In Glasgow ringleaders were locked up in the Castle. In Dumfries, the offending Settlement was burned at the Market Cross. In Nether Largo, Alexander’s eldest brother John led ‘a great mob, armed with staves and bludgeons’ who barred the church door, jeered at the Episcopalian minister, John Auchinleck, for being anglicised and a traitor and threatened to kill him if he held the Sunday service. Auchinleck got away fast. He ‘divided what Money there was amongst the Poor and retired from his Charge’.
Six years later, aged fifteen, Alexander was accused of ‘undecent beaiviar’ in the same church. He was summoned to appear before a disciplinary session of its Elders. The parish records read:
1695. Alexander Selchraig to be summoned August, 25. This same day the Session mett. Alexr. Selchraig, Son to John Selchraig, Elder, in Nether Largo, was dilated for his Undecent Beaiviar in ye Church; the Church Officer is ordirred to ga and cite him to compear befoor our Session agst ye nixt dyett.
August, 27th ye Session mett. Alexr. Selchraig, Son to John Selchraig, Elder, in Nether Largo, called but did not compear, being gone avay to ye Seas; this Business is continued till his return.†
1695–99 New Caledonia
A WAY AT ye seas for eight years, from the time of his indictment by the Largo Elders to when he joined the Cinque Ports as Master, Selkirk became a hardened man and mariner. Chances are he learned his skills, aged fifteen on, in a Scottish expedition to the South Sea. It was Scotland’s assertion as a colonial power. It became known as the Darien Disaster.†
The intention was to set up a colony on the Isthmus of Darien, a bleak strip of land in north Panama between the Caribbean and South Seas. This ‘little Caledonia’ was to control an overland trade route that would channel the wealth of the world, east and west, to Scotland.
William Paterson was the driving force behind the scheme: in 1695 he founded the Company of Scotland, trading to Africa and the Indies. He described the Isthmus of Darien as ‘this door of the seas, and the key to the universe’.† He was much influenced by Lionel Wafer, a shipmate of Dampier’s, on the Trinity in 1684. Buccaneer, surgeon and barber, Wafer kept a journal of his travels to Panama. Dampier made a transcript of this which he gave to Paterson to read. Wafer wrote of the gold mines of Canea and Santa Maria and the road to Portobello, used by muletrains loaded with the wealth of Peru. He was lyrical about Darien, its valleys watered with perennial springs, its fertile soil and pineapples as big as a man’s head.
The indigenous Cuna Indians would welcome the colonisers, Wafer said. Copper-skinned and adorned with rings and plates of gold, they lived in simple villages in huts roofed with plantain leaves. They hated the Spaniards who had made them into slaves. Wafer, though, was accepted because he cured them with ‘Physic and Phlebotomy’. In return they told him about their land.
Grand plans were made. Twenty per cent of taxes and profits from merchandise, gold, silver and jewels, would go to the Company of Scotland. The colony would be divided into districts run by councillors – Fort St Andrew, on a promontory guarding the bay, New Edinburgh, nestling in the mountains.
Five ships were prepared: the Caledonia, St Andrew, Unicorn, Dolphin and Endeavour. Recruitment advertisements posted in Scottish coffee houses promised volunteers like Selkirk adventure and riches. Each man would get fifty acres of agricultural land and a house in fifty square feet of ground. Councillors would have twice that. Relatives would be shipped out at the Company’s expense.
Opposition came from the Lords of Trade and Plantations in London. They aimed to halt the scheme and annex Darien for the Crown. They summoned Dampier and Wafer in June 1697. They paid Wafer to delay publishing his manuscript, wanting its information for themselves. Paterson paid him for the same reason.
The ships sailed from Leith on 14 July 1698, crewed with twelve hundred volunteers. Their intended route was up the east coast of Scotland, round the Orkney Islands to the Atlantic Ocean, down to Madeira, across to the Indies, then into the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Darien. Short rations and death were the voyage’s themes. The ships were supposed to be victualled for nine months, but the salt beef and pork went mouldy within days, there were weevils in the bread and insufficient oil and butter.
In thick fog, near Aberdeen, the ships lost sight of each other. At Madeira the men swarmed ashore desperate for fresh food. They ate unripe fruit and became ill. They were mistaken for Algerian pirates and attacked. Officers sold their scarlet coats and plumed hats to buy meat.
As they sailed the Atlantic to Antigua, Guadeloupe, and to ‘Crab Island’ near Puerto Rico, men died like flies: Alexander Alder, Robert Hardy, Andrew Baird, Thomas Fullarton, Peter Wilmot… They died of hunger and disease. A surgeon’s mate, Walter Johnson, took too much laudanum for his fever and ‘slept till death’. Officers were merciless. With negligible stores, they regretted it if in a day no more than four or five men died. The sick were denied oatmeal or water and left on deck, exposed to bad weather. Those who stole food ran the gauntlet of surviving men, who lashed them with knotted ropes.
It took four months to reach Darien. The Unicorn, as it entered the bay, struck sunken rocks. It tore its sheathing and from then on leaked. ‘Tis a very wet country’ Wafer had written with understatement. ‘You shall Hear for a great way together the croaking of frogs and toads, the humming of mosquitoes
