'Darien', said Paterson, would be the
'door of the seas, the key of the universe',
reducing by half the time and expense
of navigation to China and Japan, and
bringing peace to both oceans without
the guilt of war. This wondrous scheme
was premature, not impossible, and
two centuries later men would realize
part of it by cutting the cord of the Isthmus
with a canal.
===================
Darien Expedition
The Darien venture was perhaps the worst
disaster in Scotland's history, greater than
the bloody defeats of Flodden and Dunbar
and Worcester. There had been no glory,
no valour, and few nations can withstand
the terrible loss of pride and money. Its
exchequer and storehouses were empty,
and its challenge to the mercantile power
of England was now a mockery. Nine ****ps
which the Company had bought or chartered
were sunk, burnt or abandoned. A call had
been made upon three-quarters of the
subscribed capital, and it was all lost.
Only 300 of the colonists, soldiers & seamen
returned to Scotland. 2000 men, women and
children had been sacrificed to a national
hubris, drowned at sea, buried in the foetid
earth of Darien, abandoned in Spanish prisons,
or lost for ever as indentured servants in
English colonies. The anger of the people
was intense, and was not reduced when the
King said that their colony had been a threat
to peace. Nor was his promise to promote
their trade, to repair their losses if possible,
more than bitter comfort. Few men blamed
the failure of the colony upon the stupidity
of its location, the contentious inefficiency
of its leaders, or the blind ignorance of its
promoters. English treachery was responsible.
Great men who knew this to be false, or at
least an exaggeration, publicly agreed rather
than challenge the outraged emotions of the
nation. Five years after the capitulation of
Fort St Andrew, the Privy Council submitted
to a violent mob outside the locked doors of
Parliament House and agreed to the hanging
of the captain, the mate and the gunner of the
English merchantman Worcester. The charge
of piracy laid against these young men, of
looting and burning a Scots ****p, was the
imaginative creation of the Company's
embittered secretary, but most men believed
it, and some of the few who did not were
glad to see the humbling of English pride.
This squalid judicial murder was Scotland's
last gesture of defiance before it surrendered
its political independence.
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