The disaster at Darien also signaled to English colonial plantation owners the danger of using Scots as indentured servants. There was no purpose and, more importantly, no profit in hiring a Scottish workforce if four of every five died within six months. Darien had made it all too clear that Scots, and other Europeans, died too fast of mosquito-borne disease to be of any use. “Individual Britons and their families continued to make their way to the Americas,” recaps Mann, “but businesspeople increasingly resisted sending over large groups of Europeans. Instead they looked for alternative
...more