10
When it comes to rating the enemies of the buccaneers, disease has to be mentioned first. It carried off more pirates than did enemy bullets. Then the Spanish. And then weather. Morgan had been lucky in his expeditions to avoid shipwrecking storms. But when one sails the Caribbean year after year, one eventually gets hit. And now, on the return trip from the magical victory at Maracaibo, it was Morgan’s turn.
Esquemeling is light on detail, but the ships clearly hit a tropical storm, if not a hurricane, while fairly close to the shoreline. “They were surprised by a great tempest,” he writes, “which forced them to cast anchor in the depth of five or six fathom water,” or thirty to thirty-six feet. The boats, many of them undecked, could not ride out the tempest and were forced to pull up their anchors and face into the waves. It was not just drowning that concerned them: “If on either side they should have been cast on shore,” says the surgeon, “either to fall into the hands of the Spaniards or of the Indians, they would certainly have obtained no mercy.”
A storm in the age of sail was a terrifying event. The wind could tear the rigging to shreds. “What especially astonished us,” wrote Raveneau de Lussan, who barely survived a “tornado” at sea, “was the fact that our yards, sheets, braces and other rigging were cut off as clean as if hatchets had been used.” The mainmast could come down if the sails were not lowered quickly. The rats that lived in the holds would sometimes emerge during violent gales, seemingly maddened by the storm, and attack passengers, especially the sick and injured. And the men worked in terrible conditions: If the storm hit at night, they’d be tossed out on a slippery deck unable even to see the man next to them. Ropes caught in the blocks, spars snapped and flew off into the blackness, and flying tackle could brain an un-suspecting crewman.
The ocean a buccaneer sailed into was not the mapped, GPS’ed body of water we know today. Once they left the harbor, even the most forward-thinking buccaneers entered a world of superstition and hearsay. There were a thousand legends of the sea that mariners still adhered to, and many of them concerned storms. It was a world in which the elements were subject to the whims of witches and war-locks who “at their pleasure send hail, rain tempest, thunder and lightning” to sink their enemy’s vessels. Roderick believed that witches could disturb the air by digging a hole in the ground, filling it with water, and then stirring the water lightly with a finger, or by boiling hogs’ bristles in a pot; his father had told him the evil wretches could call up a hurricane by tossing a little sea sand into the air. This led to a ban on women aboard. As late as 1808, the English admiral Cuthbert Collingwood wrote that “I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel.” One Mrs. Hicks and her daughter went to trial for witchcraft in 1716, and the prosecution claimed they’d created storms by swirling their bare feet in a pot and stirring up soapsuds into a foam. Or storms could be caused by a black dragon that emerged from the clouds and plunged its head into the sea, drinking up the water and any unlucky ship that happened into its way. The dragon might be a waterspout, but the danger was just as real; the only way to avoid it was to shout at the monster or to hold a knife with a black handle, read the Gospel of St. John, and then slice the knife across the waterspout (as Columbus’s crew did once, successfully).
It was not just raging seas that concerned seamen. Above a sailor’s head was another world, the cloud sea that sat atop the white cirrus vapor. It was believed that vessels sailed on this ocean in the sky. Roderick told the story of the sailor from Bristol who, when navigating this sea, dropped his knife overboard; the knife fell through the clouds and impaled itself in the wooden table in his home. As there was a world above, there was also a subterranean civilization of which mariners could catch only glimpses. Sailors swore that in clear water they sometimes saw buildings, church steeples, whole cities underneath the sea, and even heard the tolling of the cathedral bells on lonely nights when no ship or lighthouse was in view. In the huge troughs that followed powerful waves, sailors claimed to have seen the peaked roofs and winding stairs of the houses of the giants that lived below. Even the more familiar waters of the North Sea were subject to visions: St. Elmo’s fire, the electrical phenomenon that seems to touch sails and ropes with a white flame, was believed to be a sign that St. Elmo, patron saint of sailors, was protecting the ship against tempests. “On these occasions, the sailors first recite hymns and litanies,” wrote a French author in the eighteenth century, “and when, as if often happens, the light still remains, they salute it by a whistling sound.” When the light disappeared, sailors would call “Lucky journey” after it. Certainly, on that voyage home, Morgan’s men would have searched the black horizon for some sign of the saving light.
The buccaneers made it through the tempest, only to face another one when they arrived home. If the privateers had a champion in London, it was George Monck, the Duke of Albemarle, who had once depended on Henry Morgan’s uncle Thomas as his second-in-command. This unabashed imperialist led the anti-Spanish faction in Charles II’s circle, and to him Jamaica was an outpost of the empire, an empire that should be expanded and fortified wherever and whenever possible. Monck had begun his career as a Royalist but switched sides twice, first to Cromwell, when his star was on the rise, and then to Charles II, whom he’d almost single-handedly brought to power, something Charles never forgot. Winston Churchill described him with sincere if cynical admiration as the ultimate soldier’s soldier, the kind who “waited about doing their duty on a short view from day to day until there is no doubt whether the tide is on the ebb or the flow; and who then, with the appearance of great propriety and complete self-abnegation, with steady, sterling qualities of conduct if not of heart, move slowly, cautiously, forward.” That sentence, which imitates Monck’s sluggish and deliberate style, doesn’t make him seem a romantic figure, but the privateers and their supporters were romantics only to novelists. To men in power, they were a heavy lever with which to prod and dislodge the Spanish. And so Monck argued their case with vehemence.
But Portobelo and now Maracaibo had been turning points. “We interpret what these nations have done, and are still doing, as insults,” read a report to the queen of Spain from the Council of War of the Indies. “It can be said that there isn’t a port or a coast in the Indies that they have not tried to invade or have indeed invaded.” The councilors went on to say that it was clear the English did not respect any treaties and that they’d taken advantage of the “passivity of Her Majesty’s subjects,” something the council was determined to change. The Spanish, in their fury, considered every option, even the crackpot schemes of an Irish slave trader named Sir Richard White who came up with a host of options for getting to Morgan: paying off the governors of Jamaica and Barbados to rein in the privateers; seeding Cartagena, Havana, and other cities with 1,500 Flemish or Milanese mercenaries who would rise up and “help in the confrontations” when the Brethren attacked; and even penetrating the enemy’s cities himself and spying on their fortifications. White was clearly something of a con artist: He demanded 7 million pesos ($357 million) and “a frigate to Cádiz” to arrange the truce, along with the right to continue trading in slaves on the Main (which was illegal for a non-Spaniard), the guarantee that the queen would pay all his expenses and additional, unspecified “voluntary donations” from the viceroys of Peru and New Spain. For this he tantalized the queen with his personal access to the governors of the English colonies and the rather hazy intelligence that the pirates “are not united, have no government and are not able to feed themselves well.” White’s high intrigue came to nothing, but the Spanish anger did not abate, and others in the English leadership nodded sympathetically at their complaints. The privateers were a menace. The secretary of state, Lord Arlington, was the leader of those who wanted closer relations with Spain and an end to the pirates’ reign. (He’d spent several years in Madrid and was so identified with its causes that his code name in the French ambassador’s dispatches was “the Spaniard.”) The news of Portobelo had infuriated him; the queen regent was insisting on reparations and that Modyford be sacked. Arlington replied with the threadbare party line: The attacks were simply in response to Spanish provocations, and the only way to end them was by a treaty that recognized English interests in the region; only then would the king’s subjects treat the queen’s subjects “with love and respect.” In the streets of London, however, Morgan was a hero, a Protestant avenger in a time when English military victories were rarer and rarer (the Dutch having recently humiliated the navy not once but twice). London had been consumed by the Great Fire of 1666, and plague had struck high and low; it seemed that one annus horribilis followed another. It would be difficult for the king to chastise the hero of Portobelo, especially as suspicions of Charles’s Catholic affinities lingered among the common people. Hemmed in by circumstances, Arlington fobbed off the Spanish demands while sending Modyford cryptic, icy notes. Arlington’s hopes lay with William Godolphin, the emissary working in Madrid to get a treaty signed. But Morgan’s escapades were making his job impossible. “This way of warring is neither honourable nor profitable to His Majesty,” Arlington wrote Modyford, “[and] he is endeavouring to put an end to it.”
So when Morgan returned from Maracaibo on May 16, 1669, some things were the same as always: A significant percentage of the town’s populace was going wild at the dockside, their shouts interrupted by the throaty salutes of cannon. The tavern owners were pulling the barrels of Madeira from their basements and buying every drop of rum they could get their hands on; the whores’ prices were rising by the minute, as 450 nouveau riche buccaneers would soon need servicing; the merchants readied their scales for the gobs of melted silver the pirates would soon be bringing in and slamming down on their counters with their filthy hands. In short, Port Royal was humming. But there was one face that was missing in the revelry: Modyford’s. When Morgan scanned the line of dignitaries waiting to grasp his hand and realized the governor was not there, he instantly knew that something in London had changed. Morgan hurried to Spanish Town to get the news. As he sat glumly over a glass of punch, he learned that Modyford’s son had sent a letter on the last ship to arrive from England, painting a depressing picture of the privateers’ fortunes. Monck was dying of dropsy (he’d pass away on January 3, 1670, surrounded by his veteran comrades, “like a Roman general…with all his officers about him”). The government was leaning toward calling Portobelo a rogue action. The Spanish demands were getting a hearing.
Morgan must have winced. He’d just returned from sacking Maracaibo and blowing up the queen regent’s Armada de Barlovento. What, he surely wondered, would Lord Arlington say to that?
Just over a month later, as bleary-eyed corsairs spent the last of their credit, Modyford announced the new era. Port Royal’s leaders—including Morgan—marched into the marketplace on June 24 as a drummer called the crowds to attention. Rumors had swept through the town of a coming change, and now it was made official. A proclamation was read, praising Morgan for destroying the enemy fleet and making null and void any commissions he’d issued. “From now on,” the crier proclaimed, “[we] prohibit any acts of hostility against the vassals of His Catholic Majesty by whatsoever person or persons.” And just like that it was over. The glorious tear of the Port Royal pirates had run its course. The crowd dispersed, some of them surely bewildered by what they’d just heard. The Spanish were now their “good neighbours and friends”? It was as if Modyford had announced that Jamaica had been declared an arctic region and rum was to be outlawed.
Still, Modyford had been a friend to the buccaneers, and he was now telling them to cease and desist. Lord Arlington had even asked him, on behalf of the king, how to “best dispose of this very valuable body of privateers, and whether it were not practicable to oblige them to betake themselves to planting, merchandizing, or service in his Majesty’s men-of-war.” The question of what to do with the Brethren once the Crown no longer had use for them was a tricky one. The old fears of a pirate army’s terrorizing Jamaica resurfaced. Modyford must have shaken his head at the question: It was as if the king were asking if he couldn’t find a few nice jobs for the drunken murderers they’d used to protect the empire and of whom they now wanted to dispose. Lord Arlington did not have to meet the pirates on High Street on his way to church. Some of these men would as soon cut off your face as say hello.
Modyford came up with a novel solution. On June 25, 1669, he sent the Conde de Molina, the Spanish ambassador to England, a letter. The fact that he was the governor of an upstart colony, completely illegal in Spanish eyes, addressing the representative of a world-straddling empire did not seem to cross his mind in writing this amazing document. “I know and perhaps you are not altogether ignorant of your weakness in these parts,” he wrote, “the thinness of your inhabitants, want of hearts, armes and knowledge in warre, the open opposition of some and doubtfull obedience or of other of the Indians.” Modyford warned the ambassador that, in the event of a permanent peace between England and Spain, the French corsairs would simply take up where Morgan had left off—unless the Spanish agreed to his proposal: namely, that they hire the Brethren as a mercenary army to protect the Main. “What we could have donn, the French will doe, unless these men may by your intercession be brought to serve your Master.” If the queen regent refused, Modyford predicted that the Port Royal privateers would join their Gallic counterparts or sail without commissions, taking any job they could rather than starve. Modyford was apparently serious, but the letter fairly seethes with the Jamaicans’ deep disdain for the Spaniard. Lord Arlington admonished Modyford: The proposal, he wrote, “will scarce be believed a practicall one.” The Spanish recognized it as a barely disguised insult and never responded. Modyford did come up with more practical ideas later on: that the ex-privateers join the dangerous and lucrative logwood trade, which was thriving. He predicted that two-thirds of the Jamaican pirates could be employed this way and that the English could soon dominate the market, providing handsome tax revenues to the king. He did advise Arlington not to try to get tough with the privateers: “Other more violent ways will but make them in despair or revenge join with foreign nations or set up for themselves.” It was the old fear of the merchants: the buccaneers’ turning their guns on them.
All these possibilities hinged on Spain’s making a real peace in the West Indies, which Arlington thought likely but Modyford said he “could but faintly hope for.” Modyford felt that he knew the Spanish. In his letter to Modina was a frank assessment of Spanish strength and a cynical evaluation of their aims. Arlington was willfully deluded: Spain would never open its golden lands to other nations. The Spaniards would fight until they were bled dry.
Modyford could not know how right he was.
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 Janeas 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.
Now one report tripped in on the heels of another. A privateer arrived in Port Royal having just interviewed one Edward Browne, an English turncoat who had gone native, converted to Catholicism, and moved to Cartagena; when the privateer captured the boat he’d been sailing on, Browne told him that a declaration of war against Jamaica had been broadcast in the streets there. News floated in that the same proclamation had been cried out in Portobelo, with the added specification that no quarter was to be given. The governor of the Dutch colony of Curaçao wrote to Modyford urgently, telling him he held in his hands a copy of the queen’s letter, suggesting that the order was being distributed widely. Then another English ship, the Amity, was captured by Spanish corsairs near Granada. Facts begot rumors: A new armada was on the way from Spain, an invasion was planned. Suddenly the whole North Sea seemed alive with enemy activity.
On June 11 came another escalation. Rivero appeared, not off the coast of the Main but right on the northern Jamaican shoreline, accompanied by a converted French prize, La Gallardina. Again disguised under English colors, again insulting his victims before the attack began (this time he called them “doggs and rogues”), he tried to run down a trader’s vessel, which managed to land on the beach before Rivero could board it. The Spanish landed right behind and chased the men on foot into the interior, exchanging musket fire. But the Spanish had little chance in the thick jungle and soon gave up, taking the trader’s sloop as a consolation prize. Modyford barely had time to digest the news of this probe before he learned that Rivero had brazenly returned to the north shore, landed thirty men, and burned houses of the plantation owners who lived there on the very fringe of the English empire. The war was drawing closer to Port Royal.
Rivero left a message behind, calling out Morgan to war by name:
I, Captain Manuel Rivero Pardal to ye chief of ye squadron of privateers in Jamaica. I am he who this year have done that which follows. I went on shore at Caimonos and burnt twenty houses and fought with Captain Ary and took from him a ketch laden with provisions and a canoe. I am he who took Captain Baines [Bernard] and did carry the prize to Cartagena, and am now arrived at this coast and have burnt it.
And I am come to seek Admiral Morgan, with two ships of war of twenty guns, and having seen this, I crave he would come out upon the coast and seek me, that he might see the valour of the Spaniards. And because I had no time I did not come to the mouth of Port Royal to speak by word of mouth in the name of my King, whom God preserve. Dated 5th of July 1670.
Rivero’s delusions of grandeur can bring only one figure to mind: Don Quixote. Cervantes could have been writing about the Portuguese adventurer as well as his hero: “He was seized with the strangest whim that ever entered the brain of a madman…. It was highly expedient and necessary, not only for his own honor, but also for the good of the public, that he should profess knight-errantry, and ride through the world in arms, and seek adventures…, redressing all manner of grievances, and courting all occasions of exposing himself to such dangers, as in the event would entitle him to everlasting renown.” Rivero, at least, tilted at more than windmills and sailors’ shacks. He’d taken the war to the English. He was attacking at will; he was exploiting the isolation of the Jamaican settlers; he was clearly as daring and independent as any of the privateers, not waiting for orders from Madrid. It was as if they were facing a Spanish double of Henry Morgan.
The Jamaicans were in a fever. One resident of Port Royal sat down to write this report on June 28: “The Spaniards have landed to leeward, burnt many houses, taken prisoners, and marched off,” he recounted. “They last appeared off Wealthy Wood, but finding armed men on the shore, stood off to sea…. We talk of nothing here but burning Santiago de Cuba, being the first places that granted out commissions against us.” The English had feasted on Spanish settlements for so long that it had seemed the natural order of things; and in fact the Spanish attacks paled beside the exploits of Morgan and other privateers. Now the hunters felt what it was like to be the hunted. Men watched the horizon in trepidation, hoarded their powder, met with the neighbors, and exchanged the latest rumors in low voices. There was only one solution, of course. The same letter writer revealed that all the privateers had been called in from other ports and assured they would not be arrested for fighting the Spanish.
It was an unsettled time. The Jamaicans were convinced that their colony was in danger from invaders. Preachers continued to predict that Port Royal was angering God into retribution. Seventeenth-century experts would have told Port Royalists to watch for signs that could predict the cataclysm suggested by the tremors that shook their town regularly: They should watch for the raging of the sea when there were no winds to cause it; a sulfurous smell “from the petulant Exhalations long inclosed within the Earth” (one author noted that landmasses with fewer “pores” were at a higher risk of tremors); any smoke, flame, and ashes shooting out of the ground; a sudden cold or calm breeze of air or a thin streak of “cold vapor”; noise coming from underground, especially “terrible groanings and thunderings”; and the forsaking of trees by birds, who then sat trembling on the ground. But the possibility of an earthquake concerned the people less than did an invasion by their archenemy.
Modyford yearned for word from London in this crucial time, but the ships that arrived from there carried no letters from Arlington. As in so many situations in the past, he was being left to his own devices. He called an assembly meeting for June 29, and there the planters and merchants stated that the queen regent clearly had decided “to make open Warr against the Subjects of our Sovereign Lord the King in these Parts.” If they did nothing, the assembly expected that an invasion would soon follow. The result would be an exodus: The plantations would be abandoned, their cattle and slaves run to the jungle, and the settlers forced to start over again or disappear from the West Indies.
Feeling themselves under threat, the assembly was in no mood to tie Admiral Morgan’s hands. Diplomatic language was tossed aside; the Jamaicans wished there to be no misunderstanding in what they wanted. If the Spanish surrendered, he was to act with mercy. But if they did not, Morgan was given a mandate for utter destruction:
If…the Spaniards and Slaves are deaf to your Proposalls you are then with all expedition to destroy and burn all Habitations and leave it as a Wilderness putting the Men Slaves to the Sword and making the Women Slaves Prisoners to bee brought hither and so sold for the account of your fleet and Army.
There were other powers thrown in: He could free any slaves who switched to the English side. He could impose martial law. He’d even be able to give commissions to any allied ships he encountered at sea. Modyford hedged his bets at the end of the instructions, in case a copy of a peace treaty arrived on the next ship from London. Morgan was told to “exceed [the Spanish] in civility and humanity, endeavouring to make all people sensible of his moderation and good nature and his…loathness to spill the blood of man.” Morgan must have chuckled over that last part. But the document was a deadly serious statement. It was a declaration out of the Iliad. Its message? Total war.
The quickness with which the English responded underscores how they repeatedly gained the advantage over their Spanish enemies. The locals made the decision to attack without waiting for London’s approval, placed the mission in the hands of one man, gave him every power to fulfill his objective, and then stood back and let Morgan shape the expedition. And on the crucial issue of money, which hamstrung Spanish governors again and again, the English didn’t need to raise a penny. The privateers would be paid in swag. The privateers and their backers had, by necessity, grown to regard themselves as masters of their own fate. Their enemies had never been granted the same privilege.
Drummers marched through the streets of Jamaican cities calling for volunteers to man Morgan’s ships, promising that all debts of those who sailed would be forgiven. Word came from Bermuda that the men there were eager to join, furious after a series of Spanish attacks on local ships. Morgan notified the Brethren at Tortuga that a major action was under way and that Île-à-Vache off the southern coast of Hispaniola would be the rendezvous point. “He wrote diverse letters to all the ancient and expert pirates there inhabiting…,” Esquemeling remembered, “and to the planters and hunters of Hispaniola giving them to understand his intentions, and desiring their appearance at said place….” Other sources confirmed that everyone wanted in. John Morris signed up for the expedition in his ship the Dolphin. Lawrence Prince pledged to bring his fifty-ton Pearl, which he’d bought from Commodore Mings years before, after the old admiral had captured it from the Spanish. The Pearl had recently added six more guns to its original four, and Prince signed on sixty men to man the ship. Morgan sent urgent word for his flagship, the Satisfaction, to return from its patrolling of Spanish waters, but no one knew exactly where she was. With its twenty-two cannon, the Satisfaction was a floating battery, and he needed her for the challenge ahead.
The twenty-nine-year-old Roderick had never risen to the status of captain, mostly because of his disdain for networking among the Brethren and his lack of capital to buy a boat. But he swore his allegiance once again to Morgan, and he was one of many. One captain of a merchant ship, ordered by the ship’s nervous owner to sail to Campeche for a load of logwood, thus putting himself out of reach of the war mobilization, secretly recruited some of the Port’s renowned buccaneers, loaded extra cannon into his hold, and went rogue. He quickly came across and overpowered a fast, eight-gun Spanish ship, renamed her the Thomas, and sailed both vessels to Morgan’s rendezvous. He was not alone. The buccaneers and hunters of Tortuga and Hispaniola “flocked to the place assigned in huge numbers, with ships, canoes and boats.” Some of the Hispaniola contingent could find no vessels, so they trekked across the island, battling the Spanish as they went, until they arrived at the shore looking out on Île-à-Vache. In calling out these cow skinners, Morgan was harking back to the very roots of West Indian piracy. As they emerged out of the woods, their leather stained black with blood, their hair filthy and matted, their faces splashed with mud but with muskets polished, they must have appeared like shades from the Caribbean past. The legendary sharpshooting boucaniers, the men who lived as free as wild animals, the fathers of them all. Morgan was summoning ghosts.
Taboos were broken. Among the recruits was, reportedly, one “small, old and ugly, woman…who was publicly said to be a sorceress.” The Spaniards reported that the buccaneers were disregarding the dire superstition against women on ships, let alone witches, and letting the Englishwoman aboard “to predict and warn them, telling them what they should do.” There were even rumors (soon to be proved false) that Prince Rupert was sailing from England with twenty-five men-of-war and 5,000 crack troops. “No doubt this noble fleet would in a short time overrun and conquer all these Indies,” wrote Richard Browne, surgeon general on Morgan’s fleet, “but without Admiral Morgan and his old privateers things cannot go as successful as expected.” For Morgan knew every creek, every Spanish tactic, and, even outnumbered and outgunned, the king could be assured that the Brethren “will either win…manfully or die courageously.” Browne and others began to speak of the coming mission as the first step in taking the whole Caribbean for England.
As pirates, fortune seekers, and disreputables streamed toward Île-à-Vache from every corner of the Caribbean, Morgan finally traced the Satisfaction to the Cayman Islands and ordered it back to Port Royal. Modyford sent one last letter to London, hoping to cover for what was shaping up to be a scorched-earth campaign. Modyford as always found a way to depict this battle as the last resort of courageous underdogs. It might be “a fond, rash action for a petty Governor without money to make and entertaine war with the richest, and not long since the powerfullest, Prince of Europe,” he wrote, but his hand had been forced. Jamaica was under attack, and his solution was to fight now to prevent a complete takeover, all at no cost to the English government. Arlington was also notified, and Modyford even asked that his superior send frigates in case of an attack launched on Jamaica from Spain itself. He must have known the chances of being reinforced from London were slim to none.
On August 1, Morgan received his official commission. The privateers would not be paid but would depend on “the old pleasing account of No purchase, No pay,” meaning that their only compensation for the raid would be the booty they recovered. The rest was open-ended; Morgan could attack where and when he chose. The fleet was coming together: The local merchants were lending money at a furious pace to privateers in need of sail, rigging, and powder. The Satisfaction was now ready to serve as Morgan’s flagship, while other substantial vessels and veteran captains lined up behind it: the frigate Lilly, commanded by Richard Norman, and the six-gun Fortune, commanded by Richard Dobson, along with the seventy-ton Mayflower with Joseph Bradley at the helm. Morgan’s old comrades from past battles played a large part in the new mission; clearly he valued loyalty and would later rail against the backstabbers and gossipers whom he saw around him. “The remoteness of this place gives so much opportunity to the tongue and hand of malice,” he wrote, “that the greatest innocence cannot be protected without much care and watchfulness.” He kept his early allies close throughout his life, but it would become clear that he trusted very few men.
Morgan sailed on August 24, but soon after he was back at Port Royal: a letter had arrived from Arlington. Dated June 12, it dashed cold water on the Jamaicans’ war fever. Rivero’s attack “is not at all to be wondered at after such hostilities as your men have acted upon their territories.” The king was seeking to put an end to privateering once and for all. A breakthrough in Madrid is “daily expected”; the English negotiator, William Godolphin, was working feverishly to finish the treaty. The main obstacle, as Arlington saw it, was the Spanish resentment over what the privateers had done. All in all, there was not much in the letter except a rehashing of Arlington’s old complaints, but there was one key sentence that changed everything. “His Majesty’s pleasure,” Arlington wrote, “is, that in what state soever the privateers are at the receipt of this letter he keep them so till we have a final answer from Spain.” This gave Arlington room to maneuver in any eventuality, and he cannily included a final injunction to Modyford: All attacks on land were strictly forbidden.
But Modyford had spotted the out: The fleet had been at sea when the letter arrived, and Modyford would not bring them in. Morgan could drive his fleet straight through that loophole, and there was nothing Arlington could say about it. The governor mouthed some words to Morgan about acting “with all moderation possible in carrying on this war,” and Morgan promised to follow orders, except, that is, if necessity required him to land on Spanish territory for supplies or if he learned that the Spanish were laying up ammunition and provisions for an attack on Jamaica. With a little playacting, Arlington’s language had been unspooled. Modyford assured Arlington that “those rugged fellows [had] submitted to a stricter discipline than they could ever yet be brought to,” but something closer to the opposite was true: The attacks on Captain Bart and on Jamaica had made this mission personal for the buccaneers. Modyford wrote Arlington and insisted that the Spanish were still “borne up with false measures of their strength” and that Godolphin’s mission was in vain. Knowing that he’d just unleashed the largest pirate army in the history of the West Indies, Modyford spoke with macabre wit of what awaited the enemy gathered in their towns and cities, unaware of the storm gathering over the horizon. “A little more suffering will inform them of their condition,” he told Arlington. “And force them to capitulations more suitable to the sociableness of man’s nature.”
Morgan finally sailed for Île-à-Vache. But first he headed northwest to Cuba and scouted for any activity in the South Cays. John Morris stayed to monitor the area while Morgan headed to Santiago, the focal point of Jamaican anger. His first move was in keeping with his mandate: Destroy any invasion force. But there was no Rivero, no ships of any kind. Having done this basic reconnaissance, Morgan headed for Tortuga; in the West Indies, hurricane season runs from about June through the end of November, and Morgan was now in the heart of it. A storm struck, whipping spray into the pirates’ faces as they rushed to bring down the sails, with the wind howling in the rigging. When the gales had died down, Morgan reassembled his little navy, and all arrived safely in Tortuga, where he recruited some French buccaneers to his cause.
Arriving at the Île-à-Vache on September 12, he found a handful of small vessels waiting for him with impatient buccaneers who had answered his call. Morgan knew that more were on the way, so he decided to build up the enormous stocks of food it would take to feed his pirate army. Sharpshooters were sent into the woods of Hispaniola to hunt, and they “killed there a huge number of beasts, and salted them.” Another large contingent of 400 men in five vessels was sent to the Spanish Main to roust up beef and maize. The rest of the men fell to repairing the damage done to the sails and rigging during the open-sea gale; more work was required after October 7, when “so violent a storm” hit the fleet that “all the vessels except the Admiral’s were driven on shore.” Three ships were lost, and the fleet was getting increasingly crowded with the droves of men who arrived daily in dinghies, in canoes, or on foot. Morgan wrote to Modyford complaining that he had more men than ships to carry them; the response to his call-up had been unusually strong.
As the men at Île-à-Vache sweated in the broiling sun over ropes and planking, the 400 men under Morgan’s vice admiral Collier took five weeks to cover the 450 miles to their target, the grain port of Río de la Hacha, west of the Gulf of Venezuela. Once they arrived, they were becalmed and couldn’t make the harbor. The pirates fumed. The townspeople watched the limp-sailed ships, hid their goods, and made their decisions about whether to resist; Río de la Hacha had once been the center of a dazzling pearl fishery and had been visited by corsairs before, so the residents knew the drill. Finally, on February 24, Collier managed to catch enough of a breeze to land his men two miles from the town, where they disembarked at seven in the morning with such discipline and speed that the Spanish thought they must be soldiers from the king’s armies in England. The Spanish “were scared stiff at their first sight of the enemy and did not want to fight.” Some begged the English not to kill them, some ran deep into the woods, and others hid beneath baskets.
Río de la Hacha was a backwater, and Collier expected an easy time of it. The town’s sole fort held four guns and a typically depleted garrison; the only difference this time was some unexpected visitors: a group of forty Spaniards who had attacked Jamaica with Rivero in their ship La Gallardina. The men probably suspected that burning houses and leaving posted threats had not endeared them to Morgan’s men, and so when Collier sent a trumpeter to demand that they lay down their arms, they replied with brio: “No, we cannot surrender because this is a castle belonging to the King. We will only surrender through force of arms.” That last bit indicated that the men felt a need to put up at least some resistance, for the sake of their necks if not their reputations. The Spanish fired their cannon, but casualties were light, and after blasting away at the heathen for a period of twenty-four hours, the Spaniards gave up the fight. Some of the soldiers were found hiding under mattresses, and Collier had two of them executed, one of them for refusing to produce some receipts for valuables; time was as good as treasure on the Main, and the men of La Gallardina had wasted his. “These men come once again from England…,” reported the governor of Santa Marta rather breathlessly, “and…the fifty vessels that compose their armada will come directly here to reunite.” Roderick fell in with one of the squads that now roamed the town and the countryside freely, torturing, gathering up plate, and collecting prisoners. Collier was not as skilled an inquisitor as Morgan, and although his men “in cold blood did a thousand cursed things, “the buccaneers failed to uncover 200,000 pesos ($10 million) hidden within the fort. Finally the locals, wishing to “rid themselves as soon as possible of that inhuman sort of people,” paid a ransom of maize and beef. Collier’s threat to behead those who did not contribute hastened their efforts, and soon the squadron was sailing back to join Morgan. They’d been away for a long five weeks, and every kind of nightmare scenario had been running in Morgan’s head: They’d been captured by the Spanish and given up his secrets; they had happened upon a galleon and decided to skip out on him with their winnings. When he saw all the ships returning, along with the eighty-ton Gallardina, a wave of “infinite joy” washed over the admiral. He needed the ships, the maize, and the information from Collier’s terrified prisoners.
More good news arrived when John Morris sailed into the bay: The irrepressible Manuel Rivero Pardal was dead. Morris had come upon Rivero by sheer accident. After patrolling the coast of Cuba for intelligence about Spanish ship movements and war plans, he’d come up empty. When a storm whipped up, he put his ship in to a sheltered cove on Cuba’s eastern shore. At dusk another vessel came gliding into the bay: the San Pedro y la Fama, also looking for a place to ride out the storm. On seeing the English ship, Rivero was delighted: He had fourteen guns to the Dolphin’s ten, and his crew was primed for battle, “having taken on eighty musketeers and good stores of ammunition, grenadoes and stinkpots.” For Rivero it would be another notch in his belt, but this time he was facing hardened buccaneers, not frightened farmers in the Jamaican wilderness. But at the first shot, his men began abandoning their posts and diving into the water. Their appalled commander tried to rally them, but as he shouted at them to man their guns, a single bullet pierced his throat and he fell.
A bitter moment for Rivero. The spars swayed above him against the blue sky as blood pumped out of his wound and across the deck. The sound of English barrages splintering the side of the Fama alternated with the screams of his soldiers, desperate to escape the privateers who were advancing on them, killing them in the water. If only his musketeers would die like men. Rivero had come to the West Indies to restore Spanish courage; he believed himself divinely ordained to do so. But his men had broken at the first report of a musket. The vision of the buccaneers as unconquerable demigods had triumphed over Rivero’s vision of a new Spanish fighter.
It’s a pity that Rivero didn’t last longer, for with his death Morgan had lost his most spirited enemy. So many of his opponents did not die like men: Rivero had. Who knows what further brilliance the Welshman would have been forced to display had Rivero managed to infuse the Spanish with his outrageous gallantry? The English mocked the Portuguese commander; “that vapouring captain,” the surgeon Richard Browne called him, “that so much annoyed Jamaica in burning houses and robbing the people and sent that insolent challenge to Admiral Morgan.” Modyford sent the commissions from the queen regent that Rivero had been carrying on his vessel back to his superior in London, “whereby his Lordship will find him a person of great value amongst them.” He also sent the original canvas copy of Rivero’s bold challenge to Morgan, from which, Modyford said, one could guess at Rivero’s vanity. The cowardice of his men colored the English judgment of their commander. But Rivero had died like a conquistador, a rare event on the Spanish Main. At least one group of musketeers would soon follow his example.
Other ships streamed in, fresh from their own adventures, but more men came than ships to carry them. The men were packed aboard even the tiniest boats until they were practically hanging off the sides: The French sloop Le Cerf had forty buccaneers crammed into every available space. Some vessels were so ill-suited for naval battle that they didn’t even have a cannon on board, such as the appropriately named Virgin Queen. Some impatient captains couldn’t restrain themselves from freelancing: Three privateer captains “went up the river of Nicaragua” and stormed a fort that had been built to stop French corsairs from penetrating to the cities farther inland. The Spaniards riddled the ships with shot, killing sixteen and wounding eighteen, but the buccaneers persevered and stormed the castle. When they interviewed the castellan at cutlass point, he admitted that four hours earlier he’d sent a canoe to warn the city of Granada, site of Morgan’s first triumph. The buccaneers put their strongest paddlers in a canoe and sent them rocketing up the river after them. It took the double-manned vessel three days to catch the messengers, but they did it, and stopped the alarm from spreading. The rogue buccaneers entered the sleepy town as conquerors. Not everyone had Morgan’s luck, however: His men extorted just over £7 in silver per man, “which is nothing to what they had five years hence.” Modyford gave them a slap on the wrist when they returned to Port Royal and sent them to Île-à-Vache to bulk up Morgan’s forces.
As Morgan’s army grew, the Spanish began to experience what Jamaica had suffered through months earlier: reports of war accumulating ominously one after the other. Letters arrived in Santa Marta from the terrified residents of Río de la Hacha, describing pitiless buccaneers gathering matériel for battle. Much of the intelligence was astonishingly up to date: fifty ships, 2,000 privateers, with Cartagena or Panama as the target. Other pieces of gossip were less so: The king had sent soldiers from the mainland, went one rumor, while another attested that the Duke of York was behind the entire operation. But all of the gossip pointed toward a mighty fleet on the waves. “Hardly a letter was written which did not report some news of an imminent threat,” wrote historian Peter Earle. Perhaps the most frightening piece of news came from Curaçao: A trader had just pulled into the harbor after having sailed along the coast of Hispaniola, home of the boucaniers. Usually when merchant ships arrived offshore, the blood-spattered wild men would appear from out of the forest to trade their cured meats for the necessities of life. But now few emerged. The woods had been swept clean; the buccaneers had gone to Morgan.
The governor of Cartagena received the reports that pointed toward his city as the most likely destination for Morgan’s men and began to ramp up his response: Farmers in coastal areas were ordered to draw their herds away from any possible landing areas, cutting off the buccaneers from a food source, and citizens in the outlying areas were put on alert to rush to the city’s aid in the event of an attack. Finally the governor called a junta, and military capabilities were enhanced. The city’s defenses were, truth be told, lacking: Equipment was outdated or broken, soldiers had not received their wages for over two years, and the victualing of the garrisons had been neglected. The governor ordered a general call-up: All able-bodied men who could handle a firearm, “whether they were foreigners or citizens,” was ordered to stand ready to man the city’s fifty cannon.
As Morgan’s endeavor sucked men and matériel into its vortex, the Spanish waited.
With Rivero out of the way and his vessels reaching capacity, Morgan spent the days before sailing as a combination quartermaster and port inspector. He toured every ship and made sure it was “well-equipped and clean.” He divided up the maize and beef that had been brought in among the ships. He checked out the forecastles on the larger ships where the men had slung their hammocks and stored their sea chests, his nose flaring at the combined smell of burning sulfur (used to fumigate the vessels), damp canvas, tar, and decaying wood that was the fragrance of the wooden ship. He assigned his underlings double rank: On sea they’d be captains, on land they’d be majors and colonels. Realizing that the fleet was now too large for one commander to direct effectively, he split it in two and put Collier in charge of the second squadron. The little navy was formidable at the top—Morgan’s flagship was a twenty-two-gun floating fortress that would have been a significant warship even in Europe, and it was followed by the French standout St. Catherine with fourteen guns and 110 men. But the size and quality of the ships dropped away drastically, and indeed the more remarkable vessels were the tiniest ones, some too small to host even a single cannon; Morgan fielded five of these fishing smacks. They were essentially troop transports designed to get the buccaneers onto land, where they were at home. The names of the ships were a clue to the mind-set of the men who commanded them. Captains of Morgan’s generation in the West Indies tended to see themselves as gentleman adventurers, not rebels, and their ships were often given names such as Satisfaction, Endeavour, and Prosperous, as if they were nothing more than gleaming yachts that carried aging moguls from Portsmouth to Aruba every year. As later generations became more outlaws than patriots, the names got racier: Blackbeard sailed Queen Anne’s Revenge, and vessels prowled the oceans with names like Avenger and the Jolly Roger (named, of course, after the skull-and-crossbones flag). Morgan, however, would sail with his outlaw army under a respectable name.
After inspecting his fleet, Morgan took it on a kind of shakedown cruise to Cape Tiburon on the southwestern coast of Haiti, accurately described by an eighteenth-century French traveler as a “narrow chain of mountains strewn in the middle of the sea” whose peaks give the scene a “magnificent, audacious character.” It was an appropriate setting for the mission that was to be launched from the blue waters surrounding Tiburon as the fleet of thirty-eight ships sailed in from points west. On December 2 the fleet was finally ready. Morgan invited the captains of each ship, thirty-six in all, for the council of war. As they stepped on board, along with their glass of rum punch they were each handed a fresh commission, made out in their names authorizing them “to act all manner of hostility against the Spanish nation…as if they were open and declared enemies of the King of England….” Roderick and the other commonpirates celebrated their imminent wealth by shooting off their guns and singing sea chanteys deep into the night.
Aboard Morgan’s flagship the admiral proposed the articles under which the buccaneers would sail. He’d take 1 percent of every piece of plate, every emerald or pearl, every peso, and every slave. The captains would get eight shares (eight times the portion allotted to the ordinary crew member), with the surgeon getting a fee of 200 pesos ($10,000 in modern currency), the carpenter 100 ($5,000), in addition to their common salaries. Then Morgan listed compensation for injuries, at rates “much higher” than on previous voyages. Men who lost both legs would get a whopping 1,500 pesos ($75,000); one leg, “whether the right or the left,” 600 ($30,000). A hand, 600. An eye, 100 ($5,000). There were also generous terms for the especially brave: “Unto him that in any battle should signalize himself” by being the first to enter a fort or rip down the Spanish flag and raise the English, 50 pesos. Grenadiers would rake in 5 pesos for every bomb they lobbed into an enemy position. Men fight harder when they know they will have guaranteed months of rum should they lose a limb. The generous terms gave the mission a special status; Morgan would expect them to earn every peso.
The contract showed the brilliance of the Brethren’s system as opposed to the Spanish. It rewarded greater risk with greater rewards. It gave individual men every reason to excel. The pirates understood what motivated their men. The Spanish, still drifting on the fumes of the Crusades, did not.
Now came the real matter of the evening: Where would they strike? There were only four contenders: Santiago, Panama, Cartagena, and Vera Cruz. Santiago was the name on Jamaican lips; people there believed it was the seat of the anti-English warmongering. But it had tactical disadvantages: The Cuban city was defended by a fortress that overlooked the only approach to the city. Morgan had survived a potential shooting gallery at Maracaibo, and no one was lucky enough to do that twice. Besides, it was not known as a rich target, so the city was dropped. If the mission was for booty alone, Vera Cruz would have been a natural choice: It received all the silver from Mexico and stored it up for the galleons’ arrival. But Morgan had two objectives: to acquire a pile of treasure and strike a smashing blow to the empire. Vera Cruz could answer the first requirement, but not the second. There were no reports of its citizens arming for war against Jamaica, and so raiding it would not have the right political cover. Vera Cruz was out. Cartagena was a real power center on the Main, but its defenses were awesome (at least in the minds of the privateers): twice as many soldiers in its garrison as Panama and Portobelo combined, underground tunnels, fifty cannon, a large population of 6,000 free men and slaves to draw on for reinforcements. The city would come to be called La Heróica, and the mysterious explosion of the Oxfordgave it a hexed quality. Cartagena would be difficult. So the buccaneers cast their eyes toward the oldest city in the Western Hemisphere.
Panama City was the brains and guts of a rich portion of the New World; from here the levers of the sprawling province of Panama were pulled; bankers and administrators resided in its splendid wooden houses, riders rode out from its streets to direct the movements of mayors, soldiers, Indian workers. To take Panama would be to show Spain unable to protect its most valuable assets in the colonies. And besides, it was very, very rich; it had been said to rival Venice at its height. And once the terrible isthmus was overcome, the city lay open to invaders. The vote was taken, and the result was unanimous: Panama or death. As the serious drinking began, Morgan, who was important enough now to have his own secretary, had him draw up the Brethren’s intentions into formal language. The proclamation read that the buccaneers had gathered “to prevent the invasions of the Spaniards” and had resolved to take Panama, because commissions against the English had been issued from that city. As the word spread throughout the fleet, the buccaneers—never ones to underplay their own abilities—still must have regarded their decision with a touch of awe. This was not just another escapade; there was no greater city in the Western Hemisphere than the one they’d just committed to destroy. It was as if the barbarians had laid plans to take Rome itself.
The plan immediately presented one problem: No one in the vast army that Morgan had assembled had ever been to Panama. Morgan never went into an attack blind, and so he decided to attack Providence, that old shuttlecock between England and Spain, on the way to his target. This is where the Spanish Empire housed its criminals, among which there were sure to be “many banditti and outlaws belonging to Panama.” They would be his guide. And retaking Providence, which had been taken from the Spanish by the Jamaicans and then reconquered, would give him a bauble to dangle in front of the king, a tiny nugget of the empire reclaimed. Morgan probably assumed he’d need many successes to distract Charles II from what he intended to do in Panama.
On December 18, 1670, the great buccaneer fleet sailed.
The Spanish knew the trajectory of pirates’ careers as well as men like Morgan did. The only step up from places like Portobelo and Maracaibo would be Panama, Cartagena, or possibly Havana. Of these three, Panama was probably the most vulnerable, and the kingdom’s energetic president Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán was furiously working to protect it from the coming storm. This was the same Don Juan who had recaptured Old Providence from the English and sent their leaders to the dungeons. He’d just emerged from the shade of a prison cell himself at the castle of Callao in Lima, where a power struggle with the viceroy had landed him. He returned to Panama in the spring of 1669 and immediately set to improving its defenses.
Panama sat on the other side of the isthmus from the North Sea and the hunting grounds of the privateers. Its best hope for protection lay in the fact that the journey to reach it was a nightmare: Mountains, deep rivers, swamps thick with fever mist, warlike maroons, sudden violent rains, and carnivorous animals waited for anyone brave enough to attempt it. It was an ancient route; Sir Francis Drake had walked it, and Indians before him. And it would claim victims for centuries after Morgan attempted it. When the California gold rush struck in 1849, men from the East Coast swarmed down to the town of Colón and then tramped through the black muck to Panama City, where boats waited to take them to California. Snakes, yellow fever, and dysentery made it a memorable trip; one commander of a surveying mission reported seeing mosquitoes so thickly bunched that they snuffed out lighted candles with their burned corpses. “For no consideration take this route,” wrote one miner to a friend back home. “I have nothing to say on the other ones, but do not take this one.” In 1852, when a U.S. Army regiment and the soldiers’ families were assigned to new posts in California, they followed the same route, which now was now traversed via railroad, boat, and mule train, a much easier journey than in Morgan’s time. Even when he disembarked at the starting-off point, modern-day Colón, the regiment’s quartermaster was unimpressed. “I wondered how any person could live many months [there],” wrote the young Ulysses S. Grant, “and wondered still more why anyone tried.” The Americans were no match for the cholera and tainted water, and Grant watched men grow delirious and die by the hour. He later wrote about the expedition that cost him dozens of men, women, and children. His judgment of the place? “The horrors of this road in the rainy season are beyond description.”
Don Juan knew enough not to underestimate Henry Morgan, however, and he began to build up the fortifications on the trail. He begged the Crown for men to stock the garrisons at Portobelo and Chagres, the two main entry points to the isthmus. The authorities in Madrid relented, but when the treasure fleet finally arrived at Portobelo with his troops, Don Juan encountered some difficulties in claiming his men: A large portion of the soldiers had been assigned to other posts, had absconded, or had died from yellow fever or malaria. So many had died, in fact, that the captain of the treasure fleet snapped up the remainder meant for the defense of Panama and brought them back with him to guard the silver. A demoralized Don Juan was left to round up any stragglers he could find and press-gang them into service. It was a typical frustration for a Spanish leader facing the pirates: a top-down solution to his problems that was frittered away by distance and lieutenants eager to safeguard their own careers. “I myself am ready to die in the Kingdom’s defence,” the president of Panama wrote, “but that will not stop the enemy making war.” Don Juan was the canary in the silver mine, but Madrid was deaf to his message.
Spain did not want its New World settlers to act and think on their own, or to become too dependent on one another. That would jeopardize the flow of treasure; it would disrupt the autocratic system that had made the nation a world power. Spanish towns were connected more tightly to Spain than they were to one another. Governors competed with one another for scarce resources instead of pooling them. The vast distances multiplied the problem. By tying the colonies so closely to the motherland, Spain weakened them. The pirates preyed on these isolated outposts again and again.
The president mobilized every resource he could: At San Lorenzo Castle at the mouth of the Chagres, new cannon stations were mounted on the riverside, while letters went back to Spain with more warnings and requests for able-bodied men to stock the garrison. Don Juan had called in a military engineer, and he outlined the suggested improvements to Santiago Castle at Portobelo in a letter to the queen. “It was resolved to build two high redoubts with their motes [sic] and stockades on top of the hills that serve as obstacles,” he reported. San Felipe received new stockades and raised parapets. San Gerónimo, which had been only partially finished when Morgan attacked Portobelo, was pushed near to completion. Beyond that, however, the Crown felt it had done all it could with its strained resources and Don Juan soon understood he’d have to fend for himself; there would be no warships or musketeers whipping their way from Spain. Meanwhile he was receiving reports that the pirates were building a fleet of thirty canoes for the assault. “I give you these warnings even though I know that you are a great soldier and you will not need them,” the governor of Cartagena wrote to Don Juan. It was perhaps the only thing he could think to say when the news was so obviously bad.
Worse was to follow. Don Juan’s informants turned out to have excellent sources in the Brethren’s camp, and by June of 1670 he was told that 1,500 buccaneers were going to attempt Panama by the Chagres route. It was, for the Caribbean, an enormous number of men; Panama itself held only 6,000 residents, and just a small percentage of them would be available to defend it. The final omen came in a form that was typically Spanish: A Franciscan monk, no doubt prompted by the rumors that swept the city of a black swarm of buccaneers waiting just over the horizon, had a vision one night of what lay in store for his city. In his dream, Jamaican privateers were rampaging through Panama, murdering and looting as they went, while maroons could be spotted spreading flames from rooftop to rooftop. Panamanians lay dying in the streets, with black smoke billowing in the background. The nightmare so impressed the monk that he convinced a local painter to render his vision in oils, and the portrait was displayed at the convent. The residents came to gaze upon the apocalyptic canvas and shiver with dread; it was a scene from the future of Spanish art, from the war scenes of Goya, not their beloved Velázquez.
Slowly Panama took on the aspects of a city under psychological siege. Many believed that the only question was not would Morgan come, but when.