1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [57]
Dazzled by this vision, more than 1,400 Scots subscribed to a joint-stock company, pledging what has been estimated at between a quarter and a half of the poor nation’s available capital. In July 1698 five ships set sail with 1,200 colonists and a year’s food supply. They landed on the Panamanian coast and set about clearing the forest to create the port of New Edinburgh. Just eight months later the ragged survivors—fewer than three hundred people—bolted for home, Paterson among them. They arrived just days after the departure of a second Panama expedition: four ships, 1,300 colonists. Nine months later it, too, fled. Not a hundred people made it home. Lost with the dead was every penny invested in the venture.
Calamity usually has many fathers, and Paterson’s colony was no exception. Thinking to get started by trading with the local Indians, the Scots had stuffed their ships with the nation’s finest woolen hose, tartan blankets, ornamental wigs, and leather shoes—25,000 pairs. Alas, it proved difficult to sell warm socks and itchy blankets in the tropics. Meanwhile, the hard equatorial rain rotted their stores and washed away all efforts to farm. As New Edinburgh grew desperate, William, king of England and Scotland, instructed his other colonies not to help, for fear of offending Spain. Spain for its part knew about the project and periodically attacked.
The main causes of the disaster, though, were malaria, dysentery, and yellow fever. Colonists’ accounts record dozens of deaths a week from disease. The first time Spain assaulted New Edinburgh, its soldiers found four hundred fresh graves. The colony had been well supplied, blessed with an adequate water supply, and never troubled by its Indian neighbors. European and African disease had filled that cemetery.
Back in Scotland, the debacle of New Edinburgh set off riots—it had wiped out much of the nation’s capital. At the time, England and Scotland remained separate nations despite sharing a monarch. England, the bigger partner, had been pushing a complete merger for decades. Scots had resisted, believing they would become an afterthought in a London-dominated economy. Now England promised to reimburse New Edinburgh’s investors as part of a union agreement. “Even some committed Scottish patriots such as Paterson endorsed the Union Act of 1707,” the historian J. R. McNeill wrote in Mosquito Empires, a pioneering history of Caribbean epidemiology, ecology, and war. “Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Panama.”
More than that, New Edinburgh showed that Scots—and other Europeans—died too fast in malarial areas to be useful as forced labor. Individual Britons and their families continued to make their own way to the Americas, to be sure, but businesspeople increasingly resisted sending over large groups of Europeans. Instead they looked for alternative sources of labor. Alas, they found them.
“NO DISTEMPERS EITHER EPIDEMICAL OR MORTAL”
The colony of Carolina was founded in 1670, when about two hundred colonists from Barbados relocated to the banks of a river that empties into Charleston Harbor (it was initially called Charles Town, after the reigning king). Like Virginia, Carolina was a commercial enterprise, founded by eight powerful English nobles who hoped to take advantage of the now-established traffic to Virginia by redirecting some of it to the south. The proprietors intended to lease pieces of the colony to would-be planters, realizing a profit without actually having to expend much effort or money. Barbados, full of sugar plantations, was crowded. Some of its English inhabitants, looking to acquire land, decided to take a flyer on Carolina. Knowing of Virginia’s labor problem, the proprietors