11

The Isthmus

Six days after setting out, Morgan’s ships appeared off Providence, having covered the 575 miles in excellent time. Providence consisted of a large island connected to a smaller one, Isla Chica. The main island looked deserted as Morgan’s ships pulled ashore and quickly disembarked a thousand men, and indeed it was, the Spanish contingent of fewer than 200 having decamped to Isla Chica, which Morgan soon found had been studded with castles since the last English invasion. The first one the Brethren had to face was La Cortadura, which sat between the two islands and could be approached only by a drawbridge, which was now raised.

Things began miserably. The skies opened up and poured rain on the buccaneers, who were not clothed for such weather; Roderick was lightly dressed in seaman’s trousers and cotton shirt, without shoes. When the men approached the Spanish fort, the defenders “began to fire upon them so furiously that they could advance nothing that day.” The buccaneers retreated and camped outside the gunners’ range in the open fields. Morgan now faced a problem familiar to the commander of any large army of men: sustenance. He had no supply lines to provide meals for his soldiers; they could eat only what they carried or foraged. Shivering and gnawed by hunger, Roderick and some mates pulled down a thatch house and made campfires. And they grumbled over the fire, with Roderick suggesting that Morgan was leading them astray. They’d voted on Panama, not this miserable piece of rock. They were sure that Morgan was not sitting out in the damp, like them. He’d probably found a warm hut to keep himself dry.

The next morning, more of the same. The rain pelted Roderick and the poor corsairs “as if the skies were melted into waters” and the Spanish peppered them with shot from behind their sturdy walls. With his belly rumbling, Roderick spotted an old nag in the nearby field and called to his friends, who chased it down for breakfast. But it was a pitiful sight: “both lean and full of scabs and blotches,” Esquemeling reports. They carved up the animal and divided the tiny morsels among the lucky, who roasted the meat “more like ravenous wolves than men.” The question of food was becoming critical; most of their supplies had been left on the ships. Not only that, but Morgan could now see that behind Cortadura lay a whole chain of forts; the Spanish could occupy and then abandon one after the other, killing privateers as they went. It would be a long, bloody siege. His men had come for money and glory; they hadn’t asked for a miserable slog on an island in the middle of nowhere. Soon Morgan began hearing reports that some of the Brethren were planning to head back to the ships, orders or no orders. Roderick had voted with the deserters; he hadn’t signed up for this mess, and he felt deceived. Who was Morgan to change their plans without a vote? With men getting ready to leave, the admiral made a snap decision and in front of his army called for a canoe to be arrayed with a white flag and sent to the castellan. His message was terse: Surrender or die.

The governor of the island requested two hours to deliberate, and Morgan agreed. He badly needed the man to surrender: He’d eventually take the island, but it could be at the cost of Panama. When the messenger returned, Morgan waited for the answer with bated breath. As the man read out the governor’s words, Morgan must have smiled. The governor had written that he’d surrender, but he asked Morgan to perform “a certain stratagem of war.” It was a bit of playacting designed to save the man’s career and possibly his life: He directed Morgan to lead his men to Cortadura, while his ships pulled up to the gun emplacement called St. Matthew and dispatched a platoon of men. They would find the governor making his way from one fort to another and intercept him on the path. Under threat of death, they would force him to lead them into Cortadura, masquerading as Spanish troops. Once it surrendered, the rest of the island’s fortresses would fall like dominoes. And one other thing: “There should be continual firing at one another, but without bullets, or at least into the air.” The farce would read like a pitched battle on paper, which is all the governor cared about.

Morgan could not have devised a better solution himself; it appealed to his sense of theatrical war. That night he followed the man’s instructions to the letter; the governor was surprised on his way to Cortadura, and the rest of the evening went off without a hitch. Anyone watching from seaward that night would have thought that the Spanish were defending their queen to the death, with the “incessant firing of the great guns” and the sharp reports of muskets. But the only killing took place afterward, when “the Pirates began to make a new war upon the poultry, cattle and all sorts of victuals they could find.” The buccaneers feasted on the island’s supplies and quickly discovered 30,000 pounds of powder and other kinds of ammunition. As to spies, Morgan found four of the “banditti” who claimed to know the intricacies of the city and a native Indian named Antonillo who had lived in the target city. Morgan offered the criminals a full share in the proceeds if they would guide his men, and the criminals cheerfully agreed. Their leader was “the greatest rogue, thief and assassin” on the island, who deserved, according to Esquemeling, to be tortured upon the rack rather than play soldier on Providence. He would fit in nicely.

Now the assault on Panama began. The city could be approached via two routes: by land or river. (Sailing down around the tip of South America and up the Pacific coast toward Panama was out of the question for the fleet’s tiny boats, and, of course, there was no Panama Canal to get Morgan’s ships across the isthmus.) The first passage began at the city of Portobelo, with which Morgan was already familiar. The pirates would have to take the city, then travel due south through thick woodlands laced with vines and choked with undergrowth, tramp over five-hundred-foot mountain passes, and then travel along mule paths to the city of Venta de Cruces, where they would pick up the road to Panama. If they chose the river route, they would begin at San Lorenzo, where a large and well-armed castle guarded the entrance to the Chagres, which would take them southwest to Venta de Cruces. Halfway there they would have to abandon their canoes and complete the journey on foot. Portobelo was tempting, as Morgan knew it so well, but the Spanish had surely learned their lesson and reinforced the city after his devastating raid. All in all, Portobelo was now a completely different proposition, and a much tougher one, so San Lorenzo and the Chagres it would be. Morgan estimated that the fort could be taken with 470 men in three ships, and he assigned a lieutenant colonel, Joseph Bradley, to lead the squadron. Bradley had been raiding the Spanish since the time of Mansvelt, Morgan’s predecessor; he was experienced and popular with the buccaneers, and Morgan was counting on him to open a crucial breach in the shield around Panama.

San Lorenzo was the door to the isthmus; it had been built to discourage men from thinking they could pass through it easily. It sat on the north side of the river mouth, on a high cliff that jutted out into the water, and it was really a network of defenses rather than just a single fort: two gun emplacements lower down near the water’s edge, at the base of the castle walls, with six guns each; above them a tower with eight cannon that could spray oncoming ships with shot; and at the top of the peak the castle itself, its walls consisting of two rows of thick logs, between which had been packed mounds of earth, a design that made the barricade “as secure as the best walls made of stone or brick.” The cliff top was divided into two sections, and the drawbridge over a thirty-foot ravine was the only entrance to the fortress. A single set of stairs had been cut into the mountain face, allowing men to climb from the shore to the castle.

Bradley and his men arrived off San Lorenzo on December 26. The element of surprise was gone: One of the buccaneers on the Río de la Hacha raid had deserted the ranks and fled to the Spanish side; the men in the castle had been preparing for battle for weeks. There were two ways to the castle: scale the cliffs on the seaward side or go up the stairway on the landward side. Bradley quickly saw that the dizzying cliffside was a nonstarter; the “infinite asperity of the mountain” barred all but the expert climber, and his men were no mountaineers. They would have to hit the beach, absorb the fusillades from the gun batteries and the tower, and take the castle. It was not going to be a repeat of Providence. The Spanish held the heights and seemingly every advantage, their garrison recently supplied with “much provision and much warlike ammunition,” as well as 164 more soldiers. “Although six thousand men should come against them,” the castle’s commander, Don Pedro de Lisardo, assured the president of Panama, “he should…be able to secure himself and destroy them.”

Inside San Lorenzo the buccaneers’ every move was being monitored. They had been spotted by the lookout in the castle watch-tower that very morning while four miles from the castle; as they approached, this man sent a series of running reports down to the commander: Three ships were disembarking men in six canoes, the canoes were ferrying the soldiers to the shore in shifts. When the canoes landed, they were observed by Spanish archers and lancers hidden in the woods. The buccaneers were not bothering to be crafty; their drummers pounded out a martial beat, their trumpeters sang of impending doom, and their color-bearers took their place at the head of the squadrons. The estimate? About 300 to 400 men, now moving off the beach and slashing their way through the jungle with machetes. The two sides would be close to evenly matched in numbers. Don Pedro dashed off a note to Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán, saying he expected the enemy within a few hours of midnight or at dawn. Three hundred men were reported to be advancing, but even if there were many more, he was confident he could smash them. “Here’s a scourge for these infidels!” he wrote, bristling with confidence.

At the fort the lookout and every man at the ramparts watched the brush line. Hours went by with only the chatter of birds and the sound of the surf. Finally movement at the edge: Bradley and his men came stumbling out of the jungle; their guides had miscalculated and brought them too close to the castle onto a campaña, or open plot of ground. The Spanish sharpshooters on the ramparts instantly opened up on the figures below as the gunners rained shot down on the English; in the first fusillade, the Brethren “lost many of their men.”

Bradley divided his men into three groups: a reserve force that would stay in the jungle and then two assault squads. In front of them lay an open stretch of bare land, where they would be vulnerable to Spanish fire, leading up to a deep crevice called the Ravine of the Slabs; only having crossed the ravine would they reach the walls of the castle. The men would have no artillery to cover their approach or armor to deflect the ball: “Being uncovered from head to foot, they could not advance one step without great danger.” At last they girded up their loins and charged screaming onto the open space. As soon as they did, the sound of musket fire erupted, and the privateers ran crazily for the castle. Roderick was grazed by a Spanish ball but made it to the ravine; when he turned to look back, he saw that many of his mates lay facedown in the dirt behind him. “One could not see the campaña for the dead bodies of the enemy,” wrote one defender with Spanish hyperbole. The survivors ran down into the ravine and then up and reached the castle walls. Now Bradley’s strategy was revealed: Roderick pulled out the grenadoes he’d tied to his belt and tried to set the castle’s wooden walls alight, and his comrades did the same with any combustible they carried. But the barrage from above was too fierce; Bradley finally had to call the retreat. As Roderick ran from a battle for the first time in his life, he was startled to hear the words “Victoria! Victoria!” ringing out from the fort. He swore underneath his breath.

The Brethren retired to the brush, nursed their wounds, gulped down water, and regarded the castle with malice. Roderick massaged his bad leg and debated with the others “whether to forsake the Enterprise.” But they decided there were things worse than death, namely “the Thoughts of Disgrace, and of being reproached by our Friends on board.” Like any proud fighting force, the Brethren were intensely protective of their reputation, and the thought of losing face made them “disregard even life itself.” As night fell, they charged a second time across the darkened field. The Spaniards, more confident than ever, welcomed them back: “Come on, ye English dogs,” they shouted, “enemies to God and our king; let your other companions that are behind come on, too; ye shall not go to Panama this bout.” Dusk provided cover, and the Spaniards fired at black shapes moving across black ground. The buccaneers dropped to their knees and raked the walls as their comrades slipped ahead and launched fireballs at the palm-leaf roof that sheltered the Spanish musketeers from rain and sun. The battle raged on until, according to Esquemeling, an act of sheer physical courage altered its course:

One of the pirates was wounded with an arrow in his back, which pierced his body to the other side. This instantly he pulled out with great valour at the side of his breast then taking a little cotton that he had about him, he wound it about the said arrow, and putting it into his musket, he shot it back into the castle. But the cotton being kindled by the powder, occasioned two or three houses that were within the castle…to take fire.

The fire crept onward until it caught onto a “parcel of powder” (in Spanish reports it was a loaded bronze cannon), which exploded, raining flame and burning thatch onto the roof and the wooden walls. Other buccaneers snapped up arrows and shot them toward the looming castle. The Spanish rushed to douse the flames, but every musketeer pulled into firefighting duty was a loss to the fort’s defenses, and the pirates began picking off figures silhouetted against the flames. The explosion had ripped a huge gap into the wooden palisades, and the breach became the scene of vicious, close-up fighting. Roderick found himself near the gap and blasted away at point-blank range through the gaping hole, falling back to reload while another buccaneer jumped into his spot and fired, as the Spanish tossed their combustibles at the Brethren’s heads.

The palisades were now aflame in several places, and the six-inch mahogany walls began to collapse, spilling out their earthen contents and exposing the soldiers inside. The perimeter of the castle was roasting hot; the bodies of soldiers lay near the walls, terribly burned or bullet-ridden, the wounded calling out for water. The garrison’s morale began to crumble; men deserted their posts and made their way down the stairway cut into the rock, escaping to boats tied along the river and then heading upstream toward Panama. The battle raged through the night, until even the privateers could no longer fight in the heat. They retreated and waited until the morning of January 6, which was a holiday known as the Epiphany of the Wise Kings. If the defenders of San Lorenzo had been back in Spain, they would have watched the burning of the Christmas tree, a tradition of the day, after children had swarmed over it and stripped it of its candies and treats. Perhaps a few remembered the date and called their minds back to happier times, for when first light came, showing jagged holes in the fort’s walls, with the remaining musketeers struggling to wriggle through the gaps, they must have known that many of them were not going to live out the day.

With a yell the Brethren attacked again, “shooting very furiously” and tossing grenade after grenade. The defenders wheeled their cannons down to the breaches and fired point-blank at their attackers, the castellan having ordered his men to fight to the death. The buccaneers had rarely seen Spaniards fight with such resolve; when their powder ran out, the Spaniards switched to lances and cutlasses and hacked at the men who attempted to slip between the splintered walls. It was now hand-to-hand, primeval war, with the castellan fighting alongside his men. When their lances broke, the Spaniards pulled out their cutlasses; when the cutlasses were knocked out of their hands, they picked up stones. Both Esquemeling and the Spanish letters written after the attack confirm that few conquistadors or musketeers in the legendary battles against the Moors had fought more bravely; the surgeon called their performance “very courageous and warlike.” Roderick and the other men were impressed; they would never speak of the men of San Lorenzo except with a frank admiration. The noise of the battle was so great that it reached the ears of Francisco González Salado, the man Don Juan had chosen to defend the isthmus. The forty-year old Spaniard had 400 to 500 men under his command and was waiting eighteen miles away at the River of Two Fathoms for news of the invasion. Hearing the cannon, he sent fifty soldiers to San Lorenzo. When they were six miles from the castle, they began meeting the desperately injured and terrified men who were running for their lives, and they relayed word of the attack back to González. The men abandoning the castle headed back toward Panama or melted away into the jungle.

At the castle, the pirates were simply proving too strong. They did not suffer deserters (or at least none are mentioned in the records), and what for the Spanish was heroic service was to the buccaneers their everyday fighting style. Eventually their numbers and their maniacal courage won the day; they streamed inside the castle and began slashing at the men with their cutlasses or executing them on the spot with their pistols. “The enemy refused quarter,” Morgan reported tersely, “which cost them 360 men.” As the buccaneers ran through the castle and had their vengeance on the enemy, those still at the foot of the walls looked up to witness Spanish musketeers diving from the top of the walls to the rocks below, dashing themselves to pieces rather than ask for quarter. As the buccaneers poured in, the castellan refused to yield; two cannons were wheeled in front of his position as he prepared for a last defense. But a privateer took aim with his musket and fired a shot, “which pierced his skull into his brain.” The defense of San Lorenzo was over. As the deserters paddled their canoes away from the burning fort, they heard the French buccaneers break into the song they had sung earlier: “Victoire, victoire.”

The pirates killed everything that moved within the fort; the Spanish had not asked for quarter, and they didn’t receive it. Roderick had run out of ammunition, so he took his cutlass and chopped at the necks of the Spaniards he found cowering behind shattered remnants of the barricade. The buccaneers had lost thirty men and seventy-six wounded, including Lieutenant Colonel Bradley, who had been shot in the leg. The wounded suffered terrible agonies in the heat, their wounds festering. There is no record of whether the fleet’s surgeon accompanied the San Lorenzo mission, but even if he was on the scene, one man caring for seventy casualties would have been afforded little time for niceties. One account of a shipboard operation on a pirate named Phillips reveals the level of care a patient might receive. The ship’s surgeon was absent, so it was decided that the carpenter would have to remove the man’s wounded leg. The carpenter fetched his biggest saw, secured the man’s ankle underneath his arm, and cut off the leg “in as little time as he could have cut a…Board in two.” There is no mention of anesthesia, and the stump was treated by heating an ax in the fire and then cauterizing the wound, but the carpenter burned the patient’s flesh “distant from the Place of Amputation, that it had like to have morify’d.” A patient had to pray that the surgeon was competent and sober, two attributes that were quite rare on a buccaneer ship. But most of all, he had to hope that his wounds did not get infected; once they did, death almost always followed. Bradley was an example; his wounds turned gangrenous, and he lingered in agony for ten days before succumbing to his injuries. His squadron had lost more than a quarter of their strength; if this was an omen of things to come, Morgan might run out of men before he held Panama.

Back on Providence the admiral received word of the storming of San Lorenzo. The first step was taken; now, like any smart commander, he prepared his way back from the battle. He dumped the Spanish guns into the sea and set fire to all the island’s huts and most of its castles. If the Spanish wanted to take back the little isle, he’d give them no help. He left the strongest fort untouched and ordered it stocked with provisions; if he needed a place to hole up after the raid on Panama, it would be waiting for him.

Five days after Bradley’s victory, Morgan sighted San Lorenzo and the English colors flying over it. Instead of looking up at the flag, Morgan’s captains should have been looking down, as just below the surface of the water near the river’s mouth was a notorious reef, called Laja. Morgan never saw it. Esquemeling tells us what happened next. Five of the ships, led by Morgan’s Satisfaction, slammed into the razor-sharp coral, tearing huge holes in their hulls and throwing men into the water. A powerful north wind kept the ships impaled on the reef, raking them over the coral until they were unsalvageable. Morgan had never been much of a sailor, and now he simply moved his men and matériel off the stricken vessels and packed them into the remaining ships. As long as he had men, he could get other ships. He lost ten buccaneers in the accident, including the expedition’s only female member, the much-gossiped-about witch. She failed the traditional test for enchantresses by drowning in the blue waters. Roderick and the others were actually relieved; suspected witches on board were horrible luck.

When Morgan was brought into the captured fort, “great acclamations of triumph” echoed off its walls. He supervised the last of the repairs to the castle; as on Providence, he was fortifying his escape route even as he proceeded toward Panama. But he couldn’t linger; there were rumors that Spanish forces were already on the march to retake the fallen castle. Morgan left 300 men to guard it, selected seven ships from the fleet, commandeered some of the local canoes, and began the trek across the isthmus. Esquemeling noted one fateful decision the admiral made before setting out for the Venice of the Spanish Main: “He carried very small provisions with him, being in good hopes he should provide himself sufficiently among the Spaniards.” It was a decision Morgan would come to regret.

The approach to Panama was, in some ways, a return to Morgan’s past. In the woods ahead, along the thickly wooded banks, he knew that guerrillas were waiting silently for him. Many of them were black and mulatto soldiers, just as he’d faced back in Jamaica during the first months of the English invasion. They had lived in the woods and small towns along the Chagres for years, knew its terrain intimately, its hiding spots, its natural ambush points. San Lorenzo had been a classic storming of a stockade, a method of attack that went back to the Crusades and beyond. But now Morgan could be facing a more modern style of warfare that had devastated Cromwell’s army when it settled Jamaica. The admiral had better-trained men under him than the raw youths who had fallen on Jamaica, but they were packed tightly into canoes and boats, perfect targets for hidden marksmen behind the fronds. His 1,500 men, watchful and tense, paddled down the Chagres with eyes on the brush line.

On the other side waited Francisco González Salado. Don Juan’s chosen man had parceled out his 400 men to four stockades that had been built between the mouth of the Chagres and Venta de Cruces; they were lightly armed with lances, bows and arrows, muskets and pistols. He also had scouts on foot and in canoes patrolling the Chagres. González had decided to use his men not as guerrillas but in fortifications that could perhaps kill off enough of Morgan’s men to prevent the invasion from reaching Panama. It was clearly a flawed strategy; San Lorenzo’s 400-plus musketeers, fighting like lions, had failed to stop a small contingent of the Brethren. How could a comparable amount of men, divided into four squadrons, without cannon, protected only by thrown-up stockades, hope to do better? A shoot-and-run campaign would have been a more lethal choice, but González stood by his Spanish training.

There were guerrillas on the way, however. The president of Panama had received an intriguing overture from three captains in the local prison: Let them out of jail, give them arms and men, and allow them to attack Morgan on the river. If they succeeded, charges would be dropped. If not, they would die in the service of Panama and their reputations would be saved. These men had grown up on the river and knew where Morgan would be vulnerable. The offer was accepted, and the three set off with 150 men; that number would double once they met up with González’s forces and were reinforced. Don Juan was trying to keep Morgan as far away from the city as he could and to force the battle in the difficult, pestilent jungle rather than on the plains of Panama, where the Welshman would have the advantage.

The freed captains and their squadron made their way down to a settlement called Dos Brazos and perched along the tree line, waiting in ambush. They were expecting a force the same size that had attacked San Lorenzo, about 400 men. When the first canoes appeared on the river, the Panamanians checked their powder and prepared a surprise barrage. But then more canoes appeared, buccaneers hanging over the sides, and then small boats, and then more canoes. The vessels kept coming, an endless line of grizzled men with shiny muskets. The buccaneer army was almost four times the size of what the captains had been expecting. They wished to clear their names, but the odds of four-to-one against Henry Morgan were a dead man’s bet. Instead of opening up on the English devils, the Spanish watched as a party of Morgan’s men beached their canoes, foraged among the abandoned huts, and stretched their legs onshore. The lazy privateers were easily within musket range, and they were open to attack. The Spanish gaped as some of the men even lay down on the banks and fell asleep, while others sat smoking a pipe of tobacco. The Spanish sharpshooters fingered their triggers, but the names of Morgan’s victories echoed in the captains’ minds: Granada, Portobelo, Maracaibo. They held their fire.

Back in Panama, Don Juan was expecting to hear that the buccaneers had been attacked and their progress disrupted, or that the Panama squadron had retaken San Lorenzo. But the captains’ report filled him with disgust: “They neither fought with them nor did more than flee to the mountains,” Don Juan lamented, “without trying either of the two things that they had planned.” The squadron reported that they had meant to attack the buccaneers upstream, but an incompetent Indian guide had led them astray and they had missed their chance. The valor of San Lorenzo was dissolving like a mirage.

To the many reasons that the ordinary Spanish soldier was given not to fight—bad or no pay, poor equipment, legitimate fear of the pirates’ reputation—was added the basic nature of the pirates’ invasion. Despite Morgan’s commission from the council of Jamaica, the Brethren were not there to occupy the land and enslave the people. They moved through, robbed what they could, and left. If the pirates had been traditional conquerors, settling in the territories they invaded, they would probably have met much stiffer resistance from settlers fighting for both their freedom and their land. But if you could hide from the buccaneers, you could live another day, and every soldier and militia member knew that. It was like a charging bull: You could place yourself in front of it and attempt to pierce its heart with your saber, or you could step to the side and let it brush your thigh and continue on its way. The latter choice made special sense for the poor. If you had little or no valuables yourself, why take a bullet for those who did?

Now all that stood between the buccaneers and Panama were the four lightly defended stockades. The canoes paddled up the river, while the larger ships caught breezes and sailed along. The Chagres by water was a very different prospect from the Chagres by riverbank. A nineteenth-century traveler described the pleasant scene: “In some places lofty hills, densely timbered, rose from the river banks, in others, gentle slopes of brightest green pasture terminated in white sandy shores and again impenetrable underwood, covered with ivy, formed natural arbors of every imaginable shape, abutting on the stream.” Roderick spotted alligators slipping into the water at the first canoes’ approach and heard parrots chattering; huge swarms of insects billowed like cumulus clouds. Even for the well-traveled pirate, there was an exotic aspect to the whole thing: three-toed sloths hammocked onto tree branches; rare nocturnal butterflies flitting by in the moonlight; anteaters, black-handed spider monkeys and howler monkeys, whose calls could be heard for miles across the treetops; the jaguar and puma stayed hidden, but their movements were heralded by a river of sound moving through the jungle, its waves overlapping onto the Chagres. The waterway was broad and tranquil (it would now be classified as a Class II) and only occasionally narrowed into churning rapids. But it corkscrewed back and forth through the landscape; a man rowing up it to Venta de Cruces would travel three times the distance as the crow flies. Still, it was one of the few moments in Roderick’s life when he could be said to be sightseeing; if it weren’t for the awful hunger chewing at his entrails, he could have enjoyed himself. The only worry was the low water levels in the river; even for the shallow canoes, there were toppled trees and tough mangrove roots that turned the journey into an obstacle course. The privateers wasted time paddling up tributaries that looked like the Chagres, only to have to backtrack and find the main route, or guess at it.

Unless there were rains to fill up the river, they would have to slash through the green wall of jungle sooner than they hoped. On the third day, the entire force disembarked and began cutting their way through the vines and creepers. The men left to tend the boats were warned against landing. “To these Captain Morgan gave very strict orders, under great penalties, that no man, upon any pretext whatsoever, should dare to leave the boats and go ashore.” He’d learned the lesson of the early days on Jamaica all too well. Roderick disembarked and with the other buccaneers began the exhausting work of opening up a path in the jungle. After three hours, his right arm felt like lead, and the others quickly found the work so “dirty and irksome” that Morgan quickly ordered the men back to the canoes. Roderick was relieved. They would use every foot of the river they could.

On the fourth day, one of the scouts called out that they were approaching an ambuscade. Rather than go silent with foreboding, the men grew excited, as the decision to leave most of their food behind was taking its toll. The warning produced “infinite joy” among the pirates; Spanish fortifications meant Spanish soldiers, which meant Spanish supplies. Morgan’s intelligence was unusually thin; he didn’t know how many men were waiting behind the palisades, how they were armed, whether there were archers, cannon, battle-tested soldiers, or farmers drafted into the fight. But the men didn’t care. As the attack squad approached the fortification, Roderick waited for the first shot, but as he came closer and closer without a single bullet aimed his way, he soon suspected the truth and went yelling toward the palisades, his comrades by his side. The Spanish had fled, burning their huts and taking their provisions with them. The men had obviously fallen victim to night terrors; such things as honor and duty mattered little when every snap of a twig and monkey call seemed to announce the arrival of the ravaging hordes.

The privateers’ joy quickly turned to bitterness: All that the enemy had left them were a few crumbs of bread and some leather bags. Roderick was now so desperate that he began to chew at the leather, and the other men grabbed at the sacks as well, “as being desirous to afford something to the ferment of their stomachs, which now was grown so sharp that it did gnaw their very bowels, having nothing else to prey upon.” As knives flashed out and the leather was ripped into portions, the Brethren smoldered. There wasn’t enough of the cowhide to go around; the strongest got a piece of the bags, while others only watched them force it down. As they left the stockade and resumed their journey, Esquemeling makes a startling claim: The buccaneers were so famished that they were ready to eat their enemy. “Finding no victuals, they were now infinitely desirous to meet [the Spaniards],” he tells us, “intending to devour some of them rather than perish.” The low river was complicating the mission: Morgan would have to choose what supplies to carry, as it now appeared he’d have to travel farther overland than he had first thought. To a buccaneer it was an easy choice: weapons first, food second. The beef and maize were left with one of his captains, who with 200 men would hold the stockade against any Spanish rescue party. The privateers “betook themselves to the wild wood” and came on another stockade, also deserted. The panic rose in their throats: They were fifty miles from Panama, and there didn’t appear to be a rat or a corncob to eat. The leftover pieces of leather came out of the buccaneers’ satchels, and they began to prepare them, smashing the cowhide between two stones to soften it, dipping it into the river, and rubbing it vigorously. By taking large gulps of water between bites, they were able to force the meal down.

The jungle was now a full-fledged nightmare. Striking off from the meandering riverbank, the men tried to cut a straight path through the undergrowth, but the vines and wait-a-minute creepers took many hacks to cut through; thorns ripped at their clothes, insects got into their boots, mosquitoes dived for their blood. Some had gone three days without anything resembling decent food. The Spanish were now an afterthought; the men prayed to be ambushed, because troops meant supplies. Finally, on the fifth day of their trek, at a place called Barbacoa, they found another abandoned stockade and this time a grotto that hid “two sacks of meal, wheat and like things” and two large jars of wine, along with some plantains. Morgan instantly ordered that the supplies be parceled out to the sickest and hungriest men. Here was a rigorous test of his leadership: His men were literally starving, and yet they were being asked to give up the food and wine so that a brother privateer could live a few more days. But Morgan was still the admiral, and the scant rations were passed down the line to those who could barely walk, who, “having refreshed themselves with these victuals…began to march anew with greater courage than ever.” Those whom the food did not revive were placed in the canoes, and healthy men were ordered to walk. Deep in the Panamanian jungle, Morgan’s discipline was still iron.

The sixth day dawned, and the Brethren started trudging forward, more automatons than men. They stopped frequently to rest, hundreds of men lying like corpses along the riverbank, too hot, hungry, and exhausted to move. The only food Roderick could find was leaves and green herbs; some of his mates were reduced to chewing grass. Their hunger curdled into bitterness against Morgan. The real question was quickly becoming, how long could he hold this rebel army together?

A temporary solution materialized. When they arrived around noon at a plantation and found a “barn full of maize,” the men went wild, tearing the barn doors off, scooping up the dry kernels in their hands and eating it, without bothering about cooking the stuff. They ate their fill and distributed the rest of the maize before resuming their hike. Soon after leaving the plantation, a flurry of arrows descended on them: a minor ambush. The privateers took cover and quickly spotted the enemy: a troop of local Indians tracking them from across the river. A few of the men jumped into the river and tried to swim across and take some of the Indians prisoner. But the enemy just laughed at the white men crashing through the water; taking careful aim, they fired off a few more arrows and killed two or three of them. To the rest they cried, “Ha! Ye dogs, go to the plain, go to the plain.” (The plain was the savannah surrounding Panama.) After amusing themselves with target practice, the Indians vanished into the scenery. It scarcely mattered to them whether Panama burned or not.

The fabled city seemed more and more distant. The buccaneers had imagined that once past San Lorenzo, the approach to Panama would be relatively quick, but it had turned into a grim battle against nature itself. As the buccaneers camped that night, the mood turned: “Great murmurings were heard,…many complaining of Captain Morgan and his conduct in that enterprize.” It didn’t help that many of the men had thrown away their maize when the Indians attacked; wasteful and optimistic by nature, the privateers expected to easily overwhelm the enemy and gorge on their fancier food. Now they were bone-hungry again. Roderick talked openly of returning to Jamaica with other buccaneers; others swore they would rather rot in the jungle than retrace their steps without a satchelful of silver coins. Their guides, who must have been under great pressure to lead them to a settlement, tried to convince them all that they’d soon be feasting on beef and Madeira. The stares they received in return convinced them they’d better find something, and soon.

On the seventh day, Roderick began cleaning his musket, dry-firing it to make sure it was still working. His gun had been kept coated with grease and tucked away in an oilcloth; with yesterday’s ambush the weapon would have come out and been exposed to the muck of the riverbank. He checked to see that his matches were still firmly sealed in the bottle he carried and that his powder had stayed dry. Venta de Cruces was within one day’s march, and it was the last key outpost before Panama; if the Spaniards were going to make a stand anywhere before the limits of their beloved city, it would be there.

The next day they crossed the river and, a new spring in their step, hurried toward their objective. When they were still “a great distance” from Venta de Cruces, they suddenly spotted smoke ahead, which apparently came from chimneys. This caused widespread excitement among the pirates; they began talking with one another about what the smoke meant, even as the pace quickened. The few clearheaded members of the Brethren must have known that the smoke was not a good sign, but the others raved on as if they were approaching an English country village on Christmas Day, where their relatives awaited them. The famished men could almost smell the plum pudding and game hen. Esquemeling recorded some of their conversations: “There is smoke coming out of every house, therefore they are making good fires, to roast and boil what we are to eat.” The surgeon called these thoughts “castles in the air.” It was highly unlikely the Spaniards were preparing dinner for a thousand pirates eager to despoil their town. Hunger was now causing the men to hallucinate. By the outskirts of the town, they were running.

When they burst into the settlement, “all sweating and panting,” it was empty. The smoke came from the burning homes of the Spaniards, who had fled and taken everything remotely edible with them, apart from a few stray dogs and cats. After drawing all his forces to Venta de Cruces, González, who was leading the men sent by Don Juan to ambush Morgan, had lost his nerve. He told Don Juan that his men were too “useless, discontented and afraid” to face the buccaneers. Fear was the word of the hour; Don Juan responded that González’s retreat was caused not by a reasonable estimation of troop strength and fighting capacity but by the myth of Morgan. The Spanish had passed into realms of the imagination, where pirates never lost and Spaniards were always sacrificed to the sword. “The fear that oppressed them” had defeated González’s army before a shot had been fired. And with every successive collapse, the monk’s vision of Panama grew more real.

Roderick did not feel like a world conqueror. The only things the Spanish had failed to remove from Venta de Cruces were sixteen jars of Peru wine and a sack of bread located in the king’s stables. He and the others didn’t wait to portion out the wine but guzzled it down and soon began retching. For a moment Morgan was terrified to think that the Spanish had poisoned his men—a brilliant strategy if it were true—but it turned out that the privateers’ “huge want of sustenance…and the manifold sorts of trash that they had eaten upon that occasion” had made their stomachs unable to digest the wine. Roderick lay where he fell, too weak to move, the entire day and through the night.

At Venta de Cruces all the boats and canoes that had been paralleling the troops’ progress were sent back downriver, except one, which was saved for sending messengers to Morgan’s men at the first stockade. The men milled about in the empty town, searching every nook and cranny for a crumb of bread; Morgan had given orders that no one was to leave the town “except in whole companies of a hundred together.” But one group disobeyed his command and snuck out of Venta de Cruces in search of food. The hungry squadron wasn’t gone long. “These were soon glad to fly into town again, being assaulted with great fury by some Spaniards and Indians.” They lost one prisoner to the enemy.

Panama now lay just twenty-five miles away. The men stumbled on, more dead than alive.

Day eight: Morgan sent a vanguard of 200 men to scout the route to Panama. The paths to the city were “so narrow that only ten or twelve persons could march in a file, and oftentimes not so many.” It was perfect terrain for ambushes, and for all Morgan knew, the woods around him were swarming with the enemy. After the advance party had set out, Morgan rallied his main set of troops for the final push. He was rushing to get his men to Panama before they became too weak to fight, so he forced them to march ten hours that day. At the end of their trek, at a place called Quebrada Obscura, the privateers looked up to find the sky darkened by black shapes. “All of a sudden, three or four thousand arrows were shot at them, without [their] being able to perceive whence they came, or who shot them.” Esquemeling was multiplying by ten; in fact, there were 300 Indian archers secreted among the rocks and hillocks, along with 100 Spanish musketeers. The countryside here was more mountainous than tropical, and Morgan’s men could not see their attackers in the heights: Morgan describes how the attackers were “laying over their heads” and firing down. The buccaneers marched on through the wooded landscape, “the enemy constantly galling them with ambuscades and small parties.” The admiral ordered his men into a tighter formation, four abreast, with the vanguard out front and two lines of skirmishers fending off attacks on either side. They spotted a group of Indians, who, unlike the Spaniards, stood their ground and fought “with huge courage” until their leader fell wounded. But the Indians, who had so much less to lose than the Spaniards, then gave a lesson in how to conduct battle, with their captain showing the way. “Although he was now in despair of life,” Esquemeling tells us, “yet his valour being greater than his strength, [he] would demand no quarter, but, endeavouring to raise himself, with undaunted mind laid hold of his azagaya, or javelin, and struck at one of the Pirates.” Rearing back for another thrust, the Indian was shot by a buccaneer. His comrades were unfazed, appearing and disappearing among the hills and calling to the pirates, “To the plain, to the plain, ye cuckolds, ye English dogs!” Finally the buccaneers emerged from the jungle onto the plains. Morgan called a halt, and the men fell out to rest. Roderick had stopped dreaming about silver and pearls and thought only of meat. At dusk a downpour began, and the men’s muskets were stashed in shepherds’ huts with a few men to watch over them. Everyone else lay out in the open.

At daybreak the men set off; Morgan wanted to use the morning mists to shield his men from the blazing sun. The isthmus was testing them to their limits; they hadn’t eaten for five days, and now “the way was more difficult and laborious than all the preceding.” Morgan’s past missions each had one thing to distinguish them as extraordinary: Gran Granada was a feat of navigation; Maracaibo was a triumph of deceptive warcraft; Portobelo was noteworthy for its loot; Panama, unexpectedly, became the greatest test of endurance that any pirate army had ever undergone. And it is a credit to the leadership of Morgan, just thirty-six years old, that hardship tended to drive his men together, make them a more cohesive and determined force, as at San Lorenzo, as in countless other situations. It was success that was the true danger.

And now the march came to an end. At nine in the morning, Roderick, who was with the vanguard, crested a hill and saw the South Sea glittering in the distance. He could just make out the spars of six merchant ships in the bay. And marvel upon marvel: Lying at his feet, in the valley below him, were herds of cattle. The men rushed down the hill with their knives in their hands and began slaughtering the cows as they stood; others ran around collecting wood and building roaring fires on which to roast the meat. “Thus cutting the flesh of these animals into convenient pieces, or gobbets, they threw them into the fire, and, half carbonadoed or roasted, they devoured them with incredible haste and appetite.” The valley ran red, and now the men with crazed eyes appeared to be more cannibals than former citizens of old European cities, as the blood ran down through their beards and soaked their shirts. The hill was the signal to the buccaneers that they’d beaten the isthmus. Today it’s known as El Cerro de los Bucaneros.

Fortified with the desperately needed calories, the men set off on their final march. Morgan sent a vanguard of fifty men to try to obtain some information on the state of defenses in Panama; he was attacking blind at this point, having been unable to turn one informer to his side. The scouts came across a “troop of two hundred Spaniards,” who shouted to the buccaneers, but the Brethren couldn’t decipher what they were saying. Before they were able to gather any spies, the men saw a steeple jutting above the trees ahead of them. Forget the informers—they had arrived at their target, and the men frolicked as if the city lay undefended. “They began to show signs of extreme joy,” says Esquemeling, “casting up their hats into the air, leaping for mirth, and shouting, even just as if they had already obtained the victory and entire accomplishment of their designs.”

Morgan called a halt. The trumpeters brought out their instruments and began playing, with the drummers joining in. The music was both a celebration of the end to their long march and a warning to the citizens of Panama that the corsarios had arrived. The pirate army pitched tents and settled in for the night, knowing that the next days would decide its fortune. Roderick could not sleep with anticipation; he and the others were happy, well fed, and eager for battle.