THE DARIEN DISASTER

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

  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 further 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.

  When he was told that the Spanish had posted no sentinels

  Montgomerie detached forty men to guard the village, and advanced cautiously on the grove with the rest of the company and a large party of Indians. He arrived on its outskirts toward five in the morning, and although the sun was rising it was still dark beneath the thick roof of leaves. He drew up his sixty men in an extended line with bayonets fixed and muskets cocked, intending a sudden, surprise attack. This resolute action restored the courage of the Indians on the flanks and to the rear of the Scots, and they hooted in defiance. Surprise was lost. Montgomerie ordered his drummer to beat, and led his men in a threshing advance. The Spaniards were gone when they reached the clearing, their fires still burning, their meagre provisions abandoned. Montgomerie ordered his hungry men to take what they wanted, and wondered what next he could or should do. A decision was made for him by a spatter of musketry ahead where Pedro's screaming warriors had come up with the Spaniards' stubborn rearguard. Montgomerie's drummer again beat the advance and the Scots went forward. They saw no enemies in the mist, in the slanting columns of sunlight, only the flash of muskets. And then there was silence. The Spaniards were gone.

  In the growing light, young Montgomerie calmed his Indian allies and counted his dead and wounded. In the mud he found the bodies of Ensign Alexander Swinton and a private soldier called Andrew Jaffrey. Two more officers were wounded, a sergeant and nine men, including Drummer James Forbes who had beaten the advance in the confusion of the plantain grove. That night in Pedro's village, Montgomerie wrote a proud report to the Council. He did not put his own name among the list of wounded, but admitted that "I'm a little hurt myself in the thigh." The Spaniards had taken to the hills and he did not think it safe to pursue them, for there was a larger force there which, he was told by the Indians, was intended for an attack on the settlement. He was impatient to know what to do, "not doubting but your care and speedy measures will prevent any danger we may be in by the smallness of number." The council recalled him to the Peninsula, and he went back in triumph.

  In fact the Conde de Canillas had abandoned any design he may have had for an attack, and the Spaniards whom Montgomerie had routed had been a thin rearguard with orders to watch rather than fight. High on the green ridge of the Cordillera, drenched by mists and rain, their stomachs knotted by wet bread and rotting cheese, the Conde's dispirited men could scarcely stand. At the interminable councils of war his officers quarrelled and protested, accepting the inevitability of retreat but delicately jealous of their honour. The confusion was at last resolved by a company commander from the Panama garrison, Don Juan Martinez Retes de la Vega. Thirty-one years of campaigning in Flanders as soldier, sergeant and officer, from the siege of Charleroi to the withering crossfire in the breach at Maastricht, had proved his courage and honour and taught him a simple lesson: the wisest soldier, the best soldier was he who knew when to retreat. Moreover, His Majesty would be well served by a withdrawal, for if they remained the Conde would lose an army and thus be robbed of future victories it would undoubtedly win. "And that this is his feeling," wrote the clerk who was taking down Don Juan's words for later dispatch to Madrid, "and what he offers as his opinion, he declares and swears by God our Lord, and the sign of the Cross which he made with his own right hand." Other officers, including Carrizoli, hurriedly supported de la Vega, and the Conde gratefully ordered a retreat to Toubacanti, to the coast and Panama City. When he sent his report to the Council of the Indies he wisely said nothing of the skirmish with Montgomerie's men.

  Cheered by their small victory, the Scots still lived in fear that one morning the blue and yellow of Spanish uniforms would appear out of the trees to the south. It was partly this fear, and partly their naive belief that no one could contest their presence once their right to Darien had been reasonably explained, that persuaded the Councillors to make a civil approach to the Spanish. They sent formal letters by the Indians to the Conde de Canillas and the Governor of Santa Maria, informing both of the nature of their settlement and its proper establishment by Act of the Parliament of Scotland. They enclosed safe-conducts for any Spanish officers who might come to treat, and asked for the return of similar courtesies. They said that they had a Spanish prisoner, Domingo de Bada who had been taken by Montgomerie on his return to the peninsula, and "whom we have and will continue to treat with all kindness and civility." De Bada was no soldier, a frightened merchant who had been trading with the Indians, and from fear or simple conviction he had told the Council that all the people of the Spanish colonies were delighted by the arrival of the Scots. He did not say why.

  With the letters on their way, the Colony was certain that it was safe from attack, at least until a reply was received. The long rainy season was now slackening, though the ground was still sodden and life ashore still wretched. But the sun was bright, and sometimes shone for a whole day without a single cloud. Four days after Montgomerie's fight, the watchman on Point Look-out cried two ships to the north-west. They were Jamaican sloops, one commanded by Edward Sands and the other by his friend Ephraim Pilkington. Despite the orders of their owner Wilmot, or perhaps in defiance of them, they had brought a small quantity of provisions which they were willing to sell. Beyond this, they were ready to put their ships at the service of the Colony, Pilkington to trade along the coast and Sands to go turtling. Paterson was delighted, aware that both men were doing this more out of regard for him than respect for the Council. Two days later, two more Jamaicans arrived, and their masters were less obliging. One of them had a cargo of provisions consigned to Paterson, and the other had beef and flour to sell. They were "purse-proud fellows", said Paterson, and when the Council havered over the price they said that they would sell for money only. They broke off the bargaining and turned their attention to what Paterson believed had been their main purpose in coming, the salvaging of treasure from the Maurepas. They were ordered away, and they sailed with the provisions still in their holds.

  Pilkington was gone on his commission, and his departure encouraged the Council to send out the Endeavour. She sailed with John Anderson as Master, Alliston as supercargo, trade goods worth £100 Sterling, and ambitious orders to touch at Jamaica and New York for provisions. Gales and storms drove her leaking hull back to Caledonia.

  There was a listlessness over all the settlement, sometimes too heavy for despair. Thomas Drummond drove his men hard to their work, but got no more energy from them than damnified bread and rotting meat could supply. Paterson was unwell, a steel spirit that had been bent by the death of his wife was now bending further under sickness, but he would not spare himself. "I had then some fits of intermittent fever; but, however, I put force upon myself as much as possible to be present in the Councils, lest some rash act be committed or an innocent man suffer." His mind, reaching the point of collapse, was bewildered by the squabbling of the other Councillors, and since he still would not drink he could not join them on the occasions their carousing gave them a brief and obscene unanimity. They met ashore more frequently now that it was dry, beneath the palmetto roof of the largest hut, sitting with comic dignity in their embroidered clothes, their swords and baldricks, sweat on their unshaven cheeks. There had been a great quarrel between Pennecuik and Mackay over some forgotten issue, and the others moved to and from each other in the macabre dance of their factional disputes. There were only five of them, and they still would not
accept Paterson's urgent advice to increase the number.

  Though the Indians brought welcome gifts of fruit, plantains and fowl—which were eaten by the Council and officers— Andreas and Pedro no longer came to the peninsula, and there were rumours that both were dead. Ambrosio sent occasional messages of continuing goodwill, but would not leave his village. Diego was persuaded to come, late in February, for gifts and the signing of a treaty that had been written by Hugh Rose, sealed with bright red wax, and tied with ribbon of watered silk.

  Treaty of Friendship, Union, and Perpetual Confederation, agreed and entered into between the Right Honourable the Council of Caledonia, and the Excellent Diego Tucuapantos and Estrara, Chief and Supreme Leader of the Indians, Inhabitants of the lands and possessions in and about the rivers of Darieno and Matoleme....

  It promised freedom of trade, mutual assistance in danger, succour in distress, courts of justice, and an explanation of all its clauses should they be in future doubt. It also invited the other chiefs of the Isthmus to apply for membership of the alliance. It was read aloud, interpreted and explained to Diego, and then signed by the Council. Diego put his mark to it happily, and went away with a copy in Spanish. He left with a warning. "He advises us," Pennecuik wrote to a friend in Scotland, "to prepare for the worst, believing that the Barliavento Fleet, as soon as they are in a condition, will be upon us. But this we do not fear, being assured that their General, who is said to be a man of no courage, had positively denied to attack us, his master the King of Spain having no war with the Scots."