Historians tend to disagree about the precise start date of the so-called Colonial Era—when many of the major seafaring nations of Western Europe began to travel around the world establishing new trade routes and eventually imposing (often violently and uncompromisingly) their control over the rest of the globe. No matter when this era is said to have begun, by the late 1500s and early 1600s, a handful of European countries — most notably England, France, Spain, and Portugal were already exercising their power over vast swathes of the globe, from Central and South America to parts of Africa, India, the Pacific Ocean, and the Far East.
There is at least one more European country that can be said to have become involved in this era of exploration and expansion, but whose contribution to colonialism is long-forgotten, often overlooked, and not particularly well known. Namely, the Kingdom of Scotland.
Several years before, under the Act of Union, which brought Scotland and England together to form the beginnings of the UK in 1707, Scotland was effectively an independent, self-governing nation. Additionally, seeing how successfully its English neighbor to the south was expanding its rule around the world, Scotland understandably also wanted a piece of the colonial pie.
In the early 1690s, moves began to be made to establish a Scottish-run colony somewhere in the Americas that would be known as “New Caledonia” (literally “New Scotland”). There, from a newly-established colonial capital called “New Edinburgh,” Scottish-made produce could be traded and exchanged locally with both the native Americans and fellow colonialists, thereby bolstering the Scottish economy back home and boosting the country’s status worldwide.
A site near Darien, in modern-day Panama, was selected as the prime location for New Caledonia, and a hugely successful Scots entrepreneur named Sir William Paterson was placed in charge of the project. As well as being one of the co-founders of the Bank of England, Paterson was also a successful tradesman in his own right, having already established several privately-operated trade routes across the Atlantic Ocean linking ports in Scotland to trade posts across North America and the West Indies. A new trading corporation known as the Company of Scotland was founded in 1693, in order to organize New Caledonia, and with its backing, Paterson began to secure funding and investment from similar companies in England and continental Europe. Before long, thousands of pounds of investment had been raised—but just as the so-called Darien Scheme was about to be launched, Paterson’s funding collapsed.
Fearing competition for their own overseas trading ventures and monopolies (most notably the infamous East India Company), Paterson’s English and Dutch backers suddenly got cold feet and began to pull out just weeks before his ships were due to set sail across the Atlantic. In characteristically undeterred fashion, however, Paterson simply turned closer to home for more investment and began petitioning the Scots people themselves to finance his wildly ambitious scheme.
Incredibly, the people of Scotland did precisely that in extraordinary numbers. Thousands of ordinary Scottish citizens went on to invest more than half a million pounds of capital in Paterson’s colonial enterprise, while many hundreds more volunteered to man the fleet of ships that he and his crew would take to the Americas to establish New Caledonia. By the time the fleet set sail from Leith harbor, in Edinburgh, on July 12, 1698, Paterson had assembled more than 1,200 volunteers, and invested almost half the available national capital of the entire country in his project.
Clearly, the so-called Darien Scheme was to prove a make-or-break investment. And unfortunately for Scotland, it soon proved to be more of a “break” than a “make.”
By the time the Scottish fleet arrived in Panama several weeks later, many of the Darien Scheme’s crew were desperately ill, while some (including Paterson’s wife) had even perished on the uncomfortable trans-Atlantic crossing. So, far from their arrival in the New World being a triumphant one marked by the breaking of new ground, the Scots colonists’ first task was to dig a huge graveyard for the scores of crew members who had died enroute.
The situation was worsened further, as it soon transpired that few people involved in the Darien Scheme even knew the area in which they had landed, and its choice as the location of Scotland’s new colony was, it seemed, based on little more than conjecture and anecdotal evidence rather than geographical and cartographical surveys. The area was intolerably difficult to live in, with mosquito-infested swamps and vast swathes of infertile, uncultivable land, wholly unsuited to both farming or building. What is more, Spanish settlers in the area did not take kindly to a rival set of colonists, and repeatedly and violently attacked the Scottish arrivals; ironically, far from finding themselves at war with the local tribespeople, it was the native Americans who helped the Darien settlers the most, bringing them gifts of fruit, bedding, and traditional medicines.
Despite this welcome assistance from the locals, however, the Darien Scheme proved disastrous. As time went by, scores more crew members fell ill with fever, leaving too few people healthy enough to establish any kind of base. Desperately ill and stuck in an inhospitable and impracticable location, eventually the decision was made to abandon New Caledonia and return home. Scotland’s sole colonial venture was over.