THE DARIEN DISASTER Read online

  The misery was bitter. Scotland's trade and industry were paltry, and their disappearance would have made little difference to the commerce of Europe, and none to the rest of the world. The union of the kingdoms in 1603 had not given the parity and equality of opportunity it might have implied. Ninety years later Scotland felt herself to be the subordinate nation. As theologians once debated how many angels might comfortably stand on the head of a pin, as Spanish priests once argued whether or not an Indian was a human being in the eyes of the Church, so English jurists whetted their wits on the problem of where and when a Scot might be considered an English subject, with the rights and privileges thereof. Though there were two economies, two parliaments in the island, there was one king, and since the second Stuart he had been primarily and sometimes exclusively an English king. Nor was this all a matter of mood and emotion. Scotland had not recovered from the poverty of the Commonwealth when she had carried the heavy weight of an English army of occupation. In the earlier years of the century she had enjoyed something like free trade with England, and by the imposed union of the Commonwealth this had been legally acknowledged. Under the restored Stuarts she recovered her political independence but lost the one-nation advantages of free trade when the Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663 were inexorably enforced.

  The clauses of these Acts hung on Scotland's commerce like ignoble fetters, and increased her economic dependence upon England. No goods could be transported from the King's possessions in Africa, Asia or America except in the ships of England, Ireland, Wales and Berwick-on-Tweed, or in ships whereof the master and three-quarters of the crew were English. No foreign goods could enter England except in the bottoms of English ships, or ships of the country of origin. Scots shipping was thus limited to trade with Scotland, and the vessels themselves were largely Dutch- or German-built. No more did Scots yards create great warships and merchantmen for European kings as they had done a century before, or Scots architects work in the royal yards at Copenhagen. The Scots Parliament passed retaliatory Acts of a similar character, but this was the petulant response of a child who, rejected by his companions and having neither bat nor ball, declares that no others may play with him.

  All of Scotland's meagre industries, cloth, cattle, fishing, coal, salt and lead, suffered from English competition or English legislation, and from a dispirited malaise. Her exports of grain, which in good times earned her a worthwhile income, particularly from Norway, could fall to the minimal in unpredictable, uncontrollable years of famine and drought. With no strong, reciprocal export trade she depended largely upon what England imported and sold to her across the border, paying for it in sterling. Her nobility and middle classes wore clothes made from English woollens, and equipped their kitchens with English copper and brass. Their smiths used iron from Sweden, and their coopers bought their hoops already made from England or Flanders. The best of their beer was brewed from English hops, their spices and sugars, their Levantine fruits, had come in the bottoms of English merchantmen. They rode in saddles of English leather, ate bread made from East Anglian grain when their own harvests failed, fought their quarrels with foreign muskets and Dutch powder, and treated their wounds with drugs sold to them by England.*

  Since the Revolution there had been a growing feeling that these ills might be cured by a willing political union with the southern kingdom, or at least by a favourable customs union. But a wider, stronger hope, and one that answered a stubborn pride, was that Scotland might become as great a mercantile and colonial power as England. Not as a country of interloping merchants, poaching the grounds of the East India or African Companies, but as a free and independent nation, competing in ships, men and colonies.

  Scotland's attempts at colonisation had so far been sad and disastrous. Sixty years before, a brave settlement on the Bay of Fundy had become a casualty in the war between England and France, and all that remained of it were the descendants of those Nova Scotia baronets who had bought their titles cheaply, each contributing six men and a thousand merks toward the colony. More recently a Quaker settlement in New England, a Covenanters' refuge in Carolina, had both failed, the one swamped by the English, the other destroyed by Spanish fire and sword. Yet there were Scots by the thousands in Africa and the New World. They had gone, roped and chained more often than not, as transported victims of lost causes. A thousand were sent to Virginia and New England after Cromwell's crowning mercy of Dunbar. After another such mercy at Worcester, fifteen hundred, many of them Highlanders, were sold on the coast of Guinea. The miserable failure of the Highland rebellion against Cromwell in 1654 gave the newly-acquired English island of Jamaica more bonded servants and plantation workers. Seventeen hundred Covenanters were transported to America after Bothwell Brig and during the Graham's furious dragonnade. And in 1685, when the Earl of

  *A brilliant and scholarly account of the state of affairs at this time can be found in Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union, 1660-1707, by T. C. Smout.

  Argyll made his abortive rising in support of Monmouth, his Campbell clansmen were taken to the colonies by Scots and English shipmasters who made handsome profits from the speculative gamble.

  With all these, as part of a sad Diaspora that was to continue for another hundred and fifty years, went the thieves and beggars, gipsies, whores, paupers and dissolute persons whom Scotland's own government found too much of a nuisance to keep and too valuable to hang. The Scots, said the English colonists, were good and reliable servants, and the Governor of one plantation wished that he might have more, three or four thousand perhaps, promising to pay their passage and give them their freedom after a year's bondage.

  Some years before the Revolution Scots merchants had become dimly aware that their counting-houses, and not the bloody banners of the Scots Brigades, could be the future glory of their nation. In December, 1681, eighty-two of them, aping the English, formed themselves into The Company of Merchants of Edinburgh. Their badge was a stock of broom, the yellow-flowered native shrub of astonishing growth, and they toasted it at every meeting. Their constitution ruled that none but those who joined the Company could conduct business in the city. Acknowledging the God of Battles in his alter ego as Lord of Trade, they began all their business with a supplicatory prayer: "Almighty and eternal God, the sea is Thine, and Thy hands formed the dry land. Prosper us in our present undertakings with the fruits of both."

  By 1691 the Company had indeed prospered, though the same might not have been said of the country. From the legacies of dead members it had built a school for the education of the female children of those who had nothing to bequeath but orphans. For £670 Sterling it had bought Lord Oxenforde's quadrangular house by Magdalen Chapel in Cowgate (his lordship's preference for a Stuart king preventing him from disputing the sale), hung its meeting-hall with one hundred and nineteen skins of black Spanish leather stamped with gold, and turned the waste ground to the rear into a pleasant bowling-green.

  It was the dogged efforts of the members of this company that secured Tweeddale's promise to the fifth session of the Scots Parliament. They had been in sympathy with Glasgow merchants in 1691 when the latter urged the need for a Scots colony upon the Convention of Royal Burghs. With the passing of the Act for Encouraging Foreign Trade in 1693, they were among the forty- eight signators to a bond which stressed "the great advantages that may redound to this nation by promoting a trade to the coast of Africa, America and other foreign parts", agreeing to work diligently for this until the Crown granted a patent for such a trading company, and each contributing three guineas toward the expense. Among those signators, too, were Paterson, Douglas, Nairne, Chiesly and other Scots merchants in London, and it is probable that these men, with their wider experience and shrewder brains, were the inspirational and organisational centre of the agitation.

  For it was from them that came the first real response to the King's gracious invitation. Eight months later, standing before the bar of the Commons in Westminster Hall, and not at all sure that he might n
ot be taken from thence to prison, Paterson made it seem a casual affair to which small thought had been given. Mr. Chiesly had called one day in May. Mr. Chiesly had said that there was talk at home of new measures to encourage trade. Mr. Paterson had given him "a scheme for erecting an East India Company", which Mr. Chiesly had carried into Scotland some days later.

  There had been more to it than that. Long hours, days, months, a year or more perhaps. Coffee and chocolate in Denmark Street, or the welcome change of Hannah Chiesly's hot punch in Allhallows Staining. Discarded wigs hanging on the corners of chairs, blue smoke from long clay pipes, the squeak of a knife cutting a new quill, and Scots voices from all the Lowland shires, debating and disputing. Robert Douglas so contemptuous of Paterson's Darien dream, so ready to squash all talk of it that Paterson suspected him of treachery. David Nairne, who acted as a London banker for Scotland's nobility and their improvident sons, reporting that he had written to Lord Leven, to Lord Tarbat, entreating their support. Paterson urging that the company must be a joint venture of the two kingdoms, that its directors should include men like Cohen D'Azevedo and the Huguenot Paul Domonique, English merchants like Robert Lancashire and Thomas Skinner who were jealous of the East India Company's monopoly, who wanted a more profitable exercise for their capital than fitting out interlopers which must wear ship and run as soon as an Indiaman's topsails broke the horizon.

  The scheme was written in Paterson's good hand, and was the creation of his lucid mind and ambitious imagination. It said nothing about Darien, but it drew the framework and determined the rights and privileges of an incredibly powerful trading company with a sovereignty subordinate only to the Crown. It lay in Paterson's writing-desk against the day when good news came from the north. Chiesly took it to Edinburgh, and from it, in great haste and excitement, was drafted one of the most noble, vainglorious and disastrous Acts ever passed by the Parliament of Scotland.

  "Yea the Body of the Nation longing to have a Plantation" Edinburgh, June 1695

  The Marquis of Tweeddale, an aging but conscientious man much troubled by rheums and agues, lodged in the palace of Holyroodhouse. The fine windows of his apartments looked out on the Physick Garden, the treeless park about King Arthur's Seat, and the squalid debtors who took sanctuary in St. Anne's Yard. As the King's Commissioner to Parliament he was allowed £50 a day to keep a good table, whereat most Members of the Estates dined at least once during the session. Escorted by a troop of dragoons in blue and steel, he travelled each morning to Parliament Hall in a coach drawn by six horses, another coach-and-six for his attendant gentlemen, and more for the Lord Chancellor, the Secretary for Scotland, the Lord Justice Clerk and other Officers of State. This solemn progress of patched, powdered and periwigged old men was watched by disrespectful crowds by the pillory outside the Tron Church, by the kail- wives and by women drawing water from the fountains, while the Town Guard stood to arms with drums beating. Looking up from his coach-window, the King's Commissioner could see the greystone vanity of the city's new skyline, gabled thistles, roses and fleurs-de-lys, and on the walls of older houses the sober admonitions of earlier centuries. As you are lord of your tongue, so am I of my ears....

  In Parliament Hall, forty yards long and sixteen wide, beneath the black cross-braces and hammer-beams, Tweeddale filled a lonely throne, his commission on a velvet cushion before him. Lords and Commons sat in banked tiers, sharing one chamber but preserving the distinctions of birth and privilege. Dukes, marquesses and earls were closest to God in high rows to the right of the throne, viscounts and barons to the left, and below them, descending, the knights of the shires, burgesses and commons. The fall of colour, scarlet and blue through brocade to black, ended at a long table upon which lay the Crown, the Sceptre and the Sword of Scotland, a cold fire of gold and silver, rubies, amethysts and garnets, blue enamel and pearls, diamonds, emeralds, velvet and ermine. Here, on Wednesday, June 12,1695, before a large crowd of strangers who stood inside the doors holding the white sticks that were their tickets of entry, the Estates listened to a first reading of An Act for the Encouragement of Trade. Without debate they referred it to the Committee of Trade which, within two days, had renamed it An Act in favour of the Scots Company Trading to Africa and the Indies.

  There was scarcely a literate man in the Lowlands who did not know what it proposed. On May 22, shortly after James Chiesly's arrival in Edinburgh, a short pamphlet appeared on the streets and in the coffee-houses and taverns. It was called Proposals for a Fond to Cary on a Plantation, and it is easy to believe, by deduction rather than evidence, that it was a printed version of Paterson's scheme. It was a concise, orderly plan for the creation of a joint-stock company with powers to trade, to establish colonies in America, Asia or Africa, and to hold them in the name of the Crown of Scotland, to purchase ships, and to open a bank in Edinburgh. It began without preamble, and to the point: "There is no need to take up any time in setting forth the usefulness of plantations in general to all places, or to the Kingdom of Scotland in particular, seeing now at length persons of all ranks, yea the Body of the Nation are longing to have a Plantation." The pamphlet's first condition for the establishment of the company reflects Paterson's simple idealism, his appeal to what was noblest in man. The company should be

  A Body of Trading Men of the nation (not excluding either Nobility or Gentry from furnishing their shares unto) incorporated under such reasonable and lasting rules as may carry on the design, and neither leave it in the power of the Managers to misapply, nor of passionate and peevish Members either to break the company or carry off their shares.

  Though this pamphlet, and the Bill before the Committee of Trade, provoked argument and enthusiasm, public interest was really excited by something much more dramatic. The Commission of Inquiry into the Massacre of Glencoe, three years before, had begun its sittings in the Long Gallery of Holyroodhouse, and at the other end of the Royal Mile the Estates were waiting for its report, declaring that they would delay all other business until they had it, though they might have no right to debate the matter before the King had given his opinion. Their impatience was due less to a respect for justice than to a realisation that here at last they might pull down and destroy the King's Secretary of State, the Master of Stair, upon whose orders the slaughter of the MacDonalds had taken place. Each day was thus another blaze of colourful pomp, the Officers of State going by gilded coaches to Parliament Hall, the members of the Inquiry coming by theirs to Abbey Close, the gates of the palace opening and closing upon scarlet and tartan. In the taverns, the broad thoroughfare of the High Street, by the coach-houses of the palace, could be seen some of the witnesses to the Inquiry: officers of John Hill's Regiment down from their garrison in Lochaber, and keeping close to their worried colonel; catlike clansmen in the tail of their chief, John MacDonald, and his brother Alasdair. And there was one riotous morning when the Earl of Breadalbane, the slippery Highland eel whose involvement in the massacre was suspected but not determined, was carried in his coach to the Castle, a prisoner by vote of the Estates.

  In the noisy atmosphere of accusation and recrimination, Tweeddale required more mental and physical energy than he had shown when he changed his loyalties at Marston Moor, fifty years before. As President of the Inquiry and Commissioner to Parliament, he was sometimes needed at both ends of the Royal Mile on the same morning. A servant to both King and nation, he found it difficult to obey one without angering the other. Testy dispatches from Flanders demanded that he bring the session to an end, and from the lower tiers of Parliament Hall he was told that Members would sit until they received satisfaction. He bowed before immediate pressures and hoped for understanding from those more distant, begging the King for further time

  "that your service may be done with cheerfulness and alacrity."

  To the merchants of Edinburgh, the responsibility for the murder of three dozen Highland savages was of small consequence at this moment. Their concern was to speed the passage of their Bill through the
Committee of Trade and back to the floor of Parliament for a vote. Two of them were principally concerned in sweetening the members of the Committee, answering questions, providing information, and making promises. Both had been ardent advocates of a trading company since the 1693 Act, keeping careful note of their tavern expenses against future repayment, and both had been correspondents of Chiesly, Nairne and other London Scots. James Balfour was a solid man of business with hopes of the Caribbean trade, a decent body with a modest ancestry of Lowland lairds whose fortunes and lands had been first secured at the end of a reiver's lance. His surname was respected in Scotland for honesty and plain-dealing, and would become wider known when his descendant gave it to the hero of Treasure Island. Robert Blackwood was a woollen merchant, a director of the Newmills Cloth Company, jealous of the privileges of his English competitors in Africa where, it was said, a single plaid would secure many times its weight in elephants' teeth and gold.

  Such men represented the emergent aristocracy of wealth in Scotland, pious supporters of the Kirk, and politically potent in the Estates. William Arbuckle, a merchant of Glasgow and one of the first to dip into his purse for the company, was able to subscribe more stock than peers whose estates spread across three shires. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh, at present a kinsman of James Chiesly, was by custom a knighted merchant who sat by right on the King's Privy Council. These trading men were as proud of their counting-houses, their factories and their town houses, as nobler men were of their castles and regiments. The Englishman, Joseph Taylor, once dined at Brandfield in the