Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Some of them said I should do well to preach a sermon and would make them a good chaplain. Others said, no, they wanted no Godliness to be preached there: That pirates had no God but their money, nor savior but their arms. Others said that I had said nothing but what was very good, true, and rational, and they wished that Godliness, or at least some humanity, were in more practice among them; which they believed would be more to their reputation and cause a greater esteem to be had for them, from both God and man.

  After this, a silence followed….

  The picture that emerges from many accounts is of new recruits lured by tales of riches and freedom, slowly being molded by peer pressure and constant alcohol intake until they succumbed to what might be called the culture of piracy and grew as savage as their mentors. John Fillmore, the great-grandfather of American president Millard Fillmore, was captured by pirates on a voyage from Massachusetts in 1723 and later wrote that anyone who practices a vice too long soon thinks it a virtue “and in such case conscience ceases to alarm the understanding.”

  L’Ollonais pursued cruelty to its extremity; he was violent not only for effect but because he enjoyed violence. One instance, when he was reported to have cut a man to pieces with his sword and then licked the blade clean, suggests a level of pathology not found in the ordinary pirate. Only in the wilds of the Americas could he have flourished as he did. And in the summer of 1667, he was tearing through the Spanish West Indies like a cyclone and setting a mark that Morgan would have to match. In Tortuga, L’Ollonais put out the call for men and soon had at least eight ships and over six hundred pirates under his command; he set out for the Spanish Main. Almost immediately the crew spotted a Spanish ship out of Puerto Rico bound for New Spain, packed to the decks with “one hundred and twenty thousand weight of cacao, forty thousand pieces of eight and the value of ten thousand more in jewels.” L’Ollonais called off the rest of the fleet and took on the vessel alone with his ten-gun ship. Three hours later the prize was his. Another ship was caught off the Isle of Savona, and its holds revealed stacks of muskets, 12,000 pieces of eight, and, even better, “seven thousand weight of powder” for their guns. It was a smashing start.

  L’Ollonais now set course for the city of Maracaibo, which lay on the huge inland lake beyond the Gulf of Venezuela. Maracaibo was a center for ranching and boasted huge plantations; its inhabitants had grown rich on hides, tobacco, and cacao-nuts. The Frenchman attacked the fort that guarded the city, and the Spaniards began to flee “in great confusion and disorder, crying: The Pirates will presently be here with two thousand men.” Maracaibo had been sacked by pirates before, and its people knew what lay in store for them. But they had not dealt with L’Ollonais. He hacked men to pieces as they stood before him and even threatened his own men: “Know ye withal,” he told them, “that the first man who shall show any fear, or the least apprehension thereof, I will pistol him with my own hands.”

  The pirates fought ferociously, not only overcoming Maracaibo’s fortress but also putting to death an army of 800 men sent by the governor of Mérida, a military man who had fought for King Philip IV in Flanders. Faced with an artillery of twenty pieces and a determined band of soldiers, L’Ollonais outmaneuvered the governor by pretending to retreat pell-mell. The Spanish were overjoyed and began pursuing the bandits, crying, “They flee, they flee, let us follow them!” As soon as the soldiers had outrun the range of their artillery, the pirates turned on them and began slashing the ranks to pieces. It was a military maneuver of some sophistication, which many pirate captains could not match. L’Ollonais broke the Spanish force, captured the pieces, and occupied the town, starving many of its residents to death. And, most pointedly to Morgan, who surely heard of his exploits, he ransomed the surviving townspeople for 10,000 pieces of eight and gave them only two days to collect it. When they failed to do so, his men began torching the houses. “The inhabitants, perceiving the Pirates to be in earnest,…promised the ransom should be readily paid.” It was. When the pirates returned to Tortuga, the count of the assembled loot came to 260,000 pieces of eight ($13.2 million), a fabulous sum. L’Ollonais had squeezed Maracaibo for every last cob it possessed, faced down superior forces, and found his men food, drink, women, and gold. He quickly surpassed Morgan in the eyes of the Brethren. He “had got himself a very great esteem and repute at Tortuga by this last voyage,” Esquemeling tells us. “And now he needed take no great care how to gather men to serve under his colours…. They judged it a matter of the greatest security imaginable to expose themselves in his company to the hugest dangers that might possibly occur.”

  If Morgan took a lesson from L’Ollonais’s use of cruelty in the Maracaibo campaign, he must have learned the cost of it from the Frenchman’s next, and last, exploit. Having gathered 700 men, L’Ollonais set off for Nicaragua but ran into a becalmed sea; they were unable to make any distance and so put into the first port they found and immediately began terrorizing the local Indians, “whom they totally robbed and destroyed.” They moved on to the port of Puerto Cavallo, where they took a Spanish ship and burned two huge storehouses to the ground, seemingly out of sheer willfulness. The local residents did not escape either: “Many inhabitants likewise they took prisoners, and committed upon them the most insolent and inhuman cruelties that ever heathens invented, putting them to the cruelest tortures they could imagine or devise.” L’Ollonais topped it off with a final flourish. The pirates found themselves on the road to a prosperous town; from their torture of locals, they knew that soldiers were waiting ahead of them in an ambush. What they needed was an alternative route, but one after the other the Spanish told them there was no other way forward. L’Ollonais finally snapped. “[He] grew outrageously passionate; insomuch that he drew his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spaniards, and pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth, like a ravenous wolf, saying to the rest: I will serve you all alike, if you show me not another way.”

  The pirates pushed on, enduring wave after wave of Spanish ambushes. It must be said they fought with astounding bravery, regularly repelling superior numbers of soldiers hiding behind strong fortifications. After vicious fighting, the Spanish could finally take no more and put out the white flag. L’Ollonais granted them only one concession: They’d have two hours to assemble their things and run for the forests. Once the two hours had passed, the pirate captain ordered his men to chase the Spaniards into the forest and capture them. When it came to the king’s subjects, the Frenchman gave no quarter.

  But his luck now began to run out. The buccaneers heard rumors of a rich-cargoed Spanish ship due near the mouth of the Guatemala River and, after three months of waiting, finally found that it had arrived. A ferocious battle ensued, where the pirates attacked under the blazing roar of the ship’s twenty-two guns, but when it was over, L’Ollonais found that the vessel held only “fifty bars of iron, a small parcel of paper, some earthen jars full of wine,” and little else. Now, like Morgan, L’Ollonais faced defections from his ranks. He held a council to rally the men for an attack on Guatemala, but some of them quit the whole business, mostly those “new in those exercises of piracy…who had imagined at their setting forth from Tortuga that pieces of eight were gathered as easily as pears from a tree.” The remaining pirates began to feel the pangs of hunger, as they’d run out of provisions and were forced to forage through the jungle every day. Finally they were reduced to killing monkeys, a notoriously tough business. Another pirate, Basil Ringrose, was on another voyage forced to hunt the macaques and found it unnerving. It would take fifteen or sixteen shots to kill three or four, “so nimbly would they escape our hands and aim, even after being desperately wounded.” In addition, there was something disturbingly human about the monkeys’ reaction when one of their troop had been shot. “The rest of the community will flock about him,” Ringrose reported, “and lay their hands upon the wound, to hinder the blood from issuing forth. Others will gath
er moss that grows upon the trees, and thrust it into the wound and hereby stop the blood or chew and apply as poultice.”

  Things got steadily worse. L’Ollonais managed to beach his ship in the Las Pertas Islands, where it stuck fast. The Las Pertas were the last place you wanted to get stranded. The local Indians were reputed to be excellent hunters; it was said they could run “almost as fast as horses,” were fantastic divers, and hunted their prey using wooden spears with sometimes a crocodile tooth attached to the end. Rumor also held that they were cannibals. So with one eye on the woods, the pirates were now forced to begin the work of breaking up the ship for its wood and nails and constructing a new, much smaller longboat. While the work was going on, two pirates—a Frenchman and a Spaniard—went into the jungle looking for food and were spotted by a group of local Indians. A furious chase ensued; the Frenchman escaped, the Spaniard did not. Several days later a squadron of pirates was sent into the jungle to find out what had happened to him. Near the spot where the Frenchman had last seen his compadre, they found the remains of a recent campfire and near it “the bones of the said Spaniard very well roasted.” Farther out they found more evidence of the man’s fate: “some pieces of flesh ill scraped off from the bones” and a hand with two fingers left on it.

  The increasingly desperate journey illustrated how badly things could go wrong for pirates. Once they were outside of their ports, the pirates had no guaranteed food supplies, no access to repair facilities for their ships, no sure alliances with locals, no stockades where they could get a solid night’s rest away from Indians, no way to call for reinforcements. The Spanish cities were distant from each other, but they were self-sufficient: An army had all the resources it needed to survive. L’Ollonais, the golden boy of the Brethren, was quickly learning a lesson that would haunt Morgan in the near future: One small setback could begin a cascading set of disasters. This meant that their leaders had to keep them moving forward constantly toward new sources of food and treasure, or they’d perish.

  The new boat took six long months to build. When it was finished, L’Ollonais and a group of men selected by casting lots set out for Nicaragua, where they hoped to find some canoes, take them back to the Las Pertas, and carry the rest of the men back to Tortuga. But at the mouth of the Nicaragua River, the pirate’s trip came to a final end. L’Ollonais was attacked by both Spaniards and Nicaragua’s Darien Indians, who were one of the few tribes that the conquistadors were never able to defeat. The Frenchman, always lucky in battle, escaped and decided to try one last stab at fortune by heading for Cartagena, the great galleon port in present-day Colombia. But he did not get far. “God Almighty, the time of His Divine justice already being come,” Esquemeling tells us, “had appointed the Indians of Darien to be the instruments and executioners thereof.” They captured L’Ollonais and tore him to pieces while he was still alive, “throwing his body limb by limb into the fire, and his ashes into the air; to the intent no trace nor memory might remain of such an infamous, inhuman creature.” The men left behind suffered an equally bad ending; they were rescued by another pirate in canoes and set off for Cartagena. But starvation soon haunted them again, and they were forced to eat their own shoes and the sheaths of their swords, to hunt for Indians to eat (they never found any); the majority of them starved to death or faded away from hunger and disease.

  L’Ollonais was the expression of how the pirates had turned away from civilizing influences. He’d become a legitimate monster, a savage throwback tramping through the savage jungle. To survive, Morgan would have to blend the Frenchman’s ruthlessness with subtler strategies. It was not going to be easy. For, in fact, every pirate, down to the fresh-faced youths like Roderick, had some of L’Ollonais in him; it was a prerequisite for the job.

  7

  Portobelo

  Morgan, abandoned by the French in the South Cays, now showed why he would outshine L’Ollonais. He began by giving a speech. By all reports the thirty-three-year-old Morgan had the common touch and was able to motivate even the most hardened privateer; one of his peers wrote about his “generous and undesigning way of conversing.” Seeing the doubt in his compatriots’ eyes, he “infused such spirit into his men as were able to put every one of them instantly upon new designs,” Esquemeling writes, “they being all persuaded by his reasons that the sole execution of his orders would be a certain means of obtaining great riches.” Among the listeners was an anonymous pirate from Campeche who had rendezvoused with Morgan’s tiny remaining fleet and was obviously judging whether to throw in his lot with them or go off hunting with someone else. Morgan, who “always communicated vigour with his words,” won him over. Soon Morgan’s fleet was back up to strength, boasting nine ships. A further mark of Morgan’s renewed confidence is that he persuaded the pirates to sail without voting on a destination, a violation of the pirate code. Fresh off a defeat, he was reasserting control. Roderick and the other English privateers now formed the backbone of his army.

  The privateers sailed to the coast of Costa Rica in July of 1668, and Morgan revealed the target: Portobelo. Some of the pirates protested instantly. The Panamanian city (originally known as Porto Bello) was a major stronghold; it boasted two large castles, the mammoth Santiago and San Felipe de Todo Fierro (the Iron Fort), one on each side of the harbor mouth, bristling with forty-four guns that would fix any enemy ship in a withering fire. (It was also said that the Italian who had laid out the city chose the spot because it stood on a peculiar type of coral that could withstand cannon blasts.) Should a pirate ship miraculously make it past the two castles, farther up the river toward the town there were layers of military redundancy: sentry posts, blockhouses, lookout positions manned by armed soldiers. Near the quay another huge fort was being built by the unfortunates who had been captured at Providence, slaving away during the day and chained in a prison at night. There were only two cities with stronger defenses in the entire Spanish Main: Havana and Cartagena. Even the great Sir Francis Drake had died outside Portobelo harbor, unable to penetrate its defenses.

  Portobelo was a seasonal Fort Knox: It was the terminus for the tons of raw silver dug out of Potosí and made into pieces of eight at the king’s mints. For most of the year, it was a tropical hellhole: hot, breezeless, full of “noisome vapours,” a place where various diseases competed for supremacy and fresh victims, where the smell of the rotting, fetid mud that the low tide revealed would blast into a visitor’s nostrils, never to be forgotten. To be posted to Portobelo was the Spanish noble’s biggest dread; it boasted few of the amenities of bustling Cartagena or sophisticated Havana. It existed only for those four or five weeks when the Spanish treasure fleet appeared on the horizon and Portobelo went from backwater to boomtown in record time. Merchants from Peru, Colombia, and the far reaches of the Spanish Empire, including Madrid itself, would pour into the city, sending rents spiraling. The wealth of the king’s dominions, which had been brought up the coast of South America and loaded onto mules at Panama, flooded into the town. The population exploded from 2,000 permanent residents to perhaps 10,000. Traders brought their best slaves. Farmers brought chickens (whose price would increase twelvefold). Two thousand mules were kept at the ready for transporting the king’s treasure; long trains of the sturdy animals that had laced the hills above the town in the days before would suddenly appear in the streets, loaded with jewels and bullion from Peru and beyond. Thomas Gage, while a Dominican friar, had visited the town before a fair and counted two hundred mules entering the town square in one day and dumping their load of treasure there. “Silver wedges lay like heaps of stone in the street,” he marveled; but with the town crawling with Spanish soldiers, no one dared touch a bar. Instead of coins, wedges of silver were traded for the rich spun cloth, the fine muskets, and the hundreds of other goods that arrived from Spain on the treasure ships. The assembled treasure during the fleet’s visit could amount to 25 million pieces of eight, double the king of England’s annual revenue.

  Portobelo was the
result, in many ways, of one man and one day in the summer of 1544. A young Inca named Diego Huallpa had spent a long morning tracking an elusive deer on the mountain called Potosí in the kingdom of Peru (now Bolivia). The lining of this throat began to parch as he ascended beyond the thirteen-thousand-foot mark, high even for an Inca who spent his life in thin air. But fresh meat was precious, and Huallpa pressed on, determined to claim his prey. As he reached for a shrub to steady himself on the slopes, the plant tore away, and in its thick, dangling roots was entwined something that flashed in the sun, distracting Huallpa. He brushed away the clots of dirt; the metal gleamed under his thumb. Silver, unmistakably.

  The Spanish were soon knocking on his door, threatening Huallpa with the rack, one of their earliest imports to the Americas. He pointed them to the mountain. Even when their Indian workers began to dig out piles of silver from the spot where Huallpa led them to, the colonial administrators could not conceive of what they had found. In the next two centuries, Potosí would yield almost 2 billion ounces of high-grade silver ore, at a time when the metal was just as valuable as gold. The entire European economy, tamped down for decades because of a lack of precious metals to serve as currency, took on a new life when the first ships began arriving in Spain groaning under the weight of the mine’s silver bars. The famed city of El Dorado, the city of the Golden Man, drove the conquistadors mad with its tales of unfathomable riches, but it was a myth. Potosí was real. To this day when a Spaniard wishes to talk of any crazily wealthy thing, he simply says, “It’s a Potosí.”