A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  The capture of Jamaica was one of the corollaries to the Civil War. During the reigns of James I and Charles I, relatively cordial relations had been maintained with Madrid, but Cromwell, an intolerant Protestant, saw Spain, as Drake had done, as the eternal enemy. When the Spanish ambassador discussed with him the possibility of a treaty, Cromwell told him that the first step to a treaty must be free trading in the New World and the freedom of British sailors from the Inquisition. The ambassador replied that to ask a liberty from the Inquisition and free sailing in the West Indies was to ask his master’s two eyes, and that nothing could be done on those points. In accordance with the practice of former times, Cromwell decided on appropriate action. He realized the importance of the Caribbean, and sent two of his admirals, Penn and Venables, to capture Hispaniola; they failed, but captured instead Jamaica, which the Spaniards had occupied very lightly.

  Of the colonists there, Bryan Edwards was to write: ‘They possessed nothing of the elegancies of life nor were they acquainted even with many of those gratifications which, in civilized states, are considered necessary to the comfort and conveniency of it. They were neither polished by social intercourse nor improved by education, but passed their days in gloomy languor, enfeebled by sloth and depressed by poverty. Having at the same time but little or no connection with Europe, nor the means of sending their children thither for education, they had been for many years in a state of progressive degeneracy and would probably, in a short time, have expiated the guilt of their ancestors by falling victims themselves to the vengeance of their slaves.’

  They had nothing to offer the few ships that stopped at their ports but provisions, cocoa, hog’s lard and hides, in return for manufactured European articles.

  Bryan Edwards had the typical English distrust of Spain, yet he had nothing but reprobation for the ruthless conditions of surrender that Venables inflicted on the Spanish settlers. They were ordered to hand over their slaves and property and leave the island. They pleaded that they had been born there, that they had neither relations, friends nor country elsewhere, declaring that they would rather perish in the woods than beg their bread on a foreign soil. But their prayers were in vain, and many of them sought shelter in Cuba, the first substantial immigration thither.

  In addition to their ill-treatment of the Spaniards, Penn and Venables foolishly devastated the provision grounds and killed the cattle, leaving, themselves very little to eat. On their return to England they were imprisoned for their failure in Hispaniola, but Jamaica was to prove more lastingly valuable to England than Hispaniola was to Spain and France.

  Cromwell also realized the use of the colonies as an alternative to the cost of maintaining undesirable nationals in prison. He sent to Barbados after the Battle of Worcester a large number of Scottish prisoners who, degenerating into a colony of poor whites, were later to be known as Redlegs. He also sent a number of Irish to Montserrat, and the shamrock proudly surmounts today the roof of its Government House. A little later he ordered the Scottish government to apprehend all vagrants for transportation. In Grenada today there is a curious little colony of near-whites, many of them flaunting Scottish surnames.

  When Henry Morgan reached Jamaica, the island was in the early days of its colonization, and its capital, Port Royal, which was later engulfed in an earthquake, was the most lawless city in the Antilles. It was here that the buccaneers brought their plunder, which they sold for a tenth of its value, and it was in its taverns that they spent the proceeds on rum and wenches. The extent of its lawlessness may be gauged from the fact that a gibbet stood in its public square which anyone with an appearance of authority could use. It was appropriate that the English section of the Tortuga buccaneers should begin to drift here during the 1660s, and it was from here that Esquemeling set sail with Henry Morgan on his raid on Porto Bello.

  This was one of the great pirate’s most famous actions. Porto Bello was very different from the half-built city of which Baskerville had made a funeral pyre for Francis Drake. It was judged to be the strongest fort in the West Indies, and its entry was guarded by two castles. There was a permanent garrison of three hundred men, and four hundred families were in residence. The climate was unhealthy, so that the big merchants lived in Panama, but their warehouses were in Porto Bello, and its fair, when the Spanish galleons were assembled, lasted forty days. It offered high rewards to enterprise, and Morgan decided to outflank it, anchoring down the coast and proceeding up the river by canoe.

  He had with him as a guide an Englishman who had once been imprisoned there. He sent a patrol of four men to capture the sentry at the first post. They succeeded in their task, and Morgan instructed his prisoner to lead him under the walls of the castle. When he arrived and had his men deployed, Morgan told the sentry to charge the commander of the castle to surrender instantly, under pain of massacre. The commander refused, opened fire and alarmed the city. Morgan fulfilled his promise. He stormed the citadel, herded the survivors of the action into a single room, set alight the powder, of which there was a considerable store in the cellar, and blew its occupants into the air. The pirates then turned upon the city, whose panic-stricken inhabitants threw their jewels and silverware into wells and cisterns, while the governor withdrew to the surviving castle and set it in a state of siege.

  The battle was waged with the fiercest desperation from first light until the tropical sun was high. Morgan had started the action with only four hundred men, and he began to doubt whether his forces were strong enough to carry the assault. He attempted to burn the gates with fireballs, but the Spaniards on the walls poured down on them stones, pots of powder and other inflammable material. The defenders, indeed, seemed likely to carry the day, but Morgan had a last card to play. Earlier in the action he had sacked a monastery and taken prisoner a number of monks and nuns. He now had constructed a dozen ladders so broad that five men could ascend them simultaneously. These ladders he ordered to be put in place by the monks and nuns, believing that the governor would not fire upon ecclesiastics. He underestimated the resolution of the governor, who possibly argued to himself that, the souls of the religious being safe, it did not matter what happened to their bodies. The nuns and monks screamed to him to surrender the castle and thus save their lives, but he was adamant and ordered his men to fire upon them as sternly as though they were buccaneers. Possibly his men were less ruthless than he was and wavered in their duty. At any rate, the ladders were fixed, though at the cost of many holy lives, and the pirates mounted them and swept into the castle.

  The governor refused to surrender. He would rather, he said, die as a valiant soldier than be hanged as a coward. But the garrison had had enough. Once again the prisoners were herded together, with the men and women separated. The wounded were put in a single room, ‘to the intent,’ so Esquemeling said, ‘that their complaints might be the cure of their own diseases, for no other was afforded.’

  This done, the pirates, as was their wont, delivered themselves to such an orgy that had fifty resolute men been available the city could have been easily recaptured. But Panama was many miles away.

  Next day Morgan and his men set about the task of plunder. This involved, as was customary, the torturing of those of the prisoners who appeared to be the richest, until they revealed the hiding places of their wealth. Several died upon the rack, but the accumulation of wealth proceeded smoothly. In the meantime, news of the disaster reached Panama, and the President prepared himself to exact reprisals.

  Morgan, with his ships near at hand, felt no concern, although his manpower had been weakened by the unhealthiness of the climate and the strain of a sustained orgy. He loaded his ships with food and plunder, then he told the prisoners that unless they produced what he considered an adequate ransom he would burn their city and blow their remaining castles into the air. He considered two thousand pieces of eight an adequate ransom, and he advised them to send two emissaries to Panama to collect it. The President of Panama was now ready to attempt an as
sault. He advanced on Porto Bello. He expected that the pirates would fly at his approach, but Morgan knew that the Panamanians would have to pass through a narrow passage. He set his best men to guard it, and it was the President who retired.

  There then ensued a courtly exchange of notes. If Captain Morgan did not retire immediately, said the President, he could expect no quarter. Morgan replied that unless he received the contribution money the castles and the prisoners they contained would fly skyhigh. The President prudently decided that Porto Bello could settle its own affairs. Let them pay the ransom for the territory they had so ill defended. Morgan received his two thousand pieces of eight.

  The President, in the manner which the laws of chivalry prescribed, expressed to Morgan his admiration of his enemy’s achievement and asked if he might receive a sample of the kind of weapon with which so great a city had been taken. The messenger was received with great civility, and returned to Panama with a pistol and a few small bullets of lead, Captain Morgan desiring him ‘to accept that slender pattern of the arms wherewith he had taken Porto Bello and keep them for a twelvemonth’, after which time he promised to come to Panama and fetch them away. The President of Panama returned the pistol and bullets, thanking him for the loan of them. At the same time he sent a gold chain with the message that he did not desire that Morgan ‘should give himself the labour of coming to Panama as he had done to Porto Bello, for he did certify to him that he should not speed so well here as he had done there’.

  The superficial courtesies were thus maintained as they had been with Drake a century before, and in a quiet harbour in Cuba, Morgan checked his spoil. It amounted to two hundred and fifty thousand pieces of eight in addition to a large quantity of goods.

  That was in 1668, and the high days of piracy were about to reach their twilight. The sovereigns of Europe were sufficiently committed to the profits of Caribbean trade to realize that it was in the interests of them all to curtail the activities of the buccaneers. But two mighty raids were yet to be accomplished, the assault on Maracaibo and the burning of Panama. Of this final exploit, Esquemeling was to write: ‘The history thereof I now begin to relate as being so very remarkable in all its circumstances that peradventure nothing more deserving memory may occur to be read by future ages.’ And indeed, though the world has been distracted by wars for three hundred years since then, it is to be doubted if any of them has produced a campaign more remarkable for cruelty and courage.

  Morgan was at this time supposed to be operating under official authority. Spain and Britain were at peace, and Charles II was about to sign a treaty which outlawed buccaneering, but the treaty had not yet been signed and Morgan was able to persuade the governor of Jamaica – he himself was at that time deputy governor – that the safety of the colony depended on the reduction of Spanish power; there were, moreover, a number of persons in Jamaica to whom Morgan’s men owed money, and who were ready to assist the launching of an expedition that might reimburse them. Morgan therefore sent out a recruiting summons to as many of his old comrades in arms as were still capable of bearing them, to a rendezvous in Hispaniola, and in late October he set sail for Rio de la Hacha.

  Here he had the good fortune to find a large ship that had come from Cartagena to unload maize, a useful cargo for him. As usual, he found the town empty, but he captured a party of Spaniards and by torture extracted from them the necessary information about the hiding places of the city’s wealth. He was now joined by a further series of recruits, so that his fleet numbered thirty-seven ships, which were manned by two thousand men besides mariners and boys. His flagship was mounted with twenty-two great guns and six small ones; the other larger ships had twenty, eighteen and sixteen guns apiece; even the smallest had as many as four. They were well stocked ‘with ammunition, fireballs and other inventions of powder’. This was a formidable armada, as large as that with which Drake and Hawkins had sailed upon their final voyage.

  As was the way of the buccaneers, Morgan now drew up his articles of association. He divided his fleet into two squadrons, placing a vice-admiral over each, and appointing divers officers. To each of these he gave letters patent ’to act all manner of hostility against the Spanish nation and take of them what ships they could, either abroad at sea or in the harbours, in like manner as if they were open and declared enemies of his master, the King of England’.

  He claimed for himself a hundredth part of all that was taken. Each captain should take the share of eight men, in addition to his own share. The surgeon, in addition to his pay, should have two hundred pieces of eight for his medicine chest. Every carpenter should draw, above his salary, one hundred pieces of eight.

  Morgan and his captains then had to decide the first object of their attack – Cartagena, Panama or Vera Cruz. Their choice fell on Panama because it was believed to be the richest; but because of its distance from the Atlantic and their own ignorance of the approaches they decided to capture first the island of St Catherine, where they were likely to find some outlaws who would act as guides.

  St Catherine was a penal settlement, to which were sent all the malefactors of the Spanish West Indies. It was a well-watered island, containing a great many pigeons. It conducted no commerce because its inhabitants were too idle to raise the tobacco which would have produced substantial profits; they were content to plant just enough fruit for their own subsistence. The island was, however, powerfully defended; the pirates’ first attack was beaten off, and Morgan’s men had to spend the night in the open fields under a streaming tropic rain. They wore nothing but breeches and a shirt; they had neither shoes nor stockings; they had brought no rations; their powder and their guns were wet; it was the rainy season. Morgan decided on a bluff. He tied the colours of truce to a canoe and sent a message warning the governor that if, within the day, he did not deliver himself and his men into the invaders’ hands, they would be slaughtered without mercy. The canoe brought back the answer that ‘the governor desired two hours’ time to deliberate with his officers in a full council, which being past he would give his positive answer to the message.’

  Within two hours the answer had arrived. It contained an ingenious variation on the customary proposition – His Excellency was prepared to surrender against such overwhelming forces, provided that Captain Morgan would be pleased to use a certain stratagem of war for the ‘better saving of his own credit and the reputation of his officers both abroad and at home’, which should be as follows: that Captain Morgan should bring his troops at night to the bridge that joined the lesser island to the greater one, and there attack the fort of St Jerome; that at the same time all the ships of his fleet should draw near the castle of Santa Teresa and attack it by sea, landing in the meanwhile near the battery called St Matthew some further troops who should intercept the governor as he was endeavouring to pass to St Jerome’s fort, take him prisoner and force him to lead the English into the castle, under the fraud of their being his own troops. In the meantime, the two sides should fire at each other continuously, either into the air or with blank cartridges.

  Morgan accepted these conditions willingly; there was an exchange of hostages, the sham battle was enacted, and without a single casualty or reprisal the pirates took possession of the island. They hunted and cooked and banqueted, while their leader set about finding the outlaws who would guide him to Panama.

  The approach to Panama was guarded by the castle of Chagres, and Morgan deputed one of his captains to subdue it, with a force of four hundred men. It was a bitterly contested action; and the day was turned by an accident typical of but unique in the history of this kind of battle. After a number of reverses, the pirates were attempting to reduce the palisades with fireballs, when one of them was shot through the body with an arrow; he pulled it out, wrapped a piece of cotton round it, and in a gesture of bravado put it into his musket and fired it back into the castle. The cotton was kindled by the powder; it landed in a roof thatched with palm leaves; it set the roof alight; the fire spread and r
eached a load of powder. The explosion caused considerable damage and alarmed the Spaniards, who did not recognize the cause of the disaster. Their resolution wavered and the pirates did not let the opportunity slip.

  The pirates’ casualties were heavy, but after a day and a half s fighting only thirty defenders remained out of 314. From these thirty prisoners, the pirates learned that the governor of Panama had been already warned from Cartagena that the English were equipping a fleet to attack him, and that this information had been confirmed by a refugee from Rio de la Hacha. It was believed that the governor had lined the Chagres River with ambushes and was waiting in the open fields of Panama with thirty-six hundred men.

  In face of this information, Morgan set out himself with twelve hundred men, five boats laden with artillery, and thirty-two canoes. His march on Panama is a major achievement in the annals of war. For eight days he and his men starved; proposing to live off the land, they took scarcely any provisions with them, but the Spaniards followed a scorched earth policy. Every now and then Morgan would find the traces of an ambuscade, but the leather provision bags would be empty; crumbs alone would be strewn upon the ground. The pirates were driven to eat the leather. They sliced it in strips, beat it between stones, rubbed it in intervals of dipping it in the river. They scraped off the hair, roasted it over a fire, cut it into small morsels and consumed it with the aid of water. Once they found two sacks of meal, some bananas and two jars of wine. Morgan divided it among those whose need seemed greatest. The weakest he allowed to travel by canoe. The others had to march. On the sixth day they found a barn filled with maize, on which they gorged themselves. In the distance they kept seeing Indians, who fled at their approach. On the seventh day they saw smoke rising from the chimneys of a village; they hurried forward – surely fire meant food. But the flames were part of the Spaniards’ scorched earth policy. There was nothing left except a leather cask full of bread and fifteen jars of Peruvian wine. The men slaked their thirst and hunger, but to their consternation within an hour they were violently sick; at first they thought they had been poisoned, but later they realized that the wine had mixed badly with the trash, grass, bark and leather they had been consuming. After a day’s rest they resumed their march.