Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  The strong winds that had swept the plains now acted as a huge bellows, blowing the fire up and arching it over the roofs. The pirates entered a city of black and orange, embers flying through the air, flames whipping from house to house, vortices of superheated air sucking the oxygen out of their lungs. Now they took on the strange role of firefighters, trying to save the city so they could pillage it. Morgan ordered barrels of powder to be detonated in lines ahead of the advancing fire, but the flames jumped the firebreaks and roared on. Valuable booty was being consumed: Silks and fine lace burned, beautifully wrought jewelry melted and streams of molten gold flowing along the floors of houses. The exhausted privateers fought throughout the day to put out the flames, “but in vain, for all was consumed by 12 at night.” There were exceptions: two churches, three hundred of the outlying houses, warehouses stocked with European linen and silk garments, the imposing stone civic buildings.

  Morgan had done what the illustrious Drake had failed to do: crossed the fearsome isthmus and taken Panama. Leading a band of cantankerous individualists to Panama was a major accomplishment. “The hazard, conduct and daringness of their exploits,” wrote historian Robert Burton, “have by some been compared to the actions of Caesar and Alexander the Great.” Now Morgan watched Panama burn, as his men swarmed over it, mad to grab all the gold and wine they could before these were destroyed by the fire. Morgan’s report was touched with a sense of the scale of what he’d done; for one of the few times in his reports, a feeling for his place in history enters into the admiral’s voice. “Thus was consumed the famous and ancient city of Panama,” he wrote. “Which is the greatest mart for silver and gold in the whole world, for it receives all the goods that come from Spain in the King’s great fleet, and delivers all the gold and silver that comes from the mines of Peru and Potozí.”

  The city burned through the night; it would take only thirty minutes for the flames to utterly ravage an entire street of wooden homes. Roderick lay in one of the stone monasteries and drank what wine he and his mates could find. He didn’t share Morgan’s sense of historical proportion; to him Panama was a storehouse of plunder, and he was anxious to begin raking in the swag in the morning. But when daylight came, Roderick and the others awoke to find Panama a place of cinders and ash. One of the few structures to survive was the stone tower of the cathedral. The tower had been transformed from the premier showpiece of a Christian civilization in its new frontier to what it would be for decades to come: a blackened, bitter landmark for Spanish mariners lost in coastal storms.

  The dead city was only the outward manifestation of what had been lost. The illusion that the Spanish in the New World were crusaders cut from the old cloth had fled along with the ranks of fleeing soldiers. They would apparently no longer fight for God. They certainly wouldn’t die for their king. The buccaneers had torn away the illusions on which the kingdom had survived for so many years.

  In full control, the buccaneers methodically searched Panama for swag. Morgan posted guards in key sectors and used the rest of his men to extract the remaining treasure from the hollowed-out city; the privateers sifted through the ruins of the finer homes. Roderick lowered a lighter comrade down a well where the water had been turned to mist by the raging fires so he could hunt for dumped plate and gems and helped rip apart the foundations and walls of buildings, looking for hidden stashes of gold and jewelry. Citizens unlucky enough to be caught up in the privateers’ dragnet were treated to hard questioning. Roderick had heard so many stories of Panama’s wealth that he found it difficult to believe that there were not piles of silver bars secreted somewhere in the city. He found melted blobs of gold here and there, but never the shining vaults packed tightly with plate that tortured his imagination. The interviewees paid heavily for their city’s reputation. There was one rumor in particular that haunted the buccaneers: There was said to be an altar made of gold that had been painted black to keep it out of the hands of the corsarios. It was never found. Instead of a torrent of loot, there was a slow, steady trickle of trinkets and chains tossed into piles and watched over jealously by the privateers.

  The buccaneers didn’t restrict themselves to the city limits; realizing that the merchants and traders who hadn’t sailed out of the bay would be on the trails leading from Panama, they sent out squads of men to track the escapees down. “The men marched out in parties,” reported buccaneer William Fogg, “sometimes 100, sometimes 40 and 10, and took prisoners every day.” Morgan reported that they made “daily incursions on the enemy for 20 leagues without having one gun fired at them in anger.” Three thousand prisoners were brought back for interrogation and to be held for ransom. One triumph came with the capture of a bark that had run aground and been partially burned by its crew, who didn’t want it to fall into the privateers’ hands. Morgan desperately needed a boat to take command of the waters around Panama, and this modest vessel served his purpose. His men cruised the coastline and sailed to the nearby islands of Perico and Taboga and Taboguilla, capturing other traders and taking prisoner the fleeing Panamanians onboard. The trickle of loot grew into a modest stream. But the prize that would have made them all wealthy came within a hair of capture: Before Morgan reached the city, a ship called La Santíssima Trinidada had left Panama loaded down with “all the King’s plate and great quantity of riches of gold, pearl, jewels and other most precious goods, of all the best and richest merchants of Panama.” Not to mention a tremendous hoard of ecclesiastical treasures being transported by a group of nuns. The value of the loot easily ran into the millions. This was what the buccaneers had come to Panama for, but they let it slip through their grasp. When some of the Spanish crew left the ship to fill their water casks, they were captured and brought to the bark’s captain, Robert Searle, who soon learned that the Santíssima was loaded with booty. He ordered his men to take the Spanish ship, but by that time Roderick and the others were well oiled on “several sorts of rich wines” they’d confiscated, and they yawned in the captain’s face. Instead of boarding the Santíssima, the buccaneers watched through bleary eyes as it sailed away, and then went back to drinking themselves into a stupor. When Morgan heard about the fortune that had just escaped his clutches, he sent four boats looking for the galleon. The little fleet spent eight days searching for the Santíssima, without result; they did, however, stumble across a different vessel near the islands of Taboga and Taboguilla and found aboard “cloth, soap, sugar and biscuit, with twenty thousand pieces of eight in ready money.” A meager consolation prize.

  The buccaneers first took out their frustration on the prisoners. Some, according to Esquemeling, “were presently put to the most exquisite tortures imaginable”: cutting off ears and noses, woolding, burning, and being put to the rack. The reports of cruelty were heard as far away as London, but the surgeon Richard Browne later gave a different account, in which he strongly defended Morgan’s conduct. His letter was shot through with a common soldier’s complaint: Civilians could not begin to understand the nature of battle, he wrote, denying that there were atrocities. His version had no pirates forcing themselves on the captive women and only one questionable action on the battlefield, a captain executing a friar after quarter was given. “For the Admiral,” Browne said, “he was noble enough to the vanquished enemy.”

  As Don Juan’s Panama breathed its last (it would be rebuilt in a new location, where it stands to this day, and the old one abandoned forever), the president was in the town of Nata, seventy-five miles away. The contagion of fear had reached even this distant village. “I found not one soul therein,” Don Juan remembered, “for all were fled to the mountains.” Indeed, many of the rich merchants and administrators and church authorities were deep in the hills of central Panama, where they now faced the same privation through which Morgan and his men had suffered; starvation was a real threat, and the trader who had been used to earning a fistful of silver cobs for a week’s trading now had to forage through the jungle looking for fruit and roots.

&nb
sp; Once he was safely in Nata, Don Juan tried one last time to rally the locals and the dispersed Panamanians to take up arms. Those who refused were milquetoasts who would “bear the infamy and stain for ever.” But there was little chance that men who did not have their life’s savings tied up in the great city would go to defend it when its leading citizens had run from the battle. Even the fact that many thought that Morgan had come to conquer Panama for England didn’t light a fire under the Spanish. “The pirates had brought with them an English Man,” Don Juan wrote, “whome they called The Prince, with intent there to Crown him King of Terra Firma.” The reference was probably to Captain Prince, who fought under Morgan, or to the still-fresh legend of Prince Rupert coming from over the seas. In any case very little was done to impede the buccaneers’ looting. The English scoffed at the Spanish defense of their jewel; when asked who had burned Panama, the buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp said that it couldn’t have been Don Juan, as he was miles away “saving his bacon.” Don Juan was philosophical about the defeat he’d just suffered; for a Spaniard, nothing so momentous as the destruction of a city could be achieved without being part of God’s plan. “This…has been a chastisement from Heaven,” he wrote. The same might have happened to any great Spanish commander, Don Juan thought, “as did to me, if his Men had deserted him, for one Man alone can do little.”

  This was a comfort provided by the Spanish mind-set: The individual could never truly be responsible for disaster, as they didn’t have the power to turn history one way or the other. The lone Spaniard need not despair: defeat was part of a larger pattern.

  As to why Panama had been lost, the Spaniards looked deep into themselves and acknowledged what they saw. “Fear has taken hold of the men of this Kingdom,” wrote a soldier from the castle of San Felipe. “to whom every single Englishman seems to be a strong squadron and it is for this reason, due to weakness, that the enemy is able to accomplish its plans to perfection.” This virus of terror was the result of decades of military neglect, underfunding, bureaucratic infighting, the huge territories to be protected, and Madrid’s indifference—in other words, all the ills of an empire that had shrunk within its enormous shell. But Don Juan was right: If all the Spaniards Morgan faced had fought like the heroes of San Lorenzo, he probably would have gone home without ever seeing Panama. The Spanish had let a myth get out of control.

  Instead of an army, the Spanish sent a letter to Morgan. It came from the governor of Cartagena, the other rumored target of the privateers, and it recounted his exploits before making a ridiculous demand: “You should give satisfaction for the very serious damage that you have done and restore everything that you have robbed.” The letter did refer to one thing that had changed since Morgan set out from Jamaica: A peace treaty had finally been signed. The governor even included a copy of it with his rather whiny letter. Spain had made huge concessions; it now recognized Jamaica and the other English territories in the Indies and consigned to the past all the raids and outrages of the privateers against the Spanish Main. In turn, England agreed to stop its undeclared war against the kingdom and to bring in the privateers. The opening up of Spanish ports was not addressed, but there was a loophole that accomplished the same thing: English ships would now be allowed to enter Spanish harbors to get wood, water, and the other necessities of sailing life. In two quick strokes, Spain had renounced two founding principles of its empire in the New World: that the territories there belonged to them by divine right and that foreign trade would be outlawed forever.

  Morgan had played no small part in this. His provocations had helped to force the Spanish to renounce their exclusive rights to the Spanish Main. The pressure from his relentless raids, the interruption of trading routes, the fact that their best-fortified cities were no longer safe from the admiral helped force the Spain into accepting that the New World had to be shared. Some officials saw the capitulation as a disaster. When the peace treaty was read in Lima, Peru, the viceroy wrote to the queen, “The Indies are lost, since there is no defence in the ports of this realm to resist them if they want to make themselves masters of the region where they come ashore.”

  The Treaty of Madrid had been signed on July 21, and the English were given until November 28 to ratify it. Once that was done, there was a grace period of eight months in which both governments would inform their far-flung citizens to stop all hostilities against the other nation. The treaty finally put the relationships of the great powers in the Indies into black and white; the Caribbean would now cease to be a Wild West. The grace period introduced the only notes of gray—who was informed when could be argued forever. And now Morgan had just conducted the greatest raid in the history of buccaneering under the treaty. He’d helped create the pact; now he’d be the first to test it.

  Morgan spent twenty-eight days raking over the coals of Panama. Before he left, he had to face down the first real mutiny he’d ever experienced. As the buccaneers prepared to leave Panama, the money had not yet been divided, but the buccaneers sensed that it was not the fabled sum they’d hoped for. Roderick was among a small group of pirates who formed a plan to steal away from Morgan and “go and rob upon the South Sea until they had got as much as they thought fit.” Morgan’s authority was gone. Like prisoners of war in a German camp, Roderick and the others had secreted away provisions, ammunition, powder, and muskets, even a cannon to load onto a ship they had commandeered. The extensive planning only pointed up how disgruntled the men had become. Morgan found out about the plans and had the mainmast of the ship cut down and burned; the renegades now had nothing to sail away on and so stuck with their commander. The admiral might need them to fight his way out of Panama, and who knew how many had emeralds or pearls sewn into their clothes?

  Finally, on February 24, the occupation of Panama ended, and Morgan marched out the way he’d come in. Along with him went 175 mules loaded with “silver, gold and other precious things” and six hundred prisoners who had not been able, or willing, to raise the ransom price of 150 pesos. Morgan had sent scouts ahead of the main party so that he’d flush out any dead-enders and ambush squads in the treacherous jungle. But there was one good piece of news, at least: Heavy rains had fallen, and the Chagres was back to its normal levels; the ships he had left at San Lorenzo could make it all the way to Venta de Cruces and were waiting for him. In his absence, with their food running out, the crews had gone buccaneering themselves and captured a Spanish vessel packed with rice and maize. They would have plenty to eat on the way home. Panama had proved a brutal city to approach but a very easy place to leave.

  At Venta de Cruces, the army paused. Morgan wanted to give the remaining prisoners a chance to cadge the ransom money from friends and relatives or retrieve it from hiding places. He also announced that his own men would be searched for any undeclared treasure. Every buccaneer was forced to swear that he hadn’t pocketed any of the loot, “not even so much as the value of a sixpence.” That would usually have been good enough for the Brethren, but Morgan now called for the men to be inspected from head to toe, their satchels turned over, their shoes taken off and shaken. It was a sign of the suspicions and rumors that raged through the buccaneer camp that even the admiral allowed himself to be patted down. The camaraderie that had brought them so far was gone.

  Just as it had exposed the Spanish system, Panama revealed a great deal about the pirates. As soon as the dream of great riches evaporated, the buccaneer army atomized into a thousand separate pieces. The pirates would never threaten the systems they destabilized with a nation-state of their own, because they had no faith, no laws, no institutions that would hold them together beyond the next raid. A force powerful enough to make kings tremble, the Brethren imploded, and individual members split off on their own, available to be hunted down by those they had offended.

  Now the Brethren became nautical again. The leaders regained their maritime titles, and the privateers floated down the Chagres to San Lorenzo. Morgan picked up the garrison he’d installed there and
attempted one last bit of extortion. He sent a ship to Portobelo and demanded a ransom for the fort; either the Spanish pay up or he’d raze San Lorenzo to the ground. The Portobellans were past caring: “They would not give one farthing toward the ransom of said castle, and that the English might do with it as they pleased.” True to his word, Morgan loaded the cannon on board his ship—they would become part of the defenses of Port Royal—and torched the fort. Like any good Lucifer, he was leaving the isthmus trailing the smell of smoke.

  Before the ships sailed from the mouth of the Chagres, the spoils had to be divided. The mistrust was palpable as jewels and plate and ransom money and gold doubloons were brought forth and tossed into the common pile. Each piece was weighed and appraised. How much the buccaneers came away with has been disputed ever since the raid; the estimates range from 140,000 pieces of eight ($7 million in modern dollars) to over 400,000 pieces of eight ($20 million). Most evidence points toward the lower estimate as being the more accurate. It was a significant sum, but it had been taken by an enormous army, and after deductions were made for the wounded, the brave, the surgeons, the carpenters, and the officers, the ordinary buccaneers received a share of 80 pieces of eight each, or $4,000 in modern dollars. When Roderick heard the share, his face twisted with bitterness. It was not enough. For the death march up the Chagres? For nearly starving to death and taking the capital of the Spanish Main? To Roderick it was a derisory amount, especially alongside Morgan’s cut—1,400 pieces of eight, or today’s $70,000—and he let his commander know it. “So it was that the rest of his companions,” Esquemeling wrote, “even of his own nation, complained of his proceedings in this particular, and feared not to tell him openly to his face, that he’d reserved the best jewels to himself.”