It was not till the summer of 1698 that all was ready for the expedition which was to change the face of the globe.  The number of seamen and colonists who embarked at Leith was twelve hundred.  Of the colonists many were younger sons of honourable families, or officers who had been disbanded since the peace.  It was impossible to find room for all who were desirous of emigrating.  It is said that some persons who had vainly applied for a passage hid themselves in dark corners about the ships, and, when discovered, refused to depart, clung to the rigging, and were at last taken on shore by main force.  This infatuation is the more extraordinary because few of the adventurers knew to what place they were going.  All that was quite certain was that a colony was to be planted somewhere, and to be named Caledonia.  The general opinion was that the fleet would steer for some part of the coast of America.  But this opinion was not universal.  At the Dutch Embassy in Saint James’s Square there was an uneasy suspicion that the new Caledonia would be founded among those Eastern spice islands with which Amsterdam had long carried on a lucrative commerce.

The supreme direction of the expedition was entrusted to a Council of Seven.  Two Presbyterian chaplains and a preceptor were on board.  A cargo had been laid in which was afterwards the subject of much mirth to the enemies of the Company, slippers innumerable, four thousand periwigs of all kinds from plain bobs to those magnificent structures which, in that age, towered high above the foreheads and descended to the elbows of men of fashion, bales of Scotch woollen stuffs which nobody within the tropics could wear, and many hundreds of English bibles which neither Spaniard nor Indian could read.  Paterson, flushed with pride and hope, not only accompanied the expedition, but took with him his wife, a comely dame, whose heart he had won in London, where she had presided over one of the great coffeehouses in the neighbourhood of the Royal Exchange.  At length on the twenty-fifth of July the ships, followed by many tearful eyes, and commended to heaven in many vain prayers, sailed out of the estuary of the Forth.

The voyage was much longer than a voyage to the Antipodes now is; and the adventurers suffered much.  The rations were scanty; there were bitter complaints both of the bread and of the meat; and, when the little fleet, after passing round the Orkneys and Ireland, touched at Madeira, those gentlemen who had fine clothes among their baggage were glad to exchange embroidered coats and laced waistcoats for provisions and wine.  From Madeira the adventurers ran across the Atlantic, landed on an uninhabited islet lying between Porto Rico and St. Thomas, took possession of this desolate spot in the name of the Company, set up a tent, and hoisted the white cross of St. Andrew.  Soon, however, they were warned off by an officer who was sent from St. Thomas to inform them that they were trespassing