For many years no progress was made with the idea of an isthmian canal. War between England and Spain was the natural order of things in these Central American regions. In 1655 the English seized Jamaica, and soon afterwards established themselves on the coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. The old city of Panama, of which only a picturesque church-tower remains to-day, had been founded by a Spanish governor named Pedrarias in 1519. In 1671 the city was destroyed by that wicked Welsh buccaneer, Sir Henry Morgan. The town was rebuilt two years later by Alonzo Mercado de Villacorta, five miles west of the old site. The project of a canal across the isthmus was never allowed entirely to disappear. In 1694 a very determined attempt was made to plant a British colony on the isthmus at Darien, a little east of the Panama route. The pioneer was William Paterson, a Scotsman, who founded "the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies." Sir Walter Scott, in his "Tales of a Grandfather," thus describes the project:-- The produce of China, Japan, the Spice Islands, and Eastern India, brought to the Bay of Panama, were to be transferred across the isthmus to the new settlement, and exchanged for the commodities of Europe. In Paterson's enthusiastic words, "This door of the seas and key of the universe will enable its possessors to become the legislators of both worlds and the arbitrators of commerce. The settlers at Darien will acquire a nobler empire than Alexander or Caesar, without fatigue, expense, or danger, as well as without incurring the guilt and bloodshed of conquerors."