9
After a few weeks in port, most of the pirates had exhausted their credit in the taverns and with the street-walkers. Roderick, now sporting a beard, a new gold earring, and a scar of unknown origin across his cheek, was nearly broke. He’d been forced to sell his pistols to pay off his debts and had slept rough on the beach for a few nights. He and other buccaneers came to Morgan, practically demanding another mission. There was a certain logic to the careers of pirate captains: Their expeditions tended to become progressively more ambitious after each success. Like any businessman, a privateer needed richer and richer targets to sustain the momentum of his own growing reputation. And there was something in the pirate code that disdained conservative business plans. Morgan now had in mind an even more dangerous target: Cartagena. It was the biggest port in Spain’s vast empire; here was collected the treasure from all of Peru. If in modern-day terms Portobelo was Fort Knox, Cartagena was New York, the center of trade and culture. But it was also a fortress. After Drake and his English and French peers had ransacked the city in the late 1500s, the Spanish Crown had begun a massive building program that studded the lagoons that led to the city with castles and forts, which were now manned by 400 soldiers and fifty cannon. The story was told that one of the kings of Spain looked out his westward-facing window one day and remarked that he expected to see the battlements of Cartagena visible across the ocean, as he’d spent so many fortunes building them.
It was an audacious target for Morgan. If he took Cartagena, Morgan would prove he was the strongest force in the New World, bar none. And become filthy rich in the process.
Like L’Ollonais in the wake of his great raids, Morgan and his captains had little trouble raising men. “There flocked to them great numbers of other pirates,” writes Esquemeling, “both French and English, by reason of the name of Captain Morgan was now rendered famous in all the neighbouring countries, for the great enter-prizes he had performed.” Roderick was now considered a veteran privateer, and he signed up for the next expedition without a second thought. He admired Morgan, the way he’d walk into one of the taverns and buy a round of drinks for everyone in the place and then match any of them rumbullion for rumbullion. He didn’t put on airs. He was one of them, but he wasn’t, too—he could speak eloquently, as if from a book, and he snapped out commands with the assurance they’d be obeyed immediately. Roderick had never been invited to the admiral’s estate, but he’d listened to him tell stories of the English Civil War at a tavern and had caught the great man’s eye and nodded. It was a moment he relived again and again. Despite his poor background, Roderick had pressed into him an unthinking respect for the gentry, and Morgan had a touch of the gentleman about him. Roderick, despite his newfound self-regard, respected it. That is, so long as Morgan produced.
As the admiral gathered in his fleet at Cow Island, off Hispaniola, the English government showed its appreciation in the form of the Oxford, a twelve-year-old, seventy-two-foot frigate armed with twenty-six guns and 125 men that had been sent over “for the defence of his Majesty’s plantation of Jamaica, and suppressing the insolence of privateers upon that coast.” It was the Crown’s first material gesture of support for the Brethren. Morgan was enchanted with the vessel; it immediately became the most powerful pirate ship in the Caribbean, and he made it his flagship. The Oxfordwas exactly the kind of floating arsenal needed to give him a fighting chance at Cartagena.
There was some dissension between the English and French pirates in the fleet, which the appearance of the Oxford only heightened. As soon as the frigate arrived at Cow Island, its captain arrested the crew of the French ship Le Cerf Volant, who had been accused of robbery and piracy by a Virginian captain. (The fine line between privateering with a commission and piracy without one was murky—the famous privateer William Dampier found that some French “commissions” carried by so-called privateers were actually hunting licenses.) The French were hauled back to Port Royal, where the captain was sentenced to death and the boat renamed Satisfaction, at which point both it and the Oxford returned to Cow Island, ready for duty. The French captain’s harsh sentence was later commuted, but the incident rankled in the Gallic camp.
With the fleet now at twelve ships and 900 men, Morgan was ready to begin. On the first day of 1669, he sent a message to the other ships’ captains that the next day they’d hold their war council aboard the Oxford. The morning came, and the captains boarded the spacious vessel and began their deliberations. Names flew back and forth, but the bulk of the ship that lay under their feet practically demanded they try Cartagena, and finally Morgan’s wish was approved. Now the punch bowl was replenished and the party began in earnest, one whose atmosphere was heightened by the glow of certain riches that lay just over the horizon. “They began on board the great ship to feast one another for joy of their new voyage and happy council,” Esquemeling writes, describing a scene echoed in other privateer narratives. “They drank many healths and discharged many guns, as the common sign of mirth among seamen used to be.” They fired guns under the table, another buccaneer tradition. They toasted 1669; they toasted Cartagena; they toasted the king; they toasted the whores back in Port Royal. They drank themselves insensible.
As the mellow Caribbean dusk descended, candles were brought out. The ship echoed with laughter and shouts in different languages; since pirates were fond of music, it’s likely the sound of a fiddle or a guitar went floating over the water toward the dark woods of Hispaniola. On deck the spidery white rigging would suddenly be illuminated with a flash of a pistol shot as the pirates fired away at the stars. The smell of burnt powder drifted down into the ship’s cabin, where the gregarious Morgan was playing host and telling his guests to sit down to a lavish (by pirate standards) dinner. It was going to be a long night, and they needed to fortify themselves, as this would be their last unhurried meal before the rigors of the approach to Cartagena. The flashes of pistol shots continued; the singing never stopped. And then a huge white flash followed by a shocking concussion blinded the captains, and they were lifted into the air and then down into the sea, with splinters of the Oxford showering upon their heads. The living surfaced and floated on the black water for a moment, pieces of burning sail drifting down, their eardrums shattered or ringing with the echo of the massive boom. Limbs of the men they had been sitting next to a moment ago bobbed on the waves.
The ship’s magazines had exploded, touched off by an errant spark, “the negligence of the gunner” or (some said) the French, still nursing their grievance. The latter seems unlikely, as the saboteurs would have gone up with the ship. But the magnificent Oxford was gone, along with 200 of its men. Only ten buccaneers had survived the blast. Miraculously, Morgan and the other captains who had been sitting on his side of the cabin table had all come away shaken but alive. One by one they were picked out of the water by the other ships in the fleet. (Roderick had been lying drunk on the deck of a smaller ship and had shot bolt upright when the Oxford went off, then rushed to join in the rescue.) The pirates spent little time mourning. When Morgan dispatched boats to search for the bodies of the dead, it was “not out of any design of affording them Christian burial, but only to obtain the spoil of their clothes and other attire.” If the dead were wearing gold rings, their bloated fingers were snipped off with a cutlass and the jewelry collected, while the bodies were left “exposed to the voracity of the monsters of the sea.”
The Spanish rejoiced at the news of the Oxford’s demise, especially the citizens of Cartagena. They credited their patron saint, Nuestra Señora de Popa, with the deliverance; she dwelled in the convent that looked over the city from a high hill that can be seen well out to sea. For decades to come, any Cartagena schoolboy could tell you that the morning after the explosion the saint was seen returning over the water from the direction of Hispaniola, her clothes wet and torn, her face lined with exhaustion from the work she’d done against the diabolical Morgan.
The disaster forced a change in the privateers’ plans; Cartagena was no longer a realistic target without the Oxford and the extra men. Morgan sent out a call for more ships and buccaneers and set up a rendezvous for a month in the future. Meanwhile he sought out supplies, even landing on Santo Domingo in Hispaniola to hunt for some of its famous cows. The Spanish, who knew that Morgan was resupplying on the island, set a trap for fifty of his men by assembling a great herd to draw the privateers in as the Spanish watched from a hiding place. At a signal, the soldiers attacked. “They set upon them with all fury imaginable,” Esquemeling tells us. “Crying, Mata, mata! that is, Kill, kill.” The privateers ran for their lives.
The Oxford accident hadn’t damaged the admiral’s reputation; in fact, his miraculous escape probably burnished his name as an invincible leader among the buccaneers. “While Morgan was safe,” the historian Leslie writes, “they thought success sure.” Morgan was less sanguine; a “huge impatience” was gnawing at him. Too many things could go wrong on a pirate expedition, as the Oxford disaster proved, as the lesson of L’Ollonais reinforced. After resupplying the ships, he set out for the rendezvous, Saona Island. When Morgan arrived weeks later, the news was not good. Saona lay at the southeast end of Hispaniola toward Puerto Rico, directly north across the North Sea (now known as the Caribbean Sea) of the Gulf of Venezuela, meaning that the privateers, once assembled, could swoop straight down into the heart of the Spanish Main. But it was also windward of Port Royal and the other major pirate haunts, which meant that the ships had to tack and beat against the trade winds to get there. It was a rugged haul, especially in the small, open ships that offered little protection from the whipping spray; three of the ships gave up, claiming that their vessels could not handle the pounding. “Sails chafed and stitching rotted in the alternate bright sun and heavy rain,” writes Morgan biographer Dudley Pope, “hull planking spewed caulking, rigging stretched, chafed and parted, men became worn out, unable to remember a time when they were not crashing to windward, their ships rolling violently and pitching as though every wave was a cliff edge over which they were falling.” The Spanish seemed to be stalking Morgan: Another mission to Hispaniola for supplies returned empty-handed after encountering a strong contingent of soldiers, “now so vigilant and in such good posture of defence” that it was not worth the risk of battle. Morgan’s very success was making him a target.
The Welshman finally decided he’d have to set out with the assets at hand: 500 men in eight ships. Morgan had been thinking of ransacking Venezuela’s eastern shores, “having hitherto resolved to cruize upon the coasts of Caracas, and plunder all the towns and villages he could meet,” but the ships had taken a beating already, and there was little appetite for a long slog to windward. He began talking with a French captain who had served with L’Ollonais in his glory days, when the Gallic terror had pillaged the city of Maracaibo for 260,000 pesos. This man knew the approach to the city, its “entries, passages, forces and means,” and he convinced Morgan that the fleet was perfect for the mission. And besides, it had been two years since L’Ollonais’s raid.
The cities of the Spanish New World were amazingly resilient. The elite tended to diversify their holdings: They might have interests in agriculture, in hides or textiles, in silver recovery, in real estate and other concerns. The buccaneers could devastate one aspect of their wealth, but they rarely stayed around long enough to damage everything. And the cheap labor and innate riches of the treasure territories meant that there was always another mule train of silver on the way. In the meantime governors would write Madrid reporting the raid and asking for engineers to be sent out and new forts and castles to be built, but there was a limit to what could be done. Cities often had to be located where they were to accommodate the treasure fleets or other business of the empire, and if they were moved, the buccaneers would find the new locations anyway (as was the case with a future Morgan target, Panama). Combining far-flung towns didn’t fit the needs of the king, and that was paramount—one needed his permission to relocate. Buccaneers knew that the coffers of their favorite towns replenished quickly, and they tended to let cities lie fallow until jewelry boxes and hidden reserves could be filled again. The French had pillaged Maracaibo a full two years earlier. It was ready.
The fleet set off, dropping due south with the trade winds to port. They sighted the island of Ruba (now Aruba) and stopped for supplies: wood from the island’s forests and sheep and goats from the local Indians. Two days later the ships set off for the Gulf of Venezuela; they were on war footing now and sailed only at night. By morning they’d entered the vast gulf, a large bay on top connected to the inland lake named Laguna de Maracaibo by a narrow channel, the whole formation from above looking like a figure eight, with the gulf on top and the lake below. The gulf is a notorious ship eater; its shallow waters hide sandbars, and its featureless coast makes navigation difficult, especially for the inexperienced. Luckily, the French captain knew the waters well and guided the fleet to an anchorage just off the three islands lying across the twelve-foot-deep channel that led to the bay. There they spent the night. The next morning the navigators would have to slalom between two of the islands, San Carlos and Zapara, without wrecking. It would be a pretty piece of sailing.
But by first light Morgan knew he had bigger problems. After L’Ollonais’s raid the Spanish had built a new fort on the eastern shores of San Carlos, and as the sun rose, Morgan realized he’d have to pass under the fortress’s eleven guns before he could reach the bay. Now the loss of the Oxfordmade itself felt; Morgan’s flagship was the fourteen-gun frigate Lilly. He could have used the extra dozen cannon of his former vessel, but there was nothing else except to run the channel and take their chances. The Spanish had chosen the castle’s location brilliantly, but as usual they’d failed to provide enough money to staff it. Inside, there were just nine men, no doubt astonished by the sudden appearance of the long-dreaded privateers in their peaceful cay. But they knew their duty and began furiously loading and firing the eleven guns as Morgan sailed up to the beach and offloaded his men in the teeth of the barrage, while his gunners provided covering fire. “The dispute continued very hot on both sides,” says Esquemeling, whose account is seconded by Spanish reports of a vigorous resistance, “being managed with huge courage and valour from morning till dark night.” The pirates hit the beach with Spanish ball kicking up spray as they landed and sought the only cover they could find: a ridge of sand. The buccaneers were targets in a firing gallery until they could get within musket range. The afternoon breeze kicked up in the middle of their assault, and its keen raised itself notch by notch until it was a full-blown squall, making communicating and loading the privateers’ guns much more difficult, as the Spanish poured ball and shot down on the shapes below. Morgan waited until dusk to give his approach the cover of darkness and, as soon as the sun had set, burst for the fortress walls. Strangely, the Spanish held their fire. Pistol cocked, Roderick hugged the stone wall as the pirates approached. Finally they found a gate. Morgan signaled his men, reared back, and kicked the gate with all his force. It swung open; after the stealth of their approach, it had been unlocked. The Spanish could do their sums as well as anyone; none of them wanted to spend a night being carved up by the likes of L’Ollonais. They’d fired one last volley, jumped into a boat, and headed for town to raise the alarm. When Morgan’s men entered the fort, they found it echoing with the sound of surf on the beach.
Roderick and his mates hallooed into the dark and slapped one another’s backs in delight: Maracaibo now lay open to them. But Morgan was warier; suspicious of a fort left so invitingly empty, he began to search it room by room. Soon he smelled something acrid and quickly went running toward the source. In the fortress magazine, he found what he was looking for: a lit fuse laid into a trail of powder that led straight to the barrels of gunpowder. He stamped it out, with only an inch and a few minutes to spare. Morgan’s touch had returned; he’d saved almost half his men’s lives. He then ordered the cannon spiked, which involved driving a piece of sharpened metal into the touchhole, rendering it unusable, and buried in the sand, so that any reinforcements could not use them to blast Morgan’s ships on their way home. The fort yielded up huge quantities of powder, always a favorite piece of pirate booty on the way to a fight, and a stash of military hardware: muskets, flints, ramrods. It was like the moment in a gangster film when the bad guys raid the precinct armory and start handing out the guns: Whatever Maracaibo had in store for the pirates, they’d be armed to the teeth.
The supplies were divvied up and transported to the ships, which had been brought to anchor near the San Carlos beach. The next morning the ships set sail for their target, but twenty miles from Maracaibo their way was soon blocked by a shallow bank of deadly quicksand that the ships could not pass. Maracaibo’s natural defenses were proving more formidable than her human ones. Morgan’s second trademark was forced into play: canoes. They were lowered into the water, and the men dropped down onto their benches and pulled out their paddles. The Brethren rowed into a stiff wind and soon found the shore at the foot of the fort named de la Barra. Yesterday’s script was repeated: a beach landing, a cautious approach, an empty fort. The locals had escaped into the woods.
It was savages like L’Ollonais who made such running-in-panic-before-the-barbarians possible. Indeed the Spaniards told awful tales about the pirates to their children and even came to believe the stories themselves. It was said the privateers were strange creatures “formed like monkeys” or “mad dogs” who could flit soundlessly through a jungle and then appear in a village like sorcerers, where they’d help themselves to a meal of townspeople. “This caused them to conceive a keen horrore and aversion for us,” recalled the gallant French pirate Raveneau de Lussan. He gave as an example one incident when he was escorting a Spanish woman who kept glancing nervously at him as they walked. Finally she could stand it in no longer. “Sir,” she cried, “for the love of God, do not eat me!”
The Maracaiboans had not waited around to see if the pirates really did want to eat them. On hearing of Morgan’s approach, the captain of the city’s defenses had sent drummers to muster the men to defend it and rang the war bell summoning volunteers. The bell tolled again and again, echoing out over a town that seemed suddenly deserted and silent. Only a handful of citizens showed up. “It was discovered that no more than ten or twelve men had come to help him,” a Spanish report on the invasion said. “The witness who was present heard the captain curse some people for having left him alone.” The captain tried again, this time hanging two banners that told the town’s four hundred families that “there will be the penalty of death for traitors of the Realm of Spain.” Still, when Morgan arrived, Maracaibo was a ghost town. Roderick led a squad of men who searched every corner of the eastern section of the town, looking for people who “might offend them unawares,” but the wind whistled through empty doorways and swung doors left ajar. The men chose houses for themselves and chose the church as their headquarters, where they committed “many insolent actions.” This probably referred to the English habit of desecrating captured churches, much to the horror of their French allies. Roderick and some mates entered one Spanish church and raced up to the altar, slashing at the crucifixes with their sabers, knocking the heads off statues of saints, and bending their own heads in mock prayer before upending the altar. It was hilarious, but Roderick called a halt to it when he was nearly holed by a bullet meant for an image of some Spanish saint hanging on the wall. The buccaneers then marched out into the countryside in the next few days and brought back thirty prisoners, who were questioned for information on the missing citizens and their valuables.
Much of what precedes this is recounted in Morgan’s brief report on the mission, in Spanish testimony on the raid, and in Esquemeling’s narrative, giving a reliable picture of the events. But for the dark passages that follow, Esquemeling is the only source, and one should draw a bright line around the descriptions to come and regard them as only a possible version of what happened. What the surgeon relates was not out of character for pirate missions, but whether they happened on Morgan’s watch at Maracaibo is not definitely known.
According to The Buccaneers of America, the rack was used on some prisoners, while “others had burning matches placed betwixt their fingers, which were thus burnt alive.” The pirates lived in an age when torture was commonplace, almost expected. The rack and woolding were standard punishments during the Spanish Inquisition; the New Model Army in which so many of Morgan’s original raiders had been trained (and whose red coats many of them still wore, “for the terrible name thereof”) had committed hideous savageries while conquering Ireland; and armies and bandits alike thought nothing of lopping off their enemies’ heads and sending them to the other side. It was a message that was sure to be understood. The Spanish gave as good as they got: When in 1604 they intercepted English ships in West Indian waters, they “cut off the heads, feet, noses and ears of the crews and smeared them with honey and tied them to trees to be tortured by flies and other insects.” If the pirates were distinguished in anything, it was their inventiveness. Chinese pirates were known to nail prisoners to their wooden decks and beat them with rattans; a certain English pirate, Captain Low, ordered that a Portuguese captain’s lips be cut off and broiled as the man watched. Low had, in his defense, been provoked—the captain had kept a bag filled with Portuguese gold coins hanging from a rope outside his cabin window; when the pirates appeared, he severed the rope and let the bag drop into the ocean—an incredibly stupid thing to do. Low made another sailor eat his own ears “with pepper and salt.” The Irish mutineer and pirate Philip Roche initiated a massacre of his French mates that coated the entire deck with gore; the pirates were “all over as wet with the Blood that had been spilt, as if they had been dipp’d in Water, or stood in a Shower of Rain, nor did they regard it any more.” What in Esquemeling’s account is perhaps more amazing than the pirates’ cruelty is the behavior of the tortured. Many of them resisted giving up information about their silver plate until they’d been mutilated beyond recognition.
This becomes clear in the next city that came under Morgan’s care: Gibraltar (not to be confused with the island in the Mediterranean). After pillaging the countryside for thirty miles around, taking captives and raking in piles of silver and cobs, Morgan decided to follow L’Ollonais’s path and take the city that sat at the far end of the bay. Morgan sent a group of prisoners ahead, to impress upon their neighbors that the city should surrender at once. Instead, when the pirates sailed up to Gibraltar’s fort, they were met “with continual shooting of great cannon-bullets.” After Maracaibo the men had expected an easy victory, but now they encouraged each other with this thought: “We must make one meal upon bitter things, before we come to taste the sweetness of the sugar this place affords.” Morgan reversed course, anchored beyond the range of the guns, and waited until morning. Then he ordered the assault. But one night of thinking about how little pirates liked to be trifled with was enough for the townspeople. By morning, when Morgan began his assault, the people were gone, “carrying with them all their goods and riches.” A bad reputation was as good as bullets to a pirate, and by now Morgan’s had spread far and wide. As Esquemeling put it, in a description seconded by the Spaniards’ own reports of encounters with Morgan, “the fears which the Spaniards had conceived…were so great, that only hearing the leaves on the trees to stir, they often fancied them to be pirates.”
The only person left in town was a “poor man born a fool,” a mentally handicapped Spaniard. He was questioned closely by the pirates, but to everything he answered, “I know nothing, I know nothing.” The buccaneers put him to the rack and demanded to know where the residents had fled to with their valuables. Finally the man broke and cried out, “Do not torture me anymore, but come with me and I will show you my goods and my riches!” Esquemeling reports that the pirates believed that the man was a rich citizen who was faking idiocy so he’d be left alone, though it seems like a daft idea. The pirates left no one alone who might have a morsel of information. What happens next is one of the few passages in the many pirate narratives that could be described as poignant:
Hereupon they went with him; and he conducted them to a poor and miserable cottage, wherein he had a few earthen dishes, and other things of little or no value; and amongst these, three pieces of eight which he’d concealed with some other trumpery underground. After this, they asked him his name; and he readily made answer: My name is Don Sebastian Sanchez, and I am brother to the governor of Maracaibo. This foolish answer, it must be conceived, these men, though never so inhuman, took for a certain truth. For no sooner had they heard it, but they put him again upon the rack, lifting him up on high with cords, and tying huge weights to his face and neck….
It got worse. The pirates took burning palm leaves and scorched the man’s face with them. He lasted only thirty minutes before dying; the pirates cut the cords and dragged him out to the forest and left him there, unburied.
Roderick headed into the bush with his mates and soon came on an Indian; they offered him a “mountain of gold” if he’d give them information on his former masters. Morgan’s men regularly sought out informers to point them toward the richest men in the area; once they caught these people, the price of freedom was often calibrated to how much the pirates estimated the rich man would be able to pay or raise from his neighbors and family via desperate letters sent out into the bush. (At least some townspeople always managed to escape the privateers’ raids, as their targets usually received some advance word of the attack.) Those who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay would often be tortured and forced to march along with the privateers as they made their way back toward their ships. If no ransom materialized, and the prisoners were considered valuable enough to warrant the effort, they’d be carted on board the fleet. In these cases a last chance fire sale would be had where Morgan would give the captives one final opportunity to pay a sharply reduced price for their liberty just before sailing for Port Royal. Morgan would always rather have cash in hand than a prisoner. If they paid, they might be sent home on a rowboat or dropped off on shore. If they called his bluff, they might be freed or they might be put to death by the annoyed pirates and their bodies tossed to the sharks—a common enough practice among Morgan’s fellow buccaneers. There was no set price for any one captive and no hard and fast policy governing captives’ treatment. Occasionally whole towns and their captured citizens were ransomed en masse, and if the pirates were hungry, food (especially beef) could become an acceptable substitute for money. There was no policy, that is, except that every last piece of eight should be wrung from every last prisoner.
The man led them to the hiding place of a group of Spaniards, and the usual ceremonies began, with a twist. According to Esquemeling, the pirates demanded that the slave kill some of the Spaniards as an initiation rite, “to the intent that by this perpetrated crime he might never be able to leave their wicked company.” The slave agreed, murdering one Spaniard after another and committing other, unnamed “insolent actions.” Meanwhile the other pirates tortured the captives, with a Portuguese getting special attention. The slave marked him as a rich man, and Roderick worked him over with gusto, forcing his hands behind his back, tying cords to them, and lifting his arms straight up until they rotated over his head, “breaking both his arms behind his shoulders.” (It was a torture method still in use up to the Vietnam War, when it was inflicted on American POWs.) The man still would not talk, so the furious Roderick tied his thumbs and big toes to stakes and stretched him out, “the whole weight of his body being pendent in the air upon those cords.” He then took a stick and thrashed the cords until the man’s body was whipped back and forth, up and down. Nothing. Swearing that he’d kill the Spaniard, Roderick found a heavy stone and carried it to the man’s side and placed it on his belly, but the man held out. Roderick turned away, but another pirate took a torch from their campfire and began burning the man’s face, beard, and hair. The Spaniard said not a word. Finally he was starved for five days before agreeing to pay a ransom of 500 pieces of eight, or $25,000 in current dollars.
The pirates were underwhelmed. “Old fellow,” Roderick told him, “instead of five hundred you must say five hundred thousand pieces of eight; otherwise you shall here end your life.” Still the prisoner held out. The Portuguese man claimed he was just a poor tavern owner who could raise no more; a “thousand protestations” flowed out of him, until the pirates must have been sick of his voice. At last he agreed to 1,000 pesos for his release; he raised the sum in a few days, paid up, and then walked free, “although so horribly maimed in his body, that ’tis scarce to be believed he could survive many weeks later.”
None of this is outside of the norms of battlefield behavior. But what Esquemeling reports next did go past the norms: crucifixions, men and women “lacerated in the most tender parts of their bodies,” the deaths of female prisoners and children from neglect and starvation. There is little in the record outside of Esquemeling’s account to suggest that Morgan was a monster capable of such things, and one should take the report with a grain of salt; the writer may well have been embellishing at the prodding of his publishers. If Esquemeling made it up, one has to say he had the makings of a novelist in him. The innocent fool chattering away to the pirates about his famous relatives, ensuring his own death, and the Portuguese miser who endured a Golgotha just to save 500 pesos—they are beautiful touches. The latter portrait was truer of the New World: Here it was money that brought respect, not honor. Men defended their gold the way they once had the names Jesus Christ and Santiago.
How Morgan felt about the cruelty that went along with most privateering expeditions, he never said. But later in life he did show that he could sympathize with the unfortunate. When entreating his superiors in London over some English prisoners in Spanish jails, he pleaded, “They are all great objects of compassion, so I hope you will not be unmindful of them.” And in the same letter he agonized about granting sanctuary to a religious refugee. “I do not know if I have done right herein,” he confessed. “Sure I am that [I] wished to follow the dictates of humanity as well as those of law and reason.” But a Spaniard who was resisting probably got very little sympathy from Morgan the buccaneer: Everyone understood the rules of engagement, and those who fought opened themselves up to every kind of treatment. For his part, Roderick had been raised to fear God, and the brutality he witnessed sometimes shocked him. But he’d found in himself a capacity to join in. He’d realized that the price for the life he enjoyed was that he could never question the methods of the Brethren. Anyone who shied away from woolding a captive was instantly suspect and risked marooning or worse. He expected the same if he were captured by Spanish musketeers. The pirates were like the Indian captive: They all initiated one another into torture. Any lingering doubts, any images of the burned merchant’s face with the skin hanging off, were eradicated by Roderick’s increasing intake of rum.
The buccaneers raked over Gibraltar for weeks and then left with their boats groaning under the weight of silks, slaves, and loot. The pirates were delighted and ready to begin the orgiastic spending of what they’d earned. But Morgan, one can be sure, had a clock ticking in the back of his mind. They’d spent a great deal of time gathering their prizes, and anytime the Brethren landed on the Spanish Main, riders galloped off to the centers of power to ask for help. Perhaps troops were on the way from Panama or Cartagena. As it happened, the situation was much worse. Waiting for the men of Port Royal was the dreaded Armada de Barlovento.
The fact that the armada had been dispatched to the Americas spoke volumes about how worried the queen regent was about Morgan; its arrival on the Main was a direct result of the shock of Portobelo. The fleet of five ships and its commander, Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa, had been sailing up and down the coasts of Cuba and Campeche, hoping to catch the pirates as they lurked in the cays and off the islands. The return on the significant investment that the armada represented had been slim: one small ship nabbed in the North Sea. No wonder the queen, after only six months or so of the armada’s fruitless patrols, ordered the two most formidable ships in the fleet back to Spain. The dozen ships that had been initially approved for the protection of the Main were now down to three, but all of them outclassed anything Morgan had in his motley little navy. Alonzo commanded the Magdalena, a forty-eight-gun galleon, and was supported by the San Luis, which boasted thirty-eight guns, and the Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, a fifty-ton vessel that had last seen service as a French trade ship and carried ten guns. As historian Peter Earle has pointed out, the Soledad would have been an afterthought in the European navies, but it was still the equal of Morgan’s flagship.
Alonzo had mile upon mile of open sea to patrol; to increase his chances of running into Morgan, he depended on seafront-tavern rumors and a web of informers. Pirates were inveterate gossips, and it was well known in West Indies ports that Morgan had assembled his fleet at Cow Island and that the Spanish Main was to be his next target; that could mean that Panama, Cartagena, Maracaibo, or a host of other towns were now in his sights. Any pirate fleet would likely sail east before attempting to sweep down onto the Main, so the admiral decided to head to Puerto Rico and surprise them en route. But it was a long shot, and when the fleet arrived in San Juan, the governor reported they hadn’t spotted the pirate’s flag. They were nine days too late: As Alonzo scoured the port for news of the buccaneers, Morgan was already in Maracaibo, deep into pillaging. Alonzo raced west to Santo Domingo, where he arrived on May 25, and finally got a hot lead: The president there reported that Morgan’s men had arrived in their port and attempted to push their way into the city and were only held off by the island’s infantry. A French prisoner chimed in that he’d been rounded up during one of the pirates’ cattle hunts on Hispaniola and the pirates had revealed they were victualing for a raid on the Main. This was confirmed by a Dutch trader; pirates had been buying meat and talking about a specific town: Maracaibo. The admiral pointed his ships south and went racing after Morgan.
When they reached the Gulf of Venezuela, a mestizo who was acting as “corporal of the Indians” confirmed the admiral’s hunch. Morgan was at Gibraltar. It was incredible news: His enemy was now within his reach, trapped like a dog, without the possibility of escape. How the words must have sung in Alonzo’s ears! Morgan’s ships could overawe a town because of the men on them: ferocious soldiers who regularly churned through Spanish armies like a meat grinder. But on water Morgan’s outfit was vulnerable: His undersize ships were mere water taxis meant to shuttle the rogues from one sacking to the next. They were no warships. Now Alonzo would be the instrument of royal, indeed of divine, retribution. Henry Morgan was going to surrender or die. Or, since we are talking about the Spanish system, he was going to surrender and then die.
Alonzo was not going to miss his chance; his career, not to mention the fortunes of his king and nation, now depended on stopping Morgan. The admiral sprang into action, arranging for pilots to steer his ships through the hazardous gulf, shooting letters to the general governor of Venezuela, the governor of Mérida, and other strongholds asking for men and vessels; one of his messengers drowned in the undertow on the beach at Maracaibo, but other couriers went racing inland spreading the alarm. Alonzo approached the fort at Maracaibo carefully, expecting Morgan at least to have left a skeleton crew manning it, but there was none. Morgan had gotten cocky, or greedy, or both; he probably judged that he’d need every man to take the towns of the interior lake. Alonzo immediately began to put the fort back into fighting shape, unearthing the buried cannon and restoring six of them to working order, restocking the garrison with forty soldiers and supplying it with food and ammunition. The fort would in effect act as a fourth ship barring the exit of any ship from the lagoon; the admiral’s vessels were arrayed across the channel so that no other vessel could pass without coming under direct fire from at least one of them. They acted as the cork in a bottle, and Morgan was caught inside. Alonzo gingerly steered his ships into position, struggling against strong gales (“the fury of the northern winds,” he called them) that were threatening to smash his armada on the nearby reefs. “I was invaded by a total indecision,” he confessed, “since serving His Majesty and the Glory of Spain, I had to prevent the enemy’s entry while being totally responsible for whatever happened to my vessels.” He tossed ballast into the water to lighten his ships and managed to avoid disaster. He was so confident of victory that, when seventy militiamen from Maracaibo arrived to bolster the blockade, he sent them to the fort, along with twenty-four of his own musketeers. He had more than enough men to stop the corsairs.
Morgan’s fleet had been weighed down with the fruits of his success; the pirates had gathered in slaves and captives as well as stray vessels he’d commandeered in Gibraltar and along the coast. To lighten the load, he released all the prisoners who had paid their ransom and kept four citizens of the town as collateral for the monies still owed him; the freed Spanish requested that Morgan hand over the slave who had informed on them, but knowing they’d “burn him alive,” Morgan quickly refused. His own affairs in order, he headed toward Maracaibo with “as much haste as he could to set things in order for his departure.” Four days later the fleet arrived back in town and quickly learned from the sole resident, a sick old man, that three ships were waiting for them and, “moreover, that the castle at the entry thereof was again put into a good posture of defence, being well provided with great guns and men and all sorts of ammunition.” Morgan was startled, and he sent his fastest boat to confirm the facts, which it did quickly: three ships, ninety-four guns between them. The lagoon they were trapped in was enormous: eighty-six miles long and sixty miles wide at some points. But at the top the lagoon narrowed, and it was blocked by several islands and shoals. The only navigable channel, through which Morgan’s fleet would have to pass, was approximately eight hundred yards wide. And the Spanish ships were arrayed in a line across it.
The news caused a “general consternation” among the pirates, and Morgan himself was said to “despond in his mind and be destitute of all manner of hopes.” Even an escape by land was impossible. Not only would the pirates have to throw away most of their hard-won booty, but once they’d disembarked, Don Alonzo could land his men and hunt the Brethren in the woods. And in the event they evaded the raids, they’d be confronted with the fact that the Maracaibo lowlands were surrounded by mountains on three sides. The route to the Caribbean was blocked by the northeastern extension of the Andes range, with jagged peaks rising to 14,500 feet. The image of salt-sea pirates, their beards rimed with ice, scaling sheer mountain cliffs did not present itself favorably to Morgan; his men would probably rather face loaded cannon than pick their way across fields of snowdrift. Plus, they would have no ships on which to return to Jamaica, and no certainty of hijacking any. The land route was out, and the water route was bristling with Spanish steel. It was by far the bleakest situation Morgan had faced as a commander.
If he did really sink into a depression, he soon recovered. His first move was to send Don Alonzo a letter, not of surrender but one “demanding of him a considerable tribute, or ransom, for not putting the city of Maracaibo to the flame.” It was typical of Morgan, who always bargained from a position of strength, even when that position was imaginary. The real purpose was to feel out the admiral, to see if Morgan was dealing with a time-server who didn’t want any trouble or with a real Spanish soldier of the old school. Don Alonzo’s reply ended speculation on that front. He wrote Morgan that he’d come to avenge the crimes against His Majesty and retake the castle “which you took from a parcel of cowards.” He swore he’d pursue Morgan to the ends of the earth to carry out his sworn duty. Don Alonzo’s tone was actually quite respectful; Morgan’s stock had obviously risen since Bracamonte had tossed the epithet “pirate” at Portobelo. And the admiral extended to the Welshman a generous offer: Leave your booty and slaves and return to Jamaica and you will be allowed to pass “without trouble or molestation.” Don Alonzo was a gentleman, and it is hard to imagine him setting up the same kind of double-cross with which the Englishmen at Providence had been suckered; but it’s equally hard to imagine him letting this high-profile enemy of Spain skate away without so much as a slap on the wrist. The offer of free passage was a direct contradiction of Don Alonzo’s orders to exterminate the pirates of the Caribbean. The letter spelled out what would happen if Morgan declined the offer: Don Alonzo would “cause you utterly to perish, by putting every man to the sword.” He warned Morgan not to refuse the offer, because he had with him soldiers “who desire nothing more ardently than to revenge on you and your people all the cruelties and base infamous actions you have committed upon the Spanish nation in America.”
Morgan studied the letter and called his men together in Maracaibo’s marketplace; he read the offer, translated it into French, and then asked the only question that mattered: would the pirates rather “surrender all they’d purchased, to obtain their liberty,” or fight? This scene is repeated again and again in the history of pirates: An offer is made by the authorities to surrender and give up the loot or die. To the pirates’ credit, one can find few instances of a vote for laying down arms. Pirates usually chose likely death over captivity. The Brethren kept with tradition and roared back their answer: They would fight.
But how? A patented buccaneer head-on charge would be suicidal. These were not frightened townspeople with children hanging around their knees; these were well-trained, well-equipped Spanish musketeers from the mainland, answerable to the Crown, with an overwhelming superiority in firepower, led by a capable commander. No ghost stories about monkey-faced buccaneers were going to cause them to turn and run. Morgan consulted with his men; the best idea would win.
Before he revealed his strategy, Morgan sent another letter, saying he’d agree to give up half of the slaves, leave Maracaibo intact, and free the four prisoners he still held. No mention was made of the treasure they’d stolen; that, the pirates would keep. Don Alonzo answered brusquely; he’d tried treating Morgan like a gentleman, but these thugs were so impertinent. Ignoring the counteroffer, he informed Morgan he had two days to surrender or face annihilation. Morgan’s last message was cheerful, telling Don Alonzo that since he was so near, the English would come to him and introduce him to the “hazard of battle.” He also mentioned that he expected no mercy from his enemies.
Now the townspeople of Maracaibo, those close enough to the pirate ships, heard the feverish hammering from the direction of the harbor, as if a small fort were being built. But they didn’t see any of the expected slaves or prisoners escaping to the jungle, as was typical when pirates let down their guard or were otherwise occupied. Not a soul arrived to tell them what was happening in the town.
At the neck of the lagoon, Don Alonzo waited. A stream of informers stole toward his flagship and gave the admiral a series of reports: The pirates were working on a captured trading vessel; new gun ports were being added; shipwrights were working furiously in the ship’s hold. Clearly Morgan had transferred his flag to this ship, which was bigger than his own and could give him more brawn to go up against the Magdalena. Don Alonzo drilled his men, watched the horizon carefully, and put in place a series of defensive measures: Long poles were extended from the sides of his ships to prevent the pirates from getting too close (for boarding or other nefarious activities); barrels of water were placed on deck for fighting fires.
The stalemate lasted for a week. Then, just before dark on April 30, Alonzo looked toward the lagoon, and there, suddenly, was the outline of ships against the horizon: Morgan’s fleet, now thirteen in number with the captured vessels, had sailed twenty miles up the lagoon and taken a position within view of the Spaniards, but out of firing range. Aboard the Magdalena, Don Alonzo studied the enemy ships in his spyglass. The big Cuban trader the pirates had reportedly been working on was flying Morgan’s flag; that was comforting—at least the admiral’s spies were accurate. And when, two days later, the pirate fleet raised anchor and came sailing straight at Don Alonzo, it was in the lead, flanked by the old flagship Satisfaction and another frigate. Don Alonzo watched them approach; as soon as they were within range, he gave the order to fire. His ship’s forty-eight guns roared with a thunderous volley; ball tore into the sail of the oncoming ships. Morgan’s ships responded as best they could, but their barrages were decibels lower in volume.
To his astonishment, Don Alonzo saw that the buccaneers’ ships did not peel away as they drew closer. They were going to attempt a frontal assault, as if his man-of-war were a pathetic merchant sloop fleeing for its very life. Nothing could be more to his advantage, except a sustained artillery battle on the open sea. The pirates would not go for that; their ships were being blasted apart by his gunners, who inched down the mouths of their guns as the buccaneer fleet closed on them, until they were pointed almost level, firing across the gap of blue sea at the three fast-closing ships trailed by the slower boats. The admiral could see the outlines of pirates on deck in the morning haze, some of them wearing the soft montera hat, like bullfighters, their cutlasses poised by their sides. They were unmoving against the dawn sky. Don Alonzo had just a moment to admire their steadfastness in the face of barrages of shot aimed straight at their faces—at least these infidels die like men—before the ship plowed into the Magdalena with a crash of snapping, buckling wood, and grappling hooks came spinning through the air and snagged his sails. His men, their anticipation keyed to a point, didn’t wait for the attack but leaped over the sides onto the enemy’s deck.
And in that moment, realization. The decks were empty, except for wooden cutouts cunningly shaped by Morgan’s carpenters to resemble men with cutlasses. The Spanish musketeers looked around in bewilderment before the word unfolded in their minds and came tumbling out of their mouths: brûlot. It was a fireship, a floating trap designed to set the enemy aflame. They could smell the sweet odor of tar over palm leaves as the deck around them lit up like a Roman candle and a concussion blew them up into the rigging. Don Alonzo shouted orders as pieces of burning wood and cordage came tumbling through the air into his ship. A seventeenth-century warship was a conflagration waiting to happen: Apart from the magazines of gunpowder filling the hold, its seams were caulked with tar, its ropes were covered with a layer of fat, and its sails were made of flammable canvas. The flames engulfed the tackling and rope, swept over the decks, bellowed by a strong wind at their back, burning men alive as they fled; fire ran and shot up the masts. Men dived into the water and swam for the islands, while Don Alonzo tried futilely to get the fires put out and tossed planks of wood to drowning men. “The flames built up rapidly and violently…,” Don Alonzo wrote in his report on the confrontation. “So that in a brief moment everything was ablaze.”
The Magdalena was soon fully engulfed, “the forepart sinking into the sea, whereby she perished.” Disaster tumbled into disaster: Her sister ship, the Soledad, wheeled away from the burning vessel but had a malfunction in its rigging and was soon unnavigable; as it dawdled pilotless across the water, the buccaneers chased it down and prepared to board. The terrified crew jumped into the water, and the Brethren swarmed up the Soledad’s sides, corrected the rigging jam, and soon had a fine Spanish ship as plunder. The Spanish swimmers were cut down, as “they would neither ask nor admit of any quarter, choosing rather to lose their lives than receive them from the hands of their persecutors.” The sergeant major of the Soledad was one of the survivors, hauling himself “naked and wet” to the fort. The last Spanish ship, the San Luis, was luckier, making it to the fort, where its crew unloaded its provisions and armaments and then burned the ship down to the waterline, so that Morgan could not have it. Poor Don Alonzo survived the debacle and transferred to a longboat and headed for shore, pursued by Roderick and other pirates, paddling furiously in their swift canoes. He ended up running for his life from the men he expected to take back to the Main as “sun-dried” specimens for his queen.
The Brethren had prepared the Cuban decoy beautifully, cutting new gun ports into her side and, in place of the real cannon that should have jutted out of them, inserting logs filled with gunpowder and readied with fuses. Then they’d scoured Maracaibo for every highly flammable material available to them—pitch, tar, brimstone, palm leaves—and built their combustible doll men out of them. The carpenters whom the spies heard hammering away in the hold were not installing fortifications to the structure but removing them, so that when the ship blew, the explosion would not be dampened by excess timbers. They’d adorned the ship with banners and fitted it out like a flagship; in the history of naval warfare, fireships had usually been made of old and decrepit junks, not fine specimens such as the Cuban prize. Luck had been with Morgan in the following wind that blew out of the top of the lagoon into the narrow channel, giving the ship the necessary propulsion to ram it into the Magdalena. A skeleton crew of twelve men had steered it home and jumped into canoes just before the moment of impact. The costuming, the set design, the use of the murky glow of dawn to light the scene—the whole thing resembled nothing more than an amateur English theatrical.
Morgan’s reputation for command had been well established before Maracaibo, but after this stunning reversal of fortune, he became the buccaneer commander. There was no way he should have been able to outmaneuver Don Alonzo: Morgan was a brilliant soldier throughout his career, but a subpar sailor. He regularly lost ships to reefs or, in the case of the Oxford, carelessness. The pirates usually used terror and marksmanship to win battles, but Morgan had won this naval confrontation by wit. “The Pirates were extremely gladdened at this signal victory,” Esquemeling tells us. “Obtained in so short a time and with so great [an] inequality of forces; whereby they conceived greater pride in their minds than they had before.”
If Don Alonzo had considered Spain’s history, he’d have prepared more diligently. Indeed, the greatest disaster ever to strike his nation’s navies, the loss of the Spanish Armada in 1588, turned on a fireship attack designed by the English commander and future privateer Francis Drake. The mighty Armada was thought to be invincible, but when it anchored off Calais before the planned invasion of England, the Spanish were spooked by the sudden appearance, at midnight on August 7, of a fleet of burning ships, their sails towers of flame, rushing at them out of the darkness. The Spanish were terrified that these were the dreaded “hell-burners” or “explosion-machines” (vessels loaded with gunpowder, housed in hulls closed in with brick, that would explode with tremendous force when the fire reached it); they cut their cables and scattered to the wind, canceling their D-Day and opening up the Armada to attacks by the nimble English navy, which hounded them onto the Dutch coast and sent them back to Spain as abject failures. Morgan had, in miniature, recreated the famous attack with equally devastating results. (In fact, included in Esquemeling’s book was a rather fine rendering of the attack, titled The Spanish Armada Destroyed by Captaine Morgan.) Like Drake, he’d even volunteered his flagship for the conflagration.
What Morgan did not realize until days later was that Don Alonzo had been warned about the fireship. Although the pirates kept a strict guard on all their prisoners, a “certain negro” had made it to the Magdalena days before the attack and told the admiral, “Sir, be pleased to have great care of yourself, for the English have prepared a fireship with desire to burn your fleet.” The Spanish noble had scoffed at the idea. “How can that be?” he thundered at the spy. “Have they, peradventure, wit enough to build a fireship? Or what instruments have they to do it withal?” Don Alonzo was a Spaniard to the bone: He simply could not imagine that he could be out-thought by scum like the Brethren. But the collective wisdom of the pirates had defeated the noble.
Don Juan carried with him the kingdom’s certainty of its own rightness and superiority. When dealing with the privateers, who molded their thinking to the situation at hand, certainty could be a fatal flaw.
Morgan quickly divided up his men: Some dived to the wreck of the Magdalena and brought up silver cobs worth 20,000 pesos, some of them melted into gobs of pure bullion; another 20,000 in silver remained in the black hulk but could not be reached. Other men landed on the beach and began probing the fort’s defenses, shooting at the musketeers lining the tops of the armaments. The castle, now packed full with Spanish soldiers as well as a resupplied garrison from Maracaibo, blasted back at the evening attack the buccaneers attempted. The pirates were seriously outgunned, having only muskets and “a few fire-balls” (crude grenades) to contend with the cannon above their heads. Men dropped under the barrage, blood gushing into the sand and turning it black in the dusky gloom. “We refused them the whole afternoon,” reported the fort’s castellan, “causing [them] great harm…and the deaths of many people, injured and burned.” The Brethren lost thirty men, with many more wounded, before they realized they had no chance of storming the castle. But eventually it would have to be taken: The fort’s artillery would shred the pirate fleet as it tried to sail through the narrow channel if the guns were not silenced.
There was now a three-way standoff between the pirates, Don Alonzo, and the residents of Maracaibo. The first wanted to leave but could not; the second wanted Morgan’s head, and the last simply wanted the whole mess ended as soon as possible. Morgan interviewed the pilot of one of the vice admiral’s ships, who had been captured in the fireship raid, and got the background on Don Alonzo’s mission. He now learned, if he’d not already known, that he was the target of this mission; the pilot told him that it was the “loss and ruin of Porto Bello, and many others” that spurred the Crown to action and that the Spanish force was intent on “destroying as many of [the English pirates] as possible.” The news put into doubt Don Alonzo’s offer of free passage. The pilot spoke of the bitterness the Spanish people felt at Morgan’s raids: “Of all which damages and hostilities committed here by the English,” he told the Welshman, “very dismal lamentations have oftentimes penetrated the ears both of the Catholic King and Council, to whom belongs the care and preservation of this New World.” The pilot also divulged the battle orders given by Don Alonzo to his men, and they were tough: “Having given a very good supper to his people,” the man said, “he persuaded them neither to take nor give any quarter to the English that should fall into their hands.”
Time was against Morgan. As the pilot spoke, there were frigates full of musketeers cresting the waves of the North Sea on a rescue mission to Maracaibo. Morgan had jiggled a main strand of the spiderweb that was the Spanish Empire; the news had radiated along the trade routes, and soldiers would soon be on the way from Panama to check on the disturbance. Morgan had been fortunate with Don Alonzo, but he could not afford to linger to try his luck again. There was, however, one weak link in the system: the Maracaiboans. They wanted him gone. Morgan sent Don Alonzo an offer to leave the town unmolested in return for safe passage out, but he could have no expectation that it would be accepted. He offered the good citizens a deal: the return of their prisoners and no torching of the city in return for 30,000 pieces of eight and 500 beeves. The Spanish paid up: after, that is, getting Morgan down to 20,000 pesos, or $1 million in modern terms; they were merchants, after all, and used to haggling.
Finally the citizens collected the funds and paid off the Welshman with huge relief. But then Morgan tweaked the conditions of the deal. He would leave the town alone, but now he told the citizens to go to Don Alonzo and get him to let the privateers sail off. He did not want the castle’s guns blazing away at him as he ran the channel; his ships would be sitting ducks. To motivate the messengers, Morgan announced that he’d keep the remaining townspeople captive until the vice admiral gave in.
The captives must have cursed him under their breath. But they elected representatives and sent them “beseeching and supplicating” Don Alonzo to let Morgan go; if he didn’t, “the sword and the gallows” awaited them. Don Alonzo, humiliated first by Morgan and now by his own countrymen, reacted with disgust: “If you had been as loyal to your King in hindering the entry of these Pirates,” he told them, “as I shall do their going out, you had never caused these troubles, neither to yourselves, nor to our whole nation; which has suffered so much through your pusillanimity. In a word, I shall never grant your request; but shall endeavour to maintain that respect which is due to my King, according to my duty.” Old Spain thundered at the colonists. But Don Alonzo’s real audience for the note, which was no doubt copied in triplicate, was back in Madrid, awaiting word of Morgan’s demise. He was building a legal case for the disaster that was unfolding.
The deal was off. Morgan, who had bought time to think, now began perfecting a secret plan; this one was his alone. The first thing he did was to tally up and divide the loot from the mission; if he was going to lose a ship in the breakout, he didn’t want it to be the one carrying all the silver. When this was done, the sum came to 250,000 pieces of eight ($12.5 million), not to mention the “huge quantity of merchandise and slaves.” It was his richest haul yet, bigger than Portobelo (250,000 pesos in total, without the value of the goods and slaves), bigger even than L’Ollonais’s near-legendary strike in this very same town two years earlier. He’d surpassed L’Ollonais in every way. Now all he had to do was get the treasure home.
Having drained every last bit of information from the pilot (and treating him splendidly in return), the buccaneer commander now knew much more about Don Alonzo than his opponent did about him. It could be said of Morgan the same thing that was said about Cromwell, who had created his career: that “he read men as others read books.” Morgan studied the way the Spaniard had arrayed his forces and his arms, and he concluded that Don Alonzo expected an attack by land. It was the obvious choice. Morgan’s men were past masters when it came to storming castles, while at sea they were amateurs. He saw that Don Alonzo was digging trenches and fortifying his landward positions. The muzzles of the guns were pointed away from the sea. Don Alonzo was not a complicated tactician: What you saw was what you got. Morgan decided to play to the man’s certainties.
In plain sight of the castle’s lookouts, canoes were unloaded from Morgan’s ships, and men could soon be seen climbing down into them. The boats then rowed toward the shoreline. Once there they were concealed behind trees as they presumably unloaded the buccaneers and headed back to the main ships empty except for two or three oarsmen. This went on all afternoon, and Don Alonzo drew the obvious conclusion: Morgan was unloading his men for a land assault.
He was doing nothing of the sort. The canoes were full of men as they left the ships, but when they reached the shore, the men simply lay down on the bottom of the craft and returned to the ships, Roderick and the others lying with their backs in the brackish water that sloshed at the bottom of the rowboats, wondering if this childish trick could really work. When the small boats returned to the ships, Roderick and the others climbed up the ropes on the side hidden from Don Alonzo’s watchful eyes, then made their way over to the side facing the Spanish and repeated the process. Don Alonzo again underestimated the imagination of his enemy, convinced that the men he was facing were simple and crude. The battlements of the castle that looked out over the water were left practically deserted as Don Alonzo massed his men for a midnight raid.
Night came, and with it an ebbing tide. With his men hidden out of sight, Morgan softly pulled his anchors up and let the currents slowly take them through the channel. When they were even with the castle, the ships sprang to life: Sails suddenly blossomed white against the moonlight on vessel after vessel. The canvas billowed in the night breeze, and the ships picked up speed. With what must have been a sick feeling of dread, Don Alonzo saw what was happening and wheeled his cannon to the seaside ports. They blasted away at the departing ships, but Morgan was now just out of range and fired back not in self-defense but with a derisive salute. The Spaniards could not reach him, and Don Alonzo could do nothing but watch his hopes sail with the buccaneers; the Crown would not take lightly his being outwitted twice.
Don Alonzo was arrested and put in chains, then transported back to Spain on the silver galleons. “I shall not find a person in the Kingdom of Spain that will testify in my favor,” he complained in his initial report on the battle, and he was indeed found guilty of having acted rashly. But the war tribunal of the Council of the Indies voided the conviction and freed the star-crossed admiral. He’d at least attempted to fight Morgan, and his initiative was clear in the testimony. To condemn his rigid, top-down style and admit that he’d been bested by the very flexiblility and ingenuity that found little place in the Spanish system would be to implicate the entire system of governance in the far-flung kingdoms.
Why, it might be asked here, does it seem that the Spanish never won these showdowns with the pirates? In fact, it is a misconception: The Spanish did regularly defeat pirates in battle throughout the history of their New World possessions, and the historical records are littered with tales of buccaneers who ended their days on the enemy’s beach or in his prisons. Just not Morgan. The Spanish had many handicaps: distance that made it nearly impossible to coordinate a common defense of distant cities or relieve besieged towns in time to do any good; rivalries between provincial governors; stifling bureaucracy that handicapped provincial leaders’ ability to respond quickly to threats; bad, outdated weapons; restrictions on privately importing new, up-to-date weapons; a lack of money to maintain armaments; dependence on amateur militias to face off against hugely experienced buccaneers; the fact that flight and not fight often presented the most appealing option to soldiers and townspeople faced with a buccaneer army; the myth of the all-conquering Morgan; the fact that the buccaneers did not occupy their territories, thus giving the Spanish a chance to return to their normal lives soon after the invasion; and Morgan’s strategic brilliance and his ability to leverage huge numbers of pirates against weak fortifications.
As for Morgan, he offloaded the prisoners on the way back to Jamaica, keeping only those unfortunates from Gibraltar who had still not paid their ransom. He sailed for Port Royal, having exposed the core weaknesses of the Spanish system. Happy and rich as Croesus, Morgan was ascending even higher in the firmament of outlaws. His New World dreams were coming true: He was on his way to becoming a wealthy, landed aristocrat. With every victory a little more space opened up between him and the Rodericks of the world.