THE DARIEN DISASTER Read online

  All the King's principal servants in Scotland were alarmed by the growing anger against their master, fearing the loss of his favour as much as they expected riot and burning. It was a time for great men in great office to choose between King and country, and they hastily made that choice known to William Carstares, the fat, smiling Presbyterian minister who was the King's secretary and adviser on Scots affairs. Since he was always at William's side, in camp or court, a letter to him was the same as nudging the King's attention, and his unpriced sympathy was more valuable than the services of a bought man.

  From Holyroodhouse the young Duke of Queensberry wrote anxiously to Carstares. A genteel, black-haired Douglas, he held the office of Commissioner vacated by Tweeddale, and although he usually preferred to face trouble by tinning his back on it, he now found it all about him. The Councillors of the Company, he said, intended to address the King in protest against the Hamburg Memorial. "I wish that something may be done to quieten the people who make a great noise about it and other prejudices they think are imposed on them by England." He admitted that he was deeply involved in the Company, but would do only what was pleasing to the King, if someone would be good enough to tell him what that might be. The Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, an affable old man who was never certain of the King's trust, was badly frightened by a rumour that he had given a licence for the printing of the Memorial. He wordily denied it. It was a malicious Be started by the printer's boy. And being more of a lawyer than a moralist he saw no sin in proving his loyalty by acknowledging his countrymen's hatred. "My relief is to be attacked where all see my innocence, for I have no dealing with our African Company, and many of them reckon me an unfriend." Sir James Ogilvy, whose services to the Throne as Secretary of State would soon be rewarded with the viscountcy of Seafield, also told Carstares that he had put no money into the Company, neither had any member of his family. His fellow Secretary was Lord Tullibardine, a young man of choking passion who had deserted his family and King James at the Revolution, had been given an earldom taken from his Jacobite father, and who was never sure that he was doing the right thing. He had subscribed £500 to the Company, but explained to Carstares that this was a trick whereby "I shall have the more influence to hinder any designs that may prove uneasy to His Majesty." When the Company appealed to the Privy Council for support in their Address to William, both Ogilvy and Tullibardine argued against it, carrying the Council with them by a narrow majority of four.

  The Company sent its protest to the King. Now that the matter was of no real consequence, William replied (in his own time) that he would order his Resident at Hamburg not to use his name or authority for obstructing the Company in the prosecution of its trade with the inhabitants of that city.

  The Directors kept up the façade of secrecy, deluding themselves with the belief that England did not know where they intended to settle their colony. And the English Government, which knew very well that it was to be Darien, pretended that it did not. The slow dance of ignorance and counter-ignorance was performed with comic gravity. When the Lords Justices of England wished to ask Ogilvy's advice on the Directors' plans, William Blathwayt persuaded them against it, and the Secretary —loyally declaring his non-involvement with Milne Square— would not have been pleased to know why. "It might be expected," said Blathwayt cynically, "he would own no knowledge of what the Company intended, and underhand intimate to them to forward their expedition so much the more, since notice of it was begun to be taken here."

  Blathwayt's information about Darien had come from Rycaut and Orth in Hamburg, whose spies had got it from the loose- tongued sailors whom the Company had sent to bring their ships to Leith. "I was informed," reported Orth, "that the two Scotch East India Company's ships now lying in this river were designed for the south coast of America, at the Isthmus of Darien." He had been to see the ships, and reported that each carried 56 guns, 12-pounders and 8-pounders on their lower and upper decks, and he had heard that they would be loaded with fine linen, lace and other goods for the Spanish and Indian trade. Hamburg merchants were also admitting that Paterson and Erskine had talked frankly of the intended colony on Darien. "It is in my opinion," said Orth, "not to be doubted but that this is their real design."

  He wrote so much that his imagination took over his pen. He said that the Scots were recruiting pirates from John Avery's ship, lately returned to Ireland. Some person had told him, and this person had also said that the Scots would be willing to try a little piracy themselves if they saw a profit in it. A handful of Avery's men were accordingly dragged out of ale-houses in Dublin and Cork, imprisoned and interrogated, and since some of them were later pardoned they may have had the wit to he in support of Orth's person, once they realised the purpose of their examination.

  The Lords Justices and the Commissioners for Trade were particularly concerned with the steps which should be taken to make the Scots colony impossible, or at least untenable, but they were also anxious that everything should be done within the law, English law that is. They were greatly helped by Mr. James Vernon. He was the middle-aged Member for Penryn, a scholar of Oxford and Cambridge, a one-time political agent in Holland, now an assistant in the Secretary of State's office and soon to be Principal Secretary. A tall, thin man with a brown face and a hanging lip, untidy in dress and brusque in manner, he was a superb and dedicated civil servant who lived and died an untitled gentleman, having been particularly unfortunate in his choice of patrons. John Macky said he was a drudge to office, no man ever wrote so many letters. His habit of working all day and half the night at his desk, Macky explained, was due to an ill-tempered wife whose company he desperately avoided.

  He gave the Lords Justices and the Commissioners their ruling in what came to be known as "Mr. Vernon's Line". It was based on four questions put to the Attorney-General and the Solicitor- General. Both gentleman declared that the Scots colony would be against the laws of England, and the King had thus the right to prohibit his English subjects from giving it aid and assistance. All magistrates and officers, in England or the Plantations, would have the right to search any Scots ship going to the colony, and to take from it any English subjects they found aboard. There was no doubt that the colony would be prejudicial to His Majesty's allies and to the trade of England. When Vernon became Principal Secretary a few months later, he used this minute as the legal justification for the Royal Proclamation which he composed and sent to the Governors of all English Plantations, warning them against giving so much as a cask of pure water to any ship flying the sunburst standard of the Company of Scotland.

  He also listened patiently to anyone who could give him information about the Caribbean and the Main. Thus Captain Richard Long of Jamaica found a welcome in his office and before the Lords Justices. This leathery seaman was said to be a Quaker, but one without a troublesome conscience, no doubt, since he was a hard master and a foul-mouthed roisterer. He wanted £200 and a vessel, he told their lordships, and if given both he would bring the King £1,500,000 in gold plate salvaged from Spanish- American wrecks. They debated his petition, considered his further request for a sixteenth of the treasure, and took no action. But they did not forget him.

  Toward the end of November London heard from Orth that the Scots ships had left the Baltic, and on the day that Secretary Trumbull endorsed his letter "Reed Read 22nd Nov. 1697", the Caledonia was sailing up the Forth. In clear, winters light she anchored off Burntisland and took in all sail. Her beak and stern were a glory of gold and scarlet and blue, and as pennants flew from her main-top and mizzen her bow-chaser fired a signal salute to the cheering crowds on both sides of the firth. It was joyously answered by a white thunder from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. She had been brought from the Baltic by seamen of H.M.S. Royal William, the flagship of Scotland's little Navy, although there is no record of anyone asking the permission of royal William himself. A week later the second Lübeck ship, Instauration, came bravely by the Bass Rock and into the firth, firing her signal gun as
she dropped anchor a cable's length from the Caledonia. Before sunset she had lost her equivocal name, the Directors toasting another in their panelled chamber at Milne Square, and resolving "that from henceforward it shall be called Saint Andrew, and that the usual ceremony be executed tomorrow, it being Saint Andrew's Day." Both were clinker-built, 56-gun Indiamen of 350 tons, three-masted and rigged with stay-sails on fore and main, a lateen on the mizzen, and a steep, square-sailed spirit above a golden prow. When the Union came over from Amsterdam the distasteful implications of her name, too, were quickly rejected, in favour of Unicorn and in honour of Scotland's ancient heraldic beasts. Though a silver unicorn now supported one side of King William's arms, every nursery child knew that it was in spirited and relentless defiance of the English lion opposite.

  Two smaller ships also arrived before the year was out, both of them to be tenders for the others, and neither of them much more than a coastal vessel. The Dolphin was a two-masted, snub- nosed snow, a French prize which James Gibson had bought from her captors in Holland. In strong seas she would stubbornly bury her head in the waves and run with water from stem to waist. Her companion, the Endeavour, was a pink which the busy Dr. Munro purchased at Newcastle, which indicates that one English ship-owner, at least, was indifferent to the wishes of his government. She was high-sterned, with a great rudder and a round hull that bellied out from the water-line and in again to her narrow deck. Seaworthy enough, she was quixotic and hard to handle, rolling with sickening rhythm as she dipped her yard- arms to the sea.

  The Company had its fleet. The Rising Sun should also have come, but without topmasts and rigging she was locked in the ice at Amsterdam, where Peter the Great took wine in her cabin with Direcksone and Gibson. Yet she, too, would come. The promise that she must come was already there in five splendid ships, etched in beauty against the white hills of Fife.

  All winter, when tide and weather permitted, ferries bounced across the Forth from Leith to Burntisland, emptying the warehouse and filling the ships' holds. There was now a Committee for Equipping Ships, which met under William Arbuckle at the coffee-house owned by the nieces of James Maclurg, a merchant member of the Committee. It loaded hogsheads of beer from Thomas Whyte the brewer of Leith, bread from Ninian Hay the baker, clay pipes from David Montgomery, and dye from Ephraim Roberts. In one day, packed in dry water-casks, there were loaded 380 Bibles, 51 New Testaments, 200 Confessions of Faith and 2,808 Catechisms, all printed by Widow Anderson and all intended to sustain the settlers and inspire the Indians, if the latter could be taught English. Three Edinburgh hatters, as the first instalment of their contracts, delivered 1,440 hats (at two shillings each), and Jeremy Robertson sent boxes of his bob-wigs, periwigs and campaign wigs. With derisive hindsight, Walter Herries would find these very amusing, though his humour grossly exaggerated the number.

  Scotch hats, a great quantity; English bibles, 1500; periwigs, 4000, some long, some short; campaigns, Spanish bobs and natural ones. And truly they were all natural, for being made of Highlanders' hair, which is blanched with the rain and sun, when they came to be opened in the West Indies they looked like so many of Samson's fireships that he sent among the Philistines, and could be of no use to the Colony, if it were not to mix with their lime when they plastered the walls of their houses.*

  The total value of the goods loaded on all five ships was £18,413 5s 0½d Sterling. The Caledonia and the Saint Andrew carried the largest cargoes, as they were to transport the greatest number of settlers. There were axes, knives, mattocks and hammers, tools for coopers, carpenters and smiths, and

  * Macaulay, later, was equally derisive, accepting Herries as a reliable authority and jeering at men who carried wigs to the Tropics as trade goods, forgetting that they were probably intended for use by the settlers. But Fletcher of Saltoun, answering Herries, attempted to justify their trading value. "The cargo of cloth, stuffs, shoes, stockings, slippers and wigs must needs be proper for a country where the Natives go naked for want of apparel, and fit to be exchanged for other commodities, either in the English, Dutch, French or Spanish Plantations."

  enough nails in oiled boxes to hold together the doors and windows of a city. Fuses, grenades, cannon and cannon-shell, lead shot and powder, blunderbusses and muskets, pistols and broadswords, cutlasses and pikes, and a thousand cartridge- pouches of good black leather. For parley or triumph, when these had been used, there were brass trumpets and drums. There were men's hose and women's stockings, and more than 25,000 pairs of shoes, pumps and slippers. There was "cloth in great bulk", bales and bolts of ticking, canvas, linen, serge, muslin, glazed calico, tartan plaiding, hodden-grey and harn. Coloured crepe for flags and bunting, striped muslin for neckcloths, and Holland duck for seamen. Fourteen thousand needles, balls of twine and thread in black and grey and white. Iron frying-pans and pots, basins and jugs of English pewter, a thousand precious drinking-cups of glass, horn spoons and wooden trenchers. Twenty-nine barrels of tobacco pipes in Mr. Montgomery's best white clay. Printing-tools, parchment for treaties with princes, ink and quills, sealing-wax and scarlet ribbon of watered silk. Flints for guns and tinder-boxes, candles uncountable and three thousand candle-sticks. Buttons of wood, brass, horn and pewter, looking-glasses and two thousand pounds of pine white soap.

  And combs. Remembering Lionel Wafer's idyllic picture of the Cuna Indians, combing long hair with their fingers, the Directors ordered and loaded tens of thousands, large and small, made from lightwood, boxwood and horn. Such small vanities as a wooden comb, inlaid with beads of mother-of-pearl, could buy an imperial foothold.

  Three hundred tons of biscuit—coarse, middle, and fine— seventy of stalled beef, twenty of primes and fifteen of pork, casks of suet, flour and unmilled wheat. Twelve hundred gallons of strong claret, seventeen hundred of rum, five thousand of vinegar and five thousand more of brandy. All carefully tasted. Once a week the Committee for Equipping went down to Leith with the ships' captains and there dined and "particularly tried the state and condition of both the grass-fed and stall-fed beef, as also of the pork and other provisions, and found the same in extraordinary case and well-cured to their own and the said captains' great contentment."

  There were also men. On March 12, 1698, a single folio sheet was posted at the entry to Milne Square, and on the walls of every coffee-house in Edinburgh, Leith and Glasgow.

  The Court of Directors of the Indian and African Company of Scotland, having now in readiness ships and tenders in very good order, with provisions and all manner of things needful for their intended expedition to settle a colony in the Indies; give Notice, that for the general encouragement of all such as are willing to go upon the said expedition: Everyone who goes on the first expedition shall receive and possess fifty acres of plantable land, and 50 foot square of ground at least in the chief city or town, and an ordinary house built thereupon by the colony at the end of 3 years.

  Every Councillor shall have double. If anyone shall die, the profit shall descend to his wife and nearest relations. The family and blood relations shall be transported at the expense of the Company.

  The Government shall bestow rewards for special service.

  By Order of the Court,

  Roderick Mackenzie, Secy.

  The Proclamation carried the Company's device, lately approved by the Lord Lyon King of Arms: Saint Andrew's white saltire on a blue field, cantoned with a ship in full sail, two Peruvian llamas burdened, and a towered elephant, the whole supported by an Indian and a Blackamoor holding goat's-horns of abundant fruit. The crest was a rising sun, upon the tilted human face of which was an expression of peering incredulity.

  The political and social structure of the Colony had been determined. Although there were plans for a parliament ultimately, it would be ruled at first by a Council, each member taking his weekly turn as President (and the proposer of that astonishingly inept suggestion is unknown, to the benefit of his memory). Below the Council, and subject to it entirely, the majority of the settle
rs were divided into Overseers, Assistant or Sub-Overseers, and Planters. They were all soldiers, the first being field-officers and captains, the second subalterns, and the third, despite the noble promise of the name, were private sentinels enlisted at threepence a day and mustered in companies of forty. The deception was thin, and all called themselves and were referred to by their military rank, but the Company's Act forbade the employment of soldiers as such without the permission of the King's Privy Council, and nobody would ask for that.

  There were also to be ministers, surgeons, physicians and apothecaries, clerks and craftsmen, and while military rank cut clear divisions horizontally the expedition was also split vertically, into Landsmen and Seamen. In time these definitions would become bitter pejoratives.