WHETHER Donald Trump carries out his threat that the US will take back control of the Panama Canal – a warning he reinforced in his inauguration speech on January 20 – remains to be seen. Being partially of Scottish descent, perhaps he should be wary of venturing there; 326 years ago, the Isthmus of Panama saw one of the most woeful chapters in Scottish history unfold: the Darien Scheme.
The ill-fated project was Scotland’s attempt to break away from England’s economic dominance and establish its own overseas empire. A company of investors was formed to found a colony, which would be named Caledonia, near the Gulf of Darien on the Caribbean/Atlantic Coast of the isthmus, about 200 miles east of today’s Panama Canal.
The ambitious aim was to open a land link to the Pacific Ocean, around 50 miles away. The investors envisaged establishing a thriving trade route across the isthmus, with a town to be called New Edinburgh as the entrepôt where tariffs would be charged. Gold mines and fertile plantations would add to the riches, and the wealth would flow back to Scotland. Instead, the dream died a squalid death in the swampy, rain-lashed, disease-ridden jungles of the isthmus, along with around 2,000 would-be colonists.
There are several excellent books about Darien. One of the most accessible and comprehensive accounts is John Prebble’s Darien: The Scottish Dream of Empire(first published in 1968 as The Darien Disaster).
Prebble explains how the scheme came about at the end of the 17th century, amid the Scottish establishment’s simmering resentment of England. Although both nations had shared a monarch since 1603, Scotland, which still had its own parliament and laws, was very much the poor relation. It languished under England’s Navigation Acts, which crippled its seaborne commerce, whilst bad harvests and drought brought famine. The country was in an ever-deepening slough of despond.
The initial driving force behind the Darien Scheme was William Paterson, a wealthy Scottish-born financier and trader who co-founded the Bank of England in 1694. He helped to form the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies to promote the project. However, its attempts to set up a base in London were thwarted by the East India Company and garnered the disapproval of the King, William III. William did not want to risk war with Spain, which claimed sovereignty over the Isthmus of Panama as part of its lucrative empire in the New World.
In response, the Scottish company retreated to Edinburgh and made a public appeal for investors. The response was astonishing and, within weeks, around 1,500 Scots had raised £400,000, which was around 20 per cent of the wealth available in Scotland and equivalent to some £66million today. On July 14, 1698, five ships, carrying 1,200 pioneer colonists, set sail from Leith.
The expedition was shambolic from the start. Beset by storms, fog and becalming, the fleet did not reach the Orkneys until early August. When it finally headed west into the Atlantic, there was a snag – no one knew exactly where Darien was. It was not until they reached the West Indies that they met up with an old buccaneer who agreed to guide them. Meanwhile, deaths began mounting from the bloody flux and fever.
The fleet reached Darien on November 2 and, at first, it looked like the paradise they had envisaged. From an anchorage in a sheltered bay, the colonists went ashore and started clearing land for growing crops and building New Edinburgh in the form of wooden huts. However, planting proved difficult, and the tropical heat and incessant heavy rainfall made conditions intolerable (Darien is one of the wettest places on Earth).
The local native Kuna (or Guna) tribes were friendly and brought gifts of plantains and fruit, but they were unwilling to buy the combs, mirrors and other trinkets the colonists had brought as trade goods. Meanwhile, King William had ordered the English colonies in North America and the Caribbean not to supply the Scots or give them help of any sort. Ships of other nations which occasionally anchored at Darien would only trade food and other supplies for gold, which the colonists did not have.
To make matters worse, the leading colonists soon split into squabbling factions, the main division being between seamen and landsmen. The sailors lived aboard the ships in relative comfort and safety while the rest faced the brutal environment of the rainforest. Eventually, food began running out, as supplies that had been stored aboard the ships for months were rancid. Rationing was imposed, with colonists each getting just one pound of maggot-infested flour per week, but only those who could work were fed. As tropical fevers and malaria struck the starving hordes, deaths continued to mount; by Christmas Day, the total was 76 and, by March, there were 200 graves, with ten or 12 deaths per day. There was a brief moment of elation when Spanish troops were repelled in a jungle skirmish, but the fear of a stronger attack and the deteriorating conditions led to the colony being abandoned on June 18, 1699, leaving behind a cemetery with 400 graves. At least another 400 colonists died trying to get back to Scotland. Only one ship, the Caledonia, made it, arriving in November with just 300 men aboard.
A second fleet of four ships, not knowing of the abandonment, had already been sent out to Darien three months earlier, carrying 1,300 people. Before they arrived on November 30, 160 had died en route. Expecting to be greeted by a thriving colony, one of the new arrivals wrote: ‘We found nothing but a vast howling wilderness.’ After coming under siege from the Spaniards, the colonists agreed to leave Darien, and it was finally abandoned on April 11, 1700.
None of the ships returned to Scotland, with hundreds of those aboard dying en route to Jamaica, where they were refused help, or to the North American colonies. In all, around 1,000 are thought to have perished through sickness and shipwreck.
Scotland’s vision of a bounteous empire had turned to dust, and the recriminations were rancorous. The returned colonists were reviled as cowards, riots ensued, and those who had sunk their money into the scheme angrily counted the cost. Scapegoats were sought and in a scandalous act of vengeance, three innocent English sailors were hanged in Leith on a fabricated charge of piracy in April 1705.
The collapse of the Darien Scheme is said to have helped push Scotland into signing the Acts of Union with England in 1707. One provision of the treaty was that Scotland would be paid a sum called ‘The Equivalent’ (£398,085) which would essentially repay the Darien investors their capital, plus five per cent interest.
Today, New Edinburgh has been reclaimed by the jungle and the mangrove swamps; all that remains of it is a shallow defensive ditch dug by the colonists. There was some morsel of memory in that the bay where the fleet first arrived was known as Puerto Escocés (Scottish Harbour), but that has been renamed Sukunya Inabaginya in honour of a Panamanian general. However, all is not lost. In the nearby San Blas archipelago, the inhabitants have renamed their small island Caledonia, in honour of the Scots who had arrived with such high hopes and left amid such heartbreaking failure.
