The Scots were starved out of their
settlement. The few who remained fled to New York and Jamaica, and
there, perishing of hunger, were refused supplies by the English
colonial governors. A second Scottish colony succumbed to a Spanish
fleet and army, and the company, with a nominal capital of 400,000_l._
and with 220,000_l._ paid up, was bankrupt. Macaulay calculates the
loss at about the same as a loss of forty millions would have been to
the Scotland of his own day; let us say twenty-two millions.
We remember the excitement in France over the Panama failure.
Scotland, in 1700, was even more furious, and that led to the hanging
of Captain Green and his men. There were riots; the rioters were
imprisoned in the Heart of Midlothian--the Tolbooth--the crowd
released them; some of the crowd were feebly sentenced to the pillory,
the public pelted them--with white roses; and had the Chevalier de St.
George not been a child of twelve, he would have had a fair chance of
recovering his throne. The trouble was tided over; William III. died
in 1702. Queen Anne came to the Crown. But the bankrupt company was
not dead. Its charter was still legal, and, with borrowed money, it
sent out vessels to trade with the Indies.
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