Darien

A Journey in Search of Empire

John McKendrick

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780857902610
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

An in-depth look at the history of Scotland's attempt to colonize in Central America in the late 1600s.
The Company of Scotland and its attempts to establish the colony of Caledonia on the inhospitable isthmus of Panama in the late seventeenth century is one of the most tragic moments of Scottish history. Devised by William Paterson, the stratagem was to create a major trading station between Europe and the East. It could have been a triumph, but inadequate preparation and organization ensured it was a catastrophe. Of the 3,000 settlers who set sail in 1688 and 1699, only a handful returned, the rest having succumbed to disease. The enormous financial loss was a key factor in ensuring union with England in 1707.
Based on archive research in the UK and Panama, as well as extensive travelling in Darien itself, John McKendrick explores this fascinating and seminal moment in Scottish history and uncovers fascinating new information from New World archives about the role of the English and Spanish, and about the identities of the settlers themselves.
Praise for Darien
"[A] machete wielding history that sees its author leaping from dugout canoes and hacking through tropical vegetation in the footsteps of the lost colonists." — Scottish Field (UK)
"A meticulously detailed account that spares no-one's blushes.… He makes [his own travels] vividly relevant to the central theme." — Scots Magazine (UK)

ONE

INTRODUCTION

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round man-y western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

There has always been confusion about Darien. John Keats made the unforgivable mistake of placing the wrong sharp-eyed conquistador upon a peak in Darien in his poem ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. If Panamanians read romantic English poetry (most don’t) they would be horrified: Balboa stood on that slippery peak, not Cortez, and is revered in Panama as the country’s founding father, immortalised by having not only the currency named after him, but more importantly a local beer.

Who knows if Keats, writing in 1816, knew much about the Scots clambering around the same hills in Darien, but his sonnet could have been written for them. Keats was staggered by his reading of Homer’s Odyssey and Odysseus’s journey, and so too were the Scots staggered by their own journey around ‘western isles’ to ‘stand upon a peak in Darien’ in what they very much hoped would be for them ‘the realms of gold’. Darien was home to the shortlived Scottish colony: the Darien project or the ‘Darien Disaster’ as the late seventeenth-century Scottish colonial venture is often termed. That one-time lonely outpost of Scotland, Caledonia, is no longer in Darien; according to modern Panamanian political geography it is now in the Comarca de Kuna Yala, and there are good grounds to consider it far removed from being a disaster. The failures that befell the Scots in the green jungles of Darien were to push the reluctant Scots down another path, a very different odyssey, that would lead them to greater fame, greater trade and greater riches: the Act of Union. Not all about the Darien Disaster is as it seems.

The story of the Scots and Darien is now well known, if not a stalwart of the history syllabus, and many people have heard of the energetic William Paterson: Caribbean merchant; financier; and author of the Scots’ ‘disaster’ at Darien. His project, on paper at least, was a brilliant one. He planned to establish a trading company in Scotland; to found a colony on the Caribbean side of the isthmus of Panama; to facilitate the exchange of goods between east and west; and create a centre of international trade and commerce and a hub for buying and selling. In the impoverished late seventeenth century, Scots enthusiastically bought into this tropical dream and in doing so heavily mortgaged the nation’s future in Paterson’s scheme. In the face of English commercial opposition to the project, nationalism stirred the patriotism of Scots to considerable heights and the expectations that sailed with the first fleet were as high as the depths of disappointment and despair the very same people would experience shortly thereafter, when the painfully thin survivors limped home from American and Caribbean staging posts. They were the lucky ones. All but one of the once magnificent ships lost, over 2,000 Scots dead and all hope of financial success left lying, rotting in the hot, steamy jungles of Darien.

The first expedition set sail from Leith in 1698 with four ships and one thousand two hundred men. They founded Caledonia, only to abandon it six months later, in the hope of returning home to Scotland, not victims of Spanish aggression, but of disease, ill-discipline and poor leadership. The second expedition arrived six weeks later in mid 1699 to find the deserted settlement. Initially bolstered by a small military victory against the Spaniards at Tubuganti, the colony soon faced the same problems and found itself fatally weakened when the Spanish moved in to dislodge them in early 1700. Caledonia was not to be the panacea for Scotland’s chronic poverty and the underachievement of several centuries. After the heady excitement, the launch of the great undertaking, it must have been with a humiliating sense of foreboding that Scots anticipated from where they might next find salvation.

After the publication of several (now out-of-print) books in the early twentieth century, Darien was largely forgotten, but a resurgence of interest in the Scots colony gathered pace in the late twentieth century. An expedition to the ruins, led by the Royal Geographical Society, took place in 1978; the republication of John Prebble’s book The Darien Disaster in 1999; a BBC documentary in 2003;¹ a museum exhibition displayed around Scotland in the 1990s which eventually made it to Panama City in 2005; and the publication of Douglas Watt’s excellent economic history, The Price of Scotland. Darien was also much discussed by those with a historical and political interest in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate. But it has not shed its image of disaster. For many, there can be no other way to see it. Not only did Scotland’s major attempt to compete as an equal with her European rivals end in total disaster (why not attempt if other small nations, such as Holland and Portugal, could succeed?), but worse was to come as the nation’s leadership stumbled forward, heads hung low, into parliamentary union with England – for many a disaster for Scottish identity and public life. For those involved the experience of Darien was distressing and tragic; it financially ruined Scotland and everyone knew someone – a brother, cousin or neighbour – who lost his (or her) life in Darien, or lost their money backing it.

After Darien, Scotland was weakened, vindictive and sore. There was no greater manifestation of this than the hanging of the crew of the Worcester – unfortunates unfairly accused of piracy against the designers of the Darien colonial scheme, the Company of Scotland off the African coast – whose real crime was to be English. The Scots were bitter and blamed English treachery above all for the calamity which befell them.

But in the early eighteenth century, these tumultuous years led to reflection in Scotland, and with reflection came realism and with realism, inevitably, Union. When Scotland dissolved its ancient parliament, she had one fifth of the population of her larger neighbour, but only one fortieth of its economy. She was a European weakling. Darien had brutally demonstrated the shortcomings of Scottish society. When Scotland collectively looked in the mirror, there was a deceptive profile: it had more literate people than almost any other in Europe; the Scots produced good doctors and lawyers, and had more than double the number of English universities, but all the hard work and learning did not instil in the Scots the commercial common sense found in abundance in London or Lisbon, Amsterdam or Antwerp. Scottish trade to the Baltics or London was not large-scale colonial trade and the naivety of those involved in the heady years in Edinburgh leading up to 1698 would soon be replaced by harder men whose experience of English colonial trading would utterly transform Scotland over the next 100 years.

It is hard to imagine the changes that took place in Scottish society between 1680 and 1780: from witchcraft trials and persecution to David Hume and the Enlightenment; from the run-rig farms and poverty to the ‘wealth of nations’ and the riches of the tobacco trade. Scotland was utterly transformed. This was not all due to the Union, and the Union did not come about solely because of the effects of the failure of Darien, but Darien was the defining event during the lives of those who united Scotland with England. These great men had challenged the political order of the times, the English parliament and King William. The English commercial establishment was opposed to the Company of Scotland and reputation and liberty had been risked and political capital lost to support the scheme. Those who determined Scotland’s future were only too well aware of the limitations of continuing alone.

This book is not all history. It partly relies upon other people’s historical research to tell a story. Every historian or writer of this period must rely on the pioneering work of Dr George Pratt Insh, a Scottish academic at the University of Glasgow in the early to mid twentieth century. He wrote extensively on Scotland and her place in the modern world and personally rescued from obscurity many of the papers of the Company of Scotland. Historian’s Odyssey is the title of Insh’s description of his own adventure to put together the documents and create a history of The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. The fruits of his history have largely provided us today with our knowledge of the Company of Scotland. He has been an essential guide for my own mini odyssey. Little did I know as a school boy in Scotland twenty years ago, when I sat in darkened classrooms getting my head around the iambic pentameters of John Keats’ verdant poetry, that I, too, would embark upon my own journey to Darien. This book tells the story of the Scots in Darien with the help of these works and unpublished manuscripts found in Edinburgh and Panama City. It has new insights and relies upon previously unused materials, mostly found in the Panamanian National Archives.² It sets out the depth of Spanish opposition to Caledonia and the impossibilities of the scheme ever succeeding. It reveals for the first time that the English helped the Caledonians and defended the colony from a military strike by the Spanish Armada de Barlovento (called ‘the Windward fleet’).

This book retraces the steps of those Scots involved in the Darien Scheme, whether it was as directors in Edinburgh, sailors on the voyage to the Panamanian coast, gentleman volunteers arriving at Golden Island, Scots living on the Panamanian isthmus, prisoners in Cartagena, survivors in Jamaica, missionaries in South Carolina, lost interpreters in Cuba or even just young Scots keen to embark on a new adventure. The beholding of these places adds something to the sorry tale of the Caledonians; so much of their history was related to their environment, to the weather, the jungle, the sheer distances involved in their venture. The retracing of the steps is a sorry odyssey leading from the pages of old manuscripts, textbooks and desperate journals to the very same wonders of nature and culture that enthralled and defeated the Caledonians.

I arrived in Panama for the first time in the late summer of 2003. I knew very little about Darien – it was a blurred image of a shady memory of a half-understood history lesson from years before. Ostensibly I had been backpacking around Colombia and Venezuela in the hope of learning some Spanish. In the Venezuelan Andes I led a monastic life in a simple home, spending mornings practising Spanish verbs and afternoons napping and walking. My evenings revolved around inflicting my fledgling Spanish on locals in run-down shops and stuffy cantinas. From the Andes by bus to Caracas and onwards to Ciudad Bolivar (or Angostura as it was known in the days of Bolivar’s British irregulars) my summer was a blur of new towns, air-conditioned buses and minor adventures. I kayaked up to the Angel Falls in a cayuko, wandered around the mighty tepuis and played chess at what seemed like the end of earth: the claustrophobic Venezuelan–Brazilian border, towns like islands in a sea of swamping jungle, incongruously decorated with plastic flowers. In metropolitan Caracas I enjoyed the fleshpots of the city with a friend: parties; meeting diplomats and journalists, all of whom loathed the dangerous Venezuelan capital; and hearty carbohydrate-heavy criollo food. Everywhere loomed the larger-than-life figure of Chavez, part general, part messiah, part crook, part provocateur, all rolled into one all-dominating political and social force; Venezuela was on the edge.

If Caracas was the barracks, they said in Bolivar’s day, Bogotá in Colombia was the university (and Quito in Ecuador the church). The sprawling Colombian capital, airily lodged on the Sabana de Bogotá is cool and cerebral. Ten years ago it was also intense, tumultuous and heavily armed but noted for its progressive policies and fantastic culture. From the capital of Latin America’s most beautiful country I ventured forth: visiting churches and museums; horse-riding in Antioquia; working on a coffee farm in Quindio; supporting the local football team in Medellín and ending up in a small hotel in Santa Marta in northern Colombia. On my birthday I called home, and after wishing me a happy birthday my mother launched into an anxiety-filled tirade against the dangers of travelling in Colombia – her next-door neighbour had hidden insights to share with her about Colombian guerrilla movements. As is so often the case, mothers are right and eight foreign tourists were kidnapped by the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) only days after the call and only a few miles from where I was staying. My luck had run out and my mother’s patience was not to be tried any longer. Unsure where to go, I flew to Panama.

I had not expected to go to Panama. I viewed it as no more than a longish transit, less than three days before heading by bus to Managua, the torpid Nicaraguan capital, but I was there long enough to understand a return visit was a must. Panama City is derided as the Milton Keynes of Latin America, but the reality is somewhat different. A cosmopolitan atmosphere pervades, providing the backdrop to a green city divided between bland high-rise towers and narrow cobbled streets corralled by once-elegant colonial homes. Panama is much more than the sum of its physical parts, this small isthmian country reeks of international espionage and the murky shiftiness for which it has become too well known. In the city, empty, darkened tower blocks populated by invented tenants paying astronomical, money-laundering rents are everywhere; powerful, well-connected law firms discreetly solve their off-shore clients’ problems; expensive restaurants are patronised by Colombians doing deals with Taiwanese businessmen; and floating around the edges of all this, the watchful eyes and ever-listening presence of a large diplomatic community.

Panama is, above all, international. Of course, the Scots know this: it was their idea. William Paterson’s pioneer trading post, rotten in its damp, ill-thought-out foundations is alive and well, if somewhat further along the coast. Panama is still the ‘door to the seas and the key to the universe’ – its canal ensures this, perhaps even more dramatically than the Caledonians could have conceived. Despite the fact that the canal seems to become smaller every day, and eagerly awaits the expansion of its mighty locks, it remains the key shortcut for shipping lanes and the rapid increase in port facilities, banking and other canal and maritime-related services and a large free-trade zone, cast Panama, more or less, as the entrepôt economy the Scots once looked to for national salvation. A strange coincidence then, that Panama celebrated the centenary of its canal in the same year the Scots voted on whether to return to their pre-Darien disaster sovereignty.

My distant history classes probably did not touch upon Darien, but the small panel in the back of my shabby guidebook, which briefly told the tale of Caledonia, whetted my appetite and all around was the development of the idea, touching upon every aspect of Panama’s booming economy. As Keats reminds us, for years odysseys have been launched from the new world to the old: conquistadors and Caledonians; canal constructions workers; traders; bankers; even tailors. The pages that follow pay tribute to the brave steps of the original Caledonians and today’s much less courageous ones in their pursuit.

TWO

A PLAN IS FORMED

It is with regret that Scots must record the invitation sent to a young English would-be surgeon, Lionel Wafer, inviting him to join his brother, then living in Port Royal, Jamaica, in the spring of 1679. Wafer, who had tasted life overseas in the East Indies, needed little convincing and left as soon as he could put together the cost of his passage, and installed himself in his brother’s Port Royal home. On the island he began to develop his limited practice in surgery, or as he might have put it ‘administering Physick and Phlebotomy’. Despite the professionalism of his new career and elevated status, the boredom of life on the island and the excitement of the lives of the buccaneers who regularly sailed to and from this English colonial outpost, tempted Wafer to join them on one of their frequent sorties against the Spanish Main.

It was on one such trip that he was injured and forced to remain with the Indians of Darien for some months. Later escaping and returning to England, he published A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of the Major Ships
• Map
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Plan Is Formed
• 3. The Company of Scotland
• 4. From the Old World to the New
• 5. Tierra Firma
• 6. The Republic of Panama
• 7. Settling In
• 8. Darien
• 9. The First Expedition Departs
• 10. Hope Reborn: The Second Expedition
• 11. The Caribbean
• 12. The Fall of Caledonia
• 13. South Carolina and Georgia
• Epilogue
• The Historical Context
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates Section