William Paterson

And it needed some source of income.

And so a man called William Paterson came up with the brilliant idea of founding a trading colony in Panama, in the jungles of Darien.

James

was a protege of Sir Robert Sybald, geographer royal, founder of the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens and physician to the king.

The length and detail of this list suggests my ancestor must have been a very patient man.

Was he a real person?

William Paterson was very much a real person.

He was one of the founders of the Bank of England and he subsequently went on to found the Bank of Scotland.

So I think, yeah, we're very familiar with this idea of the city and the crown having an essentially transactional relationship.

So the way that was solved in the 1790s, which is the origin of the so-called financial revolution, was that a banker, a Scottish banker called William Paterson, came up with the idea that the state would borrow from a bank which would be formed.

A new bank would be founded, which he proposed to call the Bank of England, with the government to pay interest on the loan from future tax revenue.

This idea was put into practice in 1694 when an advertisement went out in the London Gazette, the official government newspaper, to announce that some people would meet in Mercer's Hall in Cheapside and they'd receive subscriptions for the Bank of England.

The Spaniards claimed for themselves the whole coast of Central America.

It had occurred some years before to a visionary Scotchman named William Paterson, who had not always shown the qualities of a visionary, for he was the founder of the Bank of England, to lead a settlement in Darien on the Isthmus of Panama.

He represented in glowing terms to his countrymen the splendor of the country where nature produced her fruits little assisted by the labor of man and the almost certain wealth which were to accrue to Scotland.

Patterson predicted that the whole trade with India would be diverted from its existing channels and pass across the Isthmus of Panama.

And really, the country was on its knees.

And a guy called William Paterson, who was one of the people who founded the Bank of England, heard at a conference of pirates that there was this place that was basically awash with gold and riches and could make Scotland a rich trading country.

And so he basically put together a bunch of people to go

colonise this.

For these ends capital was withdrawn from the new and unsuccessful manufacturing companies.

The great scheme was the idea of William Paterson, born 1658, the far-travelled and financially speculative son of a farmer in Dumfrieshire.

He was the projector, or one of the projectors, of the Bank of England of 1694, investing £2,000.

He kept the Darien part of his scheme for an East India Company in the background, and it seems that William, when he granted a patent to that company, knew nothing of this design to settle in or near the Panama Isthmus, which was quite clearly within the Spanish sphere of influence.