The Door of the Seas by Val McDermid and Jo Sharp review: 'opens the door of history'
This novella inspired by the ill-fated Darien Scheme is as well researched as it is imagined, writes David Robinson
For Scots of a masochistic bent, the history of the Darien Scheme is essential reading, and Val McDermid and Jo Sharp, Scotland’s Geographer Royal, do justice to it in this, the latest volume in Polygon’s excellent Darkland Tales series.
Because Scotland’s disastrous attempt to found a colony in what is now Panama bankrupted the country, Darien is invariably cited as one of the main reasons for the Act of Union seven years later. In hindsight, with the knowledge that 11 of the 14 ships that left Scotland were lost, that hundreds of colonists died of disease, and the Scots were ultimately driven out by the Spanish, the scheme looks doomed from the start.
Hold on, say McDermid and Sharp. Look at what the colonists were trying to do. Read “A Proposal to Plant A Colony in Darien” by William Paterson - the brains behind the scheme - and you’ll catch a whiff of strategic brilliance. Because of its location on the isthmus of Panama, he argued, Darien would be “a door of the seas, a key of the universe” which would “enable its proprietors to give laws to both oceans, and to become arbitrators of the commercial world, without being liable to the fatigues, expenses and dangers, or contracting the guilt and blood, of Alexander or Caesar”.
Put a colony there, in other words, and you’d rule the world’s economy. You’d build a road across to the Pacific and make yourselves indispensable to global trade - all without, unlike the English, having to put enough boots on the ground to conquer a continent.
Sounds persuasive? If you were tempted, you wouldn’t have been alone: the £400,000 raised for the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies amounted to almost half Scotland’s available capital. In McDermid and Sharp’s novella, (real-life) scientist James Wallace is convinced enough to join the expedition. It is through his (fictional) letters home to his wife Eliza and his patron Sir Robert Sibbald (Scotland’s first Geographer Royal, and co-founder of Edinburgh’s Botanic Garden) that we see the disaster gradually unfold.
One of the advantages of the epistolary format is the way it constantly underlines the colonists’ isolation. If a letter home is ever answered, half a year will have passed. When will resupplies arrive? the colonists wonder, as deaths and dissension mount. In June 1699, after eight months, they abandon the colony and it is deserted until November, when a second group of settlers arrives. Eliza is among them. Wallace wanted to warn her off coming but the message didn’t arrive in time.
Letters have other advantages, too. Their knowledge is personalised and partial. They can take sides and don’t have to be objective. They also open up a side of the past that historians mightn’t see or appreciate: the restiveness of the colonists when stuck in fog for days on end even without properly leaving Scotland; their initial delight in the wonders of Darien’s wildlife and the (apparently very real) prospect of gold; the petty tensions and resentments between the colonists who try to carve out a new life ashore and those who stay aboard the ships; above all, the feeling of betrayal when they realise that their king has ordered his English colonial subjects not to trade with the Scots. This was indeed the nail in the coffin of Scotland’s own imperial ambitions.
For obvious reasons, Wallace’s account only touches lightly on the geopolitical reasons King William sided with the English imperialists of the East India Company rather than the Scots who were likely to draw England into a war with Spain at a (rare) time of peace. But whether you blame English self-interest or Scottish naivety, desperation and hubris, McDermid and Sharp’s novella is as well researched as it is imagined. Put the two together and the door of history starts to creak open.
The Door of the Seas, by Val McDermid and Jo Sharp, Polygon, £12. Val McDermid and Jo Sharp are at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 17 August.
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