The earth was largely a mystery to the seventeenth-century mind. But the leading theory centered on caves: Many “natural philosophers” (there was no such thing as a “scientist” in the late 1600s) believed that the earth was honeycombed with caves and caverns, in which tremendous gales swept back and forth, looking for a place to escape from the brimstone-filled underworld. In 1692 the astrologer Edmund Halley would expand the cavern idea to a much more intriguing theory, proposing that the planet consisted of four separate spheres: Inside the outer crust were three smaller planets, the size of Mars, Venus, and Mercury, respectively, each placed inside the other like Russian matryoshka dolls and each spinning at its own rate on its own eccentric axis.
The theory of tectonic plates was, of course, centuries away. That model would not have calmed Port Royalists, for in fact the city lay in a major tectonic region laced with faults and active volcanoes. The Caribbean Plate that Jamaica sits on dates back tens of millions of years, to when molten rock from the earth’s mantle surged up into the waters of a nameless sea. For millennia it has been grinding, slipping, and bucking against three other plates, the North American, the South American, and the Cocos. The border with the North American Plate lies just off the northern coast of Jamaica; that huge mass is pushing west, while the Caribbean moves east. The resulting fault is a treacherous “strike-slip” zone, prone to low tremors and shattering earthquakes.
All that the Jamaican citizen knew was that something odd was happening beneath his city.
9
An Amateur English Theatrical
After a few weeks in port, most of the pirates had exhausted their credit in the taverns and with the street-walkers. Roderick, now sporting a beard, a new gold earring, and a scar of unknown origin across his cheek, was nearly broke. He’d been forced to sell his pistols to pay off his debts and had slept rough on the beach for a few nights. He and other buccaneers came to Morgan, practically demanding another mission. There was a certain logic to the careers of pirate captains: Their expeditions tended to become progressively more ambitious after each success. Like any businessman, a privateer needed richer and richer targets to sustain the momentum of his own growing reputation. And there was something in the pirate code that disdained conservative business plans. Morgan now had in mind an even more dangerous target: Cartagena. It was the biggest port in Spain’s vast empire; here was collected the treasure from all of Peru. If in modern-day terms Portobelo was Fort Knox, Cartagena was New York, the center of trade and culture. But it was also a fortress. After Drake and his English and French peers had ransacked the city in the late 1500s, the Spanish Crown had begun a massive building program that studded the lagoons that led to the city with castles and forts, which were now manned by 400 soldiers and fifty cannon. The story was told that one of the kings of Spain looked out his westward-facing window one day and remarked that he expected to see the battlements of Cartagena visible across the ocean, as he’d spent so many fortunes building them.
It was an audacious target for Morgan. If he took Cartagena, Morgan would prove he was the strongest force in the New World, bar none. And become filthy rich in the process.
Like L’Ollonais in the wake of his great raids, Morgan and his captains had little trouble raising men. “There flocked to them great numbers of other pirates,” writes Esquemeling, “both French and English, by reason of the name of Captain Morgan was now rendered famous in all the neighbouring countries, for the great enterprizes he had performed.” Roderick was now considered a veteran privateer, and he signed up for the next expedition without a second thought. He admired Morgan, the way he’d walk into one of the taverns and buy a round of drinks for everyone in the place and then match any of them rumbullion for rumbullion. He didn’t put on airs. He was one of them, but he wasn’t, too—he could speak eloquently, as if from a book, and he snapped out commands with the assurance they’d be obeyed immediately. Roderick had never been invited to the admiral’s estate, but he’d listened to him tell stories of the English Civil War at a tavern and had caught the great man’s eye and nodded. It was a moment he relived again and again. Despite his poor background, Roderick had pressed into him an unthinking respect for the gentry, and Morgan had a touch of the gentleman about him. Roderick, despite his newfound self-regard, respected it. That is, so long as Morgan produced.
As the admiral gathered in his fleet at Cow Island, off Hispaniola, the English government showed its appreciation in the form of the Oxford, a twelve-year-old, seventy-two-foot frigate armed with twenty-six guns and 125 men that had been sent over “for the defence of his Majesty’s plantation of Jamaica, and suppressing the insolence of privateers upon that coast.” It was the Crown’s first material gesture of support for the Brethren. Morgan was enchanted with the vessel; it immediately became the most powerful pirate ship in the Caribbean, and he made it his flagship. The Oxford was exactly the kind of floating arsenal needed to give him a fighting chance at Cartagena.
There was some dissension between the English and French pirates in the fleet, which the appearance of the Oxford only heightened. As soon as the frigate arrived at Cow Island, its captain arrested the crew of the French ship Le Cerf Volant, who had been accused of robbery and piracy by a Virginian captain. (The fine line between privateering with a commission and piracy without one was murky—the famous privateer William Dampier found that some French “commissions” carried by so-called privateers were actually hunting licenses.) The French were hauled back to Port Royal, where the captain was sentenced to death and the boat renamed Satisfaction, at which point both it and the Oxford returned to Cow Island, ready for duty. The French captain’s harsh sentence was later commuted, but the incident rankled in the Gallic camp.
With the fleet now at twelve ships and 900 men, Morgan was ready to begin. On the first day of 1669, he sent a message to the other ships’ captains that the next day they’d hold their war council aboard the Oxford. The morning came, and the captains boarded the spacious vessel and began their deliberations. Names flew back and forth, but the bulk of the ship that lay under their feet practically demanded they try Cartagena, and finally Morgan’s wish was approved. Now the punch bowl was replenished and the party began in earnest, one whose atmosphere was heightened by the glow of certain riches that lay just over the horizon. “They began on board the great ship to feast one another for joy of their new voyage and happy council,” Esquemeling writes, describing a scene echoed in other privateer narratives. “They drank many healths and discharged many guns, as the common sign of mirth among seamen used to be.” They fired guns under the table, another buccaneer tradition. They toasted 1669; they toasted Cartagena; they toasted the king; they toasted the whores back in Port Royal. They drank themselves insensible.
As the mellow Caribbean dusk descended, candles were brought out. The ship echoed with laughter and shouts in different languages; since pirates were fond of music, it’s likely the sound of a fiddle or a guitar went floating over the water toward the dark woods of Hispaniola. On deck the spidery white rigging would suddenly be illuminated with a flash of a pistol shot as the pirates fired away at the stars. The smell of burnt powder drifted down into the ship’s cabin, where the gregarious Morgan was playing host and telling his guests to sit down to a lavish (by pirate standards) dinner. It was going to be a long night, and they needed to fortify themselves, as this would be their last unhurried meal before the rigors of the approach to Cartagena. The flashes of pistol shots continued; the singing never stopped. And then a huge white flash followed by a shocking concussion blinded the captains, and they were lifted into the air and then down into the sea, with splinters of the Oxford showering upon their heads. The living surfaced and floated on the black water for a moment, pieces of burning sail drifting down, their eardrums shattered or ringing with the echo of the massive boom. Limbs of the men they had been sitting next to a moment ago bobbed on the waves.
The ship’s magazines had exploded, touched off by an errant spark,
“the negligence of the gunner” or (some said) the French, still nursing their grievance. The latter seems unlikely, as the saboteurs would have gone up with the ship. But the magnificent Oxford was gone, along with 200 of its men. Only ten buccaneers had survived the blast. Miraculously, Morgan and the other captains who had been sitting on his side of the cabin table had all come away shaken but alive. One by one they were picked out of the water by the other ships in the fleet. (Roderick had been lying drunk on the deck of a smaller ship and had shot bolt upright when the Oxford went off, then rushed to join in the rescue.) The pirates spent little time mourning. When Morgan dispatched boats to search for the bodies of the dead, it was “not out of any design of affording them Christian burial, but only to obtain the spoil of their clothes and other attire.” If the dead were wearing gold rings, their bloated fingers were snipped off with a cutlass and the jewelry collected, while the bodies were left “exposed to the voracity of the monsters of the sea.”
The Spanish rejoiced at the news of the Oxford’s demise, especially the citizens of Cartagena. They credited their patron saint, Nuestra Señora de Popa, with the deliverance; she dwelled in the convent that looked over the city from a high hill that can be seen well out to sea. For decades to come, any Cartagena schoolboy could tell you that the morning after the explosion the saint was seen returning over the water from the direction of Hispaniola, her clothes wet and torn, her face lined with exhaustion from the work she’d done against the diabolical Morgan.
The disaster forced a change in the privateers’ plans; Cartagena was no longer a realistic target without the Oxford and the extra men. Morgan sent out a call for more ships and buccaneers and set up a rendezvous for a month in the future. Meanwhile he sought out supplies, even landing on Santo Domingo in Hispaniola to hunt for some of its famous cows. The Spanish, who knew that Morgan was resupplying on the island, set a trap for fifty of his men by assembling a great herd to draw the privateers in as the Spanish watched from a hiding place. At a signal, the soldiers attacked. “They set upon them with all fury imaginable,” Esquemeling tells us. “Crying, Mata, mata! that is, Kill, kill.” The privateers ran for their lives.
The Oxford accident hadn’t damaged the admiral’s reputation; in fact, his miraculous escape probably burnished his name as an invincible leader among the buccaneers. “While Morgan was safe,” the historian Leslie writes, “they thought success sure.” Morgan was less sanguine; a “huge impatience” was gnawing at him. Too many things could go wrong on a pirate expedition, as the Oxford disaster proved, as the lesson of L’Ollonais reinforced. After resupplying the ships, he set out for the rendezvous, Saona Island. When Morgan arrived weeks later, the news was not good. Saona lay at the southeast end of Hispaniola toward Puerto Rico, directly north across the North Sea (now known as the Caribbean Sea) of the Gulf of Venezuela, meaning that the privateers, once assembled, could swoop straight down into the heart of the Spanish Main. But it was also windward of Port Royal and the other major pirate haunts, which meant that the ships had to tack and beat against the trade winds to get there. It was a rugged haul, especially in the small, open ships that offered little protection from the whipping spray; three of the ships gave up, claiming that their vessels could not handle the pounding. “Sails chafed and stitching rotted in the alternate bright sun and heavy rain,” writes Morgan biographer Dudley Pope, “hull planking spewed caulking, rigging stretched, chafed and parted, men became worn out, unable to remember a time when they were not crashing to windward, their ships rolling violently and pitching as though every wave was a cliff edge over which they were falling.” The Spanish seemed to be stalking Morgan: Another mission to Hispaniola for supplies returned empty-handed after encountering a strong contingent of soldiers, “now so vigilant and in such good posture of defence” that it was not worth the risk of battle. Morgan’s very success was making him a target.
The Welshman finally decided he’d have to set out with the assets at hand: 500 men in eight ships. Morgan had been thinking of ransacking Venezuela’s eastern shores, “having hitherto resolved to cruize upon the coasts of Caracas, and plunder all the towns and villages he could meet,” but the ships had taken a beating already, and there was little appetite for a long slog to windward. He began talking with a French captain who had served with L’Ollonais in his glory days, when the Gallic terror had pillaged the city of Maracaibo for 260,000 pesos. This man knew the approach to the city, its “entries, passages, forces and means,” and he convinced Morgan that the fleet was perfect for the mission. And besides, it had been two years since L’Ollonais’s raid.
The cities of the Spanish New World were amazingly resilient. The elite tended to diversify their holdings: They might have interests in agriculture, in hides or textiles, in silver recovery, in real estate and other concerns. The buccaneers could devastate one aspect of their wealth, but they rarely stayed around long enough to damage everything. And the cheap labor and innate riches of the treasure territories meant that there was always another mule train of silver on the way. In the meantime governors would write Madrid reporting the raid and asking for engineers to be sent out and new forts and castles to be built, but there was a limit to what could be done. Cities often had to be located where they were to accommodate the treasure fleets or other business of the empire, and if they were moved, the buccaneers would find the new locations anyway (as was the case with a future Morgan target, Panama). Combining far-flung towns didn’t fit the needs of the king, and that was paramount—one needed his permission to relocate. Buccaneers knew that the coffers of their favorite towns replenished quickly, and they tended to let cities lie fallow until jewelry boxes and hidden reserves could be filled again. The French had pillaged Maracaibo a full two years earlier. It was ready.
The fleet set off, dropping due south with the trade winds to port. They sighted the island of Ruba (now Aruba) and stopped for supplies: wood from the island’s forests and sheep and goats from the local Indians. Two days later the ships set off for the Gulf of Venezuela; they were on war footing now and sailed only at night. By morning they’d entered the vast gulf, a large bay on top connected to the inland lake named Laguna de Maracaibo by a narrow channel, the whole formation from above looking like a figure eight, with the gulf on top and the lake below. The gulf is a notorious ship eater; its shallow waters hide sandbars, and its featureless coast makes navigation difficult, especially for the inexperienced. Luckily, the French captain knew the waters well and guided the fleet to an anchorage just off the three islands lying across the twelve-foot-deep channel that led to the bay. There they spent the night. The next morning the navigators would have to slalom between two of the islands, San Carlos and Zapara, without wrecking. It would be a pretty piece of sailing.
But by first light Morgan knew he had bigger problems. After L’Ollonais’s raid the Spanish had built a new fort on the eastern shores of San Carlos, and as the sun rose, Morgan realized he’d have to pass under the fortress’s eleven guns before he could reach the bay. Now the loss of the Oxford made itself felt; Morgan’s flagship was the fourteen-gun frigate Lilly. He could have used the extra dozen cannon of his former vessel, but there was nothing else except to run the channel and take their chances. The Spanish had chosen the castle’s location brilliantly, but as usual they’d failed to provide enough money to staff it. Inside, there were just nine men, no doubt astonished by the sudden appearance of the long-dreaded privateers in their peaceful cay. But they knew their duty and began furiously loading and firing the eleven guns as Morgan sailed up to the beach and offloaded his men in the teeth of the barrage, while his gunners provided covering fire. “The dispute continued very hot on both sides,” says Esquemeling, whose account is seconded by Spanish reports of a vigorous resistance, “being managed with huge courage and valour from morning till dark night.” The pirates hit the beach with Spanish ball kicking up spray as they landed and sought the only cover they could find: a ridge of sand. The buccaneers were targets in a f
iring gallery until they could get within musket range. The afternoon breeze kicked up in the middle of their assault, and its keen raised itself notch by notch until it was a full-blown squall, making communicating and loading the privateers’ guns much more difficult, as the Spanish poured ball and shot down on the shapes below. Morgan waited until dusk to give his approach the cover of darkness and, as soon as the sun had set, burst for the fortress walls. Strangely, the Spanish held their fire. Pistol cocked, Roderick hugged the stone wall as the pirates approached. Finally they found a gate. Morgan signaled his men, reared back, and kicked the gate with all his force. It swung open; after the stealth of their approach, it had been unlocked. The Spanish could do their sums as well as anyone; none of them wanted to spend a night being carved up by the likes of L’Ollonais. They’d fired one last volley, jumped into a boat, and headed for town to raise the alarm. When Morgan’s men entered the fort, they found it echoing with the sound of surf on the beach.
Roderick and his mates hallooed into the dark and slapped one another’s backs in delight: Maracaibo now lay open to them. But Morgan was warier; suspicious of a fort left so invitingly empty, he began to search it room by room. Soon he smelled something acrid and quickly went running toward the source. In the fortress magazine, he found what he was looking for: a lit fuse laid into a trail of powder that led straight to the barrels of gunpowder. He stamped it out, with only an inch and a few minutes to spare. Morgan’s touch had returned; he’d saved almost half his men’s lives. He then ordered the cannon spiked, which involved driving a piece of sharpened metal into the touchhole, rendering it unusable, and buried in the sand, so that any reinforcements could not use them to blast Morgan’s ships on their way home. The fort yielded up huge quantities of powder, always a favorite piece of pirate booty on the way to a fight, and a stash of military hardware: muskets, flints, ramrods. It was like the moment in a gangster film when the bad guys raid the precinct armory and start handing out the guns: Whatever Maracaibo had in store for the pirates, they’d be armed to the teeth.
Empire of Blue Water Page 16
