Union or Not

08/27/2014 - 15h46

It is less than four weeks to go until Scotland's Independence Referendum which will take place on September 18th.

The wide differences in the public opinion polls about voting intentions are sending conflicting messages, especially about the size of the pro-union vote, which is still apparently in the lead.

The future of the 307 year old political union between Scotland and England is at stake. A very high turn out is predicted.

There is no precedent for this referendum, and public opinion polling is not necessarily a good indicator of how people will actually vote on the day.

The Scots played a considerable role in the British Empire after the Act of Union, even though it was the failure of Scottish imperial ambitions in the Americas which were a major cause of the Union in the first place.

The Crowns of England and Scotland were united when James VI, King of Scots, acceded to thrones of England and Ireland after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603.

But it was the catastrophic investment during the 1690s in a failed Scottish colonial scheme on the gulf of Darien on the isthmus of Panama which wiped out 25% of the capital of Scotland.

The colony of "Caledonia" in Darien was a complete failure, succumbing to poor planning, weak leadership, tropical diseases, as well as English and Spanish opposition.

In the aftermath the English parliament voted on the Act of Union in 1706 and the Scottish parliament, after much bribery, clandestine activity by spies and agents provocateurs, voted for its own Act of Union the following year, and subsequently voted itself out of existence. Thereafter a single "United Kingdom" was established named "Great Britain."

Ironically Brazil owns the preservation of its territorial unity in the 1820s to the audacious naval actions of a Scottish mercenary sailor and adventurer, Admiral Thomas Cochrane, later the 10th Earl of Dundonald, who after founding the Chilean navy, and future naval action in defence of Greek Independence, assured the victory of the naval forces of Dom Pedro 1st, over the Portuguese in Bahia, Maranhao and Belem.

Like many Scots, Lord Cochrane, was impecunious, liberal, audacious, very scientifically advanced, and also (or so the Brazilians thought) very greedy.

A hero of the Napoleonic Wars, he was called "le Loup des Mers" (the "sea wolf") by his French opponents.

A liberal politician he was expelled from the British Navy in 1814 as a result of conviction in a London stock exchange sandal (he was reinstated in the Royal Navy in 1832).

Made Marques of Maranhao by Don Pedro, Lord Cochrane's naval exploits formed the bases for C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels of naval adventure, as well Patrick O'Brian's stories of Jack Aubrey's naval exploits.

In no small part it is thanks to the Scottish Lord Cochrane, that although Brazil has many problems, territorial integrity is not one of them.