A Darien Dream[/font]
Panama, Central America, 1699[/font]
The sun was only just beginning to rise over the calm Carribean as the young man washed and dressed, breakfasted and then gathered his clubs and balls and left the house. Wandering through the dusty streets and simple timber buildings that were New Edinburgh, he passed Fort St Andrew and headed for the shore, where, over the last few months, he had been laying out a few rudimentary golf holes along the beach and in the jungle clearings in tribute to his distant home - and to his enduring passion - golf.[/font]
Life in Darien was incredibly hard and many of the other settlers were openly hostile to his blatant, very ‘un-Presbyterian’ behaviour, but he was entirely unperturbed by their attitude and was determined to try to maintain at least some of the lifestyle he had enjoyed back home in Scotland. He hadn’t carried these expensive clubs and featheries this far for nothing![/font]
The climate and landscape of Panama were so far removed from his cold, rainy homeland that it had been hard for him to remember exactly what golf holes should look like, but his memories of St Andrews pushed him on and, luckily, he had found some natural land features which reminded him of home and which were easily included in his New Caledonia Links...[/font]