“To Enter into an Intire Frindship and Strict Allyance”: The Scots at Darien, Their Native Neighbors, and the Politics of Proselytization, 1695–1710

My paper will analyze the Scottish project to settle a colony on the isthmus of Darien in Panama in 1698, and how its proprietors justified their claim to the region with reference to a series of alliances they struck with the neighboring Native American population, the Tule. I argue that to bolster the legitimacy of their colony in a region internationally recognized as belonging to the Spanish Empire, the Scots embraced two old ideas – that of the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty towards Native Americans, and the idea that when liberated from the specter of popery, Natives would turn towards Protestantism – to craft a new argument about empire in the Atlantic World. They advocated a colonial relationship based on obtaining the consent of the Tule regarding their settlement, the need to form an Amerindian Protestant bulwark in South America, and to found a trade colony that would welcome the merchants and sailors of all nations.
This program provoked a hostile reaction from their Spanish, English and French rivals elsewhere in the Caribbean, who sought to maintain their mercantilist stronghold over trade, and rejected the unwelcome presence of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in the region. Moreover, it failed to persuade the Tule to entire into “an Intire frindship & strict allyance” with them, since they were disinterested in Presbyterianism’s strict Calvinist theology and willing to engage with the Scots only so far as it allowed them to play off neighboring European interests against one another. Though the Scots had lost this imperial contest by 1701, they continued the argument through the 1700, and ultimately shaped British policy towards Natives during the next major imperial expedition, in Nova Scotia, in 1710.