There they waited for one hour, another, and then a third. They listened to the sounds of the forest, the distant murmur of the sea, but no attack came. At last de Guevara ordered his command down the hill, cautiously and behind a skirmish line of fifteen men. No Scots were met at the bottom, but when the ensign leading the skirmishers had gone another two miles he suddenly saw the white sand of the bay, the bare yards of the Caledonians' ships, and the smoke of their fires. His blue and yellow uniform, bright against the trees, was seen by Captain Thomas Mackintosh whose company held the neck of the peninsula. A drummer had beaten to arms along the earthen rampart soon after the outlying picquet came in, and now a scarlet platoon crossed the ditch and advanced on the ensign with a hurrah. He and his men boldly stood their ground, fired two volleys, and then fell back to de Guevara's ambuscade. Met by a violent, unexpected flame of musketry, the Scots dropped down the slope of the hill and took what shelter they could behind the trees until Mackintosh came up with the rest of his company. Three times this stubborn Highlander led an attack against de Guevara's hidden infantry, and at the third repulse his men broke and ran to the safety of their ditch.
De Guevara walked over the little battlefield, sword in hand. He counted the bodies of seventeen Caledonians, and believed that there must be more undiscovered in the trees. He had no dead, and only thirteen wounded. He was pleased by his victory, by the arms the Scots had thrown away, but he did not advance. Had he done so, he might have carried the ditch that afternoon and driven Mackintosh back to the huts of New Edinburgh. Instead he retired, later arguing that his wounded needed care, that much of his powder was damp and his provisions spoiled. He fell back beyond the hill where he had made his empty stand, and did not feel secure until he had reached the bank of the River Matanzas near Caret Bay. There, with the instinctive reflex of an engineer, he began to build a fort.
On March 3 the warship El Florizant arrived off the inlet and Pimienta came ashore with three hundred picked infantrymen. Leaving seamen and gunners to disembark his artillery, he marched the soldiers to de Guevara's camp. Though he had no high opinion of the Campmaster's skill and valour, he approved of the fort. This was something demanded by the complicated formality of siege warfare. "I continued the work of entrenchment," he wrote in his diary, "laying out the form of this fortification and issuing orders which the Campmaster and other officers were to observe, both as to the watch and ward of the camp, and also in the distribution of the subsistence, arms and munitions." From the canebrakes to the west of the river two of Mackintosh's scouts watched with astonished curiosity, crawling forward until they were seen and fired upon by the Spanish sentries. They quickly fled, but they had alarmed the camp. Pimienta put his men in battle array until his Indians convinced him that his five hundred men were in no danger of attack.
His fort begun, Pimienta took the next step in the ritual dance of war and sent a drummer to the Scots, cordially inviting them to surrender. The generosity of the King his master, said his letter, obliged him to do this before his fleet entered their harbour and his soldiers stormed their trenches. He hoped they would accept his invitations, otherwise his men would give no quarter in the assault. Moreover, and this with disarming frankness, once his ships were inside the bay the prevailing wind would prevent them from leaving, and they would "be unable to go about the business in which I may need them." The drummer returned to Camp Matanzas the next day, and the letter he brought from the four Councillors had none of Pimienta's polished elegance. Without a good interpreter, it said, a clear understanding of the Governor's offer had been impossible, but if it meant that the Caledonians were to be attacked then they would fight. They were men of honour, confident in the Almighty's favour.
Such a response was no more than Pimienta had expected from chivalrous enemies. At the Caret Bay inlet he ordered ashore more men, guns and supplies. Another landing of infantry and artillery was made to the west of the harbour mouth, with orders to push their batteries forward until they commanded the sea- gate and the south shore of the bay. He was pleased to hear that Cordones might be with him soon from Santa Maria, with seven or eight hundred Spaniards, Negroes, Mulattos and Indians. He would then command more than two thousand men ashore and twelve ships at sea. He was in no hurry. There were rules to observe, the greatest captains of Europe had laid down the pattern for an assault on an entrenched and fortified position. Day by day he moved his outlying picquets forward, a cannon-shot in advance of their following companies. As the picquets approached so Mackintosh's ragged skirmish lines fell back. The weather was changing and the rains were coming. Powder was damp, and muskets hung fire in the weird mists of morning when a man in blue came face to face with a scare-crow in scarlet.
In pain from a wound that would not heal, light-headed from its attendant fever, Campbell of Fonab now had little authority in the Colony. Thomas Kerr commanded the defence, hampered by Vetch and Gibson. Lindsay was dying from waste and fever, but he came still to Council meetings, giving his colourless assent to all that the others proposed. More than a third of the Scots were sick and unable to stand, and the rest little better, forcing green biscuits and rotting fish down their throats each morning and evening. "The hand of the Lord was heavy upon us at this time," said Borland, "our sickness and mortality much increasing, and many daily dying, most of our able officers were taken away by death." Among these officers was Lord Mungo Murray, and because of his name, his rank, and the love his gentle nature inspired, he was not thrown into a communal grave by the marsh. He was buried inside the fort, below the Company's standard.
Toward the middle of the month Pimienta reinforced his picquets to company strength and sent them forward in attacks on the peninsula. From dawn until dusk the garrison in Fort St. Andrew, the sick in the huts, heard the heavy echo of shots on the damp air, the quick drum-beat of an advance, the long roll for retreat. The attacks came along the seaward side in the north, and from the shore of the bay in the south. There were ugly, confused struggles in the trees and in the water, voices crying in pain, the crash of volley-firing across the ditch. Thomas Mackintosh was mortally wounded in the last of these inconclusive engagements, and was carried away to die in his hut behind the rampart. There were no lieutenants or ensigns left alive in his company, and the command now fell to Lauchlan Bain, the young man from Mackay country who had asked to serve as a Volunteer until merit and opportunity won his promotion.
There was much consternation of heart among us at this time (said Borland) and sinking fears and little faith and hope: our condition now seeming most desperate like. Death on all hands stared us in the face, and indeed most of us had the sentence of death in ourselves, many among us said. They believed there was not a people in the world in more calamitous and desplorable circumstances that we were at this time.
The Ministers asked the Councillors to declare a Day of Prayer and Humiliation, but were roughly told that there was no time for such things. Primly hurt, they went alone to the Shades of Love, and there sent up their own mournful appeals to the Hearer of Prayer.
Shortly after dawn on March 18 the Spaniards came out of the mist in great strength, marching on the ditch with muskets presented and drums beating. There was no resistance. Lauchlan Bain had been given the opportunity he desired but could not find the courage to merit it. He ran, and his shocked and demoralised men ran with him. Cautiously the Spaniards crossed the ditch and advanced along the shore of the bay. To their front they could see the Scots retreating into the huts of New Edinburgh. Two miles away, across a low sandy sprit, they saw the Caledonian ships with gun-ports open. Though no shot was fired against them, they halted, threw up entrenchments and stood to arms behind them. Pimienta sent a company into the trees on his right, to find and hold an inlet on the north side of the peninsula where he might land his guns. He sent another along the high ground to Look-out Point, flanking the fort. The watchman was long gone, but the Spanish found his mean hut and his discarded scarlet coat. They began to build a gun empl
acement, looking down on the ships and the fort.
That afternoon Vetch, Gibson and the dying Lindsay called a general meeting of all Land and Sea Officers. Sixteen tired and dispirited men gathered in Fort St. Andrew, and there was little argument when Vetch proposed that they capitulate on honourable terms. Their vote in favour was unanimous. Bitterly ashamed of his comrades, Fonab was not present. Perhaps he remembered that two or three of these officers were men of Argyll's who had broken their swords with him when they were shamefully betrayed into surrender at Dixemude. Nor would he sign the letter which the Councillors wrote to Pimienta, and had he agreed with it he would certainly have insisted that it was phrased with honesty. Weakly evading the word surrender, it said that because the Scots did not wish to be responsible for any ill-feeling between the Kings of Great Britain and Spain they would like to know what terms the Spanish might offer.
Pimienta received the letter next day at vespers, aboard the frigate San Antonio where he had gone to watch the disembarkation of two carriage guns. He waited a day before replying, until he had seen the field-pieces ashore and on their way to Look-out Point. The letter he then wrote was long and courteous, but its meaning was brutally blunt. Since the Scots were not officers of any crown or government acknowledged by his royal master, he could not talk of terms until they had surrendered. At his camp on the peninsula the next day, within sight of the Scottish outposts, he received yet another appeal. Still the Councillors prevaricated. The lack of an interpreter.... Some person skilled in English, French or Flemish.... Also we send herewith an Act of Parliament.... Pimienta seemed to enjoy the slow pavane of such exchanges as much as he relished the formal manoeuvres of war. He replied that he had understood all the Caledonians' letters, and the French and Latin translations that had obligingly accompanied them. Any rupture between the Crowns of Spain and Great Britain would be the fault of the Scots. They were no more than dependents of a merchant company barely tolerated by their king, yet he would be generous, he would treat them as if they were William's officers and vassals.
He spent the rest of that wet day strengthening his hold on the eastern end of the peninsula. Leaving a strong guard of militia and levies to protect his tented camp, he advanced two hundred and fifty regulars to within cannon-shot of New Edinburgh. There they dug trenches and built gabions for two more carriage-guns that had been landed from the San Antonio and dragged overland from the neck.
At eight o'clock in the morning of March 21 a Spanish outpost in advance of the forward trenches challenged Thomas Kerr and a drummer. Both had white handkerchiefs tied to their sleeves. They were allowed no further than the sentinel's presented musket, and they waited in the chilling rain until Pimienta came out to them. It was early, and the Spaniard was in no mood for lengthy courtesies. Had the Scots officer come to submit? No, said Kerr, but he had the authority to suggest a truce for thirty hours. Soon after dawn to-morrow a senior officer would come with absolute authority to treat. He proposed an exchange of hostages during the truce, and Pimienta sent him away with two aides from his own staff. Within the hour: two Scots captains were returned, "whom I ordered quartered in the advance post, all pleasant treatment and entertainment possible to be afforded them."
At seven the next morning a drummer once more approached the outpost, beating a parley. With him were William Vetch and James Main, the Colony's interpreter who had come in the hope that his French might be understood by Pimienta. Vetch said that the Scots were ready to surrender if they could leave with all their guns, ships and stores. Pimienta was astonished. It was, he thought, a most unworthy suggestion. All a vanquished garrison could expect was the honour of marching out with arms shouldered and colours flying, and that only after a valorous defence. All else was the rightful prize of the victors. He called up the captains he held and released them to Vetch, demanding the return of his aides. He went back to his breakfast, and when he was told that the Scots had been working on their fort during the truce he ordered a company to clear their outposts from New Edinburgh. He sent another to reinforce his gunners on Point
Look-out. Thus the hopeful armistice ended miserably, with a spatter of musketry in the trees and the death of three Scots below the hill.
The Caledonians were now contained in their fort and the shallow, water-logged trenches their outposts held beyond its moat. Though they occasionally sent out a fighting-patrol, toward the Spanish lines or Point Look-out, the men were weak from hunger and were easily beaten off. Still Pimienta made no grand assault. Two days after the truce ended, Carrizoli arrived from Toubacanti with a hundred Indians, and although they did litde more than eat the supplies they brought they were followed the next day by Cordones with two companies of regulars from Santa Maria. These were less than Pimienta had expected, but he sent them forward at once.
March 28 & 29 (recorded Borland), the Spaniards near us. Some of their musketeers advanced forward near the skirts of the wood contiguous to our Fort, and fired both these days upon our Fort, the bullets flying over our heads, we had only one man wounded at this time. Our men on the other side were also firing toward them, they keeping themselves still darkened in the woods and behind the great trees. It was a great loss to us that since the Spaniards had got so near our Fort they debarred us from our watering-place, which was about half a mile distant from our settlement, for none then were suffered or durst adventure to go out of the Fort to fetch water, the enemy lying hid in the woods. So our poor distressed people were necessitate to dig for water within the Fort, which is brackish, puddle-unwholesome water. This was most hurtful and pernicious to our men, especially considering how bad and unwholesome our old, sair and spoiled provisions now was. And as for other liquors at this time, to give to the sick and the dying, we had little or none, or any other sustenance that was suitable or comfortable, and moreover our Surgeon's drugs were now almost all exhausted, and our Fort indeed like a hospital of sick and dying men.
Seaward from the palisades the Scots could see the Spanish fleet, great castles of blue and scarlet and gold, their sails clewed, their pennants flying, and their upper gun-ports open.
They lay beyond range, and each day their boats ferried more men and more guns to the peninsula and the south shore of the bay. On March 29, an armed launch from the San Juan Bautista came in to the little bay below Pelican Point, presumably in support of the outposts there. The Scots fired upon it with cannon and muskets. It escaped without injury but the firing continued all day, a senseless, frustrated anger echoing across the water and the trees. Yet this little incident lifted the spirits of the Scots, particularly John Stewart, and he asked leave to send out his forgotten fire-ship. James Spence the boatswain took it out at eight o'clock that night, but before he could make the long tack about and come to windward of the Spanish fleet he was sighted by the look-out of the San Juan Bautista. Drums beat on the flagship, and in the flash of musketry and cannon from her high decks he saw two launches approaching to leeward. He let the fly-boat run before the wind and back into the harbour.
During the night of March 30 the Spanish made a landing in strength below Pelican Point. Seven launches from the fleet brought guns, mortars, timber and men. By dawn a gun-battery, well protected by gabions and fascines, had been built within pistol-shot of the moat. The Scots fired upon it all day, and although they did little damage to it they prevented its gunners from cannonading their rotting walls. Before dusk there was silence, a veil of smoke across the bay, and then a drum beat a parley from the Spanish lines. An officer advanced on the moat with his hat in his hand. The letter he carried from Pimienta asked the Scots to consider their weakness and the Spaniards' strength. Were they stubbornly resolved to resist his last assault by land and sea he could not prevent their total annihilation. The friendship between the King his master and their own compelled him to ask again for their surrender.
The letter was less than honest. Pimienta's diary recorded that most of his men were ill with fever and the rest exhausted. The rainy season was b
eginning, and he did not believe that he could take the fort by assault or support a long siege.
THE DARIEN DISASTER Page 35
