[DARIEN EXPEDITION].
A perfect list of the several persons residenters in Scotland, who have subscribed as adventurers in the joynt-stock of the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies. Together with the respective sums which they have severally subscribed in the books of said company, amounting in the whole to to [sic] the sum of £400,000 sterling. Edinburgh, the heirs and successors of Andrew Anderson, 1696.
Glasgow, reprinted by Hutchinson & Brookman, 1827.
8vo, pp. 32; some minor spotting, else a good copy in contemporary drab wrappers; upper cover creased, with small stain.
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A perfect list of the several persons residenters in Scotland, who have subscribed as adventurers in the joynt-stock of the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies. Together with the respective sums which they have severally subscribed in the books of said company, amounting in the whole to to [sic] the sum of £400,000 sterling. Edinburgh, the heirs and successors of Andrew Anderson, 1696.
First edition of this reprint of the list, first published in Edinburgh in 1696, of subscribers to William Paterson’s Company of Scotland. Paterson (1658-1719) sat on the first board of the Bank of England, but left following a disagreement with the other board members. Following this he devoted himself to the ill-fated Darien scheme, and in 1698 he accompanied the first expedition to the Darien isthmus in Panama.
The list of subscribers represents a singularly Scottish endeavour: ‘the insult attending the opposition of the English Government, and the disavowal of the project by the King, wounded the honest pride of the Scots, who patriotically resolved “to stand upon their own bottom”, and to pursue the undertaking, although on different lines, with their own resources. They aimed now at a capital increased to £400,000’ (Barbour). Without English backing, however, the scheme was always in jeopardy, and this calamitous loss of stock, about a quarter of the Scottish lowlands’ wealth, was a significant factor in accelerating the 1707 Act of Union. The terms of the Union included £398,000 of ‘Equivalent Money’, just over half of which was enough to repay all shareholders with 5% interest – most retained their money as a government annuity, which was the genesis of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
See James Samuel Barbour, William Paterson and the Darien Company (1907), pp. 22-23; 42.
