Cape of Mad Hope
Neal Ascherson: The Darien disaster, 3 January 2008
The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations
by Douglas Watt.
Luath, 312 pp., £8.99, January 2007,978 1 906307 09 7 Show More
by Douglas Watt.
Luath, 312 pp., £8.99, January 2007,
“... proprietors to give laws to both oceans.’ Paterson, accompanied by his evasive little sidekick James Smyth, had been trolling around Europe with a Darien plan long before he sold it to his fellow Scots. In Amsterdam coffee houses, he had tried to enthuse Dutch bankers with ‘a Common Wealth and free port in the Emperour of Dariens Countrey’. In ... ”