This chapter focuses on literary and cultural works dealing with Scotland's attempt to colonize Darien, at the Isthmus of Panama, in the 1690s. It establishes Darien as a central trope in Scottish literature by analyzing works from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including novels, poetry, drama, songs, and political treatises by William Paterson, William Burnaby, Eliot Warburton, Douglas Galbraith, David Nicol, Alistair Beaton, and anonymous female authors. It illustrates how these depictions interact with other political and ideological trajectories in Scotland and the UK, including Jacobitism, Anglo-Scottish relations, and revisionist historical writing. The chapter establishes images of Darien gold and material possession as central structuring devices of Scottish colonial literature, which stand in conflict with depictions of Scotland's alleged kindness towards the indigenous populations of Panama. The chapter argues that narratives of benevolence together with narratives of gold and material possessions turn the colonial utopian tradition into a full-fledged myth of the Scottish Atlantic by the end of the seventeenth century. The mythologization of the colonial sphere together with the mythologization of the Scottish settlers functions as an aesthetic instrument to enter the competition over power in the late-seventeenth-century Atlantic.
