John Prebble

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

  Long dined aboard the flagship and the Unicorn, and proved that he had a greater capacity for brandy and Madeira than Andreas, Pedro or Ambrosio. He sat late with Pennecuik and Pincarton, explaining that he had cruised along the coast but had made no landing, and had no wish to claim any part of it for England. He asked questions about the settlement, its strength and intentions, and he did not think it necessary to tell Pennecuik and Pincarton that he was obliged to inform James Vernon of all that he learned from them. Also understandably, he did not admit that while down the coast he had told the Indians that if they were attacked by these Scots privateers the King of England would protect them.

  Pennecuik decided that he did not like the man, and that night in his journal he wrote a judgment upon Long that other men might well have used about himself. "We could by no means find him the conjuror he gives himself for."

  On the evening of November 17, with Long drunk and asleep aboard the Unicorn, the Council decided to accept Ambrosio's invitation to visit his village, and the next day, after the Quaker had returned to his ship, there was a squabbling argument over who should go. Pennecuik of course, there was no debate on that. Jolly was elected, but was sick and proposed Cunningham, Vetch, and Thomas Drummond. Pennecuik objected strenuously, and won his point by the strength of his voice rather than the power of his argument. It was finally agreed that the mission should consist of the Commodore, Pincarton, Cunningham and Mackay. They left at eight o'clock in the morning of November 19, four ship's boats, a strong force of armed men, the Company's banner and the flag of Scotland. They got no further than the Isle of Pines that day, for the wind turned north to a stiff gale and they were glad to run in to the lee of the Rupert and board her.

  The English Quaker liberally returned Pennecuik's hospitality, but the Scots found him even iess attractive aboard his own ship than he had been aboard theirs. "Whatever the King or Government of England may have found in Captain Long," wrote Pennecuik, "we know not, but to us in all his conversations he appeared a most ridiculous, shallow-pated fellow, laughed at and despised to his very face by his own officers, and continually drunk." The questioning and the answering were now reversed, but the Scots were unable to discover the real purpose of Long's commission. Indeed, from his stumbling letters to London it is plain that he was not sure himself, whether he was truly to search for treasure, whether he was merely to report on the Scots settlement, or whether he was to claim the country for England and turn the Indians against the Caledonians. James Vernon got little in return for the ship and money that had at last been given to the importunate man.

  When the gale dropped the next morning, Pedro arrived in a piragua, happy to guide the Scots to his father-in-law. They left in the forenoon, making frequent soundings along the coast westward until they came to a broad bay which Pennecuik, with his customary flair for exaggeration, thought might easily harbour ten thousand sail, with deep-water keys alongside which the greatest vessel in the English Navy might safely moor. It was an old meeting-place of the buccaneers, and there were marks ashore where they had once careened their ships. For a moment he thought of uprooting the settlement from Caledonia Bay and transferring it here, but he decided that it would be an ill place to defend, having no sea-gate and no high ground for batteries.

  A guard was left on the boats, and the rest of the party marched inland for a league to Ambrosio's village. It stood on the bank of a river, ten or twelve small huts dominated by the captain's house—a great building of cane and plantain leaves, ninety feet long, thirty-five broad, and thirty high. Ambrosio was waiting fifty paces from its door, smiling, and surrounded by a bodyguard of twenty men all wearing fringed cloaks of white linen and carrying feathered lances. In the background a band of musicians played sweetly on reed pipes, while others hummed, and still more danced about the Councillors in a manner that reminded them of the graceful movements of their own Highlanders. "Ambrosio saluted us kindly," said Pennecuik, "and gave us a calabash of liquor almost like lamb's-wool, which they call Mislow: it's made of Indian corn and potatoes." They were taken into the cool shade of the great house where Ambrosio and Pedro lived with their wives, their children and forty dependants. Pedro proudly introduced Ambrosio's grandmother and communal cook, a surprisingly young-looking woman for the 120 years she was said to have lived. The Scots politely doubted her age, whereupon Ambrosio called up representatives of the six generations from her body, himself among them, and added that her age was nothing, it was common enough for his people to live thirty or forty years longer. "Yet it is observed," said Pennecuik naively, "those who converse often with Europeans and drink our strong liquors are but short-lived."

  The Scots spent the night at the village, sleeping in the great house which, for some reason, reminded them of a church. In the morning they broke their fast with plantains, potatoes and wild hog, after which Ambrosio and Pedro went in to the forests and shot the largest partridges the Scots had ever seen, pressing them upon their guests with disarming promises of love and friendship.

  The Councillors returned to the settlement on November 23. The Rupert had weighed anchor three days before, which infuriated Pennecuik for he had hoped to send dispatches home with her. He soon had other matters to anger him. His report that there was no better place than Caledonia Bay for the settlement brought both Vetch and the Drummonds into open opposition. In as many words they said that he was a fool. The ground chosen for the town and the fort was dangerous and unsuitable, and the work already done, little though it was, had been wasted. Pennecuik refused to listen to them, and bullied all the Councillors but Paterson into agreeing that the building should continue as originally planned.

  And then there was the problem of Major James Cunningham of Eickett. Behind his stiff-necked arrogance and punctilious manner he was an ineffectual member of the Council, uncertain which faction his duty and his interest inclined him to, now a member of the Glencoe Gang and now cannily neutral, and usually declaring for that party which could cause him the least inconvenience. He had finally decided that the best interest was his own, and that lay as far away from Caledonia as he could place it. "He became so uneasy," wrote Paterson, "and so possessed (as we thought) by unaccountable conceits and notions that he gave us no small trouble, and at last would needs forsake not only his post but the Colony." He wanted to go home, and he was determined to go home with the first ship. Pincarton and others thought that he ought to be placed in irons, or at least disciplined until he came to a proper recognition of his duty, but even upon this the Council could not agree. He continued to nag and complain on the edge of all debates.

  He was not alone in his desperate wish to be quit of this wretched land. At the end of November, on the eve of Saint Andrew's Day to make the crime more disgraceful, ten Planters broke open the magazine aboard the Unicorn and deserted with all the weapons they could carry. A captain and four subalterns were sent after them in one of the flagship's boats to Caret Bay, where it was assumed they had gone. The incident spoiled the flavour of the Saint Andrew's Day supper which Pennecuik held for the Council, although Captain Andreas enjoyed it. He had been invited with intent, the Scots now suspecting him of correspondence with the Spanish at Portobello. "We taxed him home with it," said Pennecuik, by which he meant that the Indian was given all the brandy he wished and then questioned. He agreed that he had been friendly with the Spaniards and that they had made him a captain of their native levies, but he had accepted the friendship and the office because he was afraid of them. They had recently told him that the Scots were privateers "who had no design to settle but to plunder both Spaniards and Indians, and be gone in two or three months." Pennecuik assured him that they were there to stay, that they would protect him and his people and give him a commission in their service, and that all they wanted from him in return was "all his right to this part of the country." He gave it to them with drunken generosity, and went happily home in his canoe.

  On December 1 the deserters were brought back. They were put
in irons and given nothing but bread and water.

  "From henceforward ... we do call ourselves Caledonians" Caledonia, December 1698

  Where was the fine weather which Lionel Wafer had said should now be favouring this promised land? There were days when Hugh Rose had no spirit to record anything more in his journal than the miserable fact that it was still raining. Much thunder, lightning and rain.... Great showers of rain with much wind.... The weather very bad which hinders the work.... These twenty- four hours there has fallen a prodigious quantity of rain.... Much wind and rain.... Wind and rain as above....

  Weak from fever and flux, depressed by a heavy melancholy, exhausted by daytime heat and shivering at night beneath the dripping palmetto roofs of their huts, the Landsmen looked bitterly through this slanting rain to the ships. The sea-captains were jealous of the health of their crews, and wisely allowed no man ashore except under close watch. Even so, the sailors were frequently ill, although their chances of recovery were higher. Aboard the Unicorn young Colin Campbell survived a severe fever, blessed be God, but it had left his hands weak, as his brother could no doubt see from the unsteadiness of his writing. Shipboard life was dull, and there were times when he envied his namesake and clansman "Captain Colin", an officer of Argyll's who commanded one of the companies ashore. Yet he had no real wish to leave his friend Henry Erskine and land on the peninsula.

  "There is nothing to be had there, and besides, if I did then Captain Pincarton would never own me nor speak to me any more, as he did to another gentleman who was recommended to his care."

  Many men were writing such letters, and keeping journals against the day—pray God let it be soon—when a ship left for Scotland.

  The Council at last agreed that the site chosen for the fort was unsatisfactory, and ordered another to be built on the sandy promontory of Forth Point. Although he was no engineer, Thomas Drummond was again the only fit man to organise the work, and he, said Paterson, "according to the tools he had, did beyond what could be reasonably expected from him, for our men, though for the most part in health, were generally weak for want of sufficient allowance of provisions and liquors and the irregular serving of their scrimp allowances." Drummond was remorseless in the iron discipline he imposed upon his men, and spared his own body less than he did theirs. He was a hard man to like, having no compassion, but there were few who did not respect his ability and strength, and what talk there was about his dark service in Glencoe was kept to a guarded whisper. Indeed, what had been deplored in his behaviour at home might here have been regarded as evidence of resolute leadership. The fort he started to build was to be as simple and as effective as he could make it with the tools, labour and materials available, and large enough to hold a garrison of a thousand men—a star-shaped, palisaded wall made from a double row of wooden stakes packed with earth, cut with embrasures for the forty guns that would be brought ashore from the ships. The earth for the palisades would come from a wide moat, open to the bay and flooded by the tide. On the landward side, and beyond the moat, would be a chevaux de frise of sloping planks spiked with iron. All this, it was hoped—with the ditch that was being dug across the neck, with the land-batteries on the sea-gate and with the ships in the bay—should be strong enough to protect the Colony against anything but a formal siege-train, and it was not likely that the Spanish would have such ordnance.

  On December 3 the uncertain friendship of Captain Andreas was cemented by a treaty. He came aboard the Saint Andrew in the forenoon, with a wife or two and a bodyguard in sodden white smocks. A platoon of soldiers, equally drenched, saluted him from the ship's waist, and beneath an awning on the poop- deck the Councillors sweated in their heavy clothes and itching wigs. The treaty, written fairly on parchment by Mr. Rose and decorated with gold-striped ribbon and the Company's seal, was read aloud by the Clerk and translated into Spanish by Benjamin Spense. It commissioned Andreas as a captain in the service of Scotland, and promised him the protection of the Colony against all his enemies. It was then handed to him, together with a basket-hilted broadsword and a brace of pistols. He accepted them with the grave bow he had learnt from the Spanish, swore that he would use the weapons in defence of the Scots, and presented in return a sheaf of brightly-feathered arrows. The flagship's seven waist-deck guns fired a salute, and everyone retired hurriedly to the roundhouse for a glass of wine. According to Herries, one glass led to another, and another. "Captain Andreas went ashore with his flag flying and the other designs of his honour, except the Commission which I found the day following crammed into a locker of the roundhouse where empty bottles lay."

  A week later, a smartly-manned longboat came through the sea- gate just as the watchman on Point Look-out was reporting a ship, or perhaps two, at anchor in the haze of rain by Golden Island. A French lieutenant climbed aboard the Saint Andrew with a flourish and told Pennecuik that he was from the Maurepas, a merchantman of 42 guns, commanded by Captain Duvivier Thomas who had King Louis' commission to sail and trade in these seas. The other ship, he said, was a 22-gun Dutchman. The news he brought of the Spanish was alarming. Their Windward Fleet, the Barliavento, was fitting out at Carthagena for an attack on all European privateers, and its cruisers had already snapped up two English turtling sloops which bad weather had blown within range of their guns. The Maurepas and the Dutchman would be grateful for the protection of the Scots' ships and harbour until the Barliavento had sailed by to Portobello. The Council gave it willingly, and the next day Captain Thomas came in by longboat. He was as hearty a drinker as Richard Long, but carried himself better, and was able to tell the Scots "all the news of the coast, and that the President of Panama had given an account to the Governors of Carthagena and Portobello of our arrival." Wildly over-estimating the strength of the Scots, they believed that the settlement was a bridgehead for an intended attack across the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the Mississippi. "This obliges us," wrote Pennecuik that night, "to make all possible haste in our battery, and to get our ships in line of battle across the mouth of the harbour."

  Despite the rain, the sickness and the exhaustion, the Scots were heartened by the news the Frenchmen brought. Even Hugh Rose, normally a cautious body, was moved to vainglory. "Our men are very hearty, and seem to long for a visit from Jaque, that they might have a just pretence to their gold mines not far off." The thought of gold, the hope of gold, of great fortunes to be won by the sword, excited the Scots more than a wretched life growing plantains or trading hodden grey. The greater the risk of fever and death, the stronger their desire to be quickly rich and quickly away. When the Maurepas and the Dutchman came into the bay, dropping anchor behind the Scots' line of battle, a rumour spread that the Frenchman's hold was full of treasure taken in the raid on Carthagena. The Frenchmen did not deny it, or confirm it, they were too busy drinking and feasting.

  The day their ships came in, the Rupert was once more sighted to the north-west. Long sent a boat with news that the Barliavento, now at sea, consisted of seven great sail and a number of tenders full of soldiers. He was soon gone again, apparently in fright and not waiting for his longboat to return. When questioned by Pennecuik, its crew revealed that the Quaker had been behaving very oddly. He had put a landing-party ashore and joined the Indians in a senseless attack on a trading-post east of Portobello, killing seven Spaniards. He had then sent messages to all the Indian villages, "to tell them we were a pack of thieves and robbers, being only a parcel of disbanded officers and soldiers, and that nobody would protect us." The Commodore was glad that the battery on Forth Point was completed, with sixteen 12-pounders mounted. "We are now in such a condition," he said, with an arrogance that wearied Drummond and Vetch, "that we wished nothing more than that the Spaniards would attack us." This braggart self-confidence, which most of the Scots shared, was increased when Ambrosio came with a warning that the Spaniards were mustering 600 veteran soldiers and 200 Indian levies at Santa Maria and Panama City for a landward attack across the Isthmus. "It's feared with us,"
wrote Hugh Rose, "that they will not come, but whatever be in it, the work goes well on, the men working with much vigour and resolution."

  The Council met in dissension and argument. Each new President spent much of his week's office undoing the work of his predecessor, or hampering what he believed would be the intentions of the next. Paterson was less worried by the thought of a Spanish attack than by the shortage of provisions, the urgent need to secure fresh supplies from Jamaica. They were, he said, in a prison for want of sloops or brigantines, coastal vessels for trade, and he was delighted when an English sloop slipped into the harbour on December 20. Captain Moon had kept his promise to an old friend and had sent a colleague, Edward Sands, with a cargo of beef and flour. The Council's gratitude was shortly phrased and shortly given, it then began to argue about the proper value of the goods to be traded for Moon's supplies.

  At least there was now a real chance of sending letters and journals back to Scotland. An earlier hope that the Maurepas might take them as far as Jamaica had been soon destroyed by her captain's plain reluctance to leave either the harbour or the pleasant drinking-companions he had found among the Scots. Edward Sands said that he would take the papers to Jamaica, and any messenger the Council appointed to carry them. The question now was: who shall go? The decision would be important, the choice involved inevitable risks for all the Councillors remaining. The first man from the Colony to reach Edinburgh would have an uninterrupted audience with the Council-General and the Court of Directors. His prejudices, the complaints of his faction, his account of the settlement would be accepted by virtue of his office, despite what might be written in Hugh Rose's journal or the Commodore's letters. Daniel Mackay was anxious to go, and was lobbying for the election. Cunningham, whose conceits and notions had now become unbearable, thought that he should go, that he would go whether chosen or not. Walter Herries had tired of the Colony, as everybody had tired of him, and he had already transferred himself, his servant, his baggage and a purse of gold-dust aboard the Maurepas, but nobody thought seriously of his candidature. Paterson, with the interested support of Cunningham, proposed Samuel Vetch and two other Land Officers, but Pennecuik noisily quashed that. He would not have one of Thomas Drummond's friends at large in Milne Square, and to prevent it he decided to support Mackay, having no reason to believe the young lawyer bore him any ill-will. For the next two or three days both of them spent as much time as they could aboard the Unicorn appealing for the support of Pincarton and Robert Jolly.