On this day in 1698 the Scottish expedition to Darien landed at 'New Caledonia'.

The expedition left Leith on the 12th July 1698, heading for the isthmus of Panama. The enterprise began in 1695 when the Scottish Parliament passed an Act for the establishment of the 'Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies'. The Company was modelled on the English East India Company, and £400,000 capital was rapidly raised for the venture, a considerable proportion of Scotland's entire wealth. Darien was chosen because of the ease of access to the Americas. The expedition was doomed: malaria was rife on the tropical coast, and the Scots were short of supplies, having no success trading with the Spanish who saw them as a threat. English colonies in the area also refused to help, and hostilities broke out with the Spanish. The badly organised enterprise deteriorated rapidly and ended in disastrous failure with the loss of over 2,000 lives. They abandoned Darien on 12 April 1700, and none of the ships returned to Scotland.

Today in 2002 Lonnie Donegan, the legendary Scottish star of skiffle, died. Arguably Britain's first pop superstar, he burst onto the scene in the mid-1950s with a distinctive guitar-led sound based loosely on American folk music. Paul McCartney said of him: "When we were kids in Liverpool, the man who really started the craze for guitars was Lonnie Donegan. He was the first person we had heard of from Britain to get to the coveted number one in the charts and we studied his records avidly. We all bought guitars to be in a skiffle group. He was the man".

Today's recipe: why roast chestnuts on an open fire when they could be added to this chocolate pudding?