John Prebble Read online

  THE DARIEN DISASTER

  ALSO BY JOHN PREBBLE

  Where the Sea Breaks

  The Edge of Darkness

  Age Without Pity

  The Mather Story

  The Brute Streets

  My Great-Aunt

  Appearing Day

  The Buffalo Soldiers

  History

  The High Girders

  Culloden

  The Highland Clearances

  Glencoe

  THE DARIEN

  DISASTER

  "Door of the seas . . . key of the Universe"

  JOHN PREBBLE

  MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING EDINBURGH

  Distributed in Canada by

  DOUGLAS & McINTYRE, VANCOUVER

  This edition published in Great Britain in 1978 by MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY (EDINBURGH) LTD, 5 Glen Street, Edinburgh.

  Copyright © by John Prebble 1968 ISBN 0 906391 02 4

  First published in England 1968 by Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited.

  Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Limited.

  Contents

  List of Maps viii

  1: The Noble Undertaking 1

  2: The Rising Sun 54

  3: The Door of the Seas 119

  4: The Key of the Universe 217

  5: A Nation's Humour 266

  6: God's Wonderful Mercy 287

  7: As Bitter as Gall 308

  Appendices 317

  Acknowledgements 337

  Sources and Bibliography 341

  Index 351

  Maps

  The Caribbean: course of the First Expedition 121

  The Colony of Darien 141

  Courses of the two Expedition 203

  New Caledonia 263

  FOR

  IAIN CAMERON TAYLOR

  1 The Noble Undertaking

  "Then England for its treachery should mourn" Edinburgh, April 1705

  The savage voice of the people could be heard on the walls of the Castle. The sentinels in the Half Moon Battery, the escort company of the Town Guard drawn up in Palace Yard, had been listening to it since dawn. From the embrasures of the battery, down through blue peat-smoke and thin sunlight, over tall chimneys and craw-step gables, they could see a violent torrent from the Landmarket to Abbey Close: men, women and children, horses, coaches, and overturned stalls, a foam of white faces at windows and forestairs. The incessant cry of "No Reprieve!", on a carrier wave of screams and obscenities, was losing its meaning by repetition, but its throbbing menace still remained. In the vaulted prison below the Great Hall of the Castle there may have been nothing to hear but a man's heart-beat or the restless footfall of a gaoler, nothing to disturb Thomas Green's confidence. He smiled at the Keeper and said that he and his companions would not die that day. Her Majesty's express would arrive from London to save them, even at the foot of the gallows. Since sentence had been passed, by the Judge and Assessors of the High Court of Admiralty, since his Dying Speech had passed through improving hands to the printer, the young man had allowed no one to speak of his hanging as inevitable.

  But hanging was that morning synonymous with justice, and was plainly demanded by a mob which filled the main artery of the city, fed by sixty capillary courts and wynds. All roads that led to the six gates of Edinburgh were also crowded, by some who had come on foot for fifty miles, armed with clubs and swords to enforce payment for the wounded pride and spilt blood of the nation. Those who were not fighting to get into the city, were struggling to get out of it, by the College Kirk in the north and the Water Gate in the east. Here two roads embraced Caltoun Craigs and led to Leith, and each was choked with commons and gentility. Along the eastern road, past mud-walled parks and fields pricked by the green of young oats, the crowd was thicker, ineffectively controlled by scattered foot-soldiers and dragoons. By this way condemned pirates were customarily taken to the links at Leith, and on the grassy dunes, pointing north above the flood-mark, the gallows had been waiting two weeks for Captain Thomas Green, his mate John Madder, and his gunner James Simpson, of the English merchantman Worcester. Their last sight before they were hanged, if they were to be hanged, would be the white houses of Burntisland five miles across the Forth where their ship lay aground, its hold and cabins gutted, its masts stripped of canvas and yards.

  In the palace of Holyroodhouse, behind the closed and guarded gates of Abbey Close, some of Her Majesty's Privy Councillors had gathered soon after dawn. They had come by coach from their town-houses in Cowgate and Canongate, or from their estates in the country, and they were shortly to travel up the Royal Mile to their Council Chamber in the Laigh Parliament House, there to decide whether the three seamen should be reprieved as the Queen advised, or should hang for piracy as the people demanded. None of them was anxious to make the journey, their arrival at Holyrood had been terrifying enough. The broad way of the Canongate, between splendid grey houses of square- hewn stone, had been full of angry men and women, surrounding the coaches, catching at bridles, hammering on varnished panels, thrusting inflamed faces through windows and leather curtains and spattering the Councillors with spittle as they shouted "No Reprieve! There was now the unendurable thought of that odorous stretch of the High Street between the Netherbow Port and Parliament House, the heaps of timber, peat and dung that were the mob's traditional weapons of persuasion. It was not an atmosphere in which the Queen's principal servants could make a dispassionate decision.

  Of the thirty members of the Council, nineteen had chosen to absent themselves and make no decision at all, as they had been absent from most of the Council's meetings since the trial a month before. The Marquis of Tweeddale, hot-tempered where his honour was concerned and proud of his general popularity, said that private affairs kept him on his estates but he was sure the Council would find a quorum without him. Lord Belhaven, a roaring patriot who liked to sing descant to the music of the mob, had previously pleaded prior duties to a house full of guests, and now, perhaps not inconsequentially, said that a course of diet kept him to his bed. The Earl of Crawford, also ailing, had "a violent cold and hoarseness" that prevented him from speaking. The Earl of Roxburgh, one of Her Majesty's Secretaries of State for Scotland, had written to say that had he been able to walk downstairs he would have been in town, but "I have got such a sprain that I don't know when I shall be able to travel". The Lord Justice Clerk, Cockburn of Ormiston, showed less imagination than might have been expected in an advocate. His son had recently gone to the west country, he said, and had taken all the horses. By such lies did great men protect public office and private reputation, and neglect their duty.

  From hindsight that duty, in both law and common humanity, is now clear. The root of the evidence against Green and his crew was a drunken boast over a bowl of punch, the prosecution's case was enmeshed in medieval Latin and legal Doric, irrelevant and unintelligible to the accused and jury. The seven eminent advocates who acted for the defence appear to have presented no evidence, they did not submit their speeches for customary publication after the trial, and they left Edinburgh immediately in apparent fear for their safety. There is no record that the Judge either summed up, or gave direction in law to the jury beyond brief answers to some of their doubts as to the meaning of the prosecution's wordy quotations from the Law and the classics. None of the jurymen, five sea-captains and ten merchants, could be regarded as wholly impartial and disinterested, indeed it would have been difficult to find such a man in Scotland at that moment. Even so, a minority of them, closing their ears to the mob outside the court, could not agree with a verdict of guilty. All this the Privy Councillors had known for a month. Moreover, they now had before them affidavits sworn in London by sailors of the Scots ship Speedy Return which Green was
accused of looting and burning. They clearly exonerated the crew of the Worcester, but the Councillors had set them aside on the specious excuse that they were "only attested copies". At the express wish of the Queen, but under emotional protest, the Councillors had already postponed the execution until to-day, April 11. Although they had entreated Anne that "no further reprieve might be granted", they had themselves voted for one yesterday, but, to their relief perhaps, had failed to secure the proper majority. Unlike their nineteen absent colleagues, these eleven men at least believed themselves obliged to make a decision, but they were held between conscience and expediency, between the knowledge that an express from London might arrive this morning with a full reprieve, and the realisation that the mob outside would be satisfied with nothing less than a hanging.

  The mob had no doubts, no obligation to rationalise its passion in terms of duty and law and conscience. Its temper, always quick to ignite, had been further inflamed by a ballad written, or inspired, by Roderick Mackenzie, the embittered Secretary of the Company of Scotland, owners of the Speedy Return. In ugly verse, irresponsibly imaginative, it described how the brothers Robert and Thomas Drummond, captain and supercargo of that ship, had been bound and beheaded before they were thrown into the Indian Ocean. That innocent Scots should be so foully murdered by Englishmen was bad enough, worse that the victims should be two men who were heroes of Darien, survivors of Scotland's noble colony on the Isthmus of Panama. And that too, the mob was reminded, had been destroyed by the English.

  Copies of the ballad fluttered among the raised fists and clubs when the gates of Holyrood were opened shortly before nine o'clock. Out came the Lord Chancellor's mace-bearer, bravely pacing the way as if he were to be welcomed by the respectful huzzas that normally greeted such a procession. Forty musketeers of Captain Robinson's Town Guard marched with bayonets fixed on either side of the nervous horses and gilded coaches. In the first rode the Chancellor, James Ogilvy, Earl of Findlater, Earl of Seafield, an unostentatious, beautiful man with a serene face and a gentle smile. He used both as curtain and outworks to the fortress of a dissembling mind, the greatest strength of which, it was said, was the faculty of knowing, without any exercise of reason, what should be done to please his sovereign. Yesterday this had naturally guided him to place a casting vote in favour of reprieve, but on the other hand he was aware that by respecting the Queen's present wishes he might be risking her future favour. "We are all sensible that it would do a vast deal of prejudice to Her Majesty's affairs in Parliament," he had written after an earlier meeting of the Council, "for all I speak with say that since God in his providence had discovered this barbarous murther, it will be hard if they be not allowed to put so just a sentence in execution against those who have taken the innocent blood of their fellow subjects."

  With the Almighty thus involved as a witness for the prosecution, or at least an ad hoc member of the Privy Council, Seafield knew how this morning's business must go. That is, if the mob allowed him to reach the Laigh Parliament House. His courage, if cynical, was none the less resolute. Sitting back against the brocade and leather of his coach, his face pale and calm, he knew that there was not a man between Abbey Close and St. Giles who did not believe that he had conspired with the English, eight years before, to destroy the Company of Scotland and its colony, and in that sense was a greater villain than Green or Madder or Simpson.

  The appearance of his livery, the Ogilvy lion on his arms, enraged the people outside the gates. All the way up Canongate they surged against the musketeers, clinging to Seafield's coach and yelling "No Reprieve!" In this wild, undignified manner, with the clang of hooves on the paving, Her Majesty's principal servants passed through the Netherbow Port and into a larger, more violent mob. Here men climbed over the dunghills and the kailwives' stalls to reach the coaches, to pelt them with stones, vegetables and dung, while women screamed abuse and encouragement from the windows and forestairs. The mace-bearer was brutally clubbed to his knees, and would have been killed had he not staggered into Milne Square and the offices of the Company of Scotland. The mob held the horses of Seafield's coach, struck at its emblazoned panels with sticks, fists and swords, thrust savage faces against its windows and yelled "No Reprieve!" to the calm face inside, until the swinging muskets of

  Robinson's men beat them away. Slowly the coaches were able to move on, past the Tolbooth and Market Cross to Parliament Close. Here the buildings were the tallest in Europe, some of them newly-raised since the Great Fire, fourteen reaching storeys and each of them housing twenty families or more. At every window, on every stair, there were men, women and children crying "No Reprieve!"

  When the doors of Parliament House closed on the Councillors, the mob entertained itself with songs and brawling, by hammering on the doors and shouting exhortations to the Council. Those who could not get into the close went up to the Castle ditch and shouted across the drawbridge. Within the Castle the Governor, Lord Leven (whose private opinion was that the accused should have been hanged without further debate) decided to damp down the anger of the mob by ordering away a battalion of Foot and a squadron of Horse to Leith sands. They came out of the Portcullis Gate by beat of dram, shining bayonets and ringing harness, down the Royal Mile to the Water Gate and the Leith Road. Some of the mob followed, singing and capering, but the greater part, distrusting great men behind locked doors, stayed where it was.

  In their chamber below the great hall of the Estates, surrounded by the thumb-screws, the knives and pincers by which their predecessors had determined guilt or innocence, the Councillors debated for two hours. The noise of the mob, above their heads and beyond the doors, was a gentle, rushing murmur. There was nothing to say that had not been said, the delay came not from fresh discussion but from the need to stifle old doubts. The decision, when it was taken, was inevitable, and was made less by noble men in scarlet and ermine than by the foul mouths and hot temper of the people. "We came to be convinced," wrote Seafield, "that there was no possibility of preserving the public peace without allowing some that were thought most guilty to be execute." Green, Madder and Simpson were to hang that day as soon as they could be carried to the links at Leith, the rest of the Worcester's crew were reprieved for another week.

  When a messenger had been sent to the Castle, the Councillors went in a body to tell the people, and Seafield spoke for them, standing at the open doors of Parliament House. What he said was called back through the mob, out of Parliament Close and down the Royal Mile. There were shouts of joy and cheers, and in this sudden, sunlit mood the Councillors hurried discreetly away. Seafield's coach had scarcely left the close when there was a shout that he had lied, that it was all a trick, that the murderers had been reprieved again. He bent forward behind the window, shaking his head, calling soundlessly to the mob, telling it to be patient for it would have satisfaction. Stones broke the glass and scattered him with splinters, hands clawed the coach to a halt, and angry voices yelled through the broken window. They would have Thomas Green and his bloody crew brought to execution or they would storm the Castle and burn the pirates alive. Seafield turned the handle of the door, pushed it open and stepped down into the street. Astonished by this arrogant act of courage, the mob parted to let him through. He walked calmly and slowly to the house of a friend.

  And from Castle Hill, the beating of a dram. The Town Guard, led by Captain Robinson, was bringing the seamen down. As they came into the Landmarket there was a baying roar and then silence. Joseph Taylor, an English tourist, said that the appearance of the condemned men, their courage and their composure, moved many men to tears, and this may well have been so, for the enjoyment of all emotions was part of the public spectacle, and men who behaved well in face of death deserved and received some sentimental acknowledgement of a good performance.

  Thomas Green's composure, as he walked between the bayonets, came less from courage, however, than from a continuing belief that he would yet be reprieved. He was innocent, he said, and why should this
not be the truth when no man could hope to see God in mercy if he persisted in a He? He was a strange young man, reserved, uncommunicative, and dedicated to duty. His Dying Speech, written some days before, sold by the same hands that circulated Mackenzie's ballad, declared that he had injured no man. "What the custom of pirates is, I thank God I know not, but I understand my accusers and persecutors will have you believe I think it is unnecessary to confess before men. Take what I have said as good Christians ought to do. If you have no charity you wrong yourselves and cannot hurt me." He was twenty-five. He had been given command of the Worcester when he was twenty-one. And his sad weakness was an addiction to strong liquors.

  John Madder was no older than his captain, and was perhaps the more tragic figure, for he was a Scot, and might have escaped arrest had he not loyally surrendered himself. He knew that he was to die, and had no patience with Green's pathetic hope of a reprieve. His Dying Speech, like that of the silent gunner Simpson, had been written for him, and what either man thought, or truly said, cannot now be known.

  Captain Robinson was counting heads as he marched with sword and sash. He said afterwards that there were eighty thousand armed men gathered outside the city, and so close together that one could have walked on their heads from Edinburgh to Leith sands. There were no tears now for the condemned, there was no compassion. That scene had been played in sequence, where best for dramatic effect, and the last act was evil confounded and virtue triumphant. The author of A Letter from Scotland, published three weeks later in London, said that the seamen were

  ... huzza'd, in triumph as it were, and insulted with the sharpest and most bitter invectives. Being come to the place of execution, good God what a moving sight was it to see those men stand upon the very varge of life, just launching into eternity, and at the same time see the whole multitude transported with joy. Some with pleasure asking: 'Why their countrymen did not come and save them?' Others, loading them with Scotch prayers, told 'em their old master would have 'em immediately. All of which they bore with invincible patience, like innocent men, English men and Christians, and made no other returns than by forgiving them, and desiring their charity.