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By Root 1241 0

claimed, the Scots would be able to trade with the Far East and so break the monopoly held by the English East India Company. Paterson had already hawked his settlement scheme around England, Holland and the Holy Roman Empire, and in each place they had seen him off. But, like a good salesman, after each reverse he refined his patter. Now he talked of the Panamanian isthmus as ‘the door of the seas and the key of the universe’. ‘Trade will increase trade,’ he told them, ‘and money will beget money, and the trading world shall need no more to want work for their hands, but will rather want hands for their work.’ To a small, comparatively poor country living in the shadow of a much wealthier, mightier neighbour, this was beguiling talk: the Scots leaped at the idea and begged Paterson to take their money. According to some estimates, a fifth of the entire wealth of the country was invested in the Darien Scheme – others claim the figure was much higher. The first five ships set sail for the New World in the summer of 1698. But the unfortunate investors had reckoned without the fact that the climate in Darien was beyond filthy and soon the colonists began to die in alarming numbers. The local Indians turned out to be not much interested in buying their trinkets. The Spanish were under the impression that the whole area belonged to them, and eventually besieged the settlement of New Edinburgh. The English colonists in North America and the Caribbean refused to help supply the Scots because they did not want another fight with Spain.

Despite the dismal fate of the first settlers, a second fleet set out in late 1699, swept along on gusts of missionary fervour, acquisitiveness and national pride. This time the thousand additional settlers carried a cargo which included lots of little blue bonnets which they had been persuaded that local tribespeople might be desperate for. They were, unsurprisingly, unable to find a market for them in the jungle. The settlers’ predicament was not made any more comfortable by three earnest ministers accompanying the expedition, who were soon wandering the jungle wailing to the settlers that ‘We’re all doomed.’ The settlers’ sins – or their vanity, unpreparedness or sheer bad luck – had found them out. The Darien Scheme was a disaster. Henceforth – apart from the occasional privateer – the Scots’ only choice was to throw in their lot with the English.

The massive debt which now hung around the necks of so many eminent Scots was certainly one of the reasons for the 1707 Act of Union, which merged the governments of England and Scotland: apart from the relief of their debts, the commercial opportunities were enormous – as Robert Burns put it, the country had been ‘bought and sold for English gold’. In return for surrendering their independence, the Scots gained generous representation in the Westminster parliament, while retaining their own legal and religious settlement. The attraction of Union for the English was the elimination of a potential colonial rival and the extinction of a commercial menace. Most of all, it seemed to promise an end to hundreds of years of suspicion, hostility and periodic war. Peaceful Union in turn created the possibility of a new international identity, which found common cause in a shared commitment to stable government, the monarchy, the military and Protestantism, all of which could find a focus in the empire. Many Scots seized with both hands the opportunities which now lay open to them. As early as 1731 a Scottish director of the East India Company was writing irritably to his brother asking him to stop recommending any more men for medical positions, ‘for all the East India Company ships have either Scots Surgeons or Surgeon’s mates, and till some of them die I can, nor will, look out for no more, for I am made the jest of mankind, plaguing all the Societys of England with Scots Surgeons’.

The suppression of the last Jacobite rising in 1745 clinched things. Now the imperial project became increasingly attractive also to Stuart families, who needed somehow to make