So properly expressed, the demand could not be dismissed as insubordinate and mutinous, and on the Council there was none but Paterson to oppose it. Thomas Drummond had been suffering from an intermittent fever since March, and before his election he had asked for, and been refused, leave to return to Scotland for the good of his health. Though his self-respect was injured by the thought of surrender, his family pride wounded by his brother's belief that the Colony should be abandoned entirely, he was now contemptuous of the wretched colonists and agreed that the settlement should be deserted, if only temporarily. The other soldiers on the Council accepted his leadership. Paterson again had himself bled, and came bravely from his bed to fight the motion.
When I saw there was no talking against our leaving the
place, I persuaded them what I could, that first rumours of
things of this nature was always most terrifying and that
happily our native country knew nothing of all this; and if they did not, but remained firm to the design, there was none of us but would afterwards be ashamed of our precipitant forwardness in going away upon this occasion.
He was told that the Landsmen were too ill and weak to defend the ditch or the fort, that if there were a Spanish attack they would be over-run. He agreed, but suggested instead that the colonists should be taken aboard the ships, which might then he off the coast until help arrived from Scotland. The Council seemed to agree with him, and issued orders for the loading of the ships. Not unnaturally, a rumour spread that the settlement was to be abandoned and that the fleet would return to Scotland. Paterson protested, demanding a public denial, but the Council said nothing, and it is probable that Pennecuik and Robert Drummond intended to make all sail for home once their ships were clear of the bay. By the beginning of June the Colony was demoralised and disordered, without proper leadership or clear decision. Paterson struggled to prevent the general unease from becoming panic, putting "lets and stumbling-blocks" to the obvious preparations for departure. He said that when Henry Paton returned from Jamaica the sloop should be manned by thirty of the fittest men, cruise off the coast, "and live upon turtling and fishing till we should see if any recruits or news came from Scotland." He volunteered to remain with it. Thomas Drummond supported the proposal, but said that he would stay. Paterson should go home and tell the Company how matters stood with its noble undertaking.
And then, on June 5, Paterson's weakened body collapsed, his mind fled into the wildest delirium yet. The next day a French ship came into the harbour, and her captain brought terrifying news. He had come from Carthagena, he said, where a new Governor had recently arrived from Spain. This man had placed his predecessor, Don Diego, under arrest and was mounting a great force of ships and soldiers against the Colony. Now the last of the Scots' resistance crumbled into panic, officers and men fighting for a place in the boats on the shore. By June 10 most of the company commanders, and all of the Councillors with the exception of Paterson and Drummond, were aboard the ships with their servants and baggage. Little attempt was made to organise the evacuation, and it took a week of mounting fear and confusion. The Planters boarded what ships they could, angrily demanding that they set sail at once. The guns which had been mounted in the fort would have been abandoned but for Thomas Drummond. Gathering a few men by force and threat, he tore a breach in the palisades that had cost so much in labour and death, and dragged the guns down to the boats, standing by with an armed guard until they were ferried out to the flagship.
Ashore in his hut, in a delirium for most of the time, soaked by the rain that ran through the roof, Paterson was ignored. "None visited me except Captain Thomas Drummond, who, with me, still lamented our thoughts of leaving the place, and praying God that we might but hear from our country before we left." Though Drummond had little respect for Paterson, and was usually scornfully impatient with him, he recognised the sick man's courage at this moment and honoured it with his loyal attention. In one of Paterson's rare periods of consciousness, the grenadier captain brought him news of a disquietening rumour aboard the Saint Andrew. Pennecuik, it was said, had no intention of sailing to Scotland. He proposed a cruise along the coast as buccaneers, saying that since the Scots had been called pirates and were certain to be hanged as such if caught by the English or Spanish, they should take what profit they could and be damned. Moreover, if the ships went home to Scotland the seamen need not expect an ungrateful Company to pay the wages owing them. Paterson sent a desperate message to the other Councillors, imploring them to meet him ashore and to place Pennecuik under guard if the report were true. None came, and those who troubled to reply said that they were too ill to leave the ships.
Paterson remembered little of the last two or three days. On June 16 he was hurriedly carried aboard the Unicorn, probably by Drummond or Turnbull. His few articles of clothing, the sad relics of his wife's possessions, were brought out that night, "almost all of them damnified and wet, which afterwards rotted most of them." Like a thwarted child, he vainly asked for several brass kettles and sixteen iron pots, loaned to him by a friend in
Jamaica and now left behind in the ruins of his hut. He became angry in his fever, demanding the immediate payment of £72 Sterling which he had spent on sugar, tobacco and resin for the Colony. In such a mood of sick petulance did he leave his great dream for ever.
On the morning of June 18, a northerly wind making it impossible for them to sail through the sea-gate, the Caledonia, Unicorn and Endeavour were warped out of the bay. They lay by off Forth Point and Thomas Drummond was rowed across to the Unicorn from his brother's ship. He brought papers which he was anxious for Paterson to sign. "I was very ill and not willing to meddle," remembered Paterson, "but he pressed it, saying there could be no quorum without me. Upon this I signed." He could recall little of what the papers said, but he thought there were orders for the ships to sail to Boston or Salem in New England, for the Councillors aboard to sell what goods they could for provisions, and to carry the remainder to Scotland. Pennecuik's bold scheme for a buccaneering venture, if indeed he had truly proposed it, was forgotten. They were going home.
When Drummond got back to the Caledonia a sunset gale blew her and the Endeavour out of sight to sea. Ineptly handled by her weary crew, the Unicorn was struck broadside by a wave that smashed her long-boat in the waist and tore her away from her bow anchor. She ran in to the lee of Golden Island where she dropped another from the stern and rode out the night in danger and fear. The next morning the Saint Andrew was sighted to the east, under full sail and making for the open sea. She ignored the Unicorns signal and was soon hull down. Without the strength to weigh anchor, the Unicorn cut her stern cable and followed.
Behind in Caledonia Bay were left decaying huts, muddy tracks, the slipping palisades of Fort Saint Andrew, and six men. Too exhausted to fight their way to the boats, they had been left to die at their own request. "Poor silly fellows," Roger Oswald called them, having crawled to the shore himself, "who being so weak did not dare adventure themselves to sea." The Indians, who had watched the departure of the ships with sad incomprehension, came out of the trees and offered them shelter. These six men would have been surprised to know that they, alone of all the colonists, would later be admired and respected by their countrymen.
Some weeks later a Spanish brigantine slipped cautiously into the bay. Her captain, Juan Delgado, went ashore and wandered among the ruins of a hundred empty huts. He counted the twenty-four embrasures of the fort and a dribble of cannon- balls by the breach in its palisade. He counted the graves too, four hundred in battalion ranks and two inside the fort. He sent an armed party into the forest. It came back with four frightened Indians and a white man, one of the abandoned Scots. Delgado treated him with gentle kindness.
Before they left, the Spaniards destroyed what they could of Fort Saint Andrew and burnt the huts of New Edinburgh.
"Most of them dead, the rest in so lamentable a condition" Jamaica and New York, July to October 1699
Two hundred and fifty Planters had crowded aboard the Unicorn, lying below decks on the rotting mockery of useless trade goods. Before she left the lee of Golden Island her water had turned sour. Her provisions, the smell of which made starving men retch, would scarcely support half the numbers aboard, though death would soon balance that accounting. Waiting in the bay, her crew had caught the fever and the flux brought aboard by the Landsmen, and now she could muster no more than half a dozen seamen to a watch. John Anderson, who had been given command of the ship when Murdoch left, put the fittest Landsmen to work aloft and below, and crowded on as much sail as
the weather would allow. That weather was bad, skies of awful thunder-heads, sudden squalls, changing winds that could send men into the shrouds three or four times within an hour. South of Jamaica the Unicorn came up with Henry Paton's sloop, on its return voyage to Caledonia. The two ships lay close, their masters shouting across the heaving seas. The Unicorn's news was plain by her presence, by the white faces of the haggard men at her rail, and Paton reported no more than had been expected. Because of Beeston's proclamation, he had left Port Royal without provisions. The weather parted them, but the sloop put about and followed the Unicorn like an uneasy dog.
That night a violent gale struck both ships. The sloop weathered it, but the Unicorn lost her foremast and mizzen top and sprang so many leaks that her waist was awash.
Anderson ordered all but the unconscious and the dying to the pumps. By dawn the sea was calm, the wind soft, and in the pellucid light of a fine day the Unicorn was astonished to see the Saint Andrew two leagues off, her mainsails set and the sun golden on her stern. Closer still was Paton, silently ignoring all cries for help. Anderson could not haul up his main courses, the signal of distress, but he fired the two guns which should follow, and upon this the Saint Andrew came slowly up and lay by within half a league. Anderson went away to her in his boat, hoping that she would give him men to clear his decks and rig a jury-mast. Pennecuik was ill, lying in his cabin and peevishly indifferent to all misfortunes but the impertinence of his own sickness. He refused to help, and only after Anderson's entreaties and the insistence of Councillor Colin Campbell would he sign an order to Paton, telling him to stand by and give what aid he could.
When the wind rose the next day, the Saint Andrew left. The sloop remained within hail of the Unicorn for another twenty- four hours, and then, said Paterson, "notwithstanding her orders in writing, and Paton's repeated oaths to Captain Anderson that he would not leave us, they sailed away from us at fair daylight." It was a week, providentially of calm weather, before the Unicorn could get under way again. There were now not more than twenty Landsmen who could stand on their feet, Anderson having driven them mercilessly to the pumps while his seamen cut away the wreckage and erected a jury-mast.
It is possible that the Saint Andrew could have given no help even had her commander been willing. Her seamen were as weak as, if not weaker than the Unicorns. All her sea-officers were dead or dying, and she was soon commanded by Colin Campbell. Resolute soldier though he was, he knew more about picquet-guards and enfilade fire than he did about binnacles and whipstaffs. Shadowed by a wary cruiser from the Barliavento Fleet, she was seven terrible weeks at sea before she came in to the lee of Jamaica and dropped anchor off Blewfields. The fever brought aboard in Caledonia Bay had burnt furiously below her stinking decks. One hundred and forty men had died in the passage. Somewhere, some day or night, Robert Pennecuik had joined them, carried from his fine cabin in a canvas shroud, thrown overboard with the minimum respect and ceremony due to a member of the Council and Parliament of Caledonia, a Commodore of the Fleet of the Company of Scotland. In none of the letters and journals of the survivors is there any regret for his death.
"I know not in all the world what to do," Campbell wrote to his friend Rorie Mackenzie, "for I am certain the seamen will mutiny and play the devil, for they have not a week's bread, and besides they expect to have their wages here... They are the damnedest crew that I ever saw, for such of them as are not lazy are most confoundedly mutinous."
Uncharitable though his opinion was of these sick and starving men who had brought him to a safe landfall, Campbell did his best to find them food. He went ashore and took horse to Port Royal where, in a fine white house above the fort, Sir William Beeston welcomed him cordially. A glass of wine, a pipe of tobacco and an exchange of courtesies, however, were all he was prepared to give the Scot. "He could by no means suffer me to dispose of any goods for supplying my men, although they should starve." Apart from the orders he had received, Beeston was also afraid of the Spaniards who had been taking reprisals against Jamaican merchantmen, in the outrageous belief that there was no difference between an Englishman and a Scot. They had attacked a sloop off Crab Island, blowing away her master's jawbone as he swam from his ship, detained two more in Carthagena, and robbed another of her cargo of slaves. Beeston knew that the angry shipmasters of his island would not tolerate any help being given to the Saint Andrew. But he was not without sympathy. "The Scotch are quite removed from Caledonia," he reported to London, having carefully questioned Campbell, "most of them dead and the rest in so lamentable a condition that deserves great compassion."
Stifling his bitter pride, Campbell then called on John Benbow whose fleet was at anchor in the harbour. The Admiral would give him no provisions and no help in bringing the Saint Andrew to a safer anchorage at Port Royal. The Company's agent in Jamaica, Doctor Blair, was a frightened man and pleaded illness as an excuse for not receiving Campbell.
Thus the Scots were forced to beg or steal. Their ship rotted where they had brought her to anchor, the sick without attention and the daily dead pushed hurriedly into the bay. Many of the crew deserted, taking ship with merchantmen or the bitter alternative of Benbow's fleet. For want of bread to eat, the Landsmen who could struggle ashore signed themselves away as bonded servants to the plantations. Few, if any, would return home again. Campbell lived out the summer aboard the ship, rejecting advice to lay her up in harbour while he still had men to handle her, hoping for relief from Scotland. That autumn there was a virulent epidemic throughout the Caribbean, and no island escaped it. On Jamaica it was the worst the English had known, and the thin and yellow skeletons aboard the Saint Andrew were helpless before it. "The Scotch that came from Caledonia," reported Beeston, "are so many dead that at last they are forced to lay up the ship for want of men to carry her away." Campbell went ashore, living on charity and on drafts which Blair finally honoured. He still believed that relief would come.
The Caledonia reached New England in seven weeks, dropping anchor at Sandy Hook on August 8. She had lost one hundred and five men on the voyage, and eleven more died before she came up to New York two days later, foul with the smell of death, vomit and excrement. Of the hundred and fifty still alive, a third were sick, including the Drummonds and Samuel Vetch, and the remainder weak from exhaustion. Until he went down with fever, Robert Drummond and his officers had driven their crew and passengers with a pitiless brutality which the survivors remembered more vividly than the endless gales, the groans of the dying, and the prayers that were cried in the night. Three Scots merchants of New York, who went
aboard the ship when she arrived, met afterwards in shocked horror and wrote a passionate letter of protest to Scotland.
Was there ever a more horrid barbarity than in the passage they exercised toward their poor men, who no sooner fell sick but were turned out on deck, there exposed to most violent rains; and though the most of their provisions consisted in flour, yet they whose distemper was the flux must have nothing but a little sour oatmeal and a little water, nor their share of that neither. When they complain, to condole or comfort them—sweet Christian-like consolation!—"Dogs! It's too good for you!" Their visits from officers and surgeons were, in the morning, questioning, how many are to be thrown overboard? Answer 4, or perhaps 5. "Why," reply they, "what, no more?"
Aboard the Unicorn conditions were worse, though from sickness and over-crowding, not brutality, for Anderson was a compassionate man. Making little way under her jury-mast, and leaking badly, she was driven westward of Cuba and then beat to windward along the coast until she found shelter by the port of Matanzas. Anderson took his pinnace ashore in a green bay to look for water. He found instead a Spanish fort, with twenty-four guns gaping from its walls. He managed to escape under a spatter of musketry, but left behind Benjamin Spense who had had little opportunity to exercise his skill in languages and now stepped forward to greet the Spaniards in their own tongue. Anderson got the ship out of the bay with great difficulty, pursued by an armed piragua and the rolling fire of the fort's guns.
Northward went the Unicorn, past the Florida Keys and up the coast of Virginia, running ashore several times and hauling off by some miraculous strength of will and body. On August 13 she reached Sandy Hook, and the next day came in to New York. "Under God," said Paterson, "owing the safety of the ship and our lives to the care and industry of our commander, Captain John Anderson." With a leaking, dismasted ship he had indeed served the Company well, but at a high cost. Sixty of the hundred men left aboard were sick or dying. Councillor Charles Forbes had been turned over in Matanzas Bay, out of range of the Spanish guns. There was not a captain, lieutenant or subaltern left, and few of their soldiers. "We lost near 150, most of them for want of looking after and means to recover them, in which condition we had no small loss and inconvenience by the death of Mr. Hector Mackenzie, our chief surgeon." He had died, said Paterson who loved him, as a result of "his unwearied pains and industry among the people on shore as well as on board, for many weeks together."
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