John Prebble

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

  But it had not ended. Daniel Mackay, who had been ill with a fever for some days, now returned hot-faced to the Council for his week as President. Still delirious, he said that Maltman's sloop was sailing under a Spanish commission, and that there were three Spanish merchants aboard her at this moment. He demanded the Councillors' signatures to an order authorising Robert Drummond to arrest the ship, her master and her crew, as a reprisal for the imprisonment of Pincarton and the insufferable insults to young Maghie. When Paterson protested, Mackay turned on him in fury. "I'll warrant you'll not meddle," he shouted, "because your friend Wilmot is concerned!" Paterson surrendered and reluctantly signed the order. Away went Drummond's boats from the Caledonia, with a great show of swords, muskets and pistols. They found no Spanish commission, only papers that plainly indicated that the sloop was truly a Jamaican. Hiding in her hold, however, were two frightened Spanish passengers whom Maltman was carrying to Portobello. Drummond brought them off in triumph, together with £100 in pieces of eight which he found in Maltman's cabin. The Council appropriated the money, using it to pay the master of The Three Sisters for his mackerel and butter, but Paterson was miserably unhappy.

  "I said that I would write home about this matter, and then left them. God knows, my concern was not upon my own account, or any humour of my own, but the true love of justice and the good of the Colony."

  Recognising that an excuse might be needed for this little act of piracy, Pennecuik said that Maltman's crew were a "parcel of barbarous fellows". They had recently raided a Spanish island to the leeward of Carthagena, captured a rich friar in his cell, whipped him, and hung him up by the heels until the blood was black in his face. Which may have been true, but scarcely supported the claim that Maltman was sailing under a Spanish commission.

  Ashore in the rotting huts of New Edinburgh there was increasing horror. "Our men did not only continue daily to grow more weakly and sickly," said Paterson, "but more, without hopes of recovery." By the beginning of March there were two hundred graves in the cemetery, and now ten or twelve new ones were sometimes dug in a day. In Samuel Vetch's company there had been twenty-three Gentlemen Volunteers of whom one only, Roger Oswald, was still alive. The survivors, yellow skeletons in torn scarlet, stared at each sunrise with surprise, unable to explain their hold on life or understand their comrades' loss of it. One surgeon, Herries, had left with Hamilton. Another, Andrew Livingstone, had been captured with the Dolphin, and a man could now fall sick and die before Hector Mackenzie or his overworked assistants could be told that he was ill. The best a man might hope for was that his friends would be strong enough to dig him a grave, that he would not be left unmourned, his body thrown into the bay when the water-boats went back to their ships. There is now no way of knowing which of many tropical fevers it was that daily weakened and reduced the demoralised settlement. Patrick MacDowall, who would bring a ship to the relief of the second expedition next year, wrote a clinical account of the illness he survived.

  It was a very severe spotted fever, my whole body being entirely pale red. My extremes was worst and some places about my wrists and ankles altogether red. But all was without either itching or inflammation or any sort of exturbance above my skin. I had an hellish, vicious, bad, intolerable taste, so that everything I took was with the greatest reluctance imaginable. I had, in the beginning, an extraordinary desire of vomitting, and accordingly drunk warm water which did make me vomit up some base, yellowish, bitter, unpleasant choleric sort of stuff of which I found great ease. I continued very ill for four or five days. I took with it a great headache, soreness of my eyes, and weariness of all my joints and bones, which continued all the time with me. I was very inclined to fainting all the while of my sickness, and a considerable time afterwards it brought me so extraordinary weak that I am not yet able to walk alone now. I had blistering plasters applied to my neck at the time of my sickness, and other plasters to my temples, of both of which I found very much good, but our Doctor would neither bleed nor vomit me, though I was still very pressing to have both or either done.

  A few men remained loyal to the hope and enthusiasm they had brought with them from Scotland. Lieutenant Robert Turnbull had fallen in love with this land, with a devotion that neither hunger nor despair could destroy. As late as April he wrote to his friend, Erskine of Carnock, in language of extravagant hyperbole. Darien was a green paradise where fruit fell from the trees without the pain of plucking them, where magnificent forests ran with gentle deer, where the songs of bright- feathered birds sweetened the evening air above rivers of silver- scaled fish. He believed in this Colony. He longed for "honest Councillors" who would make it a success, men such as his friends Thomas Drummond and Samuel Vetch. He was not just a dreamer. He urged Carnock to tell the Company to send nets for fishing, sensible working-tools, more kettles, coarse harn for tropical clothing, and good shoes, many shoes "for this country burns them". And if women must come, let them be those who knew how to cook, to launder, to nurse the sick.

  But most of the settlers had long ago lost any interest they might have had in the land or the Colony. Like Roger Oswald, they wished only to survive, to be gone, to return home. Afraid of his stern father in Lanarkshire, Oswald could not tell him of this misery and despair. He wrote instead to his cousin Thomas Aikman, a Writer in Edinburgh, hoping that he would explain to an unrelenting parent. He was penniless, he said, and like most of the others was thus without the means or influence to buy more food. The salt mackerel brought by The Three Sisters, the turtles caught by Edward Sands and sold at five pieces of eight for every hundred pounds, may have come in a "happy hour" for Pennecuik, but it would seem that few of the ordinary Planters and Volunteers shared in this happiness. They lived on two pounds of flour a week. Two pounds by the Company's weighing, said Oswald, which meant one pound only, and "if it had been well- sifted you would have got a quarter of a pound of mouldy maggots, worms and other such beasts out of the same." Beef, on the rare occasions it was issued, was "as black as the sole of my foot and as rotten as the stump of a rotten boot." Sometimes a handful of dried peas was shared amongst five men for their daily allowance. "When boiled with a little water, without anything else, big maggots and worms must be skimmed off the top of the broth as ever scum is taken off a pot."

  In short, Sir, a man might easily have destroyed his whole week's allowance in one day and have but one ordinary stomach neither.... Yet for all this short allowance we were every man (let him never be so weak) daily turned out to work by daylight, whether with the hatchet, wheelbarrow, pick-axe, shovel, fore-hammer, or any other instrument the case required, and so continued until 12 a clock, and out at 2 again and stayed till night, sometimes working all day up to the headbands of the breeches in water at the trenches. My shoulders have been so wore with carrying burdens that the skin has come off them and grew full of boils. If a man were sick and so was obliged to stay within, no victuals for him that day. Our Councillors all the time lying at their ease, sometimes divided into factions and, being swayed by particular interest, ruined the public.

  At least Thomas Drummond, driving half-starved and sickly men to work in this fashion, could claim that their labour was not wasted. By the beginning of April, the palisades of the fort were finished and thirty guns were mounted in its embrasures. Twenty more had been dragged up to the land batteries on the points. Across the neck of the peninsula had been dug a great ditch, twenty feet deep and twenty-five wide. Yet this was all that had been done in five months. There was no land broken, no plantations sown, no trade established, no goods sold, no town of consequence built, no parliament elected, no government but the meddlesome rule of five quarrelling men. The Councillors no longer had the respect and confidence of the settlement. Oswald called them "superlative Doges", and was probably repeating the general gibe. When he left Edinburgh he had been placed under the protection of Robert Jolly, but "I was never a straw obliged to him, though he promised great things to my father." Worse than this neglect, Jolly ha
d taken from him a sow and four sucklings, the loss of which he remembered bitterly in his hunger.

  Oswald did not know why the Almighty should grant him his life and yet take it from others, but he praised and thanked God for this mercy. "Though I preserved my life, yet I kept not my health. I was troubled with fever and ague that I raved almost every day and it rendered me so weak that my legs were not able to support me.... Our bodies pined away and grew so macerated with such allowance and hard work that we were like so many skeletons."

  Drunkenness increased, there was no shortage of spirits or wine, and a cunning man could get all that he wished. A little was medicine, enough was solace, and excess was suicide. The

  Council issued brandy as a bribe, and sometimes as the only reward it could give. Toward the end of March a bearded, exhausted white man was brought into the settlement by a party of Indians, and it was some time before the Scots realised that this horrifying caricature of their own form was Andrew Livingstone, the surgeon who had sailed with the Dolphin. How he had escaped and travelled from Carthagena no one recorded, and perhaps his bewildered mind could not remember, but in recognition of the courage he had shown he was given four gallons of brandy "for his own proper use, over and above the common allowance". Since wine and brandy assured the oblivion of temporary stupor, and for some a peaceful slide into death, Paterson had little success in his efforts to persuade the colonists to abstain altogether. He promised them that the price of the allowance would be placed to their credit in the Company's accounts, but only one man—an officer called Gordon—accepted the offer. He was still petitioning for the money many years later.

  Faced by the smouldering hostility of the settlement, and aware that it must be placated before it burst into a flame of mutiny, the Councillors finally decided to increase their numbers. Even this decision was not made without dispute and sulks. Since his recovery from a fever which all but he had thought would kill him, Daniel Mackay had been noisily active in Council, and it was during his week as President that he persuaded Paterson (who needed little persuasion) and Pennecuik (who must have needed a great deal) to move and second a motion to appoint four new members to the Council. Mackay's suggestion was not disinterested. It had been decided earlier that The Three Sisters should leave as soon as possible with letters for Scotland, and Mackay was anxious to carry them, but while there were so few of them it would have been unwise for one of the Councillors to go. When the motion to increase was put by Paterson, James Montgomerie protested without explanation and withdrew in a huff. Robert Jolly also objected, arguing with obscure logic that the smaller the number the greater the ease of government and the wiser its rule. Moreover, since no Councillor would receive a salary until the Colony was well established and thriving, it would be improper to involve the Company in extra expense. Receiving no support for this paradox, he also withdrew. "Although we sent our Secretary several times," said Paterson, "entreating them in a friendly and respectful manner to give their attendance and assistance in Council, yet they refused, and altogether forsook us." They were both tired of the Colony and wished to go home.

  With doubtful legality, the remaining three voted on the motion themselves. The new men were probably suggested by Paterson, accepted by Mackay who knew that they would be happy to see the last of him, and hopelessly opposed by Pennecuik. They were all officers—Thomas Drummond, Charles Forbes, Colin Campbell, and Samuel Vetch. The Glencoe Gang now dominated the Council, and although Montgomerie had once been their comrade-in-arms at Fort William and one of their faction in the Colony, he still would not come to the Council. He was perhaps jealous of them, and resented the fading of his little battle- honour before the blaze of their red coats.

  The increase in numbers brought no harmony to the Council. Supported by Vetch, Thomas Drummond did not hide his contempt for Paterson, and was the instrument of his brother's hatred of Pennecuik. Though they were bitterly concerned for the condition of their starving men, Forbes and Campbell had no skill in debate or government, and their only value to the Council was that their presence restored a little of the Planters' respect. Not sure that he could survive an open breach with the Drummonds, Pennecuik began to quarrel with Mackay. The Commodore divided all men into "brave boys and lads" or "lubberly rogues and rascals", and he had recently moved the Highlander from the first to the second category. He remembered that Mackay had once taken Pincarton's part against him in some childish dispute, that on another galling occasion he had persuaded him to apologise to Jolly and invite the lubberly rogue to dinner. When Ephraim Pilkington brought the Maidstone back from her fruitless cruise against the Spaniards, Pennecuik reminded the Council that he had opposed the idea of reprisals and that Mackay had hotly supported it. He badgered the sick man at every meeting, wasting hours in abuse and recrimination. He opposed the motion that Mackay should carry dispatches to the Company and then, realising that the vote must go against him and that he would thus have a vengeful enemy abroad in Edinburgh, he shamelessly put about and came up on another tack. He visited Mackay's sick-bed with blustering good cheer, pressing upon him a letter of recommendation to the Directors in which he asked that Mackay be given a guinea a day should he travel home through England, and that they bear all his expenses while he was in Scotland. Mackay cynically accepted the letter, and their uneasy friendship was restored. There were suspicions later of a darker compact between them.

  The Councillors now met regularly ashore, in Paterson's hut or one shared by the officers. They could be seen through its open walls, wigs removed and coats loosened, the air thick with tobacco smoke to fight off clouds of insects, Mr. Rose's pen scratching at paper, and the noise of shouting voices. No longer separated from the colonists by the water of the bay and the closed door of a ship's cabin, they lost some of their august superiority, and were seen and heard to be what they were— jealous, contentious and human. This, as much as a growing discontent in the Colony, led to the first of several seemingly unrelated incidents that took the settlers and the seamen to the end of their ragged patience and a sad and abortive mutiny.

  Encouraged by the presence of their officers on the Council, some of the Planters went hopefully to the door of the hut and asked for more food. If their miserable rations could not be increased, they said, then the Colony should be abandoned. Pennecuik blandly told them that there was not a month's supply left in the ships, and therefore not enough to provision them for a withdrawal. He refused to accept the proposal, which was supported by other Councillors, that the stores should be brought ashore from the Saint Andrew and lodged in the fort, confident that Robert Drummond would allow none to be unloaded from the Caledonia. The Planters went away confused by what sounded like a sentence of death, and they were further angered when Robert Jolly, hearing of the Commodore's reply, came out of his sulky retirement and said that there were enough provisions for three months at the present allowance, not including the oatmeal set aside for the sick.

  The Commodore denied it, and no one could persuade him to release an inventory of the stores aboard his ship. He was acting altogether strangely. His seamen were filling the water-casks of the Saint Andrew, and a rumour quickly spread that he intended to weigh anchor and leave the settlement to starve. Robert Drummond believed it, and with the same concern for his own safety ordered the Caledonia's casks to be filled and the ship put in trim for sailing. When both vessels began to take ballast aboard, John Anderson of the Endeavour hurriedly did the same. Ashore, the Planters watched in stupefied amazement, and the Council did nothing.

  "About this time," wrote Jolly in his memorial, "Captain Pennecuik invited aboard several of his best and trustiest friends to whom, after dinner, he proposed that, seeing victuals were like to be expended and ships destroyed, he thought it most expedient that the Saint Andrew and the Caledonia, well-manned and provided with provisions, should be fitted out for a design." This design, it was implied, would be a privateering cruise, but to those best and trustiest friends—and to the rest of the
colonists when they heard of it—it sounded like desertion and cowardice. Pennecuik hurriedly withdrew the suggestion, protesting that he was thinking only of the good of the settlement. The affair had a paradoxical effect on morale. "The greatest number of the Colony," said Jolly, "were positively inclined that rather than forsake the place before they have recruits, or hear from Scotland, that they will be satisfied with the quarter or third, yea rather than sail, half abatement of their ordinary allowance of provisions." It was a noble declaration of faith, but it made hunger no easier to endure.

  The only sea-captain who showed any concern for the sick and the starving was William Murdoch, Pincarton's first mate, who now commanded the Unicorn. When the others were taking on water and ballast, he ordered his yards to be stripped and the ship prepared for careening, hoping that the men ashore would understand that he did not intend to desert them. He and his crew also volunteered to take their boats out in search of turtles, and invited the other ships to join them, but they, said Jolly, "busied in fishing the French wreck and catching of small fishes with their twined nets, appropriated all they took for themselves." The Unicorns boats had extraordinary luck, sometimes returning at sunset with a dozen or more great turtles, one alone being enough to feed a hundred men on the peninsula.