Elizabeth I (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death on 24 March 1603. Though Elizabeth followed a largely defensive foreign policy, her reign raised England's status abroad. Pope Sixtus V marvelled that:
"She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all".Under Elizabeth, the nation gained a new self-confidence and sense of sovereignty, as Christendom fragmented. On her death as unmarried and childless, James VI of Scotland, her first cousin twice removed, became James I of England with an arrangement called the Union of Crowns.
The Union was a personal or dynastic union, with the Crown of Scotland remaining both distinct and separate, despite James's best efforts to create a new "imperial" throne of "Great Britain".
England and Scotland continued as autonomous states sharing a monarch with Ireland (with an interregnum in the 1650s during the republican unitary state of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate), until the Acts of Union of 1707 during the reign of the last Stuart monarch, Anne.
The Darien scheme was an unsuccessful attempt by the Kingdom of Scotland to become a world trading state by establishing a colony called "Caledonia" on the Isthmus of Panama on the Gulf of Darién in the late 1690s. The aim was for the colony to have an overland route that connected the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
As the Company of Scotland was backed by approximately 20% of all the money circulating in Scotland, its failure left the entire Lowlands in substantial financial ruin and was an important factor in weakening their resistance to the Act of Union (completed in 1707). The land where the Darien colony was built, in the modern province of Guna Yala, is virtually uninhabited today.
The late 17th century was a difficult period for Scotland, as it was for much of Europe; the years 1695-97 saw catastrophic famine in present-day Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Norway and Sweden plus an estimated two million deaths in France and Northern Italy. Scotland's economy was relatively small, its range of exports very limited and it was in a weak position in relation to England, its powerful neighbour (with which it was in personal union, 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 that were in demand had to be bought from England for sterling. Moreover, the Navigation Acts further increased economic dependence on England by limiting Scotland's shipping, and the Royal Scots Navy was relatively small.
The Navigation Acts, or more broadly The Acts of Trade and Navigation were a long series of English laws that developed, promoted, and regulated English ships, shipping, trade, and commerce between other countries and with its own colonies. The laws also regulated England's fisheries and restricted foreigners' participation in its colonial trade. While based on earlier precedents, they were first enacted in 1651 under the Commonwealth. The system was reenacted and broadened with the restoration by the Act of 1660, and further developed and tightened by the Navigation Acts of 1663, 1673, and 1696.
The major impetus for the first Navigation Act was the ruinous deterioration of English trade in the aftermath of the Eighty Years' War, and the associated lifting of the Spanish embargoes on trade between the Spanish Empire and the Dutch Republic.
The Eighty Years' War or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648) was a revolt of the Seventeen Provinces of what are today the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg against Philip II of Spain, the sovereign of the Habsburg Netherlands.
Hostilities broke out again around 1619, as part of the broader Thirty Years' War. An end was reached in 1648 with the Peace of Münster (a treaty part of the Peace of Westphalia), when the Dutch Republic was definitively recognised as an independent country no longer part of the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace of Münster is sometimes considered the beginning of the Dutch Golden Age.
Overseas, the Dutch Republic gained, through the intermediary of its two chartered companies, the United East India Company (VOC) and the Dutch West India Company (WIC), important colonial possessions, largely at the expense of Portugal. The peace settlement was part of the comprehensive 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which formally separated the Dutch Republic from the Holy Roman Empire. In the course of the conflict, and as a consequence of its fiscal-military innovations, the Dutch Republic emerged as a Great Power, whereas the Spanish Empire lost its European hegemonic status.
Dutch trade on the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean exploded in the decade after the peace, as did trade in general, because trade patterns in all European areas were so tightly interlocked via the hub of the Amsterdam Entrepôt. Dutch trade in this period reached its pinnacle; it came to completely dominate that of competing powers, like England, that had only a few years previously profited greatly from the handicap the Spanish embargoes posed to the Dutch. Now the greater efficiency of Dutch shipping had a chance to be fully translated into shipping prices, and the competitors were left in the dust. The structure of European trade therefore changed fundamentally in a way that was advantageous to Dutch trade, agriculture and industry. One could truly speak of Dutch primacy in world trade.
The English Navigation Acts, were introduced when new political and economic situation had unleashed the full power of the Amsterdam Entrepôt and other Dutch competitive advantages in European and world trade. Within a few years, English merchants had practically been overwhelmed in the Baltic and North sea trade, as well as trade with the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean and the Levant. Even the trade with English colonies (partly still in the hands of the royalists, as the English Civil War was in its final stages and the Commonwealth of England had not yet imposed its authority throughout the English colonies) was "engrossed" by Dutch merchants. English direct trade was crowded out by a sudden influx of commodities from the Levant, Mediterranean and the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and the West Indies via the Dutch Entrepôt, carried in Dutch ships and for Dutch account.
During the seventeenth century, for those living in the British Isles in the lands of Scotland, England and Ireland, these were "interesting times", overshadowed by the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, sometimes known as the British Civil Wars, formed an intertwined series of conflicts that took place in the kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland between 1639 and 1651. These wars included the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640 with conflict in Scotland between Covenanters and Royalists and an English army; the Irish Rebellion of 1641; Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649; the Scottish Civil War of 1644–1645; and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1649, collectively known as the Eleven Years War or Irish Confederate Wars; and the First, Second and Third English Civil Wars of 1642–1646, 1648–1649 and 1650–1651. This was followed in Scotland by a period of unrest related to religious differences between 1670-1690. The impact upon the Scottish population was profound, and diminished their material resources significantly.
In Scotland, the so-called "seven ill years" of the 1690s saw widespread crop failures and famine. This was a period of national famine in Scotland in the 1690s. It resulted from an economic slump created by French protectionism and changes in the Scottish cattle trade, followed by four years of failed harvests (1695, 1696 and 1698–99). The result was severe famine and depopulation, particularly in the north. The famines of the 1690s were seen as particularly severe, partly because famine had become relatively rare in the second half of the seventeenth century, with only one year of dearth (in 1674). The shortages of the 1690s would be the last of their kind.
During this period, starvation probably killed 5–15 per cent of the Scottish population, but in areas like Aberdeenshire death rates reached 25 per cent. The system of the Old Scottish Poor Law was overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, although provision in the urban centres of the burghs was probably better than in the countryside. It led to migration between parishes and emigration to England, Europe, the Americas and particularly Ireland. While Scotland's deteriorating economic position led to some calls for a political or customs union with England, the stronger feeling among Scots was that the country should attempt to become a great mercantile and colonial power like England. The crisis resulted in the setting up of the Bank of Scotland and the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies.
In the face of opposition by English commercial interests, the Company of Scotland raised subscriptions in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London for the scheme. For his part, King William II of Scotland and III of England had given only lukewarm support to the whole Scottish colonial endeavour. England was at war with France and hence did not want to offend Spain, which claimed the territory as part of New Granada.
The original concept of the Darien Scheme was to create a trading colony, an entrepôt in the New World to facilitate trade between Europe and the East Indies across the isthmus, that had been realised in the maritime trading routes of the Spanish treasure fleet and the Manila Galleons from 1865 to 1815 but in the context of complete control of exchange by the Spanish and their "closed sea".
It was Scottish-born trader and financier William Paterson, and one of the founders of the Bank of England, had long promoted the plan for a colony on the Isthmus of Panama to be used as a gateway between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Beware the honeyed tales of mariners!
Whilst in London, Paterson had met a sailor called Lionel Wafer, who had told him about a wonderful paradise on the Isthmus of Panama, with a sheltered bay, friendly Indians and rich, fertile land - a place called Darien.
Lionel Wafer (1640–1705) was a Welsh explorer and privateer, and certainly had a buccaneering tale, or two, to tell. He was a ship's surgeon, and had made several voyages to the South Seas and visited Maritime Southeast Asia in 1676. In 1679 he sailed again as a surgeon, soon after settling in Jamaica to practise his profession.
It was Wafer's Pacific Adventure, under the changing leadership of various Captains, including John Coxon, Robert Allison, Cornelius Essex, and Thomas Magott, and joined later by Captains Richard Sawkins, Edmund Cooke, and Peter Harris. Towards the end of this adventure under the leadership of Bartholomew Sharp, a story was to emerge that was to spark Paterson's interest in the Isthmus of Darien. In 1680, when Wafer was recruited by buccaneer Edmund Cooke to join a privateering venture under the leadership of Captain Bartholomew Sharp. It was at this time that he met William Dampier at Cartagena on the Caribbean coast of New Granada. Dampier was an English explorer, ex-pirate and navigator who became the first Englishman to explore parts of what is today Australia, and the first person to circumnavigate the world three times. He has also been described as Australia's first natural historian, as well as one of the most important British explorers of the period between Sir Walter Raleigh and James Cook.
A New Voyage Round the World
Dampier was a buccaneer. Buccaneers were a kind of privateer or free sailor peculiar to the Caribbean Sea during the 17th and 18th centuries. The privateer was a private person or ship that engages in maritime warfare under a commission of war. The commission, also known as a letter of marque, empowers the person to carry on all forms of hostility permissible at sea by the usages of war, including attacking foreign vessels during wartime and taking them as prizes. A form of "legal" piracy, that often shifted into actual piracy?
During the 15th century, "piracy became an increasing problem and merchant communities such as Bristol began to resort to self-help, arming and equipping ships at their own expense to protect commerce." These privately owned merchant ships, licensed by the crown, could legitimately take vessels that were deemed pirates. This constituted a "revolution in naval strategy" and helped fill the need for protection that the current administration was unable to provide as it "lacked an institutional structure and coordinated finance".
The increase in competition for crews on armed merchant vessels and privateers was due, in a large part, because of the chance for a considerable payoff. "Whereas a seaman who shipped on a naval vessel was paid a wage and provided with victuals, the mariner on a merchantman or privateer was paid with an agreed share of the takings." This proved to be a far more attractive prospect and privateering flourished as a result.
During Queen Elizabeth's reign, she "encouraged the development of this supplementary navy". Over the course of her rule, she had "allowed Anglo-Spanish relations to deteriorate" to the point where one could argue that a war with the Spanish was inevitable. By using privateers, if the Spanish were to take offense at the plundering of their ships, Queen Elizabeth could always deny she had anything to do with the actions of such independents. Some of the most famous privateers that later fought in the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) included the Sea Dogs.
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates (1921), a collection of Pyle's pirate stories and illustrations, romanticises this era of swashbucling adventurers, as does Hollywood.
Piet Pieterszoon Hein was a brilliantly successful Dutch privateer who captured a Spanish treasure fleet. Magnus Heinason was another privateer who served the Dutch against the Spanish. While their and others' attacks brought home a great deal of money, they hardly dented the flow of gold and silver from Mexico to Spain.
Howard Pyle - Pyle, Howard; Johnson, Merle De Vore (ed) (1921) "Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main" in Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main
Originally the name "buccaneer" applied to the landless hunters of wild boars and cattle in the largely uninhabited areas of Tortuga and Hispaniola. The meat they caught was smoked over a slow fire in little huts the French called boucanes to make viande boucanée – jerked meat or jerky – which they sold to the corsairs that preyed on the (largely Spanish) shipping and settlements of the Caribbean. Eventually the term was applied to the corsairs and (later) privateers themselves, also known as the Brethren of the Coast.
Privateers were a large part of the total military force at sea during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the first Anglo-Dutch War, English privateers attacked the trade on which the United Provinces entirely depended, capturing over 1,000 Dutch merchant ships. During the subsequent war with Spain, Spanish and Flemish privateers in the service of the Spanish Crown, including the Dunkirkers, captured 1,500 English merchant ships, helping to restore Dutch international trade.
The Pacific Adventure
When the war ended and his commission expired Bartholomew Sharp turned to piracy. The natural scientist and Buccaneer William Dampier suggested his first major raid was on the Central American town of Segovia. In 1679 a fleet of Buccaneer vessels sailed for the Bay of Honduras, and on September 26 they took a Spanish Merchantman. According to the Governor of Jamaica, from the Calendar of State Papers:
"There has been lately taken from the Spaniards by Coxon, Bartholomew Sharpe, Bothing, and Hawkins with their crew, 500 chests of indigo, a great quantity of cacao, cochineal, tortoiseshell, money and plate. Much is brought into this country already, and the rest expected."
The fleet was joined by Captains Richard Sawkins, Edmund Cooke, and Peter Harris. Jean Rose chose to leave the voyage and the remaining pirates voted to attack the city of Panama, once again under John Coxon.
They sailed for Golden Island and left their ships in the hands of skeleton crews off the coast of Darién. 350 pirates went ashore to march across the Isthmus of Panama. They included William Dampier, Welsh surgeon and naturalist Lionel Wafer and ship's doctor Basil Ringrose. All three men would write accounts of their voyage to be published later in England. The pirates marched overland to meet with the 'Emperor of Darien' King Goldecap of the Guna people. He agreed to send guides and warriors with the buccaneers, including his eldest son, if they agreed to rescue his daughter from the nearby Spanish garrison at Santa Maria.
The pirates rowed downriver in canoes provided by the Guna until they were outside the walls of Santa Maria. 50 men charged the breastworks and breached the walls; after a mêlée within the fort the Spanish surrendered. The pirates rescued the King's daughter who was pregnant with her Spanish captor's child, and returned her to the King.
The Guna guides led the pirates downriver to the Bay of San Miguel in the Gulf of Panama. They took two small barques and sailed for Panama. There they encountered three Spanish galleons on patrol supported by five large warships in the harbour at Perico. The pirates fought from canoes and took command of one of the barques commanded by Don Jacinto de Barahona. Another of the Spanish ships escaped while the third caught fire and her magazine exploded.
During the engagement the pirates reported losing only two men and another eleven injured. Captain Peter Harris was wounded in the fight and would die two days later. Captain Coxon took command of the captured vessel and the Spanish were taken prisoner. The five warships were empty, and the pirates soon commandeered three of those, sinking the other two. The largest of these, La Santísima Trinidad, was renamed The Trinity and given over to Captain Richard Sawkins.
John Coxon was relieved of command for cowardice, and he left with 75 men to return to the Caribbean. The men voted Sawkins their new Admiral. The pirates left Panama for a nearby fishing village to await a ransom for the captured soldiers and to try to capture Spanish ships unaware of their presence. They captured a galleon carrying 60,000 Pieces of Eight intended for the pay of Panama's soldiers. The Governor of Panama refused their ransom and inquired after who gave the buccaneers a commission to attack Spanish cities in a time of peace. Admiral Sawkins replied:
"As yet all his company were not come together; but that when they were come up we would come and visit him at Panama, and bring our commissions on the muzzles of our guns, at which time he should read them as plain as the flame of gunpowder could make them."Less than a week later Richard Sawkins would be killed in battle outside Puebla Nueva and 75 of his men would leave the expedition. Command fell to Bartholomew Sharp.
Under Admiral Sharp the fleet sailed south along the coast of South America. They failed to take many prizes however. Word of their presence had spread and Spanish settlements were all prepared for them. After weeks at sea the pirates finally captured a Spanish galleon out patrolling for the English. Sharp tortured their prisoners and killed a Spanish friar on deck in front of all the men. Many among the crew began to question his fitness for command. After a series of disappointments the crews finally voted to remove Bartholomew Sharp from command in January 1681. They installed John Watling as Captain. Watling led an attack on the rich city of Arica only to be repelled and killed. Reluctantly the men reinstated Bartholomew Sharp to command. Sharpe suspected former Captain and fellow buccaneer Edmund Cooke of involvement in his ouster and had him imprisoned, ostensibly over charges of buggery.
Shortly thereafter fifty more men left the voyage, including William Dampier and Lionel Wafer.
The buccaneers continued around South America and up to the Caribbean, taking 25 Spanish ships and plundering numerous Spanish towns. Captain Sharp is credited as being the first Englishman ever to travel eastwards around Cape Horn. Sharp had planned to return to England via the Strait of Magellan, but a storm pushed the Trinity too far south, forcing him to navigate the Cape.
A pardon in exchange for maps
Because England and Spain were not at war, the Spanish demanded Sharp's prosecution for piracy. Sharp was arrested and brought before the High Court of Admiralty. However, he presented the authorities with a book of maps taken from the Spanish ship El Santo Rosario in July 1681; their value to English seafarers, and a lack of material witnesses, was such that Sharp received a full pardon from Charles II.
Best-documented voyage of high seas piracy
An eyewitness account of Sharp's adventures was published in The Dangerous Voyage And Bold Assaults of Captain Bartholomew Sharp and Others, by Basil Ringrose (London, 1684).
William Dampier gave a brief account of his time with captain Sharp and the buccaneers in A New Voyage Round the World (1697).
John Cox (not to be confused with John Coxon) wrote an account of his time with the Buccaneers, and Bartholomew Sharp wrote his own account, and a detailed atlas intended for the Admiralty. The Pacific Adventure is perhaps the best-documented voyage of high seas piracy in history.
Also: The voyages and adventures of Capt. Barth. Sharp and others, in the South Sea: : being a journal of the same, also Capt. Van Horn with his Buccanieres surprizing of la Vera Cruz to which is added The true Relation of Sir Henry Morgan, his Expedition against the Spaniards in the West-Indies, and his taking Panama. Together with The President of Panama's Account of the same Expedition: Translated out of Spanish. And Col. Beeston's adjustment of the Peace between the Spaniards and English in the West Indies
Lionel Wafer's account
Lionel Wafer also gives an account of his departure from the voyage in A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1695).
It was Lionel Wafer's account that shaped William Paterson's Darien Scheme concept.
The Darien Venture
Decades of warfare had combined with seven years of famine to drive people from their homesteads and choke the cities with homeless vagrants, starving to death in the streets. The nation's trade had been crippled by England's continual wars against continental Europe, and its home-grown industries were withering on the vine. Something had to be done. Some way had to be found to revive Scotland's economic fortunes before it got swallowed up by its much richer neighbour south of the border.
The man who came up with the answer was a financial adventurer called William Paterson, a Scot who had made his name down south as one of the founding directors of the Bank of England. Paterson returned to Edinburgh with an audacious scheme to turn Scotland into the major broker of trade across the Pacific Ocean.By Dr Mike Ibeji BBC
Whilst many of the geographic and trading facts were available in Wafer's account, the fact of the challenging dimension of the local tropical environmental conditions were passed over in another case of documentation and information having an administrative standing over experience. Nevertheless, the Darien Company hired Wafer as an adviser when it was planning its settlement on the isthmus in 1698.
Paterson had immediately seen the potential of Darien as the location of a trading colony. Trade with the incredibly lucrative Pacific markets was a hugely expensive business, since all merchant ships had to make the hazardous trip round Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America. This added months to the journey, and the ships involved had a high chance of being lost at sea. If a colony could be established at Darien, goods could be ferried from the Pacific across Panama and loaded onto ships in the Atlantic from there, speeding up Pacific trade and making it much more reliable. Moreover, the Scottish directors of the Darien Venture could charge a nice fat commission for the privilege. Never mind that the Spanish claimed control of that part of Panama: no-one ever made a profit without stepping on some toes.By Dr Mike Ibeji BBC
For the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, whilst the concept was valid, the degree of English opposition would be significant, and the scheme itself was vulnerable to the new global politics, where Spain, for the English interest, was to be treated as a sleeping dog, and left to lie, in the ongoing tensions between England and the France of Louis XIV.
One reason for English opposition to the Scheme was the then prevalent economic theory of Mercantilism, a concept as widespread and accepted then as capitalism is today. Modern economics generally assumes a constantly growing market but mercantilism viewed it as static; that meant increasing your own market share required taking it from someone else. This meant the Darien Scheme was not simply competition but an active threat to English merchants.
England was also under pressure from the London-based East India Company, who were keen to maintain their monopoly over English foreign trade. It therefore forced the English and Dutch investors to withdraw. Next, the East India Company threatened legal action on the grounds that the Scots had no authority from the king to raise funds outside the English realm, and obliged the promoters to refund subscriptions to the Hamburg investors. This left no source of finance but Scotland itself.
The idea proved hugely popular, and there was a great rush to subscribe to the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, founded in June 1695; but it was not just the Spanish who felt threatened by it. The English East India Company, fearing the loss of its monopoly on British trade to the Indies, successfully lobbied the English Parliament, which threatened the new company with impeachment, forcing its English investors to withdraw.By Dr Mike Ibeji BBC
Undaunted, Paterson and his colleagues turned to the Scottish people for support. Thousands of Scots, both rich and poor, flocked to subscribe, and within 6 months £400,000 had been raised. The money was used to fit out five ships for the expedition, the Unicorn, St Andrew, Caledonia, Endeavour and Dolphin, despite efforts by the English authorities to block them. The English ambassador to Holland even threatened to embargo any merchants who traded with the new company.
However, Lionel Wafer's stories of long-haired Indians living a life of luxury in a land of milk and honey had given the company's founders an unrealistic vision of what lay ahead. The cargo manifests of the first expedition list thousands of combs and mirrors, which they expected to sell to the Indians, along with boxes of wigs and other useless items which the colonists expected to use in their new life. They were completely unprepared for the ordeal which lay ahead.
The ships set sail from Leith harbour on 4th July 1698, under the command of Captain Robert Pennecuik. Of the 1,200 settlers in the first expedition, only he and William Paterson knew of their destination, which was outlined in sealed packages to be opened only once the ships were on the open sea.
They made landfall at Darien on 2nd November, having lost only 70 people during the voyage. Full of optimism, they named the peninsula New Caledonia, and set to work building a settlement. However, their first choice of site was, as Paterson put it: 'A mere morass, neither fit to be fortified nor planted, nor indeed for men to lie upon... We were clearing and making huts upon this improper place near two months, in which time experience, the schoolmaster of fools, convinced our masters that the place now called Fort St Andrew was a more proper place for us'.
Within the fort stockade, they began to erect the huts of New Edinburgh. However, they soon found that the land was unsuited to agriculture and the Indians were uninterested in the trinkets they had brought with them. Spring 1699 brought torrential rain, and with it disease. By March 1699, more than 200 colonists had died, and the death rate had risen to over 10 a day. To make matters worse, the ships sent out to trade for supplies returned with news that all English ships and colonies were forbidden to trade with the Scots by order of the King. One ship did not return at all. The Dolphin was captured by the Spanish and its crew imprisoned.
They were the lucky ones. Roger Oswald, a young gentleman who had joined the venture full of hope and optimism, wrote a harrowing account of what life was like that Spring on the Darien Peninsula. They lived on less than a pound of mouldy flour a week: 'When boiled with a little water, without anything else, big maggots and worms must be skimmed off the top... In short, a man might easily have destroyed his whole week's ration in one day and have but one ordinary stomach neither... Yet for all this short allowance, every man (let him never be so weak) daily turned out to work by daylight, whether with the hatchet, or wheelbarrow, pick-axe, shovel, fore-hammer or any other instrument the case required; and so continued until 12 o'clock, and at 2 again and stayed till night, sometimes working all day up to the headbands of the breeches in water at the trenches. My shoulders have been so wore with carrying burdens that the skin has come off them and grew full of boils. If a man were sick and obliged to stay within, no victuals for him that day. Our Councillors all the while lying at their ease, sometimes divided into factions and, being swayed by particular interest, ruined the public... Our bodies pined away and grew so macerated with such allowance that we were like so many skeletons.'
William Paterson's wife died on that peninsula, along with his dreams. The final straw was news that the Spanish were planning an attack on the colony. The settlers took to the sea in panic, abandoning the settlement. Of the four ships that fled the colony, only the Caledonia made it back to Scotland, with less than 300 souls on board.
A second expedition left Scotland in August 1699, knowing nothing about the fate of the first colony. Three ships, led by The Rising Sun, carried a further 1,302 settlers, of which 160 died in the crossing. Finding the colony abandoned, they set about rebuilding it; but the second colony fared no better than the first. The Revd Archibald Stobo, one of three Presbyterian ministers who accompanied the second expedition, was scandalised by the barbarity of the colonists. 'Our land hath spewed out its scum...' he wrote, 'We could not prevail to get their wickedness restrained, nor the growth of it stopped...' He viewed the sickness and contagion which plagued the colony as the just judgement of God.
In fact, his judgement is harsh. The men and women sent out to Darien were completely unprepared for the harshness of the territory in which they found themselves, and the collapse of discipline and rampant disease which afflicted them were the natural consequence of their altered circumstances. On top of this, they faced the constant threat of attack from the Spanish, with absolutely no support from the English colonies which had been ordered not to aid them.
Seeing this, one newly-arrived young officer, Captain Alexander Campbell of Fonab, persuaded the colonists to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Spanish forces massing at Toubacanti on the mainland. The attack was outrageously successful, but only served to sting the Spanish into concerted action. Under the command of Governor-General Pimiento, a massive fleet and army besieged Fort St Andrew, which finally surrendered in March 1700. The surviving colonists were permitted to vacate the fort on board their remaining ships. Only a handful ever made it back to Scotland.
The Darien Venture was a complete disaster for Scotland. The blow to Scottish morale was incalculable. Those colonists who returned found themselves cast as pariahs in their own land. Roger Oswald, disowned by his father, wrote to a friend: 'Since it pleased God that I have preserved [my life], 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... I never intended, nor do intend, to trouble my father any more.'
William Paterson found himself forced to defend his actions. He partially vindicated himself with a no-holds-barred account of the colony. Some years later, he was granted a pension of £18,000, but he died a deeply disillusioned man. Only Campbell of Fonab came out of the affair with honour. He made it back to Scotland, where he was awarded the 'Toubacanti Medal' for his part in the débacle, but he never stopped blaming the Company for failing to support its colonists.
The failure of the colonisation project provoked tremendous discontent throughout Lowland Scotland, where almost every family had been affected. Some held the English responsible, while others believed that they could and should assist in yet another effort at making the scheme work. The company petitioned the King to affirm their right to the colony. However, the monarch declined, saying that although he was sorry the company had incurred such huge losses, reclaiming Darien would mean war with Spain. The continuing futile debate on the issue served to further increase bitter feelings.
Hoping to recoup some of its capital by a more conventional venture, the company sent two ships from the Clyde, the Speedy Return and the Continent, to the Guinea coast laden with trade goods. Sea captain Robert Drummond was the master of the Speedy Return; his brother Thomas, who had played such a large part in the second expedition, was supercargo on the vessel. Instead of trying to sell for gold as the company's directors intended, however, the Drummond brothers had exchanged the goods for slaves, whom they sold in Madagascar. Carousing with the buccaneers for whom the island was a refuge, the Drummonds fell in with pirate John Bowen, who offered them loot if they would lend him their ships for a raid on homeward bound Indiamen. Robert Drummond backed out of the agreement, only to have Bowen appropriate the ships while Drummond was ashore. Bowen burnt the Continent on the Malabar coast when he decided she was of no use to him, and he later scuttled the Speedy Return after transferring her crew to a merchant ship he had taken. The Drummonds apparently decided against returning to Scotland, where they would have had to explain the loss of the ships they had been entrusted with, and no more was ever heard of them.
The company sent out another ship, but she was lost at sea. Unable to afford the cost of fitting out yet another vessel, the Annandale was hired in London to trade in the Spice Islands. However, the East India Company had the ship seized on the grounds that this was in contravention of their charter. This provoked an uproar in Scotland, greatly aided by the inflammatory rhetoric of the company's secretary, Roderick MacKenzie, a relentless enemy of the English. Fury at the country's impotence led to the scapegoating and hanging of three innocent English sailors.
The failure of the Darien colonisation project has been cited as one of the motivations for the 1707 Acts of Union. According to this argument, the Scottish establishment (landed aristocracy and mercantile elites) considered that their best chance of being part of a major power would be to share the benefits of England's international trade and the growth of the English overseas possessions, so its future would have to lie in unity with England. Furthermore, Scotland's nobles were almost bankrupted by the Darien fiasco.In Scotland, some claimed that union would enable Scotland to recover from the financial disaster wrought by the Darien scheme through English assistance and the lifting of measures put in place through the Alien Act to force the Scottish Parliament into compliance with the Act of Settlement. Some Scottish nobility petitioned Westminster to wipe out the Scottish national debt and stabilise the currency. Although the first request was not met, the second was and the Scottish shilling was given the fixed value of an English penny. Personal Scottish financial interests were also involved. Scottish commissioners had invested heavily in the Darien project and they believed that they would receive compensation for their losses. The 1707 Acts of Union, Article 15, granted £398,085 10s sterling to Scotland to offset future liability towards the English national debt.
Personal financial interests were also allegedly involved. Many Commissioners had invested heavily in the Darien scheme and they believed that they would receive compensation for their losses; Article 15 granted £398,085 10s sterling to Scotland, a sum known as The Equivalent, to offset future liability towards the English national debt. In essence it was also used as a means of compensation for investors in the Company of Scotland's Darien scheme, as 58.6% was allocated to its shareholders and creditors.
Even more direct bribery was a factor. £20,000 (£240,000 Scots) was dispatched to Scotland for distribution by the Earl of Glasgow. James Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry, the Queen's Commissioner in Parliament, received £12,325, more than 60% of the funding. Robert Burns referred to this:
We're bought and sold for English Gold,
Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation.
The Treaty was hated in Scotland at the time. Riots occurred in Edinburgh, as well as substantial riots in Glasgow. The people of Edinburgh demonstrated against the treaty, and their apparent leader in opposition to the Unionists was James Hamilton, 4th Duke of Hamilton. However, Hamilton was actually on the side of the English Government. Demonstrators in Edinburgh were opposed to the Union for many reasons: they feared the Kirk would be Anglicised; that Anglicisation would remove democracy from the only really elementally democratic part of the Kingdom; and they feared that tax rises would come.
Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath, the only member of the Scottish negotiating team against union, noted that "The whole nation appears against the Union" and even Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, an ardent pro-unionist and Union negotiator, observed that the treaty was "contrary to the inclinations of at least three-fourths of the Kingdom".
Public opinion against the Treaty as it passed through the Scottish Parliament was voiced through petitions from shires, burghs, presbyteries and parishes. The Convention of Royal Burghs also petitioned against the Union as proposed:
That it is our indispensable duty to signify to your grace that, as we are not against an honourable and safe union with England far less can we expect to have the condition of the people of Scotland, with relation to these great concerns, made better and improved without a Scots Parliament.Not one petition in favour of an incorporating union was received by Parliament. On the day the treaty was signed, the carilloner in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, rang the bells in the tune Why should I be so sad on my wedding day? Threats of widespread civil unrest resulted in Parliament imposing martial law.
Say No to colony myth
SCOTTISH NATIONALISTS increasingly paint the Union between Scotland and England as a colonial relationship. Independence for Scotland is equated – somewhat insensitively, as we shall see – with the freedoms won by former colonies of European empires.
In the past few decades, nationalist intellectuals have also detected a Scottish inferiority complex of cringing self-abasement within the Union, and have rather pointedly aligned this with the cultural experiences of colonised peoples. This is a new departure.
For, once upon a time, the acknowledged reticence of Scots was attributed – by inter-war nationalist intellectuals no less – to a dour patriarchal Calvinism inculcated by harsh dominies all too quick to use the tawse on the outspoken and self-confident, as well as on the indolent and the badly behaved.
More recently, however, the Union has replaced Puritanism as the prime cause of Scotland’s ills. Nor is the identification of Scotland as a downtrodden colony any longer confined to the margins of political debate. Rather, it seems to have become an axiom of popular nationalism. Thus the repeated references of Yes campaigners to the countries of the Commonwealth and outside who have achieved “independence” from England their former colonial master.
The phenomenon is sufficiently widespread to have attracted the notice of outside observers. The distinguished historian Linda Colley – English-born but based at Princeton University in the USA – recently expressed her surprise at the number of Scots who believe Scotland’s relationship with England to be a colonial one.
One might call this the Renton interpretation of history – who can forget his diatribe against English colonialism and Scottish self-abasement in Trainspotting? But what in Irvine Welsh’s novel appeared as an amusing and deliciously shocking slice of absurd theatre has now gone mainstream.
Even the avowedly non-nationalist figure Kenneth Roy, founder of the Scottish Review, writes in his recent history of modern Scotland that the post-war nation “reverted to the place ascribed for it in the Union as an unthreatening backwater distinguished by the poor education, poor health and poor housing of its people”.
Roy adds for good measure that Scots schoolchildren were deliberately denied by the education system a grounding in Scottish history: “In denying children an adequate knowledge of their own culture and identity, it asserted the relative insignificance of Scotland.”
Scots, it is now too widely believed for comfort, are a colonised nation, ruled over by a dominant caste of English colonisers. Or “Westminster” in the language of Yes. This is not only largely nonsensical as history, but offensive and insulting to many non-white, non-European peoples who did, in fact, find themselves oppressed or even dispossessed by the “British” Empire.
Scots were complicit in empire, and it is insulting to the real victims of empire to assume otherwise. What else are we to make of the golf course built for Scots traders at their slave trading post on Bance Island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River in the 18th century? Who was doing the exploitation here? Or the Scots planters in the West Indies – one, alas, named Kidd – who dressed their slaves in tartan? Or, indeed, of the fact that the Jamaican mother of Diane Abbott MP was a McClymont by birth?
After all, one of the main causes of the Union of 1707 was, ironically, the failure of Scotland’s attempt to establish its own colony at Darien in Panama in the late 1690s. The Darien disaster was a massive drain on Scottish capital, and accusations that English trading and foreign policy interests had conspired to thwart the venture stirred up Anglophobia in Scotland. However, the point is that Scottish criticism of English imperialism was focused on the larger power’s unwillingness to let the junior kingdom achieve its own colonial ambitions. As a result many early 18th-century Scots came to the conclusion, however reluctantly, that the only route to a Scottish colonial empire was within a formal Anglo-Scottish union.
Nevertheless, by the 1750s and for two centuries thereafter enthusiastic participation in the British Empire was a defining aspect of Scottish identity.
The nationalist version of Scottish history is cartoonish and drawn in primary colours. It leaves little room for shading, nuance or the tangled complexities of the past as it really was. The emotional resonance produced by history displaces a desire to understand or explain.
It comes as a shock, therefore, when nationalists discover that unionism – something they despise as a kind of false consciousness supposedly imposed upon Scots by the English – was framed long before the Union of Parliaments in 1707, moreover almost a century before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. And that it was devised by Scots as a means of ensuring Scotland’s interests were not overwhelmed by its larger neighbour.
Unionism was first formulated as a set of ideas by the Catholic philosopher John Mair, of Haddington, around 1520. It was Mair’s central idea that union was the opposite not of independent Scottish nationhood, but of an English empire over the territory of Great Britain. How was tiny Scotland to control her much larger neighbour who inhabited the same island except by means of an agreement, a union which would allow both English and Scottish institutions, laws, cultures and identities to flourish within the same island under a common monarchy?
The alternative was cross-border warfare, and the fear of an inevitable victory – in the end, and notwithstanding the occasional Bannockburn – for the larger power. In other words, the casual antithesis we encounter of unionism and nationalism is misconceived.
Traditionally, union was seen by Mair and the early Scots unionist tradition as a means of taming English imperial ambitions, of binding an overmighty neighbour within a set of negotiated constraints. In this sense, Flodden not Bannockburn was the decisive cross-border battle.
Unionists today are just as concerned as nationalists to protect Scottish institutions, Scottish identity and Scottish prosperity but the former believe Scottish autonomy is best secured within the civilised and polite setting of a Union state which we have built together over 300-plus years. The alternative today is a return to a less intimate, less friendly relationship: between an independent England and an independent Scotland, a situation moreover that would have been willed – however narrow the majority – by Scots themselves. Obviously this outcome would not mark a return to the warfare of the Middle Ages; but after any divorce – as we know – there’s a bit of unhappiness and anger followed by paths diverging. Both sides increasingly pursue their own interests without reference to those of their former partner.
If Alex Salmond really does believe that post-referendum negotiations to break up the UK would be seamless and friendly, and that Scots and English would remain best friends and neighbours he is deluding himself.
As Professor Anthony King – a Canadian academic based in England – has recently noted, England is a democracy too; and the people of England would feel rejected and hurt if Scotland chose to leave. Quite understandably English voters would insist on placing English interests first. Consequently, English politicians would have no choice but to reflect this posture at the negotiating table.
John Mair and the Scottish architects of the Union would be in no doubt about who would have the better of these negotiations. After all, Union was designed by Scots – and for Scotland – as the means by which our nation could maximise its autonomy while sharing across this island with a much larger neighbour.
