12
In the city of Panama, something odd was happening to Don Juan. Just as Philip IV had seen himself as the physical embodiment of the monarchy, the president of Panama could be taken to be the manifestation of Panama in the early days of 1670: As the privateers approached, he was prostrate and feverish, his body consumed by imaginary flames that swept down his limbs and scorched his skin. He was suffering from erysipelas, or “St. Anthony’s fire,” an infection in which the patient feels an intense burning sensation in his limbs, where the skin turns tender and streaks with red. Fever and chills racked the president, while fatigue clouded his mind. He vomited often, and a hot, shiny rash appeared on his chest. His doctors bled him three times, with little result. It must have been cold comfort to the Panamanians, superstitious by nature, that the President’s symptoms exactly mirrored the fate foretold in the portrait of the burning city that was still exhibited at the local convent. It was as if the leader’s body had been transformed into a miniature metropolis, a Panama-to-be. From the beleaguered city, he sent off a quick note to Don Pedro de Ulloa. “I hope the Mercy of God shall protect us,” he wrote, “and help us with the victory over these heretical dogs.”
As the news reached him of Morgan’s progress up the Chagres, Don Juan forced himself from his sickbed and collected what remained of his manpower out of a total population of over 6,000; there were only 800 traders, administrators, mestizos, “vassals and slaves” available to him. Everyone else had either failed to return from their postings upriver, evacuated, disappeared, or been killed. The army’s departure left Panama with hardly a healthy male walking its streets. On January 20, as Morgan began his second day on the river, Don Juan marched his army to Guayabal, ten miles from Venta de Cruces, and waited for word from his lieutenants. Every successive report that trickled in over the next few days was a tale of disaster: stockades abandoned, battles avoided, troops on the run “without so much as ever seeing the Face of the Enemy.” The pirate army was reported to be several thousand strong; as Morgan was unable to capture a single Spanish prisoner who could be tortured for information, so Don Juan had to depend on estimates, glimpses recorded by fleeing troops.
Clearly Don Juan would have to make a stand himself with the men he had with him; these soft-handed civilians were hardly the stuff to put against Morgan’s troops, who overawed even the kingdom’s best soldiers. He decided on Venta de Cruces and held a junta to confirm his intentions. But it was immediately apparent that the decision to stand and fight so far from Panama was not going to be popular: Those who had their fortunes stored in the city wanted to be close enough to protect them; those who didn’t have a cob to their name wanted no part of the battle. Arguments were made for staying put and for a retreat back to Panama; Don Juan quickly countered the latter. “But it being impossible then to fortifie it, it having many entrances, and the Houses all built of Wood; so soon as the Enemy should once make a breach, we should be quickly exposed to their Fury.” Finally his opponents gave up, and the exhausted, feverish Don Juan fell into bed thinking he’d at least stalled the talk of retreat.
The next morning he awoke to find his army vanished; in the middle of the night, over 500 of his men had sneaked away back to Panama. The farce had reached its climax.
It is striking how much the collapse of the Spanish before the buccaneers mirrored, in miniature, the collapse of the Inca in the face of the conquistadors a century and a half earlier. Although the conquistadors’ alliances with the Indians had a great deal to do with their success, the Inca were defeated because, in part, they believed that the Spanish were divine and destined to conquer. The Spanish, who had conquered most of the known world with steel, horses, and bureaucracy, who had created the greatest culture since Rome, would have seemed to be beyond such ghost stories; but they had slowly ceded some of the same mythic attributes to these unlettered men from Port Royal. Of course, a Spaniard could say he was rational and knew that the English walked on two legs and bled when shot—until, that is, the barbarians were camped outside his city. Then he became prone to the wildest superstitions, subject to every rumor and vision, a medievalist trapped in an unfolding prophecy. The empire had defeated the greatest armies on earth, driven the Moors from the peninsula, humbled France and England. But in the New World, at least, the Spanish could not help turning Morgan into a kind of deity who perhaps ate children and whose hair, it was said, brushed the branches of trees ten feet off the ground. He was evil, yes, but that was irrelevant. The point was that he was unstoppable.
Of course, the Spanish were right to fear the buccaneers; they were expert killers. And the buccaneers, without meaning to, also duplicated some of the methods that had enabled the Spanish to conquer the New World: forming alliances with disgruntled natives and carrying superior firearms, to name just two. But when perfectly capable soldiers who had faced Indians and the lethal maroons turned and ran, white-faced with terror, it was not the grudging retreat of an army who had met the enemy and found itself outgunned. It was a form of mass hysteria. Or, in Spanish terms, an enchantment.
Don Juan trudged back to the city, after leaving behind some squadrons who he hoped would pester Morgan on his approach and pick off some of his men. He arrived in Panama having done all he could with the earthly elements of battle; he’d sent troops down the river to fight Morgan, warned the healthy men of the city to be ready for service, seen that the city’s armaments were in their best possible shape. But men had failed him. Now he turned to the supernatural. Sacred images were carried from the churches by the monks and the nuns of Our Lady of Rosario and others and displayed to all. The people of Panama fell in behind these processions beseeching their favored saints to strike down the corsarios and leave their city in peace. Masses were paid for. Relics were brought out of their cases and paraded through the streets. And Don Juan marched back into the city and on January 25 gave a rousing address to rally the citizens:
That all those who were true Spanish Catholicks, Defenders of the Faith, and Devoto’s of our Lady of Pure and Immaculate Conception, should follow my Person, being that same day at four o’clock in the afternoon, resolved to march out to seek the Enemy and with this caution, that he that should refuse to do it, should be held as Infamous and a Coward, basely slighting so precise an Obligation.
It was a speech laced with bitterness; Don Juan had been disappointed so many times he could almost believe that even with their families and fortunes in imminent danger, the men of Panama would refuse to do battle. But his words were received with a loud cheer; men swore in front of their families to fight to the death. Don Juan led the huge crowd to the church and vowed to die in the defense of the Lady of Pure and Immaculate Conception, donating a diamond ring worth 40,000 pieces of eight ($2 million) to indicate that he was serious. Other “Jewels and Relicks” were also given to the religious orders; they included fine vestments made of silk and linen laced with gold thread and weighed down with jewels embedded in the fabric; an irreplaceable necklace made of emeralds from the mines of Colombia; diamond rings, a diamond-encrusted gold staff, and gems in bulk. Few if any Spanish governors had made such a gesture before a battle with the privateers; there was something final in the laying down of all Don Juan’s earthly possessions.
The crowd chanted the same oath as their president: death or victory. In the minds of its defenders, the battle for Panama had now explicitly become the defense of the Catholic frontier against Morgan and his Protestant heathens, a religious confrontation exactly like those that rang through Spanish history. The days before the showdown heightened the symbolic dream the Panamanians were living in. In their hearts they knew that few men in the city truly lived for God the way their ancestors had, but now they convinced themselves that dying for Him would give their men the final incentive. The pirates, on the other hand, had no such illusions; they knew down to the last piece of eight what they were fighting for.
The city was frenetic: Men gathered whatever weapons they could get hold of and finalized their affairs; women and children, along with monks and nuns, boarded ships that would carry them along the coast to safety. Much of the city’s wealth, including Don Juan’s rich bequests to the religious orders, was being packed into the holds of ships, and Don Juan knew that with their families and fortunes safely on the waves, two huge motivations for his fighters would be gone. But he reluctantly agreed; his lawyer would later point out that Panama’s open layout gave no protection to its citizens, and forcing them to stay with their plate and gems would have been inviting annihilation. He instructed that all the vessels in the harbor leave, so that the buccaneers would not be able to pursue the fleeing residents.
Now on Sunday, Don Juan marched out of the city to the savannah to meet the enemy. His army had swelled to 1,200 men, “compounded of two sorts, valiant military Men, and faint-hearted Cowards.” He had three field pieces, primed for firing, but his armaments in general were “few and bad”: carbines, arquebuses, and fowling pieces. But for a moment Don Juan allowed himself to believe that his army, fired by the Holy Spirit, could stand its own against the buccaneers: “The Army appeared all brisk and courageous, desiring nothing more than to engage,” he reported. They would strike against Morgan like lightning, Don Juan thought. The old faith died hard.
The Spanish tactics were simple: The first three ranks of soldiers would wait until the buccaneers came within range and then take a knee and fire. They would retire, and the next lines of defenders would come up and discharge their arms. The wide-open plains gave Don Juan few advantages to work with, but he took what he was given, buttressing his right flank by placing it up against a small hill. His approach was drastically straightforward; his men were arrayed across the plain, armed mostly with halberds and lances and the occasional arquebus; many of the Indians had bows and arrows. A line of cavalry stood in front of them, and one squadron of horsemen waited on each wing, armed with lances. His only innovation was to hold in reserve a herd of fifteen hundred bulls tended by fifty black cowboys; Don Juan hoped to drive the snorting beasts into the buccaneers’ formation from both left and right, scattering them at a critical moment. Don Juan had fought with the Spanish armies in the Netherlands, and he envisioned a confrontation that could have been lifted out of the European book of war: The charging buccaneers would be fed into the center of his line, where they would be decimated by his artillery and musketeers; then the cavalry would close in from both sides, slashing at the buccaneers’ flanks. Finally the oxen would stampede the survivors off the plain and send them hurtling back to the Chagres and beyond.
Two days later, on the evening of Tuesday, January 27, Morgan marched his men toward Panama. The 600 men in the vanguard were still celebrating their crossing of the isthmus with toasts of wine. The first impression of the Spanish was one of relief: One Spanish soldier called out to Don Juan, “We have nothing to fear. There are no more than six hundred drunkards.” The English had not expected so many defenders of the city; Morgan, who tended to inflate the Spanish contingents at every turn, counted 2,100 foot and 600 horse. Certainly Don Juan’s forces had swelled as stragglers rolled in from the Chagres, but those numbers seem a little high. Nevertheless, Esquemeling reported a crisis of faith among his comrades. “They discovered the forces of the people of Panama,” he tells us, “in battle array, which, when they perceived to be so numerous, they were suddenly surprised with great fear, much doubting the fortune of the day.” But after the hell they had just been through, few of the buccaneers could realistically have been thinking of retreat against a motley army such as faced them on the great plain, especially when one of the fabled cities of the Spanish Main lay before them. The Spanish reports have the buccaneers singing and dancing, which sounds more like Morgan’s men. At last the buccaneers bucked themselves up “and resolved either to conquer, or spend the very last drop of blood in their bodies.” One of the things that made the privateers such a fearsome enemy was that for them there was no other option. The Spanish had made the same vow, but experience showed that they were focused on survival. It was their hearts that began to fail first. In the Spanish ranks, González, the coward of the Chagres, remarked that he was keeping two horses close at hand to beat a quick retreat and that anyone with any sense would do the same. Don Juan called him a “chicken and an enemy spy” and ordered him shut away in the local jail.
The sun rose into a clear sky on Wednesday, imparting that first light brush of heat across the face that foretells a scorching day. Morgan had divided his men into three separate forces: the 300-strong vanguard, manned by the marksmen of the Hispaniola woods, would be commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Prince, with Morgan’s old ally Major John Morris as second-in-command. The right wing of the main body of 600 would be led by Morgan, the left wing by Colonel Edward Collier; the rear guard was under the command of the newly arrived Colonel Bledry Morgan (no relation to Henry). The “land” titles of major and lieutenant were now used exclusively; the North Sea lay miles behind them, and they were about to fight the kind of traditional field battle that echoed through the history of England and Spain. The ragamuffin sea bandits had transformed themselves into a classic European army. Fortified with fresh slabs of beef (some of the cattle having been brought along for sustenance), the ranks moved out to finally confront Don Juan.
It was afternoon before the privateers drew up to confront the Spaniards. Morgan took in the situation at a glance: Without any spies he couldn’t know the quality of the men who faced him or the caliber or number of their weapons; he had no idea that many of the black, Indian, and mestizo troops had “never in their lives…seen bullets.” It looked like a serious army; it could include reinforcements from the garrisons of any number of towns and cities. But Morgan soon spotted what he thought was a chink in Don Juan’s strategy: The small hill on the Spaniard’s right flank appeared undermanned. If he could take it and drive his men down it, he’d dramatically narrow the battlefield and reduce the ability of Don Juan’s cavalry to maneuver. He sent Prince and his vanguard to storm the hill; hidden by a ravine, the squadron dropped out of sight, then quickly swept up the incline at the rear. Now they looked down on the right wing of the Spanish cavalry. The horsemen saw the approaching buccaneers, wheeled their mounts toward them, cried, “Viva el Rey!” (“God save the king!”), and charged at the figures outlined in the blazing sun.
If the cavalry was to get into the vanguard’s ranks, the advantage would turn to them; the English musket and cutlass would be of little use against horsemen towering above them driving lances into their chests. But the Brethren, not panicking, dropped to one knee and took aim at the line of onrushing horses, and with a sharp crack of muskets the front line fell. The horses sprawled out on the plain, which along with the soggy ground made it difficult for the horsemen behind them to maneuver. Morgan noted an act of bravery by the cavalry’s leader: “One Francesco de Harro charged with the horse upon the vanguard so furiously that he could not be stopped till he lost his life.” But the advance had been quickly shattered. (The buccaneers left their mark everywhere—the hill is now known as El Cerro del Avance.)
Don Juan’s brightest hope, the cavalry, had been taken out of the picture. And now the infantry made a tactical mistake; seeing Morgan’s vanguard drop down into the ravine on their way to take the hill, they had assumed that the buccaneers were retreating. The left wing broke ranks and gave chase. “All of a sudden, I heard a loud clamour, crying out, ‘Fall on, fall on, for they fly!’” Don Juan recalled. Their commander tried to hold the men back, but he couldn’t stop the mad rush, “though he cut them with his Sword.” Don Juan’s hand was forced, and he wheeled his horse to the right and ordered his wing to follow the running troops as they raced toward the hill. “Come along, boys!” he cried out with a mixture of excitement and fatalism. “There is no remedy now, but to Conquer or Die. Follow me!”
Spaniards charging against buccaneers—it was a highly unusual situation. But Morgan’s men, descending the hill, responded like well-oiled killing machines. They took aim at the wild-eyed infantrymen and fired. The first volley tore through the first line of onrushing Spaniards, and a hundred of them dropped to the earth dead or severely wounded, gaping holes torn in their chests and stomachs. The sight dampened the Spanish ardor. “Hardly did our men see some fall dead,” Don Juan remembered, “and others wounded, but they turned their backs, and fled.” A moment before, Don Juan had been riding the crest of his soldiers’ courage; now he was left nearly alone, accompanied by a single Negro soldier and one servant. He watched his men run and must have wished he could have followed them. But he was an honorable man and felt someone had to make a show of sticking to their vow to defend Panama. Centuries of Spanish history resonated in that moment; Don Juan was sacrificing himself for a tradition his men had disgraced. “Yet I went forward to comply with my word to the Virgin, which was to die in her Defence,” he wrote. A bullet barely missed his face and ricocheted off the staff he carried in his hand. Seeing how exposed he was, a priest who knew Don Juan well and even said mass in his home caught up to the president and begged him to leave the battlefield. The old warrior twice refused and “sharply reprehended” the priest for suggesting retreat. The priest wouldn’t budge. “The third time, he persisted, telling me that it was mere desperation to die in that manner, and not like a Christian,” Don Juan remembered. With the buccaneers charging straight toward him, in pursuit of the fleeing troops, Don Juan saw the sense of the priest’s argument and relented. He was unhurt and considered it a miracle that the Virgin had protected him “from amidst so many thousand Bullets.”
Don Juan wheeled his horse and saw a scene of devastation: dead horses jackknifed on the grass, bodies of men littered across the savanna, arms and legs blown off by English ball, arquebuses tossed aside in terror, wounded soldiers being chased down by the buccaneers and chopped in the back of the neck with cutlasses, the wild bulls stampeding away from the buccaneers, terrified by the reports of the muskets and the screams. (The few that made it into the buccaneers’ lines merely tangled their horns in Morgan’s flag before being shot down by his men.) The Spanish defense collapsed. “I endeavoured with all my industry to persuade the soldiers to turn and face our enemies,” Don Juan said, “but it was impossible.” The pirates were moving through the plain executing the wounded, perhaps chopping off a finger with an attractive ring or snatching off a gold necklace. In the distance were the diminishing figures of Don Juan’s cavalry and infantry; as Morgan said, the retreat “came to plain running.” For three miles the buccaneers chased the terrified Spaniards, who attempted to hide in bushes and shrubs; discovered by a privateer, they would clasp their hands and cry out for mercy. But there was none to be had. Anyone who made the slightest resistance died.
The devastation was not over. Don Juan had given orders to the commander of the artillery, waiting back in the city: If Morgan won the day, he was to set a match to the garrison’s magazines and blow the fort sky-high. The Spanish had denied Morgan food on his trip across the isthmus; now they would deny him the means to go down the coast with fresh supplies. The commander could hear the sounds of battle in the distance, but he couldn’t know who was prevailing—until, that is, he saw the first of the retreating soldiers, running with buccaneers in hot pursuit. He lit the fuse and ran for safety. When the gunpowder ignited, the almighty boom could be heard six miles away. It was the opening salvo in the destruction of Panama itself.
As survivors from the battle streamed over the Matadero Bridge, the city still had some fight left in it. Some of the streets were barricaded, others booby-trapped with two hundred kegs of powder. Snipers took the occasional shot at the buccaneers as they smashed into the city, looting houses and drinking up the stores of wine. The flat crump of the detonating kegs could be heard in the distance; a fuse would reach a barrel, and a house in the next street would suddenly explode. Splinters came raining down on the privateers as they ruthlessly snuffed out any sign of resistance, taking time out to pillage as they made their way across the city; burning embers touched off fires. Soon flames crackled through the wood-frame houses of the merchants. The monk, and Don Juan’s fever, had been precise oracles. “Burn, burn!” cried out Spaniards in the street. “That is the order of Señor Don Juan!” The final touch came when black soldiers appeared on the streets with torches and began setting fire to the homes. If the buccaneers wanted Panama, its citizens would leave them a wasteland.
The strong winds that had swept the plains now acted as a huge bellows, blowing the fire up and arching it over the roofs. The pirates entered a city of black and orange, embers flying through the air, flames whipping from house to house, vortices of superheated air sucking the oxygen out of their lungs. Now they took on the strange role of firefighters, trying to save the city so they could pillage it. Morgan ordered barrels of powder to be detonated in lines ahead of the advancing fire, but the flames jumped the firebreaks and roared on. Valuable booty was being consumed: Silks and fine lace burned, beautifully wrought jewelry melted and streams of molten gold flowing along the floors of houses. The exhausted privateers fought throughout the day to put out the flames, “but in vain, for all was consumed by 12 at night.” There were exceptions: two churches, three hundred of the outlying houses, warehouses stocked with European linen and silk garments, the imposing stone civic buildings.
Morgan had done what the illustrious Drake had failed to do: crossed the fearsome isthmus and taken Panama. Leading a band of cantankerous individualists to Panama was a major accomplishment. “The hazard, conduct and daringness of their exploits,” wrote historian Robert Burton, “have by some been compared to the actions of Caesar and Alexander the Great.” Now Morgan watched Panama burn, as his men swarmed over it, mad to grab all the gold and wine they could before these were destroyed by the fire. Morgan’s report was touched with a sense of the scale of what he’d done; for one of the few times in his reports, a feeling for his place in history enters into the admiral’s voice. “Thus was consumed the famous and ancient city of Panama,” he wrote. “Which is the greatest mart for silver and gold in the whole world, for it receives all the goods that come from Spain in the King’s great fleet, and delivers all the gold and silver that comes from the mines of Peru and Potozí.”
The city burned through the night; it would take only thirty minutes for the flames to utterly ravage an entire street of wooden homes. Roderick lay in one of the stone monasteries and drank what wine he and his mates could find. He didn’t share Morgan’s sense of historical proportion; to him Panama was a storehouse of plunder, and he was anxious to begin raking in the swag in the morning. But when daylight came, Roderick and the others awoke to find Panama a place of cinders and ash. One of the few structures to survive was the stone tower of the cathedral. The tower had been transformed from the premier showpiece of a Christian civilization in its new frontier to what it would be for decades to come: a blackened, bitter landmark for Spanish mariners lost in coastal storms.
The dead city was only the outward manifestation of what had been lost. The illusion that the Spanish in the New World were crusaders cut from the old cloth had fled along with the ranks of fleeing soldiers. They would apparently no longer fight for God. They certainly wouldn’t die for their king. The buccaneers had torn away the illusions on which the kingdom had survived for so many years.
In full control, the buccaneers methodically searched Panama for swag. Morgan posted guards in key sectors and used the rest of his men to extract the remaining treasure from the hollowed-out city; the privateers sifted through the ruins of the finer homes. Roderick lowered a lighter comrade down a well where the water had been turned to mist by the raging fires so he could hunt for dumped plate and gems and helped rip apart the foundations and walls of buildings, looking for hidden stashes of gold and jewelry. Citizens unlucky enough to be caught up in the privateers’ dragnet were treated to hard questioning. Roderick had heard so many stories of Panama’s wealth that he found it difficult to believe that there were not piles of silver bars secreted somewhere in the city. He found melted blobs of gold here and there, but never the shining vaults packed tightly with plate that tortured his imagination. The interviewees paid heavily for their city’s reputation. There was one rumor in particular that haunted the buccaneers: There was said to be an altar made of gold that had been painted black to keep it out of the hands of the corsarios. It was never found. Instead of a torrent of loot, there was a slow, steady trickle of trinkets and chains tossed into piles and watched over jealously by the privateers.
The buccaneers didn’t restrict themselves to the city limits; realizing that the merchants and traders who hadn’t sailed out of the bay would be on the trails leading from Panama, they sent out squads of men to track the escapees down. “The men marched out in parties,” reported buccaneer William Fogg, “sometimes 100, sometimes 40 and 10, and took prisoners every day.” Morgan reported that they made “daily incursions on the enemy for 20 leagues without having one gun fired at them in anger.” Three thousand prisoners were brought back for interrogation and to be held for ransom. One triumph came with the capture of a bark that had run aground and been partially burned by its crew, who didn’t want it to fall into the privateers’ hands. Morgan desperately needed a boat to take command of the waters around Panama, and this modest vessel served his purpose. His men cruised the coastline and sailed to the nearby islands of Perico and Taboga and Taboguilla, capturing other traders and taking prisoner the fleeing Panamanians onboard. The trickle of loot grew into a modest stream. But the prize that would have made them all wealthy came within a hair of capture: Before Morgan reached the city, a ship called La Santíssima Trinidada had left Panama loaded down with “all the King’s plate and great quantity of riches of gold, pearl, jewels and other most precious goods, of all the best and richest merchants of Panama.” Not to mention a tremendous hoard of ecclesiastical treasures being transported by a group of nuns. The value of the loot easily ran into the millions. This was what the buccaneers had come to Panama for, but they let it slip through their grasp. When some of the Spanish crew left the ship to fill their water casks, they were captured and brought to the bark’s captain, Robert Searle, who soon learned that the Santíssima was loaded with booty. He ordered his men to take the Spanish ship, but by that time Roderick and the others were well oiled on “several sorts of rich wines” they’d confiscated, and they yawned in the captain’s face. Instead of boarding the Santíssima, the buccaneers watched through bleary eyes as it sailed away, and then went back to drinking themselves into a stupor. When Morgan heard about the fortune that had just escaped his clutches, he sent four boats looking for the galleon. The little fleet spent eight days searching for the Santíssima, without result; they did, however, stumble across a different vessel near the islands of Taboga and Taboguilla and found aboard “cloth, soap, sugar and biscuit, with twenty thousand pieces of eight in ready money.” A meager consolation prize.
The buccaneers first took out their frustration on the prisoners. Some, according to Esquemeling, “were presently put to the most exquisite tortures imaginable”: cutting off ears and noses, woolding, burning, and being put to the rack. The reports of cruelty were heard as far away as London, but the surgeon Richard Browne later gave a different account, in which he strongly defended Morgan’s conduct. His letter was shot through with a common soldier’s complaint: Civilians could not begin to understand the nature of battle, he wrote, denying that there were atrocities. His version had no pirates forcing themselves on the captive women and only one questionable action on the battlefield, a captain executing a friar after quarter was given. “For the Admiral,” Browne said, “he was noble enough to the vanquished enemy.”
As Don Juan’s Panama breathed its last (it would be rebuilt in a new location, where it stands to this day, and the old one abandoned forever), the president was in the town of Nata, seventy-five miles away. The contagion of fear had reached even this distant village. “I found not one soul therein,” Don Juan remembered, “for all were fled to the mountains.” Indeed, many of the rich merchants and administrators and church authorities were deep in the hills of central Panama, where they now faced the same privation through which Morgan and his men had suffered; starvation was a real threat, and the trader who had been used to earning a fistful of silver cobs for a week’s trading now had to forage through the jungle looking for fruit and roots.
Once he was safely in Nata, Don Juan tried one last time to rally the locals and the dispersed Panamanians to take up arms. Those who refused were milquetoasts who would “bear the infamy and stain for ever.” But there was little chance that men who did not have their life’s savings tied up in the great city would go to defend it when its leading citizens had run from the battle. Even the fact that many thought that Morgan had come to conquer Panama for England didn’t light a fire under the Spanish. “The pirates had brought with them an English Man,” Don Juan wrote, “whome they called The Prince, with intent there to Crown him King of Terra Firma.” The reference was probably to Captain Prince, who fought under Morgan, or to the still-fresh legend of Prince Rupert coming from over the seas. In any case very little was done to impede the buccaneers’ looting. The English scoffed at the Spanish defense of their jewel; when asked who had burned Panama, the buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp said that it couldn’t have been Don Juan, as he was miles away “saving his bacon.” Don Juan was philosophical about the defeat he’d just suffered; for a Spaniard, nothing so momentous as the destruction of a city could be achieved without being part of God’s plan. “This…has been a chastisement from Heaven,” he wrote. The same might have happened to any great Spanish commander, Don Juan thought, “as did to me, if his Men had deserted him, for one Man alone can do little.”
This was a comfort provided by the Spanish mind-set: The individual could never truly be responsible for disaster, as they didn’t have the power to turn history one way or the other. The lone Spaniard need not despair: defeat was part of a larger pattern.
As to why Panama had been lost, the Spaniards looked deep into themselves and acknowledged what they saw. “Fear has taken hold of the men of this Kingdom,” wrote a soldier from the castle of San Felipe. “to whom every single Englishman seems to be a strong squadron and it is for this reason, due to weakness, that the enemy is able to accomplish its plans to perfection.” This virus of terror was the result of decades of military neglect, underfunding, bureaucratic infighting, the huge territories to be protected, and Madrid’s indifference—in other words, all the ills of an empire that had shrunk within its enormous shell. But Don Juan was right: If all the Spaniards Morgan faced had fought like the heroes of San Lorenzo, he probably would have gone home without ever seeing Panama. The Spanish had let a myth get out of control.
Instead of an army, the Spanish sent a letter to Morgan. It came from the governor of Cartagena, the other rumored target of the privateers, and it recounted his exploits before making a ridiculous demand: “You should give satisfaction for the very serious damage that you have done and restore everything that you have robbed.” The letter did refer to one thing that had changed since Morgan set out from Jamaica: A peace treaty had finally been signed. The governor even included a copy of it with his rather whiny letter. Spain had made huge concessions; it now recognized Jamaica and the other English territories in the Indies and consigned to the past all the raids and outrages of the privateers against the Spanish Main. In turn, England agreed to stop its undeclared war against the kingdom and to bring in the privateers. The opening up of Spanish ports was not addressed, but there was a loophole that accomplished the same thing: English ships would now be allowed to enter Spanish harbors to get wood, water, and the other necessities of sailing life. In two quick strokes, Spain had renounced two founding principles of its empire in the New World: that the territories there belonged to them by divine right and that foreign trade would be outlawed forever.
Morgan had played no small part in this. His provocations had helped to force the Spanish to renounce their exclusive rights to the Spanish Main. The pressure from his relentless raids, the interruption of trading routes, the fact that their best-fortified cities were no longer safe from the admiral helped force the Spain into accepting that the New World had to be shared. Some officials saw the capitulation as a disaster. When the peace treaty was read in Lima, Peru, the viceroy wrote to the queen, “The Indies are lost, since there is no defence in the ports of this realm to resist them if they want to make themselves masters of the region where they come ashore.”
The Treaty of Madrid had been signed on July 21, and the English were given until November 28 to ratify it. Once that was done, there was a grace period of eight months in which both governments would inform their far-flung citizens to stop all hostilities against the other nation. The treaty finally put the relationships of the great powers in the Indies into black and white; the Caribbean would now cease to be a Wild West. The grace period introduced the only notes of gray—who was informed when could be argued forever. And now Morgan had just conducted the greatest raid in the history of buccaneering under the treaty. He’d helped create the pact; now he’d be the first to test it.
Morgan spent twenty-eight days raking over the coals of Panama. Before he left, he had to face down the first real mutiny he’d ever experienced. As the buccaneers prepared to leave Panama, the money had not yet been divided, but the buccaneers sensed that it was not the fabled sum they’d hoped for. Roderick was among a small group of pirates who formed a plan to steal away from Morgan and “go and rob upon the South Sea until they had got as much as they thought fit.” Morgan’s authority was gone. Like prisoners of war in a German camp, Roderick and the others had secreted away provisions, ammunition, powder, and muskets, even a cannon to load onto a ship they had commandeered. The extensive planning only pointed up how disgruntled the men had become. Morgan found out about the plans and had the mainmast of the ship cut down and burned; the renegades now had nothing to sail away on and so stuck with their commander. The admiral might need them to fight his way out of Panama, and who knew how many had emeralds or pearls sewn into their clothes?
Finally, on February 24, the occupation of Panama ended, and Morgan marched out the way he’d come in. Along with him went 175 mules loaded with “silver, gold and other precious things” and six hundred prisoners who had not been able, or willing, to raise the ransom price of 150 pesos. Morgan had sent scouts ahead of the main party so that he’d flush out any dead-enders and ambush squads in the treacherous jungle. But there was one good piece of news, at least: Heavy rains had fallen, and the Chagres was back to its normal levels; the ships he had left at San Lorenzo could make it all the way to Venta de Cruces and were waiting for him. In his absence, with their food running out, the crews had gone buccaneering themselves and captured a Spanish vessel packed with rice and maize. They would have plenty to eat on the way home. Panama had proved a brutal city to approach but a very easy place to leave.
At Venta de Cruces, the army paused. Morgan wanted to give the remaining prisoners a chance to cadge the ransom money from friends and relatives or retrieve it from hiding places. He also announced that his own men would be searched for any undeclared treasure. Every buccaneer was forced to swear that he hadn’t pocketed any of the loot, “not even so much as the value of a sixpence.” That would usually have been good enough for the Brethren, but Morgan now called for the men to be inspected from head to toe, their satchels turned over, their shoes taken off and shaken. It was a sign of the suspicions and rumors that raged through the buccaneer camp that even the admiral allowed himself to be patted down. The camaraderie that had brought them so far was gone.
Just as it had exposed the Spanish system, Panama revealed a great deal about the pirates. As soon as the dream of great riches evaporated, the buccaneer army atomized into a thousand separate pieces. The pirates would never threaten the systems they destabilized with a nation-state of their own, because they had no faith, no laws, no institutions that would hold them together beyond the next raid. A force powerful enough to make kings tremble, the Brethren imploded, and individual members split off on their own, available to be hunted down by those they had offended.
Now the Brethren became nautical again. The leaders regained their maritime titles, and the privateers floated down the Chagres to San Lorenzo. Morgan picked up the garrison he’d installed there and attempted one last bit of extortion. He sent a ship to Portobelo and demanded a ransom for the fort; either the Spanish pay up or he’d raze San Lorenzo to the ground. The Portobellans were past caring: “They would not give one farthing toward the ransom of said castle, and that the English might do with it as they pleased.” True to his word, Morgan loaded the cannon on board his ship—they would become part of the defenses of Port Royal—and torched the fort. Like any good Lucifer, he was leaving the isthmus trailing the smell of smoke.
Before the ships sailed from the mouth of the Chagres, the spoils had to be divided. The mistrust was palpable as jewels and plate and ransom money and gold doubloons were brought forth and tossed into the common pile. Each piece was weighed and appraised. How much the buccaneers came away with has been disputed ever since the raid; the estimates range from 140,000 pieces of eight ($7 million in modern dollars) to over 400,000 pieces of eight ($20 million). Most evidence points toward the lower estimate as being the more accurate. It was a significant sum, but it had been taken by an enormous army, and after deductions were made for the wounded, the brave, the surgeons, the carpenters, and the officers, the ordinary buccaneers received a share of 80 pieces of eight each, or $4,000 in modern dollars. When Roderick heard the share, his face twisted with bitterness. It was not enough. For the death march up the Chagres? For nearly starving to death and taking the capital of the Spanish Main? To Roderick it was a derisory amount, especially alongside Morgan’s cut—1,400 pieces of eight, or today’s $70,000—and he let his commander know it. “So it was that the rest of his companions,” Esquemeling wrote, “even of his own nation, complained of his proceedings in this particular, and feared not to tell him openly to his face, that he’d reserved the best jewels to himself.”
Did Morgan cheat Roderick and the rest of his foot soldiers? Many of his underlings felt he did. But the admiral would have been taking his life in his hands; on the slightest evidence of double-dealing, his men would have slashed his throat. It seems unlikely that he’d risk death or permit his belongings to be searched if he was really hiding an enormous diamond or a sackful of plate. The problem was not only the light haul; it was the number of men. The privateers had taken more swag than they’d extracted from Portobelo, but now it had to be split among four times as many buccaneers. In his report to Modyford, Morgan showed that he was aware of the controversy by devoting the final sentences to refuting the charge; he “had it from the prisoners that the reason there was no more wealth was because [the Spanish] had two months’ notice, and laded two great ships of 350 and 700 tons with money, plate, gold and jewels.” The light payday gave birth to a thousand legends. Treasure hunters off Haiti and elsewhere still talk about the famous golden altar of Panama City, painted black and smuggled out of the city by Morgan (or by the Panamanians—there are several versions). Talk of buried treasure is a must in all pirate legends, but it is rare that an expedition’s own crew begins the gossip.
Morgan took no risks. He’d already heard about the possible peace with Spain, bringing with it a new era for Port Royal. There was no time to waste; he had to make his case to Modyford and the Crown as quickly as possible. And he had to avoid being garroted by his men. Without calling a council, as was customary, he slipped away with just four ships and no advance notice. The other vessels split off for Tortuga, Costa Rica, or other hideouts. England and Spain were at peace; the Brethren were now public enemies.
The raid had shattered the Spanish idea of a Catholic kingdom built on faith and the bureaucracy that supported it. But it also marked the last gasp for the Brethren; they had become almost too successful. Nothing but the capture of a galleon’s load of treasure would have satisfied the pirates, and that had not been found. Now Morgan and the others would have to face the fact that there was no loyalty between pirates beyond the search for gold. The dispersal of Morgan’s fleet into small convoys foreshadowed the blood-letting to come.