“The nation has so great a concern in this enterprise, that I may well say all our hopes of ever being any other than a poor and inconsiderable people are imbarked with them.”

by Billy Kay

This latest feature by Billy Kay about his travels in the Scottish diaspora, adapted from his book, The Scottish World, , continues with…

SO WROTE THE great Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun in contemplation of the departure to the Darien region of Central America of the five ships and twelve hundred settlers which comprised the first Scottish colonial expedition to the area in 1698. I have never been there, but I have spoken to a few people who have, and the description of their arrival in 1985 could have been written in 1698:

“We arrived at about five o’ clock in the morning at Caledonia Bay, our first sight, the forest covered dome of Golden Island … to our left was a single rocky outcrop covered with coconut palms which was the site of Fort St Andrew. As we entered the bay itself small specks of canoes appeared, some with sails, some being paddled by eager young boys, came out to meet us, shouting screams of welcome in the Cuna Indian language.”

Ralph Mitchell of Glasgow is one of only a handful of Scots who have revisited the place which had such a dramatic effect on Scottish history at the turn of the eighteenth century. Many believe that the loss of Scotland’s independence in the Act of Union with England of 1707 can be traced back to the economic and psychological consequences of the colony’s failure. With that in mind, it is ironic that those Scots who have visited that graveyard of their country’s independence did so under the auspices of two very English‐sounding expeditions, Operation Drake and Operation Raleigh! Ralph Mitchell and Colin Dougan from Gullane were with Operation Raleigh and spent six weeks under the hostile physical conditions faced by their countrymen in the land they christened Caledonia. Darien is still as remote, her climate still as hostile as in the days the Scots built Fort St Andrew and the huts of New Edinburgh.