When Vetch married his plain-featured, sharp-nosed cousin, her father gave them a house and a lot on Pearl Street, a fine residence with a high roof and two stacks of chimneys said to be worth £1,000. Vetch set himself up as a merchant, and since the Company never discovered what happened to the goods left in his charge it was assumed that he had converted them to his own use with the assistance of Wenham and Delancey. The detestation and contempt of his countrymen at home, the hatred of those who had sailed with him from Caledonia, the shocked pain of his family, did not trouble him, at least openly. He prospered, became rich and influential, a Colonel of Militia and the Governor of Nova Scotia, until his ambition over-reached his talents and he was ruined by political enemies who had once been his friends. He fled to England. Thirty-three years after he had deserted the Company and his comrades he died a lonely debtor in the King's Bench Prison.
The Caledonia sailed on October 12. Of the five ships that had left the Forth fifteen months before, only she returned to Scotland. She carried no more than three hundred men, and some of those would die before she reached the Clyde.
4 The Key of the Universe
"It will be wonderful to see the Sun rise in the West" Edinburgh and London, January to August 1699
In London the Attorney-General was considering his answer to a question put to him on behalf of certain interested subjects of East New Jersey, where a Scot had recently been appointed Governor. Could a Scotchman hold such office in the Plantations, or was he disqualified therefrom by the Act regulating frauds and abuses? It was three weeks before Sir Thomas Trevor gave his opinion: "That a Scotchman born is by Law capable of being appointed Governor of any of the Plantations, he being a natural-born subject of England in judgement and construction of Law, as much as if he had been born in England."
In Edinburgh that last week of January, the Directors of the Company (who would have been as angry as the rest of their countrymen to hear that they were subjects of England) were giving their final instructions to Captain Andrew Gibson of the brigantine Dispatch. Three months after receiving the Council's letters from Madeira, urgently appealing for provisions, they were at last sending a small cargo of biscuits, flour, pork, stockfish, oil and brandy. Gibson's orders were to sail his little ship by the most expeditious route to Darien, to take no insults from the men-of-war of any nation, and to defend himself by force of arms if necessary. With him sailed William Vetch, now recovered from his sickness, anxious to join his brother, and eager to take his seat on the Council of Caledonia. The brigantine weathered the northern passage, but was hit by gales as she came down the Hebrides and was finally wrecked on the isle of Texa, two miles off the coast of Islay. All she carried was lost, and her crew swam ashore with nothing but what they wore.
For the next month the Company was leisurely engaged in the purchase of another small ship, the Marion of Leith. She was renamed the Olive Branch when her owner was at last persuaded to part with her—or with fifteen-sixteenths of her, though his prudent foresight in retaining the last fraction for himself was to be a misjudgement. She was soon joined in Leith Road by a chartered ship, the Hopeful Binning. As the weather improved, deep-laden lighters began to fill their holds with casks of biscuit, barrels of ale, meal, tobacco, raisins and sugar, bolts of cloth and cases of hardware.
Though much of the delay in reinforcing the Colony was due to the astonishing complacency of the committees for this and for that, there were less controllable causes and the Directors had referred to them in the letters carried by the Dispatch. "We have had a scarcity of corn and provisions here since your departure, even to a dearth, and poverty of course occasioned thereby." Scotland had moved closer still to famine, to privation and epidemic disease. It had little enough for itself, and was reluctant to spare some of it for those distant adventurers who must now be enjoying the fruitful pleasures described in Mr. Wafer's book, lately off the press. The stockholders were loyal to the Company, if not disinterested, and with few exceptions they had answered the Company's third call on the subscriptions at Candlemas. In their turn, to reward such faith, the Directors declared a small dividend on the first call.
A stronger encouragement to any doubters was that physical manifestation of the Company's glory, the Rising Sun. Still moored off the mouth of the Gair Loch, her splendid lines and gilded hull were noble in the sun of an early spring. The sight of her, and the thought of others soon to sail with her, moved a modestly anonymous Lady of Honour to compose some romping stanzas which she called The Golden Island or the Darien Song, in Commendation of All Concerned in that Noble Enterprise of the Valiant Scots.
We have another Fleet to sail,
the Lord will reik* them fast;
It will be wonderful to see the Sun rise in the West
* blow.
Some are noble, all are great, Lord bless your company, And let your fame, in Scotland's name, o'er spread both land and sea.
The friends and relations of the great and noble already gone, however, were wondering what had happened to them, and their growing anxiety burst into extravagant joy on March 25 when Alexander Hamilton arrived by express from England. He carried a large sealed packet of letters and dispatches from the Colony, and a crying, shouting mob of men and women waited at the entrance to Milne Square for a glimpse of his fever- yellow face. He had travelled in haste from Bristol, where a West Indian ship had brought him, as eager to outstrip Major Cunningham of Eickett as he was to bring the good news. He was greeted warmly by the relieved Directors, who questioned him closely and then made public as much of the dispatches as they thought politic.
Resolved, wrote Roderick Mackenzie in the minutes
... that this Court shall order a compliment to the said Mr. Alexander Hamilton as being the first person who has brought the welcome news.
Resolved, that the Ministers of this city and suburbs thereof be acquainted with the good news to the end that they may in their discretion return public and hearty thanks to Almighty God upon this occasion.
The compliment given to Hamilton was a purse of one hundred guineas, and he was further granted two guineas a week during his stay in Edinburgh. In token of its gratitude and pleasure, the City Corporation made him a burgess and a gild-brother. Two days later, after the dispatches had been thoroughly studied, the Directors sent deputations to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Provost, the Governor of the Castle, humbly asking for public demonstrations of joy. The guns of the Half Moon Battery were fired across the North Loch and the Grassmarket, bells rang above a feu de joie from the muskets of the Town Guard, bonfires were lit by Holyroodhouse and the Netherbow Port, and at night all the windows of the Royal Mile glowed with happy candles.
Riders were sent to every city in the kingdom, ordering more gunfire, more bells, more candles.
Major Cunningham arrived in the midst of the riot and celebration, having travelled home by way of London. He was in an ill humour, and resented the rewards given Hamilton, who was no member of the Council after all. He caught at the sleeves of the Directors with his tale of misfortune, of his "considerable travelling charges and expenses in coming hither by way of Jamaica and England." He was perhaps an embarrassment to them. If the Colony had been successfully established what was one of its Council doing in Scotland? He had persuaded the City to elect him a burgess and a gild-brother too, and this made it impossible for the Directors to ignore him or censure him for desertion. Upon his assurance that he intended to return to Caledonia, they gave him £200 Sterling. He then retired to his estate and never went back to the Colony.
Hamilton's news had lifted the wave-top of the nation's enthusiasm, and Milne Square was once more crowded with eager volunteers. The King's servants were alarmed by the passion of the people, its undercurrent of hostility to England and the Throne, though none of them could see what should be done about it. "It is an unaccountable thing," Lord Marchmont wrote to Carstares, "to find so great a disposition in people to go thither as there is. God knows what shall come of it."
Six weeks after Hamilton's arrival, and three after the Company heard of the loss of Gibson's brigantine, the Olive Branch and the Hopeful Binning sailed from Leith with provisions, stores, and 300 men and women to reinforce the settlers. The Directors had been sending letters of advice and admonition by every ship they thought might touch at Jamaica, and with the Olive Branch they now sent the promise of spiritual encouragement. "There is so general an inclination to supply you with whatever is needful that you need not doubt but suitable care will be taken to provide good ministers for you." In the meantime, since the Colony was without clergy, it was hoped that the Councillors would do what they could to discourage all manner of vice, and to inspire the colonists by their own sober, discreet and religious behaviour. At that moment the Caledonians, having just heard of the English Proclamations, were encouraged and inspired by their Council's plain intention to be gone from the Colony as soon as possible.
As a cool spring moved into a wet summer, once more with no promise of a good harvest, preparations for the second expedition were increased. "Question not," the Directors wrote to the Council, "but the Rising Sun, and four ships more of considerable burden, will sail from the Clyde with a greater number of men than went along with yourselves." In the meantime, remembering Hamilton's unhappy report of squabbles and dissension, they implored the Councillors "to be one in interest and affection, and to have a watchful eye over any that may be of such clattering, mutinous, and pernicious temper as Herries has proved to be." For Surgeon Herries, having made his own way to London from Jamaica, was now reported to be writing a scurrilous attack on the Colony, for his English paymasters no doubt. The man's abominable impertinence went beyond honour and imagination, and the Directors were astonished to hear that he had committed Haldane of Gleneagles to gaol in London, holding him responsible for wages allegedly owing by the Company. Gleneagles was released on his own bail, left England at once for Edinburgh, and asked the Directors to indemnify him. They did so with reluctance.
None of the news from England was good. The settlement of the Colony had openly angered the Government there, and the King's continued silence was alarming, though that naive Lady of Honour had declared that "he did encourage us against the English will." It was rumoured in London that some of the Councillors-General, notably the Earl of Annandale, were bought and employed by the English for "undoing the African Company." James Johnston, out of office since his dismissal from the Secretaryship in 1696 but still in William's favour, warned his "dear Chief" the Earl to be more circumspect. "Whatever becomes of the Company, any Scotchman that shall have a hand in undoing it will be detested by all mankind." Though he had once believed the undertaking to be an act of Providence, Johnston now thought that its failure might be for the best, ultimately producing "a union of trade betwixt the kingdoms".
Scratching away by night, secure in his office from a nagging wife, James Vernon had been waiting impatiently for some formal protest from Spain, knowing that this would allow him to declare England's innocence and Scotland's guilt. When envoys to the Spanish dominions complained of snubs and insults he told them to reply boldly, to say that the Colony was no responsibility of England. "I don't know but we have taken more care to render it ineffectual than they have done, while their silence encourages the undertakers." On May 3 he got his wish. The Spanish Ambassador called upon him and delivered a wordy memorial of protest. His Most Catholic Majesty, Charles the Sufferer—that victim of inherited syphilis, dropsy and epilepsy, now mercifully approaching his last year of dying—declared that the Colony of Caledonia was an insult to his kingdom, an invasion of his domains in America, and a violation of the treaties between himself and his cousin of England. After such a scowling start, the memorial ended amiably with the hope that William would take such measures as he found convenient to put an end to the settlement. Vernon accepted it politely, explained the difference between an Englishman and a Scot, and assured the Ambassador of His Majesty's continuing affection and friendship for the King of Spain.
Some token action was taken. Vernon advised the Lord Justice of Ireland to be vigilant in preventing the departure of any ship to Darien, and in Madrid the English envoy, Alexander Stanhope, patiently told a sceptical Royal Council that Scotland was independent of England under the Crown, "and for this reason must be handled with much prudence and circumspection." Vernon was relieved that the Spanish protest had been so mild, and he thought he knew why. Spain might soon need England's help. Upon his desk where he laid the memorial was a dispatch from Dover, written by the spy John Macky. Couriers from France had reported that Charles was already dead and that Louis XIV would soon claim the vacant throne for his grandson. "We should be glad to hear something to the contrary," Vernon told the English envoy in Brussels, "for the 50,000 men that lie ready in Flanders look to us as if they smelt a carcass and are ready to enter upon the inheritance."
In Scotland the Spanish protest aroused a flurry of anger and contempt quickly lost in the greater surge of enthusiasm for the second expedition. Enclosed with the dispatches from the Colony had been a chart of Caledonia Bay, and this was now copied, printed and circulated as a crudely inaccurate map. It gave a wondrous reality to what had been until now a misty conjecture, and the wording of its imaginative legend excited envy and cupidity. "Place where upon digging for stones to make an oven, a considerable mixture of gold was found in them " Men were eager to advise the Company, though they might get no closer to the Colony than this map and the paper on which they wrote their earnest contributions. The Duke of Hamilton, that popular friend of the undertaking, was sent a cure for those colonists who might eat poisoned fish. The bones of the fish itself, said the recipe, should be burnt, ground to a powder, and then drunk in a glass of wine. The Duke was also pleased to submit some of his own thoughts on the construction of New Edinburgh.
It must be observed on the building of the town that all the principal streets must go from north to south, and that those you are obliged to make which cross east to west must be as narrow as possible, because the sun looks plumb on them all day long.... There must be wells or cisterns in three or four different places, lest the enemy should poison the water by a bomb when but in one place.
This was sound advice, but when it was being written, in the Duke's great home by Holyroodhouse, Captain Juan Delgado was burning what was left of New Edinburgh.
August came, and the Court of Directors moved westward and took up lodgings in Greenock and Glasgow so that they might be near the Company's fleet. Their confidence had been momentarily shaken by the news of the English Proclamations, which reached them at the beginning of the month, but they had quickly recovered. The nation, too, when its anger subsided, took the Proclamations as a challenge. The Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, watched the excitement with a sour eye. "You cannot believe," he told Carstares, "how great an edge is upon persons of all degrees here for that plantation." A week later, when the Directors went to the Clyde, he was more depressed. "I am truly grieved at this matter. The nation is bent one way, and the King is of another persuasion; and whether it succeed or not it is like to have ill consequences." Unless matters took another turn, by which he meant that unless the Company met with a crippling setback, the King's servants and the King's cause in Scotland could not prosper.
Four ships now waited in the Clyde. Direcksone's handsome flagship had been joined by the Duke of Hamilton and the Hope of Bo'ness, both of 300 tons or more and both chartered. The fourth vessel, the Hope, was smaller and owned by the Company. It was the Rising Sun that attracted most of the people who came down the firth to see the fleet. Made of good Berlin oak and 450 tons in burden, she was more than 150 feet long from her forecastle head to the carved caryatids on her stern. She was armed like an Indiaman with 38 guns, twelve, eight, and four-pounders, their ports painted red and encircled with golden laurels on the after-deck. She glowed with the gold of her name. One rising sun burst into gilded rays beneath her sprit, and another below her stem. All
her golden carving was rich and elaborate, curling leaves, convolutes and whorls twined about her windows, poop- deck rail, roundhouse and captain's barge. Her yellow-panelled cabin was luxuriously furnished—bed-curtains of Bengal cloth, fringed, canopied and tasselled with gold, gilded handles to the doors, five tablecloths of yellow damask in a chest of orange wood, eighteen ells of linen napery, two large looking-glasses framed in gold, dark red earthenware, blue cups of polished pewter, and spoons of yellow horn.
The man chosen to enjoy the lonely splendour of the cabin, to command the ship and to be commodore of the fleet, was James Gibson. The sea-going partner of a rich merchant-house he owned with his brother, he was a Director of the Company, a large holder of its stock, and until recently its agent in Amsterdam. He had seen the ship's keel laid in Direcksone's yard, watched her grow, taken wine aboard her with Peter the Great, and sailed with her to the Clyde. From her beginning he had been certain that he would and should be her commander. Others were less sure that he merited it. "Some good people in Scotland," wrote the Reverend Mr. Francis Borland, "took occasion to remember and reflect upon his former cruel and inhuman carriage toward those poor prisoners whom he transported to Carolina in 1684."
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