‘Darien A Journey In Search Of Empire’, by John McKendrick (Birlinn)
Seeing this title, some readers may well be responding by wondering whether we really need another book about the ill-fated Darien scheme. After all the bibliography of work on the topic is already a substantial one. George Pratt Insh’s volumes in the 1920s and 30s provided what remains the standard scholarly account; John Prebble’s ‘The Darien Disaster’ (1968) was widely read – while every Scottish historian writing about the Union of 1707 has felt obliged to include some description of Darien as part of the context within which the Union occurred. The result is that most of us feel we know all that we need to know about the Darien scheme – its utter failure and its long-term consequences in making it almost inevitable that a bankrupt Scotland would accept the terms of a union with England.
Let me begin then by insisting that there is absolutely nothing old hat about John McKendrick’s book. On the contrary there is much here that is new, illuminating, controversial, and even moving. Three aspects of his approach in particular strike me as making it possible for the author to open up the Darien story in new ways. McKendrick, born and brought up near Glasgow, is a barrister with chambers in London, and an advocate in Edinburgh. However he has lived and worked in Latin America, throughout the Caribbean, and in Panama City in particular. In other words he knows and has first-hand experience of the world around Darien in a way that no previous historian has done. In addition his research has benefitted hugely from his discovery of new material concerning Darien in Spanish archives in Panama.
The second new dimension of his book is what I see as his emphasis on the purely human aspect of the story he is telling. There is plenty here about the geo-politics of European nations and empires; about different levels of planning, intrigue, dissension, infighting and ill-fortune. But over and over again the book comes back to the appalling level of suffering endured by the vast majority of those Scots who sailed from Leith in July 1698 for the brave new world of Panama’s Darien.
Whether we are reading about either the first expedition with its five sailing ships carrying 1200 would-be colonists or the second, relieving expedition of four ships – which left Scotland in September 1699 with 1,300 souls on board (including perhaps as many as 100 women) – we are constantly reminded of the reality of the death awaiting nearly all of these would-be founders of a Scottish empire. At sea the insanitary, over-crowded conditions meant that committing bodies to the waves soon became a daily occurrence.
For those who made it to land on Darien, back-breaking work in conditions of over-powering heat, allied to dwindling supplies of adequate food, meant that fever and disease were soon carrying off large numbers of the weakened colonists. Most of these remain nameless – no more than victims of history. McKendrick tells us for example that about a third of those in the second expedition were Highlanders who spoke only Gaelic. But he is meticulous in recording the fate of each individual whose name has come down to us. The result is that all of them, known and unknown, gain as it were a human face.
The third dimension that sets this book apart from all previous accounts of Darien is the bravest and most challenging. The first sentence of Chapter Six, ‘The Republic of Panama’, reads as follows: ‘Lucho passed me the bottle of seco and winked before the first shot fired out’. What on earth is going on here?, I asked myself, before realising that Panama at the end of the 17th century had suddenly been left behind for the Panama of today. Four of the book’s 13 chapters turn out to be about the author’s personal expedition in search of Darien.
My initial reaction was not entirely favourable. I wondered if we really needed all this detail about Mr McKendrick’s problems over shipping his car back to the UK – or indeed about Panama City and the Panama Canal, even though he provides us with a wealth of statistics proving that this is an area that has become a centre of world trade on a scale beyond anything that William Paterson dreamt of when in the 1690s he began to campaign for the establishment of a Scottish colony in Darien. But my initial doubts were entirely misplaced. John McKendrick’s decision to include this material about his personal odyssey – lending an intriguing ambiguity to his book’s title – is in the end an utterly riveting one.
Best of all is Chapter Eight headed simply ‘Darien’. Thirty-two extraordinary pages vividly and compellingly evoke the author’s ultimately successful struggle to see for himself the actual site in Darien where Paterson – much of the time too ill to leave his hut – could only look on as the Scots toiled under the sun to build New Edinburgh and Fort St Andrew. The area in question, now known as Punta Esoces, is in the deep south of Panama, only a few miles from the border with Columbia. Surely getting there from Panama City today would be a simple matter? The truth is very different.
In the few days he had within which to make the trip, John McKendrick was often close to failing to make it. Far be it for me – or John McKendrick – to suggest that there is any real parallel between the experience of the Scots colonists of the 1690s and that of McKendrick in the 21st century, but reading these pages it is undeniable that one becomes aware of a strange, almost surreal, echo of the past in the present.
The area around Punta Escoes is occupied by a native American group of tribes called the Kuna Indians. The Kuna Indians have chosen to retain their traditional way of life, and have exclusive control over the group of islands where they live. Contact with modern Panama and its society scarcely exists. A small aeroplane deposits McKendrick on a Kuna-controlled island, but after that he – an unexpected gringo visitor – is entirely on his own. The amenities of modern life are virtually non-existent. Travel is only possible in local canoes. Communication with the outside world is impossible; no telephone link is operational. The local people are mostly unhelpful and often positively hostile. Broken Spanish is the only shared language. Food is poor and difficult to obtain.
Helped only by his dollars, McKendrick finally manages to make it to his destination, but even then he struggles to find traces of the Scottish settlement he is looking for. The heat is oppressive, the lush vegetation almost impenetrable. Searching on his own, he fears he is lost and shouts for his boatman to rescue him. The reader shares his extraordinary relief when he finally comes upon the surviving traces of Scotland’s tragic failure to build its Darien empire. Leaving, he places a bouquet of flowers on the waters of the bay, and says a prayer ‘for the souls of all who had died in this place, brought together by the necessities of trade, of empire, of war and peace, of freedom and of violence’.
‘Darien’ then combines with great success a detailed account of the Darien scheme from its optimistic beginning to its tragic conclusion – emphasising the human dimension of the tragedy – while also documenting the author’s own search – in Panama, Jamaica, and the southern United States – for what if anything survives of it today. McKendrick suggests that the reasons behind the failure of the first expedition – which made the second expedition’s attempted rescue mission of no avail – are easy to pinpoint: the would-be colonists’ ‘idleness, fear, infighting, fevers and lack of proper provisioning’. Divisions among the leaders, often between the seamen and the landsmen, did not help.
The poor choices over goods for trading, and too much alcohol, may also have been factors – the first expedition had left with, among much else, large quantities of all kinds of cloth (including tartan), pewter jugs and basins, glass drinking cups, horn spoons, soap, buttons, combs, and thousands of white clay pipes – as well as 1,700 gallons of rum, 1,200 of claret, and 5,000 of brandy. But ultimately McKendrick argues that it was the Scots’ failure to grasp the complexities of European politics in the 1690s that made the attempt to build a Scottish empire in Spanish Central America bound to fail.
Is he right? Right or wrong, I’m sure this dimension of the book is the one that will prove most controversial. McKendrick posits that the orthodox explanation of the failure of the Darien scheme has been over-influenced by the self-serving propaganda of the Company of Scotland. Historians have accepted too uncritically the view that the failure of the venture was largely the result of English opposition. King William and the government in London, that is, have been seen as determined to prevent the creation of a Scottish empire. McKendrick is too good an historian to deny that a case can be made for just this view. As early as 1695, William Paterson had successfully persuaded London investors to contribute £300,000 to the funds of the Company of Scotland. But in no time at all the powerful East India Company moved in successfully lobbying parliament to prevent any such investment. No English money would be put into the Scottish venture.
Apparently even more telling is the April 1699 proclamation by the Governor of Jamaica, acting on orders from William’s secretary of state, outlawing any kind of communication with the Scots in Darien and denying them assistance with ‘arms, ammunitions, provisions, or any other necessities whatsoever’. Learning of the existence of this proclamation must have come as a hugely damaging blow to the morale of the Scots colonists struggling to survive in Darien; indeed it may well have been a major factor in determining the decision of the first expedition to admit defeat and abandon Caledonia. Does the existence of this proclamation mean that the English king was determined that the Scottish attempt to create an empire should fail? McKendrick does not see it this way, and provides new evidence of English readiness to help the beleaguered Scots.
In the Spanish archives in Panama he has found documentary evidence that the English fleet under Admiral Benbow had prevented a Spanish fleet from attacking the Scottish settlement. How to explain the apparent contradiction in English policy? McKendrick’s view is that the proclamation was mainly a gesture aimed at Spanish ears, reassuring them that England was not involved in any attempt to attack or undermine Spain’s vast empire in the west. (He reminds us that when vessels linked to the second Scottish expedition arrived in Jamaica they had no difficulty in finding merchants willing, despite the proclamation, to load them up with provisions for the Scots.)
Why was it so important not to offend the Spanish? Because nothing in his foreign policy was more important to the Dutch King William than to protect his native land from the increasingly powerful and aggressive France of Louis XIV. William was even prepared to send his own troops to defend the Spanish Netherlands. Thus McKendrick’s conclusion is that ‘English foreign policy towards Caledonia and the bitter arguments over the proclamation against support for the Scots had much more to do with this Dutchman’s desire to protect his homeland than an Englishman’s desire for the Scots to fail’.
Let me end on a less controversial note. The Church of Scotland had always shown concern for the spiritual well-being of the colonists. At least one minister had accompanied the first expedition, and no fewer than four were on board the second. One of the two who survived went on to become, in McKendrick’s words, ‘the most successful of the survivors of Caledonia’. The Rev Archibald Stobo settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where he founded five churches; his grandson became a prominent figure in Georgia in the period of the American Revolution; and, extraordinarily, his great-great-great-granddaughter, in 1858, gave birth in New York to Theodore Roosevelt, the future president of the USA. It was Teddy Roosevelt who engineered the secession of Panama from Columbia in order to facilitate the building of the Panama Canal. With its opening in 1914, William Paterson’s distant dream of how Darien might become a ‘great trading short cut between two oceans’ had at last been realised. With Scotland’s help, however tenuous?
By Andrew Hook | 6 April 2016