John Prebble

by The Darien Disaster (v1. 1) (epub)

  If the Court of Directors debated the shadowed past of this rough and inexorable man they did not make their doubts public. They gave him a commission as an Overseer. He was not, in any case, the only soldier they employed who had been involved in the Glencoe affair. There were private sentinels from Hill's and Argyll's Regiments, and at least two officers from Hill's—Captain Charles Forbes, to whom they gave a company, and Major James Cunningham of Eickett whom they were to make a Councillor. Such men, and others who had had nothing to do with the Massacre, formed Drummond's party during the bitter quarrelling on Darien, and their enemies called them the "Glencoe Gang".

  Thus the colonists were engaged, by major appointments and small. Mr. Hugh Rose to be Clerk to the Colony, on the enthusiastic recommendation of his patron, the Lord President. Alexander Hamilton, a none too successful merchant, offered his services as an Accountant, and was no more successful when he was made Keeper of Merchandise and Goods. The Reverend Mr. Adam Scott gladly agreed to go as Minister, with the blessing of the Presbytery, £100 in stock from the Company and £10 for the purchase of necessary books. A similar offer made to the Reverend Mr. Thomas James was sadly refused. He was a warm admirer of Paterson, and he could not serve the Company while it so unjustly rejected his friend. Roger Oswald was one of the eager and romantic young men who clamoured to be taken as Gentlemen Volunteers. His father, Sir James Oswald of Singleton, was a Lanarkshire laird, an officer of the Lord Treasurer's department who had recently been in prison for some innocent default in his accounts, and a stern, unforgiving parent who left his son in no doubt that family as much as national honour depended on the boy's conduct in the Colony. John Eison, a Highlandman of Clan Mackay whose name was a clerk's mauling of the Gaelic, was also taken as a Volunteer after he had extravagantly claimed to be an "absolute master of the several species of mathematics, particularly fortification, navigation, etc." Though in theory only, he added. James Lindsay, sitting on a stool in Mackenzie's office, grew tired of making ledger entries for broadswords and pistols, hodden-grey and tartan, his elbow brushed by luckier men in scarlet coats and tarpaulin jackets. He was no Gentleman, by social reckoning, but he asked leave to go as a clerk, and was accepted. William Simpson, printer of Edinburgh, offered to work the press that had been loaded aboard the Unicorn, and was engaged at forty shillings a month, ten of which were to be paid to his wife at home.

  And Benjamin Spense, a Jew, was taken as an interpreter. He said that he could read, write and speak six languages, and was particularly fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, qualifications that were to help him more than the Company. He would be a prisoner of the Spaniards for fifteen months.

  Among the lower-deck seamen waiting aboard the ships at Burntisland there was little enthusiasm for the Company or the Colony. Since the end of the war the ports had been full of workless and hungry sailors, and any berth was better than none. The Committee for Equipping Ships had paid off the crews that brought the Company's fleet from Holland and Germany, and had taken on others from the idle men on the quays. This was good business sense, not compassion. Peace had brought lower wages, since supply now exceeded demand, and the first crews had been receiving wartime rates. The seamen accepted this hard bargain silently for some weeks, and then they rebelled. At the beginning of April the ring-leaders of a mutiny aboard the Caledonia, John Bowrie and Robert MacAlexander, were brought before the Committee. They were charged with "going in a tumultous manner to their captain to represent their pretended grievance", with desertion, and with threatening to knock down any who would not desert with them. The Committee wasted no time on the pretended grievance. Between a file of musketeers both men were sent to the Tolbooth, there to stay at the Committee's pleasure, together with a warehouseman, William Turnbull, who had been solving his particular problems by embezzling the Company's stores.

  Perhaps as a result of the trouble aboard the Caledonia, and realising that a mutiny at sea would certainly be worse than one in port, the Directors decided to improve the shipboard conditions of the sailors. They did not raise pay or improve rations, but they ordered that for every five seamen there should be one chest for the stowing of their meagre property. Lest this be jealously resented by the young Gentlemen aboard, it was further resolved that every Volunteer should be given room in the hold for one barrel, in which to keep his personal effects or any trade goods he wished to take to the Colony.

  The Company also had trouble with James Smith again. It had finally, and incredibly late it would seem, struck his name from the roll of Directors "for his villainous violation of the trust reposed in him". He had been in London a year and had been insufferably slow in realising his assets and repaying the money. Dr. Munro was sent south to encourage him. Smith endured a few days of Munro's nagging, and then put his wife, his family, his relations and his luggage in a coach and set off for Dover and France. Munro pursued him by horse, with officers and a special warrant, caught him on the quayside and took him back to London and prison. The Directors sent Munro £400 to pay for the wretched man's prosecution.

  They also sent him orders to seek out Lionel Wafer in London and sound him on the matter of employment with the Company. It was the second attempt to engage the young buccaneer. A few weeks earlier he had dined at Pontack's and discussed the proposal with Andrew Fletcher and Captain Robert Pennecuik, the recently-appointed master of the Saint Andrew and Commodore of the Company's fleet. They reported that he was open to per- suasion and they advised the Directors to pursue him further. Fletcher held no office in the Company and he acted throughout with disinterested good faith, honestly believing that the Directors wished to employ the surgeon, but their intentions were in fact more subtle, and were motivated by an almost hysterical fear that Wafer was about to place their whole undertaking in jeopardy.

  A year before, Wafer and Dampier had been closely examined in London by the Commissioners of Trade, and had been asked whether the Scots, or anyone else, could settle and hold a plantation on Darien. They said that two hundred and fifty good fighting-men, with the help of the Indians, could secure and maintain a foothold against anything the Spanish might muster by sea or land. Five hundred could settle the country and keep it. Although they were probably thinking of buccaneers, not sluggish Flanders veterans and green boys from English or Scots shires, their confidence was impressive. The Commissioners advised the Lords Justices that a ship should be sent to take possession of Golden Island off the coast of Darien. But nothing came of the suggestion.

  Now the Directors heard that Wafer had placed his narrative in the hands of a printer, and they believed that once it was published, once its account of that waiting paradise was common knowledge, the English would order Admiral Benbow's West Indian Fleet to claim Darien before their own ships could leave the Forth.

  Munro called at Wafer's lodgings in early June with James Campbell, the Company's London agent. They discovered that the young man was no ingenuous tarpaulin, that he was a shrewd bargainer and well advised by an Irish merchant called Fitzgerald. When he was offered twenty guineas to postpone his book for a month, he said that for £1,000 he would give the Company all the information it wished. Munro did not tell him that the Directors already had most of that, in the copy of his manuscript which Paterson had given them. He made a counteroffer of considerably less, and they haggled until the articles of a contract were agreed, composed by Campbell and written down by Fitzgerald. Wafer was to withhold publication for a month and leave immediately for further discussions with the Directors and Council-General in Edinburgh. He was to receive £50 for the expenses of this journey and the settling of his affairs in London, and if he entered the Company's service for two years he would suppress the book entirely and receive £700. If no agreement were reached in Edinburgh, he would be free to leave and publish at the end of one month. Wafer signed, and took post-horse for Scotland within the week.

  The affair then became a comic farce. He travelled as "Mr. Brown", Munro insisting that secrecy was all. Wafer
tolerantly agreed to this, though he may have wondered who could not be in the secret, since the English knew of the Scots' interest in him and Darien. He crossed the Border and rode toward Edinburgh by way of Haddington. At the post-house there, he said in a Memorial he wrote later, he was met by Pennecuik

  who told me that he was sent express from the secret

  committee of the Company to acquaint me it was not convenient I should be seen or known at Edinburgh for some private reasons, that he was to lodge me at a house about a mile wide of the road.

  The house was Saltoun Hall, Andrew Fletcher's home, and the great patriot was there to make him welcome. The next day a coach brought five great men of the Company, the Earl of Panmure and the new Marquis of Tweeddale, both Councillors, and three Directors, Haldane, Blackwood and Sir Francis Scott. They asked him if he had so ordered his affairs that there was no need for him to return to London, and he told them that he was able to go aboard at a day's notice. This, they said, was good news, for their fleet would be ready to sail in eight or ten days. They left, and returned the next day with Pennecuik. The subject of this day's conference, as likewise for the next two or three meetings, was to inform themselves of the country of Darien, which I performed faithfully, not suspecting any private design upon me by persons of so great honour, and having unbosomed myself of all the secrets of that country of Darien, as likewise of a treasure of Nicaragua wood unknown to any person in Europe but to myself, they insisted most on this treasure, where it grows, if it were near the sea, or easily shipped aboard. I satisfied them particularly of all and in every question they asked me. There was too much talk of that fabulous red-wood, too little of his duties with the expedition, too many notes taken by Pennecuik about harbours, soundings, and pilotage. And when the Directors spoke of Darien they used words and phrases that may have reminded Wafer curiously of his own manuscript. He was being treated as a child, he thought, and likely to be dismissed

  as a child at any moment, with no more than a worthless rattle for his trouble. But the Company had not yet finished with him. Walter Herries was now sent to bring him by night and in secret again to Edinburgh, where he was privately lodged off the High Street and told to keep to the house, "less their enterprise should take air in England, which they said must inevitably happen if I were known to be in Scotland." High in this smoke-grained building he saw nobody but Pennecuik and Herries, and had no diversion but what he could see from its greasy windows, until one day he was at last visited by the Committee for Equipping Ships. He was told that since England now knew about the Company's plans for Darien that site for its Colony had been rejected in favour of another. Did he perhaps know something of the River Plate? He did not. Of the Amazon? No. A pity, yet he need not be too disappointed, the Company would think of a fit gratuity for his pains. That evening Captain Pennecuik brought him twenty guineas and the Directors' good wishes for a safe return to England.

  Walter Herries, who took Wafer out of Edinburgh and some way down the post-road, was amused by the whole affair, particularly the night-rides, the lonely rooms at a quiet stairhead. He thought the Directors' last warning that the visit should still be kept secret was unnecessary, since the bitter young man could scarcely talk about it without being laughed at. "He hath acquired so little knowledge of Edinburgh that if he were to return to that city he could no more find the way to his lodging than the Company could to the Nicaragua wood."

  In one matter the Directors had been honest with Wafer. Their fleet was ready to sail. It would be at sea before the printer had set the first page of his book.

  "A brave and generous band, inspired with thirst of fame" Edinburgh, July 1698

  There were fine ships in the firth, but against the broad hills and the wide water they seemed absurdly small to carry a nation's desperate hope of survival. The sun which shone brilliantly, day following day, was a cruel mockery of the emblem the Company had chosen for itself. For every ton of meal or cask of beef taken aboard the fleet there were dry fields and empty byres that promised little in replacement. "The main difficulty and discouragement," Lord Marchmont wrote to Carstares, "is from the bad appearance of the crops on the ground. The drouth has continued long, and the corns are very short and look ill... Truly the country is in a hardened and straitened condition, and all people are very sensible of it." What harvest there might be would certainly be late, and this was dangerous in a country where snow could fall on high ground before summer flowers had turned to seed. In the worst year of scarcity yet known, Scotland had stripped its larder to provision the fleet, and was left with nothing to supply the Colony when needed, and little to help itself through the certainty of a more bitter famine next year.

  The Company was aware of the heavy obligations upon it and to it. "Whereas," it declared to the newly-appointed Councillors of the Colony, "the Company has laid out, expended, and bestowed the most considerable part of their whole stock toward the settling of their intended Colony, the charge thereof ought in all reason and gratitude to be refunded in due time by the Colony to the Company, with a valuable consideration during the non-payment thereof." The seven men who were thus bluntly told that the purpose of the Colony was profit had been chosen by a special committee, set up at the beginning of the year to determine the type of man most needed as a Councillor. In view of the contentious, jealous band finally selected, it is hard to know what qualities the committee particularly admired.

  Major James Cunningham of Eickett was the first to be accepted by the Directors, and would be the first officer to desert. He had served in Hill's Regiment at Fort William, and as a company commander he had marched into Glencoe with that battalion on the morning of the massacre, later carrying Hill's account of it to Edinburgh. He was stiff-necked, egocentric and insolently proud, and his first thought as Councillor was to secure the appointment of his brother William as his secretary. He had never been out of Scotland in his life, had seen no action in the field, and knew nothing of ships or trade. Walter Herries said that he was "a Pillar of the Kirk", and this may explain his appointment, for by now the Company was doing little without the approval and the prayers of the Presbytery.

  Daniel Mackay, who was selected on the same day, was a hot- tempered but conscientious young Highlander from Lord Reay's country, and a hard man to like for he intrigued as busily as he worked. According to Herries he was "a scrivener's or writer's clerk, newly come out of his apprenticeship", but he was in fact already a practising lawyer, though the Directors might have found one more experienced. The third Councillor, James Montgomerie, was another of Hill's disbanded officers. He had been an ensign in the Scots Guards, said Herries, "but not liking that office, left it, and carried a brown musket in another regiment." He was a brave soldier, and if he could make no intellectual or political contribution to the government of the Colony he served it in the best way he knew, against the Spaniards in the field. Even so, his appointment can only be explained by the fact that his grandfather was the Earl of Eglinton, his father a Major- General, and his uncle a Privy Councillor and a Lord of the Treasury.

  William Vetch,* the fourth appointment, had accepted the office only after several representations, and even now he was sick and doubted whether he would ever be able to get up from his bed. Herries said that he was a man of no trade, "but was advanced to this post on account of his father who was a godly minister and a glorifier of God." The father was certainly a legendary member of the Scots hagiarchy, a Lanarkshire preacher who had led a troop of horse against the Episcopacy, been a spy for the Covenanters in Edinburgh, and suffered more than most from persecution and exile. The Privy Council had condemned him to death in absentia, and only since the Revolution had he and his family known private peace and security. He had intended that both his sons should follow him into the ministry, and had educated them at Utrecht to this end, but with the accession of William III they became soldiers instead. William joined the Scots Greys, and Samuel became a lieutenant in the Cameronians, sharing their first bloody fig
ht when they drove the clans from the burning streets of Dunkeld. Both young men later served in Flanders, and it was a nagging wound got at Steinkirk that still kept the elder brother to his bed. They were resolute veterans, and loyal friends of Thomas Drummond whom they called their "entire comrade". Samuel Vetch," who had inherited little of his father's piety and unselfishness, was now an Overseer, commanding a "mixed lot" which included the young volunteer Roger Oswald.

  The three remaining Councillors chosen were seamen. Robert Jolly, however, had not commanded a ship for a dozen years or more, having left the sea to become a merchant in Hamburg. His proposal for a Scots company with the monopoly of trade between that city and the Shetland Isles (and with a certain net gain, he was sure, of 30 or 40 per cent on every voyage) never got much further than the paper on which it was written, but such uninhibited visions of profit, and the help he gave the Company's Commission in Hamburg, probably impressed the Committee for Selection. Labouring the inevitable pun, Herries said that he was "a jolly Scotch overgrown Hamburger", but in truth he was a sad and ineffectual man who would have been happier had he kept to his house on the Elbe.