Paterson and the Darien Scheme

Some ventures are undone not by the men who oppose them but by the maps their author has already drawn. The projector sees the world in clean geometries: a narrows here, a warehouse there, a thread of silver running from Manila through Acapulco to Cádiz that may, by the right placement of a Scottish quay, be diverted into a national fortune. He sees the lines so clearly that he forgets the fevers and the cabinets and the Spanish horse at Cartagena. The lines hold. The men inside them do not.

THE PROJECTOR

William Paterson was born in April 1658 at Skipmyre, near Tinwald in Dumfriesshire, son of John Paterson, a small farmer, and Bethia. He was schooled at Dumfries and, by family tradition, sent at sixteen to a Mennonite trading-house at Bristol. From there the route is the route of the age: the West Indies between 1675 and 1680, where he watched the Spanish flota work the Isthmus; Amsterdam in the 1680s, where he learned the discipline of joint stock and discount; London after the Revolution, where in 1694, with Charles Montagu, he chartered the Bank of England on the principle, in his own phrase, that the Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing. He had been, in short, the man who built England's credit. Now, in his fortieth year, he meant to build Scotland's. The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies had its charter in 1695. Within months it had raised four hundred thousand pounds by public subscription, near a quarter of the liquid capital of the kingdom. The prospectus, much of it his, promised a fifteen per cent return on a trans-Isthmus entrepôt at Darien. The figure was repeated in the closes of Edinburgh and the kirk-vestibules of Fife until it had the weight of scripture.

LEITH ROADS, 14 JULY 1698

The afternoon light on the Forth was the long northern light of summer, slanting down the quay at twenty past five. Five ships rode at anchor in Leith Roads, fitted out over eighteen months in the yards: the flagship Caledonia of three hundred and fifty tons and thirty-six guns under Captain Robert Pennycook; the Saint Andrew of the same burden; the Unicorn of three hundred and ten; and the smaller Dolphin and Endeavour for the cargo. Twelve hundred settlers came aboard in groups of thirty, mostly young men of the Lothians and the Borders, with some two hundred wives and forty children; the rest of the women and children were to follow in the spring. The provisions had been counted to ten months: barrels of oatmeal, salt herring, brandy, Bibles in quarto, four thousand combs and four thousand periwigs the directors had been persuaded the Indians would want. Paterson stood at the head of the gangway, hat in hand, watching the boxes go up. A wind out of the west moved the colours on the Caledonia. The town behind him, all gable and smoke, had emptied its pockets into these holds.

A SECOND OF TIME AT THE GANGWAY

He had written the prospectus. He knew, better than any man on the quay, what the prospectus had not said. He knew the Council of the Indies at Madrid had set out in their letter of 1695 that no Christian prince should permit his subjects upon the Spanish coast; he knew Cartagena could put a garrison into the Gulf within twelve months of any landing. He knew the East India Company in London had whispered into the ear of William of Orange and that the Crown would forbid every English colony from selling so much as a barrel of beef to the Scots. He knew the rainy season on the Caribbean coast opened in October, and that the fevers came with the rain. He had argued, in the long meetings at Mrs Purdie's tavern in Edinburgh, for an African station first, for a slower undertaking, for staged capital. He had been overruled by the directors who had subscribed and by the burgesses who had subscribed and by the widows of Leith who had brought their husbands' silver in handkerchiefs. The prospectus he had drafted now sailed without its caveats. He looked down the quay and weighed, for the space it takes a herring-gull to cross the basin, whether to speak. The honest book in him, the book of the Bank, said: tell them the figures. The other book, the book of the Caledonian dream he had carried since the West Indies in 1675, said: a country that has gathered itself this far cannot be unmade at the gangway. He chose the second book. He did not speak. He walked up the plank of the Caledonia and went below to his cabin to write a letter to his wife, who was to follow in the second sailing, and who would in fact die at New Edinburgh before the year was out. Six o'clock struck on the Leith tolbooth. The ships warped out into the Roads.

NEW EDINBURGH

They made the Bay of Darien on the second of November 1698 and set the fort, the town and the trading-quay at the Bay of Caledonia on the third. The ground was high enough, the anchorage deep, the air at dawn lovely. By Christmas the air was a different element. The mosquitoes came up out of the mangrove at dusk in clouds that darkened the lanterns. Malaria took the strong men first; yellow fever finished what malaria began; the bloody flux finished what the fever spared. The Company surgeons had brought opium and rum and a quantity of Peruvian bark too small to matter. Paterson's wife and son were dead by December. He wrote afterwards, in the plainest of his surviving letters, that the colony was swept away with a most malignant fever. The English governors of Jamaica and Barbados, on instructions out of Whitehall, refused victuals; the Spanish at Cartagena gathered their horse. By the spring half the twelve hundred were in the ground. The survivors burned their cabins and put back to sea. A second expedition, thirteen hundred fresh settlers, made the same landfall in September 1699 and met the same fate. General Juan Pimienta's force closed on the works in February 1700. The colony surrendered the ground in April.

THE EQUIVALENT

Of two thousand five hundred Scots who had sailed for Darien, near two thousand never came home. The Company of Scotland lost its capital entire. In the closes of Edinburgh the silver had gone and would not come back. Paterson, who had survived the fevers when his wife and son had not, returned to Scotland in April 1700 and gave evidence before the Parliamentary inquiry that November, taking the responsibility on himself without flinching from any figure in the prospectus. He sat in the last Scottish Parliament, that of 1706, as a member for Dumfries, and he spoke for the Union. The men who had subscribed to his Caledonian dream now subscribed, through him, to its undoing. By the treaty of 1707 the Westminster government paid into Scotland a sum of three hundred and ninety-eight thousand and eighty-five pounds and ten shillings, called the Equivalent, to indemnify the shareholders of the Company of Scotland for their losses at Darien. The historians of the Union, Devine and Whatley among them, have written that without Darien there is no Equivalent, and without the Equivalent no Union. The country had been bought back its own money, at the cost of its parliament. Paterson defended the bargain in print as a Conjunction of Interests. He believed it. He had always believed in conjunctions of interests.

THE THREADNEEDLE STREET CABINET

He died at his Westminster lodging on the twenty-second of January 1719, in his sixty-first year. He had outlived his wife, his son, his colony, his parliament, and the better part of the men who had walked up the gangway at Leith on a July afternoon. The Bank he had founded on the principle of credit out of nothing went on creating it, and creates it still. Three centuries after the charter, in 1994, the Bank of England opened a small cabinet on Threadneedle Street with three things laid behind glass under a steady electric light: the Bank's own charter of 1694, the charter of the Company of Scotland of 1695, and a rigged model of the Caledonia, thirty-six gun-ports painted on her side, her colours set as if a west wind out of the Forth were still in them. A man stops in front of the case on a wet weekday and reads the labels in order. The order tells him, without saying so, that the same hand drew both papers, and that the ship between them is what the second paper cost.

The decisive moment in a projector's life is not the day the venture sails. It is the second on the quay when he might still set the prospectus down and tell the country what is not in it. The men who keep silent at that second do not always lose their lives; sometimes they lose only their countries. What remains of them is the paperwork, kept in a glass case, with the model of the ship between.