by Tom Phillips
Ah yes. The Spanish. You see, we haven’t actually mentioned the biggest, most startlingly obvious problem with Paterson’s scheme yet: the fact that the Spanish were pretty bloody sure they already owned Darien.
They got this notion from a few little things. Like them having been active on the Panamanian isthmus for almost two centuries. Like how it was a vital route for them to ship their plundered South American gold and silver back to Spain. And like the way that Darien lay right between three of their major cities. They had actually occupied Darien in the past, before abandoning it due to all the problems the Scots were just now discovering. The idea that Spain was about to let an upstart country simply waltz in and establish a new colony slap bang in the middle of their own was laughable.
How did the Company of Scotland ever think the Spaniards would let them get away with this? It’s a true head-scratcher. But here we do at least have a general idea of their thinking. Buoyed by romantic pirate tales of successful attacks on Spanish properties in the area, they seem to have believed that Spain had become a paper tiger, a fading imperial power with its best days long behind it. Despite the fact that Spain’s navy outnumbered Scotland’s (by one navy to zero), they likely believed that if they could repel any initial attacks, they’d be able to successfully call their opponent’s bluff.
That’s...not quite how it played out. For starters, Spain didn’t have to attack directly. If the English attempts to thwart Scottish ambitions had been damaging beforehand, it was nothing compared to what happened now. The Spanish swiftly and diplomatically let King William know that Scotland’s little venture was exactly the sort of shit wars get started over. Having only just extracted himself from one of England’s regularly scheduled wars with France, William was desperate to maintain peace with Spain, and so he immediately issued orders that no English territory or ship was to supply, give aid to or even correspond with the Scots in any form.
When news of this reached Caledonia, it sent the settlers into despair. They’d had no news from home since they arrived, no fresh supplies had come despite regular pleas sent back to Scotland—and now they were entirely cut off, with any hope of finding allies in the region dashed.
Before the English embargo even came down, the colonists had already fought off one small Spanish strike, which they’d been warned of in advance by the captain of an English ship sent to spy on their activities. (Humiliatingly, he’d actually arrived in the area before them, because the Company’s attempts at secrecy had been so inept.) That small victory improved morale for a while, but was canceled out when one of their ships was seized by the Spanish while it was out looking for people to trade with, its crew thrown in jail and its cargo seized.
Now, with half the population of Caledonia dead, dying or imprisoned and the other half exhausted, starving and hungover, the news that they were completely isolated was the last straw. Believing themselves entirely abandoned, en masse they opted to abandon Darien and make the sad journey home.
And so a mere nine months after William Paterson had finally arrived in the place he’d dreamed of for much of his life, widowed and now sick himself, he was carried on board a ship preparing to leave it. He survived the fever, but he would never see Darien again.
Still ravaged by sickness, the colonists’ journey home via Jamaica and New York was as awful as their time on Darien had been. It took them almost a week just to get out of the harbor, and hundreds more died en route. One ship sank, and another was nearly destroyed. In the end, only a single ship would limp all the way back to Scotland. Where, unfortunately, it didn’t arrive in time to prevent a second fleet sailing to Darien to find out what had happened to them.
That’s right, the Company of Scotland had finally decided to send the long-overdue reinforcements, just when it was too late.
This second fleet arrived at the end of November 1699 to find a “howling wilderness”: the abandoned and burned-out remains of New Edinburgh, an overgrown fort and a large number of shallow graves. Against all reason, the new arrivals decided to stay, rebuild and try to hold on to the land while sending for fresh supplies. All this actually achieved was yet more of them becoming sick and dying, and gifting Spain the opportunity to prove they were no faded power. A few months into the new century, the Spanish arrived in force to remind everyone who was still boss. Ravaged by fever, the Scots somehow managed to hold out under siege for a while, but by April they were forced to surrender. The Scottish Empire was over.
Possibly understanding the propaganda value of a defeated enemy fleeing with their tails between their legs, or maybe just feeling sorry for the poor bastards, the Spanish allowed the settlers to go. Once again, hundreds died of fever on the journey back. A violent storm destroyed a further two ships with the loss of a hundred more souls—including the remarkably unlucky accountant Alexander Hamilton, who having made it back to Scotland despite his first shipwreck had then opted to return to Darien with the second fleet.
In total, somewhere near 3,000 people had sailed from Scotland for Darien. Between 1,500 and 2,000 are thought to have died either in the bay of Caledonia or on the seas. Many of the survivors never returned to Scotland.
Back in Edinburgh, the failure of the scheme prompted waves of shock as the news trickled back over the course of 1700. In a newly polarized political environment, the issue became a political football, with reaction split between those blaming the Company’s directors for their shameful failure, and those blaming the perfidious English for their interference. There were riots in Edinburgh in support of the Company. One disgruntled colonist whose pamphlets tore into the directors of the Company was accused of blasphemy; three Company supporters who produced a derogatory engraving attacking the government were unsuccessfully tried for treason. It didn’t really matter what the facts were anymore—it was all about which side you were on.
The effect was not merely political, but financial: in the midst of an economic crisis, a significant percentage of the country’s total wealth had been thrown away. The individual investors had lost large sums with seemingly no hope of return. Scotland had been humiliated and weakened.
Of course, no major political change happens only for one reason. The forces pushing Scotland toward a full union with England were complex, and didn’t just spring into existence in the wake of Paterson’s foolhardy scheming. This was the end of the seventeenth century, after all, when borders and alliances seemed to change every other week. But Darien sure as hell contributed to it—particularly when, as part of the union deal a few years later, it turned out that England was offering Scotland a bailout. Not just for the country; for the individual investors in the Company of Scotland, who would receive their original stake back with a generous sum of interest.
Many called it a bribe. “We’re bought and sold for English gold,” as Burns would write eight decades later. Some saw the whole affair as a dark English plot to cripple Scotland to the point where it would have no options left. Others were just happy to have their money back.
Paterson argued in favor of union.
In May 1707, the United Kingdom came into existence. In August, a dozen heavily guarded wagons containing almost £400,000 rolled into Edinburgh.
The thing about all this is: Paterson wasn’t wrong, not exactly. Panama really was an excellent site for a colony—indeed, archaeologist Mark Horton surveyed the isthmus in 2007 and concluded that Paterson’s proposed trade routes from Darien were actually realistic. And his forecast of how global trade would develop doesn’t sound so far off the mark today, either; what’s more, he explicitly promoted it as a nonviolent alternative to the atrocities of empire, writing that trade could bring wealth without “contracting such guilt and blood as Alexander and Caesar.” Which frankly for the time makes him almost kind of woke. (Although let’s not go overboard: gleeful talk of Darien’s untapped gold mines indicates that plenty of the scheme’s backers were in this for the plunder of natural reso
urces.)
What really doomed the venture was a collective failure on the part of the scheme’s backers to grapple with difficult questions. They brushed aside the details, such as the type of ships they’d need and what supplies to take; they simply ignored the big picture, like the geopolitical implications of their actions. Instead, when setbacks or pitfalls emerged, they ended up believing their own hype and convincing themselves ever more strongly that they’d been right all along. It was a classic case of groupthink.
To this day, the story of Darien is one that divides Scotland. During the 2014 referendum on independence, it became a metaphor for both sides. For the nationalists, a parable of how England had always sought to sabotage and oppress Scottish hopes; for the unionists, a lesson in the dangers of abandoning stability in favor of unrealistic ambitions.
As a tale, it lends itself to metaphor. I mean, it’s the story of a country turning away from a political union with its closest geographical trading partners in favor of a fantasy vision of unfettered global influence promoted by free-trade zealots with dreams of empire, who wrapped their vague plans in the rhetoric of aggrieved patriotism while consistently ignoring expert warnings about the practical reality of the situation.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything that could be a metaphor for right now.
5 MORE EXPLORERS WHO FAILED AT EXPLORING
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville
A French explorer who, while becoming the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe, got as far as the Great Barrier Reef but turned back, thus failing to discover Australia.
John Evans
A Welsh explorer who spent five years in the 1790s searching for a lost Welsh tribe in America, during which he was imprisoned as a spy by the Spanish, before eventually finding the tribe—the Mandan—and discovering they weren’t Welsh.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
A Canadian explorer who believed that the Arctic was actually a pretty hospitable place, and led an expedition there in 1913. When his ship got stuck in the ice, he told his men he was leading a small party to find food, and then promptly abandoned them.
Lewis Lasseter
In 1930, Lasseter led a search party into the central Australian desert in search of a vast “reef” made of pure gold that he claimed to have found years before. There’s no such thing. Eventually the rest of his party abandoned him, then his camels ran away while he was doing a poo, and he died.
S. A. Andrée
A Swedish engineer and adventurer, Salomon Andrée came up with the excellent idea of reaching the North Pole by hydrogen balloon—and set off despite the fact that the balloon was leaking gas. He and his crew died somewhere in the Arctic.
8
A Dummies’ and/or Current Presidents’ Guide to Diplomacy
As global travel exploded in the Age of Discovery, so, too, did the opportunities for accidentally starting all manner of wars, as it dramatically increased the number of countries you could infuriate. On the assumption that, at least sometimes, you do actually want to avoid having wars, then (short of doing whatever the unclear thing was that the Harappan people did) your best bet is diplomacy. Diplomacy is the art of large groups of humans not being wankers to each other—or at the very least, managing to agree that okay, everybody is a wanker sometimes, but why don’t we try to take it down a notch.
Unfortunately, we’re not very good at that, either.
The key problem with international relations stems from a more general and fundamental problem of human interactions, namely that it involves two basic principles:
1) It is a good idea to trust people.
2) But not too much!
This is the dilemma that haunts pretty much every moment of contact between different cultures in history. Unfortunately for the people living in those moments, there’s no way of knowing which choice will be the right one. That’s a problem we’ve still not quite figured out, but at least we have the luxury of looking back at people’s choices in the past and going, “Nope, definitely the wrong call.”
It’s the problem that the Taíno faced when Columbus came along—during their first meetings, they were trusting, and impressed Columbus with their friendliness and generosity. Obviously Columbus reacted in the normal way you do when someone is friendly and generous to you: “They should make good servants,” he mused, adding after thinking about it for a few more days that “with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.” Lovely chap.
Roughly the same thing played out on a grander scale some decades later, when the Aztec ruler Moctezuma made a very, very bad decision about the intentions of Hernán Cortés.
The Aztecs (or Mexica, as they called themselves) ruled a large empire that stretched from coast to coast across what is now central Mexico. Moctezuma led it from the city-state of Tenochtitlan, the largest and most advanced city on the continent (it’s where Mexico City stands today). Everything was going pretty well for them until 1519, when Cortés landed on the Yucatán coast.
Cortés was not just a conquistador, but a rogue conquistador—he’d actually been removed of his command of the exploratory mission by the Spanish governor of Cuba, who didn’t trust him, but Cortés just took the boats and the crew and went, anyway. A while after his arrival, he deliberately sank the boats to stop his crew mutinying and heading back to Cuba. What I’m saying here is, Hernán Cortés was not a team player. And at this point, on the run from his own countrymen and with no way to get home, he’d pretty much used up any options that weren’t “conquer stuff.”
When Moctezuma heard of Cortés’s arrival, some 200 miles from Tenochtitlan, he was understandably nervous. Unfortunately, he couldn’t decide what to do. He vacillated between sending Cortés lavish gifts and sending him warnings to stay the hell away. Cortés, meanwhile, was busy exploiting the Mexica’s weaknesses. The main problem was: they were an empire, too, and an often quite brutal one. As such, there were plenty of native groups in Mexico who weren’t big fans of Moctezuma, and as Cortés made his way inland he used a combination of smooth talking, trickery and occasional mass slaughter to persuade them to ally with him against Tenochtitlan.
All this should probably have been a sign to Moctezuma that things were probably not going to end in a new era of friendship, but still he waited. It’s possible that his uncertainty was increased by the supposedly widespread belief that Cortés might be the returned incarnation of the sky god Quetzalcoatl—although the only actual evidence that anybody believed this is that Cortés talks a lot about it in his letters, and frankly it sounds like the sort of bullshit he’d say.
When Cortés finally arrived at Tenochtitlan, accompanied by a few hundred Spanish soldiers and a load of his new allies, Moctezuma finally made his decision, despite lots of advisers telling him this was a really bad idea. In fairness, it’s not clear if there was a right decision he could have made, but this was definitely the wrong one: he invited the Spanish in as honored guests. He showered them with gifts, he gave them the best rooms, the works. This did not end well. Within a couple of weeks, Cortés staged a coup, took Moctezuma hostage in his own court and forced him to rule as a puppet. The first thing the Spanish demanded was dinner; after that, they promptly insisted he tell them where all the gold was kept.
It all blew up a few months into 1520, ironically while Cortés was away fighting a large regiment of Spanish troops who’d been sent by the governor of Cuba to try and stop whatever the hell it was he was doing. One of Cortés’s lieutenants who’d been left behind to keep Tenochtitlan under the thumb decided, for no clear reason, to massacre a large number of Mexica nobles in the Great Temple while they were celebrating a religious festival. Outraged at the slaughter, the Mexica people revolted, and Cortés returned to face an uprising. He ordered Moctezuma to tell his people to cease hostilities. They didn’t, and that was the end for Moctezuma. Spanish accounts say that he was st
oned to death by an angry crowd of his own people; in all likelihood, he was actually murdered by the Spanish when it became clear he was no longer any use as a puppet. Just over a year of bloody fighting later, the Spanish had entirely conquered the Mexica, and Cortés—suddenly back in favor with his bosses—was made the governor of Mexico.
Possibly nobody could have stopped the Spanish invasion, but Moctezuma’s decision to welcome them as guests has to go down as one of the most ill-advised pieces of international relations policy in history. And to be honest, if the Mexican government had pondered his example 300 years later when they started encouraging American immigration into Texas, then the key lesson of Moctezuma’s sorry tale—“for God’s sake, Mexico, stop inviting white people into places”—might have led to history playing out very differently.
Fortunately for Moctezuma’s reputation, he’s not alone in history’s hit parade of poor international relations choices.
The crucial nature of choosing your friends wisely can be seen in the story of the Roman governor of Germany in 9 CE, Publius Quinctilius Varus. Varus was trying to do the classic occupying-force thing: picking and choosing local nobles to be on your side, in order to keep the peasants relatively placid. Unfortunately for him, he chose to put his trust in a Germanic tribal leader named Arminius, on the grounds that he had been made a Roman citizen and even led an auxiliary unit in the Roman army. Despite being warned that his trusted adviser might not be quite on the straight and narrow, he chose to believe Arminius when he told him there was an uprising among German tribes that needed to be put down. Arminius steered Varus and his Roman legions right into an ambush—one which he himself led, after pulling the old “I’m just going to ride ahead to check things out” trick. Three whole Roman legions were wiped out (the worst military defeat in their history) and the Roman Empire’s northward expansion was stopped in its tracks.