The Caribbean colony that brought down Scotland

Blackleaf

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In the 1690s, Scotland tried to found a Scottish Empire on the Isthmus of Panama on the Gulf of Darien in Central America. But the scheme was a massive failure and led to an impoverished Scotland unifying with its much larger and richer neighbour England.

The late 17th century was a difficult period for the then independent Kingdom of Scotland. The country's economy was relatively small, its range of exports very limited and it was in a weak position in relation to the then independent Kingdom of England (now England and Wales), its powerful neighbour (with which it was in personal union - the countries' monarchies were unified in 1603 - but not yet in political union).

In an era of economic rivalry in Europe, Scotland was incapable of protecting itself from the effects of English competition and legislation. The kingdom had no reciprocal export trade and its once thriving industries such as shipbuilding were in deep decline. Goods which were in demand had to be bought from England for sterling, the Navigation Acts further increased economic dependence on England by limiting Scots' shipping, and the navy was tiny.

Several ruinous civil wars in the late 1600s had squandered the country's human and other resources. The 1690s also saw several years of wide-scale crop failure, which brought famine. This period was referred to as the "ill years". The deteriorating economic position of Scotland led to calls for a favourable political union, or at least a customs union, with England. However, the stronger feeling among Scots was that the country should become a great mercantile and colonial power like England.

And so, in 1698, a fleet of five ships sailed from Leith docks near Edinburgh carrying 1,200 settlers to found a colony in Panama.

However, the "Darien scheme", as it came to be known, was a disaster, and before long the Scottish colonists were were wiped out both by tropical diseases and the Spanish.

King William III was monarch of both kingdoms (the Union of the Crowns occurred in 1603 when Scotland's James VI became England's James I). English merchants and the English parliament saw the Scottish venture as a threat to the trading monopolies they enjoyed.

King William issued a decree to all the English colonies from Canada to the Caribbean: there was to be no trade with the errant Scots and no assistance - not so much as a barrel of clean water was to be offered to them.

Thankfully for the English, the Darien scheme was a massive failure. Few of the 3,000 Scots who went to the Isthmus of Panama made it home. Those who did found an impoverished country which, within a decade, accepted union with England.

The Caribbean colony that brought down Scotland

By Allan Little
BBC News,
Darien, Panama
18 May 2014


Fort St Andrew: Scotland's attempts to found an empire in Central America was a massive failure

As Scotland prepares for an independence referendum I decided to look back at the late 1690s when an independent Scotland launched an ambitious but ultimately doomed plan to create a colony in what is now Panama.

We landed near the border with Colombia, close to where the Isthmus of Panama is at its narrowest, on a little airstrip wedged between the blue sparkle of the Caribbean and the green intensity of an impenetrable forest, and boarded a little fibreglass boat with a single outboard motor.

We made our way west, parallel to the coast, bouncing roughly in the surging surf, until we came to the island that is still called Caledonia.

"In the time of our forefathers," a village elder told us, "white people came here - Scottish and Spanish people. We liked the Scottish more than the Spanish, for the Spanish attacked us and drove us inland away from the coast and the Scots did not. But there were battles and many ships were sunk".



The story of the ill-fated Scots colony at Darien survives in the oral history of the Kuna Indians, who are the only people who have ever settled successfully in this inhospitable place.

In 1698, a fleet of five ships sailed from Leith docks near Edinburgh carrying 1,200 settlers to found a colony in Panama.

It was a place where the poet John Keats would later locate "stout Cortez" gazing at the Pacific for the first time, "and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien".

The Scots found a large sheltered harbour with a supply of fresh water. They went ashore and built a fort they called Fort St Andrew.

Three centuries on, we hacked our way through the forest and found a trench they had dug to provide the fort with a defensive moat.

It is a wide gash, filled with sea water, cut through solid coral rock by 17th Century hands - the first canal in Panama, possibly, built by Scotsmen under a punishing tropical sky. It is pretty much all that is left of the colony they named Caledonia, and the town they called New Edinburgh.


The Darien scheme was a massive failure and eventually led to Scotland's union with England, forming the new Kingdom of Great Britain

For even before they made landfall, the colonists had begun to die.

Tropical diseases - malaria, yellow fever, something they called the bloody flux - cut them down even faster on land.

Somewhere beneath the tangle we hacked through, there is a Scottish cemetery with hundreds of graves. No-one has ever found it.

The forest is too dense. Within nine months of setting sail from Leith, on a wave of national euphoria, most of the colonists were dead.

A second fleet sailed in 1699, not knowing that the colony had already been attacked and burned to the ground by the Spanish, and abandoned by its few survivors.


Allan Little: "Scotland is rethinking the lessons of the Darien disaster"

The disaster helped end Scotland's independence. For the colony had been funded by public subscription - an early example of a financial mania.

Public bodies, town corporations, members of parliament, landed gentry, and thousands of private citizens - sea captains and surgeons, apothecaries and ironmongers - sank their life savings into the scheme.

Between a quarter and a half of the available wealth of Scotland was spent, and lost.


A record of all the investors was kept

And it was the role of England that was most bitterly resented.

Scotland, though an independent country, shared its head of state with England.

What the settlers took with them


  • Tools - axes, spades and flooring nails
  • Pistols
  • Clothing - 85 ceremonial wigs, 2,000 hats, 1301 pairs of slippers and 324 pairs of women's gloves
  • 3 traps (horse-drawn carriages)
  • Household items - 9 smoothing irons, 94 bed covers, 10 cups
Source: RBS archives

King William III was monarch of both kingdoms. English merchants and the English parliament saw the Scottish venture as a threat to the trading monopolies they enjoyed.

King William III issued a decree to all the English colonies from Canada to the Caribbean: there was to be no trade with the errant Scots and no assistance - not so much as a barrel of clean water was to be offered to them.

Few of the 3,000 Scots who went made it home. Those who did found an impoverished country which, within a decade, accepted union with England.

The Treaty of Union of 1707 included a clause in which the English government agreed to pay a sum of money to the Scots, to compensate the Darien investors for what they had lost.

The sum of money England paid to the Scots was known in the treaty as the Equivalent, or the Price of Scotland.



Darien still resonates, as Scotland prepares to vote on independence.

Pro-union Scots see in it a cautionary tale about the dangers of over-ambition. But when a nation is rethinking its future, as Scotland now is, it also looks again at its past.

Some now argue that the story reinforces the case for independence, for it proved that when Scotland and England place themselves under one government in London - as they were under King William - that government will, when the interests of the two countries conflict, inevitably favour the cause of the larger and more powerful partner.

The poet Robert Burns was scathing about the Scottish parliament that voted to accept union with England. "We're bought and sold for English gold," he wrote decades later, "such a parcel of rogues in a nation".

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

By John Keats (1816)

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.



How to listen to From Our Own Correspondent:

BBC News - The Caribbean colony that brought down Scotland
 
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