he garden, the warehouse, the mart, of the whole
world, their bones peeping through their skin, and hunger and fever
written in their faces, had arrived in the Hudson.

The grief, the dismay and the rage of those who had a few hours before
fancied themselves masters of all the wealth of both Indies may easily
be imagined. The Directors, in their fury, lost all self command, and,
in their official letters, railed at the betrayers of Scotland, the
white-livered deserters. The truth is that those who used these hard
words were far more deserving of blame than the wretches whom they had
sent to destruction, and whom they now reviled for not staying to be
utterly destroyed. Nothing had happened but what might easily have
been foreseen. The Company had, in childish reliance on the word of an
enthusiastic projector, and in defiance of facts known to every educated
man in Europe, taken it for granted that emigrants born and bred within
ten degrees of the Arctic Circle would enjoy excellent health within
ten degrees of the Equator. Nay, statesmen and scholars had been deluded
into the belief that a country which, as they might have read in books
so common as those of Hakluyt and Purchas, was noted even among tropical
countries for its insalubrity, and had been abandoned by the Spaniards
solely on account of its insalubrity, was a Montpelier. Nor had any of
Paterson's dupes considered how colonists from Fife or Lothian, who had
never in their lives known what it was to feel the heat of a distressing
midsummer day, could endure the labour of breaking clods and carrying
burdens under the fierce blaze of a vertical sun. It ought to have been
remembered that such colonists would have to do for themselves what
English, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonists employed Negroes or
Indians to do for them. It was seldom indeed that a white freeman in
Barbadoes or Martinique, in Guiana or at Panama, was employed in severe
bodily labour. But the Scotch who settled at Darien must at first be
without slaves, and must therefore dig the trench round their town,
build their houses, cultivate their fields, hew wood, and draw water,
with their own hands. Such toil in such an atmosphere was too much for
them. The provisions which they had brought out had been of no good
quality, and had not been improved by lapse of time or by change of
climate. The yams and plantains did not suit stomachs accustomed to good
oatmeal. The flesh of wild animals and the gr