Darien Scheme - A Scottish Disaster

In terms of bias and exaggeration, Darien is notable for the palpable bias of the English establishment toward their own concerns and opposed to Scotland’s.  Also, the lies sent back by the first expeditioner’s that must have led to the second lot venturing out thinking they would find a ready-made community instead of which it was chaos and death.

Darien was a good idea that turned quickly to farce and disaster. This linkage of two oceans - “this door of the seas, and the key to the universe”- would later transpire as the Panama Canal which would open a trading route between Atlantic and Pacific.

The extent of Scottish trade in the late C17th – and certainly in comparison with their thriving colonial neighbours, England – was measly and limited only to low-value exports such as grain and cattle. The English had the East India Company and Royal Africa Company which prospered from slave-trading. Further than this, they had introduced the Navigation Acts in 1696 which denied Scotland access to English-controlled markets and colonies. The Darien Company – a public joint-stock affair – was meant to be a response to this dominance and a way for Scotland to rise from near-poverty.

The English were from the start antagonistic and obstructive. They warned foreign bankers that they may lose trade with the English if they in any way backed the Scottish scheme, so the funds had to come from Scots themselves: wealthy landowners, rich men and merchants raised money which amounted to some twenty per cent of the entire Scottish economy (over 16 million pounds in today’s money). In fact, the English intransigence solidified support for Darien as ‘a point of honour’ where attention was perhaps diverted from the developing imprudence of the affair.

As events transpired and the first expedition led by William Paterson was developing into a tragedy of death and hunger, the English at sea wilfully sabotaged the sending of food and supplies to save the Scots.

In order to sell Darien to Scottish investors much too much was made of the certain success of the venture and this was the case too as reports were sent back that failed to tell of what had actually transpired. This omission was to lead to a further expedition who found not a settling community but an anarchy of disease, death, hunger and the need to fight Spanish forces who all along held a claim to the territory.

Approximately two thousand lives were lost in total and the scheme abandoned. Scotland then found themselves subject to the English Aliens Act of 1704 which counted all Scots living in England as foreigners and also revoked all import trade with Scotland. The paradox here is that from being classed as alien, only three years later Scotland was in Union with its bigger neighbour.

The bankruptcy that Darien had left in its wake was to forward the cause for the loss of its independence.

‘A History of the Scottish People’ Smout, T.C. (1998) Fontana

‘The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scot’s Invention of the Modern World’ Herman, A (2003) Harper Collins