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[1695-1700. how indispensable a right understanding with Spain was, for the great objects of England's foreign policy. The proceedings in the Gulf of Darien had alarmed the English government previous to this remonstrance; and notice had been sent to the governors of English colonies in the West Indies, and in America, that the objects of the expedition had been unknown to the king, and that the proceedings of the adventurers had not his sanction. The colonists soon found how improvident had been the arrangements for their establishment. They began severely to feel the want of food. No supply from home had reached them, for Scotland itself was suffering from a fearful deficiency of harvest. The Directors of the Company wrote to the unfortu nate men, who relied upon a sympathy and foresight that would have left nothing wanting, "We have had scarcity of corn and provisions here since your departure hence, even to dearth, and poverty of course occasioned thereby; which, to our regret, hath necessarily retarded us in our designs of sending you such recruits as our inclination did prompt us unto.” * By "recruits" they do not mean men, which Scotland would have been glad to have shipped off, but provisions that the Company had not the means to purchase. They had wherewithal to exchange for food, thought the Directors of the Company: their cargoes of axes and knives, of shoes and linen, would easily command the necessaries of life. The unhappy settlers could find no exchangers amongst the Indians. They had sent in vain to Jamaica, to obtain supplies. In the huts which they had built pestilence found its seat, side by side with famine. The spring came. Those who remained alive resolved to abandon the land to which they had gone with such eager hopes. They sailed away, sick and feeble, in their three vessels, two of which arrived at New York and one at Jamaica, with the remnant of the colonists in a state of indescribable wretchedness. Paterson, who had opposed the departure, was amongst their number. "I desired them," says he, "not to design, or so much as talk of, going away." The immediate cause of their despair is thus related by Paterson: "Upon the 3rd day of May we despatched the sloop brought in by Pilkington and Sands, to Jamaica, with money and other effects, in order to purchase provisions and necessaries for the colony. Then we began to expect these two sloops; viz., that of Pilkington's and this from Jamaica; also that other supplies would be dropping in, till a reinforcement should come from our country. When, instead thereof, a periagua of ours returned from the coast of Carthagena, which had met with a Jamaica sloop, by whom she had the surprising news that proclamations were published against us in Jamaica, wherein it was declared that, by our settlement at Darien, we had broken the peace entered into with his majesty's allies, and therefore prohibited all his majesty's subjects from supplying, or holding any sort of correspondence with us, upon the severest penalties. And it seems the governor of Jamaica had been so hasty and precipitant in this matter, that these proclamations were published upon the Sabbath day (the like whereof had not been formerly known). But it was to prevent the going out of two sloops bound out next morning, and fraughted with provisions for Caledonia." Certainly, a severe measure. But Defoe states, in the most unqualified terms, that "whoever has the least knowledge of the affairs of "Life of Paterson," p. 195.

* Burton. Note, vol. i. p. 317.

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that country, and of the trade of the English colonies, must needs know that, had the Scots Company, who had placed themselves at Darien, been furnished either with money, or letters of credit, they had never wanted provisions, or come to any other disaster, notwithstanding the proclamations of the English against correspondence." * The whole affair has some resemblance to the expedition of Raleigh to Guiana; more resemblance to the filibustering adventures of our own day. "They," says Scott, "who thus perished for the want of the provisions for which they were willing to pay, were as much murdered by king William's government as if they had been shot in the snows of Glencoe." We are not inclined to retort uncour teously upon this ebullition of nationality, but we can scarcely avoid inquiring whether the Court of Directors in the city of Edinburgh,-who had sent out twelve hundred men to a barren country with insufficient supplies, and in reply to their demands for aid had said, "We have had scarcity of corn and provisions here since your departure," which has prevented us doing "what our inclination did prompt us unto "-were not partakers in the alleged murder? +

In the spring and summer of 1699 the Company in Scotland were enabled to do something for their colonists beyond imparting to them their kind intentions. Two vessels with provisions were sent out in May. On the 5th of June Paterson was attacked with the fever of that pestilential region. By the 10th, he says, "all the counsellors and most of the officers were on board the several ships, and I left alone on shore in a weak state." By the 18th of June the fort was abandoned, and the haste to sail away was such that the vigilance of one of the captains alone prevented the guns being left behind. But another expedition had been organized; and in September, thirteen hundred men, ignorant of the unhappy fate of those who had gone before them, set sail from Leith. When the truth became known in Scotland, of their lamentable failure in the scheme which had raised the hopes of the nation to an extravagant height, the Directors assumed the warlike attitude of injured princes; sent out another squadron under military command; and ordered their officers to pay no respect to any authority but that of the Secretary of State for Scotland. Those who had embarked in May arrived at Darien in the rainy or winter season, to find a scene of desolation where they expected abundance. The expedition which had left in September arrived in the latter part of the winter, when the rains were passing away: the opening of the new year is the beginning of summer, in that climate. This numerous body of men, who had come with ardent expectations, but without any well-defined purpose, found themselves wanting in the immediate means of preserving life, on the barren spot where so many of their countrymen had perished. They, as well as those who had

+ Mr. Burton's narrative of the Darien affair, in his excellent "History of Scotland, from the Revolution," is the most candid and impartial account of these transactions that has been given by any Scottish writer; and though, in our view, he scarcely makes adequate allowance for the tremendous difficulties under which William was placed, his account is not coloured by that intense nationality which renders the relation of this unhappy business by sir Walter Scott and others, necessary to be received with a cautious regard to the general politics of that time, and to the condition of society in both kingdoms. Mr. Burton had the advantage of consulting the original documents "connected with this ill-fated company."

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[1695-1700 preceded them, had been insufficiently provided with a stock of food. For the most part they kept on board the vessels, quarrelling with each other, and ready for any act of mutiny. Accounts at last reached them, that the Spaniards were preparing to attack the Scottish settlement with an overwhelming force. Then the old spirit of many a foray, and of many a battle, was roused. Campbell of Finab, who had come out with the warlike instructions of the Company, led two hundred men, by a wearisome march of three days, across the Isthmus; and finding a Spanish force on the river Santa Maria, took the post by storm. The Spaniards fled from this fierce onslaught; and Campbell and his band marched triumphantly back with their spoils of war. During their absence five Spanish men of war had arrived. The settlement was blockaded by an overpowering naval squadron. It was surrounded by large bodies of troops by land. A surrender was inevitable. On the 18th of March the settlement was abandoned, upon terms of capitulation which had been agreed upon with the governor of Carthagena.

The incidents which illustrate this text of Burnet-"the nation was roused into a sort of fury upon it "—would be painful, and almost revolting, to look back upon, if we were not sure that such an event as the Darien scheme could never happen again, and if the very calamity had not been productive of the greatest blessing to Scotland and England, their political, commercial, and social union. When the Scottish Parliament took up the whole course of the Darien transactions in a revengeful mood-making no allowance for those trade jealousies which were as rife in Scotland as in England-looking at the position of the king as if he could govern England with his right arm upon one course of policy, and govern Scotland with his left arm upon a totally opposite course,-utterly rejecting the notion that anything in the world could be of more paramount importance than the interests of a body of shareholders who had paid up two hundred thousand pounds capital, to carry forward plans which sober-judging merchants and disinterested politicians considered as symptoms of insanity,-we can scarcely conceive any more effectual remedy for the national fever than the cold reserve of William. The wrongs of the Indian and African Company were echoed from the English border to the remotest North. The Jacobites were active in proclaiming the iniquity of a king who had sacrificed Scotland to preserve the Dutch possessions in the West Indies. Associations were formed to forbid the consumption of articles of English production. The Scottish Parliament was not propitiated by a temperate and conciliatory message from the king, that it had been to him a deep regret that he could not agree to the assertion of the right of the Company's Colony in Darien; that he was fully satisfied that his yielding in this matter would have infallibly disturbed the general peace of Christendom, and have brought on a heavy war, in which he could expect no assistance. The Parliament agreed to a series of resolutions, in which the national grievances of Darien were recapitulated, as if Scotland rejected all considerations of the general peace of Christendom, and stood isolated amongst the nations, proud and defiant. Whoever defended the king was a libeller of the nation; and to the fire of the common hangman were committed the few printed attempts to induce charity and forbearance. Such a fierce crackling of the thorns under the pot was of course soon at an end. The king appears to have been the only one who could see something bright

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beyond the passing smoke. The House of Lords addressed him in terms of strong condemnation of the proceedings of the colonists at Darien, and of approbation of the means adopted by the colonial governor to discourage and injure them. William, in his reply, declared that "he cannot but have a great concern and tenderness for his kingdom of Scotland, and a desire to advance their welfare and prosperity; and is very sensibly touched with the loss his subjects of that kingdom have sustained by their late unhappy expeditions, in order to a settlement at Darien. His majesty does apprehend that difficulties may too often arise with respect to the different interests of trade between his two kingdoms, unless some way be found out to unite them more nearly and completely, and therefore his majesty takes this opportunity of putting the House of Peers in mind of what he recommended to his Parliament soon after his accession to the throne, that they would consider of an Union between the two kingdoms."

Six or seven years passed over, during which the Darien affair was a constant source of irritation in Scotland against the English government and the English people. The East India Company had become prosperous beyond expectation, in the amalgamation of the New Company with the Old. The more prosperous that great association, the more jealous and angry were the Scots, who believed that their Company, unless ruined by the tyranny of king William, might have opened the whole commerce of the East to their favoured nation. In the negotiations for the Union in 1706, the Scots Commissioners clung firmly to the principle that the charters, rights, and privileges of the African and Indian Company should be maintained. The English Commissioners as firmly resolved, that the condition of free intercourse, which was the basis of the Union, should not result in "a perfect laying open the East India trade, or at least erecting a new East India Company in Britain." * A compromise was effected, in a manner which smoothed many of the difficulties which the Darien affair presented to the establishment of cordiality between Scotland and England. The Lords Commissioners for England," being sensible that the misfortunes of that Company have been the occasion of misunderstandings and unkindnesses between the two kingdoms, and thinking it above all things desirable that upon the union of the kingdoms the subjects of both may be entirely united in affection,"-agreed to purchase the shares of the particular members of that Company. The stock "had been a dead weight upon many families; the sums paid were given over as utterly sunk and lost; and after all this, to find the whole money should come in again, with interest for the time, was a happy surprise to a great many families, and took off the edge of the opposition which some people would otherwise have made to the Union in general." +

The patriotic aspirations of king William, in the largest sense of patriotism, for the removal of the difficulties with respect to "the different interests of trade in his two kingdoms," were slowly realised. A way was found out "to unite them more nearly and completely." In less than a quarter of a century the fatal rivalries were completely at an end. The merchants of Glasgow and the merchants of Liverpool traded upon equal terms. The two kingdoms, thus united, went forward in a career of

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[1695-1700. prosperity beyond the hopes of the most ardent imagination. In a century and a-half, when Great Britain had planted new colonies in regions known only as the lands of savages; when the North American Plantations had amalgamated into a great republic; when the gold discoveries of California and Australia had given a new impulse to the commerce of the world ;—over that Isthmus of Panama where Scotland vainly attempted to establish a settlement amidst the hostility of the Spanish claimants of its territory, was constructed a railway, by which the great highways of North and South America were connected by the wonder-working powers of Science, devoted to the magnificent object of gradually making the human race one great family.