No More Learning

The man who brought these calamities on his country was not a mere
visionary or a mere swindler. He was that William Paterson whose name is
honourably associated with the auspicious commencement of a new era in
English commerce and in English finance. His plan of a national bank,
having been examined and approved by the most eminent statesmen who sate
in the Parliament house at Westminster and by the most eminent merchants
who walked the Exchange of London, had been carried into execution with
signal success. He thought, and perhaps thought with reason, that his
services had been ill requited. He was, indeed, one of the original
Directors of the great corporation which owed its existence to him; but
he was not reelected. It may easily be believed that his colleagues,
citizens of ample fortune and of long experience in the practical part
of trade, aldermen, wardens of companies, heads of firms well known in
every Burse throughout the civilised world, were not well pleased to
see among them in Grocers' Hall a foreign adventurer whose whole capital
consisted in an inventive brain and a persuasive tongue. Some of them
were probably weak enough to dislike him for being a Scot; some were
probably mean enough to be jealous of his parts and knowledge; and even
persons who were not unfavourably disposed to him might have discovered,
before they had known him long, that, with all his cleverness, he was
deficient in common sense; that his mind was full of schemes which,
at the first glance, had a specious aspect, but which, on closer
examination, appeared to be impracticable or pernicious; and that the
benefit which the public had derived from one happy project formed by
him would be very dearly purchased if it were taken for granted that
all his other projects must be equally happy. Disgusted by what he
considered as the ingratitude of the English, he repaired to the
Continent, in the hope that he might be able to interest the traders of
the Hanse Towns and the princes of the German Empire in his plans. From
the Continent he returned unsuccessful to London; and then at length the
thought that he might be more justly appreciated by his countrymen than
by strangers seems to have risen in his mind. Just at this time he
fell in with Fletcher of Saltoun, who happened to be in England. These
eccentric men soon became intimate. Each of them had his monomania; and
the two monomaniac suited each other perfectly. Fletcher's whole soul
was possessed by a sore, jealous, punctilious patriotism. His heart was
ulcerated by the thought of the poverty, the feebleness, the political
insignificance of Scotland, and of the indignities which she had
suffered at the hand of her powerful and opulent neighbour. When he
talked of her wrongs his dark meagre face took its sternest expression;
his habitual frown grew blacker, and his eyes flashed more than their
wonted fire. Paterson, on the other hand, firmly believed himself to
have discovered the means of making any state which would follow his
counsel great and prosperous in a time which, when compared with the
life of an individual, could hardly be called long, and which, in the
life of a nation, was but as a moment. There is not the least reason
to believe that he was dishonest. Indeed he would have found more
difficulty in deceiving others had he not begun by deceiving himself.
His faith to his own schemes was strong even to martyrdom; and the
eloquence with which he illustrated and defended them had all the charm
of sincerity and of enthusiasm. Very seldom has any blunder committed
by fools, or any villany devised by impostors, brought on any society
miseries so great as the dreams of these two friends, both of them men
of integrity and both of them men of parts, were destined to bring on
Scotland.

In 1695 the pair went down together to their native country. The
Parliament of that country was then about to meet under the presidency
of Tweeddale, an old acquaintance and country neighbour of Fletcher.
On Tweeddale the first attack was made. He was a shrewd, cautious, old
politician. Yet it should seem that he was not able to hold out against
the skill and energy of the assailants. Perhaps, however, he was
not altogether a dupe. The public mind was at that moment violently
agitated. Men of all parties were clamouring for an inquiry into the
slaughter of Glencoe. There was reason to fear that the session which
was about to commence would be stormy. In such circumstances the Lord
High Commissioner might think that it would be prudent to appease the
anger of the Estates by offering an almost irresistible bait to their
cupidity. If such was the policy of Tweeddale, it was, for the
moment, eminently successful. The Parliament, which met burning with
indignation, was soothed into good humour. The blood of the murdered
Macdonalds continued to cry for vengeance in vain. The schemes of
Paterson, brought forward under the patronage of the ministers of the
Crown, were sanctioned by the unanimous voice of the Legislature.

The great projector was the idol of the whole nation. Men spoke to
him with more profound respect than to the Lord High Commissioner. His
antechamber was crowded with solicitors desirous to catch some drops of
that golden shower of which he was supposed to be the dispenser. To be
seen walking with him in the High Street, to be honoured by him with a
private interview of a quarter of an hour, were enviable distinctions.
He, after the fashion of all the false prophets who have deluded
themselves and others, drew new faith in his own lie from the credulity
of his disciples. His countenance, his voice, his gestures, indicated
boundless self-importance. When he appeared in public he looked,--such
is the language of one who probably had often seen him,--like Atlas
conscious that a world was on his shoulders. But the airs which he gave
himself only heightened the respect and admiration which he inspired.
His demeanour was regarded as a model. Scotch men who wished to be
thought wise looked as like Paterson as they could.

His plan, though as yet disclosed to the public only by glimpses,
was applauded by all classes, factions and sects, lords, merchants,
advocates, divines, Whigs and Jacobites, Cameronians and Episcopalians.
In truth, of all the ten thousand bubbles of which history has preserved
the memory, none was ever more skilfully puffed into existence; none
ever soared higher, or glittered more brilliantly; and none ever burst
with a more lamentable explosion. There was, however, a certain mixture
of truth in the magnificent day dream which produced such fatal effects.

Scotland was, indeed, not blessed with a mild climate or a fertile soil.
But the richest spots that had ever existed on the face of the earth had
been spots quite as little favoured by nature. It was on a bare rock,
surrounded by deep sea, that the streets of Tyre were piled up to a
dizzy height. On that sterile crag were woven the robes of Persian
satraps and Sicilian tyrants; there were fashioned silver bowls and
chargers for the banquets of kings; and there Pomeranian amber was set
in Lydian gold to adorn the necks of queens. In the warehouses were
collected the fine linen of Egypt and the odorous gums of Arabia; the
ivory of India, and the tin of Britain. In the port lay fleets of great
ships which had weathered the storms of the Euxine and the Atlantic.
Powerful and wealthy colonies in distant parts of the world looked up
with filial reverence to the little island; and despots, who trampled
on the laws and outraged the feelings of all the nations between the
Hydaspes and the Aegean, condescended to court the population of that
busy hive. At a later period, on a dreary bank formed by the soil which
the Alpine streams swept down to the Adriatic, rose the palaces of
Venice. Within a space which would not have been thought large enough
for one of the parks of a rude northern baron were collected riches
far exceeding those of a northern kingdom. In almost every one of the
prorate dwellings which fringed the Great Canal were to be seen plate,
mirrors, jewellery, tapestry, paintings, carving, such as might move
the envy of the master of Holyrood. In the arsenal were munitions of war
sufficient to maintain a contest against the whole power of the Ottoman
Empire. And, before the grandeur of Venice had declined, another
commonwealth, still less favoured, if possible, by nature, had
rapidly risen to a power and opulence which the whole civilised world
contemplated with envy and admiration. On a desolate marsh overhung by
fogs and exhaling diseases, a marsh where there was neither wood nor
stone, neither firm earth nor drinkable water, a marsh from which the
ocean on one side and the Rhine on the other were with difficulty kept
out by art, was to be found the most prosperous community in Europe.
The wealth which was collected within five miles of the Stadthouse of
Amsterdam would purchase the fee simple of Scotland. And why should
this be? Was there any reason to believe that nature had bestowed on the
Phoenician, on the Venetian, or on the Hollander, a larger measure of
activity, of ingenuity, of forethought, of self command, than on the
citizen of Edinburgh or Glasgow? The truth was that, in all those
qualities which conduce to success in life, and especially in commercial
life, the Scot had never been surpassed; perhaps he had never been
equalled. All that was necessary was that his energy should take a
proper direction, and a proper direction Paterson undertook to give.

His esoteric project was the original project of Christopher Columbus,
extended and modified. Columbus had hoped to establish a communication
between our quarter of the world and India across the great western
ocean. But he was stopped by an unexpected obstacle. The American
continent, stretching far north and far south into cold and inhospitable
regions, presented what seemed an insurmountable barrier to his
progress; and, in the same year in which he first set foot on that
continent, Gama reached Malabar by doubling the Cape of Good Hope. The
consequence was that during two hundred years the trade of Europe with
the remoter parts of Asia had been carried on by rounding the immense
peninsula of Africa. Paterson now revived the project of Columbus, and
persuaded himself and others that it was possible to carry that project
into effect in such a manner as to make his country the greatest
emporium that had ever existed on our globe.

For this purpose it was necessary to occupy in America some spot which
might be a resting place between Scotland and India. It was true that
almost every habitable part of America had already been seized by some
European power. Paterson, however, imagined that one province, the most
important of all, had been overlooked by the short-sighted cupidity of
vulgar politicians and vulgar traders. The isthmus which joined the
two great continents of the New World remained, according to him,
unappropriated. Great Spanish viceroyalties, he said, lay on the east
and on the west; but the mountains and forests of Darien were abandoned
to rude tribes which followed their own usages and obeyed their own
princes. He had been in that part of the world, in what character was
not quite clear. Some said that he had gone thither to convert the
Indians, and some that he had gone thither to rob the Spaniards. But,
missionary or pirate, he had visited Darien, and had brought away none
but delightful recollections. The havens, he averred, were capacious
and secure; the sea swarmed with turtle; the country was so mountainous
that, within nine degrees of the equator, the climate was temperate;
and yet the inequalities of the ground offered no impediment to the
conveyance of goods. Nothing would be easier than to construct roads
along which a string of mules or a wheeled carriage might in the course
of a single day pass from sea to sea. The soil was, to the depth of
several feet, a rich black mould, on which a profusion of valuable herbs
and fruits grew spontaneously, and on which all the choicest productions
of tropical regions might easily be raised by human industry and art;
and yet the exuberant fertility of the earth had not tainted the purity
of the air. Considered merely as a place of residence, the isthmus was
a paradise. A colony placed there could not fail to prosper, even if it
had no wealth except what was derived from agriculture. But agriculture
was a secondary object in the colonization of Darien. Let but that
precious neck of land be occupied by an intelligent, an enterprising,
a thrifty race; and, in a few years, the whole trade between India and
Europe must be drawn to that point. The tedious and perilous passage
round Africa would soon be abandoned. The merchant would no longer
expose his cargoes to the mountainous billows and capricious gales
of the Antarctic seas. The greater part of the voyage from Europe to
Darien, and the whole voyage from Darien to the richest kingdoms of
Asia, would be a rapid yet easy gliding before the trade winds over blue
and sparkling waters. The voyage back across the Pacific would, in the
latitude of Japan, be almost equally speedy and pleasant. Time, labour,
money, would be saved. The returns would come in more quickly. Fewer
hands would be required to navigate the ships. The loss of a vessel
would be a rare event. The trade would increase fast. In a short time
it would double; and it would all pass through Darien. Whoever possessed
that door of the sea, that key of the universe,--such were the bold
figures which Paterson loved to employ,--would give law to both
hemispheres; and would, by peaceful arts, without shedding one drop of
blood, establish an empire as splendid as that of Cyrus or Alexander. Of
the kingdoms of Europe, Scotland was, as yet, the poorest and the least
considered. If she would but occupy Darien, if she would but become one
great free port, one great warehouse for the wealth which the soil of
Darien might produce, and for the still greater wealth which would be
poured into Darien from Canton and Siam, from Ceylon and the Moluccas,
from the mouths of the Ganges and the Gulf of Cambay, she would at once
take her place in the first rank among nations. No rival would be able
to contend with her either in the West Indian or in the East Indian
trade. The beggarly country, as it had been insolently called by the
inhabitants of warmer and more fruitful regions, would be the great mart
for the choicest luxuries, sugar, rum, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, the
tea and porcelain of China, the muslin of Dacca, the shawls of Cashmere,
the diamonds of Golconda, the pearls of Karrack, the delicious birds'
nests of Nicobar, cinnamon and pepper, ivory and sandal wood. From
Scotland would come all the finest jewels and brocade worn by duchesses
at the balls of St. James's and Versailles. From Scotland would come
all the saltpetre which would furnish the means of war to the fleets and
armies of contending potentates. And on all the vast riches which would
be constantly passing through the little kingdom a toll would be paid
which would remain behind. There would be a prosperity such as might
seem fabulous, a prosperity of which every Scotchman, from the peer to
the cadie, would partake. Soon, all along the now desolate shores of the
Forth and Clyde, villas and pleasure grounds would be as thick as along
the edges of the Dutch canals. Edinburgh would vie with London and
Paris; and the baillie of Glasgow or Dundee would have as stately and
well furnished a mansion, and as fine a gallery of pictures, as any
burgomaster of Amsterdam.

This magnificent plan was at first but partially disclosed to the
public. A colony was to be planted; a vast trade was to be opened
between both the Indies and Scotland; but the name of Darien was as yet
pronounced only in whispers by Paterson and by his most confidential
friends. He had however shown enough to excite boundless hopes and
desires. How well he succeeded in inspiring others with his own feelings
is sufficiently proved by the memorable Act to which the Lord High
Commissioner gave the Royal sanction on the 26th of June 1695. By this
Act some persons who were named, and such other persons as should join
with them, were formed into a corporation, which was to be named the
Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies. The amount of the
capital to be employed was not fixed by law; but it was provided that
one half of the stock at least must be held by Scotchmen resident
in Scotland, and that no stock which had been originally held by a
Scotchman resident in Scotland should ever be transferred to any but
a Scotchman resident in Scotland. An entire monopoly of the trade with
Asia, Africa and America, for a term of thirty-one years, was granted
to the Company. All goods imported by the Company were during twenty-one
years to be duty free, with the exception of foreign sugar and tobacco.
Sugar and tobacco grown on the Company's own plantations were exempted
from all taxation. Every member and every servant of the Company was to
be privileged against impressment and arrest. If any of these privileged
persons was impressed or arrested, the Company was authorised to release
him, and to demand the assistance both of the civil and of the military
power. The Company was authorised to take possession of unoccupied
territories in any part of Asia, Africa or America, and there to plant
colonies, to build towns and forts, to impose taxes, and to provide
magazines, arms and ammunition, to raise troops, to wage war, to
conclude treaties; and the King was made to promise that, if any foreign
state should injure the Company, he would interpose, and would, at the
public charge, obtain reparation. Lastly it was provided that, in order
to give greater security and solemnity to this most exorbitant grant,
the whole substance of the Act should be set forth in Letters Patent to
which the Chancellor was directed to put the Great Seal without delay.

The letters were drawn; the Great Seal was affixed; the subscription
books were opened; the shares were fixed at a hundred pounds sterling
each; and from the Pentland Firth to the Solway Firth every man who had
a hundred pounds was impatient to put down his name. About two hundred
and twenty thousand pounds were actually paid up. This may not, at first
sight, appear a large sum to those who remember the bubbles of 1825 and
of 1845, and would assuredly not have sufficed to defray the charge of
three months of war with Spain. Yet the effort was marvellous when
it may be affirmed with confidence that the Scotch people voluntarily
contributed for the colonisation of Darien a larger proportion of
their substance than any other people ever, in the same space of time,
voluntarily contributed to any commercial undertaking. A great part of
Scotland was then as poor and rude as Iceland now is. There were five or
six shires which did not altogether contain so many guineas and crowns
as were tossed about every day by the shovels of a single goldsmith
in Lombard Street. Even the nobles had very little ready money. They
generally took a large part of their rents in kind, and were thus able,
on their own domains, to live plentifully and hospitably. But there were
many esquires in Kent and Somersetshire who received from their tenants
a greater quantity of gold and silver than a Duke of Cordon or a
Marquess of Atholl drew from extensive provinces. The pecuniary
remuneration of the clergy was such as would have moved the pity of the
most needy curate who thought it a privilege to drink his ale and smoke
his pipe in the kitchen of an English manor house. Even in the fertile
Merse there were parishes of which the minister received only from
four to eight pounds sterling in cash. The official income of the Lord
President of the Court of Session was only five hundred a year; that
of the Lord Justice Clerk only four hundred a year. The land tax of
the whole kingdom was fixed some years later by the Treaty of Union at
little more than half the land tax of the single county of Norfolk. Four
hundred thousand pounds probably bore as great a ratio to the wealth of
Scotland then as forty millions would bear now.

The list of the members of the Darien Company deserves to be examined.
The number of shareholders was about fourteen hundred. The largest
quantity of stock registered in one name was three thousand pounds. The
heads of three noble houses took three thousand pounds each, the Duke
of Hamilton, the Duke of Queensbury and Lord Belhaven, a man of ability,
spirit and patriotism, who had entered into the design with enthusiasm
not inferior to that of Fletcher. Argyle held fifteen hundred pounds.
John Dalrymple, but too well known as the Master of Stair, had just
succeeded to his father's title and estate, and was now Viscount Stair.
He put down his name for a thousand pounds. The number of Scotch peers
who subscribed was between thirty and forty. The City of Edinburgh, in
its corporate capacity, took three thousand pounds, the City of Glasgow
three thousand, the City of Perth two thousand. But the great majority
of the subscribers contributed only one hundred or two hundred pounds
each. A very few divines who were settled in the capital or in other
large towns were able to purchase shares. It is melancholy to see in the
roll the name of more than one professional man whose paternal anxiety
led him to lay out probably all his hardly earned savings in purchasing
a hundred pound share for each of his children. If, indeed, Paterson's
predictions had been verified, such a share would, according to the
notions of that age and country, have been a handsome portion for the
daughter of a writer or a surgeon.

That the Scotch are a people eminently intelligent, wary, resolute and
self possessed, is obvious to the most superficial observation. That
they are a people peculiarly liable to dangerous fits of passion and
delusions of the imagination is less generally acknowledged, but is
not less true. The whole kingdom seemed to have gone mad. Paterson had
acquired an influence resembling rather that of the founder of a new
religion, that of a Mahomet, that of a Joseph Smith, than that of a
commercial projector. Blind faith in a religion, fanatical zeal for a
religion, are too common to astonish us. But such faith and zeal seem
strangely out of place in the transactions of the money market. It is
true that we are judging after the event. But before the event materials
sufficient for the forming of a sound judgment were within the reach of
all who cared to use them. It seems incredible that men of sense, who
had only a vague and general notion of Paterson's scheme, should
have staked every thing on the success of that scheme. It seems more
incredible still that men to whom the details of that scheme had been
confided should not have looked into any of the common books of history
or geography in which an account of Darien might have been found, and
should not have asked themselves the simple question, whether Spain
was likely to endure a Scotch colony in the midst of her Transatlantic
dominions. It was notorious that she claimed the sovereignty of the
isthmus on specious, nay, on solid, grounds. A Spaniard had been the
first discoverer of the coast of Darien. A Spaniard had built a town
and established a government on that coast. A Spaniard had, with great
labour and peril, crossed the mountainous neck of land, had seen rolling
beneath him the vast Pacific, never before revealed to European eyes,
had descended, sword in hand, into the waves up to his girdle, and had
there solemnly taken possession of sea and shore in the name of the
Crown of Castile. It was true that the region which Paterson described
as a paradise had been found by the first Castilian settlers to be a
land of misery and death. The poisonous air, exhaled from rank jungle
and stagnant water, had compelled them to remove to the neighbouring
haven of Panama; and the Red Indians had been contemptuously permitted
to live after their own fashion on the pestilential soil. But that soil
was still considered, and might well be considered, by Spain as her own.
In many countries there were tracts of morass, of mountain, of forest,
in which governments did not think it worth while to be at the expense
of maintaining order, and in which rude tribes enjoyed by connivance
a kind of independence. It was not necessary for the members of the
Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies to look very far
for an example. In some highland districts, not more than a hundred
miles from Edinburgh, dwelt clans which had always regarded the
authority of King, Parliament, Privy Council and Court of Session, quite
as little as the aboriginal population of Darien regarded the authority
of the Spanish Viceroys and Audiences. Yet it would surely have been
thought an outrageous violation of public law in the King of Spain to
take possession of Appin and Lochaber. And would it be a less outrageous
violation of public law in the Scots to seize on a province in the very
centre of his possessions, on the plea that this province was in the
same state in which Appin and Lochaber had been during centuries?

So grossly unjust was Paterson's scheme; and yet it was less unjust
than impolitic. Torpid as Spain had become, there was still one point on
which she was exquisitely sensitive. The slightest encroachment of any
other European power even on the outskirts of her American dominions
sufficed to disturb her repose and to brace her paralysed nerves. To
imagine that she would tamely suffer adventurers from one of the most
insignificant kingdoms of the Old World to form a settlement in the
midst of her empire, within a day's sail of Portobello on one side and
of Carthagena on the other, was ludicrously absurd. She would have been
just as likely to let them take possession of the Escurial. It was,
therefore, evident that, before the new Company could even begin its
commercial operations, there must be a war with Spain and a complete
triumph over Spain. What means had the Company of waging such a war,
and what chance of achieving such a triumph? The ordinary revenue of
Scotland in time of peace was between sixty and seventy thousand a year.
The extraordinary supplies granted to the Crown during the war with
France had amounted perhaps to as much more. Spain, it is true, was
no longer the Spain of Pavia and Lepanto. But, even in her decay,
she possessed in Europe resources which exceeded thirty fold those
of Scotland; and in America, where the struggle must take place, the
disproportion was still greater. The Spanish fleets and arsenals were
doubtless in wretched condition. But there were Spanish fleets; there
were Spanish arsenals. The galleons, which sailed every year from
Seville to the neighbourhood of Darien and from the neighbourhood of
Darien back to Seville, were in tolerable condition, and formed, by
themselves, a considerable armament. Scotland had not a single ship
of the line, nor a single dockyard where such a ship could be built.
A marine sufficient to overpower that of Spain must be, not merely
equipped and manned, but created. An armed force sufficient to defend
the isthmus against the whole power of the viceroyalties of Mexico and
Peru must be sent over five thousand miles of ocean. What was the
charge of such an expedition likely to be? Oliver had, in the preceding
generation, wrested a West Indian island from Spain; but, in order to do
this, Oliver, a man who thoroughly understood the administration of war,
who wasted nothing, and who was excellently served, had been forced to
spend, in a single year, on his navy alone, twenty times the ordinary
revenue of Scotland; and, since his days, war had been constantly
becoming more and more costly.

It was plain that Scotland could not alone support the charge of a
contest with the enemy whom Paterson was bent on provoking. And what
assistance was she likely to have from abroad? Undoubtedly the vast
colonial empire and the narrow colonial policy of Spain were regarded
with an evil eye by more than one great maritime power. But there was
no great maritime power which would not far rather have seen the isthmus
between the Atlantic and the Pacific in the hands of Spain than in the
hands of the Darien Company. Lewis could not but dread whatever tended
to aggrandise a state governed by William. To Holland the East India
trade was as the apple of her eye. She had been the chief gainer by the
discoveries of Gama; and it might be expected that she would do all
that could be done by craft, and, if need were, by violence, rather
than suffer any rival to be to her what she had been to Venice. England
remained; and Paterson was sanguine enough to flatter himself that
England might be induced to lend her powerful aid to the Company. He and
Lord Belhaven repaired to London, opened an office in Clement's Lane,
formed a Board of Directors auxiliary to the Central Board at Edinburgh,
and invited the capitalists of the Royal Exchange to subscribe for the
stock which had not been reserved for Scotchmen resident in Scotland.
A few moneyed men were allured by the bait; but the clamour of the City
was loud and menacing; and from the City a feeling of indignation spread
fast through the country. In this feeling there was undoubtedly a large
mixture of evil.
National antipathy operated on some minds, religious
antipathy on others. But it is impossible to deny that the anger which
Paterson's schemes excited throughout the south of the island was, in
the main, just and reasonable. Though it was not yet generally known in
what precise spot his colony was to be planted, there could be little
doubt that he intended to occupy some part of America; and there could
be as little doubt that such occupation would be resisted. There would
be a maritime war; and such a war Scotland had no means of carrying on.
The state of her finances was such that she must be quite unable to fit
out even a single squadron of moderate size. Before the conflict had
lasted three months, she would have neither money nor credit left.
These things were obvious to every coffeehouse politician; and it was
impossible to believe that they had escaped the notice of men so able
and well informed as some who sate in the Privy Council and Parliament
at Edinburgh. In one way only could the conduct of these schemers be
explained. They meant to make a dupe and a tool of the Southron. The two
British kingdoms were so closely connected, physically and politically,
that it was scarcely possible for one of them to be at peace with a
power with which the other was at war. If the Scotch drew King William
into a quarrel, England must, from regard to her own dignity which
was bound up with his, support him in it. She was to be tricked into a
bloody and expensive contest in the event of which she had no interest;
nay, into a contest in which victory would be a greater calamity to her
than defeat. She was to lavish her wealth and the lives of her seamen,
in order that a set of cunning foreigners might enjoy a monopoly by
which she would be the chief sufferer. She was to conquer and defend
provinces for this Scotch Corporation; and her reward was to be that
her merchants were to be undersold, her customers decoyed away, her
exchequer beggared. There would be an end to the disputes between
the old East India Company and the new East India Company; for both
Companies would be ruined alike. The two great springs of revenue would
be dried up together. What would be the receipt of the Customs, what
of the Excise, when vast magazines of sugar, rum, tobacco, coffee,
chocolate, tea, spices, silks, muslins, all duty free, should be formed
along the estuaries of the Forth and of the Clyde, and along the border
from the mouth of the Esk to the mouth of the Tweed? What army, what
fleet, would be sufficient to protect the interests of the government
and of the fair trader when the whole kingdom of Scotland should be
turned into one great smuggling establishment? Paterson's plan was
simply this, that England should first spend millions in defence of
the trade of his Company, and should then be plundered of twice as many
millions by means of that very trade.

The cry of the city and of the nation was soon echoed by the
legislature. When the Parliament met for the first time after the
general election of 1695, Rochester called the attention of the Lords
to the constitution and designs of the Company. Several witnesses were
summoned to the bar, and gave evidence which produced a powerful effect
on the House. "If these Scots are to have their way," said one peer, "I
shall go and settle in Scotland, and not stay here to be made a beggar. "
The Lords resolved to represent strongly to the King the injustice of
requiring England to exert her power in support of an enterprise which,
if successful, must be fatal to her commerce and to her finances. A
representation was drawn up and communicated to the Commons. The Commons
eagerly concurred, and complimented the Peers on the promptitude with
which their Lordships had, on this occasion, stood forth to protect the
public interests. The two Houses went up together to Kensington with
the address. William had been under the walls of Namur when the Act
for incorporating the Company had been touched with his sceptre at
Edinburgh, and had known nothing about that Act till his attention had
been called to it by the clamour of his English subjects. He now said,
in plain terms, that he had been ill served in Scotland, but that he
would try to find a remedy for the evil which bad been brought to his
notice. The Lord High Commissioner Tweeddale and Secretary Johnstone
were immediately dismissed. But the Act which had been passed by their
management still continued to be law in Scotland, nor was it in their
master's power to undo what they had done.

The Commons were not content with addressing the throne. They instituted
an inquiry into the proceedings of the Scotch Company in London.
Belhaven made his escape to his own country, and was there beyond the
reach of the Serjeant-at-Arms. But Paterson and some of his confederates
were severely examined. It soon appeared that the Board which was
sitting in Clement's Lane had done things which were certainly imprudent
and perhaps illegal. The Act of Incorporation empowered the detectors to
take and to administer to their servants an oath of fidelity. But that
Act was on the south of the Tweed a nullity. Nevertheless the directors
had, in the heart of the City of London, taken and administered this
oath, and had thus, by implication, asserted that the powers conferred
on them by the legislature of Scotland accompanied them to England. It
was resolved that they had been guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour,
and that they should be impeached. A committee was appointed to frame
articles of impeachment; but the task proved a difficult one; and the
prosecution was suffered to drop, not however till the few English
capitalists who had at first been friendly to Paterson's project had
been terrified into renouncing all connection with him.

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.