Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  On December 18, 1670, the great buccaneer fleet sailed.

  The Spanish knew the trajectory of pirates’ careers as well as men like Morgan did. The only step up from places like Portobelo and Maracaibo would be Panama, Cartagena, or possibly Havana. Of these three, Panama was probably the most vulnerable, and the kingdom’s energetic president Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán was furiously working to protect it from the coming storm. This was the same Don Juan who had recaptured Old Providence from the English and sent their leaders to the dungeons. He’d just emerged from the shade of a prison cell himself at the castle of Callao in Lima, where a power struggle with the viceroy had landed him. He returned to Panama in the spring of 1669 and immediately set to improving its defenses.

  Panama sat on the other side of the isthmus from the North Sea and the hunting grounds of the privateers. Its best hope for protection lay in the fact that the journey to reach it was a nightmare: Mountains, deep rivers, swamps thick with fever mist, warlike maroons, sudden violent rains, and carnivorous animals waited for anyone brave enough to attempt it. It was an ancient route; Sir Francis Drake had walked it, and Indians before him. And it would claim victims for centuries after Morgan attempted it. When the California gold rush struck in 1849, men from the East Coast swarmed down to the town of Colón and then tramped through the black muck to Panama City, where boats waited to take them to California. Snakes, yellow fever, and dysentery made it a memorable trip; one commander of a surveying mission reported seeing mosquitoes so thickly bunched that they snuffed out lighted candles with their burned corpses. “For no consideration take this route,” wrote one miner to a friend back home. “I have nothing to say on the other ones, but do not take this one.” In 1852, when a U.S. Army regiment and the soldiers’ families were assigned to new posts in California, they followed the same route, which now was now traversed via railroad, boat, and mule train, a much easier journey than in Morgan’s time. Even when he disembarked at the starting-off point, modern-day Colón, the regiment’s quartermaster was unimpressed. “I wondered how any person could live many months [there],” wrote the young Ulysses S. Grant, “and wondered still more why anyone tried.” The Americans were no match for the cholera and tainted water, and Grant watched men grow delirious and die by the hour. He later wrote about the expedition that cost him dozens of men, women, and children. His judgment of the place? “The horrors of this road in the rainy season are beyond description.”

  Don Juan knew enough not to underestimate Henry Morgan, however, and he began to build up the fortifications on the trail. He begged the Crown for men to stock the garrisons at Portobelo and Chagres, the two main entry points to the isthmus. The authorities in Madrid relented, but when the treasure fleet finally arrived at Portobelo with his troops, Don Juan encountered some difficulties in claiming his men: A large portion of the soldiers had been assigned to other posts, had absconded, or had died from yellow fever or malaria. So many had died, in fact, that the captain of the treasure fleet snapped up the remainder meant for the defense of Panama and brought them back with him to guard the silver. A demoralized Don Juan was left to round up any stragglers he could find and press-gang them into service. It was a typical frustration for a Spanish leader facing the pirates: a top-down solution to his problems that was frittered away by distance and lieutenants eager to safeguard their own careers. “I myself am ready to die in the Kingdom’s defence,” the president of Panama wrote, “but that will not stop the enemy making war.” Don Juan was the canary in the silver mine, but Madrid was deaf to his message.

  Spain did not want its New World settlers to act and think on their own, or to become too dependent on one another. That would jeopardize the flow of treasure; it would disrupt the autocratic system that had made the nation a world power. Spanish towns were connected more tightly to Spain than they were to one another. Governors competed with one another for scarce resources instead of pooling them. The vast distances multiplied the problem. By tying the colonies so closely to the motherland, Spain weakened them. The pirates preyed on these isolated outposts again and again.

  The president mobilized every resource he could: At San Lorenzo Castle at the mouth of the Chagres, new cannon stations were mounted on the riverside, while letters went back to Spain with more warnings and requests for able-bodied men to stock the garrison. Don Juan had called in a military engineer, and he outlined the suggested improvements to Santiago Castle at Portobelo in a letter to the queen. “It was resolved to build two high redoubts with their motes [sic] and stockades on top of the hills that serve as obstacles,” he reported. San Felipe received new stockades and raised parapets. San Gerónimo, which had been only partially finished when Morgan attacked Portobelo, was pushed near to completion. Beyond that, however, the Crown felt it had done all it could with its strained resources and Don Juan soon understood he’d have to fend for himself; there would be no warships or musketeers whipping their way from Spain. Meanwhile he was receiving reports that the pirates were building a fleet of thirty canoes for the assault. “I give you these warnings even though I know that you are a great soldier and you will not need them,” the governor of Cartagena wrote to Don Juan. It was perhaps the only thing he could think to say when the news was so obviously bad.

  Worse was to follow. Don Juan’s informants turned out to have excellent sources in the Brethren’s camp, and by June of 1670 he was told that 1,500 buccaneers were going to attempt Panama by the Chagres route. It was, for the Caribbean, an enormous number of men; Panama itself held only 6,000 residents, and just a small percentage of them would be available to defend it. The final omen came in a form that was typically Spanish: A Franciscan monk, no doubt prompted by the rumors that swept the city of a black swarm of buccaneers waiting just over the horizon, had a vision one night of what lay in store for his city. In his dream, Jamaican privateers were rampaging through Panama, murdering and looting as they went, while maroons could be spotted spreading flames from rooftop to rooftop. Panamanians lay dying in the streets, with black smoke billowing in the background. The nightmare so impressed the monk that he convinced a local painter to render his vision in oils, and the portrait was displayed at the convent. The residents came to gaze upon the apocalyptic canvas and shiver with dread; it was a scene from the future of Spanish art, from the war scenes of Goya, not their beloved Velázquez.

  Slowly Panama took on the aspects of a city under psychological siege. Many believed that the only question was not would Morgan come, but when.

  11

  The Isthmus

  Six days after setting out, Morgan’s ships appeared off Providence, having covered the 575 miles in excellent time. Providence consisted of a large island connected to a smaller one, Isla Chica. The main island looked deserted as Morgan’s ships pulled ashore and quickly disembarked a thousand men, and indeed it was, the Spanish contingent of fewer than 200 having decamped to Isla Chica, which Morgan soon found had been studded with castles since the last English invasion. The first one the Brethren had to face was La Cortadura, which sat between the two islands and could be approached only by a drawbridge, which was now raised.

  Things began miserably. The skies opened up and poured rain on the buccaneers, who were not clothed for such weather; Roderick was lightly dressed in seaman’s trousers and cotton shirt, without shoes. When the men approached the Spanish fort, the defenders “began to fire upon them so furiously that they could advance nothing that day.” The buccaneers retreated and camped outside the gunners’ range in the open fields. Morgan now faced a problem familiar to the commander of any large army of men: sustenance. He had no supply lines to provide meals for his soldiers; they could eat only what they carried or foraged. Shivering and gnawed by hunger, Roderick and some mates pulled down a thatch house and made campfires. And they grumbled over the fire, with Roderick suggesting that Morgan was leading them astray. They’d voted on Panama, not this miserable piece of rock. They were sure that Morgan was not sitting out in the damp, like th
em. He’d probably found a warm hut to keep himself dry.

  The next morning, more of the same. The rain pelted Roderick and the poor corsairs “as if the skies were melted into waters” and the Spanish peppered them with shot from behind their sturdy walls. With his belly rumbling, Roderick spotted an old nag in the nearby field and called to his friends, who chased it down for breakfast. But it was a pitiful sight: “both lean and full of scabs and blotches,” Esquemeling reports. They carved up the animal and divided the tiny morsels among the lucky, who roasted the meat “more like ravenous wolves than men.” The question of food was becoming critical; most of their supplies had been left on the ships. Not only that, but Morgan could now see that behind Cortadura lay a whole chain of forts; the Spanish could occupy and then abandon one after the other, killing privateers as they went. It would be a long, bloody siege. His men had come for money and glory; they hadn’t asked for a miserable slog on an island in the middle of nowhere. Soon Morgan began hearing reports that some of the Brethren were planning to head back to the ships, orders or no orders. Roderick had voted with the deserters; he hadn’t signed up for this mess, and he felt deceived. Who was Morgan to change their plans without a vote? With men getting ready to leave, the admiral made a snap decision and in front of his army called for a canoe to be arrayed with a white flag and sent to the castellan. His message was terse: Surrender or die.

  The governor of the island requested two hours to deliberate, and Morgan agreed. He badly needed the man to surrender: He’d eventually take the island, but it could be at the cost of Panama. When the messenger returned, Morgan waited for the answer with bated breath. As the man read out the governor’s words, Morgan must have smiled. The governor had written that he’d surrender, but he asked Morgan to perform “a certain stratagem of war.” It was a bit of playacting designed to save the man’s career and possibly his life: He directed Morgan to lead his men to Cortadura, while his ships pulled up to the gun emplacement called St. Matthew and dispatched a platoon of men. They would find the governor making his way from one fort to another and intercept him on the path. Under threat of death, they would force him to lead them into Cortadura, masquerading as Spanish troops. Once it surrendered, the rest of the island’s fortresses would fall like dominoes. And one other thing: “There should be continual firing at one another, but without bullets, or at least into the air.” The farce would read like a pitched battle on paper, which is all the governor cared about.

  Morgan could not have devised a better solution himself; it appealed to his sense of theatrical war. That night he followed the man’s instructions to the letter; the governor was surprised on his way to Cortadura, and the rest of the evening went off without a hitch. Anyone watching from seaward that night would have thought that the Spanish were defending their queen to the death, with the “incessant firing of the great guns” and the sharp reports of muskets. But the only killing took place afterward, when “the Pirates began to make a new war upon the poultry, cattle and all sorts of victuals they could find.” The buccaneers feasted on the island’s supplies and quickly discovered 30,000 pounds of powder and other kinds of ammunition. As to spies, Morgan found four of the “banditti” who claimed to know the intricacies of the city and a native Indian named Antonillo who had lived in the target city. Morgan offered the criminals a full share in the proceeds if they would guide his men, and the criminals cheerfully agreed. Their leader was “the greatest rogue, thief and assassin” on the island, who deserved, according to Esquemeling, to be tortured upon the rack rather than play soldier on Providence. He would fit in nicely.

  Now the assault on Panama began. The city could be approached via two routes: by land or river. (Sailing down around the tip of South America and up the Pacific coast toward Panama was out of the question for the fleet’s tiny boats, and, of course, there was no Panama Canal to get Morgan’s ships across the isthmus.) The first passage began at the city of Portobelo, with which Morgan was already familiar. The pirates would have to take the city, then travel due south through thick woodlands laced with vines and choked with undergrowth, tramp over five-hundred-foot mountain passes, and then travel along mule paths to the city of Venta de Cruces, where they would pick up the road to Panama. If they chose the river route, they would begin at San Lorenzo, where a large and well-armed castle guarded the entrance to the Chagres, which would take them southwest to Venta de Cruces. Halfway there they would have to abandon their canoes and complete the journey on foot. Portobelo was tempting, as Morgan knew it so well, but the Spanish had surely learned their lesson and reinforced the city after his devastating raid. All in all, Portobelo was now a completely different proposition, and a much tougher one, so San Lorenzo and the Chagres it would be. Morgan estimated that the fort could be taken with 470 men in three ships, and he assigned a lieutenant colonel, Joseph Bradley, to lead the squadron. Bradley had been raiding the Spanish since the time of Mansvelt, Morgan’s predecessor; he was experienced and popular with the buccaneers, and Morgan was counting on him to open a crucial breach in the shield around Panama.

  San Lorenzo was the door to the isthmus; it had been built to discourage men from thinking they could pass through it easily. It sat on the north side of the river mouth, on a high cliff that jutted out into the water, and it was really a network of defenses rather than just a single fort: two gun emplacements lower down near the water’s edge, at the base of the castle walls, with six guns each; above them a tower with eight cannon that could spray oncoming ships with shot; and at the top of the peak the castle itself, its walls consisting of two rows of thick logs, between which had been packed mounds of earth, a design that made the barricade “as secure as the best walls made of stone or brick.” The cliff top was divided into two sections, and the drawbridge over a thirty-foot ravine was the only entrance to the fortress. A single set of stairs had been cut into the mountain face, allowing men to climb from the shore to the castle.

  Bradley and his men arrived off San Lorenzo on December 26. The element of surprise was gone: One of the buccaneers on the Río de la Hacha raid had deserted the ranks and fled to the Spanish side; the men in the castle had been preparing for battle for weeks. There were two ways to the castle: scale the cliffs on the seaward side or go up the stairway on the landward side. Bradley quickly saw that the dizzying cliffside was a nonstarter; the “infinite asperity of the mountain” barred all but the expert climber, and his men were no mountaineers. They would have to hit the beach, absorb the fusillades from the gun batteries and the tower, and take the castle. It was not going to be a repeat of Providence. The Spanish held the heights and seemingly every advantage, their garrison recently supplied with “much provision and much warlike ammunition,” as well as 164 more soldiers. “Although six thousand men should come against them,” the castle’s commander, Don Pedro de Lisardo, assured the president of Panama, “he should…be able to secure himself and destroy them.”

  Inside San Lorenzo the buccaneers’ every move was being monitored. They had been spotted by the lookout in the castle watch-tower that very morning while four miles from the castle; as they approached, this man sent a series of running reports down to the commander: Three ships were disembarking men in six canoes, the canoes were ferrying the soldiers to the shore in shifts. When the canoes landed, they were observed by Spanish archers and lancers hidden in the woods. The buccaneers were not bothering to be crafty; their drummers pounded out a martial beat, their trumpeters sang of impending doom, and their color-bearers took their place at the head of the squadrons. The estimate? About 300 to 400 men, now moving off the beach and slashing their way through the jungle with machetes. The two sides would be close to evenly matched in numbers. Don Pedro dashed off a note to Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán, saying he expected the enemy within a few hours of midnight or at dawn. Three hundred men were reported to be advancing, but even if there were many more, he was confident he could smash them. “Here’s a scourge for these infidels!” he wrote, bristling with con
fidence.

  At the fort the lookout and every man at the ramparts watched the brush line. Hours went by with only the chatter of birds and the sound of the surf. Finally movement at the edge: Bradley and his men came stumbling out of the jungle; their guides had miscalculated and brought them too close to the castle onto a campaña, or open plot of ground. The Spanish sharpshooters on the ramparts instantly opened up on the figures below as the gunners rained shot down on the English; in the first fusillade, the Brethren “lost many of their men.”

  Bradley divided his men into three groups: a reserve force that would stay in the jungle and then two assault squads. In front of them lay an open stretch of bare land, where they would be vulnerable to Spanish fire, leading up to a deep crevice called the Ravine of the Slabs; only having crossed the ravine would they reach the walls of the castle. The men would have no artillery to cover their approach or armor to deflect the ball: “Being uncovered from head to foot, they could not advance one step without great danger.” At last they girded up their loins and charged screaming onto the open space. As soon as they did, the sound of musket fire erupted, and the privateers ran crazily for the castle. Roderick was grazed by a Spanish ball but made it to the ravine; when he turned to look back, he saw that many of his mates lay facedown in the dirt behind him. “One could not see the campaña for the dead bodies of the enemy,” wrote one defender with Spanish hyperbole. The survivors ran down into the ravine and then up and reached the castle walls. Now Bradley’s strategy was revealed: Roderick pulled out the grenadoes he’d tied to his belt and tried to set the castle’s wooden walls alight, and his comrades did the same with any combustible they carried. But the barrage from above was too fierce; Bradley finally had to call the retreat. As Roderick ran from a battle for the first time in his life, he was startled to hear the words “Victoria! Victoria!” ringing out from the fort. He swore underneath his breath.