THE DARIEN DISASTER

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

  During the two days he had left, Campbell was kept in the lamp-lit hold of the Duke of Hamilton, with irons on his wrists and ankles, and a corporal's guard to see that he did not end his agony now by breaking his head against the mainmast foot. Borland visited him frequently, and although Campbell may have found the minister's scalding sermons an unnecessary addition to his punishment he was happy to ask for forgiveness. Or so Borland wrote. "This poor man seemed to die very

  penitently___ He said that for some time before this, particularly

  since God had recovered him from a late sickness, he had left off prayer to the Lord, and therefore God had justly left him to this sad end." Though Borland seemed more pleased by this graphic illustration of Divine wrath than he was angered by the causes of Campbell's discontent, he and another minister compassionately asked the Council to commute the sentence to banishment. They were told that it was impossible.

  There was more anger than penitence in the carpenter's last moment, and a brave defiance in his acceptance of it. Toward two o'clock in the afternoon of Wednesday, December 20, he was rowed ashore behind a drummer beating. In the south ravelin of the fort, looking across the harbour-mouth, his fellow-carpenters had built a scaffold. As he stood upon it, the noose about his throat, a company of soldiers drawn up in hollow square, and silent crowds on the ships and shore, he remembered those men for whom he was dying. "Lord forgive them who brought me on this lock!" he shouted, and jumped from the scaffold without waiting for the thrust of a drum-major's hand. Byres found another meaning for those last words. "We fancied the rascal expected relief to the last minute."

  The next day or the day after, Thomas Drummond was arrested by order of the Council and taken from his sloop to the Duke of Hamilton. There he was locked in a cabin and allowed no visitors. Three other officers were also taken up, Captain Kerr the engineer, Ensign Spark, and a Lieutenant Logan who had come from New York with Drummond. A fifth man placed under guard was Alexander Hamilton. Having loyally returned to the Colony as Overseer of Supplies, he was the natural man to be held responsible for the shortage of provisions. The Council of four was now the instrument of one quixotic man. Vetch had persuaded himself, or had been persuaded by Byres, that his commission referred to the first Colony and that he had no real authority in the second. Lindsay seems to have been a soldier of limited wit, happy to have the weight of his conscience carried on another's shoulders. And Gibson, according to the ministers, accepted all that was done with indifference, thinking only of his pipe and dram. No formal charges were brought against the arrested men, no court-martial was ordered, but to all those who were curious about their ultimate disposal Byres talked of the evidence at Campbell's trial, of an officers' plot to overthrow the Council. There would be proof of Drummond's villainy soon, very soon. There is no record of any protest against the arrests. Weakened by fever and fear, unnerved by the sight of the carpenter's body hanging on its rotting rope, the Planters did nothing. Bound by their solemn oath to serve the Company, the Officers would not openly defy its rightful representative. Byres had come to the end of his patience. He had silenced Drummond's opposition to his proposal for a retreat to Jamaica, and by this, his only positive action, he had made himself king.

  Two days before Christmas, having bought the sloop Society on a bill they hoped the Company would honour, the Councillors decided to send her away with their first report to the Directors. Though signed by all four men, the letter was the voice of James Byres. Admittedly "long and melancholy", it whined, complained, boasted and appealed. The first colonists were a disgrace to Scotland and a reproach to humanity. There was no gold, no silver, no Nicaragua wood, and all who had reported otherwise were fools and knaves. The ships' stewards were also proven knaves, never had there been such a collection of knaves in so small a community. Captain Drummond was in custody for offences whereof there would soon be proof.... Captain Kerr, also in custody, was not fit for service in the Colony and the Council intended to be quit of him. The fort could not be rebuilt without proper tools, and the Colony was thus defenceless. On the other hand, there was no great fear of the Spaniards. The Indians were worthless allies, small and weak, and one Scots grenadier would not find it hard to defeat ten of them at once. The Company knew—and here there was a hint that Byres was frightened by the authority he had assumed —that the undersigned were under no obligation to serve as the government of the Colony, but were honest men and awaited those whom the Directors might send to replace them. "Meantime, we shall not disgracefully lay down the baton so providentially put in our hands."

  The Colony now sank into a paralysed inertia that was to last for six weeks. No work was done except that necessary for simple existence. The five hundred men selected for Jamaica, and all the remaining women and children, were sent aboard the Hope of Bo'ness and the Duke of Hamilton. Among them were most of the volunteers who had come from New York with Drummond, those who had sworn to take their fate with him in the jungle, all whom Byres suspected of being "for the taking of towns". While the weather blew steadily from the north, however, the ships could not leave the harbour, for they were as clumsy to windward as their predecessors had been. Nor was the Society allowed to sail, though she could have got through the sea-gate. For reasons that would be clear later, Byres delayed her departure.

  Fever was again epidemic. There were never less than two hundred gravely sick men aboard and ashore. At first light each morning, the night's dead were turned over the ships' sides. The ministers, who had hoped that such God-sent suffering would turn men away from viciousness, were disappointed. Mr. Shields preached aboard the flagship upon the text Behold your sins shall find you out, but the colonists remained stubborn in their depravity. "I remember," wrote Borland, "the observation of the Reverend Mr. Shields, that he had conversed with many sorts of people in several parts of the world, and had served as a minister for several years in the Army in Flanders, but he had never seen or been concerned with such a company as this was." The ministers had kept apart from the political squabbles of the Colony. Though they detested Byres, and believed Drummond to be "the most diligent and useful man", they made no protest against his arrest. Byres now ignored them, and no longer invited them to open Council meetings with a prayer. They complained bitterly when they were not given huts ashore, but they would not lift a hammer or an axe to build one for themselves. To stop their mouths perhaps, someone at last gave Stobo and Borland the use of his own hut, but Shields remained aboard the Rising Sun. Even ashore there was no peace from the mockery and blasphemous contempt of the colonists, and when these three humourless men met they often went into the trees for their mournful deliberations. Inter densas umbrosa Cacumina Sylvas, wrote Borland, glumly remembering the dripping leaves above his head.

  Their Day of Prayer, Thanksgiving and Humiliation was a dismal failure. Though each preached a long sermon on hellfire and damnation, few came to listen and most of those for the diversion only. They decided that it was neither practicable nor expedient to set up a Presbytery as they had been instructed, and they turned, with relief almost, to their second obligation, the conversion of the Indian. When Robert Turnbull heard of their wish to visit a Cuna village he acquired leave to accompany them with a file of soldiers. They could not have gone far without him, but that was not his reason. He was anxious to talk with Pedro, if that elusive captain were still alive, and to discover what was known of the Spaniards' preparations against the Colony.

  They left early in the morning of January 16, crossing by boat to the far shore of the bay and travelling from thence on foot. They climbed so many steep hills and waded so many streams that the wearied Borland lost count of them. By nightfall, when they reached Pedro's village on the banks of the Greater Acla, they were exhausted and wet to the waist. Reports of the little chiefs death, which had come to the first Colony before it left, were false, and he greeted his friend Turnbull with affectionate warmth. He welcomed the ministers too, and although their black broadcloth and white n
eck-bands were strange to him, he could see by their manner that they were important men. He fed them all on dried fish and meat, plantains and potatoes, and ordered fires to be lit by their hammocks. The Indians listened in polite silence to the ministers' sermons, but were indifferent to their meaning. Perhaps Turnbull was too tired to translate the scriptural homilies that thundered across the firelight, or had not the vocabulary to do the ministers justice, for they later complained that they could not labour in God's vineyard here without an interpreter. The Indians, they said, were a poor and naked people, idle and lazy, more inclined by temperament to adopt a Scotsman's vices than accept his religion.

  What Turnbull had learned from Pedro put him in no mood to linger while Mr. Shields or Mr. Stobo explained the significance of the Sabbath to an uncomprehending audience that counted time by the moon. He wanted to talk with other headmen, and at dawn the next day he ordered a march, moving westward to the Lesser Acla. At every village the Scots were welcomed kindly, and at each Turnbull's anxiety to return to Caledonia was increased. Believing that they might reach it more quickly, and with less strain on the ministers, if they travelled by way of the coast, he led the party back to the Greater Acla and turned northward along its banks to the sea. The ministers stumbled wearily behind the soldiers, marvelling at wide savannahs of moving grass, the vermilion flash of startled birds, cool parks of stately trees. At the mouth of the river they saw Golden Island, serene in a seaward mist, and believed that they were but a short walk from their harbour. Some way along the shore to the east, said Borland, they came to a rocky point, and moved inland again to approach the shore on its other side.

  But here we travelled so long and by such crooked turnings and through such thickets of tall and dark woods that we quite lost ourselves, and were bewildered, that we knew not what way to move, nor how to extricate ourselves. Standing still, therefore, in our bewildered and melancholy condition, we heard the noise of the sea, and judged it to be our only surest guide to wind ourselves out of our present labyrinth. Therefore we turned our course directly toward the noise of the waves, and a very difficult and uncomfortable passage we had in striving to get through the thorny thickets of woods in our way, and with much ado at length we got safely into the open air by the sea.

  Here was no sandy walk, however, but an angry coastline of breaking waves, and rather than move inland again Turnbull led the party along the edge of the water. "We were washen with waves... and the various windings and bendings of the coast made our way much longer; sometimes we had steep rocks to pass over, which we must climb with our hands and feet." They had eaten nothing since leaving the last village on the Acla, and they had no water to drink. All were exhausted, but Shields was scarcely able to walk and became so feeble that Borland feared he would die. At last they found a spring, breaking from the rocks above and as heaven-sent, they said, as the well was to Hagar in the wilderness when her child was like to die. It gave Shields the strength to continue. By dusk they saw the bare topsail yards of their ships above the trees. "The Lord leading the blind by a way they knew not," quoted Borland, with little gratitude to Turnbull, "preserving our going out and our coming in, and as our day was, so making our strength to be."

  The Lieutenant went straight to the Council. From the information the Indians had given him, he said, he beheved that the Barliavento Fleet and an army from Santa Maria would shortly attack the Colony. Byres was unimpressed. He would fight any Spaniard who came, but Caledonia was impregnable from the sea and nobody but a fool would attack it from the woods. A week later, under strong pressure from the company commanders, he agreed that some guns should be landed from the ships and mounted in the embrasures of the fort.

  But he would not release Drummond or Thomas Kerr.

  "This was now a smiling Providence upon us, but alas...!"

  Caledonia, February 1700

  From the Woods of Caledonia, Mr. Stobo wrote at the head of the letter, February 2,1700, Reverend Sir.... The three ministers were alone in the Shades of Love, away from the stench and profanity of New Edinburgh, composing a letter to the Moderator. They thought it their duty to inform him of the sad and afflicted state of the Colony. The source and fountain cause of all its miseries were the colonists themselves. Our land hath spewed out its scum.... They were perverse, pernicious and mean, without religion, reason, honesty or honour. We could not prevail to get their wickedness restrained, nor the growth of it stopped. God has punished them with a sore and contagious sickness, taking away as a terrible example some of his own jewels and excellent ones. This sickness, for some time abated, is now returned in its former rage

  It was a bitter letter, composed by lonely men who were bewildered by the failure of their mission and wounded by the contempt of men they had hoped to inspire. They sat together under the trees, each comforted by the others' sympathy, offering a word, a phrase, a scriptural reference to strengthen the letter. Mr. Stobo's pen dipped regularly into the ink-horn, scratching line after line of complaint and accusation. They had done their duty as colleagues in a Collegiate of Relation, although it had been impossible to establish a Presbytery. They had preached every Sabbath, one aboard the flagship and two ashore, but such was the malignant obstinacy of the colonists that few came to listen. Near on a third at least are wild Highlanders that cannot speak nor understand Scotch, which are barbarians to us and we to them. The Indians were no better, though those who came to hear the ministers were at least decent in their behaviour. God's servants would persevere in their thankless work, they would stay until the end of the year they had agreed to serve, but... We must now give you advertisement, and entreat you to intimate to the Reverend Commission that none of us are determined to settle here. They asked for prayers and understanding. They signed themselves the Moderator's afflicted brethren in the Work of the Gospel. They sealed the letter and walked down to New Edinburgh, to something they had not thought fit to mention— the sound of axe and saw again, the sight of men now at work after a month of despairing lethargy.

  The threat of a Spanish attack had frightened those colonists not marked down for Jamaica, and the enthusiasm of young officers like Turnbull had encouraged them to resist it. Four guns from the Rising Sun were now ashore, and were being dragged across the marsh to the fort as the ministers came down from the Shades of Love. Although Byres had not authorised it, seventy huts and two storehouses were also being rebuilt. The walls and roof of the guardhouse were restored, and the ministers had been informed that they might use the building as a church when it contained no prisoners. This, too, they had not told the Moderator. Not all the officers thought that resistance was advisable, and most of the men waiting to sail for Port Royal were hoping that they would be away before it became necessary. Major John Ramsay and several captains said that they wished to leave on the Society, and to take ship for Scotland from whatever port she touched. Sick in his cabin prison, Thomas Drummond asked the Council to free him so that he might go home for the good of his health. During the past five weeks, seeing no one but the guard at his door and the steward who brought him food, he had lost faith in the Colony and could think of his reputation only. He wanted to be the first to tell the Directors of his quarrel with Byres.

  Much of the work being done was without the direction or sanction of the Councillors, and they frequently confused everybody by ordering all sea-captains to take on water, to secure their guns and clear their decks for sailing as soon as the wind blew from the south-east. Byres' braggart defiance of the Spaniards had changed to a surly disapproval of any attempt to resist them. It would be unlawful, he said, all war was unlawful and un-Christian. Alexander Shields was outraged by such blasphemy. He had soldiered with the Cameronians and knew that was lawful. He had seen them die with the Psalms on their lips and knew that was Christian. The Councillor told him that he was talking nonsense, contradicting the Gospels, and tempting men to become atheists. On Sunday, February 4, Byres honestly acknowledged that his own safety was more important to him t
han the security of the Colony. He announced that he would sail away with the Society as soon as the fly-boats could warp her out of the bay.

  The thought had probably been in his mind since he first delayed the sloop's departure, now it had been translated into action by the arrival that morning of a Jamaican brigantine. She was loaded with dry-goods and Negro slaves, but her master had some beef and flour he was willing to sell. He was also anxious to be away as soon as he had caulked a leak, and the news he brought explained why. Four great warships had recently arrived at Portobello from Cadiz, the largest of 60 guns, and three more were expected from Carthagena. The streets of Portobello were sweet with the scent of new-made bread, thousands of loaves for the seamen and soldiers who were to fall upon Caledonia by land and by sea.

  James Byres was aboard the Society before nightfall, with his baggage, his brother-in-law and his apprentice. He said that he would return soon with provisions from Jamaica, but the letters he carried from the Council referred the Directors to Mr. Byres himself should they have any questions that were not answered in the dispatches. Perhaps—and it may be charitable to assume this—the reference was to letters which Byres said he would write to the Company from Port Royal. No one protested against this shameless desertion, all would no doubt have agreed with Shields that it was "a step in our deliverance". It was Wednesday before the fly-boats got the sloop through the sea-gate, and there was one other passenger aboard, Mrs. Dalgleish. "She is big with child," said the Council's letter. "We are not in condition so to treat her as her circumstances and good behaviour require." They hoped that she would finally reach Scotland, and that the Company would pay her the stipend her husband might have earned.