Darién: The Swamp That Cost Scotland Its Independence

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A country poured all of its money into a single harbour. Among the goods loaded onto the ships were wigs, combs and woollen stockings; the place they were bound for was equatorial rainforest. Two years later Scotland had neither a colony left nor gold enough to stay independent.

A country poured all of its money into a single harbour. Among the goods loaded onto the ships were wigs, combs and woollen stockings; the place they were bound for was the rainforest of the equator. Two years later Scotland was left with neither a colony, nor enough gold to remain independent.

In sixteen ninety-four, in London, among the names written onto the founding documents of the Bank of England there was a Scot. William Paterson had been born in the countryside of Dumfriesshire, the child of a shepherd family. In his youth he had gone out to the West Indies, traded in the Caribbean, and sat talking in harbours with pirates, merchants and smugglers. When he came home he had no money in his pocket, only an idea. He put that idea first to London, then to Hamburg, then to Amsterdam. Every one of them listened, and every one of them politely turned him down. Paterson did not give up. Because as far as he was concerned, what he held was a key that could rebuild the whole of world trade.

The idea was simple, as all dangerous ideas are. Look at a map of the world: North and South America are joined to one another by a thin strip of land in Panama. There, in the region called the Isthmus of Darién, the distance between the two oceans falls in places to as little as eighty kilometres. At that time there were two ways of carrying goods from Europe to Asia: rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the southern end of Africa, or passing through the icy waters of the Strait of Magellan at the far tip of South America. Both took months, and both devoured ships and men. Paterson's proposal was this: let a harbour be built at Darién. Let goods arriving from the Atlantic be unloaded there, carried overland across the isthmus, and loaded on the other shore onto ships putting out into the Pacific. Whoever held that harbour would take a toll on the trade of the world. In Paterson's own words, this was the door of the seas and the key of the universe.

The idea had something concrete behind it as well. A surgeon named Lionel Wafer had been wounded while crossing the isthmus with buccaneers in the early sixteen eighties, had been left behind, and had lived for months among the native Guna people. By his account Darién was green, its water plentiful, its soil fertile, its people hated the Spanish, and the Spanish had never truly managed to settle there. In sixteen ninety-seven Paterson's company quietly brought Wafer to Edinburgh and questioned him. Wafer described the region as a paradise. Nobody asked him how much rain fell there for six months of the year.

So why did this Caribbean dream find an answer in Scotland rather than in London? Because in those years Scotland was desperate. Since sixteen oh three it had shared a king with England, but it was a separate country: it had its own parliament, its own law, its own treasury. Yet the Navigation Acts passed by England had reserved trade with the English colonies to English ships. Scottish merchants, though subjects of the same king, were shut out of the most profitable markets in America. On top of that, in the middle of the sixteen nineties the country was struck by one harvest disaster after another; in this famine, remembered in history as the Seven Ill Years, a significant part of the population in some districts died of hunger or of the diseases that hunger brought. Scotland had no colony, no navy, little gold, and it watched from the sidelines as its neighbour grew rich.

It was in this atmosphere that, in June of sixteen ninety-five, the Scottish Parliament passed an act and founded the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, the Company of Scotland for short. The company was given a thirty-one-year monopoly on trade with Africa and Asia, the power to found colonies, and exemption from customs duties. On paper, Scotland had created its own East India Company.

Half of the capital was to be raised in London. In the first days things went well; within a short time subscriptions worth three hundred thousand pounds were written into the books opened in London. Then the East India Company saw what was happening. They had no intention of allowing a venture that would raise a rival to their own monopoly to be financed with English capital. The English Parliament moved, and threatened to investigate and prosecute the Englishmen who had put money into the Company of Scotland. Within a week the London investors withdrew their signatures. The company turned to Hamburg; the merchants there seemed interested, but the king's representative in Hamburg intervened and let it be known that anyone doing business with the Scots would draw the displeasure of the English king. Hamburg closed as well. So did Amsterdam.

And so the Company of Scotland found every door shut, and a single option remained: to raise the money from inside Scotland itself. No outside observer thought this was possible. The country was poor, it had gone hungry, it was short of cash. The company's directors opened a book in Edinburgh and began to wait.

When the subscription book opened in Edinburgh in February of sixteen ninety-six, what happened was something without precedent in Scottish history. The queue spilled into the street. Nobles came, lawyers came, merchants came. But they were not the striking part: weavers, tailors, farmers, widowed women, ministers and small-town shopkeepers came too. One woman subscribed a hundred pounds, another brought the last money she had put by. Towns took shares as institutions; Glasgow, Edinburgh and Perth put up money in their own names. The guilds opened their coffers. Church congregations gathered it among themselves.

The reason for this was not only the expectation of profit. The undertaking was seen less as an investment than as an answer. A country humiliated for years, shut out of trade, wrestling with hunger, was going to build an empire by its own strength. Every name written into the books was a kind of declaration. In the end the subscriptions raised reached four hundred thousand pounds. What that figure is worth today does not matter; what matters is the proportion. By the estimates of historians this money was roughly a fifth of the capital in circulation in Scotland. A country had tied a fifth of its liquid wealth to a single company, a single plan, a single swamp that most of them could not even have pointed to on a map.

Once the money was raised, the ships came. Scotland had no shipyard able to build such a fleet, so the ships were commissioned or bought in Amsterdam and Hamburg. Five vessels were made ready: the Caledonia, the Saint Andrew, the Unicorn, and two small tenders, the Dolphin and the Endeavour.

The goods loaded into the holds gave the earliest warning of how the business would go. For sale at the great trading centre to be founded at Darién, the company loaded woollen stockings, heavy woollen cloth, wigs, combs, shoes, clay pipes and Bibles. None of this would be of any use to anyone in a forest a few degrees from the equator, where the humidity reached ninety percent. The local people wanted guns, axes, knives, ironware. The Scots were taking them wigs.

Paterson himself had lost his standing by the time he set out. A man who ran the company's business in London had taken a large sum from the till and vanished, and the responsibility had been laid indirectly on Paterson. The architect of the whole project was removed from the board of directors and boarded for Darién as an ordinary settler, with no official authority whatsoever. The colony was to be governed by a council of seven working under a presidency that rotated weekly; there was disagreement over how decisions would be taken before they had even sailed.

In the summer of sixteen ninety-eight, in July, five ships weighed anchor from Leith, the port of Edinburgh. Thousands had gathered on the quay and on the hills around it. There were some twelve hundred people aboard: farmers, craftsmen, old soldiers, a few ministers, women and children. Most of the crews and the passengers did not know where the ships were going. The orders given to the captains were sealed; they were not to be opened before Madeira was passed. The secrecy was meant to keep the Spanish or the English from stopping the expedition.

The voyage took four months. The seals were broken and the course was turned towards the Caribbean. Around seventy people died of illness on the way and were given to the sea; for an ocean crossing of that age this was not an unusual loss. On the second of November, sixteen ninety-eight, the fleet entered a wide, sheltered bay on what is today the north-eastern coast of Panama. The water was clear, the bay was deep, it was sheltered from the wind. When the settlers came ashore, the scene before them seemed to confirm what Wafer had described: dense forest, tall trees, running streams, a magnificent natural harbour.

They named the bay Caledonia Bay. They called the country they would build New Caledonia, and the town they would build New Edinburgh. On a narrow peninsula commanding the entrance to the bay they laid the foundations of Fort Saint Andrew, named for Scotland's patron saint; fifty cannon were placed there. Friendly relations were established with the Guna leaders nearby, gifts were given, agreements were made. The first letters were sent to Scotland, and those letters were read in Edinburgh with great joy. The colony had been founded. On paper, everything had gone exactly as planned.

Then the rain began.

Darién is one of the wettest regions in the world. For most of the year the rain falls for days, for weeks, without a break. The ground beneath the settlement they had built turned to mud in a short time. The ditches they dug filled up, the insides of the tents took water, the roofs of the huts leaked. The flat ground around the fort turned into a swamp, and in that swamp mosquitoes bred.

At that time nobody knew that malaria was carried by mosquitoes. The illness was thought to come from bad air, from the foul vapour rising off the marsh. The settlers were facing an enemy against which they knew no means of protecting themselves. Malaria, yellow fever and dysentery spread almost at once. The people who had come ashore in November took to their beds in January.

The food ran out just as quickly. The salted meat and ship's biscuit brought in the vessels had spoiled over the four-month voyage and in the tropical damp; mouldy flour and maggoty meat were being handed out. The settlers tried to plant yams and maize, but they had missed the planting season, and the fields they cleared out of the forest did not hold up in the rain. Rations were cut, then cut again. Weakened bodies gave way to disease more easily.

The dream of trade stayed in that same mud. The Guna people were friendly, but they had no capital to enter into trade with, and no need for the goods the Scots had brought. Nobody in an equatorial forest bought woollen stockings or wigs. What had really been expected was that the bay would turn into a great port of call, that ships would come from Europe and from America and unload their goods. The ships did not come. And those that did had no wish to take the risk of trading at a harbour that counted as Spanish waters and that no great power recognised.

The council did not work. A presidency rotating weekly among seven men meant that every week a new decision undid the decision of the week before. It was not clear who was to give orders, discipline collapsed, theft and desertion began. Paterson, though he carried the whole weight of the project on his shoulders, stood at the edge with no official say at all. Within a few weeks of their landing, his wife and child fell ill and died. Paterson caught the fever too and was out of his senses for weeks; when he recovered, those who knew him said he was no longer the man he had been.

By the spring of sixteen ninety-nine, dying had become a daily piece of work. According to the records, at the worst of it ten people a day were being buried. The graveyard was larger than the fort. Those left alive did not have the strength to carry the dead.

In June the decision was taken. The colony would be abandoned. Those who remained were put aboard the ships, the sick were carried to the bunks, the cannon and the goods were left behind. In July the fleet left the bay, and New Caledonia stood empty after eight months.

But putting out to sea was not deliverance. The people on the ships were already sick, and now they were travelling in crowded, airless holds, in vessels whose fresh water had given out. The number who died on the way came close to the number who had died ashore. The Saint Andrew lost the greater part of its crew on the way to Jamaica. The Unicorn barely reached the coast of North America, and was too rotten ever to put to sea again. When the Caledonia arrived at New York, there were only a few people left with the strength to come up on deck.

Of the twelve hundred people who had set out from Leith, around three hundred were alive. The rest had been left in the mud of Darién or in the water of the Caribbean. And this was only the first half of the story. Because while they were dying, a second fleet in Scotland, knowing nothing of any of it, was preparing to set out for that same bay.

It was not illness alone that hastened the collapse of the colony. The king who sat in London was the king of the Scots as well, but he was at the same time the man who conducted England's foreign policy. England's greatest anxiety at that moment was not to set Spain against it in the succession struggle that would break out on the death of the childless and ailing Spanish king. And Darién was a region that Spain reckoned on paper as its own territory. The Scots building a fort there was seen in Madrid as an outright invasion, and it brought fierce protests.

The king's solution was plain. An order was sent to the governors of the English colonies in America, from Jamaica to New York, from Barbados to Boston: no help of any kind was to be given to the Scottish colony, no provisions sold, no arms supplied, no harbour opened to its ships. That order cut away the nearest sources of help from a starving New Caledonia with a stroke of the pen. Scottish boats that went from Darién to Jamaica to fetch provisions came back without being able to buy a single sack of flour, even though they were able to tie up in the harbour. The Scots never forgot it: their own king had ordered his own subjects to go hungry.

Meanwhile help had set out from Scotland. When two supply ships reached the bay in the summer of sixteen ninety-nine they found the colony empty; the survivors had pulled out a few weeks before. One of the ships, the Olive Branch, burned away entirely in a fire that broke out in its hold while it lay at anchor in the bay; all the provisions aboard turned to ash.

The real tragedy came after that. Before the company had yet learned what had happened to the first fleet, at the end of the summer of sixteen ninety-nine it sent out a second convoy of four ships. The largest among them was the Rising Sun, carrying thirty-eight guns. There were more than a thousand people in that convoy, and they believed the place they were going to was an established, working colony. When they entered Caledonia Bay on the thirtieth of November, sixteen ninety-nine, what they saw was empty huts that the forest had begun to take back, a fallen fort and hundreds of graves.

Turning back was not easy either. The ships were worn, the people were tired, and to return to Scotland empty-handed meant confessing that they had destroyed all the country's money. They decided to stay. Before long the same cycle began: rain, swamp, fever, death. Again the leadership could not be shared; the ministers blamed sinfulness, the members of the council blamed one another.

In February of seventeen hundred a brief gleam of hope appeared. An officer named Alexander Campbell of Fonab, seasoned in the European wars, arrived with a relief ship and effectively took command. When he learned that the Spanish were preparing to besiege the colony he did not wait; he plunged into the forest with a small force and stormed the Spanish forward post at Toubacanti in a direct assault. The attack succeeded, and the Spanish left their positions and withdrew. But Campbell was wounded in the chest, and shortly after his return the fever put him in bed. The one competent commander the colonists had found was unable to fight within days of the victory he had won.

The Spanish answer was measured and final. A fleet under the command of Juan Pimienta closed the mouth of the bay, troops were put ashore, and Fort Saint Andrew was besieged from land and from sea. The Spanish did not storm it; there was no need. The siege lasted a month. The Scots' water ran low, their powder ran low, the number of able-bodied men fell every day. The guns fired, trenches were dug, the sick died inside the fort.

In the end Pimienta offered to talk. On the thirty-first of March, seventeen hundred, terms of surrender were signed. The terms were generous, considering the strength of the besieger: the Scots would march out of the fort with their colours, with their arms and with their drums beating, board their ships and leave, never to return. In April New Caledonia was emptied for the second and last time. The Spanish walked into the empty fort, and the region went back to being what it had been, a place where no European state ever managed to plant a settlement.

The voyage home struck the last blow. The Rising Sun, lying at anchor off Charleston on the coast of North America for repairs, was caught in a hurricane in September of seventeen hundred and went down. Of the more than a hundred people aboard, not one survived. The only name to come through was that of a young minister, Archibald Stobo, who had happened to go ashore that day to preach; he stayed in America and died years later as a man who founded churches in South Carolina. Some two thousand five hundred people in all had taken part in the two expeditions. Those who made it back to Scotland numbered a few hundred.

The news reached Edinburgh drop by drop, and every drop was worse than the one before it. The loss was not only in people. A fifth of the country's cash capital had evaporated. Widows who had bought shares lost their livelihoods, the guilds found their coffers emptied, town governments went into debt. For a generation in Scotland, having put money into Darién was used as the explanation for a family's fall into poverty.

The anger was turned first on the king. The ban on assistance sent to the colonies was, for the Scots, the proof of betrayal. Then it turned on England. In seventeen oh five the captain of an English merchant ship called the Worcester, detained off Leith, and two of his men were tried on the charge of having killed the crew of a missing Scottish ship. The evidence was extremely weak, but the streets of Edinburgh wanted blood, and the three men were hanged on the sands of Leith. This showed the point the relationship between the two countries had reached.

England's response was economic. With the measure it passed in seventeen oh five, known as the Alien Act, the parliament in London announced that if Scotland did not sit down to union talks by a certain date, it would count Scots as aliens in England and forbid the entry of Scottish cattle, coal and linen into England. For a country whose economy was already on its knees after Darién, this was a pressure that ended the argument.

The talks began in seventeen oh six, and in seventeen oh seven the two parliaments ratified the treaty of union. Scotland closed its own parliament; Scotland and England became a single kingdom, a single customs area, a single parliament. Among the articles of the treaty stood one of the most striking items in history. Article fifteen provided for a payment to Scotland of three hundred and ninety-eight thousand and eighty-five pounds and ten shillings; in the documents the name of this money was the Equivalent. Its official justification was that it was compensation for Scotland taking on part of England's national debt. Its actual use was something else: the greater part of this money went to repaying the shareholders of the Company of Scotland the capital they had put in, together with five percent interest. Everyone who had lost money at Darién got that money back on the day Scotland gave up its independent parliament.

How this payment is to be read has been argued over for three centuries. On one view the Equivalent was an honest piece of accounting; an account was being closed as Scotland entered a new financial union. On another view it was the purchase of a nation's sovereignty, and the people who put the money in their pockets were some of the same people as the members of parliament who voted. Robert Burns, some eighty years later, cast this idea of a purchase into lines in his poem "Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation", saying that English gold had taken the place of Scottish gold, and those lines are still sung today.

The Equivalent had a sequel of its own. The company set up to manage the payment, carry out the distribution and pursue the remaining claims received a royal charter in seventeen twenty-seven and became the Royal Bank of Scotland. Which is to say, the liquidation desk of the Darién disaster is the place where one of Scotland's largest banks was born. Paterson, for his part, wore out the doors of government for years and was in the end paid compensation of more than eighteen thousand pounds. He died in seventeen nineteen, having seen the bank he founded grow powerful in London and the colony he had designed wiped off the map.

The idea itself was not wrong. What was wrong was the place and the time. Paterson's notion of joining the two oceans came to pass two hundred years after him, some two hundred kilometres west along the same isthmus, with modern engineering and the resources of a great state; when the Panama Canal opened in nineteen fourteen, world trade was reshaped in exactly the way Paterson had foreseen. Darién itself, by contrast, was never tamed. Today the one broken link in the highway that runs the length of North and South America is there; that strip of forest and swamp of roughly a hundred kilometres, known on maps as the Darién Gap, still has no road laid through it three hundred years later.

The real lesson that remains is something colder than anything to do with the climate or the mosquitoes. Darién showed that a small country cannot step in among the great trading empires without their permission. The colony did not die of disease alone; it died of having the ports it could trade with closed to it, of being unable to raise credit, of being under the protection of no navy at all. And when a nation piles its whole risk onto a single card, what it loses when that card turns is not only money. The money Scotland lost at Darién was repaid in seventeen oh seven. The parliament it lost did not come back until nineteen ninety-nine.

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