Nor are these youths the scum of this our land,
But, in effect, a brave and generous band, Inspired with thirst of fame and soon to have Titles upon the marbles of their graves.
Twelve hundred men, some boys, a few women. Graves most of them would certainly have within the year, on land and at sea, but no marble headstones. A wooden marker for the more fortunate, and that quickly eaten by ants.
The fleet sailed on the morning tide of Thursday, July 14, the fiction of its secret destination still maintained. Though few men did not know that it was to be Darien, it could not be acknowledged until Pennecuik and his captains broke open their sealed orders. Three packets wrapped in oiled sailcloth, one to be unfastened when the fleet had cleared the firth, the second to be read at such a time and place indicated in the first, and the third to be opened "when at the place of settlement".
There were crowds on Castle Hill and Caltoun Craigs, white faces and waving hands at every window on the northern cliff of the city. At Leith, men and women pressed forward to the water's edge, crying, calling, singing. Some knelt to pray, exhorted by the inspired voices of their ministers. A few were bitter with disappointment. At dawn, officers had gone through each ship from stem to stern, from truck to keel, turning out stowaways, wrenching their hands free from rigging and timber, ignoring their imploring voices. Now these unhappy men stood on the quay and the dunes, watching the ships they would willingly have joined without payment or reward. As top-sails cracked and bellied, there was a bray of trumpets from the decks, a rolling of drums, and a great cry from Leith Sands to Castle Hill. The ships passed through the smoke of the Saint Andrew's signal gun and turned their golden stern-castles to the shore.
But that day they sailed no more than ten miles, northward to Kirkcaldy where they took up moorings again. There they remained for five days more, while Robert Blackwood and his clerk came over from Leith to check the last of the invoices and bills of lading. He also brought word that William Vetch was still too ill to leave his bed, and the expedition must sail without him. Aboard the Dolphin young David Dalrymple, seaman, stared at the windows and chimneys of Kirkcaldy, trying to pick out his own house. When he could endure his homesickness no longer, he slipped over the tender's stern and into a dory with another deserter, John Wilson the boatswain of the Dolphin. They went ashore in the dark.
On the evening of Monday, July 18, the ships cast off their moorings, lay by all night, and were finally gone in the morning. They sailed on an early tide and into the rising sun.
They did not go without William Paterson. At the beginning of July the Company had asked the Presbytery to order prayers for a fair wind, and to persuade the Reverend Mr. Thomas James to change his mind. After a week of emotional argument and equivalent meditation, he agreed to go with the expedition, providing, he said, "that Mr. Paterson did go, believing him to be a propagator of virtue and a discourager of vice, and would be exemplary to others." The Directors did not see Paterson in this light, or any light at all nowadays. They would rather have done without the man, and they havered for another week. But Mr. James was insistent, and so was the Presbytery. Paterson was called before the Directors and asked if he wished to go. He said yes, without hesitation, and was told that the Company therefore accepted him as an ordinary member of the expedition, without office and without authority. When he asked permission to take with him his wife and his clerk, Thomas Fenner, it was grudgingly granted.
On Saturday afternoon they were rowed across to Kirkcaldy, where Pincarton generously found the Patersons a small cabin board the Unicorn. Sudden good fortune, the warm welcome he received from other colonists, went to Paterson's head. Within the hour he boarded the Saint Andrew and told the astonished Commodore that there should be an immediate inspection of all stores, so that any deficiencies might be reported to the Directors and made good before the fleet sailed.
Captain Pennecuik wasted no words. He told Paterson to mind his own business.
3 The Door of the Seas
"Yet we had patience, hoping things would mend ashore" The First Voyage, July to November 1698
It began well. There was a strong and favourable wind, blowing so hard that the larger ships sailed with their main canvas reefed. For most of the first day the fleet kept in to the Fife coast, passing between it and the Isle of May. Horsemen from Kirkcaldy had brought news of its departure and there were crowds on the shore at Elie and Saint Monans, Anstruther and Crail, fluttering hands and unheard cries. Before dusk, with Fife Ness on their larboard quarter, the ships were sailing north-east by north toward Bell Rock, spritsails curtseying to the open sea. Hull down by nightfall, their stern-lanterns were unseen by the last crowd on Saint Andrews' sands.
Captains and Councillors had opened the first of their sealed orders long before the fleet cleared Largo Bay. They were to make for the Orkneys and the Atlantic west of Ireland, thus avoiding the curious watch of English cruisers in the North Sea and Channel. At the Orkneys they could take aboard what provisions might be necessary, and from thence they were to make all sail to Madeira. Here the second orders were to be opened, but if wind and weather made this landfall impossible the papers were to be broken out as soon as the fleet reached Latitude 32° North.On the fourth day and north of Aberdeen the ships were becalmed, the sunlit air so still that the captains' pennants scarcely moved at the topmast heads. At noon the wind rose and blew gently from the south, carrying the fleet gallantly past Peterhead where the townsfolk fired three guns in salute. The compliment was ignored by Pennecuik. He was in his cabin, presiding over a bitter meeting of all sea-captains and Councillors whom he had called aboard the Saint Andrew during the calm. They had brought with them, at his request, a list of their provisions and stores as drawn up by their pursers, and the reading of these produced at first a state of speechless shock and then violent argument. The Directors of the Company had assured the Council that the provisions would be more than enough for nine months, but now the pursers reported that they would not last above six. A great deal had been consumed during the weeks the ships lay at Burntisland, and much of the bread that remained had become damnified, beef and pork had been spoilt by bad stowing. Walter Herries, who presented himself as the originator of all wise decisions and the steadfast critic of all that were bad, later claimed that the reports had been called for at his suggestion. He made his own inspection and said that he "could not make above five months and a half of any provisions except stockfish, of which there was a full eleven months and that at four days of the week, but (we) had not above four months butter and oil."
The squabbling and bickering in Pennecuik's great cabin lasted until nightfall, by which time a heavy fog had come down and the Caledonia was lost in it, despite Pennecuik's orders that all ships were to close in to his stern-lights at dusk. Robert Drummond and the two Councillors who sailed with him, Montgomerie and Jolly, were grudgingly allowed to stay aboard the Commodore's ship until the dawn look-out sighted the Caledonia's topsails above the sunbright mist. They went away to her in an ill-humour, and with Drummond convinced that Pennecuik was an ignorant fool. The first meeting of the Council had set the pattern of acrimony and suspicion of all that were to follow. Factions were already forming, jealousy and vanity marking the division between landsmen and seamen. "Our Marine Chancellors," said William Paterson, in his report to the Directors more than a year later, "did not only take all upon them, but likewise browbeat and discouraged everybody else, yet we had patience, hoping things would mend.
The Commodore had no choice now but to order his fleet to make for the Orkneys and there wait for more provisions to be sent from Leith. Meanwhile all aboard were placed on short rations. On July 24, as the ships beat up from Duncansby Head to the Orkneys, a fog came down again. First a mist moving gently on a changing wind and then, in a few hours, so thick and white a curtain that nothing could be seen beyond the bowsprit head. For a while they kept within hail, the Saint Andrew's lookout singing each ship's name and, if answered wi
th a cry of "Success!", calling back "God grant!" When voices could no longer be heard Pennecuik fired a signal gun every half hour, and anxiously counted the muffled musket volleys that replied. Groping blindly under shortened sail, no captain could say for certain where he was, and all were in fear of running aground. There was no thought now of making an anchorage in the Orkneys, if indeed they could be found, only a desperate desire to get clear of this nightmare of fog, rocks and a rising sea. Once, when the fog lifted, there was black land to the north and south, unrecognisable and unknown. Aboard the Unicorn some said it was the Orkneys, and others Shetland, and yet more that it must be the Outer Hebrides. On the Saint Andrew Pennecuik counted topmasts in the spray, and thanked God and his own skill that his squadron was still together.
But not for long. A sudden gale blew out of the north, cold and bitter from the Arctic and with grey seas running. When wind and sea dropped at nightfall the fog came on again and there was soon no reply to the Saint Andrew's appealing gun. The white darkness lasted for three days during which, by some impossible miracle, the ships passed safely between the Orkneys and Shetland. When it lifted, at dawn on July 31, each vessel was alone in the Atlantic with a skein of gulls. Off the Butt of Lewis, under clear skies and before a north-westerly wind, Pincarton rightly believed himself to be the furthest south of the squadron. He put the Unicorn about and told his maintop man to keep a sharp eye to the north. Before ten o'clock the man cried a ship astern, and Pincarton shortened sail and waited for her to come up. She was the Endeavour, a lost child happy to be found, but her master John Malloch knew nothing of the others. Although he would willingly have waited, Pincarton could not ignore a favourable wind, and with the pink to starboard he set course for Madeira. The next day they passed the cloud-head of Saint Kilda, and the sick and miserable landsmen aboard the Unicorn stared at the black wall of rock until it was gone and there was nothing about them but the sea.
On August 2, tacking across the mouth of the Minch between Cape Wrath and Lewis, the Saint Andrew found the little Dolphin, and later the Caledonia. Together they sailed southwest and south, believing the others lost.
Little was left now of the high spirits in which the settlers had left the Forth. Some of them were to remember the miseries of that northern voyage more vividly than the horrors they were still to suffer. "For God's sake," William Paterson would write to the Directors, "be sure to send the next fleet from the Clyde, for the passage north about is worse than the whole voyage to the Indies." Kept below decks by the unsympathetic seamen, sick with the stench of their own bodies and the rolling of the ship, maddened by incessant noise and choked by the fog that seeped through the hatches, angered by short rations and foul water, never clean, never alone, never told where they were or where they might be to-morrow, never seeing the sun and rarely the sky, most of them had lost all heart for the venture long before the ships broke out of the fog. What strength they had they wasted in pettish quarrels, resenting the small privileges of those above them and jealously preserving theirs against those below. During the gales they clutched each other in fear, or closed their eyes and wished for death. No one left any record of how Mrs. Paterson and the few other women aboard endured this wretchedness. Only the very young kept their courage. Colin Campbell, whose family had sent him aboard the Unicorn under Pincarton's protection in the hope that he might learn enough to make the sea his trade, somehow managed to make daily entries in the journal he was writing for his brother. Nothing a seaman would admire, he modestly admitted, for there was no man aboard who was ready or willing to give him the simplest lessons in navigation. Patiently he recorded the winds and the weather, the changing latitude, the sight of a distant and unspoken ship, the day when the Unicorn lay becalmed and her foretop-men went aloft to repair a trestle-tree that had been broken in the Orkney gales. On August 15, west of Cape St. Vincent, there came to the ship two white pigeons, lifting the hearts of all aboard.
Days behind Pincarton, the other three ships made slower sailing, and at night the Caledonia frequently lost sight of the Saint Andrew's light. The dawn hours were thus wasted in frustrating delays until Drummond's topsails came over the horizon. Pennecuik believed that Robert Drummond was deliberately dropping behind at night out of wilful spite, and the tempers of both men were not improved by the indignant signals that passed between their ships before they got under way again. Off the coast of Portugal there were frequent calms during which the squadron was idle enough for the land officers on one ship to visit their friends and kinsmen on another. They drank too much brandy, and indulged in too many intrigues. When the Drummond brothers came aboard the Saint Andrew, Robert in his blue coat and Thomas in scarlet, they boasted that the entertainment they gave aboard their ship was more generous than the niggardly hospitality a man might expect on the Saint Andrew. Pennecuik resented the arrogant contempt and secret smiles of the idling gentlemen who stood on his main-deck in red coats and campaign-wigs, talking of such exclusive matters as family, rank, battles and sieges. He readily believed the gossip brought him by Captain Lachlan Maclean, commander of a land company. This Highlander, who had his own dark reasons for disliking the Drummonds (one of which might well have been a clansman's memory of Glencoe), said that the brothers were forming a cabal and plotting against the Commodore. Pennecuik was hot for court-martialling them at once, but Mackay and Montgomerie persuaded him to wait until the fleet reached Madeira. There, they said, a full Council should debate the affair.
On August 20, at three in the afternoon and sailing due west, the Unicorn and the Endeavour sighted Madeira ahead, but a brisk gale that blew up suddenly kept them beating about for two more days. When they finally came in to Funchal roadstead, below a white castle and green and lemon hills, a Genoese ship at anchor there ran out her guns with trumpets braying. Pin- carton went ashore, his boat's-crew smart in their silvered caps badged with unicorns. The Governor said that the Scots had been taken for Algerian pirates, and although he could now see that Pincarton was no rogue he had been told by the English that Scotland was too poor a country to possess such splendid ships. By patient courtesy, by producing a copy of the Company's Act, and by a 12-gun salute providentially fired from the Unicorn at the most awkward moment of this interview, Pincarton convinced the Governor that the Scots were what they claimed to be. Twelve guns were fired in reply from the castle, and the islanders came down from their vinyards and their houses with shouts of welcome.
There had been good reason for caution. Aboard the Genoese ship were tempting prizes for a corsair: a bishop worthy of ransom, a bride who was to marry a gentleman of Madeira, and her dowry of £15,000 Sterling. "Yet the woman," wrote a Scot whose respect for this vast sum had led him curiously to her cabin, "was no beauty for all that." To his amusement, a second Genoese arrived a day or so later with another bride from Lisbon, "but cheaper and better favoured than the first."
Pennecuik's laggard ships arrived on August 26. As soon as they were sighed John Malloch went out to them in the Unicorns pinnace, piloting them into the roadstead and telling the Commodore that despite some early suspicion the Scots were now welcome to water and victual their ships. There was another thunder of salutes from ships and shore, and then Pennecuik turned to matters uppermost in his mind. He called a full meeting of the Council aboard the Saint Andrew. The behaviour of the Drummonds since leaving the Forth, he said, had "smelled of mutiny", and he moved that they be stripped of their commands and set ashore. Young Mackay and Montgomerie, weak from seasickness, weary of Pennecuik's quarter-deck manner, and aware that they must endure more of both before the voyage ended, were inclined to humour him. But Robert Jolly and James Cunningham, the uneasy traveller of the middle road and the committed member of the Glencoe Gang, argued forbearance. They promised to secure the Drummonds' submission to Pennecuik's authority while at sea, and upon this assurance the Commodore's motion was defeated.
The Scots swarmed ashore, seeking wine, food and entertainment. They ate unripe fruit and wer
e ill. Some officers sold their scarlet coats and plumed hats, their swords or their shoe-buckles to buy meat. They marvelled at the number of lizards they saw, thought the Portuguese were no better than thieves, and observed that in the general poverty of the island a few English merchants seemed to be living remarkably well. Paterson, however, was pleasantly surprised by the kindness of these Englishmen, and he concluded from this that there must be more goodwill toward the Company than the Scots imagined.
He was in a rare and warm state of euphoria, having been elected to the Council in place of the absent William Vetch. Which of the warring factions supported his election, hoping for an ally, is unknown, but they were undoubtedly disappointed for he refused to take part in their childish squabbles. "I must confess," he wrote later, "it troubled me exceedingly to see our affairs thus turmoiled and disordered by tempers and dispositions as boisterous and turbulent as the elements they are used to struggle with." He was thinking of Pennecuik's jealous feud with Robert Drummond, and of Pincarton's lack of sympathy for both. The mad proposal that the Council should elect a new President each week had been further complicated by the Commodore's noisy claim that until a landing was made he was the supreme and only authority. Paterson said that a weekly presidency was "a mere May-game of government", and he proposed that each Councillor should hold the office for a month, and that when the colony was reached the Land Councillors should take their turn before the Seamen. They would thus have four months in which to make proper rules and ordinanances, to secure a firm government that could not be upset by Pennecuik's irascibility or Pincarton's ignorance. But he got no support from the other Land Councillors. "They, like wise men, had begun to make their court, and had agreed beforehand with those of the sea that the presidency should last but a week."
THE DARIEN DISASTER Page 15
