The foreign commerce of the viceroyalty had diminished until only one small fleet came each year to Cartagena and Porto Bello, and though, during the latter part of the colonial period, certain viceroys did something to open up roads by which wheat, sugar, cacao, and hides could be exported at a profit, no measures could prove effective while the enormous fiscal exactions of the Spanish government continued. During the last few years of the eighteenth century, commerce was made nominally free, but this meant simply that the old prohibitions on private shipments by sea were abolished, and the ports opened for trade with Spain and the other colonies. These wise measures were, however, accompanied by such an increase in taxes that their effect was nugatory. Meanwhile New Granada had also had her external troubles. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake reached Cartagena and forty years after the Spanish government fortified the place at great expense. Nevertheless Ducasse took it in 1695 though Admiral Vernon, with a great fleet and army, unsuccessfully besieged the place in 1741, after having captured Porto Bello. The unsettled Central American coast north from the Isthmus was nominally a part of the vice-royalty, but had been completely neglected by the Bogota authorities, and in 1698 a colony of twelve thousand Scotchmen, with authority from Parliament and backed by a vast popular subscription, landed on the north shore of the Isthmus. They purposed the establishment of a general emporium for all nations on the spot which the great financier, William Paterson, who originated the scheme, regarded as "the key of the commerce of the world." There was to be free-trade; the Indians were to be protected; religious liberty was to be established; and the Spanish monopoly of South and Central America destroyed. The far-sighted Paterson hoped to found a colonial empire and to enrich his own country by the resulting trade. But the enterprise was wrecked by the fatal climate and the supineness of the British Government. Provisions fell short, and within a year the survivors re-embarked in a miserable plight. Two small supplementary expeditions arrived in 1699 to find assembled a Spanish fleet and army against which no serious resistance could be made. After a little half-hearted fighting the Scotchmen capitulated and the colony was definitely abandoned. The Bogota government continued to neglect that coast. It was placed under the jurisdiction of the captain-general of Cuba, and the claim that Colombia set up after she became an independent nation has never held good against the Central American republics. CHAPTER III THE WAR AGAINST SPAIN