The young king was the incarnation of his battered country, his weak constitution an accurate mirror of what he inherited. Corruption was so common that it was not even perceived as corruption; it was just the way things were done. It permeated the kingdom: Posts in the government, on the all-important galleons and elsewhere, were sold to the highest bidder. One college in Navarre paid handsomely for the right to confer medical degrees on its graduates, even though there wasn’t a single professor of medicine on the faculty. “The son of a shoemaker hates that occupation,” one government official wrote. “The son of a merchant wants to be a gentleman, and so on with the rest.” Rank was all: Some members of the titled classes avoided going to hospitals during the plague epidemics because it could have meant a slight to their honor; they found death preferable.
This attitude extended to the New World. A captain-general sailing to Cuba or New Spain would pay the Crown for the privilege, then make back his money and more by selling off positions to crew members. The Americas-bound ship was a microcosm of what Spain had become: A typical one would include a veedor, or legal counsel, who would see that all the king’s laws were obeyed even in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; there were eight gentlemen-in-waiting for the captain, four trumpeters, and a master of the plate, responsible for cataloging every piece of treasure brought on board and for delivering it to the Crown’s representatives on the ship’s return; there was a constable, a captain of arms, and the all-important notary who would affix his stamp to every piece of paper that the expedition produced. (The Archivo General de Indias in Seville, which stores the archives from the Spanish Empire in America, holds over 80 million documents.) There were even ships, called navíos de aviso, or “advice ships,” that hauled nothing but dispatches from Spain to America and back again. Copies, duplicates, triplicates—entire boats full of paper! Compare that to the average pirate ship, where every last ounce of extraneous material was tossed overboard in the name of speed, and you get an idea of the two worldviews that were about to do battle in earnest.
The differences were striking: The pirates were radical democrats; the Spanish, monarchists; the pirates prized daring and risk taking, while the Spanish prized conformity, and those who improvised often found themselves rotting in a squalid Madrid prison. The pirates were possessed by “an insatiable desire for riches”; the Spanish wanted power and honor. The pirates were often castoffs and godless heathens; the Spanish believed themselves to be God’s chosen ones. The pirates were commanded by Henry Morgan, who rose from nothing; the Spanish followed Carlos, the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty. The pirates were individualists; the Spanish represented a fantastically complex system. The pirate’s world was closer to our own; the Spanish lingered in a medieval dream.
The final confrontation between the two was now being held in check by London; Charles II had ordered that the privateers “desist those hostilities upon the Spaniards and other neighbours, as much disturbing the settlement of that plantation.” The king was being disingenuous; he did want to avoid turning Jamaica into “the Christian Algiers,” the worldwide headquarters for sea raiders, but reining in the buccaneers was actually a sop to his new allies. The island was a thorn in the side of Spain, and he needed Spain now. And so the privateers were called in. Town criers preceded by drummers went through Port Royal and two smaller towns reading the king’s directive. Many of the Port Royalists reacted with bitterness; the king did not seem to realize that they were living on a frontier where, on any given day, a Spanish, Dutch, or French ship could appear on the horizon and disgorge hundreds of soldiers or pirates, who would then proceed to plunder your house, rape your women, and squeeze your eyeballs out of your head (a favorite torture of the time). The king’s directive provided no funds for beefing up the island’s militia and no Royal Navy ships to protect the harbor. The lack of commissions was driving away the privateers, the only thing that kept the island safe.
The Spanish colonies did not sit back and wait for the English. In the same way that Modyford repeatedly beseeched his English superiors, the governors of the different territories kept up a constant stream of entreaties to Madrid, asking for ships, soldiers, and funds to arm them. There was a fleet in service called the Armada de Barlovento, or Windward Squadron, which in theory was permanently stationed in the West Indies. But, as always with the Spanish, the distance between “in theory” and “in reality” was large: Seven ships had been redirected for domestic use before they ever made the trip. And Spanish administrators were waiting impatiently for the other six to arrive in their waters and hunt down the Brethren.
Governor Modyford found that the revoking of commissions had the predicted results: The privateers drifted off to the Windward Islands, where they went pirate completely (attacking without commissions) or cadged letters of marque from the Portuguese or French. Modyford hanged a few of the locals who went out buccaneering without permission, but he pardoned more. He tried to entice them with commissions against the Dutch, but the privateers saw the Hollanders as fellow Protestants; it was difficult to get up a lusty hatred when contemplating a mission against them. Besides, they were not as rich as the Spanish. The trade that mushroomed from the privateers’ taking was shrinking, and Modyford could not even get answers to his frequent letters to Lord Arlington, his superior in London. He’d been given permission insofar “as should seem most to the advantage of the King’s service and benefit of the island,” but knowing the détente with Spain, he did not want to set Morgan loose on the Main.
By 1666, things were getting desperate. The Port Royal Militia, which had boasted Henry Morgan as one of its first leaders, had only 150 men, down from 600 the year before; even a modest Spanish force might conceivably take the island back. On February 22, Modyford called a meeting of the island’s council for the purpose of replenishing the militia. They agreed that the only way to achieve it was to start granting commissions against the Spaniards. The council gave many reasons that this would be a good thing for Jamaica: It would stimulate trade with New England; it would help the small farmer, who provisioned the privateer fleets; and, lest we forget what Jamaica would become, “it hath and will enable many to buy slaves and settle plantations.” The last justification was the most pressing: The Spanish, the council claimed, “continue all acts of hostility, taking our ships and murdering our people.” For this, the buccaneers were the only answer. “They are of great reputation to this island and of terror to the Spanish,” the council declared.
Modyford had sent a scout to entice back some of the disaffected pirates, and though “much wasted in numbers, many being gone to the French,” they agreed. The governor was still being careful, however, and issued a commission to raid the Dutch island of Curaçao. In charge would be the elected admiral of the Brethren, Edward Mansfield. Henry Morgan was not listed among the men recruited for the mission; Modyford had put him in charge of the Port Royal Militia and the defense of Jamaica. The Welshman was busy building the massive Fort Charles, at the entrance to Port Royal Harbor, and replenishing the ranks of the garrison.
Mansfield and his men set out for Curaçao, but once the Brethren were under way, his crew announced that “there was more profitt with lesse hazard to be gotten against ye Spaniard which was there onely interest.” The buccaneers decided to switch their target to Cartago, the capital of Costa Rica, but were soundly defeated after a long, starvation-haunted march, during which the different nationalities began bickering. (The contrast with Morgan-led expeditions could not be clearer.) With his men exhausted and famished, Mansfield knew that attacking a Spanish town without permission would be trouble. Attacking a Spanish town without taking it was worse: London tended to look with more favor on illegal missions that were at least successful. Desperate for a prize, the marauders turned toward two islands and a long-held dream: a pirate republic.
Providence and its smaller sister island, Santa Catalina, had been one of the first English colonies in the Americas, settled by Puritans from Bermuda and Eng
land in 1630. They lay almost halfway between Port Royal and the Spanish town of Portobelo, where the silver fleets came to fetch the king’s treasure every year. Providence would be a perfect home away from home for the pirates, perched as it was within easy striking distance of the Main’s lucrative cities. Santa Catalina had a less savory attraction: It was the home of criminals, adulterers, and women of disrepute sentenced to a term of exile away from their home cities in Panama or New Spain.
Pirates had always dreamed of having their own country, unsullied by civilian interference. Madagascar would become a pirates’ haven in the late 1690s; its hidden coves, pliant local women, fresh water, and supplies of citrus fruits (essential in battling scurvy) contributed to making it a paradise, and its close proximity to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean guaranteed a steady supply of treasure. “Gone to Madagascar for lymes” was a common expression among the Brethren. Other republics would follow. Calico Jack Rackham and the legends of a later generation took over the island of New Providence (in the Bahamas) in the early 1700s and erected a tent city packed full with thousands of pirates. The island’s democratically elected officials let the pirates do what they wished: whore around, hide out in the island’s countless limestone caves, and drink themselves unconscious, to feel the first stabs of bright sunlight through their eyelids as they lay on a deserted beach after a night of carousing. It was paradise. The cliché was that pirates did not dream of going to heaven when they died, they just dreamed of going back to New Providence.
In his quest to found such a haven, Mansfield easily took the island, killing only one Spaniard. He sailed back to Jamaica to report on the consolation prize, and Modyford immediately sent out reinforcements to secure the island. But Mansfield’s small victory had set in motion a series of tit-for-tat adventures that grew exponentially in scope, until four years later the Spanish would find Henry Morgan assembling the largest pirate army ever seen in order to storm their oldest city on the continent.
Spain decided to draw a line in the sand of Providence. The viceroy of the province of Panama, Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán, called a council of war on hearing the news of the island’s capture. In a split vote, the council determined to “retake [Providence] from the pirates, the honour and interest of His Majesty of Spain being very narrowly concerned here.” Two ships sailed from Portobelo on July 7 to reclaim the island, which Mansfield had now left in the care of his lieutenants as he sailed back to Jamaica. The 517 men on board gave the Spanish a ten-to-one advantage over the fit English soldiers on Providence. After slamming one of the ships onto a reef, the Spanish commander sent a party onto the island to demand surrender, to which the English gallantly replied that they “preferred to lose their lives” than give back the land. The Spanish soldiers poured onto the island and were met with odd-sounding volleys: The English at one of the forts had gone through all their ammunition and were now cutting up the church’s organ pipes and blasting them out of cannon at the advancing troops. It was a valiant defense of a practically worthless piece of rock, but in the end the English saw that the numbers were against them and gave up.
Now one will begin to see why the hatred between Spanish and English ran so deep and why men often fought to the death in the Caribbean. There was no Geneva Convention, no articles of war, to govern what happened next. Sir Thomas Whetstone, the ne’er-do-well nephew of Oliver Cromwell and speaker of the Jamaican House of Assembly, along with the island’s new English governor and an army captain, were to be sent to Panama in chains. Under the terms of the surrender, the rest of the surviving soldiers were to be sent to Jamaica. But the Spaniards double-crossed the soldiers, and they were carried to Portobelo, where jailers packed the thirty-three men into a small dungeon and chained them to the floor.
They were forced to work in the water from five in the morning till seven at night, and at such a rate that the Spaniards confessed they made one of them do more work than three negroes, yet when weak with want of victuals and sleep, they were knocked down and beaten with cudgels, and four or five died. Having no clothes, their backs were blistered in the sun, their shoulders and hands raw with carrying stones and mortar, their feet chopped, and their legs bruised and battered with the irons.
When the news of the men’s fates reached Jamaica two years later, it would stoke the hatred even more.
There was one other result of the Old Providence episode: Mansfield had returned to Jamaica after he’d captured the island and requested more men and matériel from Modyford, to hold it as an English possession. Modyford didn’t wish to commit more forces than he already had and so turned the admiral down. A disgruntled Mansfield had set off for the corsair island of Tortuga to drum up some reinforcements, but there, in Esquemeling’s wonderful phrase, “death suddenly surprised him, and put a period to his wicked life.”
The position of admiral of the Brethren was now vacant. It would soon be filled by the young upstart Henry Morgan.
In Europe the musical chairs were changing again and the waltz’s beat quickened. Alliances were being remade at a dizzying pace. France declared war on England in January 1667, but it was a conflict contained mostly to the Continent and to the islands of the Lesser Antilles. Then, on May 23, England finally signed the Treaty of Madrid with Spain. Eleven years after Jamaica had been taken, the queen regent was still refusing to let it go: The treaty did not formalize the English takeover, in fact did not even mention it. The island was still in play; the war in the West Indies would continue. But Charles’s mind that summer was focused suddenly on the Dutch, who in June 1667 sailed up the Thames, burning ships and blasting forts as they went. It was a humiliating loss for a maritime nation, with scenes of panic along the famous river and people fleeing down roads into the country to get away from the Dutch. Charles’s extravagance had set the stage for the defeat; spending on masques and jewels left little money for the navy, and now England had paid the cost. There were whispers, of course, that the Catholics had somehow sold the country out; there were always whispers. But the old standby could not absorb the rage of the English people. Outside Westminster, Samuel Pepys heard shouts of “A Parliament! A Parliament!” England needed time to recover and to rebuild its navy; on July 31, 1667, the Treaty of Breda was signed between the United Provinces and England. By the end of that summer, Charles II was at peace with Denmark, France, Spain, and the Dutch.
As Europe calmed itself, Jamaica was catching fire.
6
The Art of Cruelty
In Port Royal, Modyford was trying with every tool in his arsenal to hold his island together. The merchants were furious that the Treaty of Madrid did not give them legal cover to sell their goods to the Spanish colonies. Spain had again given the upper hand to marauders like Morgan instead of tradesmen like themselves. The slave traders railed that there was no provision for an asiento, or a contract for their lucrative trade. The planters bitched that the privateers continued to suck away their disgruntled workers. And the privateers clamored for commissions. The waters off his shores teemed with wild-eyed men, Spanish navy ships, and Dutch corsairs. And London told him to keep the peace. Modyford calmed his superiors with assurances that he would, “as far as I am able, restrain [the privateers] from further acts of violence towards the Spanish, unless provoked by new insolences.” Even now Modyford was hearing rumors and mumblings of a new Spanish confidence after the recapture of Providence. Returning traders spoke about activities in Cuba: troops being mustered, a fleet being readied. Jamaica was said to be the target: Spain was finally going to take it back. Having assured London that he’d restrain the privateers, Modyford did just the opposite. He and the council issued Henry Morgan a commission for reconnaissance work, to sail to Cuba and “take prisoners of the Spanish nation, whereby you may gain information of that enemy to attack Jamaica, of which I have had frequent and strong advice.” Modyford needed solid evidence of war preparations on the Spanish side to justify any future battle plans; without them his hands were tied. Up to this point, M
organ’s official status in Jamaica was as a colonel in the Port Royal Militia, the citizen soldiers who were on call to defend the island against any attack. Modyford elevated him to “admiral” of the militia. It was at this time that Morgan was also named to the top rank of the Brethren of the Coast. He was a double admiral, of both the legal and the shadow forces that guarded this lonely outpost of English civilization.
The word went forth that Morgan was assembling a fleet, and privateers appeared out of the coves of Tortuga and the bars of Port Royal, including his old friend John Morris, the Jamaica-based privateer who had sailed with Morgan on the first expedition and about whom little is known except that he became the admiral’s right-hand man. Pirates rarely planned their missions in port. The message would be broadcast that an expedition was afoot, and a rendezvous point was arranged. The leaders informed the men how many pounds of gunpowder and bullets they needed to bring, where the ships would assemble, and on what day they should set out. Morgan chose the South Cays off Cuba, where they’d be protected from the ocean waves that could snap an anchor chain. One by one the other ships appeared over the horizon; by the deadline at the end of March 1668, there were a dozen ships and around 700 men ready to sail. These were not grand vessels: Many of them were single-masted open boats that had planks of wood laid over them to provide shelter from the sun and from water seepage into the provisions. They had no cannon or superstructure. Often they were glorified longboats designed only to get the pirates from Point A to Point B. The largest ship in the fleet, the Spanish-built Dolphin, belonged to Morgan’s compadre John Morris and carried eight cannon and just 60 men at capacity. Roderick was aboard the Dolphin. He looked thinner than he had on his arrival in Port Royal after the first raid. Like most of the Brethren, he’d blown through his share of the booty with astonishing speed and had cut back to one meal a day. Morgan’s call-up had been a godsend.
Empire of Blue Water Page 9
