THE DARIEN DISASTER Read online

  Edinburgh suburb of Fountainbridge, the home of the leather- merchant Sir Alexander Brand whose skins of black and gold had been hung in Oxenforde's hall. Brand's daughters put aside their father's breeches, which they had been mending, offered Taylor brandy and champagne, and played the spinet for him beneath a splendid ceiling upon which the family's sturdy politics were displayed in a carving of one crown and two sceptres, and the ironic Latin motto: "This has been left us by one hundred and eight forefathers." It was Brand who offered to clean the streets, courts and turnpikes of Edinburgh, largely at his own expense, because it was "the nastiest city in the world".

  For two weeks following the first reading of the Act, Balfour and Blackwood tirelessly entertained the secretary and members of the Committee of Trade, not forgetting to tip the doorkeeper of the Exchequer House where the Committee met, or to buy ale for Tweeddale's servants in return for the news they might bring from the Commissioner's table. During one exhausting evening, when the two merchants dined with Committee members at the Ship tavern, they nobly dispatched a lambshead and bowls of mutton broth, herrings and a sleeve of mutton, three ducks, three chickens with gooseberries, fruit, cheese, bread and ale, French wine and brandy, followed by tobacco and pipes. All of which, Mr. Balfour meticulously recorded, would cost the future company £33 55 Scots, including two shillings for the cook and fourteen for the serving-boys. The next evening, with heroic fortitude, Blackwood joined the secretary of the Committee at the Ship, consuming a dish of fowls with gooseberries, two lobsters, cutlets, sparagrass, bread, ale and wine, tobacco and pipes. There were also endless dishes of coffee at Maclurg's, ale at Peter Steel's, more dinners at Widow Graham's, copies of the Act to be printed and circulated, a meeting of merchants and baillies at William Ross's, and the staggering expenditure of £11 17s on "coffee and otherwise" at the Sun before Balfour and Blackwood went to give evidence before the Committee of Trade.

  None of this was self-indulgence. Without relentless pressure, without liberal hospitality, the Committee might well have dallied over its business and decided nothing by the time the session ended. But by June 25, all amendments to the Act had been finally agreed and it was once more brought before the Estates.

  Again it was remitted to the Committee, in order that the names of the patentees or promoters of the company—ten resident in England and ten in Scotland—might be inserted. Lord Belhaven, president of the Committee, was also advised to consult with the Lyon King of Arms upon what seal, what emblazon the company should be given. There was no doubt about this, all men agreed that nothing could better illustrate the nation's longing and its glorious future than a golden sun, rising from the waves.

  Clerks worked overnight to make the amendments, and the next morning, Wednesday, June 26, the Bill was once more brought before the Estates. It was read, voted and approved, without debate and dismissed almost casually. A week before, the Glencoe Commissioners had finished their Inquiry, and their Report was already on its way to the King in his camp before Namur. Tweeddale had reluctantly submitted a copy to Parliament, and for five days Members had been hotly debating it, with no interest in, and no time for anything else. They could feel the Master of Stair's neck within their grasp, and to-day they wished to vote upon whether or not an Address should be sent to the King, demanding the punishment of those found guilty of bloody slaughter in a Highland glen. There was no objection when the Bill's supporters asked that it be given the Royal Assent that day. Tweeddale had not the strength or courage to delay this, though he must have known that implicit in the promise he had given on May 9 was the King's wish to study any act for a company before it was passed. Nor was it clear—and no argument later would satisfactorily determine this—whether or not he had the power to give the Royal Assent without royal permission. But he was old, and he too, perhaps, was caught up in the surge of patriotic emotion. The Sceptre was carried to him, a silver and gilt rod thirty-four inches in length, hexagonal, richly decorated with pearls, oak leaves and golden dolphins, enamelled images of the Virgin Mary, Saint James, and Saint Andrew in a Highland bonnet. Tweeddale took it in both hands, lowered its crystal globe, and gently touched the Act.

  That evening in Michael's tavern, and for what seems an unusually cautious expenditure of £2 15s, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Blackwood, with "the Londoners and the Glasgow men", toasted The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies.

  As defined by the clauses of the Act there had never been anything like this Company, nor would there ever be anything like it again. Its promoters, its supporters in the Estates, had been like children left by an open larder door, encouraged by the imagined approval of an absent parent. For the next 31 years it had the monopoly of Scottish trade with Asia, Africa and America, and for 21 of these all goods imported by it, with the exception of sugar and tobacco, would be free of duty. For ten years it had the right to equip, freight and navigate its own or hired ships, "in warlike or other manner, to any lands, islands, countries, or places in Africa, Asia or America, and there to plant colonies, build cities, towns or forts" with the consent of the natives of such places, and provided they were not part of the possessions of any European sovereign or state. It had the right to furnish its forts and towns with magazines, stores and the weapons of war, and the powers to defend them against attack, to seek reprisals, to make treaties of peace and commerce with the native princes, governors and rulers of the lands they settled. And if injury were done to the Company, its possessions and its people by a European power, then the King and the King's men must guarantee and secure reparation.

  All officers and servants of the Company in its colonies, with those of other nations who might settle with them and accept its rules, were to be free citizens of the Kingdom of Scotland, with all the rights and privileges thereof. No officer of state, civil or military, could arrest, impress or detain any member or servant of the Company, and if this were done then the Company had the right to release the men with the unquestioning assistance of the King's magistrates and officers. And all members of the Company were to be free "both in their persons, estates and goods employed in the said stock and trade, from all manner of taxes, cesses, supplies, excises, quartering of soldiers, transient or local, or levying of soldiers, or other impositions whatsoever, and that for and during the space of twenty-one years." No part of the capital stock, or of the real or personal property of the Company could be liable to confiscation or arrest, and creditors of members of the Company were to have lien over their profits only, and no rights over their stock.

  Thus was the Company a nation in itself, with the right to make governments and wage war, to grant freedoms and impose punishments, to trade where and with whom it wished. It could challenge the mercantile and colonial empires of England, Holland and Spain, fly its flag and the saltire of Scotland in any port and on any sea, and answer insults to both with fire and sword. The crystal globe of the Sceptre, catching the June sunlight from the windows of Parliament Hall, had ended a century of deprivation and despair. To the King alone did the Company own allegiance, and in token of this, and in gratitude, it promised him and his successors one hogshead of tobacco every year.

  Twenty men were named in the Act as promoters and patentees, with powers to join with others, to form a Council-General and a Court of Directors, to issue stock, to determine the rules, ordinances and constitution of the Company. Ten of them were Londoners, two Englishmen, the Jew D'Azevedo, and seven resident Scots including Paterson. In Scotland there was John Hamilton, Lord Belhaven, rewarded perhaps for his noisy advocacy in the Committee of Trade, the Lord Justice Clerk Adam Cockburn of Ormiston, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh Sir Robert Chiesly, Balfour, Blackwood, two other merchants from Glasgow and Edinburgh, and three Lowland lairds who had also been members of the Committee of Trade.

  That week James Balfour gathered the scraps of paper upon which he and Blackwood had kept a careful note of their expenses during the past two and a half years. He copied them out neatly on a scroll and
called it "An Accompt of Mony spent in Procuring the Act of Parlement for the Afrecane Tread". The lobsters and cutlets, sparagrass and mutton broth, duck and chickens with gooseberries, cheese and ale, French wine and brandy, pipes, tobacco, coffee and tips, the charges of printers and clerks, the cost of the best Lombard paper, fees to the Lord Chancellor and the Keeper of the Seal, and a curious entry "for Mr. Robert Blackwood and my own trouble and attendance", amounted to £2,119 12s 8d Scots.

  The key of the universe had been cheaply bought.

  "We must not act apart in any thing, but in a united body"

  London, July to December 1695

  And then it was seen that the Company had two heads, each turned to the other in suspicion. Whatever might be the intentions of the promoters in Scotland, those in England proceeded on the assumption that the Court of Directors must be established in London, and during the next five months the childish havering and unexplained silences of the Edinburgh promoters persuaded them that they were right. Even Paterson had not thought it necessary to go to Scotland to support the passage of the Act through Parliament, though he had cannonaded Balfour with letters of advice which were dutifully read aloud to the Lord Provost and the Baillies of Edinburgh at the Ship ("to coffee and otherwise, £3.15s").

  For their part, Balfour and Blackwood acted as if their colleagues in London had suddenly and obligingly drowned themselves in the Thames. As soon as the Act had been touched by the Sceptre they recruited twenty-eight of their fellow-merchants of Glasgow and Edinburgh as members of the Company, each contributing £3 Sterling toward immediate expenses and promising to subscribe stock to the total value of £13,600. This placed them ahead of the Londoners who had not yet decided to establish themselves as a Court of Directors, or opened a Subscription Book. Nor could they, for no one in Scotland seemed willing to send them a copy of the Act. Behind these pettish differences lay wider antagonisms. The Scots saw the Company as a colonising power that would release them from the political and religious tyrannies of the past, and bring them a rich, commercial future based on the forts, towns, magazines and navies granted them by the Act. The Londoners, with the exception of Paterson, were less interested in plantations than in the exploitation of the Spice Islands and the Indian sub-continent, too long the jealous monopoly of the East India Company.

  Paterson was accepted as the spokesman of the Londoners, or made himself so by the sustained power of his lungs and his indefatigable capacity for hard work. He decided that Sir Robert Chiesly was the responsible member of the Edinburgh promoters, and for the next three months he carried on an urgent, and usually one-sided correspondence with the Lord Provost, pleading for a copy of the Act and arguing that some of the Scots should come to London without delay. He understood his countrymen's demoralising vice of prevarication by committee, and he demanded action, action. "For if anything go not on with the first heat, the raising of a fund seldom or never succeeds, the multitude being commonly led more by example than reason."

  This London summer was exceptional, the days hot and still, broken by spectacular thunderstorms which at least kept down the dust and the stench as Paterson walked or took a hackney to the City, to sup with James and Hannah Chiesly, to dine with James Foulis in St. Mary Woolnoth or Thomas Coutts in St. Dionis Backchurch. The London Scots were aware of a growing impatience among those English merchants who had been persuaded to take an interest in the Company. The traditional English contempt for the Scots, and the Scot's long envy of the English, their religious and political differences, could destroy the Company before its first whimper of life. Paterson rightly suspected that these prejudices might be stronger in Edinburgh than in London. He pleaded with Robert Chiesly to ignore them, and his letter suggests that someone had perhaps raised an eyebrow at the inclusion of the Jew D'Azevedo. "It's needful to make no distinction of parties in this noble undertaking, but that of whatever nation or religion a man be (if one of us) he ought to be looked upon to be of the same interest and inclination. For we must not act apart in any thing, but in a firm and united body, and distinct from all other interests whatsoever."

  Chiesly and his colleagues probably resented the patronising tone and pedagogic style of such letters. They made irksome reading for proud men who could not see what Mr. Paterson had done in this affair, beyond the scheme he had drawn up, that he should so cock his hat and teach them their business. There had been talk of a company, and proposals for an Act, long before his voice had been heard in Denmark Street, as Mr. Balfour's account of money spent could show. And so, a copy of the Act was not sent. When it did leave Edinburgh, about mid-August, it was dispatched by news-writers and was circulating in the taverns and coffee-houses of Fleet Street before Paterson and his friends had read a word of it. "We are much surprised," he complained, "to see some of the printed Acts of Parliament in the hands of some who are not very well wishers to us, before we who are concerned can have them." The ill-wishers were the directors and stock-holders of the East India and African Companies, their friends and place-men in Whitehall. Worse still, to Paterson's tidy mind, was the deplorable mistake made in the names of the London promoters, eleven being given in the Act instead of ten, though Scots clerks and Scots printers might have been excused for turning Joseph Cohen D'Azevedo into two strangers called Joseph Cohaine and Daves Ovedo.

  What letters Paterson did get from Chiesly were vague and discouraging, promising little except that one of the Scots might visit London at some unspecified date. Paterson replied that at least three should be sent, and that immediately. "Since the people here are already as much awakened as they are like to be, it becomes us to strike while the iron is hot and hasten our pace." All would go well as soon as a Court of Directors was properly established, and there should be no doubt that London was the place for it. "Because without the advice and assistance of some gentlemen here it will not be possible to lay the foundation as it ought, either to counsel or money." The best heads, the best purses; by the enlistment of these in both England and Scotland would the Company prosper.

  In the end, without waiting for the Scots, the Londoners held their first formal meeting of business, on Thursday, August 29. It was a dull, cold day, with the promise of an early winter in the mists above Soho Fields. Great fires were burning in Cheapside and at Charing Cross, and the streets were noisy with drunken crowds. That morning Mr. Fry, the King's Messenger, had arrived from the Low Countries with news of the fall of Namur, a bloody affair in which three thousand of William's fusiliers had marched stubbornly on the outworks under the command of that salamander Lord Cutts, losing a third of their number by musketry and the stones which the French rolled down upon them. There were rumours that the King himself had been killed, and some days ago a mad officer of the Earl of Oxford's Horse had ridden through the City, waving sword and pistol, threatening to kill any who denied that Dutch William was dead. The mob pulled him from the saddle and took him to Newgate along with the Frenchman Pontack, who owned the fashionable eating- house in Abchurch Lane, and who had started the rumour for reasons he had so far kept to himself.

  The meeting was brief and orderly, efficiently controlled by a young scrivener called Roderick Mackenzie who had been engaged as Secretary. His Highland ancestry is obscure, his Christian name common enough among his clan, but he had pretensions to gentility, sometimes sealing his private letters with a harp, and sometimes with the stag's-head of the Seaforths. He was likeable and friendly, and was quickly called Rorie by the other Scots exiles. He wrote a clear, cursive hand, kept proper minutes with the aid of two clerks, and was to be the Company's loyal and passionate servant from this day until its sordid extinction twelve years later, and would in time be so jealous of its honour that he would he for it, take up arms for it, and see innocent men hang for it. This evening, as candles were lit against an early dusk, he wrote down the first resolutions recorded by the Company.

  Resolved, that all persons who are desirous to be incorporated into this Company do give their names toget
her with the respective sums for which they are willing to subscribe, in writing, to Roderick Mackenzie, who is to keep a list thereof.

  Resolved, that the said Roderick Mackenzie do not discover the said names, or any sums, or any part thereof, to any person or persons whatsoever, without special direction of at least a majority of the members now assembled.

  Resolved, that a sum be raised for defraying all necessary charges, till the constitution of the Company be settled.

  There were seven members present, all of them Scots, and no reason was given in the minutes for the absence of D'Azevedo and the two Englishmen. It was agreed that each should give £25 against those necessary charges, the cost of ink, paper and candles, clerks and the Edinburgh post, wine and ale, tobacco and pipes. James Foulis was elected treasurer and was instructed to advance £20 to Mackenzie for petty cash. And then they put on their cloaks, called up their link-boys, and went home through the smoke.