Apocalypse 1692

by Ben Hughes

  News of the wrecks sparked gold fever at Port Royal. By mid-August over one thousand of the town’s mariners had sailed for Point Pedro Cays in at least thirty-seven vessels, prompting the attorney general to complain that Port Royal was dangerously exposed to attack by the French.34 Among the first to react was Peter Bratelier, the Huguenot sloop captain who had fled France in 1685 following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. On hearing the news from Point Pedro Cays, Bratelier recruited thirty “English saylors” from Port Royal and paid a visit to the port captain, Reginald Wilson, to put down a deposit of £2,000.35 Each captain to sail for the wreck would be obliged to do the same to ensure that they would return with their treasure and pay the king’s tenth.36 Around August 1, Bratelier set sail in the Newcastle, a 20-ton sloop of 4 guns. Joshua Leake, another of Port Royal’s resident mariners, sailed soon afterward in the Elizabeth, having recently returned from a voyage to Carolina with a cargo of salt pork and beef and staves and hoops for constructing barrels.37 Another to leave in August was Robert Scroope. One of Port Royal’s leading wreckers, Scroope had a quarter share in at least two of the vessels that would fish the hulks off Point Pedro Cays that August: the Diligence, which Scroope himself commanded, and the Dragon, a 30-tonner which would sail at the end of the month under his associate, Robert Glover.38

  On August 7, a Council meeting was held at Spanish Town. Besides Governor Inchiquin and the usual members of the island’s plantocracy, Captain Hugh Gaines of the Seahorse was present. A gentleman adventurer in the mold of Captain Hewetson of the Lion or Captain Brooks of the Joseph, Gaines had been granted by William and Mary exclusive wrecking privileges on all vessels found within seventy leagues of Jamaica. Although the Council deemed that the Point Pedro Cays wreck did not fall under Gaines’s exclusive remit, as it had been discovered since their majesties’ order had been written, he was, nevertheless, allowed to take part. The size and power of the Seahorse, a 300-tonner armed with 36 guns and with a crew of seventy, would give him a distinct advantage over the majority of those who would fish the wreck that August.39

  UNDERSEA TREASURE SALVAGE, or “wrecking” as it was known, was big business in the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. Initiated by the Spaniards not long after Columbus’s landing in the Americas, the practice had developed in response to the frequent loss of Spanish treasure galleons. At first, indigenous divers had been employed. The Arawak and Caribs had both engaged in pearl diving prior to European arrival—the latter on a surprisingly large scale at several locations, notably the island of Cubagua off the coast of modern-day Venezuela—but it was the Lucayans of the Bahamas that the early Spanish colonial historian Oviedo considered the masters of the trade. Allegedly able to dive to depths of one hundred feet by using stone weights tied to their backs and remain submerged for an incredible fifteen minutes, the Lucayans became victims of their own success: they were enslaved by the Spaniards and wiped out by European diseases. Subsequently, the Spaniards used African slaves. They also became adept and their role was soon diversified: as well as pearl fishing (which had by then spread to the Pacific as well as the Caribbean), the divers were tasked with locating and sealing underwater leaks on ships’ hulls; salvaging treasure and supplies from submerged wrecks; and even preventing unscrupulous masters from smuggling goods attached to the undersides of their ships.

  In the early seventeenth century, the English muscled their way into the business. When raiding the Spanish pearl fisheries of Cubagua and the nearby island of Margarita, privateers from Bermuda carried off several African divers whom they put to work salvaging Spanish wrecks. So lucrative did the business prove, that it soon became the principal industry of the island. Bermuda’s hegemony did not last long. Due to its strategic location near the principal sea-lanes frequented annually by the Spanish treasure fleets, Jamaica had eclipsed Bermuda as the hub of wreck salvaging in the Caribbean by the 1660s. With a sizable population of unscrupulous mariners, Port Royal was ideally suited and by 1673 as many as fifty of the town’s burgeoning fleet of sloops and schooners were dedicated to the trade.40

  The Caribbean’s greatest salvaging success story came in 1687. The man primarily responsible was a former shepherd boy from the frontier outpost of Nequasset in Massachusetts named William Phips. After completing a four-year apprenticeship in carpentry, Phips had moved to Boston to set himself up as a shipbuilder, but had later turned his hand to wreck salvaging in the Caribbean after his yard was destroyed by a Wabanaki raiding party during King Phillip’s War. Phips’s initial attempts at salvage, though small scale, proved profitable. His ambition grew and in the mid-1680s Phips set his sights on the long-lost wreck of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, a Spanish galleon shipwrecked in 1641 on the Ambrosia Bank, a reef off the north coast of Hispaniola. The expedition was financed by a London-based consortium which included James II and Christopher Monck, the second Duke of Albemarle and future governor of Jamaica. After stopping at Port Royal to pick up twenty-four African divers, Phips spent March and April 1687 working the site with a flotilla of three ships and returned to London in mid-1687 with thirty-four tons of treasure worth £205,536 in contemporary currency or over $3 million today. Albemarle received a quarter and the king got a tenth. Phips received £19,000 as his share, out of which he awarded his crew £8,000 including bonuses for each of the Port Royal divers.41 At least twenty-three Jamaican sloops spent time salvaging the wreck in the months that followed Phips’s departure, and a further £10,000 worth of treasure was raised. Among those to profit were William Diggins of the Phenix and James Wetherill of the Mary, both of whom were among the sloop captains to fish the wreck at Point Pedro Cays three years later. Phips’s success also sparked wrecking fever in London.42 For the next two decades, the crown was petitioned by numerous consortiums seeking to secure exclusive “fishing” rights to one section of the Caribbean or another, the latest example being Captain Gaines of the Seahorse.

  A variety of methods were used to locate the treasure at Point Pedro Cays and haul it up from the seabed. On arrival, the ships would anchor some way off the reef and wait for good weather. Once the waves were calm and the wind had died, the captains lowered their boats—better suited for working the shallows—and rowed out to the site, leaving the remains of the crew to man the sloop’s cannon in case other opportunists should venture too near. The boats’ crews would then spread oil over the surface of the water to calm it and better enable them to see beneath the surface. If any irregularities were detected on the seabed, African or indigenous divers were dispatched to perform an underwater reconnaissance. Attached by lines to the boats and carrying net bags in which to place any artifacts they might recover, some divers held oil-soaked sponges in their mouths from which they could extract an extra lungful of oxygen thus maximizing their dive time.43

  Such a task was not without its dangers. “The exertion undergone during [the dive],” one observer noted, “is so violent, that upon being brought into the boat, the divers discharge water from their mouths, ears and nostrils, and frequently even blood . . . [and] quite often . . . [they] will suddenly drop dead from haemorrhaging or congestion.” The bends was not the only risk. “The divers have more to fear from sharks, manta rays, and poisonous sea snakes,” noted another writer. The former could grow to “a monsterous size,” were “very fierce and voracious and . . . often devour[ed] the poor divers,” while the manta rays could “embrace the diver so strongly that they squeeze him to death, or else by falling on them with their whole weight . . . crush them to death against the bottom.” The divers carried knives to “wound . . . the fishes and put . . . them to flight,” while one man kept a lookout for their approach from the boat “and when he sees any . . . making towards . . . [the divers], gives them notice by pulling on the line.”44

  Various devices were employed for fishing for treasure. The most frequently used were hooks and trawling grapples lowered on chains and dragged along the sea bottom. More innovative was the diving bell. The first reco
rded use of such a device in the waters of the New World was in 1612 by an Englishman. A former pirate turned wrecker, Richard Norwood lowered himself to a wreck site on the sea bottom off Bermuda inside an inverted wine barrel to which he had attached several weights. In 1616 a German named Franz Kessler improved the design by covering the bell with watertight leather and cutting two windows in its side. In 1677 a wooden bell thirteen feet in height and nine feet in diameter was constructed in Spain to salvage two shipwrecks off the port of Cadaqués. Its Moorish pilots were able to remain submerged for an hour, and the bell proved a huge success. In 1689 a French scientist, Dr. Denis Papin, took the design a step further. By incorporating a large bellows which pumped fresh air into the bell, he was able to increase the time the pilots could remain beneath the surface while also equalizing the water pressure to some extent, thus allowing the device to reach depths of up to seventy feet. Although Papin’s bell would not get beyond the theoretical stage for another century, a contemporary who turned his attention to the quandary would have more practical success. The astronomer Edmund Halley built a diving bell at the same time as Papin which was supplied with air via a valve attached to a tube installed in a lead cask, thus providing the pilots with as much air as they required. At sixty cubic feet, Halley’s bell was larger than Papin’s and had glass viewing ports and an exhaust system via which the pilots’ breath could be expelled.45

  Which, if any, of these devices was employed at Point Pedro Cays is unclear. What is known, at least in part, is the amount of treasure recovered. While it seems the Spaniards themselves, as the first on the scene, hauled away the majority, several Jamaican sloops also made considerable profits. By the end of 1691, after six months working the site, over one and a half tons of broken silver and silver plate, 137 pieces of eight, ten ounces of gold, a few hundred old pieces of iron, and a waterlogged parcel of logwood had been raised from the wreck, taken back to Port Royal, and entered into the shipping accounts by Reginald Wilson, who deducted one tenth for the king. Some individuals did considerably better than others. The Huguenot Peter Bratelier brought home just twenty-five pieces of eight (the equivalent of £6, or four shillings a head when divided among the Newcastle’s crew of thirty); Joshua Leake salvaged ten pieces of eight and one hundred pieces of “old iron”; James Wetherill hauled up twenty-five pounds in weight of coinage and broken plate; while Robert Scrope of the Diligence, one of several sloops to make multiple trips to the site, returned to Port Royal with 120 pieces of eight after his first voyage alone. This was the equivalent of twenty shillings per head when divided among his crew of thirty—a not unreasonable wage for a seaman for a few weeks’ work.46

  The figures above are unlikely to be comprehensive. The wreckers no doubt attempted to smuggle several valuable trinkets past Reginald Wilson, while some of the ships involved, notably Gaines’s 300-ton Seahorse, were not required to enter their finds into Wilson’s records. Another potential measure of the success of the Point Pedro Cays salvaging operation was the amount of attention it received from official sources. William Blathwayt was kept well-informed of developments by Reginald Wilson and Simon Musgrave, among others, while HMS Guernsey and Swan also visited the site.47 The former was there for several days in mid-September, while the latter set sail from Port Royal for Point Pedro on October 12, and returned nine days later.48 As the relevant page in the Guernsey’s logbook is missing and the Swan’s log would be lost at sea the following year, what exactly the Royal Navy vessels were doing is open to speculation. Previously, such ships had been used to provide protection from enemy vessels and police the area (it was not unknown for wreckers to turn their guns on one another in their rush to be the first to access the choicest sites), but it also seems likely that they may have been involved in raising the treasure. If so, how much they salvaged or what became of it is unknown.

  AT THE END OF September 1691, a fleet of thirteen sail departed Port Royal for England under convoy of the Quaker ketch. Among them were the Warrington, a Royal African Company slaver which had arrived from Angola with five hundred slaves in July, and the Grayhound, a small armed merchantman captained by John Finch. The Warrington carried 200 hundredweight and sixty barrels of sugar, fifty barrels of indigo, six barrels of pimento, twenty tons of logwood, and fifteen bags of cotton; the Grayhound was loaded with sugar, fustic, and sarsaparilla.49 The flagship of the fleet was the Lion, commanded by John Hewetson, the privateer-cum-wrecker-cum-asiento-enabler who had spent the previous three years adventuring in the Caribbean. A rebel to the last, Hewetson left without informing Reginald Wilson of the cargo he was carrying. “Six hundred hog sugar at least might be on board,” the port captain recorded soon after the Lion’s departure, “but what other goods of ye Growth of this island I had no account of.”50 Among Hewetson’s passengers was Lady Inchiquin. Sick of island life and finding the tropical heat every bit as unhealthy as her husband, the most honorable Elizabeth Herbert was to return home alone. Inchiquin was dismayed to see her go. The earl delayed their parting until the last moment by sailing aboard HMS Guernsey in company with the Lion and the rest of the fleet as far as Port Morant. On September 27, having spent his final night with his wife on board the Lion as Hewetson’s guest, the governor bade Elizabeth farewell and returned to Port Royal on the Guernsey. The couple would never set eyes on one another again.51

  The last three months of 1691 passed with relatively little incident. In October the annual social season kicked off once more in Spanish Town,52 and King William’s birthday was celebrated on November 4. A dozen of the island’s sloops arrived at Port Royal from the wreck, each carrying a little less broken silver plate and pieces of eight than the one before.53 Four Royal African Company slavers—the Bonaventure, the Ann, the East India Merchant, and the Mediterranean—reached Port Royal with 59, 65, 570, and 430 surviving slaves, respectively.54 The RAC’s resident agent, Walter Ruding, reported that no less than five interlopers were busy fitting out for Gambia. The disgraced and suspended Sir Francis Watson died, his passing going all but unnoticed in the extant documentation aside from a single line in a letter written on November 17.55 Meanwhile, with the French still recovering from Colonel James O’Bryan’s raid on Hispaniola, the Swan and Guernsey divided their time between convoying the asiento’s ships to Havana and Portobelo, bringing home ever more profit for Castilo and Inchiquin, cutting and fitting new masts and other routine repairs, pressing recruits from visiting merchantmen, and watching over the sloops fishing the wreck.56

  The year 1692 began inauspiciously. “Very dry and hot weather” settled over Jamaica like a suffocating quilt.57 Depressed at his wife’s departure, Inchiquin had not attended a Council meeting since December 19, and his health had been failing ever since.58 George Reeve, the governor’s personal secretary, noted that his master was indisposed with “fever” and “ague,” a reference to either malaria or yellow fever, diseases which were as little understood as they were deadly.59 As many of “a third part of” the population “were taken ill” at any one time with such ailments, according to Hans Sloane. Symptoms included splitting headaches, burning fever, jaundice, a falling pulse, nausea, and delirium. As bad air, or miasma, thought to arise from swampy ground at night, was held to be the chief cause, treatment consisted of shutting out the night air by enveloping the patient’s bed with curtains and closing all windows in their quarters, a practice which could only have added to the patient’s discomfort. Others held that purging or bleeding by means of cupping and scarification were effective, although both only reduced the sufferer’s ability to resist, while the African cures—“Country Simples” according to a scoffing Hans Sloane—which some slave owners turned to as a last resort were of equally dubious benefit.60

  On January 12, Inchiquin made a partial recovery. Following a visit to the governor that morning, Reginald Wilson noted that although the earl had “been very ill,” he was then “sumthing better.” It proved only a temporary reprieve. Within the next few days Inchiquin relapsed. Dyse
ntery, or the bloody flux as it was known, was added to his woes. Weakened by the fevers he had been suffering since December, Inchiquin deteriorated rapidly. On January 14, “being sicke and weake in body but of sound mind and memory,” he composed his will. Among the signatories were George Reeve, Simon Musgrave, and Emmanuel Heath, the newly appointed rector of St. Paul’s Church in Port Royal. Inchiquin left most of his estate to his family: his eldest son, William, received the manor house of O’Bryan’s Bridge in Clare County; James, the earl’s second son and the commander of the expedition to Petit Guavos, was bequeathed “all [the governor’s] American interests,” including all the “money and other effects and revenues whatsoever in the Asiento”; a thousand pounds was left to Lady Inchiquin to redeem the jewels she had been obliged to pawn in London before the couple had set sail for Jamaica; and £50 was donated “to the poore of the Parish of Saint Catherine’s.” On January 15, Inchiquin’s condition deteriorated and he died at 8 A.M. the next morning. That night his body was carried to the cathedral in Spanish Town and buried alongside Governor Modyford. No expense was spared, Inchiquin himself having designated £600 for his funeral in his will.61