THE DARIEN DISASTER

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

  The Caledonians' reply reached him an hour later. From somewhere, perhaps from Fonab, the Land Officers and the Sea Captains had found the momentary corn-age to over-rule the Councillors. Pride and self-preservation would not permit them to give Pimienta their ships and guns. His terms, they told him, were shameful and unworthy, and if they were accepted the Scots could never return home. "Wherefore, we consider it better to die honourably than to live without honour." Though he was genuinely grieved by the reply, Pimienta admired its courage. It obeyed the chivalrous code he himself observed, and it called upon him to make an equally noble gesture.

  I ordered Campmaster Don Melchor de Guevara to advance to their fort with a drummer to summon them and to say to them on my behalf that it was not my desire to deprive any man of honour, nor would my obligations permit me to do so, especially when I held them to be honourable men who had defended themselves as such; and that they might realise this to be the truth, to bid one of their commanding officers to return with him under the protection of my word to parley with me.

  While de Guevara waited at the broken gate of the fort a meeting of Councillors and Officers discussed the offer he had brought. Lindsay was dead that morning, but had he still been alive he would have agreed with Vetch and Gibson. They said they would ask Pimienta for better terms, but even without them the Colony must surrender. From his sick-bed, Fonab sent a passionate appeal against such a decision. There should be no treating with the Spaniards, except as honourable men with sword in hand. But though he was ready for this, and might even have welcomed death in some bloody, slithering struggle once the Spaniards broke into the fort, there was no heart left among the others. Less than three hundred of the Scots could now stand at their posts. Fever was killing sixteen a day, more than Spanish musketry. The bread they had was green with worms, the fish so stinking that starving men could scarcely swallow it. The last of the pewter had been melted into shot, and there was little powder left that was not damp or impure. Surrender was inevitable, but the shame of it was bitter, and long after it was done even Borland would feel compelled to defend these men he had so often denounced and vilified.

  If the impartial reader weighs these things, and candidly considers the case of these distressed people in the wilderness at this time, I think he shall have no just cause to reflect upon or find fault with our officers and chief men for accepting of a capitulation with the Spaniards in such circumstances. Whoever shall reproach and blame them for it, so they manifest little of Christian sympathy with them that are in affliction when they themselves live at ease. So I must tell them they know little of what it is to be in an American wilderness in such circumstances, and I would not wish them (were it lawful to wish evil to any person) to be in sadder circumstances in this world.

  From the palisades a Scottish drummer beat an acceptance of the Spanish offer to treat. William Vetch put on his sword and walked down to the nearest outpost with James Main and de Guevara. There they waited until Pimienta came up with a cloud of officers. Vetch asked what terms the Scots might expect. "I answered," reported Pimienta, "that I would permit them to evacuate with all military honours, with all their chattels and vessels excepting the warship Rising Sun." Vetch said he must discuss this with his officers, and was given two hours. He returned within the time and pleaded with Pimienta not to take the flagship. Had the Governor insisted, the Scots would probably have surrendered the ship, but he graciously let them keep it. He was not altogether generous. That morning his frigates had driven away two strange ships that tried to enter the harbour, and he was afraid that reinforcements might be on their way to the Scots.

  In the rain, and at noon on Sunday, March 31, the Articles of Capitulation were signed by Pimienta and counter-signed by Vetch and Gibson. James Main had written them in Latin so that they might be mutually understood. The Scots were to march out of the fort immediately, with drums beating and colours flying. They had two weeks in which to wood and water their ships, to load their guns and goods, and to embark themselves. They must then be gone on the first fair wind. Remembering their Cuna allies, the ministers asked for an assurance that the Spanish would not ill-treat them. Pimienta angrily replied that the King of Spain needed no advice on how to deal with his Indian subjects. When Alexander Shields protested, the Governor told him to mind his own business, "Cura tua negotia!" Unused to such a reproof in the language of his beloved classics, Mr. Shields meekly answered "Curabo."

  The Caledonians abandoned the fort the next day, carrying their sick, their arms, their drums and their colours. Pimienta had no time to be shocked or surprised by their wretched appearance. He had too much difficulty in assembling three hundred of his own men to take possession of the fort. Some of them were seamen, wearing uniforms that had been stripped from the dead in the trenches. They marched in, raised the standard of Spain and retired, leaving one sentry at the gate and another on the palisades.

  During the night of April 1 one of the strange ships that had been driven from Golden Island slipped into the harbour. Thomas Drummond was back. At Port Royal in Jamaica he had found two of the Company's ships, the frigate Speedy Return and the sloop Content. The first had brought Daniel Mackay from Scotland and was bound for the Colony, but there was no knowing where James Byres intended to sail the other. Since the man had not yet left for Scotland, and could do no harm to Drummond's reputation if he were further delayed, the grenadier decided that both ships should sail at once for Caledonia with all the provisions they could carry. Byres was reluctant, but he could not refuse. When Spanish warships drove them from the harbour mouth, Drummond said they should come by the lee of Golden Island that night and enter under darkness. He told the master of the Content to steer by the topsail yards of the Speedy Return and to follow her in without fear. The captain was willing enough, but when Byres saw the stern-lights of the Spanish fleet he picked up a billet of wood and threatened to kill the man if he took the ship any further. The master shrugged his shoulders and stood out to sea for Jamaica.

  Drummond was as angry and as bitter as Fonab when he heard that the Colony had surrendered. He sullenly kept to the Speedy Return and would not speak to the colonists, though he gave them the provisions he carried. He also delivered the dispatches which Mackay had brought from Scotland, and there was a mocking irony in their threats, promises, orders and exhortations. They had been found in Mackay's valise. Somewhere between Jamaica and Caledonia, leaning over the stern to fish for sharks, the hot-tempered young lawyer had fallen into the sea. "And so," said Borland, "perished in a very lamentable manner, being torn in pieces by those ravenous and devouring sharks."

  The embarkation was slow, for the Scots were weak and the work was hard. The long-boat of the Rising Sun ran upon the sunken rock and was abandoned for the want of strength to haul it off. Angered by the arrival of the Speedy Return, Pimienta would give no help. When Captain Andreas sent canoes to assist his friends, the Spaniards chained him in a hut. Vetch and Gibson would not protest, the one too sick and the other too indifferent, happy in his yellow cabin with his pipe and dram. But Drummond sent an angry message to the Spanish camp. If ever he had an opportunity treat Pimienta as Andreas was treated he would do it in good heart. The ministers also said nothing. It was as if they had suddenly realised how close they had come to the fires of the Inquisition and a painful martyrdom for the Kirk.

  Many of the poor, distressed Caledonians (said Borland) were sensible of God's wonderful, seasonable, and preventing mercies that had thus delivered them from falling a pray to the teeth of their bloody, Popish enemies, with whom they expected to find no mercy.

  By the evening of April 11 the Scots were all aboard. Like Paterson before him, Fonab had been carried aboard in a litter, weakly protesting. One man only refused to leave. He was Henry Erskine, brother-in-law to Haldane of Gleneagles and the dear friend of young Colin Campbell with whom he had been apprenticed to Pincarton on the first expedition. Captured with the Dolphin, he had returned to Caledonia as a boatswai
n's boy aboard one of the Spanish ships. Pimienta offered to restore him to his countrymen under the Articles of Capitulation, but he said that now he had been accepted into the Catholic Church he would remain with his new friends. The Scots mourned him as if he were dead.

  The Caledonian ships weighed anchor the next morning, but the seamen were so weak they were unable to warp the clumsy vessels out of the bay. Their bloody Popish enemies now sent boats to help them, and for a day they lay under the guns of the Spanish fleet until a fair wind sprang up from the east and carried them away. By noon they were out of sight.

  Before they left, the Protestant Scots had witnessed one last humiliating ceremony. The largest hut in New Edinburgh was consecrated to Saint Charles. There mass was said before Don Juan Pimienta and his officers, their musketeers kneeling on the earth outside its door.

  "Lord, when Thy hand is lifted they will not see it" From Caledonia, April to August 1700

  The failure of the second expedition was more disastrous than the first. None of its four great ships returned. Thirteen hundred men, women and boys had left the Clyde in September, and almost a thousand were dead within the year. Of the remainder, a handful only came back to Scotland.

  Francis Borland's survival was providential, though not for the reasons he might have argued. He lived to publish his journal. His compassion was confined in a cell of bigotry. He could not accept the meaningless tragedy of human waste, or even acknowledge that it might be the result of incompetence, selfishness and frailty. He saw it as a grand and terrible visitation, Divine punishment for a nation's sins, and he naturally accepted his own survival as an exculpation and a reward. Beneath the flesh of jejune theology, however, his journal has a firm skeleton of vivid reporting. He carefully recorded the horror of that middle passage from Caledonia to Jamaica during which the colonists endured more misery than they had believed possible, even on the peninsula.

  As they had been exercised with sore sickness and mortality while in Caledonia, so now when we were at sea it much increased upon us, and no wonder it was, for the poor sick men were sadly crowded together, especially aboard the Rising Sun, like so many hogs in a sty or sheep in a fold, so that their breath and noisome smell infected and poisoned one another. Neither was there anything suitable or comfortable to give to the sick and dying, the best was a little spoiled oatmeal and water, and poorly were they attended in their sickness.

  And it was most uncomfortable and dangerous work for the poor Ministers to go down among them, and visit them in their sad and dying condition, their noisome stench being ready to choke and suffocate any. Malignant fevers and fluxes were the most common diseases, which swept away great numbers from among us. From aboard one ship, the Rising Sun, they would sometimes bury in the sea eight in one morning, besides what died out of the other ships. And when men were taken with these diseases, they would sometimes die like men distracted, in a very sad and fearful- like manner; but this was yet more lamentable to be seen among these poor, afflicted and plagued people, that for all God so afflicted them, yet they sinned still the more, were as hard and as impenitent as before, would still curse and swear when God's hand was heavy on them, and their neighbours dying and dead about them.

  Once they had cleared Golden Island it was difficult for the ill-manned ships to keep together, and before dusk on April 13 the Rising Sun was lost to the others. When she came up with them, some days later, the Hope of Bo'ness was leaking badly by the head. Her captain, Richard Dalling, brought her up on the flagship's quarter, calling across the water. Would Gibson take his passengers? The Councillor did so unwillingly, and they came aboard to die. With half of his crew at work on the pumps, Dalling put his helm over and sailed south-east by east for Carthagena. There he offered his ship to the Spanish in exchange for the freedom of himself and his men.

  Bitterly disillusioned by the surrender of the Colony, Drummond told John Baillie, master of the Speedy Return, to steer for Jamaica as soon as his ship cleared the harbour and to shorten sail for no one. Aboard the Ann of Caledonia, Campbell of Fonab advised her captain to make for New York. She was there within the month, and his own advice probably saved Fonab's life, for his wound and its fever would have killed him in the Caribbean.

  It was the first week in May before the other three ships sighted the blue and green hills of Jamaica. The Duke of Hamilton was the first to drop anchor off Blewfields, followed next day by the flagship, and one day more by the Hope. Two hundred and fifty of their crews and passengers had been thrown overboard in the middle passage.

  There was little relief and no consolation at the English island. No credit could be obtained from Jamaican merchants, and without it the ships could not be refitted for the Atlantic voyage. The rotting, useless goods in their holds were wanted by no one. Some of their seamen and many of the Planters went ashore in the dark of night, and like the survivors of the first expedition they sold themselves to the plantations in return for food and clothing. There were good men and women on the island who did what they could for the Caledonians. Two English army surgeons brought rum and sugar and medicine, bravely going below decks to treat the sick and prepare the dead for decent burial. They asked no payment, and reluctantly accepted the gift of a few muskets. A rich and handsome widow called Ricaut sent beef she had bought from her own purse. Mrs. Isabel Murray, a Scotswoman who had turned her house into a hospital for the sick of the Saint Andrew—and buried some of them at her own expense —now gave up her bed to take more.

  The dying continued quixotically. Sometimes there were no deaths for a week, and then five, eight or ten in one day. The only solace for the living was the rum they could buy or steal. "The intemperance of many of them," said Borland, rightly if smugly, "did hasten their deaths."

  One hundred died in two months. Among them James Main, dead in the house of a friend at Port Royal. Two young men whom the ministers had been training as divinity students, thrown overboard from the Rising Sun. John Baillie, captain of the Speedy Return, and John Baillie, surgeon of the Hope. Lauchlan Bain, released from the shame of his cowardice on the peninsula. James Spence of the fire-ship, dying within hours of his small son. The Earl of Galloway's brother. The Laird of Culbin and his son, Ensign William Kinnaird. Robert Johnson, who had hoped to teach the Indians both Scots and English, following a wife and a son already dead in Caledonia. The eager young volunteers and their tutor from Glasgow University. George Winram the distiller, the goldsmith Robert Keil. John Hunter, who had minted no coins from the mythical ores of Darien. Captain Walter Duncan, master of the Duke of Hamilton. The Laird of Dunlop and the Laird of Minto. Thomas Kerr the engineer, and Alexander Shields....

  The death of their dear friend shocked and frightened both Borland and Stobo. Yet if God chose to punish the sinful with a just death, so he might reward himself by taking such excellent jewels as Shields and Dalgleish. The Cameronians' chaplain died within days of preaching his only sermon at Jamaica, upon the text Hosiah 14:19, The ways erf the Lord, are right. Having preached it, he left the ships and went to live in Port Royal "He had been heart-weary," said Borland, "and broken with this company of men, among whom he had laboured and conversed so long with so little success." He also had a premonition of his own death, telling Borland that it would come in the month of June, as indeed it did. But he had not expected it this year, for he had brought himself a passage on an English ship shortly sailing for London. Mrs. Murray spent £13 on his funeral and nobody promised to repay her, not even Shields' brother who was a Volunteer aboard the Rising Sun.

  There was a great bitterness at so many deaths and so much sickness. Only the ministers saw the hand of God in this, others suspected the greedy fingers of John Munro of Coul. A doctor called Crawford, who had sailed with the Unicorn and now practised in Jamaica, swore that Munro had cheated the Company, robbing the surgeons' chests of the medicines the Directors had ordered.

  Toward the end of June the Company's relief ship Margaret arrived at Port Royal, her foremast sprung
in two places and her canvas torn. Her master, Leonard Robertson, had taken her up to the mouth of Caledonia Bay before it was seen that the Spaniards were now there. Since then he had been in no hurry to reach Jamaica. When Patrick MacDowall urged haste, saying the fugitive colonists must be in need of provisions, Robertson amiably told him that "To-morrow's a new day." A stiff gale at last maimed the ship and blew her into Port Royal. MacDowall did what he could for the survivors, distributing the Margaret's provisions where justified by the orders given him in Edinburgh. He also delivered the Company's letters of credit to merchants ashore, and he gave a barrel of meal to Mrs. Murray for her expenses in burying Alexander Shields and four young officers from the Rising Sun.

  He was no more fortunate when he approached the Governor than others had been. Sir William Beeston was polite, but unhelpful. Now in receipt of letters from James Vernon, telling him not to hinder the sailing of any Scots ships, he did not think he was thereby obliged to assist them on their way. He had recently hanged some Spaniards who outrageously claimed that by pirating a New England sloop they had been taking reprisals against Caledonia. Although he thought the rogues deserved the noose, and was ready to hang a few more if necessary, it was all more trouble than the Scots were worth.

  Aboard the Caledonian ships, in the lodgings which some officers had taken ashore, there were now bitter disagreements and angry recriminations. Colin Campbell, who had brought the Saint Andrew to Blewfields a year ago, and who insanely believed that he might yet take her to sea again, quarrelled with his friend Drummond. Each accused the other of quitting the Colony with shame and dishonour. William Vetch, too ill at times to leave his cabin on the Hope, bickered with Dr. Blair, the Company's agent, and intrigued with Leonard Robertson. James Gibson drunkenly upbraided MacDowall, claiming that when the Margaret came in she should have fired a salute to his flagship. MacDowall insolently taunted him. "If I had met him riding in Caledonia Bay he should have had all the guns we had." Even when the survivors diced for it, there were miserable squabbles over the property of those who had died, sometimes a few coins, a sword-belt, a linen cravat. Declaring that it was in payment of a debt owing him, Gibson took all that was left by Andrew Stewart, Lord Galloway's brother. And Vetch, according to Robert Turn- bull, had two purses of money in his cabin for which there was no proper accounting. On the periphery of all these sad disputes there hovered the hopeful, ingratiating smile of James Byres. He was ostracised by all except Vetch, who weakly restored him to the Council. "It is but reasonably just," MacDowall wrote in his journal, "that such should have been the event of our Colony when such cowardly, dishonourable, self-opinionated puppies had the guiding of it as Byres is."