THE DARIEN DISASTER Read online

  There was no lack of volunteers, and few had waited for Mackenzie's proclamation. Every young and disbanded officer was eager for the venture, and in his tail were a dozen or more hungry men whom he had led in Flanders and the Highlands, and who now saw in him their only hope of bread and employment. Edinburgh blazed with scarlet coats and facings of buff, green and blue. There was a swing of swords above the cobbles, and a high-spirited clamour in the taverns. A forlorn hope well- led before Namur might count as much as an uncle's preferment, and a wound well-healed provide a testament of courage in the scar. James Ogilvy, now Lord Seafield, was in Edinburgh and was embarrassed by men who thought he could secure them service with the Company. "I have multitudes of broken officers lying about my doors," he complained to Carstares, "and I know not what to say to them." All Directors were plagued with petitions on behalf of this captain and that ensign, of this son or that nephew, of a good sergeant or a brave drummer. No family could claim respect if it had not one young man who was hot to serve the African Company.

  Twelve hundred were finally accepted, and three hundred of these were Gentlemen Volunteers, the heirs or cadet sons of good families, with the same rank and duties as Planters but with social precedence over them. A third or more of the Planters were Highlanders, discharged soldiers from Argyll's, Strathnaver's, Hill's or Mackay's, following their officers and answering the same pull of clan loyalties that had taken them into the regiments. Many of them could speak nothing but Gaelic.

  The sixty officers selected were chosen with care, twelve captains, twenty-four lieutenants and twenty-four ensigns. Though influence may have brought them before the Directors, all had then to be passed by a special committee which met to "discourse with them pretty freely concerning the encouragement which they are to expect, and report accordingly concerning their sentiments thereof." This encouragement was considerable to a young man hoping to restore a family fortune or make one for himself: £150 in the Company's stock to every captain, £100 to a lieutenant and £5 to an ensign. Many of them were Highland too, captains like Lachlan Maclean, William Fraser, John Campbell and Colin Campbell, lieutenants Hugh Munro, Patrick MacDowall, and Colin Campbell, ensigns Alexander Mackenzie, Duncan Campbell and William Campbell. Eight of them were from Clan Campbell, lately officers of Argyll's, and the valour of their regiment, the influence of their chief the Earl, and the loyalty of their clan to the Revolution guaranteed their selection.

  Dr. John Munro recruited surgeons and physicians for the expedition, interviewing applicants at Milne Square, and putting them through small examinations in anatomy, surgery and the practice of medicine. He was helped by two doctors already chosen, Hector Mackenzie and Walter Herries. When Haldane of Gleneagles went to London in November, 1696, he had unmasked one rogue in James Smith and had been duped by another in Herries. He met this plausible Dumbarton man at Moncrieffs coffee-house, and was so impressed that he took him into the Company's employ and on to Holland. He thought that he was doing an unfortunate fellow-countryman a service by saving him from unjust extinction at the end of an English rope.

  Until the year before this, Herries had been a surgeon in the English Navy, having secured the appointment, said Fletcher of Saltoun, by becoming a convert to Catholicism and by pimping for the King's officers. He smartly abandoned this faith a few months later when the Papist on the throne was replaced by a Protestant, but he continued to prosper as a pander. He was hot- tempered, jealous of his imagined honour, and gifted with a corrosive and perceptive wit. His career as a naval surgeon ended one day in Portsmouth when, upon some real or imagined slight, he drew his sword and lunged at his commanding officer Captain John Graydon of the Vanguard, the hero of Beachy Head and Barfleur. Graydon recovered from the wound and would have had Herries brought out of irons, before a Council of War, and from thence to a yardarm, had not the influence of a Scots officer enabled the surgeon to escape. Though pricked as an outlaw by Graydon, he was still skulking in London, and protected by other Scots, when he was introduced to Haldane. For the next eighteen months, in Holland and Scotland, he worked for the Company as a supervisor of provisions and medical stores, and now he enjoyed Munro's total trust and respect. He would repay both later by accusing the doctor (perhaps not unjustly) of filling his own purse at the expense of the Company's. "Save a rogue from the gallows," said Andrew Fletcher, quoting the old proverb, "and he shall be the first that will cut your throat."

  In February two brothers, Robert and Thomas Drummond, offered their services to the Company, the one a sailor and the other a soldier. Hard and self-seeking, contemptuous of weakness and stubbornly brave, loyal to their own code and kind but without compassion for others', they were among the few men of decisive action to whom the Company gave responsible office, and they would be principals in its final, melodramatic tragedy. They were sons of an impoverished branch of the Drummonds of Borland and of Concraig, Strathearn lairds who claimed descent from Malcolm Beg, Thane of Lennox, and through their mother they had blood ties with the powerful Hamiltons. Robert was a discharged naval lieutenant when he walked into Milne Square, boldly asking for the command of a ship, and bringing with him enough family influence to be given the Dolphin and £5 10s Sterling a month. Ship and pay were less than he believed he merited, and he argued the thought persuasively enough, for he was later given the Caledonia and five shillings more. He was a good seaman and a stern shipmaster.

  Thomas Drummond needed no recommendation, his name was known to all Scotland. As a captain of grenadiers in the Earl of Argyll's Regiment he had served with courage in the Low Countries, leading his company in the van of Ramsay's Scots Brigade when it attacked the French redoubts at Dottignies. But it was not for this bloody slaughter, in which he lost most of his company, that he was well-known. He and his grenadiers had also been in Glencoe on the morning of the Massacre, under the command of Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, and to Drummond the duty seemed to be no more than the extermination of a nest of rats. When the sickened Campbell hesitated to kill the last of nine bound MacDonalds, Drummond pushed him aside and shouted "Why is he still alive? What of our orders? Kill him!" He pistolled the young man himself, and then shot a boy of twelve who was crying for mercy at Glenlyon's feet. After the Commission of Inquiry in 1695, the Scots Parliament demanded his recall from Flanders, for trial and punishment, but he and his regiment were then prisoners of the French. When he did come home, two years later after the Peace of Ryswick, the King had made it plain that he wished to hear no more of Glencoe.

  If the Court of Directors debated the shadowed past of this rough and inexorable man they did not make their doubts public. They gave him a commission as an Overseer. He was not, in any case, the only soldier they employed who had been involved in the Glencoe affair. There were private sentinels from Hill's and Argyll's Regiments, and at least two officers from Hill's—Captain Charles Forbes, to whom they gave a company, and Major James Cunningham of Eickett whom they were to make a Councillor. Such men, and others who had had nothing to do with the Massacre, formed Drummond's party during the bitter quarrelling on Darien, and their enemies called them the "Glencoe Gang".

  Thus the colonists were engaged, by major appointments and small. Mr. Hugh Rose to be Clerk to the Colony, on the enthusiastic recommendation of his patron, the Lord President. Alexander Hamilton, a none too successful merchant, offered his services as an Accountant, and was no more successful when he was made Keeper of Merchandise and Goods. The Reverend Mr. Adam Scott gladly agreed to go as Minister, with the blessing of the Presbytery, £100 in stock from the Company and £10 for the purchase of necessary books. A similar offer made to the Reverend Mr. Thomas James was sadly refused. He was a warm admirer of Paterson, and he could not serve the Company while it so unjustly rejected his friend. Roger Oswald was one of the eager and romantic young men who clamoured to be taken as Gentlemen Volunteers. His father, Sir James Oswald of Singleton, was a Lanarkshire laird, an officer of the Lord Treasurer's department who had recently been in pris
on for some innocent default in his accounts, and a stern, unforgiving parent who left his son in no doubt that family as much as national honour depended on the boy's conduct in the Colony. John Eison, a Highlandman of Clan Mackay whose name was a clerk's mauling of the Gaelic, was also taken as a Volunteer after he had extravagantly claimed to be an "absolute master of the several species of mathematics, particularly fortification, navigation, etc." Though in theory only, he added. James Lindsay, sitting on a stool in Mackenzie's office, grew tired of making ledger entries for broadswords and pistols, hodden-grey and tartan, his elbow brushed by luckier men in scarlet coats and tarpaulin jackets. He was no Gentleman, by social reckoning, but he asked leave to go as a clerk, and was accepted. William Simpson, printer of Edinburgh, offered to work the press that had been loaded aboard the Unicorn, and was engaged at forty shillings a month, ten of which were to be paid to his wife at home.

  And Benjamin Spense, a Jew, was taken as an interpreter. He said that he could read, write and speak six languages, and was particularly fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, qualifications that were to help him more than the Company. He would be a prisoner of the Spaniards for fifteen months.

  Among the lower-deck seamen waiting aboard the ships at Burntisland there was little enthusiasm for the Company or the Colony. Since the end of the war the ports had been full of workless and hungry sailors, and any berth was better than none. The Committee for Equipping Ships had paid off the crews that brought the Company's fleet from Holland and Germany, and had taken on others from the idle men on the quays. This was good business sense, not compassion. Peace had brought lower wages, since supply now exceeded demand, and the first crews had been receiving wartime rates. The seamen accepted this hard bargain silently for some weeks, and then they rebelled. At the beginning of April the ring-leaders of a mutiny aboard the Caledonia, John Bowrie and Robert MacAlexander, were brought before the Committee. They were charged with "going in a tumultous manner to their captain to represent their pretended grievance", with desertion, and with threatening to knock down any who would not desert with them. The Committee wasted no time on the pretended grievance. Between a file of musketeers both men were sent to the Tolbooth, there to stay at the Committee's pleasure, together with a warehouseman, William Turnbull, who had been solving his particular problems by embezzling the Company's stores.

  Perhaps as a result of the trouble aboard the Caledonia, and realising that a mutiny at sea would certainly be worse than one in port, the Directors decided to improve the shipboard conditions of the sailors. They did not raise pay or improve rations, but they ordered that for every five seamen there should be one chest for the stowing of their meagre property. Lest this be jealously resented by the young Gentlemen aboard, it was further resolved that every Volunteer should be given room in the hold for one barrel, in which to keep his personal effects or any trade goods he wished to take to the Colony.

  The Company also had trouble with James Smith again. It had finally, and incredibly late it would seem, struck his name from the roll of Directors "for his villainous violation of the trust reposed in him". He had been in London a year and had been insufferably slow in realising his assets and repaying the money. Dr. Munro was sent south to encourage him. Smith endured a few days of Munro's nagging, and then put his wife, his family, his relations and his luggage in a coach and set off for Dover and France. Munro pursued him by horse, with officers and a special warrant, caught him on the quayside and took him back to London and prison. The Directors sent Munro £400 to pay for the wretched man's prosecution.

  They also sent him orders to seek out Lionel Wafer in London and sound him on the matter of employment with the Company. It was the second attempt to engage the young buccaneer. A few weeks earlier he had dined at Pontack's and discussed the proposal with Andrew Fletcher and Captain Robert Pennecuik, the recently-appointed master of the Saint Andrew and Commodore of the Company's fleet. They reported that he was open to per- suasion and they advised the Directors to pursue him further. Fletcher held no office in the Company and he acted throughout with disinterested good faith, honestly believing that the Directors wished to employ the surgeon, but their intentions were in fact more subtle, and were motivated by an almost hysterical fear that Wafer was about to place their whole undertaking in jeopardy.

  A year before, Wafer and Dampier had been closely examined in London by the Commissioners of Trade, and had been asked whether the Scots, or anyone else, could settle and hold a plantation on Darien. They said that two hundred and fifty good fighting-men, with the help of the Indians, could secure and maintain a foothold against anything the Spanish might muster by sea or land. Five hundred could settle the country and keep it. Although they were probably thinking of buccaneers, not sluggish Flanders veterans and green boys from English or Scots shires, their confidence was impressive. The Commissioners advised the Lords Justices that a ship should be sent to take possession of Golden Island off the coast of Darien. But nothing came of the suggestion.

  Now the Directors heard that Wafer had placed his narrative in the hands of a printer, and they believed that once it was published, once its account of that waiting paradise was common knowledge, the English would order Admiral Benbow's West Indian Fleet to claim Darien before their own ships could leave the Forth.

  Munro called at Wafer's lodgings in early June with James Campbell, the Company's London agent. They discovered that the young man was no ingenuous tarpaulin, that he was a shrewd bargainer and well advised by an Irish merchant called Fitzgerald. When he was offered twenty guineas to postpone his book for a month, he said that for £1,000 he would give the Company all the information it wished. Munro did not tell him that the Directors already had most of that, in the copy of his manuscript which Paterson had given them. He made a counteroffer of considerably less, and they haggled until the articles of a contract were agreed, composed by Campbell and written down by Fitzgerald. Wafer was to withhold publication for a month and leave immediately for further discussions with the Directors and Council-General in Edinburgh. He was to receive £50 for the expenses of this journey and the settling of his affairs in London, and if he entered the Company's service for two years he would suppress the book entirely and receive £700. If no agreement were reached in Edinburgh, he would be free to leave and publish at the end of one month. Wafer signed, and took post-horse for Scotland within the week.

  The affair then became a comic farce. He travelled as "Mr. Brown", Munro insisting that secrecy was all. Wafer tolerantly agreed to this, though he may have wondered who could not be in the secret, since the English knew of the Scots' interest in him and Darien. He crossed the Border and rode toward Edinburgh by way of Haddington. At the post-house there, he said in a Memorial he wrote later, he was met by Pennecuik

  who told me that he was sent express from the secret

  committee of the Company to acquaint me it was not convenient I should be seen or known at Edinburgh for some private reasons, that he was to lodge me at a house about a mile wide of the road.

  The house was Saltoun Hall, Andrew Fletcher's home, and the great patriot was there to make him welcome. The next day a coach brought five great men of the Company, the Earl of Panmure and the new Marquis of Tweeddale, both Councillors, and three Directors, Haldane, Blackwood and Sir Francis Scott. They asked him if he had so ordered his affairs that there was no need for him to return to London, and he told them that he was able to go aboard at a day's notice. This, they said, was good news, for their fleet would be ready to sail in eight or ten days. They left, and returned the next day with Pennecuik. The subject of this day's conference, as likewise for the next two or three meetings, was to inform themselves of the country of Darien, which I performed faithfully, not suspecting any private design upon me by persons of so great honour, and having unbosomed myself of all the secrets of that country of Darien, as likewise of a treasure of Nicaragua wood unknown to any person in Europe but to myself, they insisted most on this treasure, where it gro
ws, if it were near the sea, or easily shipped aboard. I satisfied them particularly of all and in every question they asked me. There was too much talk of that fabulous red-wood, too little of his duties with the expedition, too many notes taken by Pennecuik about harbours, soundings, and pilotage. And when the Directors spoke of Darien they used words and phrases that may have reminded Wafer curiously of his own manuscript. He was being treated as a child, he thought, and likely to be dismissed

  as a child at any moment, with no more than a worthless rattle for his trouble. But the Company had not yet finished with him. Walter Herries was now sent to bring him by night and in secret again to Edinburgh, where he was privately lodged off the High Street and told to keep to the house, "less their enterprise should take air in England, which they said must inevitably happen if I were known to be in Scotland." High in this smoke-grained building he saw nobody but Pennecuik and Herries, and had no diversion but what he could see from its greasy windows, until one day he was at last visited by the Committee for Equipping Ships. He was told that since England now knew about the Company's plans for Darien that site for its Colony had been rejected in favour of another. Did he perhaps know something of the River Plate? He did not. Of the Amazon? No. A pity, yet he need not be too disappointed, the Company would think of a fit gratuity for his pains. That evening Captain Pennecuik brought him twenty guineas and the Directors' good wishes for a safe return to England.

  Walter Herries, who took Wafer out of Edinburgh and some way down the post-road, was amused by the whole affair, particularly the night-rides, the lonely rooms at a quiet stairhead. He thought the Directors' last warning that the visit should still be kept secret was unnecessary, since the bitter young man could scarcely talk about it without being laughed at. "He hath acquired so little knowledge of Edinburgh that if he were to return to that city he could no more find the way to his lodging than the Company could to the Nicaragua wood."