Murdoch had a rough integrity, and a stubborn wish to do what his "honest Captain Pincarton" would think was best for his ship and the Colony. "I stood in defence of the ungrateful Company's interest," he would write with pride seven months later, "and in support of the Colony against their Glencoe Council when few of their men of honour had the soul to do it." He sympathised with Jolly, now aboard the Unicorn, and with Montgomerie, and when both were formally expelled from the Council he bluntly declared, with more generosity than justification, that they had been unfairly treated. He detested Pennecuik whose sole ambition, he thought, was that "the world might hear of his grandeur". He had called Cunningham a "greeting beast", and now, when he heard of Mackay's wish to carry the dispatches home he made no secret of his contempt for the Highlander's "vain stomach". Understandably, he was popular with his own crew only, and the grateful Planters ashore. His innocent involvement in the mutiny was a disaster for him, and ended his loyal service to the Colony.
He heard of it one evening when he returned with his turtling boats. Going aboard the Endeavour to take a glass of wine with John Anderson, he found the master alarmed and troubled. One of Pennecuik's officers, said Anderson, had that day approached him with a scheme to take over the Saint Andrew with drawn swords and bent pistols, and to sail her out on a buccaneering cruise. Though Anderson had refused to join the plot and had reprimanded the officer (whom he would not name), he was reluctant to inform the Council, thinking, perhaps, that Pennecuik might somehow be involved. "I told him that it was dangerous to conceal it," wrote Murdoch, "and that I going aboard presently should have the opportunity to declare it to Captain Jolly, which I did." Jolly advised him to keep a good watch, and that if any of the other ships attempted to clear the bay he should open fire on them with the Unicorn's guns. According to his own memorial, Jolly then told Montgomerie and Paterson of the plot, but the Council's report, which Paterson signed, said that he kept the information to himself. Probably he did, in the machiavellian hope that Pennecuik would be brought down and disgraced when the mutiny failed.
A few days later, the Council ordered Murdoch to beach the
Unicorn for careening and to put all his crew ashore in the fort. Though he had intended careening her himself, he decided that this must be an attempt to prevent him from opposing the Saint Andrew's departure. His stern sense of duty, his respect for the only government of the Colony, albeit the Glencoe Gang, would not permit him to refuse an order. He resigned his command instead and told the Council that he would serve it no longer. He asked permission to go aboard the Maidstone or The Three Sisters, and to leave for Scotland with whichever sailed first. Jolly and Montgomerie, fearful of their safety ashore, were already aboard Pilkington's ship.
The President of the week, Daniel Mackay, invited Murdoch to Sunday breakfast, which he refused. There followed an invitation to dine, which he again refused when he saw that the other guests were all members of the Highlander's clan. He lost his temper with Mackay and told him that neither flattery nor bullying would change his mind. "On Monday the Council sent for me and flattered me which I took little notice of, upon which Mackay produced my saucy note, as he termed it, and called me a hundred rogues, rascals and villains. I was remanded about and told they would force me to serve them." At ten in the evening of the next day he was again called before the Council, accused of disobedience, and placed under guard in the fort. Jolly, who had also been summoned, wisely pleaded illness, but it did not save him. A file of musketeers took him out of the Maidstone and across the bay to the Caledonia where Robert Drummond "used him like a dog" and locked him in the surgeon's cabin. He was accused of taking aboard the Maidstone, as his own property, half a hogshead and two ankers of brandy, as well as a cask of Madeira, all the rightful property of the Colony.
In the confusion of evidence, the deliberate obscurantism of its reporters, the truth of this miserable comedy cannot now be discovered, for each man recorded only what he thought to be true, or what he wished the Company and his countrymen at home to believe. Yet it is possible that Murdoch came closest to understanding when he said that he was kept a prisoner until Mackay sailed for Scotland "lest I should force a passage with him and spoil his embassy."
On April 11, still weak from another attack of fever, Mackay went aboard The Three Sisters and left with her before sunset. The dispatches he carried from the Council, the sad letters home, had one common theme—an appeal for help, for food, for reinforcements. Those that were private were also bitter with complaint against the Council, the idle Lords, the Doges, the Glencoe Gang. Murdoch, who knew something of these complaints, and who would be in Scotland when the letters should have been delivered, later hinted at that compact made between Mackay and Pennecuik at the moment of their reconciliation. He said that Mackay opened many of the letters on the long voyage home, and destroyed those "that gave account of the truth." But by the time of writing this his hatred of Mackay was venomous, and it may have clouded his good sense. "Wherever I meet him, if he was guarded by the ghost of the great Mackay, and all the Macraws and Mackays in the Highlands, it shall not save his carcass."
Throughout it all William Paterson had been weakly acquiescent. Sick, tired, closer still to losing his reason and unmercifully bullied by Pennecuik and Thomas Drummond, he signed all that was placed before him. But his conscience was troubled. When Murdoch was released from the fort, five days after the sailing of The Three Sisters, Paterson went to him and wept. "He hoped I would not take in ill part his pronouncing that unjust sentence against me," said Murdoch, "the Council had obliged him to do it to please Pennecuik." He begged Murdoch to reconsider his resignation, and to take service with the Colony again, but the seaman refused.
On April 17, Jolly was also released, and he joined Mont- gomerie and Murdoch aboard the Maidstone. Jolly said that seamen from the Caledonia came aboard the ship at night, asking Pillangton for rum and sugar, offering salt-blackened coins which they had fished from the French wreck. The Maidstone sailed in the afternoon of April 20, but the wind fell once she was clear of the harbour and she was forced to drop anchor. Before sunset, the Caledonia's pinnace came up under the sloop's stem, demanding Murdoch's presence at a Council meeting aboard the flagship. He went with reluctance, and upon an assurance that Pilkington would wait for his return.
He discovered that the plot he had long ago reported to Jolly had now been betrayed to the Council by one of the conspirators, a midshipman. He and three others—the boatswain, gunner and gunner's mate of the Saint Andrew—were in irons and accused of resolving "in a most barbarous manner and with cocked pistols to attack the officers thereunto belonging, as likewise for nailing up the guns on the battery and other mischievous and horrid designs tending no less than the ruin of the Colony."
When he appeared before them, the Councillors told Murdoch that they had but discovered the plot that evening, yet were disturbed to learn that he had known of it for some time and had not laid information against it. He stared at them with astonishment. "I could not forbear laughing to see a heap of rogues sitting magistrate-like to examine about that which they themselves had hatched." He meant Pennecuik, who he was blindly sure had been responsible for the conspiracy, but remembering the Maidstone waiting for him beyond the harbour he controlled his anger and his amusement and told the Councillors all he knew. Mr. Rose took down his deposition, and Murdoch insisted that the secretary sign each page, "that I might not be tricked." When Murdoch, growing bold, began to accuse them of making ill use of the information he had given Jolly, they dismissed him, saying they had no complaint against him.
At the ship's side, Pennecuik plucked at Murdoch's sleeve and invited him to take a valedictory bowl of punch, believing no doubt that here was another departing enemy whom drink might transmute into a friend, or at least a submissive servant. They were joined by Robert Drummond, who offered the use of his cabin and could thus be present to hear all that was said. By the fourth bowl, Murdoch was angry and disgusted with th
em both. He said that he believed Pennecuik to be at the bottom of the mutiny, and he asked Drummond for a boat to carry him back to the Maidstone.
She sailed at dawn, the guns on Forth Point firing a salute as she cleared the headland. The sound was muffled by the heavy air. The rainy season had begun again.
"There was none of us but would afterwards be ashamed..."
Caledonia, April to June 1699
A Parliament was at last elected and called. It was too late to be effective, and most of the Council had long been cynical about its value. "We found the inconvenience of calling a Parliament," Mackay had written to Roderick Mackenzie, "and of telling the inhabitants that they were freemen so soon. The thought of it made them insolent and ruined command." But it was that insolence and insubordination which finally made a parliament necessary, if only as a token to stiffen the spirit of the colonists and persuade them that they were not servants but partners in the noble undertaking. The election was held toward the end of April, eight representatives chosen in the rain from eight ill- defined districts of New Edinburgh. Watching under guard from the palisades of the fort, Murdoch had been delighted by the open annoyance of the Council when the Caledonians rejected its nominees and elected "an honest subaltern or soldier rather than a knavish captain". Admirable though this was as an expression of political enlightenment, it would before long be fatal to the Colony.
The delegates were called on April 24, and met beneath the dripping roof of the largest hut in New Edinburgh. Under the guidance of the Council and the presidency of Captain Colin Campbell, they enacted thirty-four Rules and Ordinances for the government of the Colony, the establishment and execution of justice. Those settlers who were not working crowded about the hut, drenched by the rain, listening to the reading of each clause and the voting upon it. The Preamble, as read by Hugh Rose, gave "the Council and Deputees assembled in Parliament" the right to appoint its president, clerk and officers, and to govern under the following ordinances and rules which had "the full force and effect of laws within this Colony and its dependencies by land and sea."
It was clearly affirmed that such laws were based on the precepts, examples, commands and prohibitions of the Holy Scriptures, and the Caledonians were warned that blasphemy, profanity and disrespect toward the Colony's officers would be punished by hard labour and a diet of bread and water. Hard labour at the public works would also be the punishment for slander, quarrelling and brawling. Death was the penalty for murder, rape, robbery, house-breaking, treason and correspondence with the Colony's enemies. It was also the just punishment for mutiny and sedition, disobedience and the violation of the Council's safe-conducts, for duelling and assault (be that only the striking of another with a stick, whip or sheathed sword), for kidnapping and the abuse of a freeman's liberty. More constructively—and here Paterson's liberal mind can be detected at work —the civil rights of the Caledonians were defined and protected, proper justiciary courts and juries ordained, their duties laid down. No man could be imprisoned for more than three months without trial. The property of a freeman could not be restrained for debt unless there were proof of intent to defraud. No judge or juryman could sit upon a case in which he was in any way interested. Corruption, bribery and the perversion of justice were to be punished as theft, but "benefits received, good services done, shall always be generously and thankfully compensated."
The first act of the eight Members reflected the mood of the men who had elected them. They appointed a committee to search all the ships for provisions, to make a correct inventory of them, and to organise their transfer to the fort. Both the Caledonia and the Saint Andrew were found to be well-supplied, and their fortunate crews living above the meagre rations of the Landsmen. Pennecuik and Robert Drummond were outraged by the search, declaring that their word alone should have been enough, and although the masters of the Unicorn and the Endeavour obediently sent their provisions ashore, the Commodore and his truculent Vice-Admiral delayed and finally did nothing.
The food supplies (though "spoiled and rotten" said Paterson) proved to be more than the worst that had been feared, but what there was could not last long. Few men were strong enough for the arduous boat-work of turtling, and the Indians rarely came now with gifts of fowl and plantains. When the Maidstone sailed, Pilkington had promised to direct any merchantman he sighted to the Colony, and to return himself as quickly as he could with beef and flour. But the days passed and no one came.
In the bay was a sloop which had come with the Maidstone on her first visit, and which Pilkington had left behind in the Colony's commission, without crew or master. The Council and Parliament now decided to send it to Jamaica with what money there was. It would also carry letters. Lying in his hut, sick and desperate with fever, Paterson asked the surgeon to bleed him and so give him the strength and clear mind to write to Roderick Mackenzie.
I hope ere this comes to hand that Scotland will be sufficiently concerned and busy to support us who are now at the head of the best and greatest undertaking that ever was to the Indies. I assure you that if they do supply us powerfully and speedily we shall in a few months be able to reimburse them all and make the Company the best fund of any in Europe, but if through poorness of spirit, and little humour and jealousies, as well as delays, this little thing should be neglected, then what we have sown others will reap the fruit of, which I hope not to live to see.
In the clear mind that wrote this there was perhaps more delirium than the fever into which it once more relapsed.
The sloop left on May 3 under the command of Henry Paton, second mate of the Unicorn. He was told to buy what food he could with the money given him, and to return with all haste. There followed days of spiritless lethargy, of unending rain that washed the earth from the palisades of the fort and turned the mean streets of New Edinburgh into runnels of mud. The Council quarrelled with Pennecuik, and gave no advice or direction to its despised Parliament. A French sloop came, with orders from the Governor of Petit Guaves to examine the wreck of the Maurepas. Her master did this indifferently, sold the Colony a few provisions, and then left. When he was gone the Caledonians must have asked themselves if the man were a fool, or had been amusing himself maliciously at their expense. He had told them that he admired this country for its riches and benign climate, that he would come and live among them, and so would five hundred other Frenchmen.
About the middle of the month, desperate for information and food, the Council sent out a piragua. It went eastward along the coast and was back within the week with news that stunned the Colony. It had spoken with a Jamaican sloop and begged her master to sail to the Colony. He would not, and why he would not was plain in the printed sheet which the piragua brought back to the Council. On Sunday, April 9, Sir William Beeston the Governor of Jamaica had published a Proclamation he had signed the day before.
In His Majesty's Name and by command, strictly to command His Majesty's subjects, whatsoever, that they do not presume, on any pretence whatsoever, to hold any correspondence with the said Scots, nor to give them any assistance of arms, ammunition, provisions, or any other necessaries whatsoever, either by themselves or any other for them, or by any of their vessels, or of the English nation, as they will answer the contempt of His Majesty's command, at their utmost peril.
The unprecedented publication of such a proclamation on the Sabbath was explained on Monday. Two sloops, freighted with provisions and about to sail for Darien, were stopped before they could clear Port Royal.
Throughout all the English colonies, from the border of French Canada to the Caribbean, Governors and Lieutenant- Governors had issued the same Proclamation in obedience to orders sent them by James Vernon. The reasons given by the Secretary were that His Majesty had been unaware of the true intentions of the Scots, that the colony of Caledonia was contrary to the spirit and the word of the treaties he had signed with his allies, that Darien was possessed by His Most Catholic Majesty and therefore the settlement was a breach of the Company's Ac
t and of England's friendly relations with Spain. The phrasing of such fine-edged, diplomatic hypocrisy was one of Mr. Vernon's most adroit exercises in clerking. He and his royal master were well aware that in September, 1697, the English Commissioners for Trade had advised the King that Darien was not possessed by Spain, that it ought to be seized by the Crown of England "with all possible dispatch lest the Scotch Company be there before us, which is of utmost importance to the trade of England."
The news of the Proclamation destroyed what was left of the colonists' morale. They could now expect no supplies, no food, no relief. They believed that England's unequivocal hostility explained their countrymen's failure to reinforce them. "That the long silence," said Paterson, "proceeded from no other cause but that they were brow-beaten out of it, and durst not so much send word to us to shift for ourselves." Their miserable failure and hopeless future were now plain even to the most optimistic. They were weak and hungry, and only a few had escaped fever and flux. Of the twelve hundred who had left the Forth ten months before, between three and four hundred were now dead. Forty more lay in the dungeons of Carthagena, or might well be dead too for all the Colony knew. There was nothing to show for their work but a ridiculous huddle of huts and an uncompleted fort. They were ruled by quarrelsome men who wasted their time in ignoble intrigues. It was raining, and would rain for another six months. Their shoes were rotten, their clothes ragged, their skins itched with inflamed sores, they could scarcely swallow their maggot-ridden food. For weeks they had wished to be gone, and now this Proclamation persuaded them that they might go without dishonour. Through their honest subalterns and soldiers in Parliament they demanded to be taken away.
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