I have added, in the present Edition, a few corroborative notes and concurrent passages from various sources, some of them of 150 years' date, which may serve to elucidate, and perhaps enliven the dryness of the more sober form in which I have considered it my duty to the mercantile public to cast the details of the present narrative. I have also added a brief sketch of the History of the Scotch Colony of Darien, the fate of which is to me the more interesting, as I came out, in December, 1849, upon the exact spot of its settlement, after four days' lonely wandering in the bush, and fixed upon it at once and without any hesitation, as the terminus for a Ship-Canal and a station for a colony, without any knowledge then of its previous history, save that there had been a colony somewhere on the coast of Darien, and that it had been cruelly made to fail. As I was the only European who had ever crossed by the route I have proposed, and as the terror of the Darien Indians had been, for thrce centuries, so prevalent along the whole length and breadth of Terra Firma, I found it impossible to induce any one to accompany me in my subsequent journeys in 1850 and 1851, and consequently had to contend, in England, against the enormous difficulties necessarily to be encountered in my early attempts to bring forward a project of such magnitude, supported only by my own statements, which appeared the more singular, from the extraordinary fact of this tract of country having remained totally unknown and unexplored up to the period of my first journey to Darien. Upon my return to England, in December, 1851, Sir Charles Fox, Mr. Henderson, and Mr. Brassey, upon a minute and careful examination of my Topographical Map, entered into an agreement with me, whereby they engaged to send out engineers to verify my observations (whilst I proceeded to Bogota to obtain the concession of the territory from the Government of New Granada): the result of the expedition, dispatched for the |