Lying on the muddy earth of the fort was Don Miguel Cordones' jewelled sword. And also his splendid coat, laced and corded, embroidered on the left breast with a Golden Fleece, the badge of a Knight of the Order of Saint James.
It had been a brave little affray, entirely to Fonab's taste, surprise and courage having overthrown a superior enemy in a strong defensive position. Seven of the Scots were dead, lying at the breach or inside the stockade, and fourteen or more were wounded. The Indian dead were not counted, but Pedro had been wounded as he attacked the salient from which Turnbull was shot. There is no exact record of the Spanish losses, and reports of them later would be ridiculously exaggerated, but there were two or three dozen prisoners surrounded by black- faced, screaming Indians. When the Scots saw that Fonab and Turnbull were wounded (or so it was said, though it may have been the dead of their own rank that angered them) they tinned on the prisoners and had already butchered some before Campbell could beat them away.
The dead were buried in the firelight, and when prayers had been said above them Fonab honoured two naked Indians whose courage he admired. The first was Diego's son, Steven, and the second an unknown man to whom Campbell gave his own name, Alexander. They were made captains in the service of the Company, and were each given a scarlet coat and a beaver hat, the late owners of which having no further use for them.
At sunrise on Friday the Scots marched for Caledonia. They left all but three of their prisoners behind. They burnt or destroyed what they could of the fort, and took away the arms, ammunition and provisions they could carry. They reached the south shore of the bay on Sunday, February 18, their drums beating a triumph. It was seven days only since Fonab had arrived in the Barbadoes sloop, and it was the end of his active control of the Colony. But though his aching wound, and the fever that followed it, would keep him to his bed, his spirit and his presence would still be the Caledonian's main strength.
The victory at Toubacanti was no more than Francis Borland had expected from the Almighty, but the disgraceful way in which the Colonists celebrated it filled him with gloom.
This was now a smiling Providence upon us, and our people now generally were lifted up with hopes and confidence that all things would succeed prosperously with them. But alas! we did not walk humbly and thankfully before God under this smile of His providence upon us. Instead of our glorifying the God of our Salvation, there was little to be seen among most of our men but excessive drunkeness, profane swearing, ranting, boasting, and singing. And so came of it, for shortly after our present smiles were turned into frowns, our clear sunshine was overcast with dark and threatening clouds. We were soon as much dejected and cast down as we had before been vain, proud and lifted up.
The first cloud in the clear sunshine was seen from Point Look-out on February 23. A tall ship, a great man-of-war was moving off Golden Island, a small schooner and a dispatch-boat in her wake. Before sunset they lay to with the wind in the west and seemed to be studying the mouth of the harbour. The warship, with a naked image on her sterncastle, was the San Juan Bautista, and Don Diego Peredo was profoundly worried by Pimienta's rash enthusiasm for getting closer yet to land so that he might see what ships were in the bay. Heavy seas and winds on the previous day had sprung the flagships foremast, and Peredo knew nothing and feared the worst of currents that might drag her on to the cliffs of the peninsula. By nightfall Pimienta stifled his curiosity—seeing nothing now in the moonless dark—and allowed Peredo to take the ship out to sea. She returned the next day, and the next, and was joined by others, the San Francisco and El Florizant with their attendant sloops, schooners and transports. They cruised far out to sea; only the small ships came in to stare at the harbour mouth like children, to put their helms over and ran at some imagined alarm.
The sight of so many ships, the paradoxical threat of their continued inaction, dismayed the Colonists. "We daily expected their coming in to attack our fort and ships," said Borland, "Our people were filled with fears and sad thoughts of heart." No one was more fearful, or had sadder thoughts than the Councillors Gibson, Lindsay and Vetch. They were for capitulating at once, for the sending out of a sloop to sue for terms. Fonab had come to their meeting in great pain, but he forgot it in his anger. He would not surrender, he said, and neither would they while he was there. They were silenced by his contempt more than by his arguments, and for the moment they spoke no more of capitulation. Though they stubbornly retained the pretence of authority, the defence of the Colony was now in the hands of officers inspired by Fonab. His bright confidence, even in a fever, was infectious. When he was told that the musketeers had less than enough shot for one engagement, he advised the casting of more from all that useless English pewter. He could do nothing to increase the miserable rations of green biscuits and rotting fish, but he reminded the men that their comrades had no more than this in their bellies when they took the stockade at Toubacanti. He was disappointed in Drummond when he found that the fort was half a mile from the nearest spring, but he wasted no time in angry protest. He ordered casks to be filled with water and taken inside the palisades. There were three hundred sick in the huts of New Edinburgh, and he put the ships' surgeons ashore to restore those who could be cured in time to work and fight. John Stewart, the young naval officer he had brought with him, was told that he could now build that fire-ship he so earnestly desired. He was given the fly-boat of the Hope of Bo'ness, and with James Spence, the boatswain of the flagship, he began to load it with twisted oakum, canvas, tarred shavings, barrels of resin and oil. Spence was offered £500 if he would take the boat out against the Spanish fleet when possible and necessary. He bravely agreed, but since he could not hope to survive he asked that the money be paid to his wife in Scotland. Upon his own responsibility, Fonab gave that assurance.
Every night the watchman on Point Look-out could see the lights of the Spanish ships, bright sparks in the darkness of sea and sky. Every day their signal-guns could be heard, the fluting call of trumpets. At each dusk the warships were a little closer to the bay than they had been at dawn. Ashore, men became careless in their uneasy fear. Spilt powder was accidentally ignited in one of the huts, and before the fire was stopped it had destroyed many of them. "Hereby many of our men lost all their goods and clothes," said Borland, "and several of the sick people being hastily pulled out to save them from the devouring flames, and exposed to the open air, it increased their sickness and hastened their death." This was clearly a warning. "Thus the anger of the Lord burnt against us round about, yet few of us duly laid it to heart."
On February 27 Nathaniel Old, master of the Jamaican sloop that had followed Fonab into the bay, agreed to leave with letters and dispatches. He was anxious to go. This mad quarrel between Dons and Scotchmen was not his affair. The Council's letter to the Directors was brief and soldierly, and reads as if it had been composed by Fonab. It said nothing of surrender, but gave news of the victory at Toubacanti and the colonists' confident belief that they could withstand any assault from the sea. "We have put ourselves here in the best order we can for receiving their fleet. So we are hopeful to give you as good an account of them as you have of their land army." This dispatch, with private letters to families and friends, from the ministers to the Moderator, was entrusted to one of the Land Captains, Thomas Hamilton. He went aboard the sloop at dusk, and was joined later by Thomas Drummond, who had promised Fonab that he would not leave Jamaica for Scotland before sending provisions to Caledonia. He too was anxious to be gone. It did not occur to him that he was leaving the Colony as James Byres had left it.
Nathaniel Old took his ship out on a west wind some hours before dawn, unseen by the Spaniards. Among the letters carried by Hamilton was one from Turnbull to his cousin. The musket- ball still in his shoulder, and unable to write, the young man had dictated it to a friend. "There is now lying before our bay twelve Spanish ships, several of them of considerable force. We know not what they intend...
5 A Nation's Humour
"The
honour and interest of the nation is engaged" Scotland, October 1699 to May 1700
Early in October a terrified English merchant, Samuel Tuckey, left Edinburgh at the gallop and did not feel safe until he had crossed the Border and reached Newcastle. There he took lodgings, at the White Hart by the post-house, and wrote an hysterical letter to the Lord Mayor of London. A week later this was placed upon James Vernon's crowded desk, and although the Secretary suspected that Mr. Tuckey's mind was probably disordered, it was not his practice to ignore any news that came from the north. He wrote at once to the Mayor of Newcastle, asking him to interrogate the anxious merchant. "He seems to have come lately in great fright from Edinburgh, and speaks of the ferment they are in now they begin to believe their expectations from Darien are vanished. He makes a very odd request, that three or four men with good horses should be sent for him, to secure his coming up to London; he imagining the Scots are lying in wait for him."
Vernon knew that the people of Scotland were "very clamorous and lay their disappointments at our door", but he believed they should blame their own stupidity and not his country for their misfortunes. The mobbing of frightened Englishmen like Tuckey troubled him less than the knowledge that the Jacobites could make irksome use of such discontent. He had already heard from Ireland that James Stuart's supporters there "base great hopes on the annoyance caused by the Darien affair." Those Scottish servants of the King who were in London were also alarmed, particularly Seafield. He had been there for a month, awaiting the King's return from Holland, and he feared that the behaviour of his countrymen would chill the hoped-for warmth of that reunion. All the news from Scotland was unsettling. "You cannot imagine," Cockbum of Ormiston wrote to Carstares, "what a general concern this nation is in.... Such a humour raging in the nation" Not only was the Edinburgh mob pursuing innocent Englishmen into the wynds, the Company was demanding another Parliamentary Address of Protest to the King, and Seafield knew how distasteful that would be to William.
When George Moffat's letter from New York had been confirmed without doubt, when the numbing shock passed into anger and pain, the Councillors-General of the Company were hastily summoned to Milne Square. Though the order came at short notice forty-three of them attended, many of them the greatest peers in Scotland. They were full of passion and noble self- denial, swearing that none would spare his purse until the Company's credit was restored. They unanimously agreed that they should address the King, asking for the recall of Parliament in November "in full confidence and expectation of having the most natural and cordial assistance from those who had first established the Company and promised it protection." Because none could sustain such unanimity for long, they then began to quarrel about the wording of the Address. The moderates were opposed to any precipitate protest against the Proclamations, saying there should be time for reflection. The hot-heads, inspired by Lord Belhaven's emotive syntax, clamoured for a vote, "Delay, or proceed to address?" Carried for the latter. And then another long debate, who should sit on the Committee for Drawing the Address? When finally chosen, it was dominated by Belhaven and his supporters. Yet another debate then, who should be sent to the Moderator, asking for a National Day of Fast and Prayer? They sat through supper and candle-time, and went home late as the bells of St. Giles' were calling ten o'clock.
The Committee for Drawing met the next morning at Milne Square, and by noon had prepared a draft Address that included both the demand for Parliament's recall and a protest against the Proclamations. Belhaven took it to Ross's coffee-house where several of the Councillors were dining. They suggested some minor amendments, and in the afternoon it was approved by a full meeting of the Council-General. Belhaven was instructed to send it to Seafield in London, with a request that it be placed before the King.
In another room at Milne Square nine Directors, sitting as a Court, were preparing an angry letter to those deserters believed to be skulking in New York—to Paterson, Vetch and the Drummonds, to all Sea and Land Officers. Though it was signed "your affectionate friends and humble servants", it was full of bitter, unforgiving words like shameful, dishonourable, knavery and cowardice. It wondered how men of trust could leave "so valuable and impregnable a settlement as you all wrote it was." Despite that Address being prepared next door, it refused to accept the Proclamations as an excuse for deserting the Colony, any man who so pleaded was a knave and a coward. All of them —gentlemen and commons—were ordered back to Caledonia at once, and were warned that "the only remedy for a fault is to amend it the best way you can."
The letter was sent to New York by the hand of Daniel Mackay, and he had been at sea aboard the frigate Speedy Return for three weeks when the Caledonia dropped anchor in the Sound of Islay on November 19. There she stayed for a day, like an errant child reluctant to face its angry parents. Robert Drummond wrote a report to the Directors, sending it to Glasgow in a fly-boat with two young officers, one of them his cousin Laurence Drummond. It gave a brief account of the Colony's sad history, and it declared that because of the English Proclamations the Landsmen had believed that they would receive no help from home, and that the Company itself had been destroyed. It lied: it said that the colonists would willingly have returned to Caledonia had there been seamen and ships to carry them from New York. It blamed the Councillors for the abrupt and frightened withdrawal. "They never intimated their intention of coming away forty-eight hours before they weighed anchor, but concealed their intention from several of the Colony who questioned them upon it."
The only Councillor who had returned, and who had therefore to carry the obloquy of all, was William Paterson. When the Caledonia reached Greenock on Tuesday, November 21, he was carried ashore weak and ill. It took him fourteen days to travel the sixty miles to Edinburgh, and he spent many of them in bed at an inn or the house of a friend. Appearing at last before the unsympathetic Directors, he asked leave to prepare a full report before questions were put to him. He finished it within two weeks, and it remains one of the saddest and most honest accounts of that wretched Colony.
There was no welcome for the men who came back with the Caledonia. There was only abuse and disgust. After all they had endured, the miracle of being alive when three times their number were dead, they were bewildered by the contempt of their friends and the shame of their families. Sir James Oswald refused to see his son. From the Widow Finlay's in Glasgow, a morning's ride from his home, the boy wrote to Thomas Aikman, sadly protesting that he was not alone in what his father called "treachery and cowardice", and bitterly agreeing that it might have been better for all had he died in Caledonia.
I am mightily sorry that I should have angered my father, but necessity has no laws. I wish he would forget my fault when I am gone, I know not whither but certainly it is to more misfortune, for I see plainly that my life is composed of a labyrinth of my own out of which I will never get an out-gate but by death's door. I design not to go back to Caledonia, but to somewhere else wherever my fate leads me, though it was one of my resolutions to go back and lay down my life cheerfully for my country's sake. Since it pleased God that I have preserved it still, and had not the good fortune (if I may term it so) to lose it in that place, and so have been happy by wanting the sight of so many miseries that have come upon myself and others of my relations which I have got notice of since I came to this town. I never intended, nor do intend, to trouble my father any more... Only I hope you will acquaint him that I wish him long life, wealth and happiness, and more comfort in the rest of his children than he has had in me.
The nation's humour had become a desperate hunger for revenge. When the mob could not find an Englishman to frighten, it bullied these miserable Caledonians, recognising them by their fever-yellow skins and their threadbare scarlet. The news from England caused riots and bonfires. The King—that "wise prince and steady to please his people" according to Seafield—had received the Address from the Council-General and had liked none of it. He coldly replied that he was sorry his northern kingdom had sust
ained such a sad loss, and that of course he would always protect and encourage its trade, but there should be no more talk of an immediate assembly of the Estates. "We will order that the Parliament shall meet when we judge the good of the nation does require it." The good of the nation, in William's opinion, would not require it before March 5. Though they were angered and humiliated by this contemptuous rejection of their Address, the Councillors made excellent use of it. They printed and circulated the King's reply, and they directed the fury it aroused into support for another Address, one which they hoped would be signed by thirty or forty of the most influential men in the nation. It would remind the King of the Company's rights and privileges, and advise him that the immediate calling of Parliament had never been more necessary.
William's patience with Scottish affairs, always short, now came to an ill-tempered end. On December 12 he wrote to his Privy Council in Edinburgh. He had never denied his subjects their just privileges, he had never discouraged their freedom to petition him in a dutiful manner, but to hear of a second Address in motion when he had said all there was to say in reply to the first was more than he was inclined to stomach. He particularly resented the fact that both Addresses were inspired by factious men who had never shown any affection for him or his Government. He ordered the Privy Council to make his displeasure known, and to take effectual steps within the law to stop the Address. The Company's friends were delighted to make that displeasure known, and they naturally emphasised the cavalier tone in which it was expressed. The effect was dramatic, and the reverse of what the King and his servants wished. There was another of those passionate manifestations of national unity which ennobled the Scots in the seventeenth century. All manner of men, as individuals and corporate bodies, demanded the right to sign the Address. As copies were sent to the shires and burghs it became a people's protest, a declaration of loyalty to Scotland's Company and Scotland's Parliament. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Marchmont, realised that he could not proceed against the subscribers without challenging a subject's right to petition the King, that William could not insist upon such interference without breaking the promises he had made when he accepted the Crown of Scotland. "We have a very tender point in hand," Marchmont told Seafield, "and if I should adventure upon prosecutions not sustainable by law, that would be to open a pack and sell no ware." He decided to do nothing.
THE DARIEN DISASTER Page 32
