During the 1690s Scotland embarked on an ambitious programme to create a colony at Darien in Panama. The English government, advised by John Locke in his role as a member of the Board of Trade and Plantations, resolutely resisted the Scottish ambition, not least because the alliance with Spain during the Nine Years War was paramount. In the contest over Darien much depended upon claims and counter-claims about the status of the native Kuna people, their dependence or independence on the Spanish Empire, and their right to treat with European settlers. Buccaneer travel reports offered an anthropology of the Kuna, which the English and Scots deployed in rival positions concerning jurisdiction and entitlement. The Darien venture ended in disaster, which Scots patriots attributed to English ministerial malfeasance. The impact of failure reverberated through Anglo-Scottish politics in the years leading to the Treaty of Union of 1707. Scottish patriots mobilized Lockean rights of resistance against English oppression, thus deploying the Two Treatises of Government in ways unanticipated by its author.