Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  The next morning he awoke to find his army vanished; in the middle of the night, over 500 of his men had sneaked away back to Panama. The farce had reached its climax.

  It is striking how much the collapse of the Spanish before the buccaneers mirrored, in miniature, the collapse of the Inca in the face of the conquistadors a century and a half earlier. Although the conquistadors’ alliances with the Indians had a great deal to do with their success, the Inca were defeated because, in part, they believed that the Spanish were divine and destined to conquer. The Spanish, who had conquered most of the known world with steel, horses, and bureaucracy, who had created the greatest culture since Rome, would have seemed to be beyond such ghost stories; but they had slowly ceded some of the same mythic attributes to these unlettered men from Port Royal. Of course, a Spaniard could say he was rational and knew that the English walked on two legs and bled when shot—until, that is, the barbarians were camped outside his city. Then he became prone to the wildest superstitions, subject to every rumor and vision, a medievalist trapped in an unfolding prophecy. The empire had defeated the greatest armies on earth, driven the Moors from the peninsula, humbled France and England. But in the New World, at least, the Spanish could not help turning Morgan into a kind of deity who perhaps ate children and whose hair, it was said, brushed the branches of trees ten feet off the ground. He was evil, yes, but that was irrelevant. The point was that he was unstoppable.

  Of course, the Spanish were right to fear the buccaneers; they were expert killers. And the buccaneers, without meaning to, also duplicated some of the methods that had enabled the Spanish to conquer the New World: forming alliances with disgruntled natives and carrying superior firearms, to name just two. But when perfectly capable soldiers who had faced Indians and the lethal maroons turned and ran, white-faced with terror, it was not the grudging retreat of an army who had met the enemy and found itself outgunned. It was a form of mass hysteria. Or, in Spanish terms, an enchantment.

  Don Juan trudged back to the city, after leaving behind some squadrons who he hoped would pester Morgan on his approach and pick off some of his men. He arrived in Panama having done all he could with the earthly elements of battle; he’d sent troops down the river to fight Morgan, warned the healthy men of the city to be ready for service, seen that the city’s armaments were in their best possible shape. But men had failed him. Now he turned to the supernatural. Sacred images were carried from the churches by the monks and the nuns of Our Lady of Rosario and others and displayed to all. The people of Panama fell in behind these processions beseeching their favored saints to strike down the corsarios and leave their city in peace. Masses were paid for. Relics were brought out of their cases and paraded through the streets. And Don Juan marched back into the city and on January 25 gave a rousing address to rally the citizens:

  That all those who were true Spanish Catholicks, Defenders of the Faith, and Devoto’s of our Lady of Pure and Immaculate Conception, should follow my Person, being that same day at four o’clock in the afternoon, resolved to march out to seek the Enemy and with this caution, that he that should refuse to do it, should be held as Infamous and a Coward, basely slighting so precise an Obligation.

  It was a speech laced with bitterness; Don Juan had been disappointed so many times he could almost believe that even with their families and fortunes in imminent danger, the men of Panama would refuse to do battle. But his words were received with a loud cheer; men swore in front of their families to fight to the death. Don Juan led the huge crowd to the church and vowed to die in the defense of the Lady of Pure and Immaculate Conception, donating a diamond ring worth 40,000 pieces of eight ($2 million) to indicate that he was serious. Other “Jewels and Relicks” were also given to the religious orders; they included fine vestments made of silk and linen laced with gold thread and weighed down with jewels embedded in the fabric; an irreplaceable necklace made of emeralds from the mines of Colombia; diamond rings, a diamond-encrusted gold staff, and gems in bulk. Few if any Spanish governors had made such a gesture before a battle with the privateers; there was something final in the laying down of all Don Juan’s earthly possessions.

  The crowd chanted the same oath as their president: death or victory. In the minds of its defenders, the battle for Panama had now explicitly become the defense of the Catholic frontier against Morgan and his Protestant heathens, a religious confrontation exactly like those that rang through Spanish history. The days before the showdown heightened the symbolic dream the Panamanians were living in. In their hearts they knew that few men in the city truly lived for God the way their ancestors had, but now they convinced themselves that dying for Him would give their men the final incentive. The pirates, on the other hand, had no such illusions; they knew down to the last piece of eight what they were fighting for.

  The city was frenetic: Men gathered whatever weapons they could get hold of and finalized their affairs; women and children, along with monks and nuns, boarded ships that would carry them along the coast to safety. Much of the city’s wealth, including Don Juan’s rich bequests to the religious orders, was being packed into the holds of ships, and Don Juan knew that with their families and fortunes safely on the waves, two huge motivations for his fighters would be gone. But he reluctantly agreed; his lawyer would later point out that Panama’s open layout gave no protection to its citizens, and forcing them to stay with their plate and gems would have been inviting annihilation. He instructed that all the vessels in the harbor leave, so that the buccaneers would not be able to pursue the fleeing residents.

  Now on Sunday, Don Juan marched out of the city to the savannah to meet the enemy. His army had swelled to 1,200 men, “compounded of two sorts, valiant military Men, and faint-hearted Cowards.” He had three field pieces, primed for firing, but his armaments in general were “few and bad”: carbines, arquebuses, and fowling pieces. But for a moment Don Juan allowed himself to believe that his army, fired by the Holy Spirit, could stand its own against the buccaneers: “The Army appeared all brisk and courageous, desiring nothing more than to engage,” he reported. They would strike against Morgan like lightning, Don Juan thought. The old faith died hard.

  The Spanish tactics were simple: The first three ranks of soldiers would wait until the buccaneers came within range and then take a knee and fire. They would retire, and the next lines of defenders would come up and discharge their arms. The wide-open plains gave Don Juan few advantages to work with, but he took what he was given, buttressing his right flank by placing it up against a small hill. His approach was drastically straightforward; his men were arrayed across the plain, armed mostly with halberds and lances and the occasional arquebus; many of the Indians had bows and arrows. A line of cavalry stood in front of them, and one squadron of horsemen waited on each wing, armed with lances. His only innovation was to hold in reserve a herd of fifteen hundred bulls tended by fifty black cowboys; Don Juan hoped to drive the snorting beasts into the buccaneers’ formation from both left and right, scattering them at a critical moment. Don Juan had fought with the Spanish armies in the Netherlands, and he envisioned a confrontation that could have been lifted out of the European book of war: The charging buccaneers would be fed into the center of his line, where they would be decimated by his artillery and musketeers; then the cavalry would close in from both sides, slashing at the buccaneers’ flanks. Finally the oxen would stampede the survivors off the plain and send them hurtling back to the Chagres and beyond.

  Two days later, on the evening of Tuesday, January 27, Morgan marched his men toward Panama. The 600 men in the vanguard were still celebrating their crossing of the isthmus with toasts of wine. The first impression of the Spanish was one of relief: One Spanish soldier called out to Don Juan, “We have nothing to fear. There are no more than six hundred drunkards.” The English had not expected so many defenders of the city; Morgan, who tended to inflate the Spanish contingents at every turn, counted 2,100 foot and 600 horse. Certainly Don Juan’s forces had swell
ed as stragglers rolled in from the Chagres, but those numbers seem a little high. Nevertheless, Esquemeling reported a crisis of faith among his comrades. “They discovered the forces of the people of Panama,” he tells us, “in battle array, which, when they perceived to be so numerous, they were suddenly surprised with great fear, much doubting the fortune of the day.” But after the hell they had just been through, few of the buccaneers could realistically have been thinking of retreat against a motley army such as faced them on the great plain, especially when one of the fabled cities of the Spanish Main lay before them. The Spanish reports have the buccaneers singing and dancing, which sounds more like Morgan’s men. At last the buccaneers bucked themselves up “and resolved either to conquer, or spend the very last drop of blood in their bodies.” One of the things that made the privateers such a fearsome enemy was that for them there was no other option. The Spanish had made the same vow, but experience showed that they were focused on survival. It was their hearts that began to fail first. In the Spanish ranks, González, the coward of the Chagres, remarked that he was keeping two horses close at hand to beat a quick retreat and that anyone with any sense would do the same. Don Juan called him a “chicken and an enemy spy” and ordered him shut away in the local jail.

  The sun rose into a clear sky on Wednesday, imparting that first light brush of heat across the face that foretells a scorching day. Morgan had divided his men into three separate forces: the 300-strong vanguard, manned by the marksmen of the Hispaniola woods, would be commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Prince, with Morgan’s old ally Major John Morris as second-in-command. The right wing of the main body of 600 would be led by Morgan, the left wing by Colonel Edward Collier; the rear guard was under the command of the newly arrived Colonel Bledry Morgan (no relation to Henry). The “land” titles of major and lieutenant were now used exclusively; the North Sea lay miles behind them, and they were about to fight the kind of traditional field battle that echoed through the history of England and Spain. The ragamuffin sea bandits had transformed themselves into a classic European army. Fortified with fresh slabs of beef (some of the cattle having been brought along for sustenance), the ranks moved out to finally confront Don Juan.

  It was afternoon before the privateers drew up to confront the Spaniards. Morgan took in the situation at a glance: Without any spies he couldn’t know the quality of the men who faced him or the caliber or number of their weapons; he had no idea that many of the black, Indian, and mestizo troops had “never in their lives…seen bullets.” It looked like a serious army; it could include reinforcements from the garrisons of any number of towns and cities. But Morgan soon spotted what he thought was a chink in Don Juan’s strategy: The small hill on the Spaniard’s right flank appeared undermanned. If he could take it and drive his men down it, he’d dramatically narrow the battlefield and reduce the ability of Don Juan’s cavalry to maneuver. He sent Prince and his vanguard to storm the hill; hidden by a ravine, the squadron dropped out of sight, then quickly swept up the incline at the rear. Now they looked down on the right wing of the Spanish cavalry. The horsemen saw the approaching buccaneers, wheeled their mounts toward them, cried, “Viva el Rey!” (“God save the king!”), and charged at the figures outlined in the blazing sun.

  If the cavalry was to get into the vanguard’s ranks, the advantage would turn to them; the English musket and cutlass would be of little use against horsemen towering above them driving lances into their chests. But the Brethren, not panicking, dropped to one knee and took aim at the line of onrushing horses, and with a sharp crack of muskets the front line fell. The horses sprawled out on the plain, which along with the soggy ground made it difficult for the horsemen behind them to maneuver. Morgan noted an act of bravery by the cavalry’s leader: “One Francesco de Harro charged with the horse upon the vanguard so furiously that he could not be stopped till he lost his life.” But the advance had been quickly shattered. (The buccaneers left their mark everywhere—the hill is now known as El Cerro del Avance.)

  Don Juan’s brightest hope, the cavalry, had been taken out of the picture. And now the infantry made a tactical mistake; seeing Morgan’s vanguard drop down into the ravine on their way to take the hill, they had assumed that the buccaneers were retreating. The left wing broke ranks and gave chase. “All of a sudden, I heard a loud clamour, crying out, ‘Fall on, fall on, for they fly!’” Don Juan recalled. Their commander tried to hold the men back, but he couldn’t stop the mad rush, “though he cut them with his Sword.” Don Juan’s hand was forced, and he wheeled his horse to the right and ordered his wing to follow the running troops as they raced toward the hill. “Come along, boys!” he cried out with a mixture of excitement and fatalism. “There is no remedy now, but to Conquer or Die. Follow me!”

  Spaniards charging against buccaneers—it was a highly unusual situation. But Morgan’s men, descending the hill, responded like well-oiled killing machines. They took aim at the wild-eyed infantrymen and fired. The first volley tore through the first line of onrushing Spaniards, and a hundred of them dropped to the earth dead or severely wounded, gaping holes torn in their chests and stomachs. The sight dampened the Spanish ardor. “Hardly did our men see some fall dead,” Don Juan remembered, “and others wounded, but they turned their backs, and fled.” A moment before, Don Juan had been riding the crest of his soldiers’ courage; now he was left nearly alone, accompanied by a single Negro soldier and one servant. He watched his men run and must have wished he could have followed them. But he was an honorable man and felt someone had to make a show of sticking to their vow to defend Panama. Centuries of Spanish history resonated in that moment; Don Juan was sacrificing himself for a tradition his men had disgraced. “Yet I went forward to comply with my word to the Virgin, which was to die in her Defence,” he wrote. A bullet barely missed his face and ricocheted off the staff he carried in his hand. Seeing how exposed he was, a priest who knew Don Juan well and even said mass in his home caught up to the president and begged him to leave the battlefield. The old warrior twice refused and “sharply reprehended” the priest for suggesting retreat. The priest wouldn’t budge. “The third time, he persisted, telling me that it was mere desperation to die in that manner, and not like a Christian,” Don Juan remembered. With the buccaneers charging straight toward him, in pursuit of the fleeing troops, Don Juan saw the sense of the priest’s argument and relented. He was unhurt and considered it a miracle that the Virgin had protected him “from amidst so many thousand Bullets.”

  Don Juan wheeled his horse and saw a scene of devastation: dead horses jackknifed on the grass, bodies of men littered across the savanna, arms and legs blown off by English ball, arquebuses tossed aside in terror, wounded soldiers being chased down by the buccaneers and chopped in the back of the neck with cutlasses, the wild bulls stampeding away from the buccaneers, terrified by the reports of the muskets and the screams. (The few that made it into the buccaneers’ lines merely tangled their horns in Morgan’s flag before being shot down by his men.) The Spanish defense collapsed. “I endeavoured with all my industry to persuade the soldiers to turn and face our enemies,” Don Juan said, “but it was impossible.” The pirates were moving through the plain executing the wounded, perhaps chopping off a finger with an attractive ring or snatching off a gold necklace. In the distance were the diminishing figures of Don Juan’s cavalry and infantry; as Morgan said, the retreat “came to plain running.” For three miles the buccaneers chased the terrified Spaniards, who attempted to hide in bushes and shrubs; discovered by a privateer, they would clasp their hands and cry out for mercy. But there was none to be had. Anyone who made the slightest resistance died.

  The devastation was not over. Don Juan had given orders to the commander of the artillery, waiting back in the city: If Morgan won the day, he was to set a match to the garrison’s magazines and blow the fort sky-high. The Spanish had denied Morgan food on his trip across the isthmus; now they would deny him the means to go down the coast with fresh suppli
es. The commander could hear the sounds of battle in the distance, but he couldn’t know who was prevailing—until, that is, he saw the first of the retreating soldiers, running with buccaneers in hot pursuit. He lit the fuse and ran for safety. When the gunpowder ignited, the almighty boom could be heard six miles away. It was the opening salvo in the destruction of Panama itself.

  As survivors from the battle streamed over the Matadero Bridge, the city still had some fight left in it. Some of the streets were barricaded, others booby-trapped with two hundred kegs of powder. Snipers took the occasional shot at the buccaneers as they smashed into the city, looting houses and drinking up the stores of wine. The flat crump of the detonating kegs could be heard in the distance; a fuse would reach a barrel, and a house in the next street would suddenly explode. Splinters came raining down on the privateers as they ruthlessly snuffed out any sign of resistance, taking time out to pillage as they made their way across the city; burning embers touched off fires. Soon flames crackled through the wood-frame houses of the merchants. The monk, and Don Juan’s fever, had been precise oracles. “Burn, burn!” cried out Spaniards in the street. “That is the order of Señor Don Juan!” The final touch came when black soldiers appeared on the streets with torches and began setting fire to the homes. If the buccaneers wanted Panama, its citizens would leave them a wasteland.