In the last years of the 17th century, Scotland embarked on an ambitious plan for colonial expansion, which failed in disaster and helped end its existence as an independent nation.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
A map of the Scottish colony at “New Caledonia” photo from Wiki Commons
In 1690, Scotland was in trouble.
At this time, Scotland was in a strange and confusing political position. In 1603, the English Queen Elizabeth I had died without leaving an heir. Her closest living relative happened to be James VI, King of Scotland. So, he was offered the English throne, and was placed in the weird position of serving both as King of Scotland (as James VI) and King of England (as James I). This even though Scotland and England remained two entirely separate countries with independent sovereignty, their own governments, their own Parliament, their own churches, and their own laws. It was called “The Union of the Crowns”.
By the 1690s, Europe was being wracked by several years of unusually cold weather (known as the “Little Ice Age”) which had destroyed Scotland’s staple harvest of oats, producing famine and starvation. Many people died, many more left Scotland for England or Ireland, and some areas lost as much as two-thirds of their population.
There was also military conflict. In 1685, James II, the grandson of James I, became King of England. In the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, however, James II (who, remember, was also the Scottish King James VII) was deposed by an uprising led by his own nobles and he fled to France, from where he raised an armed force in Scotland (known as the “Jacobites”) to fight for his return to power and Scottish independence from the English Crown. That brought action from the new English King William III (who, remember, was now also the legal King of Scotland), who now sent troops into Scotland and pacified that country by defeating the Jacobites in a series of battles.
England, meanwhile, was growing more and more powerful and wealthy, largely because it had overseas colonies and an extensive global trade network. Scotland’s Parliament, reeling from years of instability and facing domination by England, decided that the country’s only way ahead lay in increasing its own economic strength and becoming a world power on its own—and the best way to do that was to follow the example of London and establish overseas colonies and trade. This had already been toyed with: Scotland had small settlements in English colonies at Nova Scotia and New Jersey. But something much bigger and more ambitious was needed.
That led to William Paterson. Paterson was a Scottish merchant who had traveled to the Caribbean and had lived in the Bahamas for several years, where he had worked as a trader (and, it was whispered, as a pirate). By 1680, he had moved back to Europe, but was now taken with the idea of establishing a commercial colony in the area of Darien, in what is now Panama. At the time, the whole narrow isthmus was mostly empty jungle, but Paterson viewed it as a strategic trade center which could serve both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and enter trade with both the East and West Indies, and he had approached James II with a proposal to fund a colonial expedition and offered himself as its leader. But James rejected the idea as too expensive and impractical. Paterson then went to several other European powers, including Holland and the Holy Roman Empire. They all turned him down. Crushed at his failure, Paterson moved to London in 1687 and a few years later helped co-found the Bank of England, only to leave after a dispute with his partners and move to Scotland in 1695.
At this time, the Scottish Parliament was desperate for a way to play a role on the world stage, and when Paterson approached them with his Darien idea, they now paid attention. Although King William was cool to the plan, in June 1695 the Scottish Parliament established the “Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies”, which was chartered to “plant colonies” and “build cities, towns or forts” in Darien. The plan was to fund the Company with £600,000, half from Scotland and half from England. When the London Parliament, under pressure from the English East India Company, refused to provide any funds, however, the Scots went off on their own, and raised capital by selling shares in the Company. By August 1696 the Company of Scotland had raised £400,000—almost half of the entire available capital of the country.
The colonial expedition left Scotland in July 1698 and landed in November near the present-day border with Colombia. They christened their colony “New Caledonia”, built a small palisade fort, and named their initial settlement “New Edinburgh”. In all, some 1200 colonists arrived, in five ships.
It was a disaster. The Scots were completely unprepared for Darien’s tropical rainforest climate: the ground was swampy and poorly-drained and they were never able to even plant crops, the food supplies they had brought along with them were improperly stored and quickly rotted in the humid climate, and jungle diseases like malaria and yellow fever tore through the population. The colony was grossly mismanaged as the leaders hoarded food for themselves while the rest starved. The natives they encountered had nothing to trade, few European ships passed by, and William III and the English Parliament, who were not eager for another commercial rival, had ordered that no ships from England or her colonies were to land there or trade with them. The final blow came from the Spanish, who had already claimed the region and who had settlements not far away. They launched periodic raids on the Scots and captured one of the colony’s ships. After just eight months in the jungle, the colonists decided to abandon the venture, and the 300 survivors set sail in the only remaining ship, the Caledonia, to return to Europe. Paterson himself had survived the ordeal: his wife and child had not.
Meanwhile, just a few days before the starving and sickly refugees reached Scotland, another expedition of four ships with 1300 people had already set sail for the colony. Since the reports that had arrived from Darien had dishonestly described a rosy picture of a thriving colony (including false reports of gold), the Company was not aware of the actual situation there, and the new colonists found New Edinburgh burned out and empty when they arrived. They also found conditions in the area no better, and after nine months the Spanish landed troops and cannon and lay siege to the settlement, forcing the Scots to surrender. Fewer than 100 survivors made it back to Scotland. It was the end of “New Caledonia”.
The impact in Scotland was immense. Most of the people in Scotland (along with other entities like banks and city governments) had invested a huge amount of money into the venture, perhaps exceeding one-fourth of the entire country’s wealth, and now it was all gone—vanished into an uninhabitable disease-ridden jungle hell. Scotland’s economy tottered on the verge of bankruptcy, many people had lost their life savings, and riots broke out when people learned how they had been deceived by the false reports from the Company of a happy and prospering colony.
There was only one solution, and it was a bitter pill for Scotland to swallow. For years already, England (now under the rule of Queen Anne) had been offering to unify the two countries, placing them not only under the same Crown, but as one nation with a unified Parliament and government. Scotland, which had a long and bloody history of resisting English attempts at conquest, had fiercely resisted this and did not want to give up their national sovereignty. But now the situation was desperate, and when London offered to reimburse all of the money that Scotland’s citizens had lost in the venture (the money to come from England’s own treasury), the Scottish Parliament had little choice but to accept. In 1707, both England and Scotland approved the “Act of Union”, and the two countries became unified into the “United Kingdom of Great Britain”. It was the end of Scotland as an independent nation.
Today the area of the failed Scottish colony is known as the “Darien Gap”. It is still mostly empty, so difficult to travel in that even the Pan-American Highway does not cross it, and today there is a stretch of empty jungle 100 miles wide. The Kuna natives have a reserve there.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)
