Cup of Gold

by John Steinbeck

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  PENGUIN

  CLASSICS

  CUP OF GOLD

  Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, JOHN STEINBECK grew up in a fertile agricultural valley near the Pacific Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next few years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he began to publish California fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932), To a God Unknown (1933), and short stories of the working classes. Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the forties he became an amateur marine biologist, as depicted in Sea of Cortez (1941), and wrote about the war in Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), and Burning Bright (1950) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

  SUSAN F. BEEGEL is editor of a scholarly journal, The Hemingway Review, and adjunct professor of English at the University of Idaho. Coeditor of Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, she is the author of two additional books and more than fifty articles on various aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and history. A research associate of the Williams College-Mystic Seaport Program, she has a special interest in maritime studies and literature of the sea.

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  First published in the United States of America by Robert M. McBride & Co. 1929

  Published by Covici, Friede, Inc. 1936

  Published by The Viking Press, Inc. 1938

  Published in Penguin Books 1976

  This edition with an introduction by Susan F. Beegel published 2008

  Copyright John Steinbeck, 1929

  Copyright renewed John Steinbeck, 1957

  Introduction copyright © Susan F. Beegel, 2008

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  Introduction

  John Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold is, in the words of one early reviewer, a “rather weird” novel. Published in 1929, when Steinbeck was just twenty-seven years old, his first book rings with the clashing blades of dissonant elements. Cup of Gold is an historical novel, a fictive biography that follows the career of the actual Sir Henry Morgan (1635?-1688), England’s infamous “King of the Buccaneers,” with considerable fidelity. Yet the book is indebted not only to history, but to “boy’s own” adventure stories as well as to dramas of the screen and stage— to the swashbuckling romance as well as the brutal reality of the pirate tradition. And Cup of Gold is also a literary fantasy wherein the wizard-bard Merlin can instruct the historic Henry Morgan and the Grail quest of Arthurian legend can inform a story set largely in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.

  The novel’s experimental style reflects its dueling genres. Inspired by a medieval revival fashionable in the 1920s, Steinbeck juxtaposes modernist prose and naturalistic observation with archaic speech and highly wrought figurative language. Cup of Gold combines a realistic method with allegory and parable. The book can be read as an ordinary man’s tragic quest for fortune, fame, and love; an artist’s failed quest to find his Muse; or Europe’s bloody quest to realize an American Dream in the New World. It can be a cautionary tale about the piratical ethics of American business and its corporate robber barons, or about the similarly piratical ethics of a new American imperialism. And finally, Cup of Gold is an autobiographical novel, the story of young John Steinbeck’s quest to find his vocation. Perhaps the best way to make sense of this dissonant symphony is to investigate each of its unusual elements.

  STEINBECK AND THE HISTORIC HENRY MORGAN

  The basic plot of Cup of Gold is reasonably faithful to the actual life of Sir Henry Morgan, arguably the most famous pirate in English history. The novel traces Morgan’s rise to fame and fortune—his boyhood in the Welsh mountains, his departure for the West Indies, his entrapment in indentured servitude, his slow acquisition of wealth and the means to buy a sailing vessel, and his eventual fulfillment of his dream “to go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town.” Morgan’s brutal but brilliant career climaxes with his capture of the “Cup of Gold”—Panama City with its fabled riches. His depredations nearly bring him to the gallows, but instead Morgan claws his way to a knighthood and the lieutenant-governorship of Jamaica, winning the hand in marriage of the previous governor’s daughter, his cousin Elizabeth. Cup of Gold ends with the ailing knight on his deathbed.

  From Captain Blood to Pirates of the Caribbean, virtually every pirate story in our literature owes something to the life and legend of the genuine Sir Henry Morgan, and Cup of Gold is no exception. A gentleman’s son from Wales, the historic Morgan probably went out to the West Indies as a soldier in a military expedition against the Spanish. After helping England seize Jamaica from Spain, Mor
gan based himself in Port Royal. There he created his own flotilla of small vessels and a heterogeneous force known as the Brethren of the Coast—a sea-borne army of English, French, and Dutch adventurers, professional cattle hunters, vengeful Indians, escaped slaves, runaway sailors, convicts, and cutthroats. Responding to no authority but the will and charisma of their leader, the Brethren fought the Spanish solely for prizes and plunder, hence the motto Steinbeck records, “No prey, no pay.” Ashore, they were known for rape, loot, and pillage. They took hostages, tortured victims to learn where their valuables were hidden, and held entire towns for ransom, burning them down if the gold and silver were not forthcoming. Between 1655 and 1671, Morgan and his men would sack eighteen cities, four towns, and thirty-five villages of New Spain. Morgan’s capture of Portobello against heavy odds was perhaps the most successful amphibious assault of his century, and his sacking of the fabled treasure city of Panama the most notorious.

  These activities were a militant form of venture capitalism authorized, for the most part, by the British crown. Lacking a navy large enough to defend her developing interests and challenge Spanish supremacy in the New World, England instead relied on privateering—a legalized form of piracy—to harass the enemy. Men such as Morgan, able to fund their own expeditions and raise their own crews, were given letters of marque to legitimize their depredations and were allowed to keep their booty, often divided with respectable investors who purchased shares in their voyages. To the English, Morgan was, in Steinbeck’s words, “a hero and a patriotic man.” To the Spanish, however, this ruler of “a wild race of pirates” was “only a successful robber”—if not an infamous terrorist.

  The historic Henry Morgan, like Steinbeck’s protagonist, married his cousin Mary Elizabeth, daughter of Colonel Edward Morgan, lieutenant-governor of Jamaica and Henry’s uncle. As in Cup of Gold, the marriage took place shortly after the death of the bride’s father, but fact differs from fiction in one important way—the actual wedding happened well before the sack of Panama. Morgan was already a successful and wealthy buccaneer, but the marriage was not contingent upon his triumph, and seems to have been made for love, as Mary Elizabeth had no dowry. This historic union echoes in every pirate yarn featuring a love affair between a buccaneer-hero and the governor’s daughter/ niece/ward, whether Captain Peter Blood and Arabella Bishop, or Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. By transmuting the actual Morgan union into a loveless marriage of convenience, Cup of Gold departs from both the romance and reality of the pirate tradition, and establishes its own ironic, antichivalric tone.

  Problems arose for the historic Morgan when—as in the case of Panama—he continued his marauding without state sanction during a brief period when England and Spain were at peace. For this, he was arrested and taken to London to be tried as a pirate; but when England’s relationship with Spain took a turn for the worse, he was released, knighted, and made lieutenant-governor of Jamaica. There Morgan eventually died of the combined effects of tropical fever, dropsy, and alcoholism in 1688, leaving behind thousands of acres of sugar plantations and Mary Elizabeth, named in his will as “my very well and entirely beloved wife.”

  Cup of Gold’s subtitle is “A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History,” and the novel parallels the life so closely that some early readers skipped over the adjective “occasional” and mistook the fictional work for biography. Steinbeck’s brief intercalary chapters on the history of piracy in the Caribbean, his discourses on other pirates of the age such as Pierre le Grand, L’Ollonais, and Edward Mansvelt, further blurred the boundaries of fact and fiction for muddled readers. The St. Louis Star referred to “Mr. Steinbeck” as Morgan’s “biographer,” and proclaimed “[H]ere is presented Morgan’s complete life (including his loves) dealing with every phase, whether real or legendary.” Berton Braley, who published a doggerel epic titled Morgan Sails the Caribbean (1937), acknowledged Cup of Gold as a source, treating the novel as nonfiction.

  For most of the “facts” of Sir Henry Morgan’s life, Steinbeck relied not on primary research in English and Spanish archives, but on a single source, Alexander O. Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America. Originally published in Dutch as De Americaensche Zee-Rovers (1678), Exquemelin’s work was first translated into English in 1684. While little is known about Exquemelin himself, he apparently went out to the Caribbean island of Tortuga with the French West India Company, and “through necessity” became a buccaneer, serving under Morgan at Panama. Exquemelin’s firsthand account of life among the buccaneers was a bestseller in its time and has been in print almost continuously since the seventeenth century. It is a classic sea narrative and the urtext of most pirate stories in our language.

  As Darlene Eddy has observed, Steinbeck drew many of Cup of Gold’s striking images and realistic details from Buccaneers of America. Dafydd’s account of the Indian thorn torture, Merlin’s musing on the futility of keeping fireflies, Morgan’s encounter with a drunken pirate captain who orders him to drink or die, famished buccaneers coming out of the jungle at Panama and gorging on fresh meat, heedless of the blood running down their beards—these are a few of the images Steinbeck took from Exquemelin. More important, Buccaneers of America contributed to Cup of Gold’s portrait of the grim labor conditions that drove diverse men into joining Morgan’s gang of desperados, and to the novel’s graphic depiction of their cruelty, greed, and debauchery when unleashed on the cities of New Spain.

  Buccaneers of America, however, is also replete with questionable (and damning) statements about Morgan himself. Steinbeck almost certainly knew that in 1684 the historic Sir Henry had successfully sued Exquemelin’s English publishers for libel. Yet the novelist chose to retain aspects of Exquemelin’s account that contribute more to pirate legend and compelling fiction than to accurate history or biography. For instance, Buccaneers of America claims that Morgan began as an indentured servant in the West Indies, although most historians believe that he originally went to the Caribbean as an officer in an English military expedition against the Spanish in Hispaniola.

  Steinbeck kept the legend of Morgan’s indentured servitude nevertheless, using it to transform Cup of Gold into a black inversion of a Horatio Alger story, as Morgan cheats his generous owner and exploits his fellow slaves to make his way from rags to riches. Steinbeck also retained Exquemelin’s claim that Morgan tricked his men out of their fair share in the booty from Panama. Historians have doubted this as well, believing that the take from Panama was simply less than expected because the city’s real riches, silver ingots from Bolivian mines, had been shipped out before the attack. Here again Steinbeck uses Exquemelin’s disenchantment with Morgan to expose the American success story as a climb up “a ladder to a higher, more valuable crime.”

  Exquemelin also had some libelous things to say about the historic Morgan’s treatment of women captives during the sack of Panama:The rovers had a way of dealing with those women who held out. . . . [O]nce a woman was in their hands they would work their will upon her, or beat her, starve her, or similarly torment her. Morgan . . . was no better than the rest. Whenever a beautiful prisoner was brought in, he at once sought to dishonour her.

  Buccaneers of America goes on to sketch the bare kernel of a story about Morgan and “a woman so steadfast her name deserves to live.” Ironically, Exquemelin does not name this “young and very beautiful wife of a rich merchant,” but says that “no lovelier woman could be found in all Europe.” Lusting after her, Morgan at first tries her virtue with kindness— with private quarters, a slave, fine meals, visits from friends, and gifts of jewels. The lady, “as chaste as she was well-bred,” persists in refusing him and tells Morgan that he will “have to let her soul go free” before he can “work his will on her body.” Enraged, he has her stripped, imprisoned, and starved, but she continues to refuse, saying she will never give in so long as she lives. Eventually, Morgan accepts defeat, returning the lady to her husband in exchange for a substantial ransom. Stein
beck transformed Exquemelin’s libelous little story into a major plotline in Cup of Gold—Morgan’s longing for and rejection by the captive beauty La Santa Roja.

  STEINBECK AND THE ROMANCE OF PIRACY

  Steinbeck was not simply writing a biography of Sir Henry Morgan, or an historical novel based entirely on period materials such as Exquemelin’s narrative. He was also keenly aware of the romantic representations of piracy in children’s literature and popular culture. A careerist from the start, young Steinbeck was as interested in winning a large popular audience as he was in critical acclaim and academic plaudits. While working on Cup of Gold, he gave this advice about writing in a letter to his friend Webster Street: “Always crowd the limit. And also if you have time, try your hand on a melo drahmar, something wild and mysterious and unexpected [...].” A story, Steinbeck felt, should be “as racy as you think the populace will stand.” He certainly understood and hoped to exploit the broad appeal of pirate stories. Cup of Gold seems to project a fantasy of its own hoped-for reception when “a multifarious population” crowds the beach at Port Royal “to see the Captain Morgan who had plundered Panama”:Great ladies, dressed in the silken stuffs of China, were there because, after all, Henry Morgan came of a good family—the nephew of the poor dear Lieutenant-Governor who was killed. Sailors were there because he was a sailor; little boys because he was a pirate; young girls because he was a hero; business men because he was rich; gangs of slaves because they had a holiday.

  Seeking such a reception, Steinbeck turned first to a novel that had held great importance for him as a boy—Robert Louis Stevenson’s children’s classic, Treasure Island, first published in 1881. The years of Steinbeck’s boyhood were the heyday of Treasure Island’s popularity. In 1911, the year he turned nine, Simon & Schuster issued a deluxe edition with the immortal illustrations of N. C. Wyeth, whose portrait of peg-legged Long John Silver with a parrot on his shoulder now defines the popular idea of a pirate. In Cannery Row, Steinbeck remembered “with pleasure and some glory” that Robert Louis Stevenson had lived in Monterey, where Steinbeck’s parents owned a summer cottage in Pacific Grove. “Treasure Island,” he wrote, “certainly has the topography and the coastal plan of Point Lobos”—an opinion he may have formed as a boy playing at pirates and reenacting scenes from a favorite novel in the same terrain.