Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Did Morgan cheat Roderick and the rest of his foot soldiers? Many of his underlings felt he did. But the admiral would have been taking his life in his hands; on the slightest evidence of double-dealing, his men would have slashed his throat. It seems unlikely that he’d risk death or permit his belongings to be searched if he was really hiding an enormous diamond or a sackful of plate. The problem was not only the light haul; it was the number of men. The privateers had taken more swag than they’d extracted from Portobelo, but now it had to be split among four times as many buccaneers. In his report to Modyford, Morgan showed that he was aware of the controversy by devoting the final sentences to refuting the charge; he “had it from the prisoners that the reason there was no more wealth was because [the Spanish] had two months’ notice, and laded two great ships of 350 and 700 tons with money, plate, gold and jewels.” The light payday gave birth to a thousand legends. Treasure hunters off Haiti and elsewhere still talk about the famous golden altar of Panama City, painted black and smuggled out of the city by Morgan (or by the Panamanians—there are several versions). Talk of buried treasure is a must in all pirate legends, but it is rare that an expedition’s own crew begins the gossip.

  Morgan took no risks. He’d already heard about the possible peace with Spain, bringing with it a new era for Port Royal. There was no time to waste; he had to make his case to Modyford and the Crown as quickly as possible. And he had to avoid being garroted by his men. Without calling a council, as was customary, he slipped away with just four ships and no advance notice. The other vessels split off for Tortuga, Costa Rica, or other hideouts. England and Spain were at peace; the Brethren were now public enemies.

  The raid had shattered the Spanish idea of a Catholic kingdom built on faith and the bureaucracy that supported it. But it also marked the last gasp for the Brethren; they had become almost too successful. Nothing but the capture of a galleon’s load of treasure would have satisfied the pirates, and that had not been found. Now Morgan and the others would have to face the fact that there was no loyalty between pirates beyond the search for gold. The dispersal of Morgan’s fleet into small convoys foreshadowed the blood-letting to come.

  13

  Aftermath

  The news of the destruction of Panama filtered across the Atlantic in rumors and wild tales told tenth-hand on ships and in waterfront taverns. Finally, on June 5, a ship arrived in Lisbon with an authoritative report of the invasion. The news shook the Continent. Englishmen living abroad, at least those not in the pro-Spanish wing of the government, took great relish in the sacking of Panama. The distances covered and the fame of the target seemed to indicate London’s widening reach and power. “They say the King of England may conquer the whole world,” crowed the English consul in Portugal, “for nothing can be too difficult for Inglishmen to undertake.” Even those ministers who were aghast at the diplomatic implications of the raid could not help but acknowledge that it was an “unparalleled exploit” in the history of the nation. “Such an action had not ben done since the famous Drake,” wrote the Restoration diarist John Evelyn, and Drake was the standard for all such expeditions. The reaction was far different on the other side of the Treaty of Madrid. The Spanish went beyond strategic horror; it was as if their faith in the world had been given a hard wrench. “The sacred knot was untied,” wrote the Venetian ambassador to Spain, “and the laws not only of friendship but of nature were broken.” The Spanish court felt it had been tricked; the duplicity of Charles II and his ministers was beyond fathoming. To the Spanish there was no possibility that the invasion could have gone ahead without approval at the very highest levels of English government. The queen reacted violently, falling victim to “such a distemper and excesse of weeping and violent passion as those about her feared it might shorten her life.” The Conde de Peñaranda, who had negotiated the treaty that was supposed to make Morgan’s type obsolete, demanded satisfaction from the English, after wiping away his own tears. The English said the right things: King Charles even claimed that he objected to the invasion as if it had been made on English soil, but the Spanish could not, at first, be appeased.

  When the total costs of the raid were added up, the loss of Panama had cost between 11 and 18 million pesos, or between $550 and $900 million. A portion of the costs for rebuilding the city and its fortifications would have to be borne by the Crown, adding hugely to its expenses, drastically reducing its ability to expand or fortify the rest of its holdings in the New World. The flow of trade was interrupted, and whatever claims Spain had to enforcing its will in the New World were now largely in shreds. Losing a galleon could be explained by simple bad luck. But losing Panama was a systemic failure on a huge scale.

  A war council was called, and it began its deliberations by emphasizing how important Panama was to Spain. “It has been considered in detail the great importance of that population for it is the throat of the Realm of Peru and the wall that defends it,” the ministers wrote, “on whose restoration depends the conservation of the Catholic religion, and…the interests of the Spanish monarch and its trade.” The councilors, including the Conde de Peñaranda, knew the Crown’s history in these matters and urged haste; “too much dallying” would render the whole effort useless. The men suggested an ambitious response: 4,000 men, including 600 or 700 of the Royal Guard, along with cavalry and ten ships. But the costs were added up and passions inevitably cooled, although from white-hot levels, and the forces were eventually reduced to only three vessels with 550 men, which set out in the middle of August. Part of the reason for the tempered response was that the English had made real gestures toward their new friends: The first step came with a private meeting between the English diplomat Godolphin and the queen, in which he apologized profusely and swore that the king did not know of Morgan’s plans. Then Modyford’s son was tossed into the Tower of London, not for any crimes of his own but as collateral for his father’s arrest. An order had been issued calling the governor of Jamaica an enemy of the state.

  Modyford waited anxiously back in Jamaica. He’d heard nothing from England about the treaty; rather awkwardly, he had to wait until the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico sent him a copy of the accord, as a sign of the new atmosphere of friendship and cooperation. It didn’t take an exquisitely tuned weather vane like Modyford to realize that the winds from Europe were stiffening against him. Days before his replacement, the rigid and humorless Sir Thomas Lynch, sailed into the harbor, Modyford decided to punch up a memo to Arlington detailing exactly why the raid on Panama was justified. Gone was his insinuating style, replaced by fourteen quick bullet points, listing his reasons for war: the “violences” of Rivero; His Majesty’s permission to counter any Spanish outrages; the “fears of the planters, the cries of the women and children”; and so on. His final statement had a touch of his boldness: Even if he’d known of “all the trouble which now threatens me” because of the Panama raid, Modyford stated, he wouldn’t have called Morgan back. Anything else would have caused “the manifest ruin of this island.” The document lacked Modyford’s usual polish; worry clearly cramped his hand.

  At last, on the first of July, Sir Thomas Lynch sailed into Port Royal harbor to relieve him of his duties. Tucked away among Lynch’s linen shirts and talcum powder was an order to arrest Modyford. The lingering mystery that surrounds the document centers on the fact that it was dated well before reports of the Panamanian invasion reached London. Does this mean that Charles II was secretly hoping the Jamaicans would make one last strike before the treaty went into effect—and kept the arrest order on hand to show the Spanish he was serious about reining them in once that last raid was done? Or was the warrant issued for the general crimes of the privateers, committed under Modyford’s watch, an insurance policy to get him out of the way and the pro-trade Lynch more easily into office? Or was the fact that the document was left to gather dust just evidence of London’s scandalous inattention to Jamaica? The truth is unclear, but the combination of silence and treachery practi
ced by London against its own colonial governor make Modyford’s efforts at dissembling seem almost naïve by comparison.

  Lynch was in an awkward spot; he was here not only to replace Modyford but to put him in chains. Cautious to a fault, he wanted to test the air before spiriting Modyford away, and so he spent weeks as the governor’s guest, staying in his house (where an attack of gout laid him up), then attending parties thrown in his honor by Modyford, who was punctilious to the last. Eating the man’s beef, drinking his rum, and accepting his health tips, even the harsh-tempered Lynch must have felt like a cad at times. Still, he started setting the trap, telling the leading lights of Jamaican society that the privateers and those who supported them were in bad odor in London. The whisper campaign got a boost from the grumblings of the privateers, who were returning to Port Royal from Panama ship by ship. Lynch reported to London that the buccaneers’ unhappiness was working in their favor: “They would take it as a compliment to be severe with Morgan whom they rail horribly for starving, cheating and deserting them.” Soon Lynch felt comfortable enough to spring his trap. He invited Modyford and some members of the council aboard his ship, the Assistance, for a sumptuous dinner. Once he had the governor there, safely under the eyes of his loyal crew, he broke the news: Modyford was a prisoner of state. The crime? That “contrary to the King’s express commands,” Modyford had “made many depredations and hostilities against the subjects of His Majesty’s brother, the Catholic King.”

  That fact is, Charles’s commands had been anything but “express”; when he did issue one, it was often as opaque as a Spanish pearl and soon to be countermanded. Lynch softened the blow by telling the shocked governor that his “life and fortune were in no danger…. There was a necessity of the King’s making this resentment for such an unseasonable irruption.” In other words, Modyford was to be the fall guy for Panama.

  Morgan was now under a black cloud for the first time in his career; he retired to his plantation, where he fell ill with a fever. The jungles of Panama had a long reach, and they’d dosed Morgan’s blood with one of their many contagions. While Modyford was sailing for England as a prisoner, his ally sweated and tossed in his bed at home, subject to nightmares. The news of what he’d done was spreading Morgan’s name further. Panama would seal his reputation among historians of Jamaica as “the one great man, the one figure of heroic proportions” in the nation’s history (Williams); the man whose “master mind rendered Jamaica English” (Hodgetts). But in 1671, Morgan knew he’d gone too far. Although he liked the insurance of the commissions he received, he’d acted as if the Old World did not exist. The pirates had thrived in a vacuum, like men stranded on a desert island who made up new laws for themselves. That idyll was about to end.

  The other privateers began trickling into Port Royal from all points of the map. Roderick sneaked in at dusk with twelve others on one of the smallest ships and, avoiding the waterfront, slipped off to his rooms. Esquemeling returned from adventures on an unnamed island, where, after a hot skirmish with some natives, the buccaneers found two bodies on the beach, one of them with “a beard of massive gold,” a kind of sash of fine beaten metal that was hung from holes pierced in the man’s lips. Finally he returned to Jamaica, and his old obsession: Morgan. Esquemeling takes his last look at the man he would make famous, and despite the many glories he’d attributed to the admiral, his eye was now jaundiced by disappointment. “Morgan left us all in such a miserable condition,” he wrote in one of the few self-incriminating passages in his memoir, “as might serve for a lively representation of what reward attends wickedness at the latter end of life.” Esquemeling was not alone in his complaints. Even Browne, the surgeon general on the Panama expedition who had always spoke admiringly of the Welshman, took his shots. “There have been very great complaints by the wronged seamen in Sir Thomas Modyford’s time against Admiral Morgan…,” he reported. “Nothing was done, but since Sir Thomas Lynch’s arrival they are left to the law.” Indeed, Lynch was making it clear that Port Royal’s time as a pirate haven was over. He’d received “strict and severe orders” to keep the privateers from molesting the Spanish. The news seemed all bad for the Brethren. Those, like Esquemeling’s crewmates, who were not starving were shipwrecked; an untold number of vessels wrecked on the reefs of Central America as they sought fresh victims. Others of the ex-Morgan forces attacked a town in Cuba and fell into torturing and robbing again, ignoring the noises Lynch was making in Jamaica. The new governor reacted quickly, pardoning all the privateers who had taken part in the Panama expedition, so long as they reported to Jamaica for absolution. But he went after the recent offenders. He caught some of the “chief actors” in the Cuban atrocities and had them hanged at a place called Gallows Point, or simply the Point. It was a shocking sight: the bodies of the guardians of the island, the heroes of Jamaica, swinging from a scaffold in the town they had shielded for decades.

  It makes one wonder how much of Henry Morgan’s illness was bacterial and how much the result of foreboding. Or perhaps the old commander was simply planning his next step, watching where the bodies fell.

  In Panama the Spanish were returning to a city that looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake and a firestorm. The interim governor, Don Francisco de Marichalar, arrived back in the smoldering ruins on June 9, and “found nothing but disgraces, sorrows and misfortune.” The rich merchants and their wives were near-naked and living in crude huts on the outskirts of the city formerly inhabited by their slaves. The English invasion had humbled the moguls of the New World with a biblical thoroughness; their homes were rubble, their bodies were racked with fevers, their trade was gone, and they had nothing to do but “watch their people die.” Every sliver of wood had been consumed in the fire, which had even reached into the stone buildings and burned out the wooden beams, leaving the shells vulnerable; the soaring walls of the convents were now blackened monoliths that jutted up here and there like rotten teeth. Marichalar could hear them crash to the ground throughout the day, the impact of the falling stone startling the officials who were trying to get a head count and organize some sort of defenses, in case the English should return. The entire city would have to be razed; the foundations of the remaining buildings were so damaged that “nothing could be built on them.”

  Calamity or no calamity, this was still the Spanish Empire, and a full-fledged inquiry into the events of the past few months had to be undertaken. Marichalar made his rounds of the flattened metropolis and interviewed relevant witnesses in their pathetic homes, with acrid smoke still flavoring the air; he had no fewer than fifty questions to ask, most of them focused on Don Juan’s performance leading up to and during the attack. The evidence pointed to a huge calamity, with 3,000 people, half the city’s population, dead (that would translate into the loss of 250,000 people in present-day Panama City). The men who had run from Morgan and the soldiers who refused to fight now testified that in fact Don Juan had been the real traitor; he’d mismanaged the garrisons, failed to take the battle to Morgan on the Chagres, and committed one tactical mistake after another. It was, of course, completely untrue: If his subordinates and his superiors had responded to Don Juan’s requests with even a modicum of vigor, Panama might have been saved. The paper trail and a good lawyer vindicated Don Juan: The barrister produced Don Juan’s many letters asking for reinforcements and reams of testimony that directly contradicted the portrait of the old man as a failed leader. He was acquitted and returned to Spain, where he died three years later. The true criminals of the Panama episode on the Spanish side were never brought to justice.

  The destruction of Panama was so complete that the old site of the city was abandoned and a new location six miles away was found for the inevitable rebuilding. This is where the modern city of Panama grew, with its bone-white skyscrapers. The ruins of the old cathedral and a few other buildings still stand and are a minor tourist attraction; a foreigner visiting La Vieja will hear a few legends about Morgan’s raid, including the old
canard that he burned down the city, and slightly more bizarre additions—such as the notion that the privateers entered the city singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

  The Panamanians never got their revenge on the infidels of Port Royal, but a fuller justice did come in a way they understood. For that they would have to wait twenty-one years.

  Charles II had given up Modyford, but Madrid pressed for more. Master bureaucrats that they were, the Spanish had always blamed Modyford and the anti-Spanish lobby in London, rather than Morgan himself, for most of the admiral’s mayhem in the West Indies. In the Spanish system, a lone commander making up his own rules, attacking his own chosen targets, was unthinkable. Their world was so regulated from top to bottom, so bound together with affidavits, hearings, councils of war, and miles of parchment, that they could hardly imagine the free hand Morgan was given. Although he always obtained the cover of commissions, Morgan’s exploits were largely his own. The Spanish simply could not get their minds around that fact—until Panama. Trekking across the isthmus and holding 1,500 privateers under his sway was clearly not the act of a faceless cog; the Spanish finally recognized that the Welshman was greater “en audaciay en el fortuna” than anyone else who threatened them in the New World.

  King Charles did not want further complications with the Spanish; tensions with Holland were ratcheting up, and he needed the Catholic power on his side in any possible war. The year before, Charles had signed the secret Treaty of Dover with the French, who would provide him with support against the Dutch in the event of a war, in return for his secret conversion to the Catholic faith. Everything Thomas Gage had worked for was in jeopardy: The king was making peace with the hated Catholic empire in the New World, allying himself with the rising Catholic power of Louis XIV in the Old World, and facing off against those good Protestants, the Dutch. In this intricate game of kings and queens, Henry Morgan became an easily sacrificed pawn. The Spanish clamored for more evidence of English regret, and so orders were issued: Arrest the admiral.