Empire of Blue Water (21 page)

Every move that the European powers made in the West Indies was blurred by time lags. Councils and kings would receive the news of events that had occurred months ago; they in turn often procrastinated and debated for months and then sent a slow ship with their new responses to last year’s incidents. By the time their letters reached Caribbean ports, they were outdated by fresh developments, lapped by time. Such was the case now. While England and Jamaica believed themselves to be settling into a long, if troubled, peace, Spain was pounding the drums of war. Before Modyford called in the privateers, the furious queen regent, believing that the English would do nothing to discipline their private warriors, had sent her missives to the governors of the New World, ordering them to “execute all the hostilities which are permitted by war, by taking possession of ships, islands, places and ports.” She also authorized commissions for Spanish privateers. The orders arrived in Cartagena in late October 1670. Modyford had withdrawn the privateers’ commissions in June, unaware that Spain had begun a war on Jamaica. Spain still considered the English there to be outlaws and trespassers, and no formal declaration of war was therefore necessary.

But back in Jamaica life was sweet. The admiral of the Brethren was sinking back into the life of a gentleman corsair. At just thirty-five, Morgan had a reputation that was secure, his name “now…famous through all those islands.” He was rich and need not ever go out buccaneering again, if he chose not to. For his services to the Crown, the king had granted him in 1669 a large estate in the Jamaican parish of Clarendon: 836 acres, “bounding northwest and north on Waste Hilly Woodland & Easterly and Southerly on the river Minoe.” The English were pushing farther and farther into the primeval interior, but there was still plenty of land for men who “singed the beard” of the Spanish king: In those days estates were cleared to the distance of a musket shot. For this generous gift, the king asked only one thing: loyalty. “The said Henry Morgan his heirs and assigns,” the grant read, “shall upon any Insurrection mutiny or foreign invasion which may happen in my said Island of Jamaica during his or their residence there be ready to serve us.” It was a formality: Morgan considered himself a patriot, and any attack on Jamaica would be an attack on his home. All he lacked was a son to pass the land down to: his wife, Elizabeth, had not been able to bear him a child. It was the only blemish on Morgan’s charmed life. But Elizabeth had two brothers and two sisters, and their marriages produced the children whom Morgan so fervently wished for himself. With Elizabeth the eldest of the daughters and Henry as one of the most famous men in the West Indies, they became the leaders of the Morgan family in Jamaica. The admiral grew especially close to his nephew Thomas, whom he’d name as one of the trustees of his will. He spent his days as his fellow planters did: riding over his plantation and watching over his crops, discussing with his neighbors over punch in the evenings the latest prices for sugar, the rumors of slave insurrections, and the intentions of the Spanish. It was a peaceful, luxurious life, and although Morgan had for years been a legendary drinker, none of his enemies ever accused him of cheating on Elizabeth. It seems to have been a happy marriage. He was founding his line, just as he’d hoped to when he sailed for the islands. The fact that his life aims now diverged so drastically from men like Roderick’s was the sign of a larger break that would soon turn ominous.

Slowly, in the early weeks and months of 1670, cracks began to appear in the peace with Spain, cracks that threatened to end Morgan’s idyll. It began with a gesture from Modyford: He released a number of Spanish prisoners who had been sitting in Port Royal’s jail and he sent them to Cuba with a letter to the governor there “signyfying peace between the two nations.” It was all in the spirit of the new relationship between the English and Spanish colonies; the deeply skeptical Modyford was at last extending the hand of friendship. The ex-prisoners and the neighborly note were sent in the
Mary and Jane,
commanded by a popular and veteran Dutch buccaneer named Bernard Claesen Speirdyke—Captain Bart to his mates. The ship was received cautiously, with the Spanish conducting no fewer than three searches of it before letting down their guard. All was found in order, the letter was delivered, the prisoners walked off the boat to freedom, and Captain Bart began pulling up some articles straight from London and Paris he happened to have in the ship’s hold. If privateering was doomed, trade would have to take its place, and Captain Bart opened the action with gusto. The bartering was intense, and everything sold. Captain Bart sailed off toward Jamaica as the harbinger of a new status quo.

As he was passing out of the port of Bayamo, a ship appeared with the English colors flapping on her topsail. Captain Bart changed course and sent two men in a dinghy to exchange the latest gossip. But as soon as the men were aboard, the ship began acting strangely, veering toward the
Mary and Jane.
The customary call came floating across the water: “Where are you bound from?” Captain Bart replied, “Jamaica.” The answer was unexpected. “Defend yourself, dog!” cried the ship’s captain. “I come as a punishment for heretics!” To Captain Bart’s shock and dismay, this was followed by a barrage of cannon fire. The English colors were a ruse: The ship was
San Pedro y la Fama,
commanded by one Manuel Rivero Pardal, a Portuguese corsair who had decided to take up the queen of Spain on her call for avengers.

If it hadn’t been for this hero (to the Spanish), this mad fool (to the English), Morgan’s story might have been very different. Rivero’s ardor was the spark that would light a hundred fires on the Spanish Main and draw the Brethren into their greatest confrontation with their archnemesis. As Morgan perfectly represents the English personality of the era—with his wit, his enterprise, his ruthlessness, and his consuming desire for landed riches—so Rivero is the inheritor of everything Spain had been for a century or more. But he’d arrived too late: The Spanish were in retreat from the pirates, and the empire was under siege. This flamboyant and outrageously egotistical man wished to revive the nation’s fighting spirit; what better way than to kill the English dogs who made his countrymen fly madly into the woods every time they appeared?

The attack on the
Mary and Jane
was his first strike in what Rivero hoped would be a rising of Spain to its former glory in the West Indies. To commemorate his taking up the standard, he’d written a poem; and he is such a key character in the final chapter of Morgan’s exploits—and such an odd, manic figure—that it is worth quoting it. Appropriately enough, Rivero begins by invoking the pagan muse of tragedy:

Sacred Melpomene, I beseech thee

Who in lugubrious moments grant fate.

I invoke you reverently,

You, in your castalian choir,

One of the nine deities,

So that graciously you may assist me

In the endeavor that I intend.

Diligently I search

Ad honorem, so that I attain

Happy victories.

Rivero was no poet, but he did have the gift of self-promotion. In the poem he tells Melpomene of his recent exploits, attacking the island of Grand Cayman, where “with my great valor I opened fire and destroyed everything around.” (In fact, he’d burned some fishermen’s huts and taken four children hostage, an adventure that he believed would make “all the villains…tremble / Just upon hearing my name.”) The captain resupplied at Trinidad, sailed to Cuba in search of more adventure, and there heard about a “thief” lurking in Spanish waters: Captain Bart. What happened next shattered the peace between England and Spain in the West Indies.

The two ships wheeled for position and began a duel at sea. The
Mary and Jane
was outgunned, six cannon to Rivero’s fourteen, and sixteen men to the Spaniard’s ninety-six. Captain Bart put up a spirited fight, surviving a night of broadsides and killing three of Rivero’s men. They were apparently the first casualties under his command, and he wrote about it in an unusual way. “Though it was God’s will,” he wrote, “I felt it deeply.” The deaths fueled his anger, and anger fueled his vanity:

I swear that with my arm and strength,

I will capture these villains and that

I will have them all at my feet.

The next morning the battle resumed. After four hours Bart was dead (Rivero, typically, claimed to have killed him personally), along with four of his men; the ship was burning, and surrender was inevitable; the English gave in. Rivero was grieved to find out they had only lost five men, but still he strutted like a peacock and announced to the Jamaicans that he had a commission from the queen regent good for five years throughout the whole of the West Indies. He also mentioned that it was a direct result of the attack on Portobelo. The ripples from Morgan’s raid were now traveling back across the Atlantic and roiling the North Sea.

Nine of the captives were allowed to return to Port Royal. Rivero apparently wanted fame more than he did ransom for the seamen. Now it was the Spaniards’ turn to welcome a conquering hero into one of their harbors: When Rivero sailed into Cartagena on March 24 with the
Mary and Jane
as booty, he was hailed as a savior. The town threw a riotous party in his name, and the governor granted him the privilege of hoisting the royal standard on his mainmast. The Spanish had for one of the few times in their recent history deviated from their military strategy and stolen a page from the English playbook. Rivero’s success seemed to point a new way for defeating the infidels at their own game. Others joined the cause. “This great event has encouraged other inhabitants,” wrote the governor of Cartagena, “who are preparing two other vessels with which we will punish the boldness and the damages inflicted by these Pirates.”

For the Portuguese captain, it was nothing less than what he expected: The tragic muse, the mother of the sirens who call sailors to their deaths, had answered his call. Fired by his victory, toward the end of his poem he vowed to protect the empire against an unnamed villain who we must assume is Henry Morgan:

I am the defender against this monster

I have been confirmed Captain of these coasts.

By Saint Peter, I was the first.

My name alone is enough

To make the sea

And all these barbarians

Tremble.

Modyford was stunned. The loss of the
Mary and Jane
was insignificant in itself: The Spanish were constantly attacking Jamaican vessels and stealing their men away. But the news of a five-year letter of reprisal was worrying; the Spanish would never grant just one. It had to signal a wholesale change in policy. Rivero was only the spear point of a new offensive. Indeed, the Council of War of the Indies in Madrid had declared on April 9, 1669, that Jamaica must be retaken, “since it is the source of all the problems.” The councilors had decided that the objective was so important that it was worth putting at risk the “main cities of the Windward Islands and Mexico” and even leaving the coast of Spain unprotected. Modyford knew none of this, but he could sense that something was afoot. He consulted with Morgan, and they decided that they’d have to find physical evidence of this new policy to send back to England. That would checkmate any attempt Arlington would make to explain the attack as an understandable retaliation. They didn’t have to wait long. Two vessels out of Port Royal were headed for Campeche on a logwood run; their crew, just as Modyford had predicted, was peppered with former buccaneers who had turned to this honest trade when commissions were rescinded. As they cruised off the Yucatán Peninsula, they came under attack from the
San Nicolás de Tolentino,
a Spanish ship apparently in league with Rivero. To the Spaniards the much smaller boats seemed like easy prey, but the ex-Brethren reverted to their old form and soon overwhelmed the enemy crew. On board they found the smoking gun, the queen regent’s letter authorizing commissions against Jamaica. When the logwood boats returned to Port Royal and the document was handed to Modyford, he learned that Spain had been at war with him for almost a year. Without informing Arlington or the English throne, the queen had instructed her ministers “to execute all hostilities which are permitted in war, by taking possession of all the ships, islands, places and ports” of the English infidel. It was not just a letter of reprisal against the pirates; it was a directive to retake Jamaica.