The Council of five—Vetch, Gibson, Drummond, Campbell and Byres—met infrequently and invariably in disunion. They were without spirit and purpose, determined only on returning to Scotland yet afraid of their countrymen's contempt. Their single unanimous resolution was an order for the arrest of Henry Paton, whose sloop had deserted the Unicorn. He was placed under guard until the Company could bring him before the Justices of Jamaica. He thought this would be never, and was content to remain on the island for the rest of his life.
In the frustrating heat, within sight of the mocking beauty of the Blue Mountains, angry discontent spread beyond the narrow circle of a few officers. Palling had arrived from Carthagena with his crew, and he asked MacDowall to take them to Scotland in the Margaret. "I could not but tell them it savoured neither of too much honour nor honesty." Aboard that ship her mate had called upon the crew to sail her out as a buccaneer. MacDowall would have hanged him from the mainmast yard, but Robertson let the man go with a gentle reprimand. The Rising Sun lost many of her crew and passengers by desertion, and for a time she was ruled by a seaman called William Pearson and a group of starving delegates from the lower deck. "Gibson, that fine brave commander," said MacDowall, "allowing them to come to his roundhouse and make their demands with their caps on their heads, and afterwards without any orders than their own to release some of their number out of the bilboes." But the leaders of this sad and hopeless mutiny were winnowed by death, and the rest fell to drunken brawling among themselves.
"Lord," said Francis Borland, "when Thy hand is lifted, they will not see."
By some miracle of organisation and command that no one recorded, or perhaps in desperate fear alone, the ships at last put to sea. The Speedy Return sailed first, urged on by Drummond's stubborn resolve to be in Scotland before Byres. The Content followed her, with Colin Campbell who had now abandoned the rotting ship at Port Royal. On July 21 the Rising Sun weighed anchor and steered north about the island with her dying passengers, a sick and inadequate crew, and a master who rarely left his yellow cabin. She was followed the next day by the Hope and the Duke of Hamilton. Francis Borland was aboard none of these ships. Inspired by Mr. Shields' example, and "directed by the wise and well-ordered providence of the Lord", he had sailed on a New Englander the week before and was now on his way to Boston. It had pleased a holy and all-wise God, he later wrote, to save the lives of some of his ministers. "The Lord preserving, leading, healing, strengthening and upholding all the way. Thus when once Lot was got out of Sodom into Zoar, then without any longer delay the Lord rained destruction from Heaven."
Destruction from heaven, literal if not divine, first struck the Hope. She sailed westward, and before she cleared Negril Point she was leaking from midships to stern. Between Jamaica and Cuba she ran into heavy squalls that first beat her back and then veered, driving her toward a lee shore on the island of Camanos. Her decks were crowded with sick and dying, her crew could scarcely haul a sheet. She mounted the shoreward rocks by night, and the living still aboard her were taken off by the Spanish. William Vetch had at last died of his fever, and had been turned overboard within a few days of leaving Jamaica.
On August 14, in the Gulf of Florida, the Rising Sun ran into a gale that carried away all her masts and stove in most of her boats. Of the hundred and forty seamen and landsmen who had left Blewfields with her, twenty-eight had already died. The rest were now ready to accept death, with prayers or rum according to their courage. But the storm had aroused Gibson from his lethargy. It was a challenge he understood, had met before, and did not fear. He bullied his crew and the landsmen into erecting a jury-mast. Though the ship was leaking badly, he kept her afloat for ten days and brought her to the bar at Charleston in Carolina. She was too low in the water to cross it and make the nine miles upriver to where the Duke of Hamilton was already close-reefed and at anchor. For three days and nights the flagship's crew and passengers worked to lighten her, at the pumps, heaving guns and cargo overboard. On the fourth day a small galley, bound for New York, came downriver from Charleston. Though her master could not, or would not help, he waited long enough to take a letter which Gibson wrote to the Directors. It survives, stained and hastily-written, inexplicably unsigned. It gives a brief account of the ship's departure from Jamaica, the storm that dismasted her, and from the last paragraph it is clear that the bitter labour of three days had been for nothing.
By what is said you may judge of our hard circumstances. Notwithstanding whereof, God in his infinite mercy has brought us this length. Our men were fatigued with pumping, the water being six feet above the keelson all the night and next day after our misfortune, and at writing.
James Byres, who had chosen to sail on the flagship rather than the Content, now decided that it was time to leave her. With fourteen others, including Alexander Stobo and his wife, he went ashore in the long-boat. None of them, understandably, reported what Gibson may have said at their departure. Three nights later a black hurricane came up from the Florida keys. It sank the Duke of Hamilton where she lay at anchor, and it plucked the flagship from the bar and threw her out to sea. She went down with James Gibson and all her remaining company. Some of her dead, her good Berlin oak and the golden convolutes of her stern came ashore with the tide, but she took the rising sun of her figure-head with her.
Alexander Stobo never returned to his ministry in Scotland. He established another in the land to which the Lord, in his charity, had safely delivered him. He sired a sturdy line which included Theodore Roosevelt, during whose term as President America built the canal that was the ultimate realisation of William Paterson's dream. Stobo had no regret, no pity for the Caledonians who were dead.
They were such a rude company [he wrote to Borland] that I believe Sodom never declared such impudence in sinning as they. Any observant eye might see that they were running the way they went, hell and judgement was to be seen upon them and in them before the time. You saw them bad, but I saw them worse, their cup was full, they could hold no more. They were ripe, they must be cut down by the sickle of His wrath.
Francis Borland agreed. "They were a sad reproach to the nation from which they were sent."
7 As Bitter as Gall
"Now the state of that affair is quite altered... rest satisfied" Scotland, 1700 to 1707
Alexander Campbell of Fonab came home in July. His shoulder was still stiff from the Toubacanti bullet, but the hurt he felt was the wound to his pride. His country had been dishonoured and he openly blamed the Company, accusing it and its colonial Council of treachery. Though he despised them, the Directors and the Councillors-General honoured him. The nation would have allowed them to do no less. He was given a gold medal, the Company's arms on the obverse, and on the reverse a classical figure leading an attack upon the Spanish stockade. It was designed from his own modest sketch. Silver copies of this Toubacanti Medal were given to the few men who had survived the action, the siege, the fever, flux and the hard voyage home. Upon the Directors' suggestion, Fonab also received a special grant of arms from the Lord Lyon. Dexter, an Indian in his native dress, with bow and quiver. Sinister, a Spaniard in his proper habit. The arms of the Company were quartered with those of his Stewart and Glenorchy ancestors.
Fonab's return coincided with the trial of the Toubacanti rioters. Four men appeared before the Lords of Justiciary. The cook, who had been first through the door of the Tolbooth with a bayonet, was sentenced to a scourging, the others to the pillory. All were then to be banished from the city. The Earl of Argyll thought the punishment mild, he had received worse for truancy at school. On the day the sentences were carried out, a drunken crowd escorted the prisoners from the Tolbooth to the pillory by the weigh-house, throwing roses in their path. The hangman applied the scourge so gently that the angry magistrates threw him into prison, despite his protest that he had been threatened with death "if he laid on but one sure stroke". The hangman of Haddington, called to scourge him as he had not punished the cook, lost heart when he
saw the crowd and turned back to his home.
The mood of the mob reflected the sullen anger of the gentry and the indignation of the Estates. After the initial shock there was a renewed enthusiasm for the Company, and a mad belief that the Colony could yet be re-established. "Our fondness for asserting our right to Caledonia," wrote Sir James Murray, the Lord Clerk Register, "does rather increase than abate, and it is now talked confidently that there are assurances from chief men of both Houses of Parliament in England that if we stand firm to that point... they will stand by us." Such was the madness of the fever, that England should be held responsible for Scotland's misfortunes and yet be willing to save her from them. Parliament met in the autumn. The Company's party, led by the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Belhaven, at once took up the business that had been so providentially interrupted by Queensberry's sore throat. They hotly demanded another Address to the King, once more asking him to assert the nation's right to its Colony, to redress its wrongs, to secure the release of its suffering subjects from the Alcazar in Seville. Every burgh and shire in the kingdom drew up its own Address, repeating these earnest pleas. The King had already answered them, however, and he was not to be moved. In his letter to the Estates at the beginning of the session he said that he was sorry the Company had sustained such losses. He would ask for the release of the Dolphins crew, but he would not affirm Scotland's right to Caledonia. To do so would mean war with Spain. "Now the state of that affair is quite altered, we doubt not but you will rest satisfied with these plain reasons."
On September 20 the King of Spain happily obliged his cousin of Britain. The irons which had once more been shackled to Pincarton, Graham, Malloch and Spense, were struck away. Released from death, released from prison, they came home.
The Estates were not satisfied with the King's answer, and they did not rest. The angry threshing in Parliament Hall achieved little, although the debates were bold and theatrical. To support the canvassing for an Address, the Company had published all its early papers, particularly those relating to events in London and Hamburg. One day Lord Belhaven stood before the Estates with a copy held high above his head. "Let any Scotsman eat this book," he roared, "and he shall find it as bitter as gall in his belly!" He thought well enough of the whole speech to have it printed.
When the session ended, all that had been won was the King's empty assent to an Act extending the Company's existing privileges for another nine years. It was more ironic than generous. One of the last resolutions passed by the House had been put by Lord Tullibardine. It declared that those who had acquitted themselves faithfully in Caledonia—naming Fonab, Drummond and Pincarton—should be rewarded. Fonab was disgusted, and angrily asked for his name to be struck from the paper.
The year had limped away in bitterness and confusion, the Company impoverished and the people despairing. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Herries, should he ever cross the Border, and a lampoon called Caledonia, or the Pedlar turned Merchant, which he may have written, was burned by the hangman. Drummond and Byres appeared before the Directors, who heard them and their witnesses at great length, and finally released Drummond from all blame and censure. Byres was declared guilty of "several unwarrantable, arbitrary, illegal and inhumane actings and practices, manifestly tending to the great and irretrievable loss of the Company and the Colony, and to the dishonour of the nation." The condemnation was out of proportion to the man's simple knavery, but perhaps it cloaked the guilt of others unnamed.
William Paterson's faith in the Company was undamaged, though now he saw a different future for it. Recovered from his illness and his private grief, restored to the favour of the Directors and the goodwill of the people, he was writing A Plan for Scotland's Trade. Once more he proposed a Fund of Credit, and argued that all the country's merchants should join in one company to trade with the Indies, settle colonies, abolish poverty, and shame those subscribers who were now demanding the return of their money from the Company of Scotland. He told Queens- berry of this scheme, and the Commissioner was professedly touched by "the poor man's diligence and affection to the King and country." He advised William to grant the patient scribbler an annuity of £100, and the advice was not disinterested. "He has been with me several times of late, and as he was the first man that brought the people here into the project of Caledonia, so I look upon him as the properest person to bring them off from the extravagancy of prosecuting it." But Paterson could not be bought, and his Plan was not what Queensberry had expected. Nor was the Company interested, though the Directors voted him a gift of £100. His dreams became extravagant. He thought of a Crown Colony, a joint undertaking by Scotland and England with a capital of two million pounds, but Edinburgh's interest was lacklustre and his garrulous enthusiasm once more a bore. He left for London, and was no more successful there. He barely supported himself by teaching mathematics to poor students, but he wrote busily of the happiness and prosperity that must come from a union of Parliaments.
Roderick Mackenzie's zeal for the impoverished Company became a blind loyalty, charged with an unforgiving hatred of its enemies. In March, 1701, he was carried to the Tolbooth accused of publishing a libellous cartoon. Its central figure was Scotia crowned, her supporters three men clearly identifiable as Hamilton and the Marquises of Atholl and Tweeddale. Ballooning from one side of her prim mouth were the words Take courage ye to whom your safety and the glory of your country is dear, and from the other the same exhortation in Latin. Below the garlands in her hands were the names of all the nobility and gentry who had supported the Company in the Estates, and all those who had opposed it. One of the King's servants was shown with the Devil on his shoulder, and another was falling into the retributive flames of Hell. Mackenzie denied all responsibility for the cartoon, but he remained in the Tolbooth until the Directors bought his release. He was angered by the indignity of his arrest, both personally and as the Company's servant. He was determined on revenge, and the first innocent steps toward it had been taken while he was still in his cell at the head of the Tolbooth's turnpike stairs.
The Company remembered that Africa was as prominent in its title as the Indies. Already one small vessel had been sent to the Guinea Coast, but had returned with no more than seventy pounds of gold. Now it was hoped that the prosperity and reputation lost in the west might be recovered from the south. In May the Speedy Return and the Content sailed from the Clyde with barrels of flour and beer, tobacco, bullet-moulds, ivory-handled knives, looking-glasses framed in leather, gilt and silver buttons, worsted hose and scarlet ribbons. Thomas Drummond was the supercargo of the Speedy Return, and Robert was her master. Neither ship was seen again in Scotland.
They lay at anchor off the Madagascar coast some months later, loaded with slaves bought by the cargoes the Directors had hoped would be exchanged for ivory, gold and spices. When they had sold the slaves, the Drummonds caroused with the pirates to whom the island was a refuge and a buccaneering republic. One of them, John Bowen from Bermuda, persuaded Robert Drummond to lend him the Scots ships for a raid on homeward Indiamen, offering the loot in his own ship as payment. Although Drummond later withdrew from the agreement, Bowen sailed with the ships when the brothers were ashore. The Content was lost by fire on the Malabar Coast and Bowen scuttled the Speedy Return in favour of a merchantman he had taken. Neither of the Drummonds thought it wise to inform the Company of the peculiar disposal of its ships, and no more was ever heard of these hard and resolute brothers.
Months of silence were followed by years, and the Company sadly abandoned the ships as lost. A third was wrecked in the Malacca Straits, and having no money to buy or build another the Directors ordered their London agents to hire the Annandale, then lying in the Thames. Her Welsh master, John ap-Rice, agreed to sail to the Spice Islands under the Company's flag and privileges, and to keep the matter to himself until he was at sea, but the Governors of the East India Company heard of the agreement (from Captain ap-Rice himself, it seems) and the ship was seized in the Downs f
or the contravention of their charter. The anger this aroused in Scotland, sparked and blown upon by Mackenzie's passion, made the hanging of Thomas Green inevitable.
THE DARIEN DISASTER Page 37
