John Prebble

by The Darien Disaster (v1. 1) (epub)

  Green's hope for a reprieve lasted almost until the end. Twice when the hangman tried to place the hood over his head he pushed it aside, looking anxiously along the road to Edinburgh. And then he understood. He stumbled on the ladder and would have collapsed but for Madder, who frowned at him, and by his own stoic resignation gave Green the courage to accept death.

  "The tragedy was completed," said the Letter, "and from many points of hilly Edinburgh the bodies of the victims might be seen swinging on the sands of Leith. The national vengeance was more than satiated, and many of those who had been foremost in the strife were afraid to think of what they had done." Many, but not most. When the dead men were cut down, Robinson took Green's body to Mrs. Bartley's lodging-house, where the seaman had stayed before his arrest. He helped her to strip it, wash it, and coffin it, and later did the same for Madder and Simpson. But as he escorted the coffins for burial a flame of riot burst out again, and he fought the mob with a drawn sword at the door of the church.

  Although the Council pardoned the rest of the Worcester's crew, without protest, there was little forgiveness or shame in Scotland. Too much was bitterly remembered. Ten years before, the nation had created a noble mercantile company, and three years later a colony on Darien that could have been the trading hub of the world. Nine fine ships, built or bought for this enterprise, had been sunk, burnt, or abandoned. Nearly half a million pounds sterling had been freely offered from Scotland's meagre purse, and that which had been taken was now without hope of return. Over two thousand men, women and children had left the Forth and Clyde for Darien, and never returned. They were buried on Panama, drowned in the Caribbean, rotting in Spanish prisons, or lost for ever as indentured servants in English colonies. There was scarcely a family in Scotland below the Highland Line that had not lost a son, or a father, a cousin, nephew or friend in this disaster. This was why Scotland hanged Thomas Green, Madder and Simpson, and this was why there could be no forgiveness.

  Some weeks later, from the printing-house of James Watson in Craig's Close, there came another ballad, rejoicing in the confusion of England and the punishment of her pirates. It was called A Pill for the Pork Eaters, or a Scots lancet for an English Swelling.

  Then England for its treachery should mourn,

  Be forced to fawn, and truckle in its turn: Scots Pedlars you no longer durst upbraid

  And Darien should with interest be repaid.

  "Trade will increase trade, and money will beget money" London, May 1695

  He was the original Scots Pedlar, the taunt first made in a sheet of English doggerel, adopted as a sneer against all his countrymen, and later accepted by them in defensive pride. His only known portrait is an illustration to one of his many pamphlets, and it is grotesque enough to be taken for a caricature. Since it was published while William Paterson was still alive it may well have been an honest attempt at a likeness, and even in its crudity there is something of the character more fully drawn by his words and actions: a beaked, determined nose, mouth open to release the passionate conviction of his thoughts, eyes melancholy with disappointment. Like many men who respond to the instinctive spirit of their age he appeared to be in conflict with his, a conscientious abstainer among great drunkards, tolerant in a stifling atmosphere of bigotry, an advocate of national wealth rather than private fortunes, an upstart deferred to by birth and privilege, albeit never for long. What may be regarded as his enduring monuments are also bizarre in comparison, the Bank of England and a weed-choked ditch on Darien.

  Idealistic, tactless, impatient with the turbid reasoning of his contemporaries, it was not unnatural that the man should withdraw from the Bank at a moment when it was plainly certain to succeed, but stubbornly serve the Darien undertaking in the face of bitter and inevitable failure.

  Much of his life is a mystery, unrecorded, unmentioned in the thousands of words he wrote, and we have only the ribald scandal of his enemies. Tradition places his birth at Skipmyre, in Dumfries, the son of a wealthy farmer, or a poor earth-breaker. He grew up in the killing time, when Episcopacy rode a dragoon's saddle at night against the conventicles, when families were dispersed, when good men of the western shires were transported or went into exile for the glory of God and the preservation of their skins. The same tradition says that his father gave him a good schooling to prepare him for the Kirk, that at seventeen he was carrying food and news to outlawed ministers in the hills above the parish of Tinwald. He is also said to have been at Bothwell Brig on the Clyde, when Monmouth's bright cuirass and the Graham's red plume came down on the Covenant, and that during the bloody persecution which followed he fled to England.

  "He came from Scotland in his younger years," said his contemptuous enemy Walter Herries, "with a pack on his back, whereof the print may be seen." To Herries, Paterson was always the Scots Pedlar, once a real huckster and thereafter a trickster hawking the bright ribbons of his dreams to his countrymen. Whatever Paterson's youth was, it made him no ordinary man in vision or education. He wrote a good hand and reasoned clearly in it. He was an historian who had read widely, a theologian who understood that a faith without compassion was no religion at all. He had a practical knowledge of engineering, mathematics, finance and business, and was a diligent student all his life. Herries said that he abandoned his pedlar's tray after some years in England, and "seated himself under the wing of a warm widow near Oxford, where, finding that preaching was an easier trade than his own, he soon found himself gifted with an Anadab's spirit. Prophets being generally despised at home, he went on the Propaganda fide account to the West Indies, and was one of those who settled on the island of Providence a second time." Less colourfully, tradition says that he lodged with a relation in Bristol until he was 19, and when she died in 1674 she left him some small property which he used to buy himself a passage to the Caribbean. If this were so, it makes nonsense of the brave story that would have him standing in the ranks of the Lord at Bothwell Brig, five years later.

  What he did during those seven or eight years in the West Indies is obscure, and he never wrote of them, except to give the authority of experience to his proposals for a colony. It is true that he built a reputation there for honesty and integrity, and it is possible that he traded as a merchant. Not unnaturally, it was said that he had spent some time as a buccaneer, an associate of Morgan, Avery and Sharpe, Dampier and Wafer, and those other forgotten men who beached their long-boats on crescent sands, smoked bull-hides beneath the palms, sacked Portobello and crossed the Isthmus like ancient heroes. When he returned to Europe, Herries said, his head was "full of projects, having all the achievements of Sir Henry Morgan, Batt. Sharp and the buccaneers in his budget." That he knew such men was more than likely, it was easy enough to meet them, or those who sailed with them, at Blewfields or in Port Royal. Robert Alliston, a veteran of Sharpe's raid on Portobello in 1679, was certainly his friend. And it was from Alliston perhaps, or Wafer, that Paterson first heard of Darien, the green and beautiful country on the northern coast of Panama, where the earth yielded fruit without cultivation, where noble, naked Indians knew the secrets of unmined gold, and where lush mountain valleys led to the Pacific sea. There is no record that Paterson ever set foot upon Darien, or upon any part of the Central American mainland, and it might have been better for his countrymen if he had.

  From the stories told by buccaneers he created his vision of a mercantile colony astride the Isthmus, a free-trading entrepôt of factories and forts where goods from the West could be exchanged for goods from the East, a trading road between the Atlantic and Pacific, anticipating the Panama Canal by two hundred years and making the long voyage about Africa unnecessary. In one splendid paragraph he was to explain this later to his countrymen:

  The time and expense of navigation to China, Japan and the Spice Islands, and the far greatest part of the East Indies will be lessened by more than half, and the consumption of European commodities and manufactories will soon be more than doubled. Trade will increase trade, and
money will beget money, and the trading world shall need no more to want work for their hands, but will rather want hands for their work. Thus this door of the seas, and the key of the universe, with anything of a sort of reasonable management, will of course enable its proprietors to give laws to both oceans, without being liable to the fatigues, expenses and dangers, or contracting the guilt and blood of Alexander and Caesar.

  It is a character sketch of the man, imaginative, energetic, compassionate and naive.

  By the middle of the 1680s he was in Europe, hawking this dream. Robert Douglas, a Scots merchant who conducted his business in London, and who thought that Paterson was a garrulous bore who might become dangerous if taken seriously, later remembered that he was a familiar figure in Amsterdam coffee-houses, always talking about Darien. "He endeavoured to make a market of his wares in Holland and Hamburg," said Herries also, "but without any success. He went afterwards to Berlin, opened his pack there, and almost caught the Elector of Brandenburg in his noose, but that miscarried too."

  From somewhere, the West Indies, Holland or Hamburg, Paterson acquired a small fortune, or at least the foundation upon which to build a small fortune, and when he set himself up in 1687 as a merchant in London, he was soon both successful and influential, the associate of other Scots merchants and of rich Jews like Joseph Cohen D'Azevedo. In London he also met Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the noble-minded Scots patriot who saw the inspired idea behind Paterson's lamentable habit of talking his audience into bored indifference. According to Dalrymple's Memoirs, Saltoun told Paterson to abandon his hope of European interest and to "trust the fate of his project to his own countrymen, and to let them have the sole benefit, glory and danger of it." But Paterson had been too long away from Scotland. He rightly remembered it as poor in capital and resources, and, moreover, he was an internationalist, believing that no one nation could finance the scheme, or should enjoy its benefits.

  He prospered in London. His industrious and enterprising mind, as well as his political principles which the Revolution had now made popular, brought him in contact with great men and new ideas. He helped to found a company, which lasted two hundred years, for supplying north London with piped water from the Hampstead hills, and later a similar company in Southwark of which he became treasurer. He is said to have been associated with Sir Theodore Janssen in the property development of the west, a scheme for noble squares and streets marching away from Lincoln's Inn Fields toward the village of Kensington. He wrote an intelligent proposal, which was ignored, for restoring a deplorably clipped coinage to its proper value. In 1693 he appeared before a Committee of the House of Commons on behalf of a mercantile group, explaining, with considerable skill, its scheme for credit upon Parliamentary security. When the Bank of England was formed next year upon this basis, he was one of its first directors, but he quarrelled with the others and resigned in 1695. Although men respected his intellect and his genius, few can have liked him. He was humourless, tiresome, and depressingly serious about all things. "When he appeared in public," said Herries, "he appeared with a head so full of business and care, as if he had Atlas's burden on his back. If a man had a fancy to be reputed wise, the first step he took to make way was to mimic Paterson's phiz. Nay, some persons had such a conceit of the miracles he could perform that they began to talk of an engine, to give the island half a turn round, and send the Orkneys where the Isles of Scilly stand."

  Only a man like Saltoun could have admired Paterson's rigid honesty, his contempt for the corruption upon which politics, religion and trade flourished. He hated "bribery, cheating, designed cheating, wilful bankruptcy, and fraud and likewise theft, and so far from being a lesser or inferior degree thereof, they are the worst and most heinous of all. It seems strange that those who invented the hanging of thieves did not begin with this sort first."

  He lived in Denmark Street, a pleasant terraced house in the parish of St. Giles and on the edge of Soho fields. The name of his wife, her character, descent and appearance are lost in the darkness that fills so much of Paterson's life. Herries said that she was "a red-faced coffee-woman, a widow in Birchin Lane".* Whether she was or not, she was loyal to her husband, took his pedlar's pack as a burden for her own shoulders, and what remains of her lies some yards inshore from Caledonia Bay on Darien.

  The Spring of 1695 began as it had begun in London most years since the Revolution. King William went to Gravesend by coach through a flurry of gunfire and cheers, embarked on his yacht and joined his fleet for Flanders, there to re-open his annual tourney with Louis XIV. At the sessions of the Old Bailey thieves, coiners and footpads, murderers, cut-purses and stealers of bread were once more sentenced to death, burning or whipping. Lord Cutts' Regiment, in new scarlet, exercised in Hyde Park before following the King, and the nation was

  *Herries also said that she was Paterson's second wife. Who was the first is unknown, unless she was the "warm widow near Oxford".

  informed that there would be another day of General Fast during which the Lord would be implored to preserve His Majesty's person and confound those of his enemies. About the middle of May James Chiesly called on Paterson in Denmark Street. He was one of many Scots merchants, like David Nairne, James Reith, Robert Douglas and James Foulis, who enjoyed greater freedom and higher profits by trading in London rather than in Edinburgh. All of them were occasional guests at Denmark Street, and while most of them found Paterson's garrulity tedious, and probably regretted his abstemious hospitality, they respected his original mind and organisational skill. Chiesly had come from his house in the City parish of Allhallows Staining, to talk of the news from Scotland. On Thursday, May 9, the Scots Parliament had opened its fifth session. There was, at last, to be a Commission of Inquiry into the Massacre of Glencoe, and the event of the session promised to be an acrimonious debate upon its Report. But what particularly excited Chiesly, and other Scots merchants in both London and Edinburgh, was one paragraph in the opening address given by the King"s Commissioner to Parliament, the Marquis of Tweeddale. He had told the Estates that

  If they found it would tend to the advancement of trade that an Act be passed for the encouragement of such as should acquire and establish a plantation in Africa or America, or any other part of the world where plantations might lawfully be acquired, His Majesty was willing to declare that he would grant to his subjects in Scotland, in favour of their plantations, such rights and privileges as he was accustomed to grant to the subjects of his other dominions.

  It was as if a window had been opened, flooding the grey and impoverished rooms of Scotland with the sunlight of the Indies, promising a future prosperity as great, if not greater than that exclusively enjoyed by the East India Company, the African Company, and other English companies trading with America and the Levant. It was no more than was expected of the King. Though he had accepted the Crown of Scotland, when it was brought to him in London, he thought of the country as a recruiting centre only, a storehouse for supplies, and was impatient with its Parliament and its peculiar pride. For two years Scots merchants, with their friends and their bought men in the Estates and Privy Council, had been lobbying and conspiring for such an opportunity as this. In June, 1693, the Parliament of Scotland had passed a general Act which gave permission for the formation of joint-stock companies to trade with countries not at war with the Crown. It had remained on paper, and neither the King's principal servants in Scotland nor the trading companies of England wished it to become anything else.

  Yet it had been one indication of a change in the spirit of the Scottish people. For six decades the nation had wasted itself in the fratricidal agony of religious and political wars, squandering its intellectual and physical resources, and covering its rags with the bright banners of the Scots Brigades when its young men went to continue these bloody quarrels in the service of France and Germany and Holland. Now it was to take its first real step away from a past of warriors and martyrs, toward a future of commerce and industry. That it would stumble
and fall, and bring upon itself as sad a tragedy as any in its history, would not take its eyes from that future. What greatness the broadsword or the Bible had failed to secure for the Scots, might be found in something else. Fletcher of Saltoun, who could use a sword as well as any of his countrymen and had proved it against the Turks, recognised this new stirring of his people's imagination: "All their thoughts and inclinations, as if united and directed by a Higher Power, seemed to have turned upon trade, and to conspire together for its advancement, which is the only means to recover us from our present miserable and despicable condition."

  The misery was bitter. Scotland's trade and industry were paltry, and their disappearance would have made little difference to the commerce of Europe, and none to the rest of the world. The union of the kingdoms in 1603 had not given the parity and equality of opportunity it might have implied. Ninety years later Scotland felt herself to be the subordinate nation. As theologians once debated how many angels might comfortably stand on the head of a pin, as Spanish priests once argued whether or not an Indian was a human being in the eyes of the Church, so English jurists whetted their wits on the problem of where and when a Scot might be considered an English subject, with the rights and privileges thereof. Though there were two economies, two parliaments in the island, there was one king, and since the second Stuart he had been primarily and sometimes exclusively an English king. Nor was this all a matter of mood and emotion. Scotland had not recovered from the poverty of the Commonwealth when she had carried the heavy weight of an English army of occupation. In the earlier years of the century she had enjoyed something like free trade with England, and by the imposed union of the Commonwealth this had been legally acknowledged. Under the restored Stuarts she recovered her political independence but lost the one-nation advantages of free trade when the Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663 were inexorably enforced.