No More Learning

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. 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.

With some difficulty a negotiation was carried on in such French and
such Latin as the two parties could furnish. Before the end of March
a treaty was signed by which the Scotch bound themselves to evacuate
Darien in fourteen days; and on the eleventh of April they departed, a
much less numerous body than when they arrived. In little more than four
months, although the healthiest months of the year, three hundred men
out of thirteen hundred had been swept away by disease. Of the survivors
very few lived to see their native country again. Two of the ships
perished at sea. Many of the adventurers, who had left their homes
flushed with hopes of speedy opulence, were glad to hire themselves out
to the planters of Jamaica, and laid their bones in that land of exile.
Shields died there, worn out and heart broken. Borland was the only
minister who came back. In his curious and interesting narrative, he
expresses his feelings, after the fashion of the school in which he
had been bred, by grotesque allusions to the Old Testament, and by a
profusion of Hebrew words. On his first arrival, he tells us, he found
New Edinburgh a Ziklag. He had subsequently been compelled to dwell in
the tents of Kedar. Once, indeed, during his sojourn, he had fallen
in with a Beer-lahai-roi, and had set up his Ebenezer; but in general
Darien was to him a Magor Missabib, a Kibroth-hattaavah. The sad story
is introduced with the words in which a great man of old, delivered
over to the malice of the Evil Power, was informed of the death of his
children and of the ruin of his fortunes: "I alone am escaped to tell
thee. "




CHAPTER XXV.

Trial of Spencer Cowper--Duels--Discontent of the Nation--Captain
Kidd--Meeting of Parliament--Attacks on Burnet--Renewed Attack
on Somers--Question of the Irish Forfeitures: Dispute between the
Houses--Somers again attacked--Prorogation of Parliament--Death of
James the Second--The Pretender recognised as King--Return of the
King--General Election--Death of William

THE passions which had agitated the Parliament during the late session
continued to ferment in the minds of men during the recess, and, having
no longer a vent in the senate, broke forth in every part of the empire,
destroyed the peace of towns, brought into peril the honour and the
lives of innocent men, and impelled magistrates to leave the bench
of justice and attack one another sword in hand. Private calamities,
private brawls, which had nothing to do with the disputes between court
and country, were turned by the political animosities of that unhappy
summer into grave political events.

One mournful tale, which called forth the strongest feelings of the
contending factions, is still remembered as a curious part of the
history of our jurisprudence, and especially of the history of our
medical jurisprudence. No Whig member of the lower House, with the
single exception of Montague, filled a larger space in the public eye
than William Cowper. In the art of conciliating an audience, Cowper was
preeminent. His graceful and engaging eloquence cast a spell on juries;
and the Commons, even in those stormy moments when no other defender of
the administration could obtain a hearing, would always listen to him.
He represented Hertford, a borough in which his family had considerable
influence; but there was a strong Tory minority among the electors, and
he had not won his seat without a hard fight, which had left behind it
many bitter recollections. His younger brother Spencer, a man of parts
and learning, was fast rising into practice as a barrister on the Home
Circuit.

At Hertford resided an opulent Quaker family named Stout. A pretty young
woman of this family had lately sunk into a melancholy of a kind not
very unusual in girls of strong sensibility and lively imagination who
are subject to the restraints of austere religious societies. Her dress,
her looks, her gestures, indicated the disturbance of her mind. She
sometimes hinted her dislike of the sect to which she belonged. She
complained that a canting waterman who was one of the brotherhood had
held forth against her at a meeting. She threatened to go beyond sea,
to throw herself out of window, to drown herself. To two or three of
her associates she owned that she was in love; and on one occasion she
plainly said that the man whom she loved was one whom she never could
marry. In fact, the object of her fondness was Spencer Cowper, who was
already married. She at length wrote to him in language which she never
would have used if her intellect had not been disordered. He, like an
honest man, took no advantage of her unhappy state of mind, and did his
best to avoid her. His prudence mortified her to such a degree that
on one occasion she went into fits. It was necessary, however, that he
should see her, when he came to Hertford at the spring assizes of
1699. For he had been entrusted with some money which was due to her
on mortgage. He called on her for this purpose late one evening, and
delivered a bag of gold to her. She pressed him to be the guest of her
family; but he excused himself and retired. The next morning she was
found dead among the stakes of a mill dam on the stream called
the Priory River. That she had destroyed herself there could be no
reasonable doubt. The coroner's inquest found that she had drowned
herself while in a state of mental derangement. But her family was
unwilling to admit that she had shortened her own life, and looked about
for somebody who might be accused of murdering her. The last person
who could be proved to have been in her company was Spencer Cowper. It
chanced that two attorneys and a scrivener, who had come down from town
to the Hertford assizes, had been overheard, on that unhappy night,
talking over their wine about the charms and flirtations of the handsome
Quaker girl, in the light way in which such subjects are sometimes
discussed even at the circuit tables and mess tables of our more refined
generation. Some wild words, susceptible of a double meaning, were used
about the way in which she had jilted one lover, and the way in which
another lover would punish her for her coquetry. On no better grounds
than these her relations imagined that Spencer Cowper had, with the
assistance of these three retainers of the law, strangled her, and
thrown her corpse into the water. There was absolutely no evidence of
the crime. There was no evidence that any one of the accused had any
motive to commit such a crime; there was no evidence that Spencer Cowper
had any connection with the persons who were said to be his accomplices.
One of those persons, indeed, he had never seen. But no story is
too absurd to be imposed on minds blinded by religious and political
fanaticism. The Quakers and the Tories joined to raise a formidable
clamour. The Quakers had, in those days, no scruples about capital
punishments. They would, indeed, as Spencer Cowper said bitterly, but
too truly, rather send four innocent men to the gallows than let it be
believed that one who had their light within her had committed suicide.
The Tories exulted in the prospect of winning two seats from the Whigs.
The whole kingdom was divided between Stouts and Cowpers. At the summer
assizes Hertford was crowded with anxious faces from London and from
parts of England more distant than London. The prosecution was conducted
with a malignity and unfairness which to us seem almost incredible; and,
unfortunately, the dullest and most ignorant judge of the twelve was
on the bench. Cowper defended himself and those who were said to be his
accomplices with admirable ability and self possession. His brother,
much more distressed than himself, sate near him through the long agony
of that day. The case against the prisoners rested chiefly on the vulgar
error that a human body, found, as this poor girl's body had been found,
floating in water, must have been thrown into the water while still
alive. To prove this doctrine the counsel for the Crown called medical
practitioners, of whom nothing is now known except that some of them
had been active against the Whigs at Hertford elections. To confirm
the evidence of these gentlemen two or three sailors were put into the
witness box. On the other side appeared an array of men of science whose
names are still remembered. Among them was William Cowper, not a kinsman
of the defendant, but the most celebrated anatomist that England had
then produced. He was, indeed, the founder of a dynasty illustrious in
the history of science; for he was the teacher of William Cheselden,
and William Cheselden was the teacher of John Hunter. On the same side
appeared Samuel Garth, who, among the physicians of the capital, had no
rival except Radcliffe, and Hans Sloane, the founder of the magnificent
museum which is one of the glories of our country. The attempt of the
prosecutors to make the superstitions of the forecastle evidence for
the purpose of taking away the lives of men was treated by these
philosophers with just disdain. The stupid judge asked Garth what he
could say in answer to the testimony of the seamen. "My Lord," replied
Garth, "I say that they are mistaken. I will find seamen in abundance to
swear that they have known whistling raise the wind. "

The jury found the prisoners Not guilty; and the report carried back to
London by persons who had been present at the trial was that everybody
applauded the verdict, and that even the Stouts seemed to be convinced
of their error. It is certain, however, that the malevolence of the
defeated party soon revived in all its energy. The lives of the four
men who had just been absolved were again attacked by means of the most
absurd and odious proceeding known to our old law, the appeal of
murder. This attack too failed. Every artifice of chicane was at
length exhausted; and nothing was left to the disappointed sect and the
disappointed faction except to calumniate those whom it had been found
impossible to murder. In a succession of libels Spencer Cowper was held
up to the execration of the public. But the public did him justice.