SYMHC Classics: The Darien Disaster

This 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:25):
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,

(00:48):
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

(01:09):
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,

(01:35):
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,

(01:56):
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

(02:16):
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

(02:38):
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,

(03:00):
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

(03:22):
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,

(03:46):
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

(04:06):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:50):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:32):
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

(05:56):
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

(06:18):
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

(06:41):
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

(07:03):
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

(07:24):
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

(07:46):
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

(08:08):
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,

(08:32):
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,

(08:53):
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

(09:15):
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.

(09:37):
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

(09:58):
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,

(10:20):
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,

(10:45):
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

(11:06):
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

(11:27):
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

(11:47):
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

(12:11):
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.

(12:33):
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

(12:54):
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

(13:24):
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

(13:46):
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.

(14:08):
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.

(14:29):
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

(14:53):
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.

(15:14):
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

(15:35):
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,

(15:56):
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

(16:16):
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

(16:39):
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

(17:02):
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

(17:25):
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,

(17:48):
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,

(18:10):
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.

(18:34):
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

(18:56):
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

(19:19):
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

(19:39):
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

(20:01):
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

(20:22):
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

(20:44):
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

(21:06):
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

(21:26):
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(21:49):
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