CHAPTER III 

 NEW life; in a new land 



"It was a bright warm day in July, 1698," says 

 a Scotch writer, "that the shores and pier of Leith 

 were thronged with dense crowds of people, whose 

 cheers rose loud and jubilant as a tiny fleet of three 

 vessels, with a crew of 1,200 picked men, hoisted 

 sail to cross the Atlantic. This was the first of the 

 expeditions that went forth to Darien as to an El 

 Dorado." 



This, the ill-fated dream of William Paterson to 

 improve the conditions of the Scottish people by 

 colonizing the Isthmus of Darien, was the beginning 

 of a great stream of emigrants who were through 

 so many years to seek in the new world their El 

 Dorado. It was nearly a hundred years after that 

 first departure from the pier at Leith, that the ship 

 Sivift hoisted its sail at Belfast Loch, with three 

 hundred and fifty passengers huddled in together 

 "with scarce a foot for each." Among these emi- 

 grants was Alexander Wilson. He had lived, we 

 are told, four months at the expense of only a shill- 

 ing a week in order to make this possible. By foot 

 he went with his nephew, William Duncan, to Port 

 Patrick, whence he sailed to Belfast, Ireland, where 

 he embarked. Disappointed in his dreams of love 

 and poetry, suspected politically, out of heart with 

 everything about him, the way of betterment which 

 William Paterson had pointed out nearly a hundred 

 summers before seemed to him not a bad one, and 



