The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 5

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 5

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Now, surely, if not before, Paterson ought to have seen that his
project could end in nothing but shame to himself and ruin to his
worshippers. From the first it had been clear that England alone
could protect his Company against the enmity of Spain; and it was
now clear that Spain would be a less formidable enemy than
England. It was impossible that his plan could excite greater
indignation in the Council of the Indies at Madrid, or in the
House of Trade at Seville, than it had excited in London.
Unhappily he was given over to a strong delusion, and the blind
multitude eagerly followed their blind leader. Indeed his dupes
were maddened by that which should have sobered them. The
proceedings of the Parliament which sate at Westminster,
proceedings just and reasonable in substance, but in manner
doubtless harsh and insolent, had roused the angry passions of a
nation, feeble indeed in numbers and in material resources, but
eminently high spirited. The proverbial pride of the Scotch was
too much for their proverbial shrewdness. The votes of the
English Lords and Commons were treated with marked contempt. The
populace of Edinburgh burned Rochester in effigy. Money was
poured faster than ever into the treasury of the Company. A
stately house, in Milne Square, then the most modern and
fashionable part of Edinburgh, was purchased and fitted up at
once as an office and a warehouse. Ships adapted both for war and
for trade were required; but the means of building such ships did
not exist in Scotland; and no firm in the south of the island was
disposed to enter into a contract which might not improbably be
considered by the House of Commons as an impeachable offence. It
was necessary to have recourse to the dockyards of Amsterdam and
Hamburg. At an expense of fifty thousand pounds a few vessels
were procured, the largest of which would hardly have ranked as
sixtieth in the English navy; and with this force, a force not
sufficient to keep the pirates of Sallee in check, the Company
threw down the gauntlet to all the maritime powers in the world.

It was not till the summer of 1698 that all was ready for the
expedition which was to change the face of the globe. The number
of seamen and colonists who embarked at Leith was twelve hundred.
Of the colonists many were younger sons of honourable families,
or officers who had been disbanded since the peace. It was
impossible to find room for all who were desirous of emigrating.
It is said that some persons who had vainly applied for a passage
hid themselves in dark corners about the ships, and, when
discovered, refused to depart, clung to the rigging, and were at
last taken on shore by main force. This infatuation is the more
extraordinary because few of the adventurers knew to what place
they were going. All that was quite certain was that a colony was
to be planted somewhere, and to be named Caledonia. The general
opinion was that the fleet would steer for some part of the coast
of America. But this opinion was not universal. At the Dutch
Embassy in Saint James's Square there was an uneasy suspicion
that the new Caledonia would be founded among those Eastern spice
islands with which Amsterdam had long carried on a lucrative
commerce.

The supreme direction of the expedition was entrusted to a
Council of Seven. Two Presbyterian chaplains and a preceptor were
on board. A cargo had been laid in which was afterwards the
subject of much mirth to the enemies of the Company, slippers
innumerable, four thousand periwigs of all kinds from plain bobs
to those magnificent structures which, in that age, towered high
above the foreheads and descended to the elbows of men of
fashion, bales of Scotch woollen stuffs which nobody within the
tropics could wear, and many hundreds of English bibles which
neither Spaniard nor Indian could read. Paterson, flushed with
pride and hope, not only accompanied the expedition, but took
with him his wife, a comely dame, whose heart he had won in
London, where she had presided over one of the great coffeehouses
in the neighbourhood of the Royal Exchange. At length on the
twenty-fifth of July the ships, followed by many tearful eyes,
and commended to heaven in many vain prayers, sailed out of the
estuary of the Forth.

The voyage was much longer than a voyage to the Antipodes now is;
and the adventurers suffered much. The rations were scanty; there
were bitter complaints both of the bread and of the meat; and,
when the little fleet, after passing round the Orkneys and
Ireland, touched at Madeira, those gentlemen who had fine clothes
among their baggage were glad to exchange embroidered coats and
laced waistcoats for provisions and wine. From Madeira the
adventurers ran across the Atlantic, landed on an uninhabited
islet lying between Porto Rico and St. Thomas, took possession of
this desolate spot in the name of the Company, set up a tent, and
hoisted the white cross of St. Andrew. Soon, however, they were
warned off by an officer who was sent from St. Thomas to inform
them that they were trespassing on the territory of the King of
Denmark. They proceeded on their voyage, having obtained the
services of an old buccaneer who knew the coast of Central
America well. Under his pilotage they anchored on the first of
November close to the Isthmus of Darien. One of the greatest
princes of the country soon came on board. The courtiers who
attended him, ten or twelve in number, were stark naked; but he
was distinguished by a red coat, a pair of cotton drawers, and an
old hat. He had a Spanish name, spoke Spanish, and affected the
grave deportment of a Spanish don. The Scotch propitiated
Andreas, as he was called, by a present of a new hat blazing with
gold lace, and assured him that, if he would trade with them,
they would treat him better than the Castilians had done.

A few hours later the chiefs of the expedition went on shore,
took formal possession of the country, and named it Caledonia.
They were pleased with the aspect of a small peninsula about
three miles in length and a quarter of a mile in breadth, and
determined to fix here the city of New Edinburgh, destined, as
they hoped, to be the great emporium of both Indies. The
peninsula terminated in a low promontory of about thirty acres,
which might easily be turned into an island by digging a trench.
The trench was dug; and on the ground thus separated from the
main land a fort was constructed; fifty guns were placed on the
ramparts; and within the enclosures houses were speedily built
and thatched with palm leaves.

Negotiations were opened with the chieftains, as they were
called, who governed the neighbouring tribes. Among these savage
rulers were found as insatiable a cupidity, as watchful a
jealousy, and as punctilious a pride, as among the potentates
whose disputes had seemed likely to make the Congress of Ryswick
eternal. One prince hated the Spaniards because a fine rifle had
been taken away from him by the Governor of Portobello on the
plea that such a weapon was too good for a red man. Another loved
the Spaniards because they had given him a stick tipped with
silver. On the whole, the new comers succeeded in making friends
of the aboriginal race. One mighty monarch, the Lewis the Great
of the isthmus, who wore with pride a cap of white reeds lined
with red silk and adorned with an ostrich feather, seemed well
inclined to the strangers, received them hospitably in a palace
built of canes and covered with palmetto royal, and regaled them
with calabashes of a sort of ale brewed from Indian corn and
potatoes. Another chief set his mark to a treaty of peace and
alliance with the colony. A third consented to become a vassal of
the Company, received with great delight a commission embellished
with gold thread and flowered riband, and swallowed to the health
of his new masters not a few bumpers of their own brandy.

Meanwhile the internal government of the colony was organised
according to a plan devised by the directors at Edinburgh. The
settlers were divided into bands of fifty or sixty; each band
chose a representative; and thus was formed an assembly which
took the magnificent name of Parliament. This Parliament speedily
framed a curious code. The first article provided that the
precepts, instructions, examples, commands and prohibitions
expressed and contained in the Holy Scriptures should have the
full force and effect of laws in New Caledonia, an enactment
which proves that those who drew it up either did not know what
the Holy Scriptures contained or did not know what a law meant.
There is another provision which shows not less clearly how far
these legislators were from understanding the first principles of
legislation. "Benefits received and good services done shall
always be generously and thankfully compensated, whether a prior
bargain hath been made or not; and, if it shall happen to be
otherwise, and the Benefactor obliged justly to complain of the
ingratitude, the Ungrateful shall in such case be obliged to give
threefold satisfaction at the least." An article much more
creditable to the little Parliament, and much needed in a
community which was likely to be constantly at war, prohibits, on
pain of death, the violation of female captives.

By this time all the Antilles and all the shores of the Gulf of
Mexico were in a ferment. The new colony was the object of
universal hatred. The Spaniards began to fit out armaments. The
chiefs of the French dependencies in the West Indies eagerly
offered assistance to the Spaniards. The governors of the English
settlements put forth proclamations interdicting all
communication with this nest of buccaneers. Just at this time,
the Dolphin, a vessel of fourteen guns, which was the property of
the Scotch Company, was driven on shore by stress of weather
under the walls of Carthagena. The ship and cargo were
confiscated, the crew imprisoned and put in irons. Some of the
sailors were treated as slaves, and compelled to sweep the
streets and to work on the fortifications. Others, and among them
the captain, were sent to Seville to be tried for piracy. Soon an
envoy with a flag of truce arrived at Carthagena, and, in the
name of the Council of Caledonia, demanded the release of the
prisoners. He delivered to the authorities a letter threatening
them with the vengeance of the King of Great Britain, and a copy
of the Act of Parliament by which the Company had been created.
The Castilian governor, who probably knew that William, as
Sovereign of England, would not, and, as Sovereign of Scotland,
could not, protect the squatters who had occupied Darien, flung
away both letter and Act of Parliament with a gesture of
contempt, called for a guard, and was with difficulty dissuaded
from throwing the messenger into a dungeon. The Council of
Caledonia, in great indignation, issued letters of mark and
reprisal against Spanish vessels. What every man of common sense
must have foreseen had taken place. The Scottish flag had been
but a few months planted on the walls of New Edinburgh; and
already a war, which Scotland, without the help of England, was
utterly unable to sustain, had begun.

By this time it was known in Europe that the mysterious voyage of
the adventurers from the Forth had ended at Darien. The
ambassador of the Catholic King repaired to Kensington, and
complained bitterly to William of this outrageous violation of
the law of nations. Preparations were made in the Spanish ports
for an expedition against the intruders; and in no Spanish port
were there more fervent wishes for the success of that expedition
than in the cities of London and Bristol. In Scotland, on the
other hand, the exultation was boundless. In the parish churches
all over the kingdom the ministers gave public thanks to God for
having vouchsafed thus far to protect and bless the infant
colony. At some places a day was set apart for religious
exercises on this account. In every borough bells were rung;
bonfires were lighted; and candles were placed in the windows at
night. During some months all the reports which arrived from the
other side of the Atlantic were such as to excite hope and joy in
the north of the island, and alarm and envy in the south. The
colonists, it was asserted, had found rich gold mines, mines in
which the precious metal was far more abundant and in a far purer
state than on the coast of Guinea. Provisions were plentiful. The
rainy season had not proved unhealthy. The settlement was well
fortified. Sixty guns were mounted on the ramparts. An immense
crop of Indian corn was expected. The aboriginal tribes were
friendly. Emigrants from various quarters were coming in. The
population of Caledonia had already increased from twelve hundred
to ten thousand. The riches of the country,--these are the words
of a newspaper of that time,--were great beyond imagination. The
mania in Scotland rose to the highest point. Munitions of war and
implements of agriculture were provided in large quantities.
Multitudes were impatient to emigrate to the land of promise.

In August 1699 four ships, with thirteen hundred men on board,
were despatched by the Company to Caledonia. The spiritual care
of these emigrants was entrusted to divines of the Church of
Scotland. One of these was that Alexander Shields whose Hind Let
Loose proves that in his zeal for the Covenant he had forgotten
the Gospel. To another, John Borland, we owe the best account of
the voyage which is now extant. The General Assembly had charged
the chaplains to divide the colonists into congregations, to
appoint ruling elders, to constitute a presbytery, and to labour
for the propagation of divine truth among the Pagan inhabitants
of Darien. The second expedition sailed as the first had sailed,
amidst the acclamations and blessings of all Scotland. During the
earlier part of September the whole nation was dreaming a
delightful dream of prosperity and glory; and triumphing,
somewhat maliciously, in the vexation of the English. But, before
the close of that month, it began to be rumoured about Lombard
Street and Cheapside that letters had arrived from Jamaica with
strange news. The colony from which so much had been hoped and
dreaded was no more. It had disappeared from the face of the
earth. The report spread to Edinburgh, but was received there
with scornful incredulity. It was an impudent lie devised by some
Englishmen who could not bear to see that, in spite of the votes
of the English Parliament, in spite of the proclamations of the
governors of the English colonies, Caledonia was waxing great and
opulent. Nay, the inventor of the fable was named. It was
declared to be quite certain that Secretary Vernon was the man.
On the fourth of October was put forth a vehement contradiction
of the story.

On the fifth the whole truth was known. Letters were received
from New York announcing that a few miserable men, the remains of
the colony which was to have been the garden, the warehouse, the
mart, of the whole world, their bones peeping through their skin,
and hunger and fever written in their faces, had arrived in the
Hudson.

The grief, the dismay and the rage of those who had a few hours
before fancied themselves masters of all the wealth of both
Indies may easily be imagined. The Directors, in their fury, lost
all self command, and, in their official letters, railed at the
betrayers of Scotland, the white-livered deserters. The truth is
that those who used these hard words were far more deserving of
blame than the wretches whom they had sent to destruction, and
whom they now reviled for not staying to be utterly destroyed.
Nothing had happened but what might easily have been foreseen.
The Company had, in childish reliance on the word of an
enthusiastic projector, and in defiance of facts known to every
educated man in Europe, taken it for granted that emigrants born
and bred within ten degrees of the Arctic Circle would enjoy
excellent health within ten degrees of the Equator. Nay,
statesmen and scholars had been deluded into the belief that a
country which, as they might have read in books so common as
those of Hakluyt and Purchas, was noted even among tropical
countries for its insalubrity, and had been abandoned by the
Spaniards solely on account of its insalubrity, was a Montpelier.
Nor had any of Paterson's dupes considered how colonists from
Fife or Lothian, who had never in their lives known what it was
to feel the heat of a distressing midsummer day, could endure the
labour of breaking clods and carrying burdens under the fierce
blaze of a vertical sun. It ought to have been remembered that
such colonists would have to do for themselves what English,
French, Dutch, and Spanish colonists employed Negroes or Indians
to do for them. It was seldom indeed that a white freeman in
Barbadoes or Martinique, in Guiana or at Panama, was employed in
severe bodily labour. But the Scotch who settled at Darien must
at first be without slaves, and must therefore dig the trench
round their town, build their houses, cultivate their fields, hew
wood, and draw water, with their own hands. Such toil in such an
atmosphere was too much for them. The provisions which they had
brought out had been of no good quality, and had not been
improved by lapse of time or by change of climate. The yams and
plantains did not suit stomachs accustomed to good oatmeal. The
flesh of wild animals and the green fat of the turtle, a luxury
then unknown in Europe, went but a small way; and supplies were
not to be expected from any foreign settlement. During the cool
months, however, which immediately followed the occupation of the
isthmus there were few deaths. But, before the equinox, disease
began to make fearful havoc in the little community. The
mortality gradually rose to ten or twelve a day. Both the
clergymen who had accompanied the expedition died. Paterson
buried his wife in that soil which, as he had assured his too
credulous countrymen, exhaled health and vigour. He was himself
stretched on his pallet by an intermittent fever. Still he would
not admit that the climate of his promised land was bad. There
could not be a purer air. This was merely the seasoning which
people who passed from one country to another must expect. In
November all would be well again. But the rate at which the
emigrants died was such that none of them seemed likely to live
till November. Those who were not laid on their beds were yellow,
lean, feeble, hardly able to move the sick and to bury the dead,
and quite unable to repel the expected attack of the Spaniards.
The cry of the whole community was that death was all around
them, and that they must, while they still had strength to weigh
an anchor or spread a sail, fly to some less fatal region. The
men and provisions were equally distributed among three ships,
the Caledonia, the Unicorn, and the Saint Andrew. Paterson,
though still too ill to sit in the Council, begged hard that he
might be left behind with twenty or thirty companions to keep up
a show of possession, and to await the next arrivals from
Scotland. So small a number of people, he said, might easily
subsist by catching fish and turtles. But his offer was
disregarded; he was carried, utterly helpless, on board of the
Saint Andrew; and the vessel stood out to sea.

The voyage was horrible. Scarcely any Guinea slave ship has ever
had such a middle passage. Of two hundred and fifty persons who
were on board of the Saint Andrew, one hundred and fifty fed the
sharks of the Atlantic before Sandy Hook was in sight. The
Unicorn lost almost all its officers, and about a hundred and
forty men. The Caledonia, the healthiest ship of the three, threw
overboard a hundred corpses. The squalid survivors, as if they
were not sufficiently miserable, raged fiercely against one
another. Charges of incapacity, cruelty, brutal insolence, were
hurled backward and forward. The rigid Presbyterians attributed
the calamities of the colony to the wickedness of Jacobites,
Prelatists, Sabbath-breakers, Atheists, who hated in others that
image of God which was wanting in themselves. The accused
malignants, on the other hand, complained bitterly of the
impertinence of meddling fanatics and hypocrites. Paterson was
cruelly reviled, and was unable to defend himself. He had been
completely prostrated by bodily and mental suffering. He looked
like a skeleton. His heart was broken. His inventive faculties
and his plausible eloquence were no more; and he seemed to have
sunk into second childhood.

Meanwhile the second expedition had been on the seas. It reached
Darien about four months after the first settlers had fled. The
new comers had fully expected to find a flourishing young town,
secure fortifications, cultivated fields, and a cordial welcome.
They found a wilderness. The castle of New Edinburgh was in
ruins. The huts had been burned. The site marked out for the
proud capital which was to have been the Tyre, the Venice, the
Amsterdam of the eighteenth century was overgrown with jungle,
and inhabited only by the sloth and the baboon. The hearts of the
adventurers sank within them. For their fleet had been fitted
out, not to plant a colony, but to recruit a colony already
planted and supposed to be prospering. They were therefore worse
provided with every necessary of life than their predecessors had
been. Some feeble attempts, however, were made to restore what
had perished. A new fort was constructed on the old ground; and
within the ramparts was built a hamlet, consisting of eighty or
ninety cabins, generally of twelve feet by ten. But the work went
on languidly. The alacrity which is the effect of hope, the
strength which is the effect of union, were alike wanting to the
little community. From the councillors down to the humblest
settlers all was despondency and discontent. The stock of
provisions was scanty. The stewards embezzled great part of it.
The rations were small; and soon there was a cry that they were
unfairly distributed. Factions were formed. Plots were laid. One
ringleader of the malecontents was hanged. The Scotch were
generally, as they still are, a religious people; and it might
therefore have been expected that the influence of the divines to
whom the spiritual charge of the colony had been confided would
have been employed with advantage for the preserving of order and
the calming of evil passions. Unfortunately those divines seem to
have been at war with almost all the rest of the society. They
described their companions as the most profligate of mankind, and
declared that it was impossible to constitute a presbytery
according to the directions of the General Assembly; for that
persons fit to be ruling elders of a Christian Church were not to
be found among the twelve or thirteen hundred emigrants. Where
the blame lay it is now impossible to decide. All that can with
confidence be said is that either the clergymen must have been
most unreasonably and most uncharitably austere, or the laymen
must have been most unfavourable specimens of the nation and
class to which they belonged.

It may be added that the provision by the General Assembly for
the spiritual wants of the colony was as defective as the
provision made for temporal wants by the directors of the
Company. Nearly one third of the emigrants who sailed with the
second expedition were Highlanders, who did not understand a word
of English; and not one of the four chaplains could speak a word
of Gaelic. It was only through interpreters that a pastor could
communicate with a large portion of the Christian flock of which
he had charge. Even by the help of interpreters he could not
impart religious instruction to those heathen tribes which the
Church of Scotland had solemnly recommended to his care. In fact,
the colonists left behind them no mark that baptized men had set
foot on Darien, except a few Anglo-Saxon curses, which, having
been uttered more frequently and with greater energy than any
other words in our language, had caught the ear and been retained
in the memory of the native population of the isthmus.

The months which immediately followed the arrival of the new
comers were the coolest and most salubrious of the year. But,
even in those months, the pestilential influence of a tropical
sun, shining on swamps rank with impenetrable thickets of black
mangroves, began to be felt. The mortality was great; and it was
but too clear that, before the summer was far advanced, the
second colony would, like the first, have to choose between death
and flight. But the agony of the inevitable dissolution was
shortened by violence. A fleet of eleven vessels under the flag
of Castile anchored off New Edinburgh. At the same time an
irregular army of Spaniards, Creoles, negroes, mulattoes and
Indians marched across the isthmus from Panama; and the fort was
blockaded at once by sea and land.

A drummer soon came with a message from the besiegers, but a
message which was utterly unintelligible to the besieged. Even
after all that we have seen of the perverse imbecility of the
directors of the Company, it must be thought strange that they
should have sent a colony to a remote part of the world, where it
was certain that there must be constant intercourse, peaceable or
hostile, with Spaniards, and yet should not have taken care that
there should be in the whole colony a single person who knew a
little Spanish.

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