Empire of Blue Water (10 page)
Read Empire of Blue Water Online
Authors: Stephan Talty
Tags: #Caribbean Area, #Pirates, #Pirates - Caribbean Area - History - 17th century, #Mexico, #Morgan; Henry, #17th Century, #General, #Caribbean Area - History - To 1810, #Latin America, #Caribbean & West Indies, #History
Pirates had always dreamed of having their own country, unsullied by civilian interference. Madagascar would become a pirates’ haven in the late 1690s; its hidden coves, pliant local women, fresh water, and supplies of citrus fruits (essential in battling scurvy) contributed to making it a paradise, and its close proximity to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean guaranteed a steady supply of treasure. “Gone to Madagascar for lymes” was a common expression among the Brethren. Other republics would follow. Calico Jack Rackham and the legends of a later generation took over the island of New Providence (in the Bahamas) in the early 1700s and erected a tent city packed full with thousands of pirates. The island’s democratically elected officials let the pirates do what they wished: whore around, hide out in the island’s countless limestone caves, and drink themselves unconscious, to feel the first stabs of bright sunlight through their eyelids as they lay on a deserted beach after a night of carousing. It was paradise. The cliché was that pirates did not dream of going to heaven when they died, they just dreamed of going back to New Providence.
In his quest to found such a haven, Mansfield easily took the island, killing only one Spaniard. He sailed back to Jamaica to report on the consolation prize, and Modyford immediately sent out reinforcements to secure the island. But Mansfield’s small victory had set in motion a series of tit-for-tat adventures that grew exponentially in scope, until four years later the Spanish would find Henry Morgan assembling the largest pirate army ever seen in order to storm their oldest city on the continent.
Spain decided to draw a line in the sand of Providence. The viceroy of the province of Panama, Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán, called a council of war on hearing the news of the island’s capture. In a split vote, the council determined to “retake [Providence] from the pirates, the honour and interest of His Majesty of Spain being very narrowly concerned here.” Two ships sailed from Portobelo on July 7 to reclaim the island, which Mansfield had now left in the care of his lieutenants as he sailed back to Jamaica. The 517 men on board gave the Spanish a ten-to-one advantage over the fit English soldiers on Providence. After slamming one of the ships onto a reef, the Spanish commander sent a party onto the island to demand surrender, to which the English gallantly replied that they “preferred to lose their lives” than give back the land. The Spanish soldiers poured onto the island and were met with odd-sounding volleys: The English at one of the forts had gone through all their ammunition and were now cutting up the church’s organ pipes and blasting them out of cannon at the advancing troops. It was a valiant defense of a practically worthless piece of rock, but in the end the English saw that the numbers were against them and gave up.
Now one will begin to see why the hatred between Spanish and English ran so deep and why men often fought to the death in the Caribbean. There was no Geneva Convention, no articles of war, to govern what happened next. Sir Thomas Whetstone, the ne’er-do-well nephew of Oliver Cromwell and speaker of the Jamaican House of Assembly, along with the island’s new English governor and an army captain, were to be sent to Panama in chains. Under the terms of the surrender, the rest of the surviving soldiers were to be sent to Jamaica. But the Spaniards double-crossed the soldiers, and they were carried to Portobelo, where jailers packed the thirty-three men into a small dungeon and chained them to the floor.
They were forced to work in the water from five in the morning till seven at night, and at such a rate that the Spaniards confessed they made one of them do more work than three negroes, yet when weak with want of victuals and sleep, they were knocked down and beaten with cudgels, and four or five died. Having no clothes, their backs were blistered in the sun, their shoulders and hands raw with carrying stones and mortar, their feet chopped, and their legs bruised and battered with the irons.
When the news of the men’s fates reached Jamaica two years later, it would stoke the hatred even more.
There was one other result of the Old Providence episode: Mansfield had returned to Jamaica after he’d captured the island and requested more men and matériel from Modyford, to hold it as an English possession. Modyford didn’t wish to commit more forces than he already had and so turned the admiral down. A disgruntled Mansfield had set off for the corsair island of Tortuga to drum up some reinforcements, but there, in Esquemeling’s wonderful phrase, “death suddenly surprised him, and put a period to his wicked life.”
The position of admiral of the Brethren was now vacant. It would soon be filled by the young upstart Henry Morgan.
In Europe the musical chairs were changing again and the waltz’s beat quickened. Alliances were being remade at a dizzying pace. France declared war on England in January 1667, but it was a conflict contained mostly to the Continent and to the islands of the Lesser Antilles. Then, on May 23, England finally signed the Treaty of Madrid with Spain. Eleven years after Jamaica had been taken, the queen regent was still refusing to let it go: The treaty did not formalize the English takeover, in fact did not even mention it. The island was still in play; the war in the West Indies would continue. But Charles’s mind that summer was focused suddenly on the Dutch, who in June 1667 sailed up the Thames, burning ships and blasting forts as they went. It was a humiliating loss for a maritime nation, with scenes of panic along the famous river and people fleeing down roads into the country to get away from the Dutch. Charles’s extravagance had set the stage for the defeat; spending on masques and jewels left little money for the navy, and now England had paid the cost. There were whispers, of course, that the Catholics had somehow sold the country out; there were always whispers. But the old standby could not absorb the rage of the English people. Outside Westminster, Samuel Pepys heard shouts of
“A Parliament! A Parliament!”
England needed time to recover and to rebuild its navy; on July 31, 1667, the Treaty of Breda was signed between the United Provinces and England. By the end of that summer, Charles II was at peace with Denmark, France, Spain, and the Dutch.
As Europe calmed itself, Jamaica was catching fire.
6
The Art of Cruelty
I
n Port Royal, Modyford was trying with every tool in his arsenal to hold his island together. The merchants were furious that the Treaty of Madrid did not give them legal cover to sell their goods to the Spanish colonies. Spain had again given the upper hand to marauders like Morgan instead of tradesmen like themselves. The slave traders railed that there was no provision for an
asiento,
or a contract for their lucrative trade. The planters bitched that the privateers continued to suck away their disgruntled workers. And the privateers clamored for commissions. The waters off his shores teemed with wild-eyed men, Spanish navy ships, and Dutch corsairs. And London told him to keep the peace. Modyford calmed his superiors with assurances that he would, “as far as I am able, restrain [the privateers] from further acts of violence towards the Spanish, unless provoked by new insolences.” Even now Modyford was hearing rumors and mumblings of a new Spanish confidence after the recapture of Providence. Returning traders spoke about activities in Cuba: troops being mustered, a fleet being readied. Jamaica was said to be the target: Spain was finally going to take it back. Having assured London that he’d restrain the privateers, Modyford did just the opposite. He and the council issued Henry Morgan a commission for reconnaissance work, to sail to Cuba and “take prisoners of the Spanish nation, whereby you may gain information of that enemy to attack Jamaica, of which I have had frequent and strong advice.” Modyford needed solid evidence of war preparations on the Spanish side to justify any future battle plans; without them his hands were tied. Up to this point, Morgan’s official status in Jamaica was as a colonel in the Port Royal Militia, the citizen soldiers who were on call to defend the island against any attack. Modyford elevated him to “admiral” of the militia. It was at this time that Morgan was also named to the top rank of the Brethren of the Coast. He was a double admiral, of both the legal and the shadow forces that guarded this lonely outpost of English civilization.
The word went forth that Morgan was assembling a fleet, and privateers appeared out of the coves of Tortuga and the bars of Port Royal, including his old friend John Morris, the Jamaica-based privateer who had sailed with Morgan on the first expedition and about whom little is known except that he became the admiral’s right-hand man. Pirates rarely planned their missions in port. The message would be broadcast that an expedition was afoot, and a rendezvous point was arranged. The leaders informed the men how many pounds of gunpowder and bullets they needed to bring, where the ships would assemble, and on what day they should set out. Morgan chose the South Cays off Cuba, where they’d be protected from the ocean waves that could snap an anchor chain. One by one the other ships appeared over the horizon; by the deadline at the end of March 1668, there were a dozen ships and around 700 men ready to sail. These were not grand vessels: Many of them were single-masted open boats that had planks of wood laid over them to provide shelter from the sun and from water seepage into the provisions. They had no cannon or superstructure. Often they were glorified longboats designed only to get the pirates from Point A to Point B. The largest ship in the fleet, the Spanish-built
Dolphin,
belonged to Morgan’s compadre John Morris and carried eight cannon and just 60 men at capacity. Roderick was aboard the
Dolphin.
He looked thinner than he had on his arrival in Port Royal after the first raid. Like most of the Brethren, he’d blown through his share of the booty with astonishing speed and had cut back to one meal a day. Morgan’s call-up had been a godsend.
Had Morgan known what was out there waiting for him, he might have demanded bigger ships. Modyford’s informants had understated the danger. The long-awaited Armada de Barlovento, the fleet of six vessels designed to protect the Spanish Main, had finally arrived in the New World after decades of bureaucratic death matches between the Council of the Indies and the navy. “The only reason that forced Her Majesty to convene the Windward Fleet again,” wrote a Spaniard from Mexico, “was the great destruction caused by the enemy pirates. The enemy is hostile and has destroyed the commerce of the region.” The armada’s arrival instantly changed the balance of power on the open seas. These were not the usual Spanish galleons, their decks cluttered with trade goods, bales of silk dresses stuffed into spaces where guns should have gone, their crews facing the interference of lawyers and notaries. These were heavy warships bristling with cannon, manned by competent soldiers, and far superior in firepower to any pirate ship in the world. They were even commanded by an admiral, Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa, who had been given one and only one mission: “to clean the coasts of the Indies of the pirates which infest them.” Henry Morgan was not public enemy number one for the Spanish quite yet, but he was climbing toward the top of the list. And if he and his small ships ran into the armada on the open sea, he and his glorified dinghies would be quite literally blown out of the water.
As he walked his decks, Morgan would have passed among men from every corner of the Old World and the New: There were adventure-minded English youths like Roderick, French Huguenots who had fled religious persecution, English freethinkers and jail-birds, old hands from Cromwell’s New Model Army still dressed in the legendary scarlet coats, now tattered and stained; there were Portuguese adventurers, escaped slaves, mulatto sons of Spanish fathers and black mothers; indentured servants who had jumped aboard trade ships and made their way to freedom; perhaps an odd Dutchman or two. In the Old World, they would have been in a jail cell or working as disgruntled serfs. On Henry Morgan’s ship, they were one move away from being a captain or just filthy rich.
The pirates called their council. “Some were of the opinion ’twere convenient to assault the city of Havana under the obscurity of the night,” Esquemeling writes. Havana was “one of the most renowned and strongest places of all the West Indies,…defended by three castles, very great and strong.” But among the pirates were men who had been held prisoner in those castles, and they said that “nothing of consequence could be done, unless with fifteen hundred men.” Morgan had less than half that. Other city names were tossed out and debated, until a consensus formed around the city of Puerto del Príncipe. One of the buccaneers knew it and gave two things to recommend it: The town was rich and, sitting forty-five miles inland from the Cuban coast, had never been raided by pirates. Buccaneers loved fresh, untouched cities, and here was one grown prosperous on the trade in animal hides. The motion was approved, and the pirates set out for the Gulf of Ana María.
But Morgan’s illustrious career was almost deep-sixed before it even began in earnest. A Spanish prisoner who was being held by the pirates escaped from the ships and began swimming toward shore. The pirates, who didn’t think the man could understand English, had let him listen in on their council, and as soon as he reached Puerto del Príncipe, he began to tell the terrified townspeople exactly what Henry Morgan had planned for them.
This was a problem that would plague Morgan’s career and the career of many other marauders. It was nearly impossible to keep the element of surprise in an attack. If one approached a city by land, there were often settlers or Indians who would send a warning to the target settlement; if one approached by sea, fishermen and lookouts could often give the enemy at least a few days’ warning, especially as ships were dependent on a good wind to make landfall and could sit becalmed for days, in full view of their opponents. And with so much money at stake, men regularly informed on the pirates for rewards and for special treatment. The pirates themselves would brag about upcoming expeditions, especially when drunk, and the Spaniards had spies everywhere. Loose lips did sink ships, and that included pirate ships.
The Spaniards immediately began to dump their plate into the local wells and dig holes for their money. The governor, who was a former soldier and knew his defensive strategy well, ordered “all the people of the town, both freedmen and slaves” to lie in ambush for the English, and he instructed that trees be cut down and laid in the buccaneers’ path, to slow their approach; fortifications were also thrown up “and strengthened with some pieces of cannon.” Eight hundred men were rounded up; Morgan, who had landed by now, marched on the town with 650.
Morgan immediately began to show what he’d learned in the Jamaican jungles. Finding the approaches to the town impenetrable, he took his men into the woods, where progress could be made only “with great difficulty,” but which took the pirates safely past the ambushes on the trail. After a long, sweaty march, the pirates emerged onto a plain, la Savana, that lay before the city. The governor spotted the advancing ranks, now formed into a semicircle, and sent his cavalry to break them up. The pirates did not flinch: Their spirits roused by the sound of their drummers and by marching behind the flag of the Brethren, they began picking off the riders as they swept toward them. The assault was broken, and the skirmish on la Savana devolved into a classic, head-to-head, open-field battle in which marksmanship was all-important. The French muskets proved their worth: Soon the governor went down, and more and more Spaniards were dropping one after the other under the privateers’ wickedly accurate shooting. Finally, “seeing that the Pirates were very dextrous at their arms,” the Spanish relented and the men turned toward the wood line to try to escape. Morgan and his men did not let them get far; “the greatest part of them” died as they retreated. The battle had taken four hours. The Spaniards lost most of their men, the pirates only a few.
Within an hour Morgan was on the outskirts of the city, where the pirates found the people holed up in their houses, taking pot-shots at them. This was too much for Morgan; he’d won the city fair and square. He sent the following message to the town’s men:
If you surrender not voluntarily, you shall soon see the town in a flame, and your wives and children torn in pieces before your faces.
The Spanish relented, and Morgan had all the prisoners locked up in several of the city’s churches. After pillaging the empty homes, Morgan then sent his men out into the countryside, “bringing in day by day many goods and prisoners.” There was wine, too, and the privateers guzzled it like water.
The admiral then turned to an old pirate standby: ransom. Four prisoners were sent into the adjacent woods to find the people who had fled and demand money for the imprisoned families. The four returned a few days later to tell Morgan they’d been unable to find anyone and asked that he give them fifteen days to complete the job. Morgan agreed. A few hours after the four messengers had left, some of the privateers returned from pillaging and reported they’d taken substantial booty and also captured a Negro who was in possession of letters. When Morgan read them, his eyes must have narrowed with fury. The missives were from the governor of Santiago, capital of the adjoining province. In them he told the prisoners to delay paying any ransom and to “put off the Pirates as well as they could with excuses and delays; expecting to be relieved by him within a short while, when he’d certainly come to their aid.” Morgan had been double-crossed. As the men had swilled the local wines and fell over themselves collecting booty, an army was being organized to defeat them.
Morgan began barking out orders. He told his men to load the ships with all the treasure and demanded that the Spanish slaughter and salt five hundred head of cattle for his men, which they did along with the buccaneers in great haste. Finally the beef was loaded—after an unfortunate incident in which an English privateer stole the marrow bones from a cow being slaughtered by a Frenchman. As they walked to a dueling spot, the Englishman “drew his sword treacherously” and fatally wounded the other man in the back. The French were ready for war right there on the beach, but Morgan had the man arrested and promised his Gallic allies justice once they returned to Port Royal. The French grumbled but agreed.
The Spanish were impressed by the raid. The governor of the province that included Puerto del Príncipe wrote to the queen regent to express his shock and outrage at what the privateers had done. He reported that he’d charged his sergeant major and another officer with misconduct, because the rugged country and long distances should have enabled a much smaller force to destroy the buccaneer army. The privateers were less thrilled. They sailed off to the South Cays and counted up their booty, which came to a disappointing 50,000 pieces of eight (or $2.5 million in today’s dollars). It sounds like a windfall, but when deductions were made for the king’s share, for Morgan’s and the captains’ and the surgeon’s and carpenter’s take, for injuries, and with the remainder being split among 650 men, the seaman’s share was hardly a small fortune. And besides, Port Royal, where many of them made their homes, was one of the most expensive cities on earth in which to live, as nearly everything except rum and food had to be imported from Europe. “The sum being known,” reports Esquemeling, “it caused a general resentment and grief, to see such a small booty; which was not sufficient to pay their debts at Jamaica.” Roderick was among the complainers. His share would barely pay his back rent, let alone allow him the bacchanal he’d been dreaming of for weeks. From a callow youth, Roderick had grown into a shrewd, toughened buccaneer, with hardly an ounce of fat on him. For the first time, he looked at his leader with a cold eye.
