for
her cloths. The Scots were more successful in secret and unlegalised
trading with their kinsmen in the American colonies.

The Scottish East India Company's aim was to sell Scottish goods in many
places, India for example; and it was secretly meant to found a factory
and central mart on the isthmus of Panama. For these ends capital was
withdrawn from the new and unsuccessful manufacturing companies. The
great scheme was the idea of William Paterson (born 1658), the
far-travelled and financially-speculative son of a farmer in
Dumfriesshire. He was the "projector," or one of the projectors, of the
Bank of England of 1694, investing 2000 pounds. He kept the Darien part
of his scheme for an East India Company in the background, and it seems
that William, when he granted a patent to that company, knew nothing of
this design to settle in or near the Panama isthmus, which was quite
clearly within the Spanish sphere of influence. When the philosopher
John Locke heard of the scheme, he wished England to steal the idea and
seize a port in Darien: it thus appears that he too was unaware that to
do so was to inflict an insult and injury on Spain. There is reason to
suppose that the grant of the patent to the East India Company was
obtained by bribing some Scottish politician or politicians unnamed,
though one name is not beyond probable conjecture.

In any case Paterson admitted English capitalists, who took up half of
the shares, as the Act of Patent permitted them to do. By December
William was writing that he "had been ill-served by some of my
Ministers." He had no notice of the details of the Act of Patent till he
had returned to England, and found English capitalists and the English
Parliament in a fury. The Act committed William to interposing his
authority if the ships of the company were detained by foreign powers,
and gave the adventurers leave to take "reparation" by force from their
assailants (this they later did when they captured in the Firth of Forth
an English vessel, the _Worcester_).

On the opening of the books of the new company in London (October 1695)
there had been a panic, and a fall of twenty points in the shares of the
English East India Company. The English Parliament had addressed William
in opposition to the Scots Company. The English subscribers of half the
paid up capital were terrorised, and sold out. Later, Hamburg
investments were cancelled through William's influence. All lowla