THE DARIEN DISASTER Read online

  Sensing an imminent end to the King's war, and an uncertain future on half-pay or no pay at all, officers promised their prize money, the rewards of loot, or loans from more provident relations. From Flanders honest Captain John Blackader, though sanguine enough in print about a soldier's life and always confident that the Lord stood at his side, took out insurance against a crippling ball or an unlucky sword-thrust. He wrote to his brother Adam, a merchant of Edinburgh, asking for £100 to be put down in his name. Eleven officers—two majors, six captains, two lieutenants and an ensign—all of John Hill's Regiment at Fort William, subscribed £1,900 between them. Because no other unit made so large a contribution, theirs is intriguing. They had been involved, with the Earl of Argyll's Regiment, in the Massacre of Glencoe four years before, and many of them had been in Edinburgh for the Inquiry when the Company's Act was pushed through Parliament. They may have been caught up by the enthusiasm for it, or they may have hoped that in this way they would redeem some of their honour. More probably one of them persuaded the rest, Major James Cunningham of Eickett, for like Byres he was ambitious for office in the colony, and could have argued that by bringing such support he had earned preferment.

  As it had put a thousand broadswords at the service of William in 1689, Clan Campbell now offered the money they had secured and protected. Its great chief, MacCailein Mor, Archibald the 10th Earl of Argyll, subscribed £1,500, his brother James £700, and in their tail were twenty-two gentlemen and merchants, all of Clan Diarmaid's name and allegiance. There was Campbell of Ardkinglas the Sheriff of Argyll, and there was Campbell of Aberuchil the Senator of the College of Justice. There were Campbell lairds and tacksmen of Soutar, Monzie, Bogholt, Calder, Cesnock and Kinpoint, as well as Mungo, Matthew, Daniel, Archibald and more, who kept merchant houses in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Between them they subscribed £9,400, and this though some of them had scarcely recovered from the terrible raid which the Jacobite clans had made upon their lands and stock ten years before.

  A Glasgow Subscription Book was opened on March 5 and closed on April 22. When the Edinburgh Book was also closed on August 1, the full £400,000 had been subscribed. There were over 1,400 entries in both books, but since many were for associations and incorporations, for towns and burghs, the number of people involved could be counted in tens of thousands, and all men now spoke proudly of their Company, their African Company, their India Company. When the first 25 per cent call for money was made on the subscribers in June, the response was just under £100,000 Sterling, and there were no defaulters.

  Paterson was busy throughout the Spring and early Summer, writing note after note upon a proposed constitution for the Company, which he submitted to the promoters and which were politely read and set aside. The Company took shape without him. There was now a Council-General of great men, and there was a Court of Directors to which were appointed many of those whose ardent support and shrewd bargaining had carried the Act so triumphantly through the Estates. The ultimate number of Directors was set at fifty, to accommodate all who should be so rewarded and to provide enough members for the various working committees. It was a time for honouring pledges and returning favours, but Paterson had to wait until May before the Court, reluctantly almost, admitted him as a Director. Upon a promise that James Smith would subscribe the £3,000 he had underwritten in London, he became a Director too, and the Court was later to remember that the promise had been made by Paterson, and that it had been upon Paterson's recommendation that Smith was then sent to London as the Company's agent.

  There was a hiring of clerks and tellers, cashiers and accountants, doormen and messengers, and no proper building as yet to house them all. Roderick Mackenzie's office was a valise of papers, quills and ink-horns which his clerk carried behind him, up the High Street to the Laigh Parliament House where the Court and Council-General occasionally sat, or down to Maclurg's coffeehouse where the Committee for Improvements gathered less formally. The five members of this Committee included Balfour, Blackwood and an intense, dedicated Perthshire laird, John Haldane of Gleneagles, who had sat in the Estates since the Revolution, which he regarded as the salvation of the Protestant faith and the promise of prosperity for Scotland. Upon these men rested the responsibility for stores, equipment and trade goods, the discovery of where ships might be bought, built and docked. Paterson fluttered like a moth about the bright flame of their work, and they treated him with good-natured tolerance, sending him once to Glasgow, to study the shores of the Clyde as far as Dumbarton, to find a good run of deep water where the ships of the Company might anchor and load. It was the first real work he had been given since he came back to Scotland, and if he submitted a report no attention was paid to it for three years.

  The Committee drew up contracts that would have excited the envy of the King's Master of Ordnance or the Commissioners of Supply. Once a week they assembled in the Patern Chamber of Parliament House where tradesmen from all over the Lowlands brought examples of their work and honest estimates of their costs. The Committee ordered firelocks and cartridge-belts, powder and ball, pistols and broadswords. They signed contracts for whip-saws, cross-saws, machete knives and bill-knives, shovels, felling-axes and spades, door-nails, window-nails and tacks, for bowls, platters, spoons and smoothing-irons, candle-sticks, lanterns and hogsheads of tobacco. They ordered tartan hose and stockings, shoes at six hundred pairs a time. They bought a warehouse at Leith, and there merchants and tradesmen were told to deliver the goods ordered, every Tuesday and Thursday between eight and six. They bought second-hand stockings, seventy-nine dozen at a time, and sent them to a workman's wife, Isobel Bickerton, for darning, and from her to a dyer for colouring. They looked for Bibles at bargain prices, and found them in the store-room of Agnes Campbell, relict of Andrew Anderson, printer. They discovered that Jeremy Robertson would make them as many periwigs as they desired (and they desired an extraordinary number), and they decided that the mounting piles of serge they were buying should be dyed "one fourth part black, one fourth part blue, one fourth part of several sorts of reds, and one fourth part of several sorts of cloth colours."

  By July the Company had offices fitting the solemnity of its title and the grandeur of its intentions. No longer a stool by Mrs. Purdie's window or Roderick Mackenzie's valise, the depressing Privy Council Chamber in the Laigh House or a corner in a Leith warehouse, but a tall, grey building in Milne Square opposite the Tron Church. Paterson found it. He had been invited to arrange the purchase of a suitable property when he was appointed to the Court, and although he may have considered this a small use of his abilities he went about it diligently with the help of two other Directors. Milne Square was a large, three- sided building about a small paved court, its rear windows looking north to Leith over a fleshers' market and the green marsh of the loch. It had been built six years before by Robert Milne, whose ancestors had been Master Masons to the Crown for seven generations. It was grand, dour, and dark, and its inner windows seldom caught the sun, but it was quiet, and its narrow entrance was easily guarded by a doorman. The Company took one side only at first, paying its owner, the lawyer John Eidington, £395 17s 9½d Sterling, and later buying another side from Mackenzie of Broomhill for £455 11s. Roderick Mackenzie moved his wife and family into the upper floor, and scattered his clerks and tellers, cashiers and accountants about the rest.

  Here a quorum of the Court of Directors met almost every day, resolving the general business of the Company, receiving reports from the Committee for Improvements, for Foreign Trade, and of the Treasury. Here the Council-General and the Court followed the advice given in Paterson's scheme and in the Proposals for a Fond, without perhaps acknowledging it. They established a Fund of Credit, which soon developed into a bank with splendidly-designed notes and agents in Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Dumfries. It was illegal from its inception. The young Bank of Scotland, now twelve months old, had been given a monopoly for twenty-one years, but if its directors resented this piratical invasion by the Company
they had the good sense to hold their tongues and wait for the Fund to collapse. Which it soon did. As it sank into the morass of its colonial disasters, the Company was to have no money for Funds of Credit.

  Having sent James Smith to England, to discover what trade goods were now needed in Africa and the Indies (and with the incredible hope that he might persuade some of the London subscribers to make a first payment on their subscriptions), the Court gave a warrant to two other Directors, Alexander Stevenson and James Gibson, to "repair beyond the seas ... where you shall inform yourselves of the best and most expeditious way of purchasing or building five or six ships of about 600 tons each, well and sufficiently built, and such as are fit for voyages to the East Indies." They left for Holland and Hamburg.

  All that now remained was for the Company to decide where to plant its colony—when the ships were bought, the cargoes loaded, the leaders chosen, and the settlers engaged.

  Thus William Paterson was once more remembered. One day in late July he and his young friend, Daniel Lodge, were appointed to the Committee for Foreign Trade, and were invited to lay before it any schemes, any proposals which Paterson might have for a settlement or settlements "upon some island, river, or place in Africa or the Indies or both." Paterson's imagination, capable of soaring beyond Europe and beyond his own age, was impersonal, and he never dramatised himself. It is unlikely that he felt anything more than eager satisfaction when he received this invitation. Yet a dream had become a wondrous reality, the ten years of pain and disappointment, of ridicule and rejection, were now to be rewarded, the future of this noble undertaking depended upon his labours. On July 23 he came to Milne Square with the vast paper accumulation of those ten years—manuscripts, books and journals by his own or others' hands, maps, charts and soundings, readings by the stars and by astrolabe, the recorded conversations with shipmasters and buccaneers, the drawings of savage Indians and strange plants, translations from the Spanish and from the French, the discoveries of priests and pirates, all that was needed to turn the key of the universe and push open the door of the seas.

  The papers lay on a table before the Committee as Paterson talked of the great entrepôt which should be established on Panama, and the fact that he had never been ashore on the Isthmus, nor could have seen it from the island of Providence three hundred miles away, does not seem to have been important. The evidence he had brought was overwhelming. Now and then, by way of illustration, Daniel Lodge handed a journal to Sir Francis Scott, a map to Mr. William Wardrop, a letter to Sir Archibald Mure. They would have been odd men, grown strangely far from boyhood, not to have been excited. Here they could read of Indian kings who wore gold in their nostrils as casually as Scots gentlemen wore lace at their cuffs. Here were descriptions of valleys, rivers, and harbours beyond their imagination. They could turn the pages of a journal kept by lantern-light in the cabin of a buccaneer ship, while rare and beautiful moths danced about its glass. They could study charts drawn beneath the compassionate shade of palm-trees, and could imagine the sailor-artist looking up from the stiff parchment to the blue of the Caribbean and the crystal glitter of sand. But it was the simple logic of Paterson's proposal that convinced their counting-house minds, a merchant colony between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the natural hub of the world, the central point of the shortest bridge across the seas.

  When the meeting closed the Committee asked Paterson if the Company might keep these papers, and he gave permission with spontaneous, unconditional generosity. At the request of Sir Francis, presiding, he gathered them into one large bundle, securely bound and sealed. It was handed to Rorie Mackenzie who was told that it must be further sealed by four other Directors, and was not to be opened except by instructions from the Court. All this was properly ordered and entered in the minutes, and then

  Resolved, that it is the opinion of this Committee that the pains, expense, and damage of the said Mr. Paterson in promoting the said design, and the means to enable and encourage him freely to bestow all his pains and time henceforward in prosecuting this undertaking, ought to be taken into consideration by the Company.

  The Company duly took it all into consideration, and since whatever was given to Paterson would, by this resolution, be reemployed in the Company's interest, the gift was not over- generous. He was granted £7,500 of the Company's stock.

  This said design, this undertaking, was a colony on Darien. A decision to settle there was undoubtedly made that week, although no hint of it was allowed to appear in the minutes or records. By such secrecy, which was to prove as useless as it was melodramatic, the Company hoped that the English Parliament would not be alarmed before it was too late to prevent the settlement. Thus the Committee for Foreign Trade passed a vague, and deliberately misleading resolution, proposing the settlement "with all convenient speed" of some island, some river, some place in Africa, the East or West Indies. Paterson's passionate advocacy of a colony on Darien had strongly influenced the Directors, but what may have finally persuaded them was a fat manuscript among the papers he surrendered the Company. He had borrowed it from his friend William Dampier, and probably had no right to part with it, since its author did not know that he had it. It was the copy of a journal written by a young buccaneer and surgeon, lately of the Batchelor's Delight, and recently returned to England from the Spanish Main.

  His name was Lionel Wafer, and no man in Europe, not even Dampier, had a greater knowledge of Darien.

  "Valleys watered with rivers, brooks and perennial springs" Edinburgh, July 1696

  "Though there are some matters of fact that will seem strange," the Directors read, "yet I have been more especially careful in these to say nothing but what, according to the best of my knowledge, is the very truth."

  Indeed, Lionel Wafer was an honest, careful man. No one, not even Herries, spoke ill of him, and when William Dampier wrote of his own voyages in the Caribbean he said little about Darien because "Mr. Wafer, who made a longer abode in it than I, is better able to do it than any man I know." Copies of Wafer's book were later carried in the baggage of many Scots who went to the Isthmus, and when they wrote home of what they found and saw they disputed nothing he had said, and occasionally used his words as if they were their own.

  All that is known of him, his background and origins, is limited to what he chose to say about himself. He said that he had some knowledge of Gaelic, and that he lived in the Highlands of Scotland as a boy. He knew Ireland, too, and his father may have been one of Cromwell's buff-coats garrisoned in Ulster, and later sent with Colonel Fitch's Regiment to Lochaber. There are traditions of Huguenot descent, of a name that was originally Weaver, or Delawafer, but of this the young man said nothing, believing it, perhaps, of no importance. In 1677, when he was 16 or 17, he went to sea as a loblolly-boy, a surgeon's assistant serving that water-gruel to the ship's sick. He served on merchantmen trading in the Spice Islands, and learnt his master's business well enough to practise as a surgeon himself. And then to Jamaica, to visit a brother who worked on a sugar estate to the north-west of Spanish Town. Here he joined the buccaneers, to whom a lancet and a bleeding-cup were sometimes more important than another cutlass. He gave no reasons for choosing this dangerous, unpredictable life, but he was young, and therein is an explanation.

  He sailed in the company of Cook and Lynch, Coxon and Bartholomew Sharpe, Alliston and Thomas Maggot, sharing their sea-fights, their savage raids upon the Isthmus in search of gold or Spanish throats to cut. He survived while others died from pistol-shot and sword-cut, from fever and nostalgia, from old age or impetuous youth. His companions fought and traded, drank and sang, content with a life of sudden action and quick profit, and he may have done all this too, but he also looked and remembered. His eye for detail was incredibly sharp, and the prose he used to record what it saw was simple and evocative, free from the convoluted style of men with a better education. He modestly asked his readers not to expect anything like a complete journal. "My principal design was to give what descriptio
n I could of the Isthmus of Darien.... I was but young when I was abroad, and I kept no journal, so that I may be dispensed with as to defects and failings of less moment. Yet I have not trusted altogether to my own memory; but some things I committed to writing long before I returned to England."

  The land he described lay between Latitudes 8 and 10 North, on the Caribbean side of Panama where the isthmus bends toward the shoulder of South America. Here were the numberless bays and inlets of the Darien coast, smooth shores of white sand, tiny islands like green jewels, where the buccaneers had traditionally watered and careened their ships since the days of Drake, where they planned and sometimes executed insane raids on Portobello to the west and Carthagena to the east. For three years Wafer was the shipmate of Dampier, and was one of the three hundred men who followed that excellent hydrographer but third-rate buccaneer on a march across the isthmus in May 1681, over two mountain ranges in an abortive attack on the Spaniards at Real de Santa Maria. While drying gunpowder one night, on a silver plate over an open fire, Wafer's leg was badly scorched by a flash-ignition, and he was left behind in the care of the Indians. He lived with them for two months, admiring them and adored by them, regretting only the loss of his salves and plasters when a Negro slave ran off with his knapsack ("Yet I preserved a box of instruments, and a few medicaments wrapt up in an oil cloth"). This idyllic period gave him time for observation, reflection and discovery, and the recording, perhaps, of those notes which he later turned into a book. He had no skill at drawing like Dampier, but his pen was capable of more graphic descriptions. All about him was a thick, green-dark jungle, unexplained silences and bewildering sounds, animals to which no man had yet given a name, and others that reminded him wistfully of home. There were mountain-heads capped with mist, and "valleys watered with rivers, brooks and perennial springs", and there was the sudden, unexpected meeting of sea and land where palm-fronds idly fingered the Caribbean.