Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Besides rum there was one other thing that lured the pirate on a spree: the female sex. In Port Royal, for the most part, that meant whores. And there was no more famous whore, and none more representative of the type of grandiose scoundrel that called the city home, than Mary Carleton. To understand the kind of person that ended up in Port Royal and made it such a sink of vice in the eyes of the world, one must know Mary.

  She’d been born the daughter of a fiddler and raised in the rural English district of Canterbury, and she arrived in London in 1663 on a river barge. She’d no intention of remaining a lowborn nobody, however; like Morgan, like Roderick and many of the buccaneers, she wanted more out of life than the common round and didn’t care if mere legality stood in her way. Her route was impersonation: As she entered the first drinking house that would admit her, the Exchange Tavern, Mary suddenly became Maria von Wolway, a German princess down on her luck. The story she made up seemingly moment to moment was a heartbreaking one: With “teares standing in her eyes,” Mary revealed that she was a noble orphan who had been forced into an engagement with an old count against her will. She’d come to London, in disguise as an ordinary woman, leaving estates and mounds of jewels behind in Germany. She quickly married a local who thought he was getting a catch. When her scam was uncovered, her husband called her an “Out-landish Canterbury Monster,” and she was prosecuted for bigamy (it turned out she’d married before). Her trial at the Old Bailey became a Restoration drama of the first order. Spectators fought to get seats; reporters hung on her every word; the gentry argued pro or con at dinner parties. Samuel Pepys was decidedly pro-Mary; he even visited her in prison.

  Carleton’s real sin was rising above her station. Like the privateers she’d soon consort with, she was unsatisfied with the fate she’d been allotted and she did whatever she had to do to change it. Moralists were outraged that she’d pretended to be royalty, but Mary shot back that if she was not noble by birthright, she was a fast learner. During the trial she detailed her “intent care and elegancy of learning, to which I have by great labour and industry attained.”

  Mary was acquitted of her crimes and became a public personality, in the style of the times. She published her own pamphlets, in which she stuck to her story. She went onstage, of course, in a play written for her called The German Princess (Pepys panned it). But when she was caught in yet another marriage, Mary was shipped off to Port Royal, which was the last stop for many English criminals sentenced to exile. There she dropped the act and went into prostitution. Mary would not arrive until 1671, in the wake of Morgan’s greatest triumph, but she embodied the wide-open days of the pirates there. She joined other professionals whose names basically gave their stories: Buttock-de-Clink Jenny, Salt-Beef Peg, and No-Conscience Nan.

  To keep her image fresh in her public’s mind, Mary sent back a letter from Port Royal. “I could not in reason expect much civility from the Commander of Seamen of the Ship,” she told her old mates. “Yet contrary to all expectation I was treated like my self, I mean a Princess.” On her arrival at the city, crowds swarmed around her, “especially the looser sort of persons,” and competed to see who could pay her the bigger compliment. She was amazed to see the town packed with London underworld figures, “so many of my acquaintance,” but quickly realized that this was the end of the line for her type. Mary joined other waterfront denizens in the business of swindling buccaneers, and she found plenty of business among Morgan’s men. As she arrived, the pirates blew into town and went on a binge: “Such hath their success been in some late dangerous exploits,” she reported, “that it hath blown their excesses to that height of expence, that they have almost delug’d this place in liquor.” She called the pirates “Bully-Ruffins” and said the only danger she faced was either drowning in rum or being killed with the buccaneers’ kindness.

  It was a fantasy, of course. Mary would have worked hard for her pieces of eight in the taverns that lined the harbor street. She painted the pirates, tongue in cheek, as gentlemen rogues; but pirates stinking drunk on Kill Devil would not have been gentle customers. An old song that Mary most likely heard in her rounds was not far off in its description of the average pirate:

  Him cheat him friend of him last guinea,

  Him kill both friar and priest—O dear!

  Him cut de t’roat of piccaninny

  Bloody, bloody buccaneer!

  Still, as the most famous whore in the West Indies, Mary would have commanded a high price, and she probably ended up with more of the pirates’ money than they did. More likely than not, she met Morgan; certainly she met his men. “A stout frigate she was,” wrote one of her chroniclers, “or else she never could have endured so many batteries and assaults. A woman of unexampled modesty, if she may be her own herald. But she was as common as a barber’s chair: no sooner was one out, but another was in. Cunning crafty, subtle, and hot in the pursuit of her intended designs.” She didn’t lack for customers.

  Mary was Port Royal personified. In the dusty towns of the Spanish New World, a person could hope to rise only one station in life, at most. The system discouraged risk taking and enterprise. Mary, on the other hand, had vaulted from the very bottom of English society straight to celebrity by imagination and hard work. Her life simply would not have been possible in the Spanish system.

  It was appropriate that Mary ended up in Henry Morgan’s home. It was a frontier town full of the empire’s discards given one last chance at realizing their fortune. “There have been few cities in the world,” wrote one historian of the place, “where the thirst of wealth and pleasure had united more opulence and more corruption.” In its shops every form of currency that flowed through the Spanish Empire could be found: pieces of eight, crude cobs, piastres, golden moidores, cross money, newly minted doubloons. In fact, the haul from Portobelo was so enormous that the piece of eight was declared legal tender in Jamaica. But if you traveled inland, another Jamaica presented itself that could make the port town seem almost giddily innocent. The tightly packed streets of Port Royal gave way to the sprawling plantations. Sugar would be to England what silver was to Spain: the reason for sustaining the New World empire. Various cash crops had been tried in the islands, but West Indian tobacco could never compete with the rich Virginia variety. Sugar was a difficult crop and required backbreaking work from an army of indentured servants and slaves to produce. The land had to be cleared, hoed, weeded, dewormed, degrubbed, planted, tended with care. Small planters desperate not to sink back down into servitude drove their servants pitilessly, beating them with cudgels or whacking them with sticks when they did not keep up, until the white men’s backs blistered and ran with pus. The men slept in tiny shacks “rather like stoves than houses.” They needed permits to travel around the island to meet a friend or a sweetheart, and for every two hours they were off the plantation, they had to donate an extra month of servitude. When they rebelled against the treatment, even minor offenders received harsh sentences from planters whose dreams and gossip were filled with scenes of uprising: When one John Wiborne published a book that spoke out against a member of the Barbadian elite, he was sentenced to have his ears nailed to the pillory; after they took him down from this minor crucifixion, he was whipped and branded. Disease killed between a third and a half of the bondsmen before they finished their term, and if they died, their bodies were tossed into unmarked holes. When these men finally earned their freedom, they found that there was little demand for unskilled laborers like themselves; often they had to sell themselves back into servitude just to eat.

  The plantations became factories for rebels and pirates; servants who were sick to death of the hellish life sneaked away to the ships waiting in Port Royal’s harbor. The pirates offered the only other outlet for men who were tired of being beaten. Port Royal was the way station: Indentured servants and slaves were trundled off the boats arriving in the harbor by day. By night, runaways from the interior would appear in the town, looking to join a pirate crew. The planters
constantly complained that the privateers were a menace and drained off badly needed manpower from their fields. But the planters had no army. Little did the pirates know that their long-term enemies were not the Spanish but these planters and merchants who slapped their backs and bought their illicit goods at cut rates. As the plantations grew more and more profitable, as the global model of trade built on the currency minted from Potosí silver solidified and grew, the white gold produced by black slaves and poor “buckras,” or white men, became more valuable than the latest haul of pirate booty.

  The Brethren believed they were helping to kill off an oppressive system—the Spanish Empire—as they enriched themselves. But they were also helping to bring into being a different system that would become their worst enemy.

  The privateers were the sole protection for Jamaica; the English Crown could not afford to send warships to Jamaica—or to any of their colonies, for that matter—and so the privateers became the navy, the intelligence service, and the infantry. Ever fearful of attack from the Spanish or French, the merchants and planters relied on Henry Morgan and his men for protection. The pirates “were very welcome guests at Jamaica,” one Jamaica historian recounts; “the planters and men in power caressed Morgan, while the inferior sort contrived every sort of bait to drain his associates of their money.”

  And the pirates were willing; they sprayed pesos around the harbor as if the money were water. Portobelo stood out in Morgan’s résumé for one reason: loot. And the privateers did their best to distribute it in the vice industries of their hometown. This is perhaps the greatest mystery the pirates have left us: why they spent their money the way they did. Men like our representative pirate, Roderick, endured incredible hardship to get their rewards: They were felled by malaria, beheaded by Indians, separated from loved ones, excommunicated from the church, hanged from gallows; they ate rats, dogs, grass, leather sheaths, or nothing at all; they had poisoned arrows shot at them, flaming pots of oil dumped on their heads, pikes thrust through their entrails, and were faced with “instruments made especially for cutting off the legs” of those attacking Spanish forts; they were stung by scorpions, bitten by poisonous snakes, or drowned (one out of seven ships that sailed out of harbors in the age of sail were never seen again); they hacked their way through godforsaken jungles and marched or paddled their way through crocodile-infested swamps and across half of the Spanish Main. Despite the happy-go-lucky image, pirates were hunted like vermin, and the memories of that fear often stayed with them for years. One pirate reported symptoms among his comrades similar to shell shock after they arrived home in France. “Some of our men whose spirits were so misguided,” he wrote, “and whose minds had given way from the suffering they’d experienced to such an extent that they were always imagining Spaniards were coming, upon sighting from the deck of the boat some men on horseback riding along the seashore got out their arms ready to fire thinking they were enemies.” They did all this in the hopes of getting a small fortune, and, once they did, an astonishing number of them immediately gambled and whored the money away within a matter of days. “Men who had been the owners of millions,” wrote one observer, “were in a brief space totally ruined, and finding themselves destitute even of raiment and provisions, returned again to sea.”

  Poor men live by a different logic than those who have never starved; being rich means spending money on all those things one has been denied, not soberly stashing the money away for future needs. Woodes Rogers, another privateer turned pirate hunter, offered some corsairs plots of land if they’d give up the profession and build a home on it. He was hoping to make them into prosperous farmers, but many refused the offer or built only miserable shacks and planted just enough to get by. “For work they mortally hate it,” wrote Rogers. “They thus live, poorly and indolently, seeming content, and pray for wrecks or pirates.” But the pirates went beyond any Lotto winner or Bolivian miner who hits a rich vein: L’Ollonais’s men were reported to have blown through 260,000 pieces of eight, or $13.5 million in today’s dollars, in three short weeks after one of their expeditions, “having spent it all in things of little value, or at play either cards or dice.” One buccaneer was said to have showered a whore with 500 pieces of eight, or about $25,000, just to watch her strip; others, according to a historian of Jamaica, went through 2,000 or 3,000 pieces of eight in a single night. The men practically threw the money away with contempt. And when they weren’t spending, they were giving the stuff away. “Among themselves, and to each other, these Pirates are extremely liberal and free,” Esquemeling wrote, in an observation that was backed by other chroniclers of the pirate life. “If any one of them has lost all his goods, which often happens in their manner of life, they freely give him, and have him partake of what they have.”

  Why, when they’d earned it at so high a cost? In fact, there were only a few options for the common pirate who came into money. With his hefty shares, Henry Morgan could (and did) buy large estates and stock them with slaves; other captains or even thrifty buccaneers sailed back to England and bought property. But on his share a common pirate would have to buy a smaller plot in Jamaica, purchase some cheap indentured servants, watch them closely, whip them when needed, and husband his money. In other words, become a kind of tight-fisted farmer with regular hours and work seven days a week. He might set up shop in town, but these were uneducated men used to a life of drinking and freedom. How could they go and buy a grocer’s stall and nickel-and-dime their way to a living? It went against the whole joy of being a pirate. After years in the life, pirates had become accustomed to long periods of drunken tedium interrupted by binges of extreme violence and spending. If they had been meant to be shopkeepers or yeoman farmers, they would never have ended up on Henry Morgan’s ship in the first place.

  Now walking with a pronounced limp from the wound suffered at Portobelo, the twenty-seven-year-old Roderick dreamed of gushers of wine, of staining his newly grown beard with groaning platters of meat running with savory juices, of specific prostitutes and specific acts he wished to commit with them. The silver begged to be spent. Money attached him to the land; there was the danger he could buy a piece of property or do something equally respectable and leave the pirate life forever if he didn’t get rid of it now. And there was no better town in the world to be sailing into on a pile of gold than hot Port Royal; Roderick had in his short time in the Brethren lost sight of anything besides the next score, the next woman, the next adventure. He dealt only in immediate gratifications; it was almost as if the pirate code had short-circuited his ability to think of a regular life outside it.

  Treasure had transformed the Spanish Empire and heightened its flaws. It did the same thing to the pirates: From being ragamuffins scraping out a living on the edge of civilization, they had become the avatars of the New World. No one was freer than they were, but the easy money meant they never had to think beyond the next stake. However, forces were gathering that would end their reign, and there was a turncoat in their midst who would help bring their flashy ride to an end.

  In the meantime Port Royal was their playground, and it was earning a reputation as the baddest place in the Americas. “This town is the Sodom of the New World,” wrote one clergyman, “and since the majority of its population consists of pirates, cutthroats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world, I felt my permanence there was of no use and I could better preach the Word of God elsewhere among a better sort of folk.” He was as good as his word, leaving Jamaica on the same ship that had brought him. Every few years it seemed a preacher would come through town and, horrified at what he saw, would predict that God would destroy the city.

  It was the biblical Sodom and its sister city Gomorrah to which the Jamaican port was compared. The two ancient towns had sat on a beautiful plain near the Jordan River. Although they became the byword for vice, Sodom and Gomorrah were accused of specific crimes: “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned,” the accusation goes in
Ezekiel 16:49. “They did not help the poor and needy.” To these charges were added sexual offenses (which means either homosexuality or rape, depending on which scholars you believe) and inhospitality. As with Port Royal, the towns had a bad reputation that even reached the ears of God. “The outcry…is so great and their sin so grievous,” the Lord tells Abraham, that he was forced to investigate the rumors. Once he’d seen the sinful ways of the towns’ rich inhabitants, he rained down burning sulfur on them and wiped Sodom and Gomorrah utterly off the face of the earth. The devastation was so complete that when the Allies decided to launch the most destructive aerial bombing campaign in history to that point, against the city of Hamburg in 1943, they named the raid Operation Gomorrah.

  Every society must have its Sodom, the place that absorbs the evil expelled from more righteous communities. In the Bible it was Sodom. In the modern world, New York, Las Vegas, and other metropolises have played the role. In the late 1600s, in the New World, it was Port Royal.

  The city’s days were, it was believed, numbered in the hundreds, and at times it seemed as if the moment of judgment were at hand. The English had been on the island for a decade and a half, and by now they noticed that the notoriously tremor-ridden sands of Port Royal were restless, especially during spells of hot weather. The earth would tremble under their feet when the heat came, and the longer the spells lasted, the more severe the tremor.