The Brethren retired to the brush, nursed their wounds, gulped down water, and regarded the castle with malice. Roderick massaged his bad leg and debated with the others “whether to forsake the Enterprise.” But they decided there were things worse than death, namely “the Thoughts of Disgrace, and of being reproached by our Friends on board.” Like any proud fighting force, the Brethren were intensely protective of their reputation, and the thought of losing face made them “disregard even life itself.” As night fell, they charged a second time across the darkened field. The Spaniards, more confident than ever, welcomed them back: “Come on, ye English dogs,” they shouted, “enemies to God and our king; let your other companions that are behind come on, too; ye shall not go to Panama this bout.” Dusk provided cover, and the Spaniards fired at black shapes moving across black ground. The buccaneers dropped to their knees and raked the walls as their comrades slipped ahead and launched fireballs at the palm-leaf roof that sheltered the Spanish musketeers from rain and sun. The battle raged on until, according to Esquemeling, an act of sheer physical courage altered its course:
One of the pirates was wounded with an arrow in his back, which pierced his body to the other side. This instantly he pulled out with great valour at the side of his breast then taking a little cotton that he had about him, he wound it about the said arrow, and putting it into his musket, he shot it back into the castle. But the cotton being kindled by the powder, occasioned two or three houses that were within the castle…to take fire.
The fire crept onward until it caught onto a “parcel of powder” (in Spanish reports it was a loaded bronze cannon), which exploded, raining flame and burning thatch onto the roof and the wooden walls. Other buccaneers snapped up arrows and shot them toward the looming castle. The Spanish rushed to douse the flames, but every musketeer pulled into firefighting duty was a loss to the fort’s defenses, and the pirates began picking off figures silhouetted against the flames. The explosion had ripped a huge gap into the wooden palisades, and the breach became the scene of vicious, close-up fighting. Roderick found himself near the gap and blasted away at point-blank range through the gaping hole, falling back to reload while another buccaneer jumped into his spot and fired, as the Spanish tossed their combustibles at the Brethren’s heads.
The palisades were now aflame in several places, and the six-inch mahogany walls began to collapse, spilling out their earthen contents and exposing the soldiers inside. The perimeter of the castle was roasting hot; the bodies of soldiers lay near the walls, terribly burned or bullet-ridden, the wounded calling out for water. The garrison’s morale began to crumble; men deserted their posts and made their way down the stairway cut into the rock, escaping to boats tied along the river and then heading upstream toward Panama. The battle raged through the night, until even the privateers could no longer fight in the heat. They retreated and waited until the morning of January 6, which was a holiday known as the Epiphany of the Wise Kings. If the defenders of San Lorenzo had been back in Spain, they would have watched the burning of the Christmas tree, a tradition of the day, after children had swarmed over it and stripped it of its candies and treats. Perhaps a few remembered the date and called their minds back to happier times, for when first light came, showing jagged holes in the fort’s walls, with the remaining musketeers struggling to wriggle through the gaps, they must have known that many of them were not going to live out the day.
With a yell the Brethren attacked again, “shooting very furiously” and tossing grenade after grenade. The defenders wheeled their cannons down to the breaches and fired point-blank at their attackers, the castellan having ordered his men to fight to the death. The buccaneers had rarely seen Spaniards fight with such resolve; when their powder ran out, the Spaniards switched to lances and cutlasses and hacked at the men who attempted to slip between the splintered walls. It was now hand-to-hand, primeval war, with the castellan fighting alongside his men. When their lances broke, the Spaniards pulled out their cutlasses; when the cutlasses were knocked out of their hands, they picked up stones. Both Esquemeling and the Spanish letters written after the attack confirm that few conquistadors or musketeers in the legendary battles against the Moors had fought more bravely; the surgeon called their performance “very courageous and warlike.” Roderick and the other men were impressed; they would never speak of the men of San Lorenzo except with a frank admiration. The noise of the battle was so great that it reached the ears of Francisco González Salado, the man Don Juan had chosen to defend the isthmus. The forty-year old Spaniard had 400 to 500 men under his command and was waiting eighteen miles away at the River of Two Fathoms for news of the invasion. Hearing the cannon, he sent fifty soldiers to San Lorenzo. When they were six miles from the castle, they began meeting the desperately injured and terrified men who were running for their lives, and they relayed word of the attack back to González. The men abandoning the castle headed back toward Panama or melted away into the jungle.
At the castle, the pirates were simply proving too strong. They did not suffer deserters (or at least none are mentioned in the records), and what for the Spanish was heroic service was to the buccaneers their everyday fighting style. Eventually their numbers and their maniacal courage won the day; they streamed inside the castle and began slashing at the men with their cutlasses or executing them on the spot with their pistols. “The enemy refused quarter,” Morgan reported tersely, “which cost them 360 men.” As the buccaneers ran through the castle and had their vengeance on the enemy, those still at the foot of the walls looked up to witness Spanish musketeers diving from the top of the walls to the rocks below, dashing themselves to pieces rather than ask for quarter. As the buccaneers poured in, the castellan refused to yield; two cannons were wheeled in front of his position as he prepared for a last defense. But a privateer took aim with his musket and fired a shot, “which pierced his skull into his brain.” The defense of San Lorenzo was over. As the deserters paddled their canoes away from the burning fort, they heard the French buccaneers break into the song they had sung earlier: “Victoire, victoire.”
The pirates killed everything that moved within the fort; the Spanish had not asked for quarter, and they didn’t receive it. Roderick had run out of ammunition, so he took his cutlass and chopped at the necks of the Spaniards he found cowering behind shattered remnants of the barricade. The buccaneers had lost thirty men and seventy-six wounded, including Lieutenant Colonel Bradley, who had been shot in the leg. The wounded suffered terrible agonies in the heat, their wounds festering. There is no record of whether the fleet’s surgeon accompanied the San Lorenzo mission, but even if he was on the scene, one man caring for seventy casualties would have been afforded little time for niceties. One account of a shipboard operation on a pirate named Phillips reveals the level of care a patient might receive. The ship’s surgeon was absent, so it was decided that the carpenter would have to remove the man’s wounded leg. The carpenter fetched his biggest saw, secured the man’s ankle underneath his arm, and cut off the leg “in as little time as he could have cut a…Board in two.” There is no mention of anesthesia, and the stump was treated by heating an ax in the fire and then cauterizing the wound, but the carpenter burned the patient’s flesh “distant from the Place of Amputation, that it had like to have morify’d.” A patient had to pray that the surgeon was competent and sober, two attributes that were quite rare on a buccaneer ship. But most of all, he had to hope that his wounds did not get infected; once they did, death almost always followed. Bradley was an example; his wounds turned gangrenous, and he lingered in agony for ten days before succumbing to his injuries. His squadron had lost more than a quarter of their strength; if this was an omen of things to come, Morgan might run out of men before he held Panama.
Back on Providence the admiral received word of the storming of San Lorenzo. The first step was taken; now, like any smart commander, he prepared his way back from the battle. He dumped the Spanish guns into the sea and set fire to all the island’s
huts and most of its castles. If the Spanish wanted to take back the little isle, he’d give them no help. He left the strongest fort untouched and ordered it stocked with provisions; if he needed a place to hole up after the raid on Panama, it would be waiting for him.
Five days after Bradley’s victory, Morgan sighted San Lorenzo and the English colors flying over it. Instead of looking up at the flag, Morgan’s captains should have been looking down, as just below the surface of the water near the river’s mouth was a notorious reef, called Laja. Morgan never saw it. Esquemeling tells us what happened next. Five of the ships, led by Morgan’s Satisfaction, slammed into the razor-sharp coral, tearing huge holes in their hulls and throwing men into the water. A powerful north wind kept the ships impaled on the reef, raking them over the coral until they were unsalvageable. Morgan had never been much of a sailor, and now he simply moved his men and matériel off the stricken vessels and packed them into the remaining ships. As long as he had men, he could get other ships. He lost ten buccaneers in the accident, including the expedition’s only female member, the much-gossiped-about witch. She failed the traditional test for enchantresses by drowning in the blue waters. Roderick and the others were actually relieved; suspected witches on board were horrible luck.
When Morgan was brought into the captured fort, “great acclamations of triumph” echoed off its walls. He supervised the last of the repairs to the castle; as on Providence, he was fortifying his escape route even as he proceeded toward Panama. But he couldn’t linger; there were rumors that Spanish forces were already on the march to retake the fallen castle. Morgan left 300 men to guard it, selected seven ships from the fleet, commandeered some of the local canoes, and began the trek across the isthmus. Esquemeling noted one fateful decision the admiral made before setting out for the Venice of the Spanish Main: “He carried very small provisions with him, being in good hopes he should provide himself sufficiently among the Spaniards.” It was a decision Morgan would come to regret.
The approach to Panama was, in some ways, a return to Morgan’s past. In the woods ahead, along the thickly wooded banks, he knew that guerrillas were waiting silently for him. Many of them were black and mulatto soldiers, just as he’d faced back in Jamaica during the first months of the English invasion. They had lived in the woods and small towns along the Chagres for years, knew its terrain intimately, its hiding spots, its natural ambush points. San Lorenzo had been a classic storming of a stockade, a method of attack that went back to the Crusades and beyond. But now Morgan could be facing a more modern style of warfare that had devastated Cromwell’s army when it settled Jamaica. The admiral had better-trained men under him than the raw youths who had fallen on Jamaica, but they were packed tightly into canoes and boats, perfect targets for hidden marksmen behind the fronds. His 1,500 men, watchful and tense, paddled down the Chagres with eyes on the brush line.
On the other side waited Francisco González Salado. Don Juan’s chosen man had parceled out his 400 men to four stockades that had been built between the mouth of the Chagres and Venta de Cruces; they were lightly armed with lances, bows and arrows, muskets and pistols. He also had scouts on foot and in canoes patrolling the Chagres. González had decided to use his men not as guerrillas but in fortifications that could perhaps kill off enough of Morgan’s men to prevent the invasion from reaching Panama. It was clearly a flawed strategy; San Lorenzo’s 400-plus musketeers, fighting like lions, had failed to stop a small contingent of the Brethren. How could a comparable amount of men, divided into four squadrons, without cannon, protected only by thrown-up stockades, hope to do better? A shoot-and-run campaign would have been a more lethal choice, but González stood by his Spanish training.
There were guerrillas on the way, however. The president of Panama had received an intriguing overture from three captains in the local prison: Let them out of jail, give them arms and men, and allow them to attack Morgan on the river. If they succeeded, charges would be dropped. If not, they would die in the service of Panama and their reputations would be saved. These men had grown up on the river and knew where Morgan would be vulnerable. The offer was accepted, and the three set off with 150 men; that number would double once they met up with González’s forces and were reinforced. Don Juan was trying to keep Morgan as far away from the city as he could and to force the battle in the difficult, pestilent jungle rather than on the plains of Panama, where the Welshman would have the advantage.
The freed captains and their squadron made their way down to a settlement called Dos Brazos and perched along the tree line, waiting in ambush. They were expecting a force the same size that had attacked San Lorenzo, about 400 men. When the first canoes appeared on the river, the Panamanians checked their powder and prepared a surprise barrage. But then more canoes appeared, buccaneers hanging over the sides, and then small boats, and then more canoes. The vessels kept coming, an endless line of grizzled men with shiny muskets. The buccaneer army was almost four times the size of what the captains had been expecting. They wished to clear their names, but the odds of four-to-one against Henry Morgan were a dead man’s bet. Instead of opening up on the English devils, the Spanish watched as a party of Morgan’s men beached their canoes, foraged among the abandoned huts, and stretched their legs onshore. The lazy privateers were easily within musket range, and they were open to attack. The Spanish gaped as some of the men even lay down on the banks and fell asleep, while others sat smoking a pipe of tobacco. The Spanish sharpshooters fingered their triggers, but the names of Morgan’s victories echoed in the captains’ minds: Granada, Portobelo, Maracaibo. They held their fire.
Back in Panama, Don Juan was expecting to hear that the buccaneers had been attacked and their progress disrupted, or that the Panama squadron had retaken San Lorenzo. But the captains’ report filled him with disgust: “They neither fought with them nor did more than flee to the mountains,” Don Juan lamented, “without trying either of the two things that they had planned.” The squadron reported that they had meant to attack the buccaneers upstream, but an incompetent Indian guide had led them astray and they had missed their chance. The valor of San Lorenzo was dissolving like a mirage.
To the many reasons that the ordinary Spanish soldier was given not to fight—bad or no pay, poor equipment, legitimate fear of the pirates’ reputation—was added the basic nature of the pirates’ invasion. Despite Morgan’s commission from the council of Jamaica, the Brethren were not there to occupy the land and enslave the people. They moved through, robbed what they could, and left. If the pirates had been traditional conquerors, settling in the territories they invaded, they would probably have met much stiffer resistance from settlers fighting for both their freedom and their land. But if you could hide from the buccaneers, you could live another day, and every soldier and militia member knew that. It was like a charging bull: You could place yourself in front of it and attempt to pierce its heart with your saber, or you could step to the side and let it brush your thigh and continue on its way. The latter choice made special sense for the poor. If you had little or no valuables yourself, why take a bullet for those who did?
Now all that stood between the buccaneers and Panama were the four lightly defended stockades. The canoes paddled up the river, while the larger ships caught breezes and sailed along. The Chagres by water was a very different prospect from the Chagres by riverbank. A nineteenth-century traveler described the pleasant scene: “In some places lofty hills, densely timbered, rose from the river banks, in others, gentle slopes of brightest green pasture terminated in white sandy shores and again impenetrable underwood, covered with ivy, formed natural arbors of every imaginable shape, abutting on the stream.” Roderick spotted alligators slipping into the water at the first canoes’ approach and heard parrots chattering; huge swarms of insects billowed like cumulus clouds. Even for the well-traveled pirate, there was an exotic aspect to the whole thing: three-toed sloths hammocked onto tree branches; rare nocturnal butterflies flitting by in the moonlight; ante
aters, black-handed spider monkeys and howler monkeys, whose calls could be heard for miles across the treetops; the jaguar and puma stayed hidden, but their movements were heralded by a river of sound moving through the jungle, its waves overlapping onto the Chagres. The waterway was broad and tranquil (it would now be classified as a Class II) and only occasionally narrowed into churning rapids. But it corkscrewed back and forth through the landscape; a man rowing up it to Venta de Cruces would travel three times the distance as the crow flies. Still, it was one of the few moments in Roderick’s life when he could be said to be sightseeing; if it weren’t for the awful hunger chewing at his entrails, he could have enjoyed himself. The only worry was the low water levels in the river; even for the shallow canoes, there were toppled trees and tough mangrove roots that turned the journey into an obstacle course. The privateers wasted time paddling up tributaries that looked like the Chagres, only to have to backtrack and find the main route, or guess at it.
Unless there were rains to fill up the river, they would have to slash through the green wall of jungle sooner than they hoped. On the third day, the entire force disembarked and began cutting their way through the vines and creepers. The men left to tend the boats were warned against landing. “To these Captain Morgan gave very strict orders, under great penalties, that no man, upon any pretext whatsoever, should dare to leave the boats and go ashore.” He’d learned the lesson of the early days on Jamaica all too well. Roderick disembarked and with the other buccaneers began the exhausting work of opening up a path in the jungle. After three hours, his right arm felt like lead, and the others quickly found the work so “dirty and irksome” that Morgan quickly ordered the men back to the canoes. Roderick was relieved. They would use every foot of the river they could.
On the fourth day, one of the scouts called out that they were approaching an ambuscade. Rather than go silent with foreboding, the men grew excited, as the decision to leave most of their food behind was taking its toll. The warning produced “infinite joy” among the pirates; Spanish fortifications meant Spanish soldiers, which meant Spanish supplies. Morgan’s intelligence was unusually thin; he didn’t know how many men were waiting behind the palisades, how they were armed, whether there were archers, cannon, battle-tested soldiers, or farmers drafted into the fight. But the men didn’t care. As the attack squad approached the fortification, Roderick waited for the first shot, but as he came closer and closer without a single bullet aimed his way, he soon suspected the truth and went yelling toward the palisades, his comrades by his side. The Spanish had fled, burning their huts and taking their provisions with them. The men had obviously fallen victim to night terrors; such things as honor and duty mattered little when every snap of a twig and monkey call seemed to announce the arrival of the ravaging hordes.
Empire of Blue Water Page 24
