sailed for the Isthmus of Panama as
captains in the band of adventurers embarked in the disastrous
enterprise known as the Darien Scheme. William Vetch died at sea, and
Samuel repaired to New York, where he married a daughter of Robert
Livingston, one of the chief men of the colony, and engaged largely in
the Canadian trade. From New York he went to Boston, where we find him
when the War of the Spanish Succession began. During his several visits
to Canada he had carefully studied the St. Lawrence and its shores, and
boasted that he knew them better than the Canadians themselves.[123] He
was impetuous, sanguine, energetic, and headstrong, astute withal, and
full of ambition. A more vigorous agent for the execution of the
proposed plan of conquest could not have been desired. The General Court
of Massachusetts, contrary to its instinct and its past practice,
resolved, in view of the greatness of the stake, to ask this time for
help from the mother-country, and Vetch sailed for England, bearing an
address to the Queen, begging for an armament to aid in the reduction of
Canada and Acadia. The scheme waxed broader yet in the ardent brain of
the agent; he proposed to add Newfoundland to the other conquests, and
when all was done in the North, to sail to the Gulf of Mexico and wrest
Pensacola from the Spaniards; by which means, he writes, "Her Majesty
shall be sole empress of the vast North American continent." The idea
was less visionary than it seems. Energy, helped by reasonable good
luck, might easily have made it a reality, so far as concerned the
possessions of France.

The court granted all that Vetch asked. On the eleventh of March he
sailed for America, fully empowered to carry his plans into execution,
and with the assurance that when Canada was conquered, he should be its
governor. A squadron bearing five regiments of regular troops was
promised. The colonies were to muster their forces in all haste. New
York was directed to furnish eight hundred men; New Jersey, two hundred;
Pennsylvania, one hundred and fifty; and Connecticut, three hundred and
fifty,--the whole to be at Albany by the middle of May, and to advance
on Montreal by way of Wood Creek and Lake Champlain, as soon as they
should hear that the squadron had reached Boston. Massachusetts, New
Hampshire, and Rhode Island were to furnish twelve hundred men, to join
the regulars in attacking Quebec by way of the St. Lawrence.[124]

Vetch sailed from Portsmout