Darien Disaster

Description

Three hundred years ago, the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, defied the King and the persistent hostility of the English to establish a noble trading company, to settle a colony, and to recover its people from a century of despair, privation, famine and decay. The site of the colony, Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, was the enduring dream of William Paterson, who believed that it would become a bridge between East and West through which would pass the richest trade in the world. The Scots created it by themselves, in a wave of almost hysterical enthusiasm, subscribing half of the nation's capital. Three years later the venture had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been lost and over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned. It was a tragic curtain to the last act of Scotland's independence.

John Prebble was born in the UK in 1915 but spent his boyhood in a predominantly Scottish township in Canada. He became a journalist in 1934 and went on to become an historian, novelist, film-writer and the author of several highly praised plays and dramatised documentaries for BBC TV and Radio. He died in January 2001.

Prebble describes this almost forgotten episode as a raw cross-section of human aspirations for freedom, noble in its inception, foolish, petty and shocking in its end... Prebble's canvas is immense, his characterisations excellently drawn * Publisher's Weekly * This is a welcome and long-overdue reissue of the late John Prebble's 1968 classic about Scotland's disastrous venture into creation of a trading colony... His writing is as compelling as are the salutary incidents he relates * Kirkus Reviews *