4
In November 1663 the twenty-eight-year-old Morgan finally set out on his own to test his mettle against the Spanish Empire. Along with three other captains, he left Port Royal and sailed for Central America bound for New Spain (current-day Mexico). Most likely the crowds were thinner for his departure than they’d been for Mings’s: Morgan was not yet a name to conjure with in Jamaica.
What kind of ship Morgan commanded is not known, but privateer and pirate ships were often specially modified by the raiders to suit their purposes. In the weeks before the mission, Roderick, who had joined up with Morgan, worked with the other privateers to get the ships ready; the first order of business was to rip out the wooden bulkheads in the holds, which were used in merchant ships to keep barrels and trunks from sliding. Cabins—first class and steerage—were gutted, creating an open space belowdecks, for reasons both practical (to accommodate the large number of men these ships often carried) and philosophical (pirates were democrats and decreed that no man should have better quarters than the next). Carpenters would reinforce the deck to support extra cannon and cut slots in the hold for guns or mount them fore and aft as “chasers,” cannon that could be fired on anyone trying to pursue or escape them. Aboveboard, the forecastle and any superstructure behind (in seaman’s terms, “abaft”) the mainsail was removed, as were the cabins (“roundhouses”) in the stern, creating a clear deck ideal for boarding vessels or stashing excess numbers of privateers, captives, or booty. Finally, the rig of the converted vessel could be altered by stepping the mainmast aft, for increased power in the wind. Pirates adored speed; an extra knot could mean the difference between riches and hanging. Like grease monkeys cackling as they dropped a supercharged V-12 into their father’s vintage Olds, Roderick and the other Brethren took a stock mercantile vessel and made it into a thing built to fly.
Onto their customized ships, the privateers loaded boucan, water, hard tack, and their most valuable possessions, prized above women and even Spanish gold: their muskets. The long, broad-butted muskets and the pirates’ skill with them were so essential to their success that one must pause to linger over these unique seventeenth-century creations. Like Lewis and Clark heading into the vasts of the western territories, the privateers depended on their firearms for their very lives; Lewis and Clark needed them for killing buffalo, the privateers for killing men. They bought them from French and Dutch traders who plied the waters of the New World, and getting a good musket and a pair of working pistols would have been one of the first priorities for a buccaneer. They paid small fortunes to obtain them, using any seed money they’d brought with them from the Old World, from their wages as indentured servants, or from selling boucan or animal skins; there were a dozen ways to get the necessary cash. They cleaned the guns obsessively and would slit the throat of anyone who dared touch them.
The pirate musket was an objet d’art, often originating in the shops (one might almost say studios) of the great French gunsmiths: Brachere of Dieppe and Galin of Nientes. Mass production of firearms would not be perfected until the middle of the eighteenth century, when interchangeable parts were produced and assembled into a piece. So the privateers and pirates carried one-of-a-kind matchlocks (in which a burning taper was placed into a pan of gunpowder) and the later wheelocks (in which a metal wheel spins against a flint, causing sparks to fly and touching off the powder, a technique supposedly invented by Leonardo da Vinci). The finest of these heavy iron guns were considered near counterparts to Renaissance paintings and sculpture. On a typical French musket, you might find the hammer shaped into the form of a leaping dolphin, while on the blued barrel would be etched intricately worked portraits of gods such as Jupiter and Mars throwing thunderbolts or reclining on billowy clouds. Producing these firearms was a complex process involving a designer, a stockmaker, a barrelsmith, a metal carver, an inlayer, and an engraver. To achieve the scenes that made the French guns distinctive, the craftsman would work much as a sculptor like Leonardo would, his chisel and chasing tools guided by his free hand as he pounded shapes into the cold metal. The craftsman was a metallurgist who had to know how to forge metal, reduce it, soften it to a working consistency, harden it, then “clean it white,” shining it until it gleamed like porcelain. Gunsmiths also strove for lightness; due to their innovative design, the French-produced wheelocks were lighter than their competitors on the Continent, a wonderful attribute when you’re carrying a weapon on twenty-mile marches through Central American jungles. Ironically, the buccaneers, whom many regarded as civilization killers, carried into battle an instrument that was at the forefront of Renaissance artistry. A Spanish soldier sometimes had to face off against the privateers with an outdated arquebus, which was less accurate than the long-barreled musket, a crucial disadvantage when trying to pick off a buccaneer. The musket gave the pirate a distinct tactical advantage.
The Spanish monarchy’s grip on the lives of its settlers extended even to firearms. The rather shocking truth was that the Crown strictly limited the amount of weapons that could be imported into the New World by private citizens. The only weapons legally available were the ones supplied by the government in Madrid, which often took the best ones for its soldiers in Europe. Ensuring that the weapons that were shipped to the New World reached the soldiers at the other end meant trusting in a long supply line, where greed or simple necessity might mean that the muskets disappeared. Like a mistrustful parent, the Crown wanted to control the firepower that guarded its treasure. This official fear of private enterprise at every level meant that the Spanish would often face Morgan with only a few decent muskets equivalent to what the buccaneers carried. The Spanish settlers could and did trade with the illegal Dutch and French merchants who trawled their shores, but they could not always pay the prices that the privateers could for a musket in working order, and so they often went without. Morgan didn’t depend on London for his guns; if he had, the Welshman might never have won a battle.
Roderick, now twenty-two, had quickly learned the value of having a good musket. He’d bought his from a Dutch trader who had come through Port Royal, borrowing some of the purchase price from his mates and getting the rest out of his stash from the Mings expedition. He was hoping to earn enough to pay off his debtors (he’d run up a tab in several of the taverns, for meals and rum, and with a certain prostitute) with a solid payday from this modest expedition. And he was enjoying the newfound respect he got on the streets of his adopted town. Tradesmen and merchants nodded to him; townspeople gave him a wide berth when he was blind drunk on rumbullion. Perhaps it was actually fear and not respect, but Roderick would take it. He was no longer a scrub boy on a merchant ship; he was the protector of Jamaica and, more important, a customer with the potential for fantastic future earnings. He’d come up in the world.
As he sailed out to make his fortune, Henry Morgan was much changed from the cherubic Welsh boy in his early portrait. He was now lean, broad-shouldered, and bronzed by the Jamaican sun. He wore his beard short and pointed, in the style of Sir Francis Drake, and around his forehead tied a scarlet kerchief. In later expeditions he’d carry a wig among his things, in case he was called to accept a surrender from a Spanish noble. Captains liked to dress well, in the manner of English gentlemen: In 1722 the captain “Black” Bart Roberts was described as being “dressed in a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain round his neck with a diamond cross hanging around it.” But Morgan’s working clothes would have been much less glamorous: a cotton shirt, breeches, leather boots. He was dressed for war.
Here on the eve of Morgan’s first expedition is where one John Esquemeling (or Alexander Exquemelin, another variant that has come down to us) enters the story. The details of his life—in fact, his very identity—are incomplete, but it’s clear he was a surgeon who accompanied Morgan on some of his raids. Some believe that “John Esquemeling” was a pseudonym for Hendrik Barentzoon Smeeks, a surgeon who left his hometown of Zwolle in central Holland to serve aboard a merchant ship with the Dutch East India Company, during which service he shipwrecked, landed on a boat that sailed to Java, and eventually ended up at the French pirate port of Tortuga, where he came into contact with the Brethren. Others believe that he was in fact French, from the town of Honfleur, and had sailed to the West Indies as an apprentice before learning his trade and hooking up with Morgan. Whatever Esquemeling’s true background, out of his exploits came a memoir, The Buccaneers of America, published in Holland in 1678 and then in many subsequent translations. Esquemeling’s reports are sometimes contradicted by the Spanish accounts, but he knew Morgan and fought under him, and if some parts of his book smack of embellishment, key passages are verified by Spanish accounts, by Morgan’s reports, and by other sources. His stories of the buccaneers almost single-handedly created the pirate craze that obsessed Daniel Defoe and enchanted Robert Louis Stevenson and gave birth to the image of the pirate as cruel, wild, and free.
Buccaneer expeditions followed a routine. The privateers would first meet over a bowl of rum punch on the captain’s flagship. (Refusing a drink would often bring “a Man under a suspicion of being in a Plot” against the Brethren of the Coast.) The first order of business was fresh meat, especially tortoise. What the buffalo was to the American settler in his wagon train, the tortoise was to the pirate: Without the sustenance that animal provided, it’s unlikely that the buccaneers could have achieved half their victories. They could distinguish among the four species common to the West Indies and knew their breeding grounds intimately. “The choice of all for fine eating is the turtle or sea tortoise,” wrote one visitor to Jamaica in 1704. “The flesh looks and eats much like choice veal, but the fat is of a green colour, very luscious and sweet; the liver is likewise green, very wholesome, searching and purging.” Pork was also a favorite, and to get it the buccaneers would hit Spanish hog yards in the middle of the night. “Having beset the keeper’s lodge, they force him to rise,” Esquemeling tells us of Morgan’s fledgling fleet, “and give them as many heads [of swine] as they desire, threatening withal to kill him in case he disobeys their commands or makes any noise.” Having seen to their rations, the Brethren would then call a second council, where the central issue was “what place they shall go, to seek their desperate fortunes.” The men would often suggest towns they’d raided before or toss out a piece of secondhand information on weak defenses, lazy sentries, warlike mayors, a particularly large stockpile of silver. Finally a target would be agreed upon, and the real drinking would begin in earnest.
One cannot help but compare the process to the situation aboard the Royal Navy ships that brought Morgan and so many others to the islands. On the Hispaniola expedition, the men were so uninformed and demoralized that many of them believed that their commanders were going to sell them as white slaves. They were given no incentives to fight, and they fought terribly. They were allowed no share in the prizes, and so they didn’t seek them. As a merchant seaman, Roderick had gained nothing from the successful completion of his mission; with the Brethren he could earn a different kind of life.
Roderick had joined a uniquely democratic institution. Back in England he’d heard odd stories about the Levellers, who had recently proposed universal suffrage (except for those under twenty-one years of age, servants, those on charity, and a few other categories). The Levellers believed that men were citizens who could be ruled “no farther than by free consent, or agreement, by giving up their power each to other, for their better being.” To the average Englishman, this was madness, “utterly revolutionary and even frightening.” The Levellers were crushed for talking about these ideas, but Roderick was beginning to see that the average pirate would have garroted you had you tried to deny him his basic rights. He lived in a democracy where the most important decisions were often made from the bottom up; it was a tradition that would save Morgan more than once. Nothing like it existed in the Spanish colonial system.
Once they had a confirmed destination, the buccaneers agreed to the articles that governed the ship for the duration of the voyage. Too timid at this point to speak up, Roderick watched the proceedings from a distance, his back pressed against the ship’s wall. He soon learned that the captain was in charge only when the crew was fighting, chasing a ship, or being chased. The rest of the time he got no more respect than his peers. There was an election for the quartermaster, who would look after the rights of the pirates, take command of any prisoners, settle disputes, and all in all act as a “trustee for the whole.” The pirates voted on how many shares of treasure each pirate would get. The captain got five or six shares to the common pirate’s one; the master’s mate got two; the cabin boy one-half. Skilled tradesmen were well compensated: The carpenter who’d be responsible for fixing any breaches of the hull from cannonballs or storm damage was often was paid 150 pieces of eight; the surgeon and his “chest of medicaments” got 250. Men of both professions were so sought after that pirates would sometimes attack merchant ships just to steal away their shipwright or doctor, who was then forced into piracy.
The most extraordinary clauses in the articles were the ones addressing the “recompense and reward each one ought to have that is either wounded or maimed in his body, suffering the loss of any limb, by that voyage.” Each eventuality was priced out:
Loss of a right arm: 600 pieces of eight
Left arm: 500
Right leg: 500
Left leg: 400
Eye: 100
Finger: 100
Some articles even awarded damages for the loss of a peg leg. Prostheses were so hard to come by in the West Indies that a good wooden leg was worth as much as a real one. And other ships posted rewards for bravery: The first man to board an enemy ship or throw a grenade into a fortification would walk away with extra pieces of eight. “In case wee should meete with any strong opposition in any place…,” one set of articles read, “the first man entering such place or places shall have 20 pounds, alsoe he that first displayes his colores in such place…20 pounds; as alsoe to all those that carry ladders, for every ladder soe carried and pitched upp against the walls…10 pounds.” Generous medical insurance, incentive pay, and employee control: Most modern American corporations would not match the pirates’ articles until well into the twentieth century, if then.
The articles were a savvy psychological document. Each clause not only gave the ordinary pirate a voice and a stake in the mission but it sharpened their incentive to win, which would benefit the leaders even more than the common buccaneer. The pirates understood what drove men, and they used that knowledge as a tool of battle. Pirates did not get paid a yearly salary or pensions for long-term service, so they had to maximize their earnings during raids.
Its articles firmly established, the tiny fleet sailed northwest, skirting the tiny Isle of Pines off the west coast of Cuba, and then headed due west toward the Yucatán Peninsula. What today would be a modestly interesting sail for a yachtsman with a GPS system was in the mid-1600s a journey into blankness, only here and there illuminated by a known landmark or a familiar current. Speed was determined by dropping a piece of wood onto the sea’s surface and measuring the time it took to reach the stern. There were no charts to guide Morgan, no way of measuring longitude. Navigation in the New World was an art that drew on ships’ logs, lead lines (for measuring the ocean’s depth), collective memory, and gossip. Dead reckoning was also a primary tool; sailing due east or west from a “deduced” position (or “de’d” in the log, thus the term “dead reckoning”) was a reliable method: Sail due east from the Canary Islands and you would arrive at Africa’s west coast; sail west and you would find yourself in the Bahamas. But this kind of knowledge built up over decades; the West Indies had few such routes available to the captain. In the Gulf of Honduras, ships that had become hopelessly lost in the foul weather were reduced to listening into the night for the splash of migrating tortoises, the only thing that could lead them to land. Ships’ pilots prayed fervently to the Holy Virgin for guidance through a nest of reefs. Most pirates could attest to the truth of what a French soldier bound for the New World wrote in his journal, “Now we saw nothing but sky and water and realized the omnipotence of God, into which we commended ourselves.”
Morgan’s first foray into Spanish America retraced the expedition of Hernán Cortés in 1519, and he knew as little about the territory he was invading as Cortés had. The longhaired, woman-loving conquistador had sailed around the Yucatán Peninsula with twenty-two boats, artillery, cavalry, swords, arquebusiers carrying their fire-belching matchlocks, twenty women, and a crew of 600. The Spaniard was hailed by the native inhabitants, the Mexica, as the god Quetzalcoatl, who they believed was returning from the sea, where he’d disappeared millennia before on a raft of serpents. Cortés was in search, of course, of gold, colonies, and converts, but he’d also been charged with the duty of mapping the shores of Mexico and reporting back on the inhabitants of the territories, who were rumored to be “people with large, broad ears and others with faces like dogs.” Cortés found the Mexica to be incredibly hospitable and rich in gold and gems; their emperor, Montezuma, welcomed the white man with honeyed words: “O our lord, thou has suffered fatigue, thou has endured weariness, thou has come to arrive on earth.” But the conquistadors wanted to rule the Mexica, and inevitably they and the Mexica soldiers, fortified by rations of psychedelic mushrooms and peyote, went to war. The natives lost thousands, the Spanish hundreds, and Cortés finally prevailed after a series of battles that changed the face of the Americas forever. Morgan sailed into a world altered by swords, guns, and horses. But he and his men were in fact inheritors of the days when Spaniards were daring, independent thinkers who could earn their fortunes through war. If only Philip IV, back in Spain, could have recaptured that ethos, his kingdom would be protected.
In his report on the expedition, Morgan wrote that once the buccaneer ships had passed the western tip of the peninsula, they tacked southwest into the Bay of Campeche, using the lead line to avoid the shallow cays and reefs that make the coastline a mariner’s nightmare. Their target was Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco province. It had been founded in 1596 by the Spaniards and was a thriving trading post and settlement; how many people lived there was unknown, but it was a formidable target for the small force led by Morgan. The expedition’s lookouts watched for a telltale plume of brown in the brilliant blue water, indicating that a nearby river was pushing its silt as much as twenty miles out into the bay. The second such sighting told the men they’d found the Grijalva River, which would take them to Villahermosa. The ships anchored, and 107 men disembarked, leaving aboard a skeleton crew, and headed for Frontera, a small town three miles upriver. Here they came across the local Indians, a moment of high tension for any invader: On Cortés’s journey the conquistadors had stumbled on an Indian altar “covered with clotted blood,” the site of many human sacrifices. But the buccaneers soon learned that the Indians detested the Spanish and would be happy to join the expedition as guides. Their new allies had bad news, however: Marching the fifty miles straight to Villahermosa would be impossible. The banks of the river were dense swamps for twenty miles on each side, snake-infested and impassable on foot. Jumping into boats would get them to the capital quickly, but the advantage of surprise would be lost; surprise was necessary not only as a military tactic as it was to prevent the townspeople from digging holes and hiding their silver plate or running off to the countryside. So the English were forced to follow the Indians into the bush for a grueling three-hundred-mile slog that took them around the outer edge of the swamps and away from any settlers who might alert the town to their approach. By the time it was over, Morgan had far exceeded the famous trek of Sir Francis Drake across the isthmus ninety-one years earlier; in fact, he’d travel approximately thirty-seven hundred miles, the distance from Los Angeles to Caracas.
Villahermosa was many hundreds of miles away from the pirate haunts of Port Royal and Tortuga, and its citizens believed that distance ensured their safety. Towns might see ten or twenty years of peace before a horde of buccaneers suddenly appeared on the horizon one day. Guards slept at their posts; the roundshot (small cannonballs) for the cannons rusted in the soft night air until they’d no longer fit into the mouths of the guns. Keys to chests full of gunpowder hadn’t been seen in a decade. Vigilance under the hot sun was a challenge few commanders could meet. So when Morgan’s men burst into the town square, the Spanish defense collapsed; Morgan reported that he quickly took and plundered the village. The pirates searched the houses for plate and jewels, gathered a few hundred prisoners, and headed back to their ships. But when they arrived at the river’s mouth, Morgan’s heart must have dropped: He saw that his ships had been captured by a contingent of Spanish soldiers, who now attacked with three hundred men. Aiming their muskets with care, the privateers cut down the enemy one after the other, quickly repelling their charge. The Spanish retreated and sailed off. Morgan had not lost a single man, but his only means of returning to Jamaica was gone.
The young Welshman was now stranded hundreds of miles from home with no transportation, little food, and a passel of violent men under his command. In modern terms it was as if he’d crash-landed on the dark side of the moon. It was a precarious moment. Countless other buccaneer armies would disintegrate under such circumstances in the coming years; the history of the West Indies is littered with their pathetic stories, which often followed a similar plot: a minor setback, dissension, mutiny, breakup, starvation, or death from Spanish guns. Like soldiers caught behind enemy lines, Morgan and his men would now have to improvise, and quickly. Roderick was horrified at their situation; merchant ships sailed known routes and resupplied at regular intervals. But here it seemed as if they could die in the sun and no one would ever know. Roderick had come face-to-face with the realities of pirate life: There was no support network and no safety net.
As Morgan debated the options, two Spanish barks and four canoes suddenly sailed into view; Morgan’s troops pounced on their owners and commandeered the vessels. The canoes were of a type forty feet long and powered by a basic sail, paddles, and muscle; the privateers leaned into their strokes as they churned back to the Yucatán Channel, a five-hundred-mile journey, all against a one-knot current that added twenty-four miles to every day’s distance. The privateers were now living off the land: They had to find water and food and keep a sharp eye out for the small towns that dotted the coast. When opportunity presented itself, they attacked. At a place called Río Garta, the privateers “with 30 men…stormed a breastwork there killing 15 and taking the rest prisoners.” Morgan was not running back to Jamaica; in fact, he was becoming more aggressive. It would become an emblem of his expeditions: Always act as if you have the upper hand, even if you don’t.
The men grew more confident with every skirmish with the Spaniards; a force of their size and sharpshooting skills would have little to fear unless they came across a significant garrison or a large body of hostile Indians. And there was even something reassuring in encountering Spaniards, who were at least a known quantity out here in Indian territory. These were the ancient lands of the Aztecs, and even in the 1660s the place had a dark history, a past made up of rumor and hearsay that prevented lesser men from venturing there. Who knew what lay around the next bend in the river? Thomas Gage had reported on a menagerie kept by Montezuma and filled with unspeakable things:
The hunters were maintained in that house because of the ravenous beasts which were also kept in the lower halls in great cages made of timber, wherein were kept in some lions, in others tigers, in others ounces, in others wolves…. There were also in another great hall…snakes as gross as a man’s thigh, vipers, crocodiles which they call caymans, of twenty foot long with scales and head like a dragon; besides many other smaller lizards and the other venomous beasts and serpents…. To these snakes and the other venomous beasts they usually gave the blood of men sacrificed to feed them. Others say they gave unto them man’s flesh, which the great lizards, or caymans eat very well…. the floor with blood like a jelly, stinking like a slaughter-house, and the roaring of the lions, the fearful hissing of the snakes and adders, the doleful howling and barking of the wolves, the sorrowful yelling of the ounces and tigers, when they would have meat.
The buccaneers safely passed by old Mexico, Morgan would later report, turned the northeast corner of the Yucatán Peninsula, and headed south along the coast, crossing the Gulf of Honduras. When they came to the Isle of Rattan, they rested, took on water, and prepared for a raid on Trujillo on the mainland coast. Trujillo had become a destination for epic journeys. Over a century and a half before, Christopher Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage to the New World, had anchored in the nearby Bay of Trujillo and made his first landing on the American continent here. His men said the first Catholic mass ever celebrated in the Americas. Later Cortés had arrived in Trujillo after a ghastly march from Mexico City overland through nearly impenetrable jungles. Now Morgan added his name to the list, as his men crashed into the town, quickly stormed the fort, carried away everything of value, and for good measure snatched a Spanish vessel.
Next in their sights was Monkey Bay, 450 miles due south, off present-day Nicaragua. To get there Morgan followed Columbus’s route along the dangerous, rock-toothed shoreline that now forms the coast of Honduras. Downpours could be torrential; on Columbus’s voyage the sky was the color of mist and merged with the sea at the horizon, making navigation difficult. Rain, sky, and ocean all turned the same color. The precipitation had come down in solid sheets, so the explorer could not see the other ships in his fleet, which covered only six miles a day. Columbus wrote that his sails were torn, that their anchors, shrouds, hawsers, and launches were stripped away. He’d never seen a storm “so terrible, that lasted so long.” The privateers swept around the belly-shaped coast and dropped down to Monkey Bay, where they recruited nine Indian guides who were not friendly toward the Spaniards. Granada lay at the far end of the huge inland Lake of Nicaragua; to get there they’d have to paddle up the San Juan River in their canoes. The men traveled by night, surprise still their best weapon, and slept hidden in the underbrush by day; they forded three falls where they had to carry their canoes, covering 111 miles before the river brought them to a “fair laguna, or lake, judged to be 50 leagues by 30, of sweet water, full of excellent fish with its banks full of brave pastures and savannahs covered with horses and cattle.” The grazing cows soon began dropping to the report of muskets, and the men enjoyed “good beef and mutton as any in England.” After feasting on the herd, the men approached the town, “hiding by day under cays and islands and rowing all night.” On the fifth night, they reached the outskirts of the city of Gran Granada. Founded in 1524 by Hernández de Córdoba, Gran Granada was a rich commercial outpost that just might, the buccaneers hoped, still contain some of the golden Aztec treasures that had astonished the conquistadors. The town was twice as big as Portsmouth and boasted seven stone churches, colleges, monasteries, and, more important, seven companies of cavalry and militia. But Gran Granada, like so many others, was unprepared for the buccaneers. What astonishment Morgan’s band must have caused when they marched into the town square, overturned the great guns, captured the sergeant-major’s house, which doubled as the town’s armory, locked “300 of the best men prisoners” in the great church, and went on a major spree. The privateers had been children’s stories told to wayward boys to frighten them. But now they swept in, real as life, with over a thousand of the local Indians, who, believing themselves liberated, joined in with the plundering and were on the verge of executing the Spanish prisoners en masse until Morgan reminded them that the English would be leaving and the natives would have to live with their colonizers when they were gone. The knives were stayed, and Morgan and his men collected their loot, headed back to their ships and set their course for Jamaica. Roderick counted his takings and was satisfied: He could pay off his debts, rent a better room, and look forward to more weeks of carousing back in Port Royal. It wasn’t just the money—it was the feeling of entering the town with as much cash in one’s pocket as the richest merchant, of being able to look anyone in the eye, hard if he liked. Money made the man in Jamaica; it didn’t matter who your father was or what you had done in the Old World. Roderick’s estimation of himself was rising by the week.
Each of Morgan’s raids was remarkable for a different reason. His first was a feat of navigation and improvisation: He’d covered thousands of miles across portions of the globe for which no good maps existed, made alliances with Indians, learned to trust their advice, survived the loss of his vessels, and brought his men back safely and much richer. The Spanish had proved less of an adversary than sheer geography, and in fact Morgan had studiously avoided attacking the power centers of the empire: Havana, Cartagena, Panama. But he’d rampaged at will through the length and breadth of the empire. The sheer number of miles he’d covered demonstrated how the Spanish Empire had been distorted by the search for treasure: It was a collection of distant towns strung out over a huge continent. It had not been created with defense or sustainability in mind, only exploitation. What excitement Morgan must have felt as he set course for Jamaica: He’d just proved to himself that the empire was vulnerable to smart, driven men like himself. If he could mold the Brethren to his will, he’d be as rich and as respected as any of his illustrious kin. The West Indies were his for the taking.
Reports filtered back to Madrid about Morgan’s feats in territories previously thought out of reach. Morgan began to acquire the name that would pass the lips of terrified colonists for years to come: El Draque. The Spaniards were beginning to believe he was the reincarnation of the dreaded Sir Francis Drake.