The Lords Justices and the Commissioners for Trade were particularly concerned with the steps which should be taken to make the Scots colony impossible, or at least untenable, but they were also anxious that everything should be done within the law, English law that is. They were greatly helped by Mr. James Vernon. He was the middle-aged Member for Penryn, a scholar of Oxford and Cambridge, a one-time political agent in Holland, now an assistant in the Secretary of State's office and soon to be Principal Secretary. A tall, thin man with a brown face and a hanging lip, untidy in dress and brusque in manner, he was a superb and dedicated civil servant who lived and died an untitled gentleman, having been particularly unfortunate in his choice of patrons. John Macky said he was a drudge to office, no man ever wrote so many letters. His habit of working all day and half the night at his desk, Macky explained, was due to an ill-tempered wife whose company he desperately avoided.
He gave the Lords Justices and the Commissioners their ruling in what came to be known as "Mr. Vernon's Line". It was based on four questions put to the Attorney-General and the Solicitor- General. Both gentleman declared that the Scots colony would be against the laws of England, and the King had thus the right to prohibit his English subjects from giving it aid and assistance. All magistrates and officers, in England or the Plantations, would have the right to search any Scots ship going to the colony, and to take from it any English subjects they found aboard. There was no doubt that the colony would be prejudicial to His Majesty's allies and to the trade of England. When Vernon became Principal Secretary a few months later, he used this minute as the legal justification for the Royal Proclamation which he composed and sent to the Governors of all English Plantations, warning them against giving so much as a cask of pure water to any ship flying the sunburst standard of the Company of Scotland.
He also listened patiently to anyone who could give him information about the Caribbean and the Main. Thus Captain Richard Long of Jamaica found a welcome in his office and before the Lords Justices. This leathery seaman was said to be a Quaker, but one without a troublesome conscience, no doubt, since he was a hard master and a foul-mouthed roisterer. He wanted £200 and a vessel, he told their lordships, and if given both he would bring the King £1,500,000 in gold plate salvaged from Spanish- American wrecks. They debated his petition, considered his further request for a sixteenth of the treasure, and took no action. But they did not forget him.
Toward the end of November London heard from Orth that the Scots ships had left the Baltic, and on the day that Secretary Trumbull endorsed his letter "Reed Read 22nd Nov. 1697", the Caledonia was sailing up the Forth. In clear, winters light she anchored off Burntisland and took in all sail. Her beak and stern were a glory of gold and scarlet and blue, and as pennants flew from her main-top and mizzen her bow-chaser fired a signal salute to the cheering crowds on both sides of the firth. It was joyously answered by a white thunder from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. She had been brought from the Baltic by seamen of H.M.S. Royal William, the flagship of Scotland's little Navy, although there is no record of anyone asking the permission of royal William himself. A week later the second Lübeck ship, Instauration, came bravely by the Bass Rock and into the firth, firing her signal gun as she dropped anchor a cable's length from the Caledonia. Before sunset she had lost her equivocal name, the Directors toasting another in their panelled chamber at Milne Square, and resolving "that from henceforward it shall be called Saint Andrew, and that the usual ceremony be executed tomorrow, it being Saint Andrew's Day." Both were clinker-built, 56-gun Indiamen of 350 tons, three-masted and rigged with stay-sails on fore and main, a lateen on the mizzen, and a steep, square-sailed spirit above a golden prow. When the Union came over from Amsterdam the distasteful implications of her name, too, were quickly rejected, in favour of Unicorn and in honour of Scotland's ancient heraldic beasts. Though a silver unicorn now supported one side of King William's arms, every nursery child knew that it was in spirited and relentless defiance of the English lion opposite.
Two smaller ships also arrived before the year was out, both of them to be tenders for the others, and neither of them much more than a coastal vessel. The Dolphin was a two-masted, snub- nosed snow, a French prize which James Gibson had bought from her captors in Holland. In strong seas she would stubbornly bury her head in the waves and run with water from stem to waist. Her companion, the Endeavour, was a pink which the busy Dr. Munro purchased at Newcastle, which indicates that one English ship-owner, at least, was indifferent to the wishes of his government. She was high-sterned, with a great rudder and a round hull that bellied out from the water-line and in again to her narrow deck. Seaworthy enough, she was quixotic and hard to handle, rolling with sickening rhythm as she dipped her yard- arms to the sea.
The Company had its fleet. The Rising Sun should also have come, but without topmasts and rigging she was locked in the ice at Amsterdam, where Peter the Great took wine in her cabin with Direcksone and Gibson. Yet she, too, would come. The promise that she must come was already there in five splendid ships, etched in beauty against the white hills of Fife.
All winter, when tide and weather permitted, ferries bounced across the Forth from Leith to Burntisland, emptying the warehouse and filling the ships' holds. There was now a Committee for Equipping Ships, which met under William Arbuckle at the coffee-house owned by the nieces of James Maclurg, a merchant member of the Committee. It loaded hogsheads of beer from Thomas Whyte the brewer of Leith, bread from Ninian Hay the baker, clay pipes from David Montgomery, and dye from Ephraim Roberts. In one day, packed in dry water-casks, there were loaded 380 Bibles, 51 New Testaments, 200 Confessions of Faith and 2,808 Catechisms, all printed by Widow Anderson and all intended to sustain the settlers and inspire the Indians, if the latter could be taught English. Three Edinburgh hatters, as the first instalment of their contracts, delivered 1,440 hats (at two shillings each), and Jeremy Robertson sent boxes of his bob-wigs, periwigs and campaign wigs. With derisive hindsight, Walter Herries would find these very amusing, though his humour grossly exaggerated the number.
Scotch hats, a great quantity; English bibles, 1500; periwigs, 4000, some long, some short; campaigns, Spanish bobs and natural ones. And truly they were all natural, for being made of Highlanders' hair, which is blanched with the rain and sun, when they came to be opened in the West Indies they looked like so many of Samson's fireships that he sent among the Philistines, and could be of no use to the Colony, if it were not to mix with their lime when they plastered the walls of their houses.*
The total value of the goods loaded on all five ships was £18,413 5s 0½d Sterling. The Caledonia and the Saint Andrew carried the largest cargoes, as they were to transport the greatest number of settlers. There were axes, knives, mattocks and hammers, tools for coopers, carpenters and smiths, and
* Macaulay, later, was equally derisive, accepting Herries as a reliable authority and jeering at men who carried wigs to the Tropics as trade goods, forgetting that they were probably intended for use by the settlers. But Fletcher of Saltoun, answering Herries, attempted to justify their trading value. "The cargo of cloth, stuffs, shoes, stockings, slippers and wigs must needs be proper for a country where the Natives go naked for want of apparel, and fit to be exchanged for other commodities, either in the English, Dutch, French or Spanish Plantations."
enough nails in oiled boxes to hold together the doors and windows of a city. Fuses, grenades, cannon and cannon-shell, lead shot and powder, blunderbusses and muskets, pistols and broadswords, cutlasses and pikes, and a thousand cartridge- pouches of good black leather. For parley or triumph, when these had been used, there were brass trumpets and drums. There were men's hose and women's stockings, and more than 25,000 pairs of shoes, pumps and slippers. There was "cloth in great bulk", bales and bolts of ticking, canvas, linen, serge, muslin, glazed calico, tartan plaiding, hodden-grey and harn. Coloured crepe for flags and bunting, striped muslin for neckcloths, and Holland duck for seamen. Fourteen thousand needles
, balls of twine and thread in black and grey and white. Iron frying-pans and pots, basins and jugs of English pewter, a thousand precious drinking-cups of glass, horn spoons and wooden trenchers. Twenty-nine barrels of tobacco pipes in Mr. Montgomery's best white clay. Printing-tools, parchment for treaties with princes, ink and quills, sealing-wax and scarlet ribbon of watered silk. Flints for guns and tinder-boxes, candles uncountable and three thousand candle-sticks. Buttons of wood, brass, horn and pewter, looking-glasses and two thousand pounds of pine white soap.
And combs. Remembering Lionel Wafer's idyllic picture of the Cuna Indians, combing long hair with their fingers, the Directors ordered and loaded tens of thousands, large and small, made from lightwood, boxwood and horn. Such small vanities as a wooden comb, inlaid with beads of mother-of-pearl, could buy an imperial foothold.
Three hundred tons of biscuit—coarse, middle, and fine— seventy of stalled beef, twenty of primes and fifteen of pork, casks of suet, flour and unmilled wheat. Twelve hundred gallons of strong claret, seventeen hundred of rum, five thousand of vinegar and five thousand more of brandy. All carefully tasted. Once a week the Committee for Equipping went down to Leith with the ships' captains and there dined and "particularly tried the state and condition of both the grass-fed and stall-fed beef, as also of the pork and other provisions, and found the same in extraordinary case and well-cured to their own and the said captains' great contentment."
There were also men. On March 12, 1698, a single folio sheet was posted at the entry to Milne Square, and on the walls of every coffee-house in Edinburgh, Leith and Glasgow.
The Court of Directors of the Indian and African Company of Scotland, having now in readiness ships and tenders in very good order, with provisions and all manner of things needful for their intended expedition to settle a colony in the Indies; give Notice, that for the general encouragement of all such as are willing to go upon the said expedition: Everyone who goes on the first expedition shall receive and possess fifty acres of plantable land, and 50 foot square of ground at least in the chief city or town, and an ordinary house built thereupon by the colony at the end of 3 years.
Every Councillor shall have double. If anyone shall die, the profit shall descend to his wife and nearest relations. The family and blood relations shall be transported at the expense of the Company.
The Government shall bestow rewards for special service.
By Order of the Court,
Roderick Mackenzie, Secy.
The Proclamation carried the Company's device, lately approved by the Lord Lyon King of Arms: Saint Andrew's white saltire on a blue field, cantoned with a ship in full sail, two Peruvian llamas burdened, and a towered elephant, the whole supported by an Indian and a Blackamoor holding goat's-horns of abundant fruit. The crest was a rising sun, upon the tilted human face of which was an expression of peering incredulity.
The political and social structure of the Colony had been determined. Although there were plans for a parliament ultimately, it would be ruled at first by a Council, each member taking his weekly turn as President (and the proposer of that astonishingly inept suggestion is unknown, to the benefit of his memory). Below the Council, and subject to it entirely, the majority of the settlers were divided into Overseers, Assistant or Sub-Overseers, and Planters. They were all soldiers, the first being field-officers and captains, the second subalterns, and the third, despite the noble promise of the name, were private sentinels enlisted at threepence a day and mustered in companies of forty. The deception was thin, and all called themselves and were referred to by their military rank, but the Company's Act forbade the employment of soldiers as such without the permission of the King's Privy Council, and nobody would ask for that.
There were also to be ministers, surgeons, physicians and apothecaries, clerks and craftsmen, and while military rank cut clear divisions horizontally the expedition was also split vertically, into Landsmen and Seamen. In time these definitions would become bitter pejoratives.
There was no lack of volunteers, and few had waited for Mackenzie's proclamation. Every young and disbanded officer was eager for the venture, and in his tail were a dozen or more hungry men whom he had led in Flanders and the Highlands, and who now saw in him their only hope of bread and employment. Edinburgh blazed with scarlet coats and facings of buff, green and blue. There was a swing of swords above the cobbles, and a high-spirited clamour in the taverns. A forlorn hope well- led before Namur might count as much as an uncle's preferment, and a wound well-healed provide a testament of courage in the scar. James Ogilvy, now Lord Seafield, was in Edinburgh and was embarrassed by men who thought he could secure them service with the Company. "I have multitudes of broken officers lying about my doors," he complained to Carstares, "and I know not what to say to them." All Directors were plagued with petitions on behalf of this captain and that ensign, of this son or that nephew, of a good sergeant or a brave drummer. No family could claim respect if it had not one young man who was hot to serve the African Company.
Twelve hundred were finally accepted, and three hundred of these were Gentlemen Volunteers, the heirs or cadet sons of good families, with the same rank and duties as Planters but with social precedence over them. A third or more of the Planters were Highlanders, discharged soldiers from Argyll's, Strathnaver's, Hill's or Mackay's, following their officers and answering the same pull of clan loyalties that had taken them into the regiments. Many of them could speak nothing but Gaelic.
The sixty officers selected were chosen with care, twelve captains, twenty-four lieutenants and twenty-four ensigns. Though influence may have brought them before the Directors, all had then to be passed by a special committee which met to "discourse with them pretty freely concerning the encouragement which they are to expect, and report accordingly concerning their sentiments thereof." This encouragement was considerable to a young man hoping to restore a family fortune or make one for himself: £150 in the Company's stock to every captain, £100 to a lieutenant and £5 to an ensign. Many of them were Highland too, captains like Lachlan Maclean, William Fraser, John Campbell and Colin Campbell, lieutenants Hugh Munro, Patrick MacDowall, and Colin Campbell, ensigns Alexander Mackenzie, Duncan Campbell and William Campbell. Eight of them were from Clan Campbell, lately officers of Argyll's, and the valour of their regiment, the influence of their chief the Earl, and the loyalty of their clan to the Revolution guaranteed their selection.
Dr. John Munro recruited surgeons and physicians for the expedition, interviewing applicants at Milne Square, and putting them through small examinations in anatomy, surgery and the practice of medicine. He was helped by two doctors already chosen, Hector Mackenzie and Walter Herries. When Haldane of Gleneagles went to London in November, 1696, he had unmasked one rogue in James Smith and had been duped by another in Herries. He met this plausible Dumbarton man at Moncrieffs coffee-house, and was so impressed that he took him into the Company's employ and on to Holland. He thought that he was doing an unfortunate fellow-countryman a service by saving him from unjust extinction at the end of an English rope.
Until the year before this, Herries had been a surgeon in the English Navy, having secured the appointment, said Fletcher of Saltoun, by becoming a convert to Catholicism and by pimping for the King's officers. He smartly abandoned this faith a few months later when the Papist on the throne was replaced by a Protestant, but he continued to prosper as a pander. He was hot- tempered, jealous of his imagined honour, and gifted with a corrosive and perceptive wit. His career as a naval surgeon ended one day in Portsmouth when, upon some real or imagined slight, he drew his sword and lunged at his commanding officer Captain John Graydon of the Vanguard, the hero of Beachy Head and Barfleur. Graydon recovered from the wound and would have had Herries brought out of irons, before a Council of War, and from thence to a yardarm, had not the influence of a Scots officer enabled the surgeon to escape. Though pricked as an outlaw by Graydon, he was still skulking in London, and protected by other Scots, when he was introduced
to Haldane. For the next eighteen months, in Holland and Scotland, he worked for the Company as a supervisor of provisions and medical stores, and now he enjoyed Munro's total trust and respect. He would repay both later by accusing the doctor (perhaps not unjustly) of filling his own purse at the expense of the Company's. "Save a rogue from the gallows," said Andrew Fletcher, quoting the old proverb, "and he shall be the first that will cut your throat."
In February two brothers, Robert and Thomas Drummond, offered their services to the Company, the one a sailor and the other a soldier. Hard and self-seeking, contemptuous of weakness and stubbornly brave, loyal to their own code and kind but without compassion for others', they were among the few men of decisive action to whom the Company gave responsible office, and they would be principals in its final, melodramatic tragedy. They were sons of an impoverished branch of the Drummonds of Borland and of Concraig, Strathearn lairds who claimed descent from Malcolm Beg, Thane of Lennox, and through their mother they had blood ties with the powerful Hamiltons. Robert was a discharged naval lieutenant when he walked into Milne Square, boldly asking for the command of a ship, and bringing with him enough family influence to be given the Dolphin and £5 10s Sterling a month. Ship and pay were less than he believed he merited, and he argued the thought persuasively enough, for he was later given the Caledonia and five shillings more. He was a good seaman and a stern shipmaster.
Thomas Drummond needed no recommendation, his name was known to all Scotland. As a captain of grenadiers in the Earl of Argyll's Regiment he had served with courage in the Low Countries, leading his company in the van of Ramsay's Scots Brigade when it attacked the French redoubts at Dottignies. But it was not for this bloody slaughter, in which he lost most of his company, that he was well-known. He and his grenadiers had also been in Glencoe on the morning of the Massacre, under the command of Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, and to Drummond the duty seemed to be no more than the extermination of a nest of rats. When the sickened Campbell hesitated to kill the last of nine bound MacDonalds, Drummond pushed him aside and shouted "Why is he still alive? What of our orders? Kill him!" He pistolled the young man himself, and then shot a boy of twelve who was crying for mercy at Glenlyon's feet. After the Commission of Inquiry in 1695, the Scots Parliament demanded his recall from Flanders, for trial and punishment, but he and his regiment were then prisoners of the French. When he did come home, two years later after the Peace of Ryswick, the King had made it plain that he wished to hear no more of Glencoe.
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