He lived amongst the Indians, taking part in their daily life, eating their food and immersing himself in their customs. He had gone increasingly ‘native’ and wore only a loin cloth and a large number of skin paintings (although he refused tattoos). However fun this life was, it was bound to come to an end and Wafer was anxious to make his way to the Caribbean to find a ship back to Jamaica. He left, promising to return, and was delighted to arrive at the coast to find Dampier and the ships. Mischievously, he pretended for some hours to be one of the Indians before his friends rumbled his disguise and welcomed him back.

It was these experiences which Wafer drew upon to produce his book: a clear account of the land, fauna and people of Darien. Paterson, however, would draw one-sided conclusions from Wafer’s manuscript. Amongst the picture of a tropical Eden, the book amounts to a litany of warnings. Wafer, for example, recounted that when he and his companions set off from the Indian camp to reach the Caribbean coast and reunite themselves with their fellow pirates, they wandered around the isthmus, hopelessly lost and near-drowned for over five days – a considerable achievement given the relatively narrow nature of Panama’s geography. Wafer recounted: ‘But not long after Sun-set, it fell a Raining as of Heaven and Earth would meet; which Storm was accompanied with horrid Claps of Thunder, and such flashes of Lightning, of a Sulpherous smell, that we were almost stifled in the open Air.’

The rain and the unhealthiness of the climate are a constant feature of his account. ‘The Country all about here is Woody and Low, and very unhealthy; the Rivers so Oazy, that the stinking Mud infects the Air.’ He describes the new town of Panama as ‘very sickly’ but ‘very healthy in comparison of Portobel’ of which he writes ‘I have already said that it is an un-healthy Place. The East-side is low and swampy; and the Sea at low Water leaves the Shore within the Harbour bare, a great way from the Houses; which having a black filthy Mud, it stinks very much, and breeds noisome Vapours, thro’ the Heat of the Climate.’

Wafer’s account of the nature of the Panamanian climate remains accurate today:

The Weather is much the same here as in other places of the Torrid Zone in this Latitude; but inclining rather to the Wet Extreme. The Season of Rain begins in April or May; and during the Months of June, July and August, the Rains are very violent. It is very hot also about this time, where-ever the Sun breaks out of a Cloud: For the Air is then very sultry, because then usually there are no Breezes to fan and cool it, but ’tis all glowing hot … So that ’tis a very wet Country, and has Rains for Two Thirds, if not Three Quarters of a Year. Their first coming is after the manner of our suddain April Showers, or hasty Thunder Showers, one in a day at first. After this, two or three in a Day; at length, a Shower almost every Hour: and frequently accompanied with violent Thunder and Lightning: During which time, the Air has often a faint Sulpherous Smell … [T]here will be several fair Days intermix’d, with only Tornado’s or Thunder-Showers; and that some-times for a Week together …. When the Shower is over, you shall hear for a great way together the Croaking of Frogs and Toads, the humming of Moskitos or Gnats, and the hissing or shrieking of Snakes and other Insects, loud and unpleasant; some like the quacking of Ducks. The Moskitos chiefly infest the low swampy or Mangrove Lands near the River or Seas …

More warnings are apparent. The manuscript also contained descriptions of the topography of the land: ‘[t]he Land of this Continent is almost every where of unequal Surface, distinguished with Hills and Valleys, of great variety for height, depth and extent.’ Less than ideal for settlement and more importantly it clearly describes the difficulty accessing the Pacific side of the isthmus to advance trading to the Indies. Paterson also overlooked why Wafer, Dampier and the other pirates favoured such a spot: its very isolation and relative distance from settlements in the Caribbean. A paradise for fugitive pirates, but too remote for merchants in search of consumer markets and trade.

It is likely that in a time of maritime discovery and burgeoning maritime trade, Paterson became most animated by Wafer’s description of the isthmus as a place of natural harbours. We know that in 1698, when the fleet sailed from Leith with the directors’ ‘secret’ orders, they instructed Robert Pennecuik, who insisted on the title of ‘commodore’, to sail to the pleasantly sounding Golden Island, off the coast of Darien. Wafer’s description was relied upon by the board of directors:

The Eastermost of those three [islands] is Golden Island, a small one, with a fair deep Channel between it and the Main. It is rocky and steep all round to the Sea (and thereby naturally fortified), except only the Landing-place, which is a small Sandy Bay on the South side, towards the Harbour, from whence it gently rises. It is moderately high, and cover’d with small Trees or Shrubs. The Land of the Isthmus opposite to it, to the South East, is excellent fruitful Land, of a black Mold, with sand intermix’d; and is pretty level for 4 or 5 Mile, till you come to the foot of the Hills.

The directors would order the expeditions’ commanders to make fortified bases both on Golden Island and on the coast nearby. It would turn out to be less ‘fruitful’ than Wafer described, but his writing directly led the directors to believe remote Darien was the best place to establish both a trading colony and a populated settlement. The obvious concerns about climate and health were banished by the thoughts of fortified harbours there for the taking.

Wafer’s description of Darien is a spellbinding one: a lush strip of land sparsely populated with friendly Indians and overgrown with exotic trees, flowers and fruits. To the people of famine-ravaged Scotland it would have seemed a tropical paradise: a land of opportunity and adventure and of course the Scots were more than used to a little rain. Given the repeated crop failures at this time in Scotland, Wafer’s account of the many lush fruits that simply grew on trees allured and deceived the Scots in equal measure. He peppers his account with descriptions of fruits a Scotsman would have been unlikely to have heard of: plantains (‘in great abundance’); bonano’s (‘thick, sweet and mealy’); mammee (‘wholesome and declicious’); mammee sappota (‘fine beautiful Colour when ripe’); sapadillo’s (‘small as a Bergamasco Pear, and is coated like a Russet-Pippin’); pine-apples (‘’tis very juicy’); and prickle pears (‘It’s a good fruit’). And as a final appeal for the directors, Wafer wrote of Logwood or Campeachy trees, viewed in those times as a valuable find by traders because of their rich dye, extracted from the trunks.

Wafer paints a South Pacific-style portrait of loosely clad native beauties, temptation throughout the ages for all manner of northern Europeans. History has left us surprisingly few accounts of the Caledonians’ interactions with flower-garlanded, seductive natives. Perhaps they took on board Wafer’s warning of the punishments meted out for debauching a virgin – ‘they thrust a fort of Bryer up the passage of his Penis, and turn it round ten or a dozen times: Which is not only a great Torment, but commonly mortifies the part; and the Person dies of it; but he has liberty to cure himself if he can’.

Wafer’s guidebook to the Indians even contains a traveller’s guide to their language, albeit limited to a few essential basics, but helpful nonetheless and still useful to this very day:

Pa poonah eetah Caupah? – Woman, have you got the Hammock?

Paterson had been in the Caribbean for a few years, but had never ventured as far as Darien and its bryer-wielding natives. With his academic comportment he did not often leave Port Royal. He was, however, drawn to the idea of exploiting international trade and found in Wafer’s manuscript the blueprints for the location of his trading posts between the two great oceans. The exoticism of Wafer’s manuscript helped make up Paterson’s mind. The directors of the Company were also to become so reliant on Wafer’s manuscript that they even invited him to Edinburgh to discuss offering him a position with the Company in return for delaying the publication of his book.

Paterson had planned his proposal long before Wafer’s unpublished manuscript came into his hands. His critics claim he had trailed the idea around for years trying to find backers and this may well be true, but it does not diminish people’s enthusiasm for the project at the time. No one before or since has explained the great idea as well as Paterson himself:

The time and expense of navigation to China, Japan and the Spice Islands, and the far greatest part of the East Indies will be lessened by more than half, and the consumption of European commodities and manufactories will soon be more than dobled. Trade will increase trade, and money will beget money, and the trading world shall need no more to want work for their hands, but will rather want hands for their work. Thus this door of the seas, and the key of the universe, with anything of a sort of reasonable management, will of course enable its proprietors to give laws to both oceans, without being liable to the fatigues, expenses and dangers, or contracting the guilt and blood of Alexander and Caesar.

Paterson wanted to create a peaceful Scottish trading post on the north coast of Panama with access to the southern coast and the Pacific sea. The colony would use the world’s greatest shortcut to create an international focus on trade and create an entrepôt economy on the isthmus, in effect an international trading post in the Americas, trading with both Europe and Asia. He believed, after reading Wafer’s manuscript, he would have the evidence he needed, when the time came, to convince people of the soundness of his plan, but first he needed to find a vehicle for it and the financial backers.

William Paterson was born in Skipmyre in rural Dumfriesshire in 1658.2 As every writer and historian has conceded, little is known of his early childhood, Paterson being a man far too serious to have left behind a nostalgic autobiography. His father sent him to live with family in Bristol and little is known of his life or schooling there, nor the reasons why he was sent there. Probably it was to provide him with a better education and opportunities than would have existed in rural Scotland, especially in the south-west, where Covenanters were resisting the restored Charles II’s attempts to reform the Church and, from 1685, James II and VII’s attempts at toleration of all creeds. Men had died a generation before over the issue of whether bishops should have the power to interfere in their worship of God, and many Scots fiercely believed in the equality of men before God. In 1666 the Covenanters from the south-west rose up against the government and marched on Edinburgh – they were defeated at Rullion Green and over the years the government used Highland troops to brutally put down Covenant uprisings. This was no place for a young boy intent on making his fortune.

Paterson is likely to have felt more at home in Bristol, an international port open to the world and its influences, yet he tired of the town and left to seek work in Jamaica. Like many a young Scotsman, he was tempted by the allure of foreign places, strange names and graphic tales of faraway places. He spent a reasonable period of time in Jamaica and met some of the leading buccaneers and privateers of the time. What he did out there is a mystery. It is hard to imagine him having become involved, like Wafer, in daring exploits raiding the Spanish Main. Paterson was a red-faced, serious man and teetotal – characteristics unlikely to have tempted him to a buccaneering way of life. He took himself seriously and is said to have lacked a sense of humour. Many contemporaries describe him as a bore and he was obsessive about his projects. He nursed a sense of grievance: coming from a humble background but graced with considerable intellect, he found himself mixing with wealthy and powerful men who failed to give him the position in society he felt he deserved. Most viewed him as bright, but many thought him some sort of charlatan and questioned his judgement.

Paterson’s judgement had been questioned before Caledonia. He had suffered an ignominious exit from the Bank of England, which he helped to found in 1694, but his early involvement is clear proof of his abilities. In the late seventeenth century, government finances were stretched to breaking point by William III’s wars with Louis XIV. The war, then known as the War of Grand Alliance, endured until 1697 and exacted a considerable toll on the English Treasury, taking place, as it did, both on mainland Europe, at sea and in the North American colonies. Paterson developed an innovative idea to ease the strain on the Treasury and in the process he helped create the Bank of England. It is a strange coincidence that though many point to the Scottish roots of the Bank of England, yet the same man did more to ensure union with England than any other contemporary.

The development of joint stock companies has long been attributed a prominent place in the economic history of Europe and in the development of capitalism in the Netherlands and England particularly. The end of the seventeenth century saw significant investment in such structures. Paterson, under the influence of his continental friends and travels in the Netherlands, was quick to grasp the idea and in 1691, the year of his return to London from travels abroad, he formed, under the joint stock principle of raising capital, the Hampstead Water Company. This was a success and Paterson channelled his energies into the bigger and more rewarding project of creating a financial system to lend money to the beleaguered Treasury. He relied on the principle of the joint stock company: investors, giving money to the company, would receive shares, and this money would be lent to the Treasury at a competitive interest rate, which could then be split and given to the shareholders as an annual dividend. In addition this loan or investment could be traded, given that it was based in a shareholding and the projected bank had an excellent image, given that the State was paying the interest and because one-fifth of the money held by the bank was converted into gold or coin. Financially, it was an excellent scheme, but politically there were doubts. It had to be approved by parliament and when Paterson went before a Committee of Inquiry in 1692, a difficulty soon emerged with the ability of the bank’s receipts to be used as legal currency. Parliament dismissed the idea and again raised taxes.

This short-term solution would soon become untenable: the financing scheme and the war were bound up together and as King William and his allies’ defeats increased, so would the demand for easier access to funds. Paterson required titled men, influential merchants or other men of standing to back his scheme: credibility was essential in a time when many schemes were ill-thought-out or plain fraudulent. In 1691 Sir William Phipps, a wealthy merchant and colonist, returned from Massachusetts and was convinced by Paterson’s scheme and agreed to become a leading backer. He had previously led a large colonial militia force in an unsuccessful attack on French positions in Quebec. He was a man eager to back a system for increased funds to fight war; he had seen his own troops defeated, in part, by a lack of resources and training.

Paterson befriended Charles Montagu, an aristocratic young MP and Treasury minister, who teamed up with him to convince the government of the merits of Paterson’s proposal and to find a way to obtain parliamentary approval for the scheme. Parliament again rejected a reformulated plan in which Montagu had discarded giving the receipts of the Company the status of legal tender. This further setback brought out the politician in Montagu, who formulated with Paterson’s help a design for a new bank, but instead of pushing a Bill through parliament solely for this purpose, the relevant statutory provisions were contained within the ‘Tunnage Bill’, which on the face of it was part of the Budget and sought to increase taxes on the weight of ships using English ports. With an increasingly desperate Treasury and losses mounting on the battlefield, despite concerns raised in parliament, the Bill was passed and so it came to be that the Bank of England was founded in 1694 – the development of William Paterson’s original idea and, for Scotland, his first and last great achievement.

Paterson went on to become a director of the bank, but with his prickly character he did not enjoy the company of his fellow directors. His request for financial acknowledgment in proposing the scheme which founded the bank was rudely rejected and when the board was invited to answer questions about the success of the scheme before a parliamentary committee, he was not invited. His vanity was unable to accept the insult. The final straw, which severed Paterson’s connection with the bank, was his involvement in another joint stock company bank, called the Orphans’ Bank (so-named to raise funds to replenish a depleted orphans’ account run by the corporation of the City of London) became public. The court of directors of the Bank of England publicly rebuked Paterson – his actions were a breach of trust, detracting from his fiduciary role as a director. Paterson, shocked by this, never returned to a further board meeting. Further ignominy awaited him as the Orphans’ Bank crashed after two years and his great friend, James Smith, was imprisoned for involvement in committing a fraud on the Bank of England on behalf of the Orphans’ Bank.

Paterson’s achievement in helping to create the Bank of England is evidence enough of his brilliance and foresight. It also demonstrated some of the qualities which were to make him a liability for the Scotsmen who supported his scheme in Darien. He could be a poor judge of character (Smith’s name was associated with fraud later) and his vanity blinded him to how others might perceive him and at times his judgement was far from sound. Paterson was above all else a man who could see an opportunity and was able to sell it; he was a man of ideas, from a country, at that time, lacking in development and enterprise.

Scotland was not a place for opportunities in the late seventeenth century. It was a poor country, rife with religious division, superstition, famine and endemic poverty. The nation was particularly afflicted by two ills: religious strife and famine. Both had a debilitating effect on efforts to relieve poverty and strengthen the institutions to bring about national modernisation.

In his book on the Scottish Enlightenment, Arthur Herman recounts the chilling case of Thomas Aitkenhead, vividly demonstrating the transformation of Scottish society around this time. In 1696, the same year as the Bank of England was settling into everyday financial life and Paterson was seeking to promote his next great idea, Scotland was transfixed by altogether very different matters.

During an uncommonly cold August, four young men walked down the High Street, past the Tron Church. Amongst them was an eighteen-year-old man called Aitkenhead. He was heard to have said, ‘I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell, to warm myself there.’ His companions, not content to ignore the remark and no doubt unpleasantly ambitious would-be clergymen, promptly told the Kirk authorities and the very next day and upon closer examination it emerged Aitkenhead had previously challenged accepted Church teachings and mocked Christ himself. This foolish eighteen-year-old boy could never have known the trouble his off-the-cuff remarks would get him into. Unfortunately, the Lord Advocate, a devout member of the Kirk, heard of his transgressions and decided here was a case upon which he could take a moral stand against the increasing tide of looser reasoned theology flowing northwards. Religious pressure from the General Assembly of the Kirk had resulted in draconian laws: three offences of blasphemy could result in punishment by death because of the obstinacy of the blaspheming, but only one count of blasphemy, in which the blasphemer ‘railed and cursed’ against God and offended the Holy Trinity was also sufficient for the death penalty. The Lord Advocate had Aitkenhead arrested in November 1696 and he was imprisoned in the Tolbooth in Edinburgh; after initial denials he quickly sought mercy by admitting his transgressions, confirming his true Christian beliefs and asking for mercy. Scotland, however, was not interested in listening.

The Lord Advocate himself prosecuted the trial and defence counsel was disposed with. In such circumstances, with the incriminatory affidavits from his supposed friends and his repentance, unsurprisingly, the jury found him guilty. The fifteen God-fearing middle-class members of Edinburgh society had been put under enormous pressures by the Kirk and the legal establishment to arrive at a holy verdict. The Lord Advocate zealously demanded the death sentence for Aitkenhead’s wickedness. The teenager would hang in January 1697 for the words he had uttered. John Locke, the eminent English jurist and writer, became involved, attempting as he was, at the end of his career, to leave writings on the separation of Church from State. He argued religious belief was a matter of private conscience and public authorities had no right to intervene in such matters. This view was not a popular one in Scotland at the time. Religion was very much a matter for the state and nothing illustrates this more than the Scottish enthusiasm for witchcraft trials in the seventeenth century.

Leading Scottish historian T.C. Smout estimates that between 1560 and 1707 ‘considerably more than 3,500 people, and perhaps as many as 4,500’3 were put to death for practising the black arts of witchcraft, four times more than in England. These, mostly elderly women, were strangled, covered in pitch and then burned at the stake. This was not, however, an unsupervised populist practice; as late as 1662 the Privy Council set down basic civil rights for the trial of witches. The establishment was behind the practice and they were, somewhat incredibly, concerned to see fairer procedures for witchcraft trials. Laws were passed to outlaw witch-pricking (the practice of proving communion with the Devil by pricking a sharp pin over the alleged witch’s body until a spot is found where no pain is felt); torture to extract confessions; and a law was passed to ensure the sanity of those who voluntary admitted witchcraft was verified. Only fifty years before the birth of Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, women were burned alive for witchcraft, and the Scottish establishment’s response was to insist on safeguards as outlandish as outlawing witch-pricking.

Thomas Aitkenhead had little chance. His appeal was rejected at all levels: by the appellate court, the Privy Council, the Lord Chancellor and even by their majesties William and Mary. He was helped from the Tolbooth on a January day in 1697 and made to walk to Leith, where before him he could see the wooden scaffold: the embodiment of the Scottish Church’s obsession with doctrine, a graceless lack of compassion. Aitkenhead himself stood before the crowds, shaking in the cold, yet exuding more dignity than the rabid ranks of Edinburgh’s legal and religious elites who had sent this young man to his death, and forgave those involved in the trial against him and declared that; ‘it was out of pure love of truth, and my own happiness that I acted … an insatiable inclination to truth’.

It is to the credit of the Caledonians that their own laws in steamy Panama would be very different from this world they sailed away from.

Scotland, at this time, was not only a backward place, but a poor place too. Famines had been common in the seventeenth century but the repeated failure of harvests in the 1690s was particularly devastating for the majority of the population who were peasants. Some parishes saw burial rates increase fivefold in the worse years of the famine. Smout quotes a contemporary writer:

Everyone may see Death in the face of the poor that abound everywhere; the thinness of the visage, their ghostly looks, their feebleness, their agues and their fluxes threaten them with sudden death if care be not taken of them. And it is not only common wandering beggars that are in this case, but many householders who lived well by their labour and their industry are now by want forced to abandon their dwellings.4

Scottish political life was little better. It was moribund, with the parliament in Edinburgh not nearly as effective or as powerful as its Westminster equivalent. Corruption and vested interests were rife, and members of the parliament were commonly bought off by the king’s powerful secretaries of state. For this impoverished, repressed, politically corrupt country, Darien represented an ideal: an opportunity to reverse Scotland’s fortunes and allow it to modernise and keep pace with other European countries. Scottish civil society was a poor midwife for the birth of the Company of Scotland. The failures of Darien can be traced back to the shortcomings of its Scottish conception.

THREE

THE COMPANY OF SCOTLAND

Paterson was desperate to find a means to make his great idea a reality. In June 1695 a Scottish Act of Parliament, ‘An Act in favour of the Scots Company Trading to Africa and the Indies’ had been passed by the parliament in Edinburgh and Paterson was determined to take advantage of the opportunities the Act presented. Despite the obvious Scottish foundation of the Company, Paterson, unconcerned by borders, and wary of the commercial competence of his compatriots, had devised a scheme to ensure the stock and the directors would be split between Edinburgh and London.

The oppressive trade practices of the English East India Company resulted in many London merchants being keen to invest in a rival company with similar wide-sweeping powers. The history of the Company in India demonstrated just how far beyond commercial activities its role was permitted to grow. With its power and influence, the East India Company was not about to stand by as a serious, state-backed, commercial rival was born. Shortly after the necessary £300,000 had been raised in the subscription books in London, the English parliament called a halt to the entire proceedings. The powerful East India Company had intervened, lobbying Parliament to crush a potential competitor, strangling the infant company at birth. Parliament declared the directors of the board were guilty of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’. In January 1696 the House of Commons passed a resolution arraigning many of the directors of the Company, charging them with treason. This brought a swift end to the project and Paterson was forced to put together a purely Scottish venture, without the help, wealth and experience of the English. He turned north and headed to Edinburgh.

Arriving in early 1696, he was received with a wave of adulation. He was seen as a national hero for standing up for Scottish interests, suffering for the national good at the hands of unfairness and English spite. Paterson enjoyed the attention. He was respected. Distinguished men acknowledged him and the great and good sought him out. Ballads were even written about him and his project. The inelegantly sounding ‘Trade Release, being an excellent new ballad to the tune of “Turks are all Confounded”’ had this to say:

Come, rouse up your Heads, Come rouse up anon!Think of the Wisdom of old Solomon,And heartily Join with our own Paterson,To fetch home Indian Treasures:Solomon sent afar for Gold,Let us do now as he did of old,Wait but three Years, for a Hundred-foldOf Riches and all Pleasures.

The attention went to Paterson’s head and he became more convinced of the soundness of his project. With Scotland in a miserable condition, many were eager for salvation and Paterson provided profile for the projected company, transforming it (against his better judgement) from an Anglo-Scottish venture to a purely Scottish one. Nationalism created unstoppable momentum. The Edinburgh merchants lost little time opening a Scottish subscription book and surprised even themselves by demanding £400,000 in subscriptions, which was a huge sum for those times for a small country, impoverished more than normal by famine and hunger. Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations estimated Scottish capital in 1700 must have been around £1 million, although T.C. Smout notes that when the coninage was called in after Union in 1707, just £411,000 was discovered in circulation.1 The Company would consume nearly one half of all available Scottish capital.

The subscription book opened on Wednesday, 26 February 1696, at Mrs Purdie’s coffee house by Mercat Cross, a popular meeting place for the cognoscenti of the day. On the first day there was the predictable rush to subscribe, helped by a number of aristocratic and high-profile subscribers committing themselves early. The list of subscribers is, in itself, a fascinating historical document mapping the nature of Scottish society and its economy shortly before Union. First to sign was the Duchess of Hamilton and Chatelherault. She subscribed £3,000 and committed one of the most aristocratic families in Scotland to the great project. Her lead ensured many others followed to give away their life savings to a flawed project, but they were not to know that; Edinburgh was buoyant with enthusiasm.

Not every subscriber had a title of course; amongst the more surprising subscriptions are Robert Douglas, a soap boiler from Leith (£100); Thomas Gemill, a hammerman from the Gorbals, who gave £100; and Thomas Baxter, a Glaswegian tailor who contributed a hefty £400. Towns and institutions also contributed to allow those who could not afford the £100 minimum investment to subscribe. Perth, a wealthy market town, gave £2,000, whilst the incorporation of tailors in Glasgow gave £200. Paterson was pleased to see his home town of Dumfries support its successful son to the sum of £500. Old rivalries preserved down the centuries; ‘the town of Glasgow’ contributed £3,000, but was not accorded the same title as Edinburgh, which also gave £3,000, but was inscribed as ‘the Good Town of Edinburgh’.

Many subscribers were merchants seeking preferment from the Company to provide goods for the trading missions. Most came from Glasgow and Edinburgh, with a few from Dundee. The legal profession in Edinburgh contributed a significant amount, including four Senators of the College of Justice. The greatest contributors were the landed classes, not surprising given the undeveloped state of the Scottish economy. W. Douglas Jones in his interesting article entitled ‘The Bold Adventurers’ provides interesting insights into both the class and gender mixes of the list by way of comparison with the list of subscribers to the Bank of Scotland, a contemporary rival.

Thirteen servants and ninety-one women contributed to the Company, an indicator of the broad appeal of the Company, but also the meritocratic approach taken; this was not solely an elite project, but an inclusive, national one. The Bank of Scotland’s subscribers by comparison did not include any servants, students, soldiers, tradesmen or clergy. It was dominated instead by landed people, who held 36 per cent of the stock, higher than the 26 per cent of stock held by landed people in the Company of Scotland. This is underlined by the number of institutions who contributed, even small ones, like Cowane Hospital in Stirling, and the number of towns, which