TELEVISION: The crisis of Scottish imperialism
Darien, BBC2
One of the reasons why it's hard to know whether we're in the middle of a Silver Age of 'TV history' programmes is that, who can say what the point of them is? The presumption has to be that when Lord Clark of Civilisation drawled, or AJP Taylor came in, stood up, and spoke straight to the camera for an hour without notes, that they weren't speaking into a void. Which is to say, their knowledge illuminated the fairly common understanding of the past most people were assumed already to have. Today any basic awareness of the past is in itself a great leap forward, so such history as there is on television has to first tell the story, before it can go on to explain it. The best means by which to do this is of course by holding the viewer's attention; and the best means television knows how to do this is by being entertaining. And this is where leftie Scotch thesp, Bill Paterson, and, from the University of Bristol, Dr Mark Horton's Darien: disaster in paradise was such a success — it was a very entertaining evening on TV. As to the history of the Scotland's abortive central American colony, well, it's the best you're likely to see on BBC2 anytime soon.
The story of Darien certainly used to be a familiar one: at the end of the C17th, William Paterson (no relation) set up a Company to try and plant a Scottish colony near modern-day Panama; this company attracted much of the, as our Marxist friends used to put it, surplus capital of Scotland; the colony was a disaster, the site was badly chosen, the Spanish had some late-imperial vim for once, and the whole thing went belly up. Within a few years, Scotland, for a century joined by a personal union (ie they shared a sovereign) with England assented to an incorporative union, hence the modern United Kingdom. One signal provision of the Treaty of Union being that the shareholders in Paterson's failed scheme recouped all their losses from the new Union treasury. Darien is thus held to encapsulate the failure of the Scottish state: though since this 'failure' lasted from 1603 till 1707, it really is a case of, 'in the long run, we're all dead', I think.
How did Bill Paterson (the actor, and driving force behind the documentary) seek to illustrate whatever point this history was going to make? By the excellent device of both filming a team from the University of Bristol trying to find the long-since abandoned site of the original colony, and, by intercutting this with an acted-out version of the actual planting. This, though spiritedly done throughout, had the usual quotient of nonsense. One of the financial backers in Auld Reekie may well have been addressed as 'yur grace', but her accent suggested more deep-fried oatmeal biscuits than any obvious gentility. The establishing scenes in Edinburgh were designed to show how desperate Paterson's backers were to find a way out from under the shadow of England. The air of doom we pleasingly supped up from the contemporary on-screen efforts of the archaeology students to find the ruins of the patently unsuccessful colony, was therefore dunned into even the thickest Sassenach bonce.
Bristol's Mark Horton was a real find, whooping with infectious enthusiasm every time a musketball or privy foundation were, possibly, discovered. His contributions though lacked the deliberate political edge of the dramatisation. This gave a bit of a touch to the Kirk, with the representative Presbyterian minister being treated as an absolute Pharisee; indeed it's hard not to imagine that the quay-side scene of thousands of bibles being loaded onboard was meant to demonstrate to a secular audience: 'see, how silly they were! if only they'd packed more salted beef instead!' But, in fairness, most of the problems of the colony in getting off the ground were laid at the foot of habitual Jock disputatiousness. That and the fact that, when the Spanish came sniffing round (their claim to the territory being superior, much like their locally available military force) the Scots were abandoned to their fate by the callous English. More exactly, by evil Dutch William. Yet this represents just one of any number of rhetorical inconsistencies: if the purpose of Darien was to both demonstrate and reinforce Scottish 'independence' from England, why mewl when the 'English' demonstrated the consequences of that independence in the starkest manner possible?
What however ruined the programme's argument, despite its beautiful presentation, was a sly dishonesty about Scotland's status prior to 1707 (Darien dates from 1698 on), and this in turn compromised its presentation of the facts. It is — as both in its voiceover narrative, and in the story acted out by Bill Paterson's troupe, Darien did — simply illiterate to state that the issue at stake was how to keep 'Scotland independent of England'. In 1698 France was independent of England, and vice versa, but, for instance, the United Provinces were not entirely of either Scotland or England, and somewhere like the Spanish Netherlands was not at all independent of Spain. The reason why it's misleading and anachronistic to talk, in this instance (Scotland and England) of 'independence' as we would understand it today, is that even today Britain wouldn't share her government with another state. Tony Blair might well be Prime Minister here, but he's not anytime soon going to be Prime Minister of, say, the United States as well. This obviously is exactly what was going on in 1698: as well as being Stadtholder of the United Provinces, Dutch William also wore the crowns of England and Scotland (and Ireland for what that's worth). In him the government of the two British states was united, even if the machinery of government wasn't as one. This was a perfectly common occurrence in the early modern period. Thus whatever William Paterson and the investing classes of North Britain were doing with Darien, it wasn't strictly speaking, anything to do with 'maintaining' or enhancing some irrelevant concept of Scottish independence.
This philo-seperatist agenda however distorts and distorts. So it was that we were presented the lovely vision of near commune-like relations between the Scots planters and the aborigineal Amerindians, when, in the normal run of a BBC2 documentary, this European encounter with the wider world could normally have expected a somewhat harsher light shone upon it. This isn't to say that the normal experience of European settlement in the Americas, at least, the non-Spanish variant, wasn't a lot more co-operative than it's recently been fashionable to present it as, it's just that it was a bit much that the Scots never did anything which, by modern standards, was even slightly naughty or politically incorrect. In fact, this presentation of the colonists as ultimately enjoying that quintessential modern condition, that of being victims, does them no credit at all. The world is littered with British graves, and the forgotten by-ways of empire (what consciousness now is there of the imperial moment in, oh, the Ionian Islands, or, come to it, of the march on Buenos Aries — either of them?). That a colony was planted and failed shouldn't been seen as miserable or shameful but as habitually proud ambition. And as the record was eventually to show, each failure was purely a mark on the way to renewed achievement.
Darien though an awful place to try and plant a colony of ginger Europeans was a gorgeous thing to film. The scenes that elided from Horton's modern boat cutting through the brilliant offshore waters, to that of William Paterson's brig were as good as anything on television this year. This did entertain, and did explain, but the sad thing is that it didn't explain quite the whole truth. For in contradiction to the programme's central thrust, the origins of the Scottish Company of Africa and the Indies were in fact . . . explicitly English. The driving finance behind the project came from London merchants seeking to exploit a loophole in the personal union of the crowns. English trade with the Americas (and Africa, and Asia) was subject to the twin monopolies of the Royal African, and East India Companies. The reason why Paterson's company was set up was so that English traders could circumvent, using this Scottish back-door, the Navigation Acts. Far from being a Scottish enterprise thwarted by the wicked English, this was a typical Anglo-Scottish undertaking of the late seventeenth century forestalled by happenstance. Indeed, given the greatest 'joint venture' of the two nations, the plantation of Ulster, it is (almost) amusing to think on what Northern Ireland-in-Panama would have looked like today, had it succeeded.
What was lost in this programme's inevitably truncated presentation was that, just as with Ulster, there were plenty of other individual 'Scottish' colonisations. South Carolina saw a notable example, but the problem for the mindset that informed Darien was that, as the seventeenth century progressed, it became less and less meaningful to talk of purely 'English' or 'Scottish' colonial adventures. From Greater Britain they all came to join in the fun, even the Welsh. In addition, the statist conception of how colonies were made that Darien presented ("Scotland did this", "England did that", & etc), misunderstands the essentially private nature of planting. It was not government-directed, let alone financed, on the whole, in the English-speaking world. The central state didn't do it itself, it merely licensed others to go off and do it themselves. The chief virtue in this was that individual failure could far more easily be countenanced than failure by the state, or any of its institutions.
One could go on about the modern pieties displayed on behalf of the Scottish colonists — no mention is made of the fact that Darien was not the only undertaking of Paterson's company: at the same time vessels in its employ were, albeit unsuccessfully, slaving off Africa — but the programme ends on a less jaundiced note than it might have done. The Union of the Kingdoms in 1707 is presented as a chance for Scots, and Scotland qua Britain to redeem themselves. And I suppose that was in truth my only quibble with this entertainment: the final scene should have been some pebbles left on a beach by the C17th Scots in the shape of a saltire, being transformed by a falling St George's cross-shaped frond from a palm tree (hacked down by one of our latter-day archaeologists) into the Union jack. But then I'm cheesy that way.
Darien: Disaster in Paradise, BBC2
Peter Greene Coates, July 15, 2003 10:44 AM