Stuff You Missed in History ClassThis 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers an attempt to start a Scottish colony in Panama in the late 1600s. But the expedition faced disease, death and poor trade, taking down the settlers -- and, ultimately, Scotland.
Happy Saturday. A couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about Joseph Pulitzer, we mentioned the very long history of various shady dealings and scandals and problems connected to the eventual building of the Panama Canal. Today's Saturday classic is tangentially related to that theme. It's the Darien Disaster, which was a failed Scottish attempt to establish a colony on the Isthmus of Panama. So to clarify one point that's made in the episode, the Darien region of Panama has historically been one of the most densely forested parts of the Isthmus. It's mountainous terrain can be really unforgiving, and while it's often described as sparsely populated, it has been home to multiple indigenous peoples for thousands of years, especially around the region's river valleys. One of the multiple reasons why there is still a gap in the Pan American Highway in Darien is concerns by indigenous people's living there about how a highway would impact their food sources in their way of life. There's a moment in this episode where it sort of sounds like theory in was like almost uninhabited but that's going a little far from how many people really did live there. This episode is from previous hosts Sarah and de Bliema, and it came out on July eleven. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblin a Chuck Reboarding. And I was thinking about it. It's been a while since we've done a real disastrous expedition podcast, hasn't it. Yeah, I think it's been since the Dr Livingston episode, the last time I had to do a fake voice, and even then there's a little success in that mission. It seems like you never expect, when you're packing your bags with truffles and cases of shamp pain, that the trip is going to end with your strange altering vehicle not being so altering after all and stuck in the mud, or that maybe sharks will eat your ponies, or that, in Stanley's case, crocodiles will eat your donkey. Yeah, that's never any fun, but listener Rich promised us highs and low similar to that when he wrote in to suggest the Dairy Enn Expedition for our next podcast, and it involves the seventeenth century Scottish attempt to settle Panama, and it's always been somewhere in I think our mental topic list. Yeah, definitely. I remember reading about it briefly in Matthew Parker's book Panama Fever a couple of years back now, while I was researching an article on the Panama Canal. So yeah, it's it's always been sort of hanging out in our in our mental list for sure. Yeah. But Rich told us that while he couldn't guarantee an exhimation, the dairy Enne expedition was certainly in the best tradition of expedition podcasts, a shockingly unrealistic idea of what to expect, unpreparedness, severe deprivation, ation, and also strange items brought along for the trip which will go over. So yeah, Rich, I think you really sold it there with that explanation. But the Darien story is also a little different from some of the other expedition podcasts we've done in the past, which are often just pure adventures, adventure for the sake of adventure. This was more than just a personal folly, and it was definitely more than a disaster. For just the people who were involved. It was a national fiasco and it really played no small part in eighteenth century nation building, so it had far reaching consequences for sure. So before we get too involved into what happened in Panama, we're going to start with the primary player involved, which was Scotland. Yeah, the country was experiencing troubled times in the late sixteen hundreds. There had been war, famine, and poor international trade due to England's constant continental wars, and a lot of people around this time we're getting out they were immigrating to the colonies, but the ones who stayed behind needed some hope. And with some peace with the French and the English finally on hand and continental trade opening up again, it seemed like global commerce was the way to go, specifically bringing valuable Eastern commodities to the West. Yeah. So enter William Patterson. He was a young Scotsman and he had spent his youth traveling. Matthew Parker, the author I just mentioned, described him as part missionary, part buccaneer, if that gives you a good idea of what kind of man he was in his youth at least, but he had made his fortune in business in England, and in six nine four he had even helped start the Bank of England. But his main operation at this point was promoting speculative money making schemes, which sounds kind of promising and ominous considering we've already told you this podcast doesn't exactly work out for the people involved, right, So here's how it starts. Well, Patterson's in London. He meets a sailor named Lionel Wafer who tells him about a place called dairy En on the eastern side of the Panamanian Isthmus. And it's supposedly this wonderful paradise naturally. Yeah. And the true beauty of the place, so as we'll find out, was not its supposed bounty, but in its geography. Yeah. So, Europeans had been enchanted by the narrow strip of land between North and South America for a really long time, since they first saw it in the hundreds fifteen o one in fact. So dreams of some kind of overland route or maybe even a canal eventually started in fifteen thirteen when Vasco Nunez de Balboa made his march to the Pacific and realized that he could see both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean from a peak at Darienne, and Patterson was thinking along similar lines here. He was thinking, if you established ports on both sides of the Isthmus, then hauled goods overland, you'd be in control of this global trade artery of Scotland, controlled Darienne, and a published a colony there. It would consequently soon become fabulously wealthy from all of the trade levies going through because ships loaded down with Pacific goods would no longer have to go all the way around South America around the Cape Horn, which was not only a long and expensive trip, but a dangerous one to you might just wreck your entire ship and lose everything. So instead, he figured people would be willing to pay a little bit to this Scottish territory and take the shortcut through Darien. Patterson actually took plans a step further and envisioned not just a highway like outpost with financial ties to Scotland, but a melting pot of all nationalities, races, and religions. He said that whoever controlled the Cosmopolitan center would possess quote the gates to the Pacific and the keys to the universe. Do but open these doors and trade will increase and money will be get money, all right. But the problem was, while Patterson had been to the Caribbean and had traveled there, he had never actually been to Panama, and the reports coming back on the terrain and the climate especially weren't exactly accurate. He was hearing about these nice low valleys, the kind of the kind of terrain it's easy to imagine just cutting a road through and hauling goods the Dairyen region, and reality is really hot. It's humid, there's dense rainforests, there are mangrove swamps, and they're low mountains, so it's difficult and pretty much every way you can think of. Yeah, and it is a paradise, but it's a paradise of flora and fauna, you know, jaguars, awcelets my favorite animal, your favorite animals showing up and dareen and they're also giant aunt eaters, harpie eagles, American crocs, things like that. But it's not a paradise in the way Linel Wafer described it. In fact, the Dairyen region is such a tough place to live. It's actually believed to have been always the sparsely populated, and it still is today, so it doesn't exactly sound like the best spot to send a few shipfuls of Scottish immigrants, does repaired Scottish immigrants, No, it doesn't, although the Scottish Parliament thinks that it sounds like a great idea even though it seems too good to be true to set up this colony. The Parliament backed the scheme and allow the creation of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, which is quite a mouthful in June now, though they had to raise the money to build the ship's stock them and and just get the materials they need to start trade and and start up a colony. Unsurprisingly, though, the English and the English backed East India Company weren't really thrilled by the idea of this new potential rival in global trade. They weren't thrilled at all. In fact, English investors who had put money into the new Scottish company early on were forced to withdraw it um and the ambassador, the English ambassador in Holland even threatened to embargo merchants that traded with this new company. So the English were really throwing up any roadblocks they could to try to put the lockdown on this thing before it even got started. Yeah, and you'd think that would be a bad omen, but it's funny. Those that English opposition actually seemed to only make the Scots more gung ho about this entire plan. So subscriptions soared and in six months time, the rich and the poor alike raised four hundred thousand pounds together, half of the country's capital. Yeah. But even then, even with all of this support and enthusiasm, there was an early glitch. A company member named James Smith ran off with seventeen thousand pounds earmark for boat construction, and Patterson, of course, being in charge of this new company, was sort of under suspicion, but nobody could prove that he was involved. He been paid back nine thousand pounds of his own money, but he was still kind of tainted by the scandal, and he lost his position at the head of the company and was forced to travel just as a simple settler one of the masses, and that kind of set up a leadership issue that was going to prove to be a major problem down the road. Yeah, so they're troubles right off the bat, but still plans marched on. There were five ships built in Hamburg and Amsterdam. Their names were the Caledonia, the st Andrew, the Unicorn, the Dolphin, and the Endeavor and they were stocked with medical supplies for people for two years. It included food like biscuits, beef, pork, prunes um. They brought along tobacco, pipes, cloth, and tons of brandy and rum. But they also brought along some pretty unnecessary items to it in nice Sarah, Yeah, wigs. I mean, you would not think you'd need wigs for moving to Panama, but they were expecting there was some stylish living in their futures. And they also brought items to trade with the local Indians, like heavy Scottish cloth and mirrors and combs because they heard that the native people had really long hair and and we're kind of vain about it. And they even brought fifteen hundred English language Bibles thinking they would be able to sell those. So again, kind of a bad sign here if this is your packing list. But on July twelfth they left Scotland with all of those colonists on board, and people were so desperate to go to join this mission, which which was full and there weren't any spaces left that still always had hidden themselves on the ships and had to be expelled before they sailed off. It was a real big to do. The whole city turned out. It was the celebration for the country. People thought this was gonna was gonna make Scotland, which is so wild because they did not even know where they were going. No, at the time, they didn't. With the exception of men like Patterson, most of the people on board didn't know the destination. Like they did not know where they were sailing to. It was contained. The destination was contained in a sealed packet and it wasn't opened until Madeira, and at that point it was revealed to be a place called Golden Island on the coast of Darienne. So even then they have a name, but they're still not exactly sure what to expect there. It's a three month voyage to yeah, and it's kind of treacherous. I mean forty three die en route, which was supposed to be fairly typical unfortunately for a journey at this time. That's true. And they landed November three at a spot they named Caledonia Bay and it was fortunately but deceivingly the beginning of a short dry season when they got there, so things seemed okay at first. Patterson wrote, quote, our situation isn't one of the best and most defensible harbors perhaps in the world. The country is healthful, exceedingly fertile, and the weather is temperate, So positive attitude right at the get go. And the locals were nice to the Kuna and the Choco were friendly and helpful, and they liked to fly the Cross of St Andrew and their canoes too, so they seemed on board with what was going on. So they were getting along. But things started to go bad pretty quickly. Their first choice of a building site wasn't at all suitable. Paterson called it quote a mere morass, neither fit to be fortified, nor planted, nor indeed for men to lie upon. We were clearing and making huts upon this improper place near two months, in which time experience the school master of Fools convinced our masters that the place now called Fort St Andrew's was a more proper place for us. So at the fort site they started to build New Edinburgh. And by that point though, there was major trouble because rainy season had started, and of course rain brought bugs and disease, and by March of that year, two d colonists were dead and the death rate eventually increased to about ten people per day. So they're dropping like flies in this weather and heat and bad climate. Yeah, and to add to that situation, food was scarce despite the large supplies they had bought with them. It was rotting because of the damp, and there just wasn't enough of it, and there was no strong leadership and lots of infighting and basically they just lost hope at that point, they lost their spirit. Yeah. There's an account from a young gentleman who was on the trip named Roger Oswald, and he described his experience at Darien, living off of less than a pound of moldy flower a week. And here's here's what he had to say. It pretty much sums up all of the points we just made. When boiled with a little water without anything else, big maggots and worms must be skimmed off the top. Yet, for all this short allowance, every man let him never be so weak. Daily turned out to work by daylight, whether with the hatchet or wheelbar, pick, ax, shovel for hammer, or any other instrument the case required, and so continued until twelve o'clock, and at two again, and stayed till night, sometimes working all day up to the headbands of the breeches in water at the trenches. My shoulders have been so war with carrying burdens that the skin has come off them and grew full of boils. If a man were sick and obliged to stay within, no victuals for him that day. Our counselors, all the while lying at their ease, sometimes divided into factions, and being swayed by particular interest, ruined the public. Our bodies pined away and grew so masserated with such allowance that we were like so many skeletons. So it wasn't quite the gates to the Pacific and possessing the keys to the Universe that Patterson thought it would be. And even basic non overland trading was not going according to plan, so they weren't able to make money either. For example, and surprisingly the Indians did not want to buy lots of Scottish claw or combs, and the English colonies in the West Indies and in North America were actually forbidden by London to communicate with the Scots, let alone trade with them. So they were frozen out. Yeah, and only a few traders in Boston and New York were willing to trade food for cash. And obviously if you're trading for cash, that's not a long term solution. So we have to ask why did the English just come down so hard on trade for this new company. The East India thing was obviously still a sore point, but the main issue here was maintaining diplomatic relations with Spain. Because yes, in addition to overlooking the climate of Darien and its mosquitoes and the difficult terrain, the expeditions promoters had just completely ignored the fact that Spain already laid claim to Panama. Powerful Spain with all of its armies and ships. Whoops, big mistakes. So by June, survivors had sort of packed it in. Patterson's wife and son had both died, and the party sailed to Jamaica and then to New York, leaving ships and dead behind along the way. Some of the ships crashed, I think some were sold off, and really the only one that made it back home to Scotland was the Caledonia, and survivors in New York were described as looking quote, rather like skelets than men being starved. But before word could get back to Scotland that the settlers had abandoned the colony, the company had actually sent more people out there. So several more ships were sent out to Dairyen, and they met with numerous disasters along the way. But when the new settlers finally arrived in November, what they found there obviously was an abandoned colony. And again they had a terrible time. There was no leadership, um, no decent goods to trade, and they wondered, you know again, they came to this question, should we stay or should we go back home? Yeah, and there was a man named James Buyers who took control and had folks vote to keep five hundred men at Darien and send the rest to Jamaica and on to home. And he ran into some trouble. There was a mutiny, one man was executed, and finally this in fighting was put to a stop by the Spanish. The Spanish got fed up with the situation and attacked, and Buyers abandoned the settlement. Others stayed behind to fight, and obviously the poor starving colonists were no match for the Spanish. The Spanish soon blockaded the port and forced the colonists to surrender March eighth, sev hundred. But fortunately for the Scots, the Spanish commander was pretty generous. He gave them two weeks to pack up supplies and and scavenge for food get what they could together before they got out. But the settlers who returned home, and there weren't many of them since many had obviously died, were considered pariah's really by their own countrymen. The company had lost the life savings of much of the kind Tree, and people held them responsible for that. Yeah. According to Scottish Parliament, it was about the cost of one quarter of Scotland's liquid assets that they lost, so pretty big deal. And Scotland was so deeply in debt at that point that they could no longer They no longer had the resources to compete with England. Instead, the country dissolved its parliament and in seventeen oh seven joined the Act of Union with England, and as part of that Act, England paid Scotland's debts. They paid three thousand pounds and that was to be managed by the eventual Royal Bank of Scotland. Which somewhat surprisingly Patterson actually helped organize. I know, I guess he was good at starting banks, but I'm surprised that he was allowed to manage this amount of money again. But still, many Scots held the English responsible because of all those early roadblocks and the freezing out and all of that. According to BBC History, some historians consider this strong dislike to have been a factor in the eighteenth century Jackbite rebellions. But there's still a you traces of the Scottish settlement that are left today. There's a spot of land called Scots Point, and small traces of the settlement can be found at Caledonia Bay. They were actually first discovered in nineteen seventy nine. I guess they had been sort of reclaimed by the by nature, but a few little points left here and there. Yeah, and it's still really remote. Only a few air strips are there to reach settlements in Darien. And a true measure of this difficult terrain, the Pan American Highway that runs from Alaska to Argentina only has one gap at Darien. Yeah, so it makes it impossible to drive a car between the two continents. Um. So pretty pretty wild story with Scotland and in their investment scheme here, and it reminded me a lot of what comes about two hundred years later when the French tried to build a canal at Panama. Again, there was sort of a subscription, public subscription, a lot of national pride and total disaster. In that case, tens of thousands of people died trying to build the canal in the climate, dying of yellow fever, in malaria and um. Just kind of an interesting cyclical story, almost a good adventure, but an ill faded one. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a product shin of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
