Six Indiamen for the Company of Scotland: An unwise investment

The Company of Scotland was set up to be Scotland's answer to the East India Company, but its hopes foundered with a failed attempt to colonize Darien in Panama. That change in destination has been given little consideration in the historiography but, having built a fleet of East Indiamen, the Company was left with ships that were, at best, suboptimal for the chosen voyage and, at worst, detrimental to its success. Ships have previously been treated by the Company's historians as interchangeable, but this was not the case as the ships were considerably larger and more specialized than credited, and thus less flexible. This adds to Douglas Watt's thesis that the Company's errors were largely to blame for its failure. The cost of this misallocation of resources damaged the Company's prospects after the Darien debacle, with both economic and political consequences.