“Is that when you left your parrot?” Helen asked him.
He nodded. “I’ll warrant now in New York there’s a parrot from the Darien coast that wonders what it’s doing there, but I could find no one to send it on to my cousin in Scotland, and I was too rushed to return it with me to the colony, so it remained with my friends,” he said, “on Staten Island.”
We talked less of the time we’d spent in Caledonia. Most of it had been unpleasant. We’d arrived to find our fort burnt by the Spanish, and a very short while later our ship had been joined by the fleet of the second expedition, and turmoil began. The arguing among the councilors. The people who had wished to stay, and those who’d wished to leave. Those who had wished to build again, and those who’d wished to turn their backs on the attempt. And then, of course, there had been Captain Drummond.
I confess that when I’d heard his name first in New York, I’d thought it could not be the same man I was thinking of, for surely the directors of the company would never make a councilor of the man who’d been a leader of the massacre at Glencoe—who in the dark times following our revolution had not only repaid the MacDonalds’ hospitality by slaughtering their women, men, and children, but who, so it was said, had personally killed two lads who’d begged for mercy, when another captain hesitated.
Drummond was an able soldier, but he was not liked nor trusted by the men of the new council. He urged them to take action. They did, having him imprisoned under guard.
Turnbull, as his lieutenant, was imprisoned, too. A man who protested was hanged, and through it all I’d thought of nothing so much as that evening at Wood Creek when I had sat with Jacob Wilde beneath the pines and watched the war council, when other men were in such disagreement.
Wilde had told me then, “You cannot take the measure of a man when things are working well. It’s only when the plan goes badly wrong and everything is broken that you’ll see what he is made of—if he breaks, too, or builds something from the pieces that remain.”
Turnbull had not broken.
And in time another ship had brought to us another leader who had built what he could from the wreckage, taken charge, released the men who were imprisoned, and led a defending force against the fort the Spanish had just built nearby at Toubacanti.
Turnbull talked of that. He did allow that Toubacanti had been a brave fight. Even though the shot he’d taken to his shoulder had come from an ambush, Turnbull argued that no men on either side could be called cowards. “The Spaniards stood firing until our own men could reach out and grip the muzzle of their guns, but at last we had the better of them and we gained possession of their fort. That was a good day,” he told Helen.
It had not lasted. Only a month later, we’d been once again preparing to withdraw from Caledonia, and this time there would be no return.
Turnbull still believed it could have been successful. “Caledonia was a place that would have well provided for us, if we’d been supplied with bread, for there was always new fruit growing ripe each month. And all around, the woods were stocked with deer, and goats, and rabbits, and so many different types of fowl that I could not begin to list them. We were taking turtle with our own boats from the bay. And fish. The bread was all we wanted.”
Helen said, in her opinion, we had been in want of better councilors.
He smiled. “True. If I had to do it over, I’d choose only people who were loyal to the king, but as it was we had the Highlanders and Jacobites and everyone all mixed among us, and so we were bound to fail.”
See, this is the problem with our colonies. We brought these disagreements from our old land to our new one. Jacob Wilde had told me that as well, and he was right.
I felt sure that the Highlanders, so many of whom had sought to escape the overbearing Kirk by going to the colony to make a new start there, would have been happier without the disapproval of the ministers the company had sent—all Presbyterians—and without a murderer of Glencoe being sent into their midst.
That we carried our divisions where we went and let them weaken us was certainly a failing, but it was not the only thing that made us fail.
Some blame the toll of sickness and starvation and the unrelenting rains. It’s true I caught my tertian fever there, and many died, but I was only there a short while, and I’ve heard accounts from others, who were there at other seasons, of the fineness of the weather, so I cannot judge.
There was sickness here in Scotland in that same year, bitter weather, and starvation, and our people did survive.