They must not think that we have so far degenerated from the courage and honour of our ancestors as tamely to submit to become their vassals, when for two thousand years we have maintained our freedom, and therefore it is not in their interest to oppress us too much. If they consult their histories they will find that we always broke their yoke at the long run.
"I waited a considerable time," Seafield wrote to Carstares, "but none of the King's servants speaking anything, I thought it needful to speak my mind freely; and yet I did it so as that my enemies could catch no advantage of what I said." He blandly acknowledged that of course it was important for the Company and the nation to prosper jointly. If he had any quarrel at all with the undertaking it was upon the matter of the assistance which should, or should not be given to it. The demands for an extension of the Company's monopolies, for a new Act confirming its privileges, for the gift of ships by the King, were extravagant and foolish. Let the Colony be properly settled, let it then be seen how things marched. It had been unwise to give the King's Secretary and the King's Commissioner no foreknowledge of what they were now being asked to place before him, for "there might be many proposals made of greater advantage to the Company than these, and it would be cross and contrary to press a vote." He further disarmed the major complaint of the Address by explaining at length how he and others had persuaded the King to restrain his Resident in Hamburg from putting obstacles in the way of the Company. "I think that since His Majesty has done so much in this matter you would not offer to give him further trouble concerning it."
A motion by the Company's friends to put the Address to a special committee was hotly debated for three hours, during which, said Seafield, "I did not so much as sit down." He intervened persistently, with adroit argument and soft threats, persuading the uncommitted and subtly reminding the bought men of their obligations. He did not oppose a committee, believing it would be more manageable than the whole house, and persuaded the Members to pass the matter to the existing Committee of Security rather than elect a new one. He was pleased when the Directors appeared before it to press their demands. "I hope it shall turn to our advantage," he told Carstares, "for this does plainly make appear that (they) proceed by way of humour, and have no regard either to the honour of the King or the satisfaction of his servants."
When the Committee reported to Parliament the debate became a formality. There would still be an Address, a sop to the self-respect of the Estates and the pride of the nation, but it was now easy to turn it from a protest into a declaration of loyalty. The resistance of the Company's party had been broken by the bribes and threats of the King's servants, and Seafield retired exhausted from the battle, leaving the rout to the light cavalry of Argyll and Marchmont. The Address was rephrased and accepted unanimously. The sting had been removed and there was now what Marchmont called "an Address to His Majesty in such terms as shall please him." It thanked William for his gracious assurance that the kingdom's trade would be suitably encouraged, and it humbly recommended the Company to his favour, without suggesting how he might bestow it. Argyll sent copies of the original and final version to Carstares in Flanders. "You'll see it clipped as much as possible of what might choke," he said. "It is now in the King's power to establish his servants who have always been faithful to him." And that, in the opinion of those servants perhaps, was all that really mattered.
Throughout autumn and into early winter the Company's committees were engaged, in a desultory manner, with preparations for a second great expedition to Darien, and they were in no haste to send a ship with those supplies the Council had so urgently demanded in letters from Madeira. In September the Rising Sun arrived from Amsterdam, dropping anchor by Greenock on the Firth of Clyde. There she would stay for months, her bare yards black against the water of the Gair Loch and the snow-hills of Dunbarton. At one time it had seemed as if Scotland would never see this fine ship with the emotive name, upon which Willem Direcksone had expended such skill and art. When the ice melted and released her from his dock, the Company's Dutch creditors had detained her against the money owing them. The Company had sent Stevenson orders to sell her and realise what he could, but she had been saved by generous advances from some of the richer stockholders and by the prospect of a second call on the subscribers at Martinmas.
In Edinburgh it was as if the great orgasm of the fleet's departure had left the Directors listless and benignly unconcerned. They were late for meetings at Milne Square, if they attended at all, and it became necessary to fine them sevenpence if they were not there promptly at nine, and to withhold their sederunt fee of twenty shillings entirely if they could not arrive before a quarter past. There were other distressing matters. James Smith, thought to be safe in the King's Bench Prison, London, escaped therefrom one night with the aid of his gaoler and was never to be seen again. Dr. John Munro was troublesome, complaining that although he had worked two years for the Company, and had brought his family from Caithness to Edinburgh at great expense, he had received no salary at all. The Directors may have been unimpressed by his protestations of loyal and diligent service when they discovered that the apothecaries who had supplied medicines for the expedition, and whose accounts he should surely have settled, were now clamouring for their money. Erskine and Gleneagles also wanted to be paid for their expenses in Hamburg. And finally there were English and French ships lying in the Forth and Clyde, taking on bonded servants and provisions for their own plantations, to "the manifest prejudice of the Company".
There was no news of the fleet, no reason for hope or despair, no encouragement and no dismay. But the spirit of the nation was high. At his print-shop in Parliament Close, James Wardlaw published A Poem upon the Undertaking of the Royal Company of Scotland.
Admire the steady soul of Paterson;
It is no common genius can persuade
A Nation bred in war to think of trade.
"I represented how sad and scandalous our condition was" Caledonia, January and February 1699
Don Andres de Pez, General Commanding the Windward Fleet of His Most Catholic Majesty, was troubled by wild rumours from Spain, by the indecision of the Council of the Indies in Madrid, and by the failure of the provincial governors to realise that his splendidly-styled squadron was in a lamentable condition. Apart from the tenders, he had four warships only, and when they finally sailed from Carthagena at the beginning of January they could limp no further than Portobello. There, he said, they would have to stay. His flagship, and one other, leaked so badly that they would have to be careened before he would take them to sea again, and this work could not be completed before April. The maintenance of the fleet, which was Spain's only defensive force on the Main, was costing 8,000 pesos a month, and this did not include the pay of the soldiers in the tenders. Don Andres had been given no exact account of the strength of the Scots in Caledonia, and he was alarmed to hear from Spain that a second expedition had already sailed to reinforce them.
Since it would be madness to take his tenders and his two sound ships out of Portobello for an attack by sea, he proposed a sensible alternative to the Conde de Canillas, President of Panama. He would bring 500 of his soldiers over the Isthmus to Panama City, and they, together with all the men the President might gather, could attack the settlement from the south. The Conde accepted the proposal, not because he believed it would be possible to destroy the Scots, but because, as he later explained to his King, "we should alarm them, and let them know that in this kingdom there was force and inclination to oppose them." Having thus excused failure before trying for success, he mustered two companies of gentlemen volunteers and waited for de Pez.
The expedition was miserable, wretched and useless. The soldiers and the volunteers were carried eastward by boat along the southern coast of the Isthmus until they reached the Gulf of San Miguel. There, at the mouth of the River Savana, was waiting a cloud of Indian levies in whose canoes the Spaniards were to travel into the heart of the Isthmus. Once the stores were loaded, howev
er, there was no room for men, and the soldiers had to march along the bank, sweating in the moist heat, hacking desperately at the thick undergrowth. Leaving the river they entered the jungle, moving northward and climbing. In the foothills of the continental divide, with tall, green mountains rising before them, they reached Toubacanti. This was an outpost which the President had established three months before upon the first news of the Scots' arrival. A crude, palisaded fort, it was manned by four companies of militia under Campmaster Don Luis Carrizoli, and they now brought the strength of the expedition to fifteen hundred men. Still not sure that he was strong enough to engage the Scots, the President decided to advance over the mountains. Each man was to carry a basket containing rations for ten days, as well as his arms and ammunition. Though he thanked God for the fine weather, de Canillas remembered the nightmare misery of that march.
We had first to cross a river shut in between cliffs and full of boulders. We could not avoid it, and had to march through the actual bed of the stream. It took two days and the men were much knocked-up, because of the weight of the supplies to which was added that of muskets, arquebuses and rifles, bags of shot and fifty balls which the soldiers carried loose. The most lamentable part of it was the men fell frequently, which wet the food they carried.... We came to the end of the river, which is at the foot of the southern slope, and despite the fact that the men were much exhausted, lest the subsistence give out entirely at dawn next day we began to ascend the range, which is extremely impenetrable. We mastered it in that day's march and reached a very marshy
place, only two leagues distant from the enemy's settlement.
The Divine favour, which the President believed had sent them good weather, now deserted them. That night it began to rain, and the river which fed the marsh turned it to flood, washing away the shelters which the soldiers had built. It rained for three days without ceasing. A party of Negro slaves who arrived on the second day from Toubacanti, with baskets of sodden biscuits and cheese, were half-drowned and terrified by the loss of their lances. There was now no spirit in the soldiers. They had marched fifty leagues from the Gulf of San Miguel and the country frightened them. Most of the men brought by Don Andres were lately come from Spain, and the memory of the dry, red earth of their homes was an exquisite torment in this green ocean of leaves. The Indian levies, who may have been enjoying the misery of their masters, told them that the Scots had laid cunning ambuscades ahead. At night, from vespers until dawn, they heard the regular thumping of a gun from the settlement, and believed that at any moment there might be a volley of musketry from the dark trees. By day they crouched on the earth, unable to dry their arms and ammunition, staring at the rain-cloaked mountain heads, and praying for the order to be gone. Their officers passed the time in fruitless councils of war. The President had lost his voice from exposure and exhaustion, and the others could talk of nothing but how they might save both their lives and their honour.
At Caledonia, since the departure of Edward Sands' sloop, little had been done to finish the town and the fort, and nothing at all to break the land. In the irritation of the heat and the persistent rain, the Council was still quarrelling childishly. With Cunningham gone, said Paterson, there was now a need to elect a new member, or even more. "I represented to them separately how sad and scandalous our conditions was." Without a powerful majority, which would be possible if the Council were enlarged, there could be no hope of authoritative government, an end to factional bickering and a beginning to their proper business. He won Jolly and Montgomerie to this point of view, and they agreed to support his motion. But both were weak men. Montgomerie had a young and inexperienced soldier's admiration for Thomas Drummond, and he may have been reluctant to provoke the man's dislike if the new member were not one of the Glencoe Gang. He was also influenced by Mackay who, currently in Pennecuik's favour, was inclined to do what pleased the Commodore. Montgomerie withdrew his support from Paterson, whereupon Jolly, who was President that week, lost his courage too and quashed Paterson's motion before it could be put, there being no seconder.
Robert Jolly had his troubles. Like all the Councillors, except the self-sacrificing Paterson, he lived aboard ship, having comfortable quarters on the Caledonia. He liked to think he was an honest, plain-spoken man, and certainly he was frank enough about his own importance. He sometimes thought that he was in command of the ship, or that at least his office empowered him to give orders to her captain. Robert Drummond endured this for the length of his patience, which was invariably short, and then told Jolly that since he was master of his own ship the Councillor could take himself, his baggage, and his servant ashore. Jolly lordly refused, and went off to a meeting of the Council. While he was away, he later complained in a pathetic memorial, "Captain Drummond caused to break down all his apartments, so therefore Captain Jolly was obliged to go aboard the Unicorn."
The Council was angered by this affront to the dignity of one of its members, although Pennecuik maliciously reminded Jolly that his soft-headed intercession had prevented the Drummonds from being put ashore at Crab Island. He was advised to lay a formal complaint against Robert Drummond but he refused, lest it be thought, he said self-righteously, that he desired the command of the Caledonia for himself. His quarrel with Drummond was further embittered by a dispute over an invoice for the goods aboard the ship, in which each appeared to be accusing the other of theft. It was a complicated, confused squabble of which the details are not important, only the sadness that men with such responsibility should have been concerned with such trivialities.
Paterson's great dream of a trading entrepôt had come to this, and what opportunities there might have been at the beginning were now lost. Wafer and others, perhaps even Paterson, had warned the Company that the Colony would need weatherly ships for coastal trade, but the Scots ships were of little use to windward and were thus idle in the harbour when they were not actually imprisoned in it by the northerly gales. The few North American ships and the Jamaican sloops that came curiously to the Colony had provisions to sell and goods to trade, but none of them, as the Council ought to have realised from its experience with Moon at Saint Thomas, wanted anything from the fleet's bizarre cargoes, certainly not at the rate of exchange the Scots were still asking. They preferred money. Gold was something the Company had not thought of sending, nor could have sent.
At the beginning of February, when the gales began to moderate, it was decided to send the Dolphin on a cruise to Curasao and Saint Thomas, to trade for a sloop, rum, sugar and provisions. Paterson opposed the decision. On the voyage out, he said, the snow had proved to be the worst of all to windward. It was also unwise to send, as was proposed, both Pincarton and John Malloch, the new captain of the Dolphin. What could be done by both could be equally well done by one, and the Colony had few good sea-officers. Finally, their present circumstances were bad enough without sending so much valuable cargo to sea on a hazardous adventure. "But to all this I was answered in the usual form, that I did not understand." The Dolphin sailed, with Pincarton and Malloch, a good crew and a cargo of trade goods worth £1,400 Sterling.
A few days later Richard Moon's sloop came into the bay. With him was his partner Peter Wilmot, and neither of them wished to sell or trade. They had come to recover the provisions bought from Sands, declaring that the goods given him in exchange could be bought at less the price in Jamaica. Moon said little, perhaps being ashamed of the matter, but Wilmot insisted that the Scots had over-valued their goods by forty per cent, and that if they would not make the balance good he would take back the provisions. After some clamours, said Paterson, the Council offered thirty per cent, which Wilmot accepted. "He would not let us have any more of his provisions at that rate, but parted with us, complaining that he should be a loser. It vexed me not only to see us part with such a parcel of provisions, but also for the effect it might have to discourage others."
Any rise there had been in the Colony's morale was lowered by this, and it dropped still furt
her when Captain Pedro sent word that the Spaniards were about to attack the settlement. It had been known for some days that they were in the timbered hills to the south, and the gun which had been fired at regular intervals during the night from the battery on Forth Point had been designed to keep up the Scots' courage as much as to frighten the attackers. Now Pedro said that they were within two leagues of the bay. There was an immediate alarm, drums beating the Assembly inside the fort, trumpets sounding aboard the ships. The Council met, and for once wasted no time in quarrelsome debate. James Montgomerie was elected to lead one hundred soldiers to Pedro's village, and Robert Drummond was ordered to muster sixty fit men from the crews of the Saint Andrew, Unicorn and Caledonia and to follow Montgomerie as soon as possible. "If you shall be attacked by an enemy before you join him," he was told, "you are hereby ordered to take or kill such as wrongfully attack you." The small force of soldiers, and the use of sailors as a reserve, suggest that fever and sickness had seriously weakened the military strength of the settlement. Neither Thomas Drummond nor Samuel Vetch was given command of the expedition, and though this may have been due to Pennecuik's stubborn hatred of both, more probably the Council decided that they would be better used in the defence of the peninsula if Montgomerie were overwhelmed.
Montgomerie left at dusk on February 5 and reached Pedro's village before midnight, his men exhausted by the weight of their arms and ammunition, their thick uniforms, the marshy ground beneath their feet and the tangle of branches before their faces. On their way they met two frightened Indians who said that the Spanish had already taken possession of the village. Montgomerie halted, and sent the Indians to make certain. When they did not return he pressed on valiantly, and found the village deserted except for a group of wailing women. An hour later Pedro came in, happy to see the Scots in arms at last, and said that about 26 Spanish soldiers, with fifteen or more Indians and Negroes, were camped in a plantain grove a few miles off. He made no apology, nor explained why he had earlier reported that there were three hundred of them. These were frightening enough, and the courage of Captain Diego, who arrived shortly afterwards, was no bolder.
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