John Prebble

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

  It was a bitter letter, composed by lonely men who were bewildered by the failure of their mission and wounded by the contempt of men they had hoped to inspire. They sat together under the trees, each comforted by the others' sympathy, offering a word, a phrase, a scriptural reference to strengthen the letter. Mr. Stobo's pen dipped regularly into the ink-horn, scratching line after line of complaint and accusation. They had done their duty as colleagues in a Collegiate of Relation, although it had been impossible to establish a Presbytery. They had preached every Sabbath, one aboard the flagship and two ashore, but such was the malignant obstinacy of the colonists that few came to listen. Near on a third at least are wild Highlanders that cannot speak nor understand Scotch, which are barbarians to us and we to them. The Indians were no better, though those who came to hear the ministers were at least decent in their behaviour. God's servants would persevere in their thankless work, they would stay until the end of the year they had agreed to serve, but... We must now give you advertisement, and entreat you to intimate to the Reverend Commission that none of us are determined to settle here. They asked for prayers and understanding. They signed themselves the Moderator's afflicted brethren in the Work of the Gospel. They sealed the letter and walked down to New Edinburgh, to something they had not thought fit to mention— the sound of axe and saw again, the sight of men now at work after a month of despairing lethargy.

  The threat of a Spanish attack had frightened those colonists not marked down for Jamaica, and the enthusiasm of young officers like Turnbull had encouraged them to resist it. Four guns from the Rising Sun were now ashore, and were being dragged across the marsh to the fort as the ministers came down from the Shades of Love. Although Byres had not authorised it, seventy huts and two storehouses were also being rebuilt. The walls and roof of the guardhouse were restored, and the ministers had been informed that they might use the building as a church when it contained no prisoners. This, too, they had not told the Moderator. Not all the officers thought that resistance was advisable, and most of the men waiting to sail for Port Royal were hoping that they would be away before it became necessary. Major John Ramsay and several captains said that they wished to leave on the Society, and to take ship for Scotland from whatever port she touched. Sick in his cabin prison, Thomas Drummond asked the Council to free him so that he might go home for the good of his health. During the past five weeks, seeing no one but the guard at his door and the steward who brought him food, he had lost faith in the Colony and could think of his reputation only. He wanted to be the first to tell the Directors of his quarrel with Byres.

  Much of the work being done was without the direction or sanction of the Councillors, and they frequently confused everybody by ordering all sea-captains to take on water, to secure their guns and clear their decks for sailing as soon as the wind blew from the south-east. Byres' braggart defiance of the Spaniards had changed to a surly disapproval of any attempt to resist them. It would be unlawful, he said, all war was unlawful and un-Christian. Alexander Shields was outraged by such blasphemy. He had soldiered with the Cameronians and knew that was lawful. He had seen them die with the Psalms on their lips and knew that was Christian. The Councillor told him that he was talking nonsense, contradicting the Gospels, and tempting men to become atheists. On Sunday, February 4, Byres honestly acknowledged that his own safety was more important to him than the security of the Colony. He announced that he would sail away with the Society as soon as the fly-boats could warp her out of the bay.

  The thought had probably been in his mind since he first delayed the sloop's departure, now it had been translated into action by the arrival that morning of a Jamaican brigantine. She was loaded with dry-goods and Negro slaves, but her master had some beef and flour he was willing to sell. He was also anxious to be away as soon as he had caulked a leak, and the news he brought explained why. Four great warships had recently arrived at Portobello from Cadiz, the largest of 60 guns, and three more were expected from Carthagena. The streets of Portobello were sweet with the scent of new-made bread, thousands of loaves for the seamen and soldiers who were to fall upon Caledonia by land and by sea.

  James Byres was aboard the Society before nightfall, with his baggage, his brother-in-law and his apprentice. He said that he would return soon with provisions from Jamaica, but the letters he carried from the Council referred the Directors to Mr. Byres himself should they have any questions that were not answered in the dispatches. Perhaps—and it may be charitable to assume this—the reference was to letters which Byres said he would write to the Company from Port Royal. No one protested against this shameless desertion, all would no doubt have agreed with Shields that it was "a step in our deliverance". It was Wednesday before the fly-boats got the sloop through the sea-gate, and there was one other passenger aboard, Mrs. Dalgleish. "She is big with child," said the Council's letter. "We are not in condition so to treat her as her circumstances and good behaviour require." They hoped that she would finally reach Scotland, and that the Company would pay her the stipend her husband might have earned.

  From the cabin window of the Duke of Hamilton, Thomas Drummond watched the sloop until she was gone beyond the point, convinced that James Byres' voice would now be heard in Milne Square before his.

  The remaining Councillors did nothing. They increased the daily allowance of flour by a quarter of a pound, and they worried about the brandy that was being stolen, suspecting James Milne, the steward of the Rising Sun. But they did nothing to organise the defence of the peninsula, and they stubbornly refused to release the arrested officers or to put more men ashore. For two weeks a Spanish cruiser, hull-down to the north, had been watching the Colony, and now it moved in closer, picking up a long-boat which the Scots had sent out to study it. From dawn to dusk the gold of its stern and the distant call of its trumpets could be seen and heard from Point Look-out. By the week's end, like a paralysed rabbit, the leaderless Colony was once more immobilised by fright.

  For months the Spanish had known less about the strength of the Scots than the Caledonians knew of theirs. An Indian, holding up his fingers before Turnbull or Drummond, could say with accuracy how many ships he had seen, but a lock of hair shaken before the Campmaster at Toubacanti might mean five hundred men or five thousand. The Spanish commanders were also bound by rigid and inflexible rules. The long chain of command, its sea and land-borne links connecting Carthagena, Portobello, Panama, Vera Cruz and Mexico City with that moribund Sufferer in Madrid, made strong and independent action inadvisable where it was not impossible. Days passed before a Governor could read a Campmaster's report, a week, two weeks before a President heard from a Governor, a month before a President's dispatch was read by the Viceroy, and almost a year before the Viceroy might hope for an answer from Madrid.

  The new Governor of Carthagena, Don Juan Pimienta, was more impatient than most with the long delays between the dispatch of information he had received and the return of orders in reply. When he heard that the Hopeful Binning had left Caledonia he advised the King that the twice-abandoned fort should now be occupied by Spanish soldiers, but even he would not do this without orders, and before his letter could reach Madrid the Scots were back. Pimienta was a small, dark-skinned salamander, neat and stiff in the Castilian manner, inexorable in purpose but scrupulously exact in the courtesies of war. He was no pen-and- ink soldier, and did not waste paper or insult his own intelligence by calling the Scots pirates and corsairs. He was as anxious as Don Quixote for a chivalrous passage of arms with them, respecting their valour and eager to gild his own by defeating them. His garrison and ships, however, were crippled by disease, and he believed that his dispirited soldiers would have to be dragged "to anything that looks like fighting". He asked for seasoned infantrymen and good sea-officers, knowing that by the time they arrived—if ever they arrived—the Scots might become too strong to be dislodged. He complained bitterly that the citizens of Carthagena tightened their purse-strings when ordered to loosen them in the King
's service. His councillors were tradesmen who knew nothing of the disciplines of war, frightened men who confused themselves with ridiculous rumours. The Scots, they said, had mined a mountain above the neck of the peninsula and intended to explode it should the Spanish attack from that direction. Who could lay such a long fuse, asked Pimienta, who could be sure that such a vast mine of powder would not become damp and useless in this climate? Such inane fancies, he thought, "cause the writing of a great lot of paper to those who direct military affairs."

  On January 15 the Conde de Canillas, President of Panama, was at last in no doubt about the strength and morale of the Colony, and was delighted to find that both were much lower than he had feared. At noon that day a sergeant and four Indians from Santa Maria brought him two Scots deserters—John Jardine a labourer, and William Strachan a tailor. Both had sailed with the first expedition as Planters, and both had returned with Drummond on the Ann of Caledonia. Shortly after Christmas they had decided that rather than exist any longer on a daily ration of two biscuits and a little codfish they would live or die in the forest. For a few yards of stolen linen an Indian agreed to take them where gold might be found, but he did not tell them that the gold was coin and that he hoped to find it for himself. He led them into the mountains and delivered them to Campmaster Carrizoli at Toubacanti. From thence they were sent to Panama City by way of Santa Maria.

  They were miserable and frightened when they were brought before Canillas and his council that afternoon. None of the Spaniards could understand their thorny Scots, but an illiterate Irish adventurer, a marine called Michael Burke, acted as an interpreter. Canillas was gentle with the deserters, telling Burke that they might take whatever oath their church allowed, examining them separately and questioning them closely on both the first and second expeditions. By dusk he knew all that they were able to tell him about the ships, arms, supplies and defences of the Colony, the discontent and the desertions. They had left before Byres agreed to the landing of the flagship's guns, and Strachan said that his countrymen had not "mounted any artillery ashore, their whole effort being to build houses to shelter them; the old fortification is in bad shape, without gates." When the interrogation was over, the tailor and the labourer were taken away under guard. They were again lost in the darkness that hides the existence of most fnen. This one afternoon only of their lives endures on record, but it was decisive.

  Canillas ordered an immediate attack on Caledonia, his couriers riding the treasure road to Portobello and from thence by ship to Carthagena. Though there was a terrible epidemic of fever in all the Spanish provinces, from Vera Cruz to New Granada, the President was confident that those seamen and soldiers who were not sick were enough to exterminate this puny and impudent settlement of pirates. He proposed the plan he had attempted a year before, the land attack which had ended in Montgomerie's skirmish and his own wretched retreat from Toubacanti, but this time it would be supported by a simultaneous assault from the sea by the Barliavento Fleet under its commander, Don Diego Peredo. Pimienta, and those of his soldiers whom he could drag to the business of fighting, were to leave Carthagena as soon as possible by the auxiliary transports of the Barliavento, and Canillas would join them off the coast of Caledonia with three ships and five hundred men from the garrisons of Panama City and Portobello. Three companies of militia, also from Panama City, were to be sent by oared galleys to Santa Maria from whence the foppish Governor of Darien, Don Miguel Cordones, would march them inland to reinforce Carrizoli's militia, slaves and levies at Toubacanti. With the four hundred men he would then command, Cordones was to strike north at Caledonia as soon as his scouts reported the arrival of the Barliavento.

  At dawn on February 12 Pimienta went aboard Peredo's flagship, San Juan Bautista, and ordered her out to the harbour mouth where some launches were waiting to load the last of his field guns and carriages. To his speechless fury, an incompetent helmsman put the ship aground on a shoal in the lee of the castle, and it was sunset before she could be waiped off by her own boats. Even then she dragged her anchor in the night breeze and went aground again. It was another twenty-four hours before the guns were hauled aboard and the flagship could at last sail in pursuit of her squadron.

  Had all gone as Canillas wished, had the Barliavento answered Cordones' advancing trumpets one morning with a cannonade from the lee of Golden Island, the demoralised Scots would probably have surrendered without resistance. They were saved in time from this disgrace by an unlikely coup de theatre, by The Hero's sudden appearance from the wings, sword in hand.

  Alexander Campbell of Fonab arrived on Sunday, February 11, slipping past the watching cruiser in a Barbadoes sloop. It had taken him four frustrating months to reach Caledonia, and he brought it no more than a few provisions, a young naval officer called John Stewart, and the strength of his own indomitable spirit. A Jamaican sloop followed his into the bay, driven there by the cruiser, and her master told the Scots that Benbow's fleet was under sail to help them. Heartening though this nonsensical report was, the real encouragement came from Fonab's presence, the sight of his calm and upright head, his straight back and scarlet coat as he was rowed across to the Rising Sun. He was no stranger, most of the officers had served with him in Ramsay's Scots Brigade, and many of the Planters had trailed a pike or shouldered a musket behind him at Dottignies and Landen. The three miserable Councillors scarcely troubled to read his commission, but gladly gave him all responsibility for the protection of the Colony. His advice was simple, fight—and by fight he meant offence not defence. He took command in a storm of sleepless energy, ordering the instant release of the arrested officers, the landing of the men embarked for Jamaica, and their immediate employment on the fort and ditch. "So we see," wrote Borland, with no apparent confidence that all was now for the best, "that men propose but God disposeth of us and all our concerns, and it pleaseth Him."

  When Thomas Drummond came ashore from the Duke of Hamilton, Fonab embraced him warmly. They had not met since they were captains together in Argyll's, and it may be that Campbell hoped his friend would share this command with him. But the galling indignity of his imprisonment had soured Drummond's loyalty to the Colony and the Company. He could think only of James Byres already at sea, and if not bound for Edinburgh then certain to be writing letters of scurrilous complaint against him. He was ill, and in this bitter mood was of no use to Fonab. When he asked leave to sail for Scotland as soon as possible, for an early opportunity to vindicate himself before the Directors, Campbell willingly gave it.

  Within a day of his arrival Fonab proposed an attack on Toubacanti where, according to Turnbull's Indian friends, several companies of Spanish soldiers were assembling for an assault on the Colony. Campbell knew nothing of the country, of the difficulties of marching through it or fighting in it. He knew where the enemy was, and that was sufficient. His confidence inspired the younger officers, particularly Tumbull, who offered him thirty eager warriors he had trained as a militia, and who said that Captain Pedro would join them with as many more once he heard the Scots had decided to fight. On Tuesday morning, having had little sleep in the forty-eight hours he had been in the Colony, Alexander Campbell crossed the bay with two hundred Scots and Turnbull's Indians. The soldiers had been hurriedly selected by candle-light on Monday night, each captain choosing the fittest men in his command, and twelve of them were young Gentlemen Volunteers particularly attached to Turnbull in loyalty and affection. They marched with incredible speed through the mangroves and the thick forest to the south of the bay, men who had eaten nothing but rotting biscuits and codfish for months, who carried heavy muskets, ammunition-boxes and swords, whose wet clothes and long hair were caught by every snatching thorn. Yet before nightfall they had reached Pedro's village on the banks of the Acla. He was waiting for them, having been warned by a runner, his face painted black for war, his shoulders covered by the stained scarlet coat the Scots had given more than a year before. Fonab and his officers slept in Pedro's long-house that ni
ght, with fires beside their hammocks, and at dawn he joined them in their march with forty of his warriors.

  The way was now even harder than it had been on Tuesday, for the ground rose steadily toward the ridge of the Cordillera, and was barred by fallen trees, great boulders and the rush of bright green streams. Campbell kept the Scots together and on the march by the strength of his will and the power of his personality. None of them, except perhaps Turnbull, had ever been this deep into the forests or seen such country, so unlike their homeland hills or the dusty avenues of Flemish poplars where once they had campaigned. Sometimes they saw nothing but the red shoulders of the man in front, an angry branch snapping back as he passed. They sank to their knees in a millennium of vegetable decay, were blinded by leaf-splintered sunlight, and deafened by the raucous protest of hidden birds. Turnbull enjoyed all of it.

  I was ordered to march on the front with the Volunteers (he wrote to his cousin later) and with Captain Pedro and about 30 Indians, the rest being divided among the party. We marched over a great hill and crossed the river that runs to the South Seas, and then one of our Indian spies came in and told us that the Spaniards were on top of the next hill, cutting down trees to strengthen themselves, so I sent and told Captain Campbell, and he marched up with the party and halted there a little.

  It was noon and the heat intense. The "next hill" was a long mountain slope of timber, some miles from its foot to the flat summit of Toubacanti. Nothing could be seen but the shimmering movement of leaves. The Scots dropped exhausted where they stood, or bent over their grounded muskets in the sobbing agony of fatigue. The Indians' childish enthusiasm had changed to a melancholy despair, and they were in no humour for an assault on a stockade manned by Spanish soldiers. Pedro smiled hopefully and asked why they should not remain where they were in ambush, for the Spaniards must pass this way to Caledonia. Campbell angrily refused, a soldier was not a bandit but a brave man who advanced boldly upon his enemy with musket primed and bayonet fixed. He drove his Scots to their feet and put them to the march again. They could climb no more than two miles of the bitter slope before dusk and then, by a small spring, the Indians stubbornly refused to go any further. There would be no more water, they said, before Toubacanti was reached. That night the Scots ate the last of the biscuits and dried fish they carried in their pockets, slept as best they could on the earth, and were glad when dawn came. They stood in file, ready to march, but the Indians would send no scouts ahead. Turnbull was ashamed for his friends.