Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  The privateers’ joy quickly turned to bitterness: All that the enemy had left them were a few crumbs of bread and some leather bags. Roderick was now so desperate that he began to chew at the leather, and the other men grabbed at the sacks as well, “as being desirous to afford something to the ferment of their stomachs, which now was grown so sharp that it did gnaw their very bowels, having nothing else to prey upon.” As knives flashed out and the leather was ripped into portions, the Brethren smoldered. There wasn’t enough of the cowhide to go around; the strongest got a piece of the bags, while others only watched them force it down. As they left the stockade and resumed their journey, Esquemeling makes a startling claim: The buccaneers were so famished that they were ready to eat their enemy. “Finding no victuals, they were now infinitely desirous to meet [the Spaniards],” he tells us, “intending to devour some of them rather than perish.” The low river was complicating the mission: Morgan would have to choose what supplies to carry, as it now appeared he’d have to travel farther overland than he had first thought. To a buccaneer it was an easy choice: weapons first, food second. The beef and maize were left with one of his captains, who with 200 men would hold the stockade against any Spanish rescue party. The privateers “betook themselves to the wild wood” and came on another stockade, also deserted. The panic rose in their throats: They were fifty miles from Panama, and there didn’t appear to be a rat or a corncob to eat. The leftover pieces of leather came out of the buccaneers’ satchels, and they began to prepare them, smashing the cowhide between two stones to soften it, dipping it into the river, and rubbing it vigorously. By taking large gulps of water between bites, they were able to force the meal down.

  The jungle was now a full-fledged nightmare. Striking off from the meandering riverbank, the men tried to cut a straight path through the undergrowth, but the vines and wait-a-minute creepers took many hacks to cut through; thorns ripped at their clothes, insects got into their boots, mosquitoes dived for their blood. Some had gone three days without anything resembling decent food. The Spanish were now an afterthought; the men prayed to be ambushed, because troops meant supplies. Finally, on the fifth day of their trek, at a place called Barbacoa, they found another abandoned stockade and this time a grotto that hid “two sacks of meal, wheat and like things” and two large jars of wine, along with some plantains. Morgan instantly ordered that the supplies be parceled out to the sickest and hungriest men. Here was a rigorous test of his leadership: His men were literally starving, and yet they were being asked to give up the food and wine so that a brother privateer could live a few more days. But Morgan was still the admiral, and the scant rations were passed down the line to those who could barely walk, who, “having refreshed themselves with these victuals…began to march anew with greater courage than ever.” Those whom the food did not revive were placed in the canoes, and healthy men were ordered to walk. Deep in the Panamanian jungle, Morgan’s discipline was still iron.

  The sixth day dawned, and the Brethren started trudging forward, more automatons than men. They stopped frequently to rest, hundreds of men lying like corpses along the riverbank, too hot, hungry, and exhausted to move. The only food Roderick could find was leaves and green herbs; some of his mates were reduced to chewing grass. Their hunger curdled into bitterness against Morgan. The real question was quickly becoming, how long could he hold this rebel army together?

  A temporary solution materialized. When they arrived around noon at a plantation and found a “barn full of maize,” the men went wild, tearing the barn doors off, scooping up the dry kernels in their hands and eating it, without bothering about cooking the stuff. They ate their fill and distributed the rest of the maize before resuming their hike. Soon after leaving the plantation, a flurry of arrows descended on them: a minor ambush. The privateers took cover and quickly spotted the enemy: a troop of local Indians tracking them from across the river. A few of the men jumped into the river and tried to swim across and take some of the Indians prisoner. But the enemy just laughed at the white men crashing through the water; taking careful aim, they fired off a few more arrows and killed two or three of them. To the rest they cried, “Ha! Ye dogs, go to the plain, go to the plain.” (The plain was the savannah surrounding Panama.) After amusing themselves with target practice, the Indians vanished into the scenery. It scarcely mattered to them whether Panama burned or not.

  The fabled city seemed more and more distant. The buccaneers had imagined that once past San Lorenzo, the approach to Panama would be relatively quick, but it had turned into a grim battle against nature itself. As the buccaneers camped that night, the mood turned: “Great murmurings were heard,…many complaining of Captain Morgan and his conduct in that enterprize.” It didn’t help that many of the men had thrown away their maize when the Indians attacked; wasteful and optimistic by nature, the privateers expected to easily overwhelm the enemy and gorge on their fancier food. Now they were bone-hungry again. Roderick talked openly of returning to Jamaica with other buccaneers; others swore they would rather rot in the jungle than retrace their steps without a satchelful of silver coins. Their guides, who must have been under great pressure to lead them to a settlement, tried to convince them all that they’d soon be feasting on beef and Madeira. The stares they received in return convinced them they’d better find something, and soon.

  On the seventh day, Roderick began cleaning his musket, dry-firing it to make sure it was still working. His gun had been kept coated with grease and tucked away in an oilcloth; with yesterday’s ambush the weapon would have come out and been exposed to the muck of the riverbank. He checked to see that his matches were still firmly sealed in the bottle he carried and that his powder had stayed dry. Venta de Cruces was within one day’s march, and it was the last key outpost before Panama; if the Spaniards were going to make a stand anywhere before the limits of their beloved city, it would be there.

  The next day they crossed the river and, a new spring in their step, hurried toward their objective. When they were still “a great distance” from Venta de Cruces, they suddenly spotted smoke ahead, which apparently came from chimneys. This caused widespread excitement among the pirates; they began talking with one another about what the smoke meant, even as the pace quickened. The few clearheaded members of the Brethren must have known that the smoke was not a good sign, but the others raved on as if they were approaching an English country village on Christmas Day, where their relatives awaited them. The famished men could almost smell the plum pudding and game hen. Esquemeling recorded some of their conversations: “There is smoke coming out of every house, therefore they are making good fires, to roast and boil what we are to eat.” The surgeon called these thoughts “castles in the air.” It was highly unlikely the Spaniards were preparing dinner for a thousand pirates eager to despoil their town. Hunger was now causing the men to hallucinate. By the outskirts of the town, they were running.

  When they burst into the settlement, “all sweating and panting,” it was empty. The smoke came from the burning homes of the Spaniards, who had fled and taken everything remotely edible with them, apart from a few stray dogs and cats. After drawing all his forces to Venta de Cruces, González, who was leading the men sent by Don Juan to ambush Morgan, had lost his nerve. He told Don Juan that his men were too “useless, discontented and afraid” to face the buccaneers. Fear was the word of the hour; Don Juan responded that González’s retreat was caused not by a reasonable estimation of troop strength and fighting capacity but by the myth of Morgan. The Spanish had passed into realms of the imagination, where pirates never lost and Spaniards were always sacrificed to the sword. “The fear that oppressed them” had defeated González’s army before a shot had been fired. And with every successive collapse, the monk’s vision of Panama grew more real.

  Roderick did not feel like a world conqueror. The only things the Spanish had failed to remove from Venta de Cruces were sixteen jars of Peru wine and a sack of bread located in the king’s stables. He and the other
s didn’t wait to portion out the wine but guzzled it down and soon began retching. For a moment Morgan was terrified to think that the Spanish had poisoned his men—a brilliant strategy if it were true—but it turned out that the privateers’ “huge want of sustenance…and the manifold sorts of trash that they had eaten upon that occasion” had made their stomachs unable to digest the wine. Roderick lay where he fell, too weak to move, the entire day and through the night.

  At Venta de Cruces all the boats and canoes that had been paralleling the troops’ progress were sent back downriver, except one, which was saved for sending messengers to Morgan’s men at the first stockade. The men milled about in the empty town, searching every nook and cranny for a crumb of bread; Morgan had given orders that no one was to leave the town “except in whole companies of a hundred together.” But one group disobeyed his command and snuck out of Venta de Cruces in search of food. The hungry squadron wasn’t gone long. “These were soon glad to fly into town again, being assaulted with great fury by some Spaniards and Indians.” They lost one prisoner to the enemy.

  Panama now lay just twenty-five miles away. The men stumbled on, more dead than alive.

  Day eight: Morgan sent a vanguard of 200 men to scout the route to Panama. The paths to the city were “so narrow that only ten or twelve persons could march in a file, and oftentimes not so many.” It was perfect terrain for ambushes, and for all Morgan knew, the woods around him were swarming with the enemy. After the advance party had set out, Morgan rallied his main set of troops for the final push. He was rushing to get his men to Panama before they became too weak to fight, so he forced them to march ten hours that day. At the end of their trek, at a place called Quebrada Obscura, the privateers looked up to find the sky darkened by black shapes. “All of a sudden, three or four thousand arrows were shot at them, without [their] being able to perceive whence they came, or who shot them.” Esquemeling was multiplying by ten; in fact, there were 300 Indian archers secreted among the rocks and hillocks, along with 100 Spanish musketeers. The countryside here was more mountainous than tropical, and Morgan’s men could not see their attackers in the heights: Morgan describes how the attackers were “laying over their heads” and firing down. The buccaneers marched on through the wooded landscape, “the enemy constantly galling them with ambuscades and small parties.” The admiral ordered his men into a tighter formation, four abreast, with the vanguard out front and two lines of skirmishers fending off attacks on either side. They spotted a group of Indians, who, unlike the Spaniards, stood their ground and fought “with huge courage” until their leader fell wounded. But the Indians, who had so much less to lose than the Spaniards, then gave a lesson in how to conduct battle, with their captain showing the way. “Although he was now in despair of life,” Esquemeling tells us, “yet his valour being greater than his strength, [he] would demand no quarter, but, endeavouring to raise himself, with undaunted mind laid hold of his azagaya, or javelin, and struck at one of the Pirates.” Rearing back for another thrust, the Indian was shot by a buccaneer. His comrades were unfazed, appearing and disappearing among the hills and calling to the pirates, “To the plain, to the plain, ye cuckolds, ye English dogs!” Finally the buccaneers emerged from the jungle onto the plains. Morgan called a halt, and the men fell out to rest. Roderick had stopped dreaming about silver and pearls and thought only of meat. At dusk a downpour began, and the men’s muskets were stashed in shepherds’ huts with a few men to watch over them. Everyone else lay out in the open.

  At daybreak the men set off; Morgan wanted to use the morning mists to shield his men from the blazing sun. The isthmus was testing them to their limits; they hadn’t eaten for five days, and now “the way was more difficult and laborious than all the preceding.” Morgan’s past missions each had one thing to distinguish them as extraordinary: Gran Granada was a feat of navigation; Maracaibo was a triumph of deceptive warcraft; Portobelo was noteworthy for its loot; Panama, unexpectedly, became the greatest test of endurance that any pirate army had ever undergone. And it is a credit to the leadership of Morgan, just thirty-six years old, that hardship tended to drive his men together, make them a more cohesive and determined force, as at San Lorenzo, as in countless other situations. It was success that was the true danger.

  And now the march came to an end. At nine in the morning, Roderick, who was with the vanguard, crested a hill and saw the South Sea glittering in the distance. He could just make out the spars of six merchant ships in the bay. And marvel upon marvel: Lying at his feet, in the valley below him, were herds of cattle. The men rushed down the hill with their knives in their hands and began slaughtering the cows as they stood; others ran around collecting wood and building roaring fires on which to roast the meat. “Thus cutting the flesh of these animals into convenient pieces, or gobbets, they threw them into the fire, and, half carbonadoed or roasted, they devoured them with incredible haste and appetite.” The valley ran red, and now the men with crazed eyes appeared to be more cannibals than former citizens of old European cities, as the blood ran down through their beards and soaked their shirts. The hill was the signal to the buccaneers that they’d beaten the isthmus. Today it’s known as El Cerro de los Bucaneros.

  Fortified with the desperately needed calories, the men set off on their final march. Morgan sent a vanguard of fifty men to try to obtain some information on the state of defenses in Panama; he was attacking blind at this point, having been unable to turn one informer to his side. The scouts came across a “troop of two hundred Spaniards,” who shouted to the buccaneers, but the Brethren couldn’t decipher what they were saying. Before they were able to gather any spies, the men saw a steeple jutting above the trees ahead of them. Forget the informers—they had arrived at their target, and the men frolicked as if the city lay undefended. “They began to show signs of extreme joy,” says Esquemeling, “casting up their hats into the air, leaping for mirth, and shouting, even just as if they had already obtained the victory and entire accomplishment of their designs.”

  Morgan called a halt. The trumpeters brought out their instruments and began playing, with the drummers joining in. The music was both a celebration of the end to their long march and a warning to the citizens of Panama that the corsarios had arrived. The pirate army pitched tents and settled in for the night, knowing that the next days would decide its fortune. Roderick could not sleep with anticipation; he and the others were happy, well fed, and eager for battle.

  12

  City of Fire

  In the city of Panama, something odd was happening to Don Juan. Just as Philip IV had seen himself as the physical embodiment of the monarchy, the president of Panama could be taken to be the manifestation of Panama in the early days of 1670: As the privateers approached, he was prostrate and feverish, his body consumed by imaginary flames that swept down his limbs and scorched his skin. He was suffering from erysipelas, or “St. Anthony’s fire,” an infection in which the patient feels an intense burning sensation in his limbs, where the skin turns tender and streaks with red. Fever and chills racked the president, while fatigue clouded his mind. He vomited often, and a hot, shiny rash appeared on his chest. His doctors bled him three times, with little result. It must have been cold comfort to the Panamanians, superstitious by nature, that the President’s symptoms exactly mirrored the fate foretold in the portrait of the burning city that was still exhibited at the local convent. It was as if the leader’s body had been transformed into a miniature metropolis, a Panama-to-be. From the beleaguered city, he sent off a quick note to Don Pedro de Ulloa. “I hope the Mercy of God shall protect us,” he wrote, “and help us with the victory over these heretical dogs.”

  As the news reached him of Morgan’s progress up the Chagres, Don Juan forced himself from his sickbed and collected what remained of his manpower out of a total population of over 6,000; there were only 800 traders, administrators, mestizos, “vassals and slaves” available to him. Everyone else had either failed to return from their postings upriv
er, evacuated, disappeared, or been killed. The army’s departure left Panama with hardly a healthy male walking its streets. On January 20, as Morgan began his second day on the river, Don Juan marched his army to Guayabal, ten miles from Venta de Cruces, and waited for word from his lieutenants. Every successive report that trickled in over the next few days was a tale of disaster: stockades abandoned, battles avoided, troops on the run “without so much as ever seeing the Face of the Enemy.” The pirate army was reported to be several thousand strong; as Morgan was unable to capture a single Spanish prisoner who could be tortured for information, so Don Juan had to depend on estimates, glimpses recorded by fleeing troops.

  Clearly Don Juan would have to make a stand himself with the men he had with him; these soft-handed civilians were hardly the stuff to put against Morgan’s troops, who overawed even the kingdom’s best soldiers. He decided on Venta de Cruces and held a junta to confirm his intentions. But it was immediately apparent that the decision to stand and fight so far from Panama was not going to be popular: Those who had their fortunes stored in the city wanted to be close enough to protect them; those who didn’t have a cob to their name wanted no part of the battle. Arguments were made for staying put and for a retreat back to Panama; Don Juan quickly countered the latter. “But it being impossible then to fortifie it, it having many entrances, and the Houses all built of Wood; so soon as the Enemy should once make a breach, we should be quickly exposed to their Fury.” Finally his opponents gave up, and the exhausted, feverish Don Juan fell into bed thinking he’d at least stalled the talk of retreat.