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 s
ent 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."
The minister of Glassford in the Covenanting parish of Avon- dale, Borland had himself been chosen to go to the Colony. In July, the Commission of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland had met in Glasgow, listened to an inspiring and relevant sermon (upon the text Hebrews 11:8, By faith Abraham, being called of God, obeyed, and went out, not knowing whither he went), chosen four ministers for Caledonia, and given them their instructions. In addition to Borland, they were Alexander Shields, Archibald Stobo and Alexander Dalgleish, all good men in the faith and of proven worth. Upon arrival, they were told, they should immediately set a day apart for public thanksgiving, and should then constitute themselves as a Presbytery by electing a Moderator and a Clerk. Thereafter, with all speed and the consent of the people, they should select the most pious, prudent and judicious among the settlers to be Elders and Overseers of the community, holding parochial sessions and Diets of the Presbytery as often as occasion required. "And thus we commit you, and our Lord's great and glorious work in your hands, unto His own powerful, wise and gracious conduct and blessing."
Of the four ministers only Borland would return to Scotland, and it is history's good fortune that he was a tireless scribbler. He was also a bigot, a prig, and an intolerant critic of human frailty, convinced that the Almighty guided him in righteousness and damned those who did not follow. If Gibson had transported Papists and Episcopalians, instead of Covenanters, Borland might not have deplored his inhumanity toward them. He had been particularly chosen because he had spent some time in the Dutch colony of Surinam, though this had given him little sympathy for other men and no understanding of the peculiar temptations they suffered in such remote places. His dear friend and mentor was his companion Alexander Shields, minister of the second charge of Saint Andrews, and a strong man in the service of the Lord. Shields was still young, but for most of his life he had been persecuted for his beliefs, and had at one time been a prisoner on the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth. His physical courage was exceptional: as chaplain to the Cameronians he had sung psalms with them in their advance at Steinkirk, and sustained them with prayers in the trenches before Namur. He had been a field preacher with James Renwick and had vindicated that ardent Covenanter's work in The Hind Let Loose. In his study at Saint
Andrews he left behind a manuscript life of Renwick, and would never live to see its publication.
The last of the supplies were being loaded by gabbards from Glasgow and wherries from Greenock, the same diverse cargoes of hardware and haberdashery that had been sent with the first expedition. And bayonets and powder. Raisins and sugar. Brandy and beer. All entered in his ledger by Peter Murdoch, the Company's agent in Glasgow, with a neat index so that the Committee for Equipping might know at a glance how many pounds of bees-wax or casks of brimstone, firkins of black soap or kegs of nails were aboard the ships. The Directors worked industriously, rose early, and consumed prodigious quantities of claret when they entertained each other at dusk. Their euphoric self-satisfaction was disturbed only momentarily by some unpleasant news from London. Montgomerie and Jolly, back from Caledonia by way of Jamaica and Bristol, had arrived there and had as yet sent no word that they were coming north. Writing to Paterson, the Marquis of Tweeddale said that he could not think what the villains would have to say for themselves. They were reported to be preparing a petition for presentation to the Duke of Hamilton, but His Grace, having had notice of their behaviour in letters from the Colony, would be on his guard against it. The arrival of both men in England reminded the Directors of the sad lack of unity in Caledonia, and they wrote long letters to the now extinct Council, recalling earlier admonitions against "jealousies, animosities, factions, heart-burnings and disagreements." Such evils the colonists should zealously renounce with the help of their new ministers, even though they were "penned up in a corner close together, in a state of lazy idleness."
And let them be of good cheer, a great number of reinforcements was coming with these letters, including men whom the Company understood were desperately needed. For the defence of the fort there was John Jaffray to be Fire-master and Bombardier. Captain John Wallace and Thomas Kerr were engineers of renown from Flanders, and the former something of an artillerist as well. He had recently examined and fired 36 leather guns, the gift of Lord Elcho, and declared them in good condition. For the proper management of the precious metals that would seem to be found in
every stone upturned, the Company was sending a goldsmith, Robert Keil, and also John Hunter who was "perfectly versed in the art of coining money and the making of mills for the edging of money." David Dovale was coming to help his friend and co-religionist Benjamin Spense, having a remarkable fluency in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and English, as well as some of the Indian tongues of the Darien coast. Upon the recommendation of the Duke of Hamilton Robert Johnson had been appointed to employ his new method of teaching the Indians both English and Scots. And George Winram had gone aboard the Hope with his "stills and other necessaries, for the distilling and fermenting of several sorts of liquors."
A hundred women were sailing with the expedition at the Company's expense, and as many more were willing to pay £4 to a private speculator who was proposing to charter a sloop or brigantine for the purpose. Most of them were loyal wives, and all but a few of them are now nameless. There was Mrs. Stobo, wife of the minister. There was Mrs. Jaffray, sailing with the Fire-master and their daughter Mary, Mrs. Johnson and her son. There was Mrs. Bell and there was Mrs. Merston who did not know that they were in fact widows, for the husbands they hoped to join in Caledonia, like the men of other wives aboard, were long since dead in their water-logged graves.
The captains, lieutenants, ensigns and soldiers were again discharged men of the disbanded regiments of Leven and Strathnaver, Mackay, Hill and Argyll. Many of them had been waiting impatiently about Milne Square since the Company refused their services a year ago. More than a third of the common men, according to Francis Borland, were from the mountains, Highlanders whose lack of English and scandalous contempt for the discipline of the Presbytery were to fill him with disgust and pity, the pity being reserved for himself. William Dunlop, Principal of the University of Glasgow, asked the Company to take as volunteers "some young men who passed their course at the college and are desirous to go to Caledonia." They were accepted, on condition that one of their masters accompanied them, and that Dunlop advanced them £10 for the purchase of small necessities.
THE DARIEN DISASTER Page 27
