Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Alonzo was not going to miss his chance; his career, not to mention the fortunes of his king and nation, now depended on stopping Morgan. The admiral sprang into action, arranging for pilots to steer his ships through the hazardous gulf, shooting letters to the general governor of Venezuela, the governor of Mérida, and other strongholds asking for men and vessels; one of his messengers drowned in the undertow on the beach at Maracaibo, but other couriers went racing inland spreading the alarm. Alonzo approached the fort at Maracaibo carefully, expecting Morgan at least to have left a skeleton crew manning it, but there was none. Morgan had gotten cocky, or greedy, or both; he probably judged that he’d need every man to take the towns of the interior lake. Alonzo immediately began to put the fort back into fighting shape, unearthing the buried cannon and restoring six of them to working order, restocking the garrison with forty soldiers and supplying it with food and ammunition. The fort would in effect act as a fourth ship barring the exit of any ship from the lagoon; the admiral’s vessels were arrayed across the channel so that no other vessel could pass without coming under direct fire from at least one of them. They acted as the cork in a bottle, and Morgan was caught inside. Alonzo gingerly steered his ships into position, struggling against strong gales (“the fury of the northern winds,” he called them) that were threatening to smash his armada on the nearby reefs. “I was invaded by a total indecision,” he confessed, “since serving His Majesty and the Glory of Spain, I had to prevent the enemy’s entry while being totally responsible for whatever happened to my vessels.” He tossed ballast into the water to lighten his ships and managed to avoid disaster. He was so confident of victory that, when seventy militiamen from Maracaibo arrived to bolster the blockade, he sent them to the fort, along with twenty-four of his own musketeers. He had more than enough men to stop the corsairs.

  Morgan’s fleet had been weighed down with the fruits of his success; the pirates had gathered in slaves and captives as well as stray vessels he’d commandeered in Gibraltar and along the coast. To lighten the load, he released all the prisoners who had paid their ransom and kept four citizens of the town as collateral for the monies still owed him; the freed Spanish requested that Morgan hand over the slave who had informed on them, but knowing they’d “burn him alive,” Morgan quickly refused. His own affairs in order, he headed toward Maracaibo with “as much haste as he could to set things in order for his departure.” Four days later the fleet arrived back in town and quickly learned from the sole resident, a sick old man, that three ships were waiting for them and, “moreover, that the castle at the entry thereof was again put into a good posture of defence, being well provided with great guns and men and all sorts of ammunition.” Morgan was startled, and he sent his fastest boat to confirm the facts, which it did quickly: three ships, ninety-four guns between them. The lagoon they were trapped in was enormous: eighty-six miles long and sixty miles wide at some points. But at the top the lagoon narrowed, and it was blocked by several islands and shoals. The only navigable channel, through which Morgan’s fleet would have to pass, was approximately eight hundred yards wide. And the Spanish ships were arrayed in a line across it.

  The news caused a “general consternation” among the pirates, and Morgan himself was said to “despond in his mind and be destitute of all manner of hopes.” Even an escape by land was impossible. Not only would the pirates have to throw away most of their hard-won booty, but once they’d disembarked, Don Alonzo could land his men and hunt the Brethren in the woods. And in the event they evaded the raids, they’d be confronted with the fact that the Maracaibo lowlands were surrounded by mountains on three sides. The route to the Caribbean was blocked by the northeastern extension of the Andes range, with jagged peaks rising to 14,500 feet. The image of salt-sea pirates, their beards rimed with ice, scaling sheer mountain cliffs did not present itself favorably to Morgan; his men would probably rather face loaded cannon than pick their way across fields of snowdrift. Plus, they would have no ships on which to return to Jamaica, and no certainty of hijacking any. The land route was out, and the water route was bristling with Spanish steel. It was by far the bleakest situation Morgan had faced as a commander.

  If he did really sink into a depression, he soon recovered. His first move was to send Don Alonzo a letter, not of surrender but one “demanding of him a considerable tribute, or ransom, for not putting the city of Maracaibo to the flame.” It was typical of Morgan, who always bargained from a position of strength, even when that position was imaginary. The real purpose was to feel out the admiral, to see if Morgan was dealing with a time-server who didn’t want any trouble or with a real Spanish soldier of the old school. Don Alonzo’s reply ended speculation on that front. He wrote Morgan that he’d come to avenge the crimes against His Majesty and retake the castle “which you took from a parcel of cowards.” He swore he’d pursue Morgan to the ends of the earth to carry out his sworn duty. Don Alonzo’s tone was actually quite respectful; Morgan’s stock had obviously risen since Bracamonte had tossed the epithet “pirate” at Portobelo. And the admiral extended to the Welshman a generous offer: Leave your booty and slaves and return to Jamaica and you will be allowed to pass “without trouble or molestation.” Don Alonzo was a gentleman, and it is hard to imagine him setting up the same kind of double-cross with which the Englishmen at Providence had been suckered; but it’s equally hard to imagine him letting this high-profile enemy of Spain skate away without so much as a slap on the wrist. The offer of free passage was a direct contradiction of Don Alonzo’s orders to exterminate the pirates of the Caribbean. The letter spelled out what would happen if Morgan declined the offer: Don Alonzo would “cause you utterly to perish, by putting every man to the sword.” He warned Morgan not to refuse the offer, because he had with him soldiers “who desire nothing more ardently than to revenge on you and your people all the cruelties and base infamous actions you have committed upon the Spanish nation in America.”

  Morgan studied the letter and called his men together in Maracaibo’s marketplace; he read the offer, translated it into French, and then asked the only question that mattered: would the pirates rather “surrender all they’d purchased, to obtain their liberty,” or fight? This scene is repeated again and again in the history of pirates: An offer is made by the authorities to surrender and give up the loot or die. To the pirates’ credit, one can find few instances of a vote for laying down arms. Pirates usually chose likely death over captivity. The Brethren kept with tradition and roared back their answer: They would fight.

  But how? A patented buccaneer head-on charge would be suicidal. These were not frightened townspeople with children hanging around their knees; these were well-trained, well-equipped Spanish musketeers from the mainland, answerable to the Crown, with an overwhelming superiority in firepower, led by a capable commander. No ghost stories about monkey-faced buccaneers were going to cause them to turn and run. Morgan consulted with his men; the best idea would win.

  Before he revealed his strategy, Morgan sent another letter, saying he’d agree to give up half of the slaves, leave Maracaibo intact, and free the four prisoners he still held. No mention was made of the treasure they’d stolen; that, the pirates would keep. Don Alonzo answered brusquely; he’d tried treating Morgan like a gentleman, but these thugs were so impertinent. Ignoring the counteroffer, he informed Morgan he had two days to surrender or face annihilation. Morgan’s last message was cheerful, telling Don Alonzo that since he was so near, the English would come to him and introduce him to the “hazard of battle.” He also mentioned that he expected no mercy from his enemies.

  Now the townspeople of Maracaibo, those close enough to the pirate ships, heard the feverish hammering from the direction of the harbor, as if a small fort were being built. But they didn’t see any of the expected slaves or prisoners escaping to the jungle, as was typical when pirates let down their guard or were otherwise occupied. Not a soul arrived to tell them what was happening in the town.

  At the neck o
f the lagoon, Don Alonzo waited. A stream of informers stole toward his flagship and gave the admiral a series of reports: The pirates were working on a captured trading vessel; new gun ports were being added; shipwrights were working furiously in the ship’s hold. Clearly Morgan had transferred his flag to this ship, which was bigger than his own and could give him more brawn to go up against the Magdalena. Don Alonzo drilled his men, watched the horizon carefully, and put in place a series of defensive measures: Long poles were extended from the sides of his ships to prevent the pirates from getting too close (for boarding or other nefarious activities); barrels of water were placed on deck for fighting fires.

  The stalemate lasted for a week. Then, just before dark on April 30, Alonzo looked toward the lagoon, and there, suddenly, was the outline of ships against the horizon: Morgan’s fleet, now thirteen in number with the captured vessels, had sailed twenty miles up the lagoon and taken a position within view of the Spaniards, but out of firing range. Aboard the Magdalena, Don Alonzo studied the enemy ships in his spyglass. The big Cuban trader the pirates had reportedly been working on was flying Morgan’s flag; that was comforting—at least the admiral’s spies were accurate. And when, two days later, the pirate fleet raised anchor and came sailing straight at Don Alonzo, it was in the lead, flanked by the old flagship Satisfaction and another frigate. Don Alonzo watched them approach; as soon as they were within range, he gave the order to fire. His ship’s forty-eight guns roared with a thunderous volley; ball tore into the sail of the oncoming ships. Morgan’s ships responded as best they could, but their barrages were decibels lower in volume.

  To his astonishment, Don Alonzo saw that the buccaneers’ ships did not peel away as they drew closer. They were going to attempt a frontal assault, as if his man-of-war were a pathetic merchant sloop fleeing for its very life. Nothing could be more to his advantage, except a sustained artillery battle on the open sea. The pirates would not go for that; their ships were being blasted apart by his gunners, who inched down the mouths of their guns as the buccaneer fleet closed on them, until they were pointed almost level, firing across the gap of blue sea at the three fast-closing ships trailed by the slower boats. The admiral could see the outlines of pirates on deck in the morning haze, some of them wearing the soft montera hat, like bullfighters, their cutlasses poised by their sides. They were unmoving against the dawn sky. Don Alonzo had just a moment to admire their steadfastness in the face of barrages of shot aimed straight at their faces—at least these infidels die like men—before the ship plowed into the Magdalena with a crash of snapping, buckling wood, and grappling hooks came spinning through the air and snagged his sails. His men, their anticipation keyed to a point, didn’t wait for the attack but leaped over the sides onto the enemy’s deck.

  And in that moment, realization. The decks were empty, except for wooden cutouts cunningly shaped by Morgan’s carpenters to resemble men with cutlasses. The Spanish musketeers looked around in bewilderment before the word unfolded in their minds and came tumbling out of their mouths: brûlot. It was a fireship, a floating trap designed to set the enemy aflame. They could smell the sweet odor of tar over palm leaves as the deck around them lit up like a Roman candle and a concussion blew them up into the rigging. Don Alonzo shouted orders as pieces of burning wood and cordage came tumbling through the air into his ship. A seventeenth-century warship was a conflagration waiting to happen: Apart from the magazines of gunpowder filling the hold, its seams were caulked with tar, its ropes were covered with a layer of fat, and its sails were made of flammable canvas. The flames engulfed the tackling and rope, swept over the decks, bellowed by a strong wind at their back, burning men alive as they fled; fire ran and shot up the masts. Men dived into the water and swam for the islands, while Don Alonzo tried futilely to get the fires put out and tossed planks of wood to drowning men. “The flames built up rapidly and violently…,” Don Alonzo wrote in his report on the confrontation. “So that in a brief moment everything was ablaze.”

  The Magdalena was soon fully engulfed, “the forepart sinking into the sea, whereby she perished.” Disaster tumbled into disaster: Her sister ship, the Soledad, wheeled away from the burning vessel but had a malfunction in its rigging and was soon unnavigable; as it dawdled pilotless across the water, the buccaneers chased it down and prepared to board. The terrified crew jumped into the water, and the Brethren swarmed up the Soledad’s sides, corrected the rigging jam, and soon had a fine Spanish ship as plunder. The Spanish swimmers were cut down, as “they would neither ask nor admit of any quarter, choosing rather to lose their lives than receive them from the hands of their persecutors.” The sergeant major of the Soledad was one of the survivors, hauling himself “naked and wet” to the fort. The last Spanish ship, the San Luis, was luckier, making it to the fort, where its crew unloaded its provisions and armaments and then burned the ship down to the waterline, so that Morgan could not have it. Poor Don Alonzo survived the debacle and transferred to a longboat and headed for shore, pursued by Roderick and other pirates, paddling furiously in their swift canoes. He ended up running for his life from the men he expected to take back to the Main as “sun-dried” specimens for his queen.

  The Brethren had prepared the Cuban decoy beautifully, cutting new gun ports into her side and, in place of the real cannon that should have jutted out of them, inserting logs filled with gunpowder and readied with fuses. Then they’d scoured Maracaibo for every highly flammable material available to them—pitch, tar, brimstone, palm leaves—and built their combustible doll men out of them. The carpenters whom the spies heard hammering away in the hold were not installing fortifications to the structure but removing them, so that when the ship blew, the explosion would not be dampened by excess timbers. They’d adorned the ship with banners and fitted it out like a flagship; in the history of naval warfare, fireships had usually been made of old and decrepit junks, not fine specimens such as the Cuban prize. Luck had been with Morgan in the following wind that blew out of the top of the lagoon into the narrow channel, giving the ship the necessary propulsion to ram it into the Magdalena. A skeleton crew of twelve men had steered it home and jumped into canoes just before the moment of impact. The costuming, the set design, the use of the murky glow of dawn to light the scene—the whole thing resembled nothing more than an amateur English theatrical.

  Morgan’s reputation for command had been well established before Maracaibo, but after this stunning reversal of fortune, he became the buccaneer commander. There was no way he should have been able to outmaneuver Don Alonzo: Morgan was a brilliant soldier throughout his career, but a subpar sailor. He regularly lost ships to reefs or, in the case of the Oxford, carelessness. The pirates usually used terror and marksmanship to win battles, but Morgan had won this naval confrontation by wit. “The Pirates were extremely gladdened at this signal victory,” Esquemeling tells us. “Obtained in so short a time and with so great [an] inequality of forces; whereby they conceived greater pride in their minds than they had before.”

  If Don Alonzo had considered Spain’s history, he’d have prepared more diligently. Indeed, the greatest disaster ever to strike his nation’s navies, the loss of the Spanish Armada in 1588, turned on a fireship attack designed by the English commander and future privateer Francis Drake. The mighty Armada was thought to be invincible, but when it anchored off Calais before the planned invasion of England, the Spanish were spooked by the sudden appearance, at midnight on August 7, of a fleet of burning ships, their sails towers of flame, rushing at them out of the darkness. The Spanish were terrified that these were the dreaded “hell-burners” or “explosion-machines” (vessels loaded with gunpowder, housed in hulls closed in with brick, that would explode with tremendous force when the fire reached it); they cut their cables and scattered to the wind, canceling their D-Day and opening up the Armada to attacks by the nimble English navy, which hounded them onto the Dutch coast and sent them back to Spain as abject failures. Morgan had, in miniature, recreated the famous atta
ck with equally devastating results. (In fact, included in Esquemeling’s book was a rather fine rendering of the attack, titled The Spanish Armada Destroyed by Captaine Morgan.) Like Drake, he’d even volunteered his flagship for the conflagration.

  What Morgan did not realize until days later was that Don Alonzo had been warned about the fireship. Although the pirates kept a strict guard on all their prisoners, a “certain negro” had made it to the Magdalena days before the attack and told the admiral, “Sir, be pleased to have great care of yourself, for the English have prepared a fireship with desire to burn your fleet.” The Spanish noble had scoffed at the idea. “How can that be?” he thundered at the spy. “Have they, peradventure, wit enough to build a fireship? Or what instruments have they to do it withal?” Don Alonzo was a Spaniard to the bone: He simply could not imagine that he could be out-thought by scum like the Brethren. But the collective wisdom of the pirates had defeated the noble.

  Don Juan carried with him the kingdom’s certainty of its own rightness and superiority. When dealing with the privateers, who molded their thinking to the situation at hand, certainty could be a fatal flaw.