Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Morgan’s haul was not a huge loss to the Crown’s coffers; when the treasure ships arrived, they brought millions in pieces of eight and gems, so to lose a few hundred thousand to a Welsh corsair was not a crippling blow. Besides, the local merchants and traders would be expected to make up their own losses. Only the capture of a galleon or the treasure waiting for a galleon at one of the New World ports would show an immediate result, such as the kingdom defaulting on its loans or canceling a major offensive in its European wars. But the Portobelo raid was important, because it showed the world that the empire was vulnerable. It would spawn a thousand imitators, it would embolden Spain’s enemies, and it would weaken the infrastructure that delivered the treasure.

  The king’s poverty was shocking, but more dangerous to the Crown were the plots whirling around the misshapen head of Carlos II. Morgan’s victory found Spain at peace with her enemies for the first time in memory, but at war with herself. As poor as it was in ready money, the Spanish Crown was still a thing of tremendous possibilities. And Carlos’s bastard brother Don Juan wanted it for himself. In 1668, as Morgan sacked Portobelo, the battle was coming to a head. France’s Louis XIV was receiving a steady stream of reports about Carlos’s weaknesses. “The doctors do not foretell a long life,” a French diplomat wrote to the king. “And this seems to be taken for granted in all calculations here.” Louis and the emperor of Austria had secretly agreed to carve up the kingdom and its empire between them as soon as Carlos should die. And Don Juan certainly had his half brother’s frailty in mind. He was the illegitimate son of Philip IV and La Calderona, an actress who had initially attracted Philip because of a piece of intriguing gossip: The Duque de Medina de las Torres told the king that lover after lover had failed to de-flower the young thespian because of a certain anatomical oddity (most likely a thick hymen). The king, who always wanted what he could not have, marched straight off to see her, only to meet the same fate as the other swains. After corrective surgery the two became lovers. Don Juan was born in 1629 and grew up to be one of his father’s favorites of the rumored thirty-two bastards he sired. Philip recognized him in a way he never did his other illegitimate children, and the special treatment gave Don Juan the idea that he was destined for the greatest things. This certainty led him to overestimate his power. The incident of the painting was just one example.

  Since a bastard could never be king, Don Juan decided that he must marry one of his half sisters, the legitimate daughter, Maria Theresa, and thus solve the problem of an heir. Even by the incestuous standards of the Hapsburgs, this was beyond the pale. But Don Juan was not to be put off by niceties. He even sent an inquiry to the august theologians at Belgium’s famous Catholic university, Louvain, to see if the pope could grant an exception to divine law and allow the marriage. Nothing came of the idea; in 1665, with the monarchy resting on the slender reed of Carlos II, Don Juan revived it, with his half sister Margarita now in the role of his bride. He had decided to broach the idea when his father invited him for a talk to decide whether the favorite son would be named inquisitor general or archbishop of Toledo, both powerful positions. Knowing he was dying, Philip had been looking for a place for his strong, quick-minded favorite; and he must have considered himself a generous parent to think of bestowing such prestigious titles on a bastard. Little did he know what Don Juan held in store for him.

  Don Juan had come up with a novel way of presenting the idea to his father: He’d give him a painting, a very special painting he’d done specifically for this occasion. In the curious portrait, Saturn, the Roman god of the harvest, watches his son Jupiter (the king of all the gods) and his daughter Juno (the protector of marriage) frolicking like lovers. In mythology Jupiter and Juno were married; even if Jupiter cheated scandalously on his sibling-wife. To make his point even clearer, Don Juan had given his own face to Jupiter, while Philip’s mournful visage sat atop Saturn’s body, and Juno became Margarita. Don Juan must have thought the work of art would give the idea of the scandalous union some precedent, along with a subtle message: You and I, Father, are like gods; we are above human laws. The painting does not survive, but it must have been grotesque. You have to sympathize with Philip as he was presented with the painting. He was a sick, exhausted man and probably expected some loving tribute from a dutiful son. Instead he was handed this piece of pornography, which would have brought back to him the (now much regretted) sexual voraciousness of his youth. After comprehension set in, Philip turned away in disgust. The awkward gesture had gone terribly wrong, and the king never agreed to see Don Juan again.

  One would have expected Don Juan’s ambition to be checked by his father’s reaction to the marriage idea, but he was beyond embarrassment. With Philip IV fresh in his mausoleum, he turned his sights on the new reigning power, Queen Regent Mariana; specifically, he targeted the queen’s confessor, Father Nithard, a Jesuit who was casually hated by the Spanish man in the street for being Austrian and so close to power. Don Juan tried gambit after gambit to draw the dour Jesuit close to him, first supporting the priest’s pet cause: the making of the Immaculate Conception into an article of faith. The belief in Mother Mary’s chastity had not been recognized as official dogma by the church (and would not be until 1854), and now Don Juan declared himself a wholesale advocate of its adoption. It was ironic that the amorous Don Juan would choose virginity as his secret devotion, but he revealed to Nithard that indeed it was. Nithard took him up as an ally. Don Juan also met secretly with the confessor to ask him to intervene on his behalf: His carnal urges were so strong that he could no longer observe the vow of chastity he’d sworn when he’d been appointed to religious offices. As usual with Don Juan, he had the perfect resolution: He’d resign all his offices, marry the niece of the elderly king of Poland, and take the throne for Spain when the monarch died. It was a pipe dream, as were so many of Don Juan’s schemes, but it was wrong to underestimate him: He was young, dark, virile, and unmistakably Spanish. The folk identified with him against the pale, foreign-born Mariana.

  Don Juan’s maneuvers—including a marriage to the Arch-duchess Claudia Felicidad when the Polish option turned sour—all came to nothing. Meanwhile Nithard’s star was rising even higher. When Mariana named him as inquisitor general, the Spanish were outraged. Sensing an opening, Don Juan played all his cards and arranged the Jesuit’s murder. Before it could be carried out, the plot was exposed, and Don Juan fled to Barcelona, where his supporters gathered around him into a rebel army intent on purging the foreign influence from the Spanish throne. Spain seemed ready to tear itself apart. It was not until the pope stepped in that negotiations began. Don Juan set one condition for his cooperation: the removal of Nithard. “If by Monday the fellow has not left by the Palace door for ever,” he said, “I shall go with my men on Tuesday and throw him out of the window.” Nithard left Spain for Rome; Mariana was weakened, and Don Juan went into exile. At the center of these swirling currents of hate and intrigue, Carlos II sat as a spectator. When told that Nithard was gone, he cried out, “What evil there is in the world!”

  Queen Mariana retained power, but she was ruling with a five-man junta, with members from the grandees (the highest level of Spanish aristocracy), the church, and the state bureaucracy, while a subservient body, the Council of State, directed foreign affairs (at Mariana’s direction). It was not a structure that lent itself to action. So it was with Portobelo. The junta de guerra of the Council of the Indies, a subset of a subset of the Council of State, met to discuss the raid on February 17, 1669. At first the junta declared all-out war on the Brethren: The galleons and the Armada de Barlovento, along with any available ships that could be mustered to the cause, would be sent out to retake Portobelo and smash the pirate ring. Not only that, the junta decreed that should the fleet find that Portobelo was in Spanish hands, they were then to turn and attack the source of all the trouble in the West Indies: Jamaica itself. As long as the island remained in English hands, the region would not be safe for the workings of
empire.

  The watering down began immediately: The galleons could not be spared, as the Crown was too dependent on Potosí silver to divert the ships to other missions. The supply could not be interrupted even to protect the supply. A commitment was made to strengthen the New World’s defenses, but the governors of the Main had heard that before. Like any addict, Spain thought only of short-term fixes. “We certainly do not wish to impede [the treasure ships]…,” the council decided. “If we did, the Royal Treasury would be starved of its returns in silver and the Kingdom would be starved of its commerce that the silver fertilizes.” And so the boats would keep hauling treasure and not hunting pirates.

  The reaction to Portobelo exposed a hypocrisy: Spain’s rulers told themselves they’d conquered the New World for God. But when it came time to truly defend it, it was the treasure that they wanted from the territories. The souls of the settlers, the land itself—they had to be sacrificed so that the kingdom could survive another day. The soldiers and administrators in the New World had learned a harsh lesson: Their safety was to be forfeited for the larger good. It was as cogs on the conveyor belt that delivered the king’s treasure that they mattered.

  Spain protested the capture of Portobelo vehemently. Months after the raid, an English diplomat was still getting an earful, “many storms and loud outcries…not only from ye Minister but from ye common people, upon the assaults on the maineland and depredations at sea committed on them by our privateers.” But the English were in no mood to apologize. It was Spain who had devised the policy of “no peace beyond the line,” and if the Spaniards wanted to live by the sword, they could die by it, too. The English responded to the protests by reciting instances of Spanish violences against their own: this ship captured, this captain detained or tortured, this town burned to the ground. They also brought up the plans for the invasion of Jamaica that Morgan had uncovered. “It is almost certain that the Spanish had full intention to attempt this island but could not get men,” Modyford, Morgan’s protector and ally, told his superior back in London. “And they still hold the same minds.” When the Crown’s share of the Portobelo loot was brought to London, the Spanish ambassador immediately filed a claim in the High Court of Admiralty for its return to Madrid and was just as quickly denied. Behind this tough stance was the king’s desire to negotiate a new treaty that would allow the English a free hand to trade with the Spanish colonies. For that he’d sell out Morgan and the privateers in a moment. But until he got it, Spain needed the English more than they needed Spain.

  The queen regent did have one original idea: to steal a page from England’s book. Mariana decided that Spain would authorize its own privateers to fight Morgan and his ilk. It was a natural solution, but a rather embarrassing one for a nation that had not thought in terms of empowering individuals to do its work since the days of the conquistadors. Nevertheless, the queen had no other good options and sent notice to her governors that the vassals of her son the king were to move against the English “with every sort of hostility” and expel the enemy from the territories they’d captured. From now on, Morgan would have to deal not only with the Armada de Barlovento and the garrisons of the Main’s towns but with any Spanish adventurers who cared to challenge him. One in particular would take the queen’s letter to heart.

  8

  Rich and Wicked

  The town that greeted Morgan on his return from Portobelo had changed as well, or simply intensified its character. Far from being the Protestant beacon that Oliver Cromwell had envisioned, Port Royal was now known as the undisputed Western capital of sin. Priests sent to the country reported back on “the Torrent of Wickedness and Vice rushing through” its streets. The thousands of pounds’ worth of illicit goods the privateers brought with them would only accelerate the process: Port Royal was now the biggest, wickedest, richest, and most populous city in English America.

  From the water it looked very much like any other English port, with only an occasional architectural note reminding that one was in Jamaica and not Yarmouth. Brick buildings with gambrel roofs lined the shore, dwarfed by the huge storehouses, three and four stories high; in a region where dwellings were relatively small, these buildings were mountainous. They were nests of activity on a typical day, with slaves or indentured servants straining against ropes, hoisting into the air fat hogsheads of rum, great chests filled with iron goods or the newest fashions from London. Other workers leaned out of the large windows cut into the storehouse walls, snagged the rope, and began pulling the cargo inside. The windows consumed and disgorged everything the empire produced: sugar, tortoiseshell, cowhides, pimento, ginger and cinnamon. The West Indies supplied luxuries to the expanding European market, including dyes that satisfied the booming demand for color. There was fustic for yellow and brazilwood and heart of logwood for red, the latter felled by the cutters in the Bay of Honduras, men who lived hard lives in the swamps and on riversides, where poisonous worms spiraled into the bottoms of their feet. There was indigo for blue, a dye mentioned as far back as Herodotus; the demand was so strong that the boats from India could not keep up, and farmers cultivated the native West Indian plants, which the Indians used to dye their hair. The city was so rich because it was both a trading post for a burgeoning empire and a large fencing operation for one of the most successful networks of thieves in history. The fledgling sugar plantations also added revenue, but their heyday was in the future.

  Port Royal was a rollicking town, where rum drinking was so common that it seemed to flow through the town via a municipal pipe system into the mouths of the thirsty. Morals were not highly prized: Centuries later the merchants’ scales used to weigh the privateers’ gold and emeralds were found to be illegally weighted (in the merchants’ favor, of course). Compare this to the scene that greeted another set of Morgans who arrived in the New World two decades before Henry. In 1636 the twenty-year-old Miles Morgan, direct ancestor of the financier J. P. Morgan, arrived in colonial Boston, sixteen years after the Mayflower landed. Along with his two brothers, Miles wanted to make a new life for himself in America, but the scene that greeted the Welsh immigrant must have given him a cold chill: The corpses of adulterers twisted slowly in the New England breeze, hung on crudely built scaffolds; those accused of blasphemy were paraded through the streets to the whipping post, where their backs were reddened in the name of the Lord; settlers had the letter D (for drunkard) sewn on their jackets, while if Miles looked close he could see signs of mutilation—cropped or missing ears, for example—meted out to those who challenged or spoke out against John Winthrop, the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Boston was a gray place, grim and deadly serious, where the pillory was used to cleanse the conscience of new Americans. It was in many ways still caught up in the religious struggles of the Old World.

  In the colonies, among religious men and civic leaders, Port Royal was often a byword for evil. One Bostonian told an employee whom he was sending to Jamaica as his business agent to “keep your New England principles,…hear God’s Word publicly preached every Lord’s Day [and] be a Law to your self.” But among the common people and those interested in a sweet deal on goods that had, so to speak, fallen off the back of a ship, the pirates were folk heroes. The pirates of the Caribbean brought much-needed trade goods pillaged from Spanish ships and sold them all over the colonies. Morgan had little or nothing to do with the North American territories, but other pirates sailed there regularly to trade and find refuge from authorities that had placed a price on their heads. One buccaneer, nicknamed “Breha,” was so popular in Boston that when a dutiful citizen told the governor that the man and his posse were in town, his enraged neighbors nearly lynched the rat.

  But Boston still considered itself a city on a hill. Port Royal had no such illusions about itself. The town that Cromwell and Gage had dreamed of had never materialized. Instead it had become the first Wild West town, fabulously on the make.

  For the brahmins there were balls for the king’s birthday, masquera
des, “strolling puppet players” on a swing through the island; there was family life as well, because many of the richest men brought out their families, dressed as if they were strolling along the Thames on Sundays. Below them swirled the life of the pirates and their ilk; few of them had families or long-term plans. There weren’t many activities that did not revolve around drinking. At the Bear Garden, bearbaiting and bullfighting were popular; cockfights drew a crowd, as did gambling and shooting games (though the games got more dangerous as the night progressed). Drinking was the national pastime. “The Spaniards wondered much at the sickness of our people,” wrote Modyford, “until they knew the strength of their drinks, but then wondered more that they were not all dead.” The local rum was fermented from crushed sugarcane and was famously potent; its nickname, “Kill Devil,” accurately described a liquor that could knock riders from their horses. For ordinary pirates like Roderick, the ties to England had been loosened, and the memories of their working-class lives back in London grew dimmer by the week. Religion couldn’t hold them; neither could law. One young Spaniard, José Crespo, who had been captured by English pirates and jailed in Port Royal, was interviewed by the Spanish after his escape. He estimated that only 1,000 of Port Royal’s residents were professional soldiers and sailors, with the 4,000 to 5,000 other citizens being “seamen of little prestige, most of them scoundrels.” When asked if the men had religion, Crespo replied that he saw them go off to church on Thursday and Friday, but at noon they’d return home to get drunk “without any regard or respect for married women.”