Bank of England God

The cult of the Bank of England's deified founder still flourishes among the Indians of the Isthmus of Panama, the Smithsonian Institution reported last week. The Choco Indians of Colombia have recently adopted the cult.

For many years the Smithsonian has been acquiring curious canes used as wands of authority by Indian medicine men in Panama and northern South America. On the heads of the canes, some of them generations old, are carved statuets of their god of medicine. He is a man who closely resembles the U. S. caricature of Bluenose the Prohibitor. He has a long nose, a high hat and European dress. Some carvings are crude, some masterpieces of wood carving. Herbert W. Krieger, National Museum curator of ethnology, noted that all obviously were intended to portray the same individual, a white man.

What white man could have impressed those worshipful Indians enough to earn their deification? Dr. Walter Hough, the Museum's head curator of anthropology, decided that the god was redoubtable William Paterson.

William Paterson (1658-1719) was a Scotsman who early removed to the Bahamas. In the Bahamas he preached to the planters' servants, learned from pirates the lore of the Spanish Main, conceived a scheme. The southern reaches of the Isthmus of Panama were known as Darien. From a peak in Darien Balboa first saw the Pacific. Soon the Spaniards were transporting their Inca loot across the Isthmus.

William Paterson returned to England, tried in vain to interest the merchants of James II's reign in a company to establish a colony on Darien. Hamburg, Amsterdam and Berlin also rejected him. While trying to find backers, he organized the Bank of England (1694), soon fought with fellow directors, resigned, went to Scotland.

In Scotland he organized the "Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies." In 1698, "amidst the tears and prayers of relatives and friends and countrymen," he, his wife and child accompanied 1,200 colonists to Darien. They settled between Porto Bello and Cartagena, two strong Spanish ports, there intended to build a canal and establish a free trade route "whereby to Britain would be secured the key to the universe, enabling their possessors to give laws to both oceans and to become the arbiters of a commercial world." The Spanish soon drove the colony out. Paterson's family died. He returned to England, helped cement the frail union between Scotland and England, argued incessantly for international free trade, against cheap money.

Along the Panama coast he left his impress. There still is a Caledonia Bay and a Puerto Escoces. The San Blas Indians occasionally breed a blond child. When the San Blas and Choco medicine men want to carve a really imposing fetish on a medicine cane, they give long-nosed William Paterson a waistcoat, shirt, necktie, collar, buttons, striped trousers, paint his coat black or green.

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