Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Roderick considered. His life on the merchant ship was dull and underpaid; the captain whipped the men occasionally when he drank to excess. The nautical life had not yet matched his conception of it; Roderick wanted greater excitement and greater rewards. He looked down the line of crewmen and saw two other men step forward, and with sudden conviction he strode across the twelve feet of planking that separated sailors from pirates. He had just made a sizable leap: from law-abiding citizen to hunted criminal. You could go no further astray in the seventeenth-century world, except perhaps by proclaiming yourself a child of Satan or killing a man, and the new pirates would get ample opportunity to do the latter. The pirates looked at him as he approached their line, and the captain nodded slightly. Roderick turned and stared down at the deck, unable to meet the eyes of his former mates. He’d just left everything he knew.

  The Spanish had helped create this petri dish of malcontents. If they’d allowed legal trade with their colonies and opened up their cities in the New World, these vagabonds would most likely have been incorporated into a thriving economy and become respectable workers in the region’s booming industries. The hard cases among them would have been hunted down by the English and French authorities and punished for interfering with trade. But the Spanish resisted—for them, trade was not a virtue in itself but only a tool to achieve the worldwide divine kingdom. By hoarding the riches and preventing these men from finding a place in the world, Spain slowly built its own perfect enemy, an enemy diametrically opposite in almost every respect.

  Roderick and the West Indian pirates had a special ancestor: the boucaniers. These outcasts got their name from boucan, the process of smoking strips of beef obtained from the cows that ran wild on Hispaniola (brought there by the Spanish in a failed attempt at raising livestock), which these hunters would shoot, butcher, and then cure expertly over a pit fire. The tangy, preserved strips of meat could be traded with passing ships for everything a man needed. The boucaniers found their way to the forests of Hispaniola in the early decades of the 1600s, a diverse assortment of political refugees, religious refugees, escaped Negro slaves, outright criminals, and disgruntled or abused servants. They were Scotch, Irish, Dutch, French, and mulatto, and they were all radicals in one respect—they rejected everything a good bourgeois looked for in life. Last names were not to be used; some had pasts they did not wish to discuss. (With one stroke they dissolved everything a Spaniard worked toward his whole life.) Women were not allowed into their camps, on pain of death; instead the cow killers paired off with matelots (literally, “bedmates,” but used to connote friendship) for lifelong, probably sexual, relationships. The boucaniers used flat stones for plates and hollowed-out calabashes for cups. They shared everything; no one had more food, liquor, or ammunition than the others. These backwoods communists topped off their lifestyle with a very basic appearance: They wore homemade suits fashioned of cow skins that were covered with layers of dried blood so thick that it looked like black tar.

  What they’d created was a male fantasy of escape from all civilizing influences: women, heritage, children, and money. No one had power over them; living on the far-flung edge of Western civilization, the boucaniers were freer than almost anyone else in the world. This gift they’d give to their inheritors, the men with so many names: pirates, buccaneers, filibustiers, corsairs, and the more decorous privateers. The Spanish looked on the buccaneers and their inheritors as vermin. They were godless, without culture or meaning to their lives. Their system was no system; it was as if they were savages who had freely chosen to reject all that the Spanish held dear. And they were trespassing on the divine kingdom. So the Spaniards hunted them.

  When the Spanish soldiers began to track them down like the cattle they survived on, many of the buccaneers fled to wide-open ports where another kind of living awaited them. The island of Tortuga attracted many of the French buccaneers, while the Jamaican town now named Port Royal in honor of the new king of England, Charles II, became another destination. In the five short years since the English had arrived, Port Royal had been transformed from a killing ground into “the wickedest city in the world.” Privateers had turned Cromwell’s new city on a hill into a Sodom and Gomorrah. It was a thriving outpost of English civilization and a serious annoyance to the Spanish, two of Cromwell’s objectives when he sent the expedition out from Portsmouth. But, spiritually speaking, it was a disaster.

  Roderick, our representative pirate, gaped at it when he first arrived in 1660. The town had 4,500 white residents and 1,500 Negro slaves. There were eight hundred houses eight years later, three hundred more than its competitor, New York, with more taverns and brothels than the rest of the English colonies combined; forty new licenses for drinking houses were issued in the month of July 1661 alone. And it was so rich that, in 1662, the government proposed building a mint on the island, to melt down and coin the piles of silver and gold plate that the privateers were bringing in. Port Royal lived and prospered not by an English proverb but by a Dutch one: “Jesus Christ is good, but trade is better.” When Roderick strode down from the docks, he saw a town bathed in the light of the Jamaican sunset, its shops and houses thrown into relief by the big blue mountains hovering behind them, its streets covered with a layer of golden sand and coral dust that cushioned Roderick’s steps as he made his way toward the bars that lined the waterfront. He could not believe how smartly dressed the local merchants were. Riding through town in fine carriages pulled by six horses, jeweled rings on their fingers and shod in shiny leather boots, they were the equal of Dover’s richest gentry. Port Royal had the romance of a civilized oasis about it. But then Roderick walked toward the pirate haunts such as the Bear Garden, which looked like any of the rough joints you might find in Portsmouth or London. There was a blast of singing and shouting as he passed by the open door. Lingering there, he saw that bets were being thrown down at the cockfight pit dug right into the tavern’s sandy floor. Pirates spilled past him into the night air and invited a local man, at gunpoint, to have a glass of rumbullion, a potent grog. Down the street others had carved a hole in a wine barrel, and local whores were taking their turns dancing in the spray. It looked like the kind of place where a thug off a corsair ship might murder someone whose face he didn’t like or where you might come across a newly arrived privateer having his way with a prostitute in an alleyway off the harbor.

  There was one difference from his home in Dover that Roderick noticed immediately: Here the pirates seemed to own the place. Never before had he seen bad men act as if they were the law.

  In Port Royal the privateers were commanded by Christopher Mings, whom the great diarist Samuel Pepys had described as “a man of great parts and most excellent tongue among ordinary men.” The son of a shoemaker, Mings had climbed his way through the ranks from cabin boy to captain by sheer force of will. In 1659 he led a privateer expedition against the Spanish Main, taking and pillaging in succession the towns of Campeche, Coro, Cumana, and Puerto Cabello. At Campeche his subordinates (who may have included a young Henry Morgan) advised a sneak attack by moonlight, but Mings scoffed at the idea as being beneath an English seaman; he sailed into the harbor in broad daylight, with his trumpeters sounding the attack and his drummers beating a martial tune. The fort fell in the first attack, surprise or no surprise. And when he returned to Port Royal, Mings’s boats were brimful with Spanish loot, estimated at a value of 1.5 million pieces of eight.

  It is notoriously tricky to give present-day equivalents for seventeenth-century money, but a very rough estimate can be obtained. The math goes like this: In the late 1600s, four pieces of eight were worth about one English pound. One English pound in 1670 would be worth £115 today. And £115 British today equal $204 U.S. So divide that $204 by four (as it took four pieces of eight to equal one pound) and you have $51. That’s how much modern buying power in the local Wal-Mart a single piece of eight might get you. Or you can forget all that and just think of a piece of eight jingling in Roderick’s poc
ket as worth $50 or more.

  In today’s dollars Mings had just snatched $75 million. It was an immense fortune, and it surged into Port Royal’s taverns, goldsmith shops, and merchant houses. The only entity that didn’t profit from the raids was the English government: When Mings refused to give the lord high admiral his share, he was sent back to England for trial.

  Mings returned to Jamaica in 1662, having been freed by an indulgent Charles, who was grateful for Mings’s support during the bad days of the Civil War. The raiding began again. Next on his list was Santiago, the second-largest city in Cuba after the jewel of Havana, too strong even for the privateers. The mission was to be Henry Morgan’s initiation into the trade: He was the captain of one of the twelve ships that sallied forth to try their luck against the Crown’s forces. The fact that he’d already achieved the rank of captain suggests that Morgan had proved his talents as a soldier during the guerrilla wars and that his talent for leading men—and making alliances with those richer or more socially prominent—was already evident. Morgan’s family and their illustrious military history also probably earned him a foot in the door, reputation-wise. But everything after that he earned himself.

  On September 21, 1661, Morgan and the other adventurers were given a hero’s send-off, with wives, whores, and merchants lining the shore to cheer the boys away. It was the middle of hurricane season, which runs from June to November, and the ships tacked to Negril in Jamaica and then headed north for Cuba at three knots. Off the coast the fleet encountered a surprise: a ship already anchored near a cay, commanded by none other than Oliver Cromwell’s scapegrace nephew, Sir Thomas Whetstone. Whetstone’s background was not unusual for a gentleman pirate. The Restoration of Charles II had brought with it a return to pleasure, and Whetstone had thrown himself into the whirl of parties and plays, spending wildly; he was soon being hounded by creditors. Luckily, he’d sided with the Royalists and not his uncle during the Civil War, and King Charles had released him from debtors’ prison with a loan of £100, with the understanding that he’d recover it on the high seas. Charles did not grant him a commission, however, so he was operating as a full-fledged pirate. His crew was almost entirely Indian, natives who had been forced off their land by the Spanish. They were out for more than treasure. Whetstone and his Indian crew soon joined Mings’s expedition.

  A council of war was held aboard Mings’s forty-six-gun ship, Centurion, and a final battle plan was worked out. Santiago was a defender’s dream: The port sat on a bay accessible only through a long, thin channel, sixty yards wide at its narrowest, with high cliffs towering on either side. At the entrance to this channel stood the Castillo del Morro, a major fort whose guns could easily reach any ship attempting to sail through the gap. Another battery of guns sat at the cliff’s foot, just below the Castillo, adding more firepower. And in this age of sail, the winds at the mouth of the channel were notoriously tricky.

  For the seventeenth-century sailor, winds were animate creatures, the physical manifestations of minor demigods and demons. Roderick believed they lived on mountain summits or in the hollows of caves, awaiting their orders to go and blow up a storm or hasten a ship to its destination, orders given by their commander, the great North Wind. The South, East, and West each had its own personality, as did all their various subalterns, from North by Northwest down to harbor breezes. Seamen imagined that the winds led sailorly lives; shouted into action by the blustery voice of the North, they’d go out, whip up a hurricane, then retire exhausted to the top of an Alpine peak for a game of cards or some storytelling over rum punch. These gales had feelings: They could be offended, wounded, or flattered, and sailors often called out to them encouragingly as they passed. Each had its own peculiar sound, which the mariner claimed to know by heart: lazy murmurs, keening gusts, voices angry or mournful. It is a testament to the loneliness of the seas and how much power wind had over the sailor’s life.

  The breezes off Santiago were chaotic and difficult to predict, so the men decided on a direct attack up the mouth of the channel. Capricious or nonexistent breezes slowed the fleet’s pace, but on October 5, the men spotted the Castillo del Morro, towering over the entrance to the bay. By now the fleet had swelled to twenty ships with late arrivals from Port Royal, and the captains used telescopes to gauge the action of the wind at the channel mouth. Old hands who had sailed this way before knew that at dusk an onshore breeze would kick up; Mings decided to use it.

  He swept the fleet in to the village of Aguadores at the mouth of the San Juan River, two miles from Santiago. The Spanish, who thought the attack would have to wait until the next day, were startled to find riders arriving from Aguadores saying that the English were pouring off their ships onto the rocky shore. By nightfall Mings had landed 1,300 men without losing a single soul. The privateers lit fires and waited for morning. At Santiago the troops were put under the command of Don Cristóbal Arnoldo y Sassi, a well-connected Spanish-Jamaican who had led the Jamaican guerrillas in their battles with the English invaders. Perhaps the governor hoped for some of the guerrillas’ success in picking off the English; but this was to be an old-fashioned frontal attack. The next morning the English marched to Santiago and, just after sunrise, sent wave after wave of musketeers toward the castle. The Spanish broke in short order, with Arnoldo leading the retreat. The privateers spent five days looting the town, taking anything that could be resold for the tiniest sum, down to the iron fixtures in the church. During the whole operation, Mings lost only six men to enemy fire, while twenty succumbed to sickness. When he sailed into Port Royal on October 22, the crowds along the shore erupted in celebration. Roderick and the boys flowed off the ship and straight into the taverns. By now our nineteen-year-old privateer was an experienced binge drinker. The pieces of eight jingling in his pocket promised weeks of nonstop carousing. He’d killed his first man at Santiago, a Spanish musketeer he’d shot in the face with his pistol, now tucked safely into his leather belt. Roderick would spend all he’d earned on rum and women, but Morgan, although it is likely he dropped a few cobs in the taverns, husbanded most of his share for the future. His plans were grander than Roderick’s.

  The raid on Santiago was a preview, in miniature, of Morgan’s expeditions to come, which shows how much he learned from the irrepressible Mings. One more expedition to Campeche, which netted the privateers fourteen Spanish ships in addition to the usual assortment of trade goods and silver plate, and Morgan was ready to set out on his own. Privateering was confirmed as a business proposition: Fabulous riches lay strewn across the length and breadth of Central America, and Mings had proved that the rabble London had flushed out of its sewers and its army ranks could take it when motivated. Now the English blade had been placed at the jugular that fed Philip IV’s empire. Soon Morgan would begin to press it home.

  In London the man who had set the invasion of Jamaica in motion was gone. Cromwell had died in 1658, and his Puritan revolution seemed to dissolve like morning fog. In his place came a far different man, Charles II, whose biography was touched early and often by piracy. The new king’s father, like many of the Stuarts, had married a Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France. This had enraged conspiracy-minded Protestants like Thomas Gage, who were always prone to rumors of papist plots to take over the country. When she was pregnant with Charles II, Henrietta had sent to France for a Catholic midwife. Her dwarf and dancing master were sent by sea to retrieve the woman but were captured by pirates and delayed past the blessed event. The man in the street rejoiced: Charles II was guided into the world by faithful Protestant hands.

  At his birth, fortune-tellers predicted that Charles would be drawn to mathematicians, merchants, learned men, painters, sculptors—and sailors. Astrologers foresaw a man with a “mincing gait,” a high-pitched voice who would be lucky in both marriage and war. Charles’s father once stated that “the state of the monarch is the supremest thing upon earth: For kings are not only God’s lieutenants, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself ar
e called Gods.” His son, however, came of age in a much more uncertain world. He had to fight for power from his exile in France, flitting in disguise through enemy ranks, endangered and hungry. He’d even turned pirate for a brief moment when he sailed up the Thames and held merchant ships for heavy ransoms to raise money for his armies. Cromwell’s death in September 1658 opened the way for Charles II to assume the throne, and he’d be the monarch whose court would be enriched and scandalized by Henry Morgan’s raids. He brought the Restoration to England, and with it a spirit of debauchery of which Morgan and his boys would have approved. By his return to the throne in 1660, Charles was a canny, passionate man with few illusions; in the marvelous description of one historian, he was “life-bitten.”

  Charles inherited a monarchy with few assets and many lurking enemies. The main players in Europe were at war with each other for most of the seventeenth century, seeking dominance and riches, but only four were vying for colonies in the West Indies: France, England, the United Provinces, and Spain. During Charles’s reign France was the rising power, rich and led with supremely cynical brilliance by Louis XIV. Spain, despite her recent military losses, was still Spain; it was difficult for the English, who had been raised on tales of her immense power, to believe she was really as depleted as she seemed. The United Provinces (the modern Netherlands) were tough and resourceful and had a powerful navy that was increasingly able to challenge any of the European fleets. And England was dependent on its West Indies privateers to do the work of empire. Other countries of varying degrees of potency—including the behemoth Austria (the Holy Roman Empire), Sweden, Italy, Greece, and Russia—were not active in the Caribbean arena, while Portugal was preoccupied with Brazil. In the mid-and late seventeenth century, European nations switched allies constantly in their bids for domination on the Continent and in the New World. Religious affinities and popular opinion meant little in this furious grab for power: Protestant kings would ally themselves with Catholic monarchs one year and then switch sides the next. The colonies of the New World were chess pieces in this ever-changing game, to be milked for money to fight European wars and to trade away if absolutely necessary.