Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Morgan quickly divided up his men: Some dived to the wreck of the Magdalena and brought up silver cobs worth 20,000 pesos, some of them melted into gobs of pure bullion; another 20,000 in silver remained in the black hulk but could not be reached. Other men landed on the beach and began probing the fort’s defenses, shooting at the musketeers lining the tops of the armaments. The castle, now packed full with Spanish soldiers as well as a resupplied garrison from Maracaibo, blasted back at the evening attack the buccaneers attempted. The pirates were seriously outgunned, having only muskets and “a few fireballs” (crude grenades) to contend with the cannon above their heads. Men dropped under the barrage, blood gushing into the sand and turning it black in the dusky gloom. “We refused them the whole afternoon,” reported the fort’s castellan, “causing [them] great harm…and the deaths of many people, injured and burned.” The Brethren lost thirty men, with many more wounded, before they realized they had no chance of storming the castle. But eventually it would have to be taken: The fort’s artillery would shred the pirate fleet as it tried to sail through the narrow channel if the guns were not silenced.

  There was now a three-way standoff between the pirates, Don Alonzo, and the residents of Maracaibo. The first wanted to leave but could not; the second wanted Morgan’s head, and the last simply wanted the whole mess ended as soon as possible. Morgan interviewed the pilot of one of the vice admiral’s ships, who had been captured in the fireship raid, and got the background on Don Alonzo’s mission. He now learned, if he’d not already known, that he was the target of this mission; the pilot told him that it was the “loss and ruin of Porto Bello, and many others” that spurred the Crown to action and that the Spanish force was intent on “destroying as many of [the English pirates] as possible.” The news put into doubt Don Alonzo’s offer of free passage. The pilot spoke of the bitterness the Spanish people felt at Morgan’s raids: “Of all which damages and hostilities committed here by the English,” he told the Welshman, “very dismal lamentations have oftentimes penetrated the ears both of the Catholic King and Council, to whom belongs the care and preservation of this New World.” The pilot also divulged the battle orders given by Don Alonzo to his men, and they were tough: “Having given a very good supper to his people,” the man said, “he persuaded them neither to take nor give any quarter to the English that should fall into their hands.”

  Time was against Morgan. As the pilot spoke, there were frigates full of musketeers cresting the waves of the North Sea on a rescue mission to Maracaibo. Morgan had jiggled a main strand of the spiderweb that was the Spanish Empire; the news had radiated along the trade routes, and soldiers would soon be on the way from Panama to check on the disturbance. Morgan had been fortunate with Don Alonzo, but he could not afford to linger to try his luck again. There was, however, one weak link in the system: the Maracaiboans. They wanted him gone. Morgan sent Don Alonzo an offer to leave the town unmolested in return for safe passage out, but he could have no expectation that it would be accepted. He offered the good citizens a deal: the return of their prisoners and no torching of the city in return for 30,000 pieces of eight and 500 beeves. The Spanish paid up: after, that is, getting Morgan down to 20,000 pesos, or $1 million in modern terms; they were merchants, after all, and used to haggling.

  Finally the citizens collected the funds and paid off the Welshman with huge relief. But then Morgan tweaked the conditions of the deal. He would leave the town alone, but now he told the citizens to go to Don Alonzo and get him to let the privateers sail off. He did not want the castle’s guns blazing away at him as he ran the channel; his ships would be sitting ducks. To motivate the messengers, Morgan announced that he’d keep the remaining townspeople captive until the vice admiral gave in.

  The captives must have cursed him under their breath. But they elected representatives and sent them “beseeching and supplicating” Don Alonzo to let Morgan go; if he didn’t, “the sword and the gallows” awaited them. Don Alonzo, humiliated first by Morgan and now by his own countrymen, reacted with disgust: “If you had been as loyal to your King in hindering the entry of these Pirates,” he told them, “as I shall do their going out, you had never caused these troubles, neither to yourselves, nor to our whole nation; which has suffered so much through your pusillanimity. In a word, I shall never grant your request; but shall endeavour to maintain that respect which is due to my King, according to my duty.” Old Spain thundered at the colonists. But Don Alonzo’s real audience for the note, which was no doubt copied in triplicate, was back in Madrid, awaiting word of Morgan’s demise. He was building a legal case for the disaster that was unfolding.

  The deal was off. Morgan, who had bought time to think, now began perfecting a secret plan; this one was his alone. The first thing he did was to tally up and divide the loot from the mission; if he was going to lose a ship in the breakout, he didn’t want it to be the one carrying all the silver. When this was done, the sum came to 250,000 pieces of eight ($12.5 million), not to mention the “huge quantity of merchandise and slaves.” It was his richest haul yet, bigger than Portobelo (250,000 pesos in total, without the value of the goods and slaves), bigger even than L’Ollonais’s near-legendary strike in this very same town two years earlier. He’d surpassed L’Ollonais in every way. Now all he had to do was get the treasure home.

  Having drained every last bit of information from the pilot (and treating him splendidly in return), the buccaneer commander now knew much more about Don Alonzo than his opponent did about him. It could be said of Morgan the same thing that was said about Cromwell, who had created his career: that “he read men as others read books.” Morgan studied the way the Spaniard had arrayed his forces and his arms, and he concluded that Don Alonzo expected an attack by land. It was the obvious choice. Morgan’s men were past masters when it came to storming castles, while at sea they were amateurs. He saw that Don Alonzo was digging trenches and fortifying his landward positions. The muzzles of the guns were pointed away from the sea. Don Alonzo was not a complicated tactician: What you saw was what you got. Morgan decided to play to the man’s certainties.

  In plain sight of the castle’s lookouts, canoes were unloaded from Morgan’s ships, and men could soon be seen climbing down into them. The boats then rowed toward the shoreline. Once there they were concealed behind trees as they presumably unloaded the buccaneers and headed back to the main ships empty except for two or three oarsmen. This went on all afternoon, and Don Alonzo drew the obvious conclusion: Morgan was unloading his men for a land assault.

  He was doing nothing of the sort. The canoes were full of men as they left the ships, but when they reached the shore, the men simply lay down on the bottom of the craft and returned to the ships, Roderick and the others lying with their backs in the brackish water that sloshed at the bottom of the rowboats, wondering if this childish trick could really work. When the small boats returned to the ships, Roderick and the others climbed up the ropes on the side hidden from Don Alonzo’s watchful eyes, then made their way over to the side facing the Spanish and repeated the process. Don Alonzo again underestimated the imagination of his enemy, convinced that the men he was facing were simple and crude. The battlements of the castle that looked out over the water were left practically deserted as Don Alonzo massed his men for a midnight raid.

  Night came, and with it an ebbing tide. With his men hidden out of sight, Morgan softly pulled his anchors up and let the currents slowly take them through the channel. When they were even with the castle, the ships sprang to life: Sails suddenly blossomed white against the moonlight on vessel after vessel. The canvas billowed in the night breeze, and the ships picked up speed. With what must have been a sick feeling of dread, Don Alonzo saw what was happening and wheeled his cannon to the seaside ports. They blasted away at the departing ships, but Morgan was now just out of range and fired back not in self-defense but with a derisive salute. The Spaniards could not reach him, and Don Alonzo could do nothing but watch his hopes sail with the buccan
eers; the Crown would not take lightly his being outwitted twice.

  Don Alonzo was arrested and put in chains, then transported back to Spain on the silver galleons. “I shall not find a person in the Kingdom of Spain that will testify in my favor,” he complained in his initial report on the battle, and he was indeed found guilty of having acted rashly. But the war tribunal of the Council of the Indies voided the conviction and freed the star-crossed admiral. He’d at least attempted to fight Morgan, and his initiative was clear in the testimony. To condemn his rigid, top-down style and admit that he’d been bested by the very flexiblility and ingenuity that found little place in the Spanish system would be to implicate the entire system of governance in the far-flung kingdoms.

  Why, it might be asked here, does it seem that the Spanish never won these showdowns with the pirates? In fact, it is a misconception: The Spanish did regularly defeat pirates in battle throughout the history of their New World possessions, and the historical records are littered with tales of buccaneers who ended their days on the enemy’s beach or in his prisons. Just not Morgan. The Spanish had many handicaps: distance that made it nearly impossible to coordinate a common defense of distant cities or relieve besieged towns in time to do any good; rivalries between provincial governors; stifling bureaucracy that handicapped provincial leaders’ ability to respond quickly to threats; bad, outdated weapons; restrictions on privately importing new, up-to-date weapons; a lack of money to maintain armaments; dependence on amateur militias to face off against hugely experienced buccaneers; the fact that flight and not fight often presented the most appealing option to soldiers and townspeople faced with a buccaneer army; the myth of the all-conquering Morgan; the fact that the buccaneers did not occupy their territories, thus giving the Spanish a chance to return to their normal lives soon after the invasion; and Morgan’s strategic brilliance and his ability to leverage huge numbers of pirates against weak fortifications.

  As for Morgan, he offloaded the prisoners on the way back to Jamaica, keeping only those unfortunates from Gibraltar who had still not paid their ransom. He sailed for Port Royal, having exposed the core weaknesses of the Spanish system. Happy and rich as Croesus, Morgan was ascending even higher in the firmament of outlaws. His New World dreams were coming true: He was on his way to becoming a wealthy, landed aristocrat. With every victory a little more space opened up between him and the Rodericks of the world.

  10

  Black Clouds to the East

  When it comes to rating the enemies of the buccaneers, disease has to be mentioned first. It carried off more pirates than did enemy bullets. Then the Spanish. And then weather. Morgan had been lucky in his expeditions to avoid shipwrecking storms. But when one sails the Caribbean year after year, one eventually gets hit. And now, on the return trip from the magical victory at Maracaibo, it was Morgan’s turn.

  Esquemeling is light on detail, but the ships clearly hit a tropical storm, if not a hurricane, while fairly close to the shoreline. “They were surprised by a great tempest,” he writes, “which forced them to cast anchor in the depth of five or six fathom water,” or thirty to thirty-six feet. The boats, many of them undecked, could not ride out the tempest and were forced to pull up their anchors and face into the waves. It was not just drowning that concerned them: “If on either side they should have been cast on shore,” says the surgeon, “either to fall into the hands of the Spaniards or of the Indians, they would certainly have obtained no mercy.”

  A storm in the age of sail was a terrifying event. The wind could tear the rigging to shreds. “What especially astonished us,” wrote Raveneau de Lussan, who barely survived a “tornado” at sea, “was the fact that our yards, sheets, braces and other rigging were cut off as clean as if hatchets had been used.” The mainmast could come down if the sails were not lowered quickly. The rats that lived in the holds would sometimes emerge during violent gales, seemingly maddened by the storm, and attack passengers, especially the sick and injured. And the men worked in terrible conditions: If the storm hit at night, they’d be tossed out on a slippery deck unable even to see the man next to them. Ropes caught in the blocks, spars snapped and flew off into the blackness, and flying tackle could brain an un-suspecting crewman.

  The ocean a buccaneer sailed into was not the mapped, GPS’ed body of water we know today. Once they left the harbor, even the most forward-thinking buccaneers entered a world of superstition and hearsay. There were a thousand legends of the sea that mariners still adhered to, and many of them concerned storms. It was a world in which the elements were subject to the whims of witches and war-locks who “at their pleasure send hail, rain tempest, thunder and lightning” to sink their enemy’s vessels. Roderick believed that witches could disturb the air by digging a hole in the ground, filling it with water, and then stirring the water lightly with a finger, or by boiling hogs’ bristles in a pot; his father had told him the evil wretches could call up a hurricane by tossing a little sea sand into the air. This led to a ban on women aboard. As late as 1808, the English admiral Cuthbert Collingwood wrote that “I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel.” One Mrs. Hicks and her daughter went to trial for witchcraft in 1716, and the prosecution claimed they’d created storms by swirling their bare feet in a pot and stirring up soapsuds into a foam. Or storms could be caused by a black dragon that emerged from the clouds and plunged its head into the sea, drinking up the water and any unlucky ship that happened into its way. The dragon might be a waterspout, but the danger was just as real; the only way to avoid it was to shout at the monster or to hold a knife with a black handle, read the Gospel of St. John, and then slice the knife across the waterspout (as Columbus’s crew did once, successfully).

  It was not just raging seas that concerned seamen. Above a sailor’s head was another world, the cloud sea that sat atop the white cirrus vapor. It was believed that vessels sailed on this ocean in the sky. Roderick told the story of the sailor from Bristol who, when navigating this sea, dropped his knife overboard; the knife fell through the clouds and impaled itself in the wooden table in his home. As there was a world above, there was also a subterranean civilization of which mariners could catch only glimpses. Sailors swore that in clear water they sometimes saw buildings, church steeples, whole cities underneath the sea, and even heard the tolling of the cathedral bells on lonely nights when no ship or lighthouse was in view. In the huge troughs that followed powerful waves, sailors claimed to have seen the peaked roofs and winding stairs of the houses of the giants that lived below. Even the more familiar waters of the North Sea were subject to visions: St. Elmo’s fire, the electrical phenomenon that seems to touch sails and ropes with a white flame, was believed to be a sign that St. Elmo, patron saint of sailors, was protecting the ship against tempests. “On these occasions, the sailors first recite hymns and litanies,” wrote a French author in the eighteenth century, “and when, as if often happens, the light still remains, they salute it by a whistling sound.” When the light disappeared, sailors would call “Lucky journey” after it. Certainly, on that voyage home, Morgan’s men would have searched the black horizon for some sign of the saving light.

  The buccaneers made it through the tempest, only to face another one when they arrived home. If the privateers had a champion in London, it was George Monck, the Duke of Albemarle, who had once depended on Henry Morgan’s uncle Thomas as his second-in-command. This unabashed imperialist led the anti-Spanish faction in Charles II’s circle, and to him Jamaica was an outpost of the empire, an empire that should be expanded and fortified wherever and whenever possible. Monck had begun his career as a Royalist but switched sides twice, first to Cromwell, when his star was on the rise, and then to Charles II, whom he’d almost single-handedly brought to power, something Charles never forgot. Winston Churchill described him with sincere if cynical admiration as the ultimate soldier’s soldier, the kind who “waited about doing their duty on a short view from day to day until there is
no doubt whether the tide is on the ebb or the flow; and who then, with the appearance of great propriety and complete self-abnegation, with steady, sterling qualities of conduct if not of heart, move slowly, cautiously, forward.” That sentence, which imitates Monck’s sluggish and deliberate style, doesn’t make him seem a romantic figure, but the privateers and their supporters were romantics only to novelists. To men in power, they were a heavy lever with which to prod and dislodge the Spanish. And so Monck argued their case with vehemence.

  But Portobelo and now Maracaibo had been turning points. “We interpret what these nations have done, and are still doing, as insults,” read a report to the queen of Spain from the Council of War of the Indies. “It can be said that there isn’t a port or a coast in the Indies that they have not tried to invade or have indeed invaded.” The councilors went on to say that it was clear the English did not respect any treaties and that they’d taken advantage of the “passivity of Her Majesty’s subjects,” something the council was determined to change. The Spanish, in their fury, considered every option, even the crackpot schemes of an Irish slave trader named Sir Richard White who came up with a host of options for getting to Morgan: paying off the governors of Jamaica and Barbados to rein in the privateers; seeding Cartagena, Havana, and other cities with 1,500 Flemish or Milanese mercenaries who would rise up and “help in the confrontations” when the Brethren attacked; and even penetrating the enemy’s cities himself and spying on their fortifications. White was clearly something of a con artist: He demanded 7 million pesos ($357 million) and “a frigate to Cádiz” to arrange the truce, along with the right to continue trading in slaves on the Main (which was illegal for a non-Spaniard), the guarantee that the queen would pay all his expenses and additional, unspecified “voluntary donations” from the viceroys of Peru and New Spain. For this he tantalized the queen with his personal access to the governors of the English colonies and the rather hazy intelligence that the pirates “are not united, have no government and are not able to feed themselves well.” White’s high intrigue came to nothing, but the Spanish anger did not abate, and others in the English leadership nodded sympathetically at their complaints. The privateers were a menace. The secretary of state, Lord Arlington, was the leader of those who wanted closer relations with Spain and an end to the pirates’ reign. (He’d spent several years in Madrid and was so identified with its causes that his code name in the French ambassador’s dispatches was “the Spaniard.”) The news of Portobelo had infuriated him; the queen regent was insisting on reparations and that Modyford be sacked. Arlington replied with the threadbare party line: The attacks were simply in response to Spanish provocations, and the only way to end them was by a treaty that recognized English interests in the region; only then would the king’s subjects treat the queen’s subjects “with love and respect.” In the streets of London, however, Morgan was a hero, a Protestant avenger in a time when English military victories were rarer and rarer (the Dutch having recently humiliated the navy not once but twice). London had been consumed by the Great Fire of 1666, and plague had struck high and low; it seemed that one annus horribilis followed another. It would be difficult for the king to chastise the hero of Portobelo, especially as suspicions of Charles’s Catholic affinities lingered among the common people. Hemmed in by circumstances, Arlington fobbed off the Spanish demands while sending Modyford cryptic, icy notes. Arlington’s hopes lay with William Godolphin, the emissary working in Madrid to get a treaty signed. But Morgan’s escapades were making his job impossible. “This way of warring is neither honourable nor profitable to His Majesty,” Arlington wrote Modyford, “[and] he is endeavouring to put an end to it.”