I’m assuming people with the moral code of the ELT were probably pirates or slavers in those days.
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@ar Rather than Scotland’s Darien schemers, an apt comparison would be the Nabobs of the East India Company.
Magic potion hawkers.
Distributed potions and magic beans?
They would have taken a one way voyage to Botany Bay.
@c7 I don’t believe France was even mentioned by the OP nor any of the below posts. So, let’s all of is try to keep our heads on. (Excuse the pun)
From 1787 to 1789, they were being decapitated by the cartload in France.
No, just Scottish …
In 1698, Scotland raised the ultimate sovereign seed round: they poured up to half the entire country’s liquid cash into a stealth-stage Panama logistics startup promising to "disrupt global maritime trade."
Their product-market fit was an immediate disaster. They deployed into a 95% humidity swamp armed with wool suits, powdered wigs, and English Bibles to pitch to Indigenous tribes and hostile Spanish warships.
The burn rate was literal dysentery. But because 17th-century Slack had an eight-month latency, Edinburgh assumed they were crushing their KPIs, celebrated their "Series A," and shipped a v2 fleet of founders straight into a ghost town of freshly dug graves.
The cap table burned down so thoroughly that Scotland couldn't even afford Chapter 11. Their only exit strategy was a distressed acqui-hire: in 1707, they dissolved their own parliament and sold the country to England just to cover the liquidation preference.
It remains history’s only pitch deck so catastrophic the founders had to surrender national sovereignty to settle the bad debt.
Nope, politicians and local regulators/tax authorities.