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
Robert Drummond's orders, as signed by a quorum of the Council on June 18, had been to make the best way he could "in company with the rest of the ships". He waited for none of them. Yet the little Endeavour was able to keep the Caledonia's topsails in sight for twelve days, and sometimes come within a cable's length of her stern, despite a dying crew and timbers that threatened to split under every wave on her larboard quarter. On July 1, her master, John Richard, made desperate signals to Drummond, asking for help. The pink's mainmast was sprung and she was taking in water forward. Without waiting for a reply, Richard ordered his crew and his frightened passengers into the boats. As the Endeavour went down by the head, Drummond reluctantly put his ship about and picked up the survivors. Most of them would soon wish that they had been mercifully drowned.
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 Drummon
d 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."
But these things Paterson would not write for months yet. He was now gravely ill and could do nothing for himself, nor be removed from the little cabin built for him. From the moment he had been carried away from Caledonia he had slowly relinquished his interest in life. All had gone—his wife, a dream, his friends and companions, and it is possible that he felt so deep a responsibility for the omnipresence of death that he fled from it into silly regret for the loss of some brass kettles and iron pots. In a little while even these were of no importance. His spirit was still, his eyes clouded, his mind gone. The same three Scots who had visited Drummond's ship later came aboard the Unicorn. "The grief has broke Mr. Paterson's heart and brain," they said, "and now he's a child."
Recovering from fever and writing to his brother William, Samuel Vetch had no sympathy for Paterson. He said that all misfortune and disaster might be blamed on the man's "knavery or folly or both". Robert Drummond, also recovered and writing his first report to the Directors, blamed no one by name and Providence only by implication. The responsibility for any future calamities, he further implied, might well be the Company's. "I am afraid I shall have a hard pull to get the ship home, for my people are still dying, being all weak: and men is very scarce here to be had.... With God's help, fourteen days or three weeks hence I design to put to sea. I am not capable by writing to give you an account of the miserable condition we have undergone, first before we came off Caledonia, being starved and abandoned by the world, as also the great difficulty of getting the ship to this place."
The claim that he might put the ships to sea within three weeks was insanely optimistic, and perhaps he did not believe it himself. He could scarcely muster enough seamen to make one crew for the Atlantic passage, even should he be able to provision the ship. And the matter of provisions was his greatest problem. There was a strong Scots settlement in New England. The principal traders of East and West Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York were Scots, and there were more of them to the south in Maryland and Virginia, but although they were rich, influential, and a growing political power, they were watched with intense suspicion. The Proclamations had frightened them, and had effectively choked any more practical sympathy like the dispatch of The Three Sisters to Darien. The Navigation Acts had always been strictly enforced against them—one of their ships had recently been arrested in the Thames—and they were often accused of treason and Jacobite plots. Governor Jeremiah Basse of Jersey, a bigoted Anabaptist minister who sometimes behaved as if he were still fighting the Civil War, believed (with some justice) that many of them were in collusion with pirates. He spoke of the Scots as if they were a creeping disease in the colonies, "their numbers yearly increasing whilst the interest of our nation seems so much declining."
The Governor of New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire was Richard Coote, Earl of Bellamont, a high-spirited, impulsive Anglo-Irishman in his early sixties, rightly regarded by his friend the King as "honest and intrepid". He hated corruption and bribery, and had an aristocrat's fine contempt for most of the colonials who attempted to influence his government. The practice of Law in New York, he said, was in the hands of scandalous characters, one of them a dancing-master, another a glover, and the third a Scot who should have been hanged for blasphemy in Edinburgh. He suffered badly from the gout, and was sometimes sorry for his lack of charity when in pain. He worked from five in the morning until ten at night, and preferred the company of his valet de chambre to that of his lazy officers. He was sorry for the Caledonians, but his orders were to give no assistance and he was determined to obey. In any case, he had other things on his mind at this moment. He was away from town, concluding a successful treaty with the Iroquois, and when he returned he would have to deal with the pirate William Kidd. This unfortunate, pock-marked Scot had once been given the Governor's commission as a privateer, had interpreted it as a licence for piracy, and had come back to New England with £1,000 in gold, several ingots of silver, and a handsome enamelled box of jewels which he boldly sent to Lady Bellamont. The Governor impounded the gift and threw its presumptuous donor into prison. He was further outraged when he heard that Kidd had once intended to join his fellow-countrymen in Caledonia. There was no doubt what the Governor's enemies in London would make of that. The Commissioners for Trade had recently censured him for allowing five New England ships to carry provisions to Darien, and they had yet to receive his tart reply that the five were in fact one brigantine, The Three Sisters, and she had sailed before he had taken up his appointment here. From the savage lodges of the Iroquois on Lake Cayuga, he sternly reminded Lieutenant-Governor Nanfan of the Proclamation against the Scots and his obligations thereunder.
John Nanfan, a kinsman of Lady Bellamont and no doubt owing his office to her husband, was a fussy, indecisive man who would have been happier had the Earl left his Indian friends and returned to deal with the Scots. Though he loyally disapproved of the Caledonians, and knew that he should be firm with them, he was moved by their deplorable state. "They are so weak from pure fatigue and famine," he wrote to Bellamont, "They have no money, so I desire you will let me know how far the law will allow the barter of stores. Their miserable condition is enough to raise compassion." The Governor was not a hard man, and his gout had been improved by the less indulgent diet his surgeon had advised, and by the astringent air of Ma
ssachusetts Bay where he was now in gubernatorial residence. "You know how strict my orders are against furnishing the Caledonians with provisions," he wrote, "Yet if you can be well assured these ships will go directly for Scotland you may furnish them with just provisions enough for their voyage."
Unfortunately, Nanfan could be well assured of nothing. Until he heard from Bellamont he had allowed the Scots to buy immediate necessities on credit, and this had emboldened them to ask leave to provision their ships entirely, offering trade goods in exchange. Robert Drummond, it was true, swore that he intended to return to Scotland, but his brother Thomas was said to be seeking a sloop or a brigantine which he proposed to sail back to Darien. He and other officers, particularly Vetch and Turnbull, also offended Nanfan by their insolent pride. They had been lodged ashore by sympathisers who were delighted to embarrass the Governor, and they walked arrogantly abroad in ragged scarlet, touching their swords at every smirking glance.
THE DARIEN DISASTER Page 25