sthmus from Panama; and the fort was blockaded at
once by sea and land.

A drummer soon came with a message from the besiegers, but a message
which was utterly unintelligible to the besieged. Even after all that we
have seen of the perverse imbecility of the directors of the Company, it
must be thought strange that they should have sent a colony to a remote
part of the world, where it was certain that there must be constant
intercourse, peaceable or hostile, with Spaniards, and yet should not
have taken care that there should be in the whole colony a single person
who knew a little Spanish.

With some difficulty a negotiation was carried on in such French and
such Latin as the two parties could furnish. Before the end of March
a treaty was signed by which the Scotch bound themselves to evacuate
Darien in fourteen days; and on the eleventh of April they departed, a
much less numerous body than when they arrived. In little more than four
months, although the healthiest months of the year, three hundred men
out of thirteen hundred had been swept away by disease. Of the survivors
very few lived to see their native country again. Two of the ships
perished at sea. Many of the adventurers, who had left their homes
flushed with hopes of speedy opulence, were glad to hire themselves out
to the planters of Jamaica, and laid their bones in that land of exile.
Shields died there, worn out and heart broken. Borland was the only
minister who came back. In his curious and interesting narrative, he
expresses his feelings, after the fashion of the school in which he
had been bred, by grotesque allusions to the Old Testament, and by a
profusion of Hebrew words. On his first arrival, he tells us, he found
New Edinburgh a Ziklag. He had subsequently been compelled to dwell in
the tents of Kedar. Once, indeed, during his sojourn, he had fallen
in with a Beer-lahai-roi, and had set up his Ebenezer; but in general
Darien was to him a Magor Missabib, a Kibroth-hattaavah. The sad story
is introduced with the words in which a great man of old, delivered
over to the malice of the Evil Power, was informed of the death of his
children and of the ruin of his fortunes: "I alone am escaped to tell
thee."

CHAPTER XXV.

Trial of Spencer Cowper--Duels--Discontent of the Nation--Captain
Kidd--Meeting of Parliament--Attacks on Burnet--Renewed Attack
on Somers--Question of the Irish Forfeitures: Dispute between the
Houses--Somers again attac