In 1695 the Scottish Parliament had passed, with the royal
assent, an Act granting a patent to a Scottish company dealing with
Africa, the Indies, and, incidentally, with the globe at large. The
Act committed the occupant of the Scottish throne, William of Orange,
to backing the company if attacked by alien power. But it was unlucky
that England was then an alien power, and that the Scots Act infringed
the patent of the much older English East India Company. Englishmen
dared not take shares, finally, in the venture of the Scots; and when
the English Board of Trade found out, in 1697, the real purpose of the
Scottish company--namely, to set up a factory in Darien and anticipate
the advantages dreamed of by France in the case of M. de Lesseps's
Panama Canal--'a strange thing happened.' The celebrated philosopher,
Mr. John Locke, and the other members of a committee of the English
Board of Trade, advised the English Government to plagiarise the
Scottish project, and seize the section of the Isthmus of Panama on
which the Scots meant to settle. This was not done; but the Dutch
Usurper, far from backing the Scots company, bade his colonies hold no
sort of intercourse with them.
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