THE DARIEN DISASTER Read online

  If the Scots did not understand this, and if they did not see that there was more to Darien than rich meat and sweet honey, it was not Wafer's fault, for he was honest about the risks, the dangers and the discomforts. But they were blinded by the startling colours of his narrative, and excited by their own greed. They heard the sound of axes in groves of fragrant wood, they saw strong forts and green plantations, great merchantmen anchored in broad bays. What they should have read again, and again, and yet again, was what Wafer had to say about the weather. So much rich vegetation, so many forests, swamps and marshes, bright brooks and rivers, so abundant a life growing on its own putrefaction, could mean one thing only. The land wept more than it smiled.

  It rained. Wafer remembered how it rained, how he had lain in an Indian hut with a burning knee and listened to the unending sound of water. The rains began in April or May and continued with increasing violence until September. "It is very hot also about this time, wherever 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." In October the storms slackened, but it was sometimes January before they stopped, and thus a third of the year, perhaps only a quarter, was entirely free from rain. The season began with brief and sudden showers that reminded Wafer of Spring in England, a cooling rustle on leather leaves and the earth running with singing streams. Then, in one day, there would be two or three violent storms, a rolling cannonade of thunder, a black sky stabbed with lightning and a smell of sulphur beneath the trees.

  After this variable weather, for about four or six weeks, there will be settled, continued rains of several days or nights, without thunder or lightning but exceeding vehement considering the length of them. Yet at certain intervals between these, even in the wettest of the season, there will be several fair days intermixed, with only tornadoes or thunder- showers; and that sometimes for a week together. These thunder-showers cause usually a sensible wind, by the clouds pressing the atmosphere, which is very refreshing and moderates the heat.

  Cooling though these powerful winds were, they also pulled down trees, dammed rivers, and turned the swamps and westward savannahs into green and stinking lakes. In the brief intervals between the storms there was no compassionate silence. "You shall hear for a great way together the croaking of frogs and toads, the humming of mosquitoes or gnats, and the hissing or shrieking of snakes and other insects, loud and unpleasant; some like the quacking of ducks." Fairer weather came with Christmas, but from the swamps at night, the rotting shores of the floodwater, there rose throbbing clouds of newly-hatched mosquitoes. Wafer called them "uneasy vermin". That they were also lethal would be unsuspected for another two hundred years.

  '"Tis a very wet country," said Wafer. Yet there is no indication—in the minutes of their meetings, the inventories of their ships, their lists of clothing, equipment and trade goods—that the Directors gave serious thought to his warning that Darien was one of the wettest parts of the torrid zone, or concluded from it that Europeans who settled there might suffer terribly from fevers, ague, and the rotting of the spirit that comes from wretched idleness.

  "I must bear these as I have done the rest of my troubles" Edinburgh and Hamburg, July 1696 to June 1697

  Wise Paterson, the ballads were now calling him, judicious Paterson, creator of wholesome laws and the architect of Patersonian Government. Men would have found it hard to define this government, or name one of the healthy statutes it might enact, but all agreed with the ballads: where it was established, upon some future colony in Asia or America, there would be no cause for discontent, no factious brawling and complaints. Within three years the savage Indians would cry "God bless the Scottish Company!", their souls uplifted by trade, their bodies liberated, and their simple hearts full of gratitude. Extravagant though the street-songs were, they did reflect the selfless emotion which gave the Company much of its early impetus.

  To Scotland's just and never-dying fame,

  We'll in Asia, Africa and America proclaim

  Liberty! Liberty!—nay, to the shame Of all that went before us.

  And now, it seemed, the Company could not do enough for Paterson. Within a fortnight of his appointment to the Committee for Foreign Trade, and a week of the generous surrender of his papers, it was agreed that he and two other Directors should leave as soon as possible for Amsterdam and Germany. There they were to "engage such foreign merchants and others as may be needful to be concerned in this Company, as also to make and conclude such negotiations and agreements as may be found beneficial to the trade thereof." It was a belated acknowledgment of his stubborn belief that the Company could not survive without "the best heads and purses for trade in Europe", and it was a wise employment of his peculiar talent for persuasion. He should have been reassured, but he was not. Ten years of disappointments had worn his armour thin, and he was hypersensitive to criticism. He became suspicious and petulant. He saw malice behind every compliment, and spite behind every smile. In London he had believed that a cabal in Edinburgh was intent on ruining him, and now in Scotland he suspected the London Scots, who had once been his friends, of plotting his disgrace. He was convinced of this when Robert Douglas arrived in Edinburgh, at the request, it would appear, of some cautious Scots who wanted his experienced judgment on the Company's proposals for a colony.

  Paterson remembered the candle-lit bickering in Mr. Carpenter's house, and that terrible afternoon when the envy and distrust of his colleagues had compelled him to renounce his royalties. He became almost hysterical with indignation, and appealed for the sympathy and aid of great men on the Council-General of the Company. Douglas had come to slander him, he told the Earl of Annandale, and not only him but the Company and the country as well, just as in London he had tried to "turn out me and my party, as he calls them, and set up himself and his own", and this though Paterson had always treated him with patience and civility. Now there was vicious gossip, accusing Paterson of seeking office and profit. If the Council- General truly believed this it was free to cast him out and put another in his place, perhaps one of those gentlemen who vilified him. Did he not put the Company's good before his own, he would gladly make room for such a man.

  This I must say, that in all the course of my life my reputation was never called so much in question as about this matter, and it is no very easy matter to me, reputation being the only thing I am nicest in; and no doubt but malicious stories of me will fly like wildfire in England at this time; since I, in a special manner, he under a national hatred. But patience; I must bear these as I have done all the rest of my troubles. I doubt not but your lordship and all my friends will discountenance malicious stories behind a man's back.

  It was a sad and childish letter, and it probably wearied Lord Annandale, who spent much of his public life in the service of his own interest, and would accordingly believe that a man who made such a noise about his own unselfishness ran the risk of being thought a fool or a liar.

  Douglas went south to his home in Surrey, sending his friends in Edinburgh a long and reasoned disapproval of what he rightly concluded were the Company's plans for a colony. Nobody had openly admitted that this was to be planted on Darien, but he had found the nation besotted with Mr. Paterson, and he remembered the fellow's coffee-house prattle in Amsterdam nine years before. "I heard accounts of his design, which was to erect a commonwealth and free port in the Emperor of Darien's country, as he was pleased to call that poor miserable prince, and whose protection he pretended to be assured of from all who would engage in that design." Douglas was shocked by the innocence of his countrymen, by their stupidity in abandoning all thought of the East India trade and committing the Company's resources to a ridiculous Fund and a Caribbean adventure that could only end in disaster.

  My friends give themselves up blindfold to another at his

  pleasure. He deceives the Company, and imposes upon

  them (and, indeed, the nation, which is generally concerned in i
t) that he puts them upon attempting so hazardous and costly an undertaking with their little stock. Whereas it is reasonable to believe that if they were able at last to accomplish it, after a long war with the Spaniards, and to make themselves masters of both seas—without which it would be no ways profitable—it may cost more millions than they have hundreds of thousands.

  This prescient, and tragically accurate warning was undoubtedly circulated privately in Edinburgh, but while it may have caused some men to temper their enthusiasm, and others to thank God they had ventured no silver in the Company, the Directors ignored it. As they had ignored the implicit warnings of Wafer's narrative. They were busy, and being busy were far too involved with plans, schemes, contracts and agreements to concern themselves with the sour opinions of one envious merchant.

  The Committee for Foreign Trade had taken into the Company's employ—as Supervisor-General of Medicaments and Provisions (such as might be needed by 1,500 men for two years)—a Highlandman from the far north, Dr. John Munro of Coul. Though he was later to be accused of peculation by some of those who survived the lack of proper medicines in Darien, he was a resolute and active worker. He was also a tireless traveller. He was here, there and everywhere that summer, in Dundee, Montrose, Aberdeen, Inverness and Wick, buying salt beef and dried cod, ordering pistols and firelocks, Cheshire cheese and butter, instructing four surgeon-apothecaries of Edinburgh to prepare vast quantities of powders, potions, salves and plasters. What he was not doing, or had no time to do, was being done by others. Biscuit was ordered, baked, bought and casked (James Balfour was told to find 300 tuns of it). Two hundred oxen were driven to Leith and there slaughtered in one bloody day, and barrelled within the week. Ten tuns of black and yellow rum five of crimson claret, four hogsheads of musket flints, suet and pork by the oaken cask, spades, mattocks and hoes, horn-spoons and white -iron candlesticks, fish-hooks and plaiding hose, thus was the Leith warehouse being slowly filled.

  On September 30 the Committee was clearly gifted with cynical foresight. Two thousand reams of paper were ordered for the colony, and the Scots in Darien were to use much of it in libellous complaints against each other.

  In Holland and Germany the Company's ships were already bought or building. James Gibson had early acquired a 46-gun trader from an Amsterdam merchant, a gilded, broad-beamed vessel called Saint Francis, gentle to the helm and sweet to handle. In a rush of British rather than Scots patriotism, which would not be shared later by the Directors, he renamed her the Union. A rough and brutal man, he had spent a lifetime at sea as mate and master aboard the ships of his brother Walter, the Provost of Glasgow. The money they made, often by the transportation of bonded servants and prisoners to the Plantations, had enabled them to become rich and influential, subscribers and directors of the Company, and James Gibson's ambitions now included office and profit in the colony. On September 29, in the red-brick, canalside house of a Scots merchant in Amsterdam, over pipes and glasses of Hollands, he signed a contract for a second ship, larger than the Union. When built by Willem Direcksone, shipwright, she would be as stout and as seaworthy as any Dutch Indiaman, with an upcurving beak, clinker-laid bulwarks of scarlet and green, a great whipstaff on her quarterdeck, and a baroque stern heavy with lanterns, cupids, caryatids and the golden orb of the name already chosen for her, the Rising Sun.

  In Lübeck to the north of Hamburg, Alexander Stevenson had placed orders for the building of four more ships, and the rounded ribs of one had already risen above the Baltic. Though both men were empowered to commission the ships, the completion of the contracts, the final payments, were the responsibility of Paterson and his colleagues.

  And it was mid-October before any of them left for Amsterdam. Colonel John Erskine of Carnock, the Governor of Stirling Castle, and Haldane of Gleneagles had been appointed as Paterson's companions, and James Smith had been instructed to join them from London. Like Haldane, Erskine was sternly dedicated to the political and religious principles of the Revolution, jealous of the honour and prosperity of his country. In his youth he had been a law student, but had abandoned advocacy for a buff-coat and sword when Argyll rose in the West against James II. He escaped from this pathetic disaster with little more than his life, lying in the bilge of a ship off Bo'ness until a fair wind took him to Holland. He returned four years later with William of Orange, to that preferment and favour guaranteed by exile. He had a particular and personal interest in the success of a colony. In 1684 his brother, Lord Cardross, had led a mixed company of transported Covenanters and free colonists to a miserably unsuccessful plantation in Carolina (aboard a ship owned by Walter Gibson and commanded by James Gibson). Erskine went to Gourock to say good-bye to his brother and his friends, and he never forgot the sweet sound of the ship's trumpet, calling farewell across the Firth of Clyde.

  He and Paterson left Leith together for Amsterdam, it being agreed that Haldane should follow later by way of London, bringing Smith with him. Paterson was glad to be gone from Edinburgh, although the trust the Company now placed in him was absolute. He had been given £25,000—a quarter of the first call on the subscribers—for the purchase of ships and stores, and upon his own responsibility he had sent £17,000 of this to James Smith in London, with instructions that it be used to honour all drafts issued by himself or others abroad. He was anxious to open books in Amsterdam and Hamburg, and had assured everybody that his friends there, merchants, senators and princes, were waiting to subscribe. Gossips still troubled him, particularly the retelling of Douglas's sneer that he had been bribed by the East India Company to ruin the London venture, but he had now decided that the reason for such malice was envy, as he explained in a valedictory letter to Annandale.

  Envy usually attends the prosperity of any man, and my own natural defects, as well as those of some of my countrymen, will doubtless lay me open, as well as others, to the usual treatment in such cases, and as I have always found, so I find now, that the best remedy for these things is patience. I hope this Company, like Hercules in the cradle, shall strangle all these snakes.

  Once he was gone, this Hercules instructed Roderick Mackenzie's clerks to employ their spare time in making fair copies of all the manuscripts, journals and papers which Paterson had lent to the Court.

  In Amsterdam the Commissioners found that James Gibson had prepared some of the ground for them. The Company's Act had been translated into Dutch, printed and bound, and distributed among the independent merchants of Holland. In the beginning the Dutch were attracted by the thought of joining with the Scots in the Indies trade, but their warmth did not last long. It was first chilled by a tavern rumour claiming that Paterson had privately boasted that the Company was empowered to give favourable commissions to anybody, provided they sailed under Scots colours, made a token call at a Scots port, and gave the Company three per cent of the twenty they could thus earn by underselling the English and Dutch Companies. The Commissioners hotly denied the rumour, and might have been believed had not the powerful Dutch East and West India Companies awoken to the sharp danger of this thistle that had appeared in their orderly tulip bed. Less spectacularly than the English East India Company and without any public show, by the whispered threat of their displeasure they squashed all interest in the subscription book. Still Paterson and Erskine remained in Amsterdam, reluctant to leave lest their miserable failure to be too obvious, and give too much satisfaction to the enemies of the Company. As winter came on, canals froze over and windmills turned swiftly before the fierce gales that blew in from the polders, they got what comfort they could from the Rising Sun, the final contracts for its equipment and stores. They visited Direcksone's frosted yard, heard the encouraging noise of hammer and saw, smelt oil, resin and turpentine, and watched the argosy of their dreams take shape in a fine round hull and carved sterncastle.

  Haldane came to Holland in December, and with him a strangely furtive and hangdog Smith who was protesting innocence and shame in one breath. He behaved like a prisoner, and in a se
nse that is what he was. When Haldane had arrived in London he had been first uneasy, then suspicious of Smith's conduct of affairs, and finally alarmed by the discovery that £8,000 was missing from the money Paterson had sent to London. Smith had a ready explanation. The deficit, he said, was covered by bills which Paterson had drawn, and seemed unconcerned by the fact that he was thereby accusing his friend and patron of embezzlement. Haldane was an honourable man, and he was reluctant to think ill of Paterson before he had been given an opportunity to explain. In the presence of two of the Company's London agents, Smith's papers were bound and sealed, and were then carried to Holland in Haldane's baggage. By some unknown means, it may have been the threat of arrest, Smith was persuaded to accompany Haldane.