THE DARIEN DISASTER Read online

  Paterson sent news of the meeting to Scotland, and again asked that delegates be sent, "all the Gentlemen here do seriously press it." And again a few days later, "We find ourselves daily more and more obliged to press the coming of these persons who shall be deputed from you, the reasons still increasing for us to get our business here dispatched before the approaching Sessions of Parliament." For when William came home from his war, when Commons and Lords sat that autumn, all the trading companies of England would conspire to crush the upstart, malapert, interloping Company of Scotland.

  If they were not doing so already. The East India Company, it was said, was considering a petition to the King, begging his gracious consideration of their troubles. These did not include, publicly at least, the Scots Company, but were none the less grave. French privateers, which lay off the Scilly Isles like waiting cats, and could sometimes be seen from Plymouth or Wight, had recently taken two great Indiamen, the latest of many such expensive losses to all the English companies. Great men were withdrawing their support from the East India Company, and its shares had fallen from 94 to 74. When the Londoners met on September 26, this time with D'Azevedo, they were uneasy. Tavern rumours, probably started by agents of the English companies, said that they were a conspiracy of wild men, of Jacobites even, who gathered to plot against the Crown and to slander the English people and their Government. The only business done that day was the passing of a motion upon this matter.

  Whereas, upon information, it appears that some enemies to this Company do industriously spread abroad surmises, as if some of the persons concerned in this Company did openly speak reproachfully and contemptibly of the Power of the Government and People of England, in relation to this Company, Ordered, that Members of this Company do, upon all occasions, speak with due respect of the Power of the Government and People of England; and that they endeavour, with all imaginable candour, to obviate and satisfy the objections of any person, or persons, without heat or reflection.

  Ordered, that Roderick Mackenzie do signify the contents of

  this resolution to absent Members.

  The wording of the motion suggests that it was composed by Paterson, and its tone implies that there may have been a small truth in the rumours; that unable to hold their tempers before English jibes some of the Scots had spoken too boldly in defence of their country and its Company. It was hard for proud and ambitious men to walk softly and speak circumspectly.

  Autumn, and still no assurance from Scotland, though the Lord Provost seems to have been writing more frequently. "We wonder that some of you should still be of the opinion that this matter may be transacted by correspondence," Paterson tartly told him. There was a strong feeling in Edinburgh that there should be different riders in the saddle, and a different journey undertaken. The Londoners should send a deputation to Scotland. Paterson would have none of this. The Company would fail without the strong support of English capital. "It's impossible to lay the foundation anywhere but here. We've already pressed you to hasten by our former letters more than modesty would admit, and we must now tell you that if you neglect coming up but a few days after this comes to hand, it will endanger the whole matter." The Scots should be in London by the first day of November at the latest.

  Both Houses of the English Parliament had already met, and had been prorogued until the end of the month. Agents of the English companies had been seen in Westminster Hall, catching at the coats of Commons and Lords, and it was no secret that by the year's end they would have taken this Scots child by the throat and throttled it before it could be weaned. The King came home from Flanders on October 10, landing at Margate and riding in slow triumph to London with a gathering train of nobility, knights of the shires, gentlemen and merchants of the City. None could say what his humour was on matters of State and the affairs of Scotland, and since the death of his faultless Queen, nine months before, he had been more than usually aloof and withdrawn. He wore a lock of her hair, in a ring tied to a black ribbon above his left elbow, and he was happiest away from England with his army. When he came back from killing Frenchmen he preferred to divert himself by killing a stag at Windsor, or by watching his horses run at Newmarket. He left the bonfires and the bells of London behind him, and went to his lonely palace at Kensington. There he told his Privy Council that he was satisfied with their prudent administration in his absence, and instructed them to dissolve Parliament, and to call a new one on November 22.

  The Londoners could expect no interference until the new Parliament sat, and before then they must establish themselves as a Court of Directors and open a Subscription Book, with or without the presence of a deputation from Edinburgh. They gathered now at a regular meeting-place a red brick, three- storyed house in Clement's Lane belonging to a sympathetic City merchant called Nathaniel Carpenter. The ticking of his great pendulum-clock, the noise of his four young children, and the bells of St. Clement's in Eastcheap were a background to their worried anxiety. On October 22, when they met at three in the afternoon, there was the louder noise of shouting and brawling in the streets. Four members of Parliament for the City were being elected at the Guildhall. On this day, too, the King's horse won the Town Plate at Newmarket, the East India Company heard that it has lost another ship to French privateers, and its stock fell from 76 to 54.

  The Directors finished their business quickly, anxious to be away home before the crowd in the streets turned to a mob, but it was the most important meeting they had held so far. Once more they agreed, in view of the growing rumours, to keep secret "all discourses and transactions passed here." And they passed two major resolutions. The Subscription Book of the Company was to be opened on November 6. The capital fund was to be set at £600,000 Sterling, one quarter of which would be taken up upon the opening of the Book.

  Paterson's heart was lifted, at last something was being done. During the next few days it was resolved that the government of the Company should rest in the persons named in the Act, who could now describe themselves as its Court of Directors, with the right to increase their number to fifty. Further, there would be thirty "Proprietors" of the Company, being those who subscribed £1,000 or more in stock. In a mood of restored confidence, the ten Directors were probably pleased to hear that the East India Company's stock had reached its lowest yet. Many of its investors were making discreet inquiries about the potential of the Scots Company, and so serious had become the withdrawals from the East India Company that its Governors had called a General Court, frankly acknowledging the grave losses of ships, goods and men to the French, and declaring that only a call of £25 per cent would keep the Company in business.

  The preamble to the Subscription Book of the Scots Company, written in Mackenzie's clear hand, indicated that Paterson was at this moment the most important member of the new Court of Directors. Because he, and others concerned with him, had been "at great pains and expense in making several considerable discoveries of trade and improvements, in and to both Indies, and likewise in procuring needful powers and privileges for a Company of Commerce", he was to receive two per cent of the money first subscribed, and three per cent of the profits for the next 21 years. It was an incredible gift, and it is almost impossible to understand how nine sober and experienced merchants could agree to it. In all probability Paterson himself suggested it, and it shows the mesmeric power he could sometimes exert over others, if never for long.

  Mackenzie's clerks had scarcely ruled the first pages of the Subscription Book and entered the first names when unannounced, and by now unexpected, three of the Edinburgh promoters arrived in London: Balfour, Blackwood, and that patriotic rhetorician Lord Belhaven, whom the English spy, John Macky, described as "a round, fat, black, noisy man, more like a butcher than a lord." None of them was in a good humour when they attended their first meeting in Clement's Lane on November 9. They had all read the Preamble, and were all unhappy about it. They were astonished by the size of the proposed capital, and doubted whether Scotland's purse was deep enou
gh to provide the required half of it. Paterson's simple eloquence was no match for a practised speaker like Belhaven, who tuned his oratory by printing his own speeches, and who now dominated the meeting by his rank, his presence, and his inexhaustible supply of metaphors and similes, apologues, parables and perorations. The Londoners quickly understood that the Scots regarded Edinburgh as the proper base for the Company, and they realised that Paterson's influence there might be less than was claimed by him in London. Although they persuaded the Scots to accept the need for so large a capital subscription, they agreed that Paterson should write to Edinburgh, explaining this need, and that copies of all their journals and records should also be sent to Scotland.

  Now the Court of Directors met almost every day, and usually in disharmony. Mackenzie's minutes tersely indicated the wrangling that burnt away Mr. Carpenter's candles: Upon some objections offered... Several debates arising concerning the management. .. Several objections made by the persons deputed from Scotland.... The Scots' principal objection was to the terms and wording of the Preamble, arguing that some patentees in Scotland might withdraw when they realised how great was to be the capital fund. There was also one other matter which profoundly disturbed them, and although they had not yet brought it into the open it lay behind every other objection they raised. This was the rich reward granted Paterson, before the Company had begun trading and before any man could see security in its profits, and Balfour may have reflected that there had been no proposal to repay him and Blackwood for all those dinners and suppers, sealing-wax and paper, the expenses due them for their attendance and trouble.

  On November 11 the East India Company took public notice of the Scots. It voted that no member of the Company could be associated with them in any way without breaking his oath. Three days later it petitioned the King at Kensington, placing before him the grave state of its affairs, its bitter losses in the war, the unfair and possibly illegal competition of the proposed Scots Company. The King accepted the petition without comment, and went off to hunt at Windsor, to attend an electoral chapter of the Garter.

  The warning was clear to the Scots, though none seems to have recognised it, or acknowledged it in the minutes of their meetings. They argued on, sometimes over trivial matters, sometimes acting like sober, intelligent businessmen, and when the latter was the case it was usually due to the London merchants D'Azevedo, Nairne and Chiesly. They admitted eight new directors, all of them Englishmen and ready to subscribe stock on their own or others' behalf, and they rightly decided that a majority and quorum of the Court should not consist of the original directors but of new men, appointed directly by the stockholders and exercising their right of proxy. Now Mackenzie's minutes were nobly and properly headed

  "At a Court of Directors of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies"

  Robert Douglas, the London Scot who was Paterson's sour and sceptical critic, was admitted as a Director on November 22, and Paterson was later to claim that he was an agent of some cabal in Scotland that wished him ill, and had joined the Company to destroy him. It was a day of events. The London Subscription Book was closed that morning, having reached the agreed sum of £300,000. There was also published a small pamphlet called Some Considerations upon the Late Act of the Parliament of Scotland, and it reads as if written by Paterson. It was the Company's only acknowledgement of English hostility, and its only attempt to ward off the disaster that threatened. It lightly argued that the English had nothing to fear from the Company, if they wished to keep their commercial superiority they should relax their own trading laws and not waste their energies in an attack upon the Scots.

  That morning, too, the new Parliament of England assembled in Westminster Hall. The King went to the Lords and asked the Commons to choose a Speaker. From the Throne, at eleven o'clock the next morning, he spoke of the war, his soldiers' courage and his people's contribution in coin. It was unfortunate that he must again ask for recruits and money to continue that war, and he urged his Parliament to think of new means of raising both. He suggested that merchant shipping should be increased, and that the East India trade should be encouraged. There would, he hoped, be a speedy dispatch of all business before the House, for the French would be early in the field next Spring.

  On Friday, November 29, William Paterson's influential role in the Court of Directors was abruptly ended, and that by himself. Twenty men met at Mr. Carpenter's under the presidency of Belhaven. Six of them were new English directors. Two more were Paul Domonique the Huguenot, and Daniel van Mildert a Dutchman. These, with Robert Douglas and the three delegates from Edinburgh, made a majority upon whom Paterson could rely for little sympathy or support. The business of the day began at three o'clock with the reading, by Roderick Mackenzie, of an agreed oath De Fideli Administratione as enjoined by the Act.

  We, whose names are herunto subscribed, do severally, in the presence of Almighty God, and this Company, declare and promise, That, during our being jointly, or severally, concerned in the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, we shall not disclose any thing that, from time to time, shall by the President of the Court be given us in charge to be kept secret; but shall in our respective stations, endeavour, to the utmost of our power, to promote the Profit and Interest of the said Company.

  Following business included agreement on a similar oath to be taken by the Company's servants, and a resolution to acquire a ship, or ships, that could be sent to trade in the East Indies. A Committee of Trade was elected to manage this.

  When Paterson rose, asking Belhaven's leave to address the Court, it was without prompting, but stress and pressure were implicit in all he said, an awareness that the majority of those present resented the special favours granted him, and had made that resentment plain. He said that he had insisted on the royalties and profits, not doubting the justice and generosity of the Company, or his usefulness to it, but because he had had bitter experience of man's ingratitude. He had spent nearly £10,000 of his own and other men's money on this noble undertaking, though he did not say how, or where, or when. There had also been "ten years of pain and travel, six years whereof were wholly spent in promoting the design of this Company", and again he did not say where or when. The claim that he had been the suffering and impoverished creator of their Company was listened to in silence by Balfour and Blackwood, who knew that they had spent four years and more in the same service, and had their scroll of expenses to prove it, which was more evidence than Paterson was offering.

  "This Court," said Paterson extravagantly, "being filled with so many excellent persons, in whose justice and gratitude I have entire confidence, I resolve to take hold of so glorious an opportunity of showing the generosity and integrity of my heart. I freely and fully renounce and resign the two per cent and three per cent mentioned in the Preamble of Subscription, back again to the Company from whom I had so brave and noble a concession."

  And the Directors took it back, and thanked him for it. They gave no sign of suspecting that this bold renunciation, wrapped in flattery, might be an invitation to confirm him in the grants. Years later, when men fought over the corpse of the Company, eager to snatch up a penny where they had placed a pound, Paterson regretted his noble gesture. By then a poor teacher of mathematics in a Soho room, he said that his release "was only given in trust", that he had been prevailed upon by the lie that the two per cent had already been promised to others, to great men in Scotland who wanted payment for their support in the Estates. And this may well have been true, but again he offered no proof.

  It was almost the last meeting held by the London Directors. On December 3, the Lords debated the state of the nation. "Particularly upon the Scotch East India Company," wrote Narcissus Luttrell in his annals that night, "which they think will be prejudicial to our trade; and after long debates resolved that divers English merchants trading to the East Indies, as also the Commissioners of Customs, attend them on Thursday next about it." The minutes of the Directors' meeting
the next day contain no mention of this danger, although they once more warned each other that all their proceedings should be kept secret. They urged the opening of a Subscription Book in Scotland as soon as possible, and instructed Belhaven, Balfour and Blackwood to prepare a preamble. The English Directors, out of patience with the Scots' habit of arriving any time they chose at Mr. Carpenter's house, insisted that there should be strict rules on punctuality, with fines for absentees and late-comers.

  On Friday, December 6, the day after officers of the East India Company and the African Company had been heard at the bar of the Lords "as to the inconveniences arising from the Scotch Company", the Directors considered a draft of the preamble to the Scots Subscription, imposed a fine of half a crown for unpunctuality or non-attendance, and agreed that the only correct time was that shown by Mr. Carpenter's pendulum-clock. They closed their business late, resolving to meet again on Friday, at ten o'clock in the forenoon.

  It was the last entry in their minutes. The next morning the Lords ordered seven of them, all named in the Act, to appear before the bar.

  "Impeached of the said High Crimes and Misdemeanours" London, December 1695 to February 1696

  Improvident Sawney, aping gentility while he scratched at fleas, had been a ribald jest since that clamorous train of hungry Scots came south with James I in 1603. By then England had exhausted its ridicule of the Welsh, and had not yet discovered how contemptible were the Irish. Scotland was to be its buffoon for the next two hundred years, and the joke would be kept alive by witty contributions from Johnson, Lamb and Sydney Smith, with illustrations by Hogarth, Rowlandson and Gillray.