13

Aftermath

The news of the destruction of Panama filtered across the Atlantic in rumors and wild tales told tenth-hand on ships and in waterfront taverns. Finally, on June 5, a ship arrived in Lisbon with an authoritative report of the invasion. The news shook the Continent. Englishmen living abroad, at least those not in the pro-Spanish wing of the government, took great relish in the sacking of Panama. The distances covered and the fame of the target seemed to indicate London’s widening reach and power. “They say the King of England may conquer the whole world,” crowed the English consul in Portugal, “for nothing can be too difficult for Inglishmen to undertake.” Even those ministers who were aghast at the diplomatic implications of the raid could not help but acknowledge that it was an “unparalleled exploit” in the history of the nation. “Such an action had not ben done since the famous Drake,” wrote the Restoration diarist John Evelyn, and Drake was the standard for all such expeditions. The reaction was far different on the other side of the Treaty of Madrid. The Spanish went beyond strategic horror; it was as if their faith in the world had been given a hard wrench. “The sacred knot was untied,” wrote the Venetian ambassador to Spain, “and the laws not only of friendship but of nature were broken.” The Spanish court felt it had been tricked; the duplicity of Charles II and his ministers was beyond fathoming. To the Spanish there was no possibility that the invasion could have gone ahead without approval at the very highest levels of English government. The queen reacted violently, falling victim to “such a distemper and excesse of weeping and violent passion as those about her feared it might shorten her life.” The Conde de Peñaranda, who had negotiated the treaty that was supposed to make Morgan’s type obsolete, demanded satisfaction from the English, after wiping away his own tears. The English said the right things: King Charles even claimed that he objected to the invasion as if it had been made on English soil, but the Spanish could not, at first, be appeased.

When the total costs of the raid were added up, the loss of Panama had cost between 11 and 18 million pesos, or between $550 and $900 million. A portion of the costs for rebuilding the city and its fortifications would have to be borne by the Crown, adding hugely to its expenses, drastically reducing its ability to expand or fortify the rest of its holdings in the New World. The flow of trade was interrupted, and whatever claims Spain had to enforcing its will in the New World were now largely in shreds. Losing a galleon could be explained by simple bad luck. But losing Panama was a systemic failure on a huge scale.

A war council was called, and it began its deliberations by emphasizing how important Panama was to Spain. “It has been considered in detail the great importance of that population for it is the throat of the Realm of Peru and the wall that defends it,” the ministers wrote, “on whose restoration depends the conservation of the Catholic religion, and…the interests of the Spanish monarch and its trade.” The councilors, including the Conde de Peñaranda, knew the Crown’s history in these matters and urged haste; “too much dallying” would render the whole effort useless. The men suggested an ambitious response: 4,000 men, including 600 or 700 of the Royal Guard, along with cavalry and ten ships. But the costs were added up and passions inevitably cooled, although from white-hot levels, and the forces were eventually reduced to only three vessels with 550 men, which set out in the middle of August. Part of the reason for the tempered response was that the English had made real gestures toward their new friends: The first step came with a private meeting between the English diplomat Godolphin and the queen, in which he apologized profusely and swore that the king did not know of Morgan’s plans. Then Modyford’s son was tossed into the Tower of London, not for any crimes of his own but as collateral for his father’s arrest. An order had been issued calling the governor of Jamaica an enemy of the state.

Modyford waited anxiously back in Jamaica. He’d heard nothing from England about the treaty; rather awkwardly, he had to wait until the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico sent him a copy of the accord, as a sign of the new atmosphere of friendship and cooperation. It didn’t take an exquisitely tuned weather vane like Modyford to realize that the winds from Europe were stiffening against him. Days before his replacement, the rigid and humorless Sir Thomas Lynch, sailed into the harbor, Modyford decided to punch up a memo to Arlington detailing exactly why the raid on Panama was justified. Gone was his insinuating style, replaced by fourteen quick bullet points, listing his reasons for war: the “violences” of Rivero; His Majesty’s permission to counter any Spanish outrages; the “fears of the planters, the cries of the women and children”; and so on. His final statement had a touch of his boldness: Even if he’d known of “all the trouble which now threatens me” because of the Panama raid, Modyford stated, he wouldn’t have called Morgan back. Anything else would have caused “the manifest ruin of this island.” The document lacked Modyford’s usual polish; worry clearly cramped his hand.

At last, on the first of July, Sir Thomas Lynch sailed into Port Royal harbor to relieve him of his duties. Tucked away among Lynch’s linen shirts and talcum powder was an order to arrest Modyford. The lingering mystery that surrounds the document centers on the fact that it was dated well before reports of the Panamanian invasion reached London. Does this mean that Charles II was secretly hoping the Jamaicans would make one last strike before the treaty went into effect—and kept the arrest order on hand to show the Spanish he was serious about reining them in once that last raid was done? Or was the warrant issued for the general crimes of the privateers, committed under Modyford’s watch, an insurance policy to get him out of the way and the pro-trade Lynch more easily into office? Or was the fact that the document was left to gather dust just evidence of London’s scandalous inattention to Jamaica? The truth is unclear, but the combination of silence and treachery practiced by London against its own colonial governor make Modyford’s efforts at dissembling seem almost naïve by comparison.

Lynch was in an awkward spot; he was here not only to replace Modyford but to put him in chains. Cautious to a fault, he wanted to test the air before spiriting Modyford away, and so he spent weeks as the governor’s guest, staying in his house (where an attack of gout laid him up), then attending parties thrown in his honor by Modyford, who was punctilious to the last. Eating the man’s beef, drinking his rum, and accepting his health tips, even the harsh-tempered Lynch must have felt like a cad at times. Still, he started setting the trap, telling the leading lights of Jamaican society that the privateers and those who supported them were in bad odor in London. The whisper campaign got a boost from the grumblings of the privateers, who were returning to Port Royal from Panama ship by ship. Lynch reported to London that the buccaneers’ unhappiness was working in their favor: “They would take it as a compliment to be severe with Morgan whom they rail horribly for starving, cheating and deserting them.” Soon Lynch felt comfortable enough to spring his trap. He invited Modyford and some members of the council aboard his ship, the Assistance, for a sumptuous dinner. Once he had the governor there, safely under the eyes of his loyal crew, he broke the news: Modyford was a prisoner of state. The crime? That “contrary to the King’s express commands,” Modyford had “made many depredations and hostilities against the subjects of His Majesty’s brother, the Catholic King.”

That fact is, Charles’s commands had been anything but “express”; when he did issue one, it was often as opaque as a Spanish pearl and soon to be countermanded. Lynch softened the blow by telling the shocked governor that his “life and fortune were in no danger…. There was a necessity of the King’s making this resentment for such an unseasonable irruption.” In other words, Modyford was to be the fall guy for Panama.

Morgan was now under a black cloud for the first time in his career; he retired to his plantation, where he fell ill with a fever. The jungles of Panama had a long reach, and they’d dosed Morgan’s blood with one of their many contagions. While Modyford was sailing for England as a prisoner, his ally sweated and tossed in his bed at home, subject to nightmares. The news of what he’d done was spreading Morgan’s name further. Panama would seal his reputation among historians of Jamaica as “the one great man, the one figure of heroic proportions” in the nation’s history (Williams); the man whose “master mind rendered Jamaica English” (Hodgetts). But in 1671, Morgan knew he’d gone too far. Although he liked the insurance of the commissions he received, he’d acted as if the Old World did not exist. The pirates had thrived in a vacuum, like men stranded on a desert island who made up new laws for themselves. That idyll was about to end.

The other privateers began trickling into Port Royal from all points of the map. Roderick sneaked in at dusk with twelve others on one of the smallest ships and, avoiding the waterfront, slipped off to his rooms. Esquemeling returned from adventures on an unnamed island, where, after a hot skirmish with some natives, the buccaneers found two bodies on the beach, one of them with “a beard of massive gold,” a kind of sash of fine beaten metal that was hung from holes pierced in the man’s lips. Finally he returned to Jamaica, and his old obsession: Morgan. Esquemeling takes his last look at the man he would make famous, and despite the many glories he’d attributed to the admiral, his eye was now jaundiced by disappointment. “Morgan left us all in such a miserable condition,” he wrote in one of the few self-incriminating passages in his memoir, “as might serve for a lively representation of what reward attends wickedness at the latter end of life.” Esquemeling was not alone in his complaints. Even Browne, the surgeon general on the Panama expedition who had always spoke admiringly of the Welshman, took his shots. “There have been very great complaints by the wronged seamen in Sir Thomas Modyford’s time against Admiral Morgan…,” he reported. “Nothing was done, but since Sir Thomas Lynch’s arrival they are left to the law.” Indeed, Lynch was making it clear that Port Royal’s time as a pirate haven was over. He’d received “strict and severe orders” to keep the privateers from molesting the Spanish. The news seemed all bad for the Brethren. Those, like Esquemeling’s crewmates, who were not starving were shipwrecked; an untold number of vessels wrecked on the reefs of Central America as they sought fresh victims. Others of the ex-Morgan forces attacked a town in Cuba and fell into torturing and robbing again, ignoring the noises Lynch was making in Jamaica. The new governor reacted quickly, pardoning all the privateers who had taken part in the Panama expedition, so long as they reported to Jamaica for absolution. But he went after the recent offenders. He caught some of the “chief actors” in the Cuban atrocities and had them hanged at a place called Gallows Point, or simply the Point. It was a shocking sight: the bodies of the guardians of the island, the heroes of Jamaica, swinging from a scaffold in the town they had shielded for decades.

It makes one wonder how much of Henry Morgan’s illness was bacterial and how much the result of foreboding. Or perhaps the old commander was simply planning his next step, watching where the bodies fell.

In Panama the Spanish were returning to a city that looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake and a firestorm. The interim governor, Don Francisco de Marichalar, arrived back in the smoldering ruins on June 9, and “found nothing but disgraces, sorrows and misfortune.” The rich merchants and their wives were near-naked and living in crude huts on the outskirts of the city formerly inhabited by their slaves. The English invasion had humbled the moguls of the New World with a biblical thoroughness; their homes were rubble, their bodies were racked with fevers, their trade was gone, and they had nothing to do but “watch their people die.” Every sliver of wood had been consumed in the fire, which had even reached into the stone buildings and burned out the wooden beams, leaving the shells vulnerable; the soaring walls of the convents were now blackened monoliths that jutted up here and there like rotten teeth. Marichalar could hear them crash to the ground throughout the day, the impact of the falling stone startling the officials who were trying to get a head count and organize some sort of defenses, in case the English should return. The entire city would have to be razed; the foundations of the remaining buildings were so damaged that “nothing could be built on them.”

Calamity or no calamity, this was still the Spanish Empire, and a full-fledged inquiry into the events of the past few months had to be undertaken. Marichalar made his rounds of the flattened metropolis and interviewed relevant witnesses in their pathetic homes, with acrid smoke still flavoring the air; he had no fewer than fifty questions to ask, most of them focused on Don Juan’s performance leading up to and during the attack. The evidence pointed to a huge calamity, with 3,000 people, half the city’s population, dead (that would translate into the loss of 250,000 people in present-day Panama City). The men who had run from Morgan and the soldiers who refused to fight now testified that in fact Don Juan had been the real traitor; he’d mismanaged the garrisons, failed to take the battle to Morgan on the Chagres, and committed one tactical mistake after another. It was, of course, completely untrue: If his subordinates and his superiors had responded to Don Juan’s requests with even a modicum of vigor, Panama might have been saved. The paper trail and a good lawyer vindicated Don Juan: The barrister produced Don Juan’s many letters asking for reinforcements and reams of testimony that directly contradicted the portrait of the old man as a failed leader. He was acquitted and returned to Spain, where he died three years later. The true criminals of the Panama episode on the Spanish side were never brought to justice.

The destruction of Panama was so complete that the old site of the city was abandoned and a new location six miles away was found for the inevitable rebuilding. This is where the modern city of Panama grew, with its bone-white skyscrapers. The ruins of the old cathedral and a few other buildings still stand and are a minor tourist attraction; a foreigner visiting La Vieja will hear a few legends about Morgan’s raid, including the old canard that he burned down the city, and slightly more bizarre additions—such as the notion that the privateers entered the city singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

The Panamanians never got their revenge on the infidels of Port Royal, but a fuller justice did come in a way they understood. For that they would have to wait twenty-one years.

Charles II had given up Modyford, but Madrid pressed for more. Master bureaucrats that they were, the Spanish had always blamed Modyford and the anti-Spanish lobby in London, rather than Morgan himself, for most of the admiral’s mayhem in the West Indies. In the Spanish system, a lone commander making up his own rules, attacking his own chosen targets, was unthinkable. Their world was so regulated from top to bottom, so bound together with affidavits, hearings, councils of war, and miles of parchment, that they could hardly imagine the free hand Morgan was given. Although he always obtained the cover of commissions, Morgan’s exploits were largely his own. The Spanish simply could not get their minds around that fact—until Panama. Trekking across the isthmus and holding 1,500 privateers under his sway was clearly not the act of a faceless cog; the Spanish finally recognized that the Welshman was greater “en audaciay en el fortuna” than anyone else who threatened them in the New World.

King Charles did not want further complications with the Spanish; tensions with Holland were ratcheting up, and he needed the Catholic power on his side in any possible war. The year before, Charles had signed the secret Treaty of Dover with the French, who would provide him with support against the Dutch in the event of a war, in return for his secret conversion to the Catholic faith. Everything Thomas Gage had worked for was in jeopardy: The king was making peace with the hated Catholic empire in the New World, allying himself with the rising Catholic power of Louis XIV in the Old World, and facing off against those good Protestants, the Dutch. In this intricate game of kings and queens, Henry Morgan became an easily sacrificed pawn. The Spanish clamored for more evidence of English regret, and so orders were issued: Arrest the admiral.

Ironically, the arrest warrant arrived in a Jamaica that was again besieged, and from the old enemy. Lynch had received information that a fleet sent from Madrid to avenge Panama and retake Jamaica was under sail, with 5,000 soldiers aboard. The governor was skeptical but worried; he called a council of war and put the island on battle footing, but still he could not believe that the Spanish would attack. “I cannot think it is for the Spaniards’ interest to break [the peace],” he wrote. “Lest we should bring the war again into their own quarters.” Modyford was whiling away the days in the Tower of London; under his rule, the news of a fleet on the way would have been cause to bring the privateers roaring out of Port Royal. But Lynch kept his powder dry. When the letter arrived ordering him to arrest Morgan, however, he now saw his old nemesis in a fonder light. “To speak the truth of him, he’s an honest, brave fellow,” he wrote. He even wavered for a second on the arrest: “The sending home of Morgan might make all the privateers apprehend they should be so dealt with,” Lynch admitted. But there was no thought of refusing London. “I shall send him home so as he shall not be much disgusted, yet the order obeyed, and the Spaniards satisfied.”

A proper vessel for the prisoner’s return was found, the Welcome, an ancient frigate that had once lain at the bottom of the Thames as a barrier to Dutch marauders but was later reclaimed and sent to Jamaica. It was a junker hardly fit for a person of Morgan’s standing, but it told his current fortunes well enough. In April of 1672, at age thirty-seven, he was finally brought aboard as a prisoner of state, and the last of the true founders of Jamaica and the English empire in the West Indies disappeared into the stinking hold. One Jamaican wrote of the islanders’ feelings about their old protector, now in chains on his way to London: “I know not what approbation he may find there, but he received here a very high and honorable applause for his noble service…. I hope without offence I may say he is a very well deserving person, and one of great courage.” But others, like Roderick, were glad to see him go. They still believed he’d buried their gold somewhere on his estate, and the admiral could burn in hell for all they cared. Roderick felt that the great man had let him down, that the thing that had come to replace the family he’d left behind—the Brethren—was now in shreds because of Morgan. Roderick spent most of his time drinking in Port Royal, sleeping with his prostitute girlfriend, and working the pirate grapevine for news of upcoming missions. He was not fit for returning to England or for starting another kind of life. He’d done great things, and the life back there would be too strange to him.

Morgan sailed to England, getting sicker as he got closer to the seat of his troubles. On the voyage he commiserated with Captain Francis Witherborn, a pirate who had been condemned to death. The mood for the Brethren could not have been darker: Back in Jamaica, Morgan’s second-in-command on the Panama expedition, Edward Collier, quietly sold his plantation and attempted to leave the country before the garrison came looking for him. In Port Royal some of the merchants and planters breathed a sigh of relief. Their spokesman, Lynch, expressed what the buccaneers had done to Jamaica:

People have not married, built, or settled as they would in peace; some for fear of being destroyed, others have got much and suddenly by privateers’ bargains and are gone. War carries away all freemen, labourers, and planters of provisions, which makes work and victuals dear and scarce. Privateering encourages all manner of disorder and dissoluteness, and if it succeed, does but enrich the worst sort of people, and provoke and alarm the Spaniards, constraining them to arm and fortify….

It was an analysis that went all the way back to the buccaneers’ rowdy male-only club, where women were banished and a kind of bestial party atmosphere reigned. Pirates were just not good for good bourgeois family values, and now that they were out of favor, the bourgeois were sticking their heads up and saying so. With Morgan and the boys prowling outside your windows, there was an atmosphere of lawlessness, always a hint of threat in the scented air. Civil society couldn’t flourish where they held so much power.

Now Jamaica had gotten rid of the outlaws. Or so Lynch thought.

After a rough passage, the admiral arrived in London in August 1672. He must have wondered if he’d join his friend Modyford. The wily governor was still in the Tower of London, where Walter Raleigh and Thomas More had spent their last days. Actually a series of buildings, the Tower had been founded almost six hundred years before by William the Conqueror and its expanding collection of structures had served as a castle right up until 1625. Its many uses had included an observatory, a zoo for the royal menagerie, and a mint. But it was as a jail that the Tower had become famous, and Modyford was in illustrious company: Princes had been murdered here, the treasonous Duke of Clarence was drowned in a barrel of wine, Elizabeth I plotted behind its walls, and Guy Fawkes’s screams echoed off the stones as his torturers softened him up before his court date. Although Modyford was not whipped, he knew that the atmosphere behind the thick stone walls of the Tower was subject to every change in the diplomatic weather. The lives of rightful heirs to the throne had been snuffed out here; executing a mere colonial governor would hardly cause the king to lose a moment’s sleep.

Morgan, on the other hand, was allowed the freedom of London. If he’d landed in Cromwell’s tight-lipped, Puritan England, the buccaneer king would surely have found it tough going. But Restoration London was piratical in its outlook—hard drinking, displayed wealth, luxurious dress, dubious morals were all in favor. If it were only thirty degrees warmer, Morgan would have felt right at home. He arrived in a country where religion and war were once again on people’s minds. Charles II had cemented an alliance between England and France, which gave the always strapped king access to some of Louis XIV’s ready cash and included a notorious clause stipulating that the English monarch would declare himself a Catholic “as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit”; all of this had tilted the nation toward France and against his fellow Protestants in the United Provinces, who had become England’s great competitors for world markets. Indeed, everywhere he turned, the Londoner saw signs of the current fetish for things Catholic: their new St. Paul’s Cathedral was practically a duplicate of St. Peter’s in Rome; the aristocrats marched down Oxford Street in French wigs, gripping the latest Gallic novel, speaking French to their chambermaids and delighting in the latest Spanish-influenced play. The old, tramped-down vine of Catholicism was sprouting new leaves in England. And any alliance with Catholic powers was bad news for Modyford and Morgan, as it would always bring with it a consideration of Spain’s desires. So Modyford shivered in the cold lodgings of the Towers while Morgan sank deeper into a heavy tropical fever.

Why did Morgan remain free? Because even before he arrived, the political situation was shifting in his favor. The war with the Dutch was not going well; the enemy had outwitted its larger, clumsier opponents with a combination of guerrilla warfare and unconventional tactics, including opening the dikes and flooding their own countryside to stop a French advance. The English commoners were growing weary of battle, and with weariness came irritation: Why was the nation expending its money and the lives of its youth on fighting good Dutch Protestants? Here the ancient hatred of France played to Morgan’s favor. When it was revealed that Charles’s newest mistress was a Catholic and that others in his immediate circle had recently converted, the English hysteria raised its head again. Jailing Morgan would only have incensed Charles’s anti-Catholic critics, and so he stayed out of prison. Even Modyford benefited: After two years in the Towers, he was released.

The admiral walked the London streets as a free, if deeply annoyed, man. A contemporary painted a picture of a frustrated Morgan, paying for lodging, food, and new clothes while he waited for his case to be decided, while his plantations were neglected back in Jamaica. “Under those difficulties and the perpetual malice of a prevailing court faction, he wasted the remaining part of his life, oppressed not only by those but by a lingering consumption, the coldness of this climate and his vexations had brought him into, when he was forced to stay here.” But he enjoyed himself, too, going to parties and regaling the scandalized socialites with tales of plunder, sea battles, and nights in Jamaica’s finest holes-in-the-wall.

There is evidence that Morgan fell in with a raffish, even dangerous crowd. His newest friend was the nineteen-year-old Christopher Monck, one of the princes of the realm, the son of Charles’s re-doubtable and rich general George Monck. The son was hotheaded and impetuous. Before meeting Morgan, he’d been cavorting in the red-light district of London with two highborn friends; when the beadle (or sheriff) of the district had stepped in to protest their drunken outrages, the young men killed him in the street. The locals wanted to lynch the trio, but their names saved them. Henry Morgan found young Christopher’s wild ways to his liking; it was the closest thing to being in Port Royal after a rich haul.

It is odd how much of what we know of Morgan’s three years in London retraced the rise of Thomas Gage. At a party attended by the best and brightest of English society, the diarist John Evelyn records the only sighting of the famous privateer and the now-released Modyford. He characterized Morgan as the man “who undertooke that gallant exploit from Nombre de Dios to Panama” and reported that the admiral estimated it would take only 10,000 men to conquer the Indies. He also reported that Morgan bragged about the “great booty” they had taken, surely a required note in any buccaneering tales told in London drawing rooms. Twenty years after Gage had spread the word of immense riches in the Spanish New World and the ease with which they could be extracted, here was Morgan saying the same thing. Morgan’s estimate of the manpower needed was much more realistic than the pastor’s, but Gage’s dream of New World domination had not died. Nor had his avarice. By now it was practically the national credo of Jamaica.

And then, a final echo from the past: The king asked Morgan to draw up a memo with his ideas on Jamaica’s protection, just as his old nemesis Cromwell had done with the pastor from Deal on the subject of the New World. The wars with the Netherlands meant that Jamaica faced new enemies: Dutch warships sailed out of Curaçao; the unappeased Spanish were still a threat; even the French could not be trusted. But with Morgan thousands of miles away, the privateers could no longer be called on to defend the island, as Lynch had so alienated the Brethren that they would not come to the country’s defense. The governor asked the king for “a frigate or two” to protect his shores from invasion, but Charles was hard up, barely able to sustain his war against his Protestant rivals, and in this situation Lynch’s pacifism looked increasingly like weakness. Morgan’s stock rose by the week; say what you would about the buccaneer, he’d held England’s enemies in check. After reading his memo, Charles called him in and they went over his points: More guns and ammunition for Port Royal led the list.

From arriving in London in the company of a doomed man, Morgan was being consulted by his king. It was a delicious turnaround. The meeting went so well that he was later presented with a snuff box bearing the king’s profile done in small diamonds, a few extra required for Charles’s long Gallic nose. Finally, on November 6, Morgan received word that he’d been named deputy governor of Jamaica, “his Majesty reposing particular confidence in his loyalty, prudence and courage, and long experience of that colony.” With the job came a knighthood, and Morgan, dressed in the finest suit a London tailor could cut, attended the ceremony and felt the royal sword touch his clavicle. With clouds gathering on the horizon again, the rulers of England had finally clasped Morgan close; he was now one of theirs.

Cynics would have laughed at the ceremony; Morgan had almost been stuffed away in a dungeon by the same people who were now making him a knight. But one can be sure he was not among the scoffers: Morgan was a Royalist to the bone. It was certainly one of the happiest days of his life.

In London, Morgan had returned from the jungles to a brawling, febrile city that still thought of itself as in the forefront of new thinking in natural philosophy (that is, science), astronomy, and other disciplines. One tiny offshoot of this scientific revolution was a fresh look at the perennial scourge of Port Royal, the shaking of the earth, which had for centuries been attributed to one thing: God’s wrath. There were dozens of theories as to what caused these tremors, some dating back centuries, some brand-new. The Greek Thales of Miletas proposed that the earth’s crust floated on an ocean whose waves and gales caused the ground to heave up and down, while Descartes believed that subterranean gases shot out of their dens and sparked the tremors. Steam vapor caused by underground rivers flowing onto hot rocks was another hypothesis, while one famous London expert on earthquakes came down on the side of “eruptions of fiery Conflagrations inkindled in the Subterranean regions.” A shift in the earth’s core, the influence of passing comets, and—from the director of the Royal Observatory in London—“an explosion of nitreous and sulphurous particles in the air” were also suggested. In the General History of Earthquakes, published in the late 1600s, the author began with this statement: “An earthquake is a shaking of the Earth occasioned by Wind and Exhalation inclosed within the Caves and Bowels of the Earth.” When the winds were out of balance, they found a gap in the earth’s surface and proceeded to “rendeth and openeth” the ground. There were four kinds of quakes, and all were related to the movement of air:

1. A lateral quake, in which “the whole force of the inclosed wind and vapors [are] driven to one place and there is no contrary motion to preserve it.” This represents an early attempt to describe how land actually moved during earthquakes, which the author compared to “a man shaking in an ague [fever].”

2. The explosive upward event, where “the earth is lifted up with great violence so that the buildings are like to fall and instantly sink down again.” These kinds of tremors, it was believed, were caused by the earth actually collapsing into the cavern that had once been supported by the pressure of the escaping wind.

3. A split in the earth, “when the sea in some places has been drunk up so that people have gone over on foot.” This accounted for the phenomenon of disappearing lakes and rivers so common to powerful quakes.

4. The reverse, quakes that caused mountains “to arise out of the Earth.”

Morgan was appointed deputy governor of Jamaica, second-in-command on the island. The new governor and Morgan’s new superior was one Lord Vaughan, five years younger than the thirty-nine-year-old Morgan, a man of letters who had some claim to “discovering” the poet John Dryden. He was a fitting emissary from Restoration London: an aristocrat with a satyr’s face whom Samuel Pepys once called “one of the lewdest fellows of the age.” Still, he was no match for a veteran like Morgan. The young lord warned the buccaneer to stick close to his vessel on the voyage from England to Jamaica and under no circumstances set out ahead. If Morgan arrived first, he’d be acting governor of the island until Vaughan made it ashore. The admiral agreed and then completely ignored Vaughan; he set out in the Jamaica Merchant under the command of Captain Joseph Knapman, but there is some evidence that Morgan himself whipped the crew on to leave Vaughan in his wake. Knapman later said that some evil genius had plotted the Merchant’s route, and “never was any man more surprised considering the course they had steered.”

If past performance is any clue, Morgan was the evil genius in question, because the Merchant crashed into a coral reef off Île-à-Vache, the buccaneers’ old meeting place off the southern coast of Haiti. Morgan treated ships like disposable objects, to be wrecked, sunk, rammed, or turned into blazing weapons whenever necessary, and the Merchant was no different: The ammunition and cannon that he’d brought with him, as per his memo to the king, sank straight to the bottom of the ocean. Morgan had not been humbled by his time abroad; he reported solemnly to London that “they had all perished had Morgan not known where he was.” Undaunted, he soon caught a ride with a privateer who happened by and was brought in his old style to Port Royal on March 6. The parties commenced immediately; those who had been pining for a resumption of the town’s notorious ways and a strong man to face down all comers stood drinks for their returned hero. His wife, Elizabeth, fell into his arms, his nephews and nieces crowded around him, planters pressed invitations on the admiral, and all in all the wide-open spirit of the buccaneer paradise seemed ready to whir up again to its old dizzying heights.

His enemy, Lynch, was waiting for him with a scowl on his face. The governor had in November written to London to warn them that Morgan’s second coming would only lead to more bloodshed in the West Indies. The Spanish were reportedly sending a fleet of galleons, “biscaniers, Ostenders and Flushingers, which are likely to clear the Indies of all that Infest them,” adding with a sting, “one of the reasons of their coming is, the noise of Admiral Morgan’s favour at Court and return to the Indies, which much alarmed the Spaniards, and caused the King to be at vast charge in fortifying in the South Sea.” Morgan’s old cronies, including Roderick, who had lost two fingers in a grenado accident, were sailing under French commissions out of Tortuga and keeping to their old style of “rapine and libertinage.” Time had sweetened their memories somewhat, that and the fact that they had yet to hit a payday equal to the admiral’s best. If Morgan could promise another rich target, they might be ready to take up with him. It seemed like the old wars were about to begin again.

As he’d arrived before Vaughan, Morgan assumed the office of governor until his superior landed. He immediately took charge of the island’s defenses, which he found in a deplorable state, with only fourteen barrels of powder available for the fortress guns. He accused Lynch of selling the king’s supplies to the Spanish, a fair indication of the nasty tone of Jamaican politics that Morgan would help ramp up. Increasingly, as he grew older, Morgan needed enemies; he thrived on controversy and in-close fighting. “Nevertheless that shall not daunt him,” he wrote to his superiors in London on April 13, only five weeks after arriving and referring to himself in the third person, “for before he will lose his Majesty’s fortifications, he will lose himself and a great many brave men more, that will stand and fall by him.”

Even as he knocked heads together, the return of the rugged Morgan disguised the fact that there had been a fundamental change in his life. Over the next few years, he had a career that was marked by a series of long and bitter feuds, and he was a lively figure in domestic politics. There is little that compares in viciousness to the backbiting and infighting that goes on in a colonial council, especially when ambitious men are left to fight over the reins of power, and Morgan joined in with gusto. He stayed on as deputy governor, made enemies, and wrote suave, violent letters back to London reporting and complaining about everything from taxes to slanderous colleagues and the logwood trade. He built up Jamaica’s defenses, feuded with Lynch, drank like a pirate, and extended his holdings in the Jamaican countryside to include another fine plantation (his third), four thousand acres in the parish of St. Elizabeth’s. But it was a different kind of life, a far more ordinary one. The diversions of local politics are simply not as exciting as those that take place on blue waters when the course of empires is at stake. The first part of his life could have been written by Dumas, the second by Orwell, in a bleak colonial mood. There was, in fact, only one remarkable and revealing thing that Morgan did that sets him apart from the thousands of bureaucrats who underpinned the English empire in the next two hundred years, sweating and growing old in places from Bombay to the Falklands, and it had to do with his old comrades, the buccaneers.

Morgan was charged with exterminating piracy from Jamaica and the surrounding waters. He did it, as always, with a style balanced somewhere between mockery and brutality. Morgan most likely wrote a 1679 report that laid out the Jamaican government’s policy on pirates: They were “ravenous vermin” who used any Spanish cruelty against English sailors as justification for their raids on the enemy, thereby wreaking havoc on trade. Morgan kept up a constant stream of letters to London on his efforts against the pirates, issued arrest warrants, and sent squadrons of militia out into the surrounding waters to chase down suspicious ships. When one sloop anchored in Montego Bay and the sailors stayed aboard, his suspicions were aroused; only buccaneers uncertain of their reception acted in this way. Morgan invited the seventeen men aboard to King’s House in Port Royal (which Morgan preferred to the governor’s mansion in Spanish Town) and served them red snapper, lobster, beef, fruit pie, and goblets of the best local rum. As the alcohol worked through their veins, the men dropped their pretenses and admitted that they were indeed pirates. Morgan roared with laughter, and the party continued; for the younger men, it was like being feted by their boyhood hero, the greatest buccaneer who had ever lived. After a long night of storytelling and carousing, Morgan sent the boys to their beds. The next morning he greeted them, and with reluctance they strolled out the door. Waiting on the steps were members of the local garrison, and the confessed pirates were clapped in chains.

The seventeen were brought before the Admiralty Court, and there they found a far less jovial Henry Morgan, staring down at them from the bench, where he sat as chief judge, and regarding the crew as if he’d never seen them before. There is a portrait of Morgan in his later years that has never been found, but Charles Leslie, who saw the painting in 1740, gave a description of it. “There appears something so awful and majestick in his countenance,” he wrote, “that I’m persuaded none can look upon it without a kind of veneration.” This is the Morgan whom the pirates met that morning; this is the man who conducted a quick, businesslike trial and sentenced them to death. The unlucky crew were marched out of the courts and handed over to the “finisher of the law,” the hangman. It is moments like this that make one wish Morgan had written his memoirs; the sheer enjoyment he got out of being a ruthless bastard could have made him one of the great seventeenth-century characters. One of the maxims he used in later life was “Nothing but a diamond can cut a diamond,” and Morgan was certainly hard enough to deal with the average pirate.

The separation between Morgan and his former mates was now complete. The admiral had seen the future, and it was trade, not pillage. Privateering had given him estates and status, but he knew that only a rational system of trade and a lasting peace could ensure his family’s position for generations to come. Morgan’s writings never betray a flicker of doubt about his actions; he believed he’d turned privateer for the benefit of his family and his country. Now he was hunting pirates for the same reason. Morgan proved more inventive and flexible than the Rodericks of the world; he’d made the final turn that they were not capable of. The Brethren were a passing phase; he wanted to join that which would last.

Without hesitation the admiral terrorized his former comrades, whom he now described as “a dangerous pestilence.” Although with tongue in cheek he claimed to “abhor bloodshed,” he didn’t shy away from it when dealing with pirates. “I have put to death, imprisoned and transported to the Spanish for execution all English and Spanish pirates that I could get,” he wrote his masters in London. The fact that he was accused of secretly encouraging the pirates and taking a cut of their profits only increased his severity; any whiff of scandal weakened his position with London, and he was not going to have that. His letters to his superiors were filled with reports of “bloody and notorious villains” he’d sent soldiers to capture, “a powerful and desperate pirate” prowling out in the North Sea. When London pressed for even more action, he acidly replied that piracy could no more be ended in the West Indies that the brigands who terrorized people on the highways of London could be wiped out. Morgan spent five years hunting down buccaneers. Some he pardoned (if they returned to Jamaica and renounced their former lives); many others he hanged.

Pirate trials the world over tell us what kind of things happened at Port Royal. Outlaws were encouraged to confess before dying and to cleanse their souls of their many, variegated crimes. Some were broken by their impending doom, cried out for mercy, found Christ, or at least mumbled an apology and blamed their wrongdoings on drink. Asked what had drawn him into the life, one pirate recalled, “I may begin with gaming! No, whoring, that led on to gaming….” There were scenes of quite heartfelt regret and penance. Others reacted differently. “Yes, I do heartily repent,” one told the judge. “I repent that I had not done more Mischief, and that we did not cut the Throats of them that took us, and I am extremely sorry that you an’t all hang’d as well as we.” These kinds of mocking confessions run through the transcripts of pirate trials, and many a judge was incensed to see the condemned corsairs cracking jokes, laughing at the crowd, and generally living as they were about to die.

Another incident caused Morgan to further distance himself from his past: the publication of Esquemeling’s The Buccaneers of America. The book was an immediate sensation. “No other book of that time…,” wrote one observer, “experienced a popularity similar to that of Buccaneers.” It spawned a thousand imitators: Every fictional buccaneer from Treasure Island’s Billy Bones to Johnny Depp’s very postmodern Captain Jack sprang from its overheated pages. Originally titled De Americaensche Zeerovers, it was a smash success and would soon be translated into Spanish (where Morgan’s name was blackened even further by the translators) and then English. The book depicted Morgan as a bold and at times brilliant leader, but it also painted him as a rampaging, torturing, thieving pirate. The Spanish editors described him acidly in their preface, failing even to get his name right: “the English of Jamaica, under the command of the intrepid and valiant John Morgan, who would have gained greater honour for his skilful management and daring, if his tyrannical cruelty to the conquered had not blotted out all the splendour of his glory.” Morgan was livid. He sicced lawyers on the Dutchman and his publishers, and the libel suit produced intriguing testimony from Morgan. “The Morgan family had always held due and natural allegiance to the King,” he wrote, “were both by sea and land of good fame, and against all evil deeds, piracies, &c, had the greatest abhorrence and disgust, and that in the West Indies there are such thieves and pirates called bucaniers, who subsist by piracy, depredation and evil deeds of all kinds without lawful authority, that of these people Henry Morgan always had and still has hatred.”

Was Morgan a hypocrite? The line between pirates and privateers is a thin one to modern eyes; they often behaved exactly alike, and to their victims there was no difference whatsoever. But to Morgan those commissions with the king’s blessing were everything. A Welshman to the bone, he craved respectability, or at least respect, for his clan (notice that Morgan mentions his family in the testimony above). Esquemeling had cut him to the quick not by describing the lines of Spaniards that fell under his men’s swords but by classifying himself as a renegade and a criminal. Morgan got his revenge, however, by winning the suit; abject apologies soon followed from the publishers, along with heavily edited versions of The Buccaneers, which did not sell very well.

Morgan saw things in stark black and white. One was either with him, and England, or against them. To the admiral it was not he but the pirates who had betrayed the cause—the cause of getting rich while at the same time serving their country.

The realities of life in the Caribbean, where piracy still offered a chance at quick wealth possible in few other trades, kept the corsairs’ flag flying. Roderick sailed with a small, international outfit, attacking settlements along the coast of the Main and making only enough to sustain a regular drinking schedule. He still dreamed of hitting a galleon, but like many pirates he was reduced to hand-to-mouth living. The stories of Panama and Portobelo got told and retold.

Morgan was not sentimental about the past; he was now hunting all the Rodericks he’d helped create. Not only were many of the veterans who had studied buccaneering under him in his great raids now sailing under French commissions and passing along the lessons of his leadership to their acolytes, but the stories of his success echoed around the West Indies and even through the harbors of England and France, keeping the new recruits flowing in. The next generation of pirates would often be straight outlaws, not sanctioned by the English king. And they’d add new dimensions to the pirate life, just as Morgan had built on Drake’s example and made the privateer, in the words of one historian, into “that raffish instrument of foreign policy.”

To find out what happened to Morgan’s former enemies, we must skip ahead. By the late 1600s, the empire Morgan had fought was reeling; Queen Mariana had died in 1696 of breast cancer, after her doctors had given up and called in a santiguadore, a faith healer from La Mancha, the seventh son of a daughterless couple. This unlettered peasant was rumored to have miraculous powers, and he’d hurried to Madrid to work his art. But when he arrived, the man simply produced a crucifix, stood holding it over the royal patient, and chanted “I cross thee, God heal thee” over and over. The queen’s enormous, melon-size tumor showed no change, and soon she was dead. The devastated Carlos II, the last of the Spanish Hapsburg kings, was left alone. In 1679 he’d married Marie Louise, the niece of Louis XIV, but he had proved impotent, and the deeply depressed queen ate herself to an early death, passing away at age twenty-seven. The race for an heir became even more urgent: Carlos the Bewitched had then married a neurotic German queen, Maria Ana, whom he openly hated. Their unfortunate marriage produced no heirs, and Carlos spent his last years as a weakling sitting atop a golden chest, with the great powers of Europe waiting impatiently for him to die so the spoils could be distributed. He began to suffer from the death obsession that ran through his family’s history, even to the point of ordering his ancestors’ bodies exhumed so that, like his father before him, he could sit and contemplate the illustrious corpses. For a Spanish king, it was not as macabre a thing to do as it would be for an Englishman or a Frenchman, and for Carlos it made a special kind of sense. In many ways his dead ancestors were the only ones who could truly understand his dilemma; even the deformed, impotent Carlos considered himself to be a divine prince, without equal on earth. Only death would release him from the monstrous body that disgusted his wife and made a mockery of his greatness. It comforted him to know that he’d soon join his family and meet the Lord he’d striven so hard to serve.

Month by month he grew sicker, more spectral. The English ambassador wrote that the king was so weak he could barely lift his head to feed himself and that he was “so extremely melancholy that neither his buffoons, dwarfs nor puppet shows can in the least divert him from fancying everything that is said or done to be a temptation of the devil.” The king’s bewitchment was now regarded as official fact; his inability to produce an heir was, in fact, taken as a sign that Carlos was possessed by the devil. The court was convulsed with talk of witches, charms, and ciphers with the king’s name written in diabolical code. The exorcist assigned to the case conducted interviews with the devil to find out how the king had been enchanted, and he reported that it had been “done to destroy his generative organs, and to render him incapable of administering the kingdom” and that the enchantment had been achieved using “the members of a dead man” mixed into a chocolate drink. Carlos was paraded before the public, staggering and pale as a ghost, with one eye sunken into its socket; he was clearly failing. On his sickbed freshly killed pigeons were laid on his head to ward off vertigo, and the entrails of slaughtered animals were placed on his stomach to warm it. But nothing could save him, and on November 1, 1700, Carlos died, and his body was placed alongside the other descendants of Juana the Mad. Despite much back-channel negotiation and maneuvering by all the major powers, the question of who would get Spain had not been settled, and so the War of Spanish Succession was joined in 1702, with England and Holland battling France and Spain over who would rule in Madrid and lay claim to the wonders of Potosí and the rest of the American treasure. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, in which Spain lost Portugal and its territories in the Netherlands, marked the nation’s retirement from the ranks of first-tier world powers.

Morgan had helped, in his own way, point a path toward the future. Some historians have even argued that without Morgan the Spanish would have been able to settle and defend Florida more vigorously and even extend their control along the Gulf Coast, creating an impregnable empire stretching to Texas. Without him who knows what the map of the Caribbean and even of the United States might look like? He battled a divine empire on behalf of men interested in trade and gold and rational society (but certainly not freedom for every member, as the pirates had insisted on). The next great world empire, the British, would be a mercantile, not a religious, one. The world had turned Morgan’s way, and he’d nudged it along.

We have skipped ahead of the final chapter of Morgan’s story. As his inheritors sailed to every corner of the known and unknown world, Henry Morgan was back in Port Royal. He’d grown increasingly cantankerous against his enemies, including Sir Thomas Lynch, who returned to the island in 1682 to serve as governor and resumed his duel with the Welshman. The sickly Lynch reported to London that Morgan, although friendly in the beginning, had soon shown his deep enmity and in fact was “mightily elated by the hopes of my death.” Old sea captains do not make good followers, and old buccaneers make even worse ones. Over the years the stories had become memorized, the rum had become a necessity, the glory of fighting the Spanish was whittled away to battles between planters and merchants. In his forties Morgan developed a heavy paunch and could be found any night of the week drinking himself into a stupor with a passel of cronies who treated him as a vilified hero. Lynch petulantly wrote of his rival that he sat in his regular haunts drinking for days on end with the “five or six little sycophants” with whom he traveled. “In his drink,” Lynch wrote, “Sir Henry reflects on the government, swears, damns and curses most extravagantly.” The thing that finally caused Morgan’s downfall was almost ridiculously petty: Leaving a tavern one night, he was heard to say, “God damn the Assembly.” The ex-buccaneer denied it, but he was removed from the council and from public service in October 1683. He was forty-eight and had five years to live.

If a pirate’s life was about excess, it could be said that Henry Morgan died of it. Long years of alcohol abuse had weakened his system; his stomach grew to an enormous size so that his tailor could not even design a coat that would button over it, his appetite disappeared, his legs became swollen and painful. The admiral was suffering from dropsy, in which the body’s tissues retain excess fluid. The doctors who treated him were using concepts of the body that went back fifteen centuries to Claudius Galen, who was physician to the gladiators and, later, to Marcus Aurelius. The medical care that was directed at Henry Morgan was little different from that which would have been received by a Roman warrior clawed by a captive lion in AD 190. Galen took Aristotle’s theory of the four elements—earth, water, fire, and air—and developed them into the corresponding theory of humors. Health depended on a correct balance between the humors at work in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humor had a condition linked to it (dryness, heat, cold, wet) as well as an organ (liver, kidney, gallbladder, and spleen). Balancing these competing elements was the physician’s delicate work.

Morgan was lucky enough to have one of the best doctors in the West Indies, perhaps even in the world, attending him. Dr. Hans Sloane was a rising physician and naturalist who would go on to treat the royal family. He arrived in Port Royal in 1687, accompanying the star-crossed Duke and Duchess of Albemarle; the duke was assuming the governorship of the island. The new arrival was the same young rake who had murdered a beadle in London and later escorted Morgan through the delicious byways of Restoration vice. Now he was married to the ex–Lady Cavendish, a shopper of epic proportions who was showing signs of mental instability, while he himself was deteriorating from the effects of years of riotous living. One of their initiations into Jamaican life came on February 19 of that year, when a minor earthquake struck. “It was felt all over the island at the same time,” wrote Sloane. “Houses were near ruin with few escaping injury.” The tremors seemed to be getting more frequent: Just about a year later, Sloane reported three short shocks over the span of a minute, with the sounds of thunder that seemed to be coming from under the ground. Two years later a quake rocked the eastern Caribbean, with a huge chunk of a rock formation on the island of Redonda splitting off and crashing into the ocean. Sugar mills were swallowed up on St. Kitts, and people died on Antigua. The governor of the island of St. Thomas reported that the sea withdrew, and townspeople could walk out onto the seabed and collect fish flopping on the dry land.

Modern seismologists use the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale to measure the “shaking severity” of an earthquake (the more popular Richter scale measures magnitude). Invented by the Italian vulcanologist Giuseppe Mercalli in 1902, its grades range from I to XII. A Value I earthquake would not even be felt by humans standing on affected areas; a Value IV would cause chandeliers to swing, wooden walls to creak, and glasses to clink in the cupboard. It is the earthquakes at Value VIII and above that are the great ones. At VIII, towers and chimneys can collapse, poorly built houses suffer severe damage. At X, most buildings are completely destroyed and landslides add to the devastation. In recent times the Northridge, California, earthquake in 1994 registered scale values from the extremely mild I to the devastating IX rating at the epicenter. The 1906 San Francisco quake reached a value of IX to X. Anything above X is an apocalyptic quake. The tremors shaking Jamaica month after month were nothing close to that. Not yet.

Back in Port Royal, few thought about the inner workings of the earth; people focused on their daily lives. Dr. Sloane was concerned about Henry Morgan, a rare colonial species in decline, and the young doctor studied him with an exacting eye. Sloane’s writings, which are admirably precise and alive, would later become the basis for the British Library and would form its first collection. In his words the old privateer was

lean, sallow-coloured, his eyes a little yellowish and belly jutting out or prominent…. He complained to me of want of appetite for victuals, he had a kicking or roaching to vomit every morning and generally a small looseness attending him, and withal is much given to drinking and staying up late, which I supposed had been the cause of his present indisposition.

Sloane prescribed a thin gruel and a feather (for sticking down Morgan’s throat), so that he’d vomit and bring up the fluids in his stomach. Once that had been done, Morgan tried some “Madeira wine in which roots of gentian, tops of centaury had been infused with Mich.Vomit.” What Morgan really needed was rest and a different lifestyle, but he refused to change. He spent his days lolling in a hammock, his bloated body straining against the cords, and received friends, who could not be turned away without a drop of rum. The nights were the worst: The heat, the buzzing insects (but not a guilty conscience) kept him awake; he could not pass water and croaked like a night frog, belching to relieve his stomach of the intolerable feeling of swelling. Finally he’d reach, against Sloane’s express orders, for the liquor bottle and drive away the boredom and the more unpleasant memories with a long pull. Sloane despaired of his muleheaded patient: “Not being able to abstain from company, he sat up late at night drinking too much.” Morgan grew tired of hearing the young Englishman chide him about the rum and called for another doctor. Sloane’s rival diagnosed timpany, or an excess of wind in the belly; the contrary opinion must have pleased Morgan, who one can imagine repeating it to Sloane with a broad smile on his face, as it meant he could keep on drinking.

Morgan must have known he was dying. In one of his last public outings, he returned to the Council of Jamaica, which by permission of the king he’d been allowed to rejoin. The summer heat was roasting, but Morgan was transported in his carriage and made it to his seat with the help of a cane, and there he heard a last vale-dictory by the Speaker of the assembly. Morgan’s time as lieutenant governor was described as a golden age. “His dispensations of favour and kindness were great and many,” the Speaker said, “even to those who, true hornet like, lay buzzing about him during his government.”

But finally Western medicine could do him no more good, and Morgan went to the black doctor the local slaves depended on for cures. He was given urine enemas and covered with clay plasters, but the treatment only gave him a persistent cough. He moved on to another. What other remedies the folk doctor prescribed have not been passed down, or if a desperate Morgan in fact consulted with an obeah man, spirit doctors who used ghosts as assistants for their curing, bribing the shades with doses of rum and offerings of silver. But all measures failed, and on August 25, 1688, at about eleven in the morning, Henry Morgan died at age fifty-three.

In his will the admiral revealed himself as he rarely did in his letters. His holdings were valued at 5,000 pounds, or $1.2 million in today’s dollars. He left the bulk of his sprawling estates to Elizabeth, whom he described with uncharacteristically tender language as “my very well and intirely beloved wife Dame Mary Elizabeth Morgan.” She’d be the caretaker of his wealth until her death, when the lands would pass to his nephew Charles—on one condition. Charles would have to change his last name from Byndloss to Morgan “and always go thereby.” Morgan’s almost desperate desire to continue his line had extended even after death. There is no doubt that Henry wished to be remembered: He left mourning rings not only to his godsons and nephew but to his friends and secretary and even his servants.

His funeral proceeded along the lines of any farewell for a major government official, with one twist. The governor of the island quietly issued a twenty-four-hour amnesty for anyone wishing to attend the ceremony; soon ships flying no flag were arriving in the harbor and discharging groups of men into the evening gloom, men with no fixed address who were now making a living raiding ships of all nations as they caught the trade winds on the North Sea. Armed as always with pistols, their faces scarred and grim, on any other day they’d have been met by members of the local militia, who could spot their kind on sight and would have clamped them in irons and marched them off to hear their death sentences. But Morgan’s day was a one-of-a-kind legal holiday, and so they made their way along the pier toward King’s House, the home of the governor and the official seat of government on the island, where Morgan lay in state until the funeral on August 26. Every sort of person passed by his lead-lined coffin and stood to regard the face of the man who had made Jamaica: French corsairs, fantastically wealthy merchants, madams, tavern owners, skilled tradesmen, Morgan’s cousins and drinking mates, prostitutes, government officials. Morgan was by no means an uncontroversial figure in the city; there were certainly men who came to look on his face with barely concealed satisfaction; there were buccaneers from the Panama mission who still could not forgive him for, they believed, violating their trust and stealing their silver plate. But Panama had been fourteen years ago, and Morgan was, in death, bigger than any single expedition.

Roderick came. Now forty-seven, he’d survived two recent bouts of malaria and was living in Nassau. The teeth were rotting in his head, he was lean, he had new scars on his face (some martial, some nightlife-related), and, to judge by his general appearance, it didn’t seem he’d outlive his leader by many months. Why had he come? Because the raids with Morgan now seemed like his halcyon days; he’d never been involved in anything on the same scale again, nothing so daring or rich. The fact that Morgan the governor would have hanged him didn’t bother Roderick; he’d accepted years ago that the world wanted him dead. Pirates recognized that self-interest was at the bottom of most things. Many of them didn’t bear the admiral a grudge—that is, after the bitterness about the Panama money had gone, which had taken a few years. Still, Morgan had brought things off with style. He’d made the world take notice of the Brethren, and pirates had a love of the world’s regard. They sought it out. And here was the man who had spread their name to every corner of the earth. Roderick took his hat off at the coffin, tilting slightly as he did (he was not entirely sober), and studied the admiral’s face. He was in many ways the sum of the urges that had brought white men like Roderick to the New World, minus any spiritual ones, and the qualities that had allowed the hugely outnumbered English to battle the Spanish Empire to a draw. Roderick had come because, despite it all, he was proud to be a pirate, proud of the unconventional and wicked life he’d led. The Brethren had been his family, and Morgan was the greatest of his kin.

As the time for the ceremony approached, Morgan’s old partner in crime, the Duke of Albemarle, arrived, looking anything but healthy himself (he’d be dead in two months, the victim of the same ills that killed Morgan). The pallbearers carried the coffin to a gun carriage, the conveyance that would be used for royal funerals such as Queen Victoria’s, and the procession wound its way to St. Peter’s Church, where the funeral mass was said. The mourners then marched to the cemetery on the Palisadoes, where the coffin was interred in the sandy ground. The ships in the harbor fired a twenty-two-gun salute, one more than even Albemarle would receive at his death. Governors came and went. Morgan’s passing was unique.

Perhaps there were other ceremonies that were never recorded. Morgan’s estate included 109 slaves, and he was said to have fathered children by several of them; today there are even rumors of his descendants living near Montego Bay, though no ancestry can be proven. One colonial administrator in the early 1900s reported that the wild behavior of a number of Jamaican families in the Yallahs Valley proved they were descended from the Welshman. If Morgan did indeed have family, whether by force or through a relationship, however oppressive, it’s likely his passing was marked with a ritual. The slaves in Jamaica believed that hotheaded people were survived by like-minded ghosts, or duppies, who would go through the world causing havoc if measures were not taken to stop them. There were several methods available to restrict the duppy’s progress: sticking pins into the dead man’s feet, so that the ghost could not walk without pain, and cutting out the pockets in the burial suit, so that the duppy would not have rocks to throw at his enemies. The slave family would not have had access to Morgan’s body, but there was one rite that could be performed without it: nine days of singing, followed by a banishment ritual on the ninth night, expelling the duppy forever.

If the banishment was performed, it didn’t take. Morgan had one final appearance to make in the story of Port Royal.