Scotland lost a fifth of its national wealth on a doomed Panama colony

In 1698 Scotland sank roughly a fifth of its circulating capital into founding Caledonia, a trading colony on Panama's disease-ridden Darien coast. Poor planning, tropical fever, and a Spanish siege wiped it out within two years, killing over 2,000 settlers and bankrupting the country - a collapse that helped push Scotland into union with England in 1707.

— John Prebble, The Darien Disaster: A Scots Colony in the New World, 1698-1700 — Secker & Warburg, 1968
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