Such an accident was bound to dampen even Captain Morgan’s undaunted spirit; desertions followed. With his reduced force, Cartagena was out of the question, but an assault on Maracaibo, Venezuela, was not. Warned of his approach, the Spaniards abandoned—but booby-trapped—the fort that guarded the inlet that led to the town. Morgan’s men found the slow-burning fuse that was meant to send them and the fort to destruction. The town of Maracaibo was also abandoned, but Morgan’s men scoured the area, rounded up captives, and tortured them to find where their valuables were hidden. If Morgan’s experience is anything to go by, torture works; his men meted out the same treatment to the citizens of the nearby town of Gibraltar. But as Morgan prepared to lead his men back into the Caribbean a note arrived from a Spanish admiral. He had three Spanish warships blocking the inlet, and the fort guarding the inlet had been regarrisoned—its guns would be leveled directly at Morgan’s ships. The admiral had come “with orders to destroy you utterly and put every man to the sword” unless Morgan and his men were prepared to surrender and give up their loot.
Morgan read the letter to his men—and as buccaneers are wont to do, they scoffed. If they had risked their lives to gain treasure, why would they not risk their lives to keep it? Morgan then dictated his official reply: “Sir, I have your summons, and since I understand you are so near, I shall save you the labor with your nimble frigates to come here, being resolved to visit you with all expedition, and there we will put to hazard of battle in whose power it shall be to use clemency (yours we are acquainted with; nor do we expect any).” It closed with a final insult, dating the letter “from his Majesty of England’s city of Maracaibo. . . . ”6
That was the spirit—and it was backed by force, as Morgan, with the skill of a trained soldier and the cleverness of an entrepreneurial English sea dog, was about to outwit the Spaniards once again. He sent a captured Cuban ship—crewed by only a dozen men, and wooden dummies dressed in sailors’ gear—to the Spanish flagship. When the ships were grappled together, the Spaniards discovered the ruse—but too late. The freebooters, plunging over the side, had set the ship ablaze, and the fire ship soon engulfed the flagship. The other two Spanish ships ran aground by the fort. One was scuttled by fire; the other captured by the buccaneers.
There was a temporary stalemate. Morgan didn’t think he could run his ships past the fort’s guns, so he mounted an overland attack, but it was repelled. A few days later Morgan made a show of landing a large raiding party for another landward attack—but it was merely a decoy to get the Spaniards to move their guns to face inland. After they did, and night fell, Morgan sailed his flotilla safely away.
The overarching irony was that while England was trying to get Jamaica to cooperate with its policy of peaceful coexistence with Spain, the Spanish in their frustration had decided that the only rational course was to enlist their own privateers to attack the English, which they duly did. In retaliation, Governor Modyford, ignoring London (as was popular in Jamaica) named Morgan admiral and commander in chief with a commission to attack every Spanish ship that crossed his path.
Morgan embraced his roving commission and throughout the summer and fall of 1670 he raided the Spanish. The highlight came in December, by which time Morgan had gathered together a seaborne army of two thousand buccaneers—the largest ever assembled: Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, united by a hatred of Spain and a willingness to risk life for loot. On Christmas Day they recaptured Providence Island (a colony originally established by English Puritans). It was the first step on Morgan’s path to sack Panama. In January 1671, he captured the fort guarding the entrance to the Chagres River at the narrow waist of central Panama. Morgan’s plan was to lead his men across the Isthmus to the Pacific side where they would find the famously wealthy Panama City.
Morgan garrisoned the captured river fort with several hundred freebooters and then led fifteen hundred buccaneers on a seven-day trek through the Panamanian jungle. When they emerged outside Panama City, they found a Spanish army drawn up to meet them. But the buccaneers proved better soldiers, with steadier discipline. The Spanish militia, cavalry and infantry, charged impetuously—and then fled with equal dispatch when met by blasts from buccaneer guns. The buccaneers suffered fifteen casualties—the Spanish, four hundred to five hundred. Morgan’s privateers stormed the city, only to find that most of its treasure had been moved offshore, to ships Morgan couldn’t reach. Morgan’s expedition had been a military coup, but his men were in it for profit and there was very little of that to be had—certainly nothing large enough, in the minds of many of them, for the hazards they had endured and the long march back up to the Chagres that had to follow.
The Governor’s Deputy
In Spring 1671, Jamaica received a new governor from England, Sir Thomas Lynch. Lynch bore orders to arrest his predecessor Sir Thomas Modyford, but assured him that his arrest was largely to impress Spain with England’s good faith in trying to maintain the peace between their two countries (though Modyford was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two years and Lynch would soon be hanging pirates who failed to heed his warnings that Jamaica was no longer a haven for “the Brethren of the Coast,” the self-governing Protestant pirates who had so long been its protectors). Also, in due course, came orders that he was to arrest Morgan for his unauthorized (by London) raid on Panama.
Morgan, however, was unwell—a dangerous fever kept him bedridden, wrapped in sweat-sodden blankets—and Lynch did not want to alienate the affections of the people of Jamaica by mistreating their hero. It was not until April 1672 that Morgan was judged well enough to travel, and when he did so, he was borne away not as a convict but as a very important person who needed to return for consultations with the government in London. There too, the government seemed uninterested in pressing charges against him (he was not imprisoned, but left at liberty) and by the summer of 1673 the mood in London had reversed: Morgan seemed just the man to secure Jamaica’s future. In 1674, he was knighted and returned to Jamaica as deputy governor to the newly appointed governor, Lord Vaughn.
Among other duties, Morgan was charged with ending piracy in the Caribbean, and this he did with all the mocking gusto he had brought to ravaging the Spanish Main. At times, his new career could make him appear cruel and hypocritical. But he was no crueler to his former friends the pirates than they had been to the Spanish.
As a private citizen Morgan increased his landholdings. In his social life, old habits died hard. He caroused in true pirate style, with a well-earned reputation for heavy drinking in a place and time when the standards for “moderate” drinking were rather capacious—and his waistline began to show signs of his regular debauches. The raffish privateer was fast becoming a supersized fatty. In 1683, he found himself bounced from the island council as no longer sober-minded enough to represent the new respectable face of Jamaica—a face that was being powdered by the return of Sir Thomas Lynch as governor. Before he died in 1688, Morgan was, by the king’s consent, allowed to rejoin the council—but Morgan’s last years were those of a cantankerous physical wreck.
Morgan the (Reformed) Pirate
“I have put to death, imprisoned and transported to the Spanish for execution all English and Spanish pirates that I could get.”
Letter from Sir Henry Morgan, deputy governor of Jamaica, 9 April 1678, quoted in Stephan Talty, Empire of the Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe that Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign (Crown, 2007), p. 273
Nevertheless, Morgan, like Drake, had always been driven by ambition—ambition for money, glory, and respect. Drake had bought his manor house to have the appurtenances, if not the bloodlines, of a gentleman. Morgan had become a planter, and he left his wife with holdings that, in today’s terms, likely made her a modest millionairess. Both men were patriots, and like all patriots they no doubt wanted to be remembered by history.7
If you want to pay your respects to Morgan, it’s impossible. Hi
s grave fell into the ocean when an earthquake collapsed Port Royal. Still, a burial at sea was obviously suitable, and it would no doubt amuse the old rogue to learn that he is today best known as the grinning, bearded, red-coated, high-booted, sword-resting, caped, pistol-belted, and tricorned captain that is the label trademark of a well-known brand of rum. It is, after all, a fitting tribute.
Chapter 6
CHARLES CORNWALLIS, 1ST MARQUESS CORNWALLIS (1738–1805)
“The reasonable object of ambition to a man is to have his name transmitted to posterity for eminent services rendered to his country and to mankind.”
—Cornwallis in a letter to his son Lord Brome, 28 December 17861
Cornwallis was a proto-Victorian. If he lacked the breed’s eccentricity, he fully embodied its devotion to duty and high moral character. He was responsible, temperate, and industrious; domestic and countrified in his preferences, he nevertheless seemed to chafe when not employed by his country—which employed him quite a lot, across three continents.
Typical of his class, he was sent to a hard school—Eton, where pupils learned Latin declensions and Spartan habits. Also typical of his class—and a tribute to its education—he was undaunted by hardship, unimpressed by threats, indifferent to danger, sure in command, practical in his assessments, and high-minded in his duty. He was, his father noted, a “very military”2 young man; Cornwallis always thought of himself foremost as a soldier.
* * *
Did you know?
Cornwallis supported the protests of the American colonists—until they turned to rebellion
Cornwallis was an innovator in using elephants to transport artillery
Cornwallis resigned as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland when King George III refused to grant toleration to Catholics
* * *
Cornwallis’s military career began at seventeen, when he became an ensign in the fashionable 1st Grenadier Guards. Unlike many young officers, he took his military vocation seriously. He went to the continent to see action, and even finagled himself a staff appointment in Germany during the Seven Years’ War. In 1763 he took up his political duties in the House of Lords, where he joined the Rockingham Whigs and established himself as a liberal in favor of conciliating rather than taxing the American colonies. In 1768, he married Jemima Tullekin Jones, the daughter of a regimental colonel. The couple was ardently devoted; it was alleged she died (in 1779) because his long absences fighting the American colonists broke her heart. Her death, Cornwallis wrote, “effectually destroyed all my hopes of happiness in this world. I will not dwell on this wretched subject, the thoughts of which harrow up my soul.”3
The Reluctant General
When he was sent to America to suppress the rebellion in 1776, he was promoted to lieutenant-general of Britain’s North American Army, which still left him third in command, subordinate to generals Sir Henry Clinton and Sir William Howe. All three generals had supported the colonists before the war, and it showed. Howe was pessimistic about Britain’s ability to suppress the rebellion, especially after the Battle of Bunker (or actually Breed’s) Hill where the Americans proved a stubborn foe. Howe fought with a caution born of half-heartedness and even let Washington’s army escape New York when he could possibly have crushed it. Cornwallis was cautious too, but the British succeeded in driving the Americans before them, even if the king’s forces suffered stinging rebukes at Trenton and Princeton.
In October 1777, Howe resigned and Sir Henry Clinton was appointed his successor. Clinton preferred the safety of New York, its charming social life, and the comforting arms of his mistress to campaigning; and Cornwallis, though he remained a dutiful subordinate, tried to resign his commission. He yearned for home and believed the government was undercutting the army in North America in order to fight the French in the Caribbean. The king refused his resignation, but Cornwallis was finally granted leave and returned to England in December 1779 to find his wife, Lady Cornwallis, desperately ill. He stayed with her through the winter until she died in February. It was her death that compelled Cornwallis to forgo thoughts of home and the company of his two young children and to return to the grim and unsatisfactory war in America; the reserved Englishman needed to bury his never-healing grief in duty.
He found that duty in the southern United States where he rejoined Clinton and besieged Charleston—this time, unlike a previous attempt in 1776, successfully. With Charleston secured, Clinton returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis in command, granting him broad powers and instructions to work his way to the Chesapeake after bringing the Carolinas to heel. This Cornwallis swiftly set out to do, reestablishing a loyalist government in South Carolina and then moving to the back country to fight the rebels. He met them at Camden. The rebel commander was General Horatio Gates, a former British army major of common birth and conniving personality. He had served in America in the past, but had only become an American resident in 1772. For all of Gates’s experience—and the fact that he had nearly twice Cornwallis’s number of guns and men—the nobleman routed the commoner, popping Gates’s self-inflated reputation, and capturing all his guns. Gates disgraced himself by abandoning his army and fleeing the field.
An Imperialist in Grief
“This country [England] now has no charms for me, & I am perfectly indifferent as to what part of the world I may go.”
Cornwallis, after the death of his wife, in a letter to Sir Henry Clinton, 4 April 1779
Cornwallis believed in seeking out enemy armies and destroying them, but in the South he was confronted by partisan warfare, with loyalists brutalized into submission by patriot guerrillas. The patriots were full of passionate intensity, while the loyalists lacked all conviction—not surprising perhaps because all they wanted was a quiet life and a return to the status quo ante bellum.
The enormous weight the British government put on the presumed loyalist sentiment of Georgia (back in the British fold) and the Carolinas annoyed Cornwallis, usually the most temperate of men. He dismissed the loyalists as “dastardly and pusillanimous”4 and entirely reliant on his British regulars. The loyalists, however, were neither dastardly nor pusillanimous under the command of Scotch-born Major Patrick Ferguson, a brilliant and courageous British officer, at the Battle of King’s Mountain, North Carolina (7 October 1780). They were nevertheless destroyed, their defeat reverberating throughout the South; the allegedly loyalist Carolinas did not seem so very safe for the British.
An Active Senior
“Was there ever an instance of a General running away, as Gates has done, from his whole army? And was there ever so precipitous a flight? . . . It does admirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life.”
Alexander Hamilton on Horatio Gates’s fleeing the field at Camden, quoted in Harrison Clark, All Cloudless Glory, Volume One: The Life of George Washington from Youth to Yorktown (Regnery, 1995), p. 467
Cornwallis’s chief failing in the Southern campaign was actually to his credit as a human being. He had, as his most prominent biographers have noted, “a soldier’s conception of honor and straight dealing. He enjoyed fighting openly against a declared and courageous foe. By the same token he abhorred cruelty, deceit, and dishonesty. Here, however, he found himself in a situation where the last three qualities counted most in winning the war.”5 Luckily, he had the British Legion under the command of Banastre Tarleton, a cavalryman and politically incorrect poster boy who had fewer qualms about cruelty, deceit, and dishonesty. It is hard not to warm to a man like Tarleton—a man who boasted, according to Horace Walpole, “of having butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army”6 and who, as a member of Parliament defended the slave trade7—but the Americans managed; indeed, his very name was used to frighten children; “Tarleton’s quarter” was invoked by the patriots to mean “no quarter”; he was the most feared and hated British cavalryman in the war. While Cornwallis insisted that his officers should behave like gentlemen, Tarleton, a gentleman by birth, was more than
willing to mix it up with the partisans on their own terms of terror and slaughter. Cornwallis liked the ambitious young Tarleton, and though he discerned an occasional impetuosity and lack of scruple in his subordinate, he defended him when pressed. He did so even after Tarleton’s rashly ordered cavalry charge, while on detached command, led to defeat at Cowpens (17 January 1781)8—another serious blow to Cornwallis’s campaign, one that he confessed “has almost broke my heart.”9
But when Cornwallis could bring his army against the colonials in a set-piece battle, even if badly outnumbered, he turned up trumps. He was so eager to catch an American army to fight that he burnt his supply train so that his troops could move faster. It also meant they had to endure more and live off what they could find, whether a turnip patch or a field of corn. As redcoat sergeant Roger Lamb noted, “In all this his lordship participated, nor did he indulge himself even in the distinction of a tent; but in all things partook our sufferings, and seemed much more to feel for us than for himself.”10
A Not So Gracious South
“The violence and passions of these people are beyond every curb of religion, and Humanity, they are unbounded and every hour exhibits dreadful wanton mischiefs, murders, and violence of every kind. We find the country in great measure abandoned, and the few who venture to remain at home in hourly expectation of being murdered, or stripped of their property.”
British general Charles O’Hara on the partisan warfare in the Carolinas, in a letter to the Duke of Grafton 6 January 1781, quoted in Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History (iUniverse, 2002), p. 66
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Page 6
