In July of 1698, a Scottish fleet assembled in the Firth of Forth to be loaded and equipped and then set sail to found the new Scotland, Caledonia, in the Darien Peninsula of Panama, bordering Colombia. 

Less than two years after the first five ships - 'Caledonia', 'St Andrew', 'Unicorn', 'Dolphin' and 'Endeavour' - had set sail from Leith, the attempt to set up a Scottish trading colony on the isthmus of Panama had ended in failure, with the loss of over 2,000 lives and around one-quarter of Scotland's available capital. 

In Scottish history the episode is almost always referred to as the Darien disaster: an impossible dream that went horribly wrong. 

It is a story of national expectation and pride, desperation and death, unfulfilled hope and achieved despair, great sacrifice and suffering, and ultimately, desperation and death. 

Rev. Francis Borland, in a narrative of his Darien experience, noted that 'Darien is pernicious, unwholesome and contagious. Thou devourest men and eatest up thy inhabitants'. 

READ MORE: Drug ballads and drams: How narcoculture made one Scotch whisky Mexico’s biggest seller

Of a total of 2,500 settlers that set off in the two expeditions, just a few hundred ever saw Scotland again. They were defeated by poor planning, feuding, inadequate provisions and natural factors such as disease and weather.

Add to that the direct and indirect interference by foreign powers, especially the Spanish, who were unwilling to accept a rival colony halfway between Panama City and Cartagena in Colombia.

Perhaps the colonists were unaware that the area chosen to establish New Caledonia - on the central coastline of the modern-day Guna Yala province -  was very close to Acla, one of the first settlements of Spain in the New World that was founded in 1515 and completely abandoned by 1532, due to the unhealthy nature of the climate and terrain.

Scotland's fateful colonial expedition was also a personal catastrophe for the chief architect of the speculative venture, Dumfries and Galloway-born trader and banker Sir William Paterson. 

The man who would go on to found the Bank of England believed that the small area of land linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was the 'door of the seas, and the key of the universe', yet he would return among the 30 survivors a widower, having witnessed his wife die in Darien.

The Herald: 'A new map of ye Isthmus of Darien in America, the Bay of Panama…''A new map of ye Isthmus of Darien in America, the Bay of Panama…' (Image: Newsquest)

From hastening the Act of Union to the formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, few events in Scottish history have had an impact that can be so readily traced to the present as that of the doomed Darien Scheme. 

Remnants of the colony

In 1979, a team of professional and amateur archeologists participating in Operation Drake, a round-the-world voyage organised by UK Charity the Scientific Exploration Society, discovered a sunken trading ship and other remains of the ill-fated colony. 

The ship, complete with all its trading goods, was found at the bottom of Caledonia Bay, where she sank in 1699 on her way to resupply the colony, while excavations on shore unearthed the fortifications of Fort St. Andrew, which the colonists built in 1698 and abandoned in 1700, after a siege by Spanish forces.

The story goes that the ship, the Olive Branch, sank after catching fire when the cooper’s candle ignited brandy fumes in the ship’s storeroom, after he had sneaked in for a secret nip in the dead of night.  

According to a New York Times article on the discovery, archaeologists also found the moat and eastern ramparts of the fort, as well as countless pieces of Scottish pottery, clay pipes, weapons, trading beads and two coins, one of which was dated 1695.

READ MORE: Scots shipwreck inaugurated as Argentinian Falklands War memorial

Over two decades later, on the 300th anniversary of the arrival of the colonists in 1998, Stewart Redwood, a geologist from Stirlingshire, visited the abandoned colony to honour the dead and found that the area was as it was then. 

"It is a beautiful, unspoiled paradise of lush green jungle, mangrove swamps, coral islands and reefs with golden beaches and turquoise sea that basks in the tropical sun and are nourished by the rain”, he said.

And while further remnants of the abandoned Scottish colony do exist in the wreck of the supply ship alongside the remains of a fortification and huts - uncovered by archaeologists who visited the area for a 2003 BBC documentary - its connection to modern-day Panama place names - over three centuries on - invites fresh intrigue. 

Panama place names

The names of the colony, settlement and fort of the Darien Scheme  - "New Caledonia", "New Edinburgh" and "Fort St Andrew" - may be long defunct, but references to the colonists remain in some of the place names of the region.

This ‘Scottish effect’ as it were is present in names such as Bahía de Caledonia (Caledonia Bay) and Cerro Calidonia (Calidonia Ridge) in the autonomous Guna Yala region on the Panamanian mainland, which is home to the indigenous Kuna people.

The Herald: The Caledonia PeninsulaThe Caledonia Peninsula (Image: Newsquest)

In 1871, the founder of the Société Civile Internationale du Canal Interocéanique de Darien, which was established in Paris to explore the prospect of a new canal in Panama or Nicaragua to create a channel connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, discovered that in the southern part of the Bahía de Caledonia there were many places that preserved the names bestowed upon them by the colonists.

The names included Punta Escocés (Scottish Point), Monte (Mount) Vernon, and Monte Patterson (after Sir William Paterson).

Despite a Panamanian name change to Puerto Inabaginya in 2011 (in honour of a Kuna hero from a village near to Panama City), the indigenous Kuna also still refer to the bay where New Caledonia was located as Puerto Escoces (Scottish Harbour). 

The area is also home to a small island village of bamboo huts a few miles offshore, called Caledonia, also known as Coedub.

Speaking to the BBC in 2014, Leonidas Pérez, from the Caledonia community, said: "The story is a bit forgotten, but it is part of the Kuna mythology. We remember it because our ancestors have told us so for years, that white men came to these lands a long time ago, looking for gold.

READ MORE: The Scottish artist whose work was collected by Andy Warhol

"We also know that there were many battles and many ships sank in that bay. Our ancestors, frightened, fled to the mountains.”

Meanwhile, in Panama City, the capital and largest city of Panama, Calidonia, a neighborhood known for its historical landmarks and museums, can also trace its name back to the doomed colony.

It is said that the area was given the name after many people native to ‘Caledonia’ - where the Scottish colony was located -  settled there when it was still a small settlement, which led it to also be christened ‘Calidonia’.

The change in spelling came via the writings of Don Francisco Silvestre y Sánchez, a Spanish representative of the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, who referred to the name of the area where the Scots settled as 'Calidonia' instead of 'Caledonia', Latinizing its name. 

Along with El Chorrillo, Granillo and Malambo, Calidonia was one of the first four neighborhoods that formed the city of Panama, and is now famous for the concentration of skyscrapers which overlook Panama Bay from the financial centre of Avenida Balboa. 

The Panama Canal

Speaking of the Darien Scheme’s mark on the ‘present’, another, quite incredible connection, exists between the ill-fated colony and the Panama Canal, the engineering marvel - built between 1904 and 1914 - that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the narrow Isthmus of Panama. 

The great-great-grandson of one of the survivors of the colony, a young cleric by the name of Alexander Stobo, was none other than former US President Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt, who served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909, convinced Colombia to accept the secession of Panama in 1903, which facilitated the construction of the Canal the following year.

Stobo, along with five other clergymen, two of whom who had set sail for Darien a year prior to him, had been instructed by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to establish a Presbytery of the Scottish Kirk in the New World and evangelize ‘the Indians of America’.

All four others died during the two expeditions to Darien, with Stobo, following the failure of the colonial effort, settling in what is today the southern United States.