.WILLIAM THE THIRD. 273

men, the remains of the colony which was to have been thegarden, the warehouse, the mart, of the whole world,their bones peeping through their skin, and hunger andfever written in their faces, had arrived in the Hudson.

The grief, the dismay and the rage of those who had afew hours before fancied themselves masters of all thewealth of both Indies may easily be imagined. The Direc-tors, in their fury, lost all self command, and, in theirofficial letters, railed at the betrayers of Scotland, thewhite-livered deserters. The truth is that those who usedthese hard words were far more deserving of blame than thewretches whom they had sent to destruction, and whomthey now reviled for not staying to be utterly destroyed.Nothing had happened but what might easily have beenforeseen. The Company had, in childish reliance on theword of an enthusiastic projector, and in defiance of factsknown to every educated man in Europe, taken it forgranted that emigrants born and bred within ten degreesof the Arctic Circle would enjoy excellent health within tendegrees of the Equator. Nay, statesmen and scholars hadbeen deluded into the belief that a country which, as theymight have read in books so common as those of Hakluytand Purclias, was noted even among tropical countries forits insalubrity, and had been abandoned by the Spaniardssolely on account of its insalubrity, was a Montpelier. Norhad any of Paterson’s dupes considered how colonists fromFife or Lothian, who had never in then- lives known whatit was to feel the heat of a distressing midsummer day,Macaulay, History. IX. 18

CHAP.

XXIV.

Id!)!!.