Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Ironically, the arrest warrant arrived in a Jamaica that was again besieged, and from the old enemy. Lynch had received information that a fleet sent from Madrid to avenge Panama and retake Jamaica was under sail, with 5,000 soldiers aboard. The governor was skeptical but worried; he called a council of war and put the island on battle footing, but still he could not believe that the Spanish would attack. “I cannot think it is for the Spaniards’ interest to break [the peace],” he wrote. “Lest we should bring the war again into their own quarters.” Modyford was whiling away the days in the Tower of London; under his rule, the news of a fleet on the way would have been cause to bring the privateers roaring out of Port Royal. But Lynch kept his powder dry. When the letter arrived ordering him to arrest Morgan, however, he now saw his old nemesis in a fonder light. “To speak the truth of him, he’s an honest, brave fellow,” he wrote. He even wavered for a second on the arrest: “The sending home of Morgan might make all the privateers apprehend they should be so dealt with,” Lynch admitted. But there was no thought of refusing London. “I shall send him home so as he shall not be much disgusted, yet the order obeyed, and the Spaniards satisfied.”

  A proper vessel for the prisoner’s return was found, the Welcome, an ancient frigate that had once lain at the bottom of the Thames as a barrier to Dutch marauders but was later reclaimed and sent to Jamaica. It was a junker hardly fit for a person of Morgan’s standing, but it told his current fortunes well enough. In April of 1672, at age thirty-seven, he was finally brought aboard as a prisoner of state, and the last of the true founders of Jamaica and the English empire in the West Indies disappeared into the stinking hold. One Jamaican wrote of the islanders’ feelings about their old protector, now in chains on his way to London: “I know not what approbation he may find there, but he received here a very high and honorable applause for his noble service…. I hope without offence I may say he is a very well deserving person, and one of great courage.” But others, like Roderick, were glad to see him go. They still believed he’d buried their gold somewhere on his estate, and the admiral could burn in hell for all they cared. Roderick felt that the great man had let him down, that the thing that had come to replace the family he’d left behind—the Brethren—was now in shreds because of Morgan. Roderick spent most of his time drinking in Port Royal, sleeping with his prostitute girlfriend, and working the pirate grapevine for news of upcoming missions. He was not fit for returning to England or for starting another kind of life. He’d done great things, and the life back there would be too strange to him.

  Morgan sailed to England, getting sicker as he got closer to the seat of his troubles. On the voyage he commiserated with Captain Francis Witherborn, a pirate who had been condemned to death. The mood for the Brethren could not have been darker: Back in Jamaica, Morgan’s second-in-command on the Panama expedition, Edward Collier, quietly sold his plantation and attempted to leave the country before the garrison came looking for him. In Port Royal some of the merchants and planters breathed a sigh of relief. Their spokesman, Lynch, expressed what the buccaneers had done to Jamaica:

  People have not married, built, or settled as they would in peace; some for fear of being destroyed, others have got much and suddenly by privateers’ bargains and are gone. War carries away all freemen, labourers, and planters of provisions, which makes work and victuals dear and scarce. Privateering encourages all manner of disorder and dissoluteness, and if it succeed, does but enrich the worst sort of people, and provoke and alarm the Spaniards, constraining them to arm and fortify….

  It was an analysis that went all the way back to the buccaneers’ rowdy male-only club, where women were banished and a kind of bestial party atmosphere reigned. Pirates were just not good for good bourgeois family values, and now that they were out of favor, the bourgeois were sticking their heads up and saying so. With Morgan and the boys prowling outside your windows, there was an atmosphere of lawlessness, always a hint of threat in the scented air. Civil society couldn’t flourish where they held so much power.

  Now Jamaica had gotten rid of the outlaws. Or so Lynch thought.

  After a rough passage, the admiral arrived in London in August 1672. He must have wondered if he’d join his friend Modyford. The wily governor was still in the Tower of London, where Walter Raleigh and Thomas More had spent their last days. Actually a series of buildings, the Tower had been founded almost six hundred years before by William the Conqueror and its expanding collection of structures had served as a castle right up until 1625. Its many uses had included an observatory, a zoo for the royal menagerie, and a mint. But it was as a jail that the Tower had become famous, and Modyford was in illustrious company: Princes had been murdered here, the treasonous Duke of Clarence was drowned in a barrel of wine, Elizabeth I plotted behind its walls, and Guy Fawkes’s screams echoed off the stones as his torturers softened him up before his court date. Although Modyford was not whipped, he knew that the atmosphere behind the thick stone walls of the Tower was subject to every change in the diplomatic weather. The lives of rightful heirs to the throne had been snuffed out here; executing a mere colonial governor would hardly cause the king to lose a moment’s sleep.

  Morgan, on the other hand, was allowed the freedom of London. If he’d landed in Cromwell’s tight-lipped, Puritan England, the buccaneer king would surely have found it tough going. But Restoration London was piratical in its outlook—hard drinking, displayed wealth, luxurious dress, dubious morals were all in favor. If it were only thirty degrees warmer, Morgan would have felt right at home. He arrived in a country where religion and war were once again on people’s minds. Charles II had cemented an alliance between England and France, which gave the always strapped king access to some of Louis XIV’s ready cash and included a notorious clause stipulating that the English monarch would declare himself a Catholic “as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit”; all of this had tilted the nation toward France and against his fellow Protestants in the United Provinces, who had become England’s great competitors for world markets. Indeed, everywhere he turned, the Londoner saw signs of the current fetish for things Catholic: their new St. Paul’s Cathedral was practically a duplicate of St. Peter’s in Rome; the aristocrats marched down Oxford Street in French wigs, gripping the latest Gallic novel, speaking French to their chambermaids and delighting in the latest Spanish-influenced play. The old, tramped-down vine of Catholicism was sprouting new leaves in England. And any alliance with Catholic powers was bad news for Modyford and Morgan, as it would always bring with it a consideration of Spain’s desires. So Modyford shivered in the cold lodgings of the Towers while Morgan sank deeper into a heavy tropical fever.

  Why did Morgan remain free? Because even before he arrived, the political situation was shifting in his favor. The war with the Dutch was not going well; the enemy had outwitted its larger, clumsier opponents with a combination of guerrilla warfare and unconventional tactics, including opening the dikes and flooding their own countryside to stop a French advance. The English commoners were growing weary of battle, and with weariness came irritation: Why was the nation expending its money and the lives of its youth on fighting good Dutch Protestants? Here the ancient hatred of France played to Morgan’s favor. When it was revealed that Charles’s newest mistress was a Catholic and that others in his immediate circle had recently converted, the English hysteria raised its head again. Jailing Morgan would only have incensed Charles’s anti-Catholic critics, and so he stayed out of prison. Even Modyford benefited: After two years in the Towers, he was released.

  The admiral walked the London streets as a free, if deeply annoyed, man. A contemporary painted a picture of a frustrated Morgan, paying for lodging, food, and new clothes while he waited for his case to be decided, while his plantations were neglected back in Jamaica. “Under those difficulties and the perpetual malice of a prevailing court faction, he wasted the remaining part of his life, oppressed not only by those but by a lingering consumption, the coldness of this c
limate and his vexations had brought him into, when he was forced to stay here.” But he enjoyed himself, too, going to parties and regaling the scandalized socialites with tales of plunder, sea battles, and nights in Jamaica’s finest holes-in-the-wall.

  There is evidence that Morgan fell in with a raffish, even dangerous crowd. His newest friend was the nineteen-year-old Christopher Monck, one of the princes of the realm, the son of Charles’s re-doubtable and rich general George Monck. The son was hotheaded and impetuous. Before meeting Morgan, he’d been cavorting in the red-light district of London with two highborn friends; when the beadle (or sheriff) of the district had stepped in to protest their drunken outrages, the young men killed him in the street. The locals wanted to lynch the trio, but their names saved them. Henry Morgan found young Christopher’s wild ways to his liking; it was the closest thing to being in Port Royal after a rich haul.

  It is odd how much of what we know of Morgan’s three years in London retraced the rise of Thomas Gage. At a party attended by the best and brightest of English society, the diarist John Evelyn records the only sighting of the famous privateer and the now-released Modyford. He characterized Morgan as the man “who undertooke that gallant exploit from Nombre de Dios to Panama” and reported that the admiral estimated it would take only 10,000 men to conquer the Indies. He also reported that Morgan bragged about the “great booty” they had taken, surely a required note in any buccaneering tales told in London drawing rooms. Twenty years after Gage had spread the word of immense riches in the Spanish New World and the ease with which they could be extracted, here was Morgan saying the same thing. Morgan’s estimate of the manpower needed was much more realistic than the pastor’s, but Gage’s dream of New World domination had not died. Nor had his avarice. By now it was practically the national credo of Jamaica.

  And then, a final echo from the past: The king asked Morgan to draw up a memo with his ideas on Jamaica’s protection, just as his old nemesis Cromwell had done with the pastor from Deal on the subject of the New World. The wars with the Netherlands meant that Jamaica faced new enemies: Dutch warships sailed out of Curaçao; the unappeased Spanish were still a threat; even the French could not be trusted. But with Morgan thousands of miles away, the privateers could no longer be called on to defend the island, as Lynch had so alienated the Brethren that they would not come to the country’s defense. The governor asked the king for “a frigate or two” to protect his shores from invasion, but Charles was hard up, barely able to sustain his war against his Protestant rivals, and in this situation Lynch’s pacifism looked increasingly like weakness. Morgan’s stock rose by the week; say what you would about the buccaneer, he’d held England’s enemies in check. After reading his memo, Charles called him in and they went over his points: More guns and ammunition for Port Royal led the list.

  From arriving in London in the company of a doomed man, Morgan was being consulted by his king. It was a delicious turnaround. The meeting went so well that he was later presented with a snuff box bearing the king’s profile done in small diamonds, a few extra required for Charles’s long Gallic nose. Finally, on November 6, Morgan received word that he’d been named deputy governor of Jamaica, “his Majesty reposing particular confidence in his loyalty, prudence and courage, and long experience of that colony.” With the job came a knighthood, and Morgan, dressed in the finest suit a London tailor could cut, attended the ceremony and felt the royal sword touch his clavicle. With clouds gathering on the horizon again, the rulers of England had finally clasped Morgan close; he was now one of theirs.

  Cynics would have laughed at the ceremony; Morgan had almost been stuffed away in a dungeon by the same people who were now making him a knight. But one can be sure he was not among the scoffers: Morgan was a Royalist to the bone. It was certainly one of the happiest days of his life.

  In London, Morgan had returned from the jungles to a brawling, febrile city that still thought of itself as in the forefront of new thinking in natural philosophy (that is, science), astronomy, and other disciplines. One tiny offshoot of this scientific revolution was a fresh look at the perennial scourge of Port Royal, the shaking of the earth, which had for centuries been attributed to one thing: God’s wrath. There were dozens of theories as to what caused these tremors, some dating back centuries, some brand-new. The Greek Thales of Miletas proposed that the earth’s crust floated on an ocean whose waves and gales caused the ground to heave up and down, while Descartes believed that subterranean gases shot out of their dens and sparked the tremors. Steam vapor caused by underground rivers flowing onto hot rocks was another hypothesis, while one famous London expert on earthquakes came down on the side of “eruptions of fiery Conflagrations inkindled in the Subterranean regions.” A shift in the earth’s core, the influence of passing comets, and—from the director of the Royal Observatory in London—“an explosion of nitreous and sulphurous particles in the air” were also suggested. In the General History of Earthquakes, published in the late 1600s, the author began with this statement: “An earthquake is a shaking of the Earth occasioned by Wind and Exhalation inclosed within the Caves and Bowels of the Earth.” When the winds were out of balance, they found a gap in the earth’s surface and proceeded to “rendeth and openeth” the ground. There were four kinds of quakes, and all were related to the movement of air:

  1. A lateral quake, in which “the whole force of the inclosed wind and vapors [are] driven to one place and there is no contrary motion to preserve it.” This represents an early attempt to describe how land actually moved during earthquakes, which the author compared to “a man shaking in an ague [fever].”

  2. The explosive upward event, where “the earth is lifted up with great violence so that the buildings are like to fall and instantly sink down again.” These kinds of tremors, it was believed, were caused by the earth actually collapsing into the cavern that had once been supported by the pressure of the escaping wind.

  3. A split in the earth, “when the sea in some places has been drunk up so that people have gone over on foot.” This accounted for the phenomenon of disappearing lakes and rivers so common to powerful quakes.

  4. The reverse, quakes that caused mountains “to arise out of the Earth.”

  Morgan was appointed deputy governor of Jamaica, second-in-command on the island. The new governor and Morgan’s new superior was one Lord Vaughan, five years younger than the thirty-nine-year-old Morgan, a man of letters who had some claim to “discovering” the poet John Dryden. He was a fitting emissary from Restoration London: an aristocrat with a satyr’s face whom Samuel Pepys once called “one of the lewdest fellows of the age.” Still, he was no match for a veteran like Morgan. The young lord warned the buccaneer to stick close to his vessel on the voyage from England to Jamaica and under no circumstances set out ahead. If Morgan arrived first, he’d be acting governor of the island until Vaughan made it ashore. The admiral agreed and then completely ignored Vaughan; he set out in the Jamaica Merchant under the command of Captain Joseph Knapman, but there is some evidence that Morgan himself whipped the crew on to leave Vaughan in his wake. Knapman later said that some evil genius had plotted the Merchant’s route, and “never was any man more surprised considering the course they had steered.”

  If past performance is any clue, Morgan was the evil genius in question, because the Merchant crashed into a coral reef off Île-à-Vache, the buccaneers’ old meeting place off the southern coast of Haiti. Morgan treated ships like disposable objects, to be wrecked, sunk, rammed, or turned into blazing weapons whenever necessary, and the Merchant was no different: The ammunition and cannon that he’d brought with him, as per his memo to the king, sank straight to the bottom of the ocean. Morgan had not been humbled by his time abroad; he reported solemnly to London that “they had all perished had Morgan not known where he was.” Undaunted, he soon caught a ride with a privateer who happened by and was brought in his old style to Port Royal on March 6. The parties commenced immediately; those who had been pin
ing for a resumption of the town’s notorious ways and a strong man to face down all comers stood drinks for their returned hero. His wife, Elizabeth, fell into his arms, his nephews and nieces crowded around him, planters pressed invitations on the admiral, and all in all the wide-open spirit of the buccaneer paradise seemed ready to whir up again to its old dizzying heights.

  His enemy, Lynch, was waiting for him with a scowl on his face. The governor had in November written to London to warn them that Morgan’s second coming would only lead to more bloodshed in the West Indies. The Spanish were reportedly sending a fleet of galleons, “biscaniers, Ostenders and Flushingers, which are likely to clear the Indies of all that Infest them,” adding with a sting, “one of the reasons of their coming is, the noise of Admiral Morgan’s favour at Court and return to the Indies, which much alarmed the Spaniards, and caused the King to be at vast charge in fortifying in the South Sea.” Morgan’s old cronies, including Roderick, who had lost two fingers in a grenado accident, were sailing under French commissions out of Tortuga and keeping to their old style of “rapine and libertinage.” Time had sweetened their memories somewhat, that and the fact that they had yet to hit a payday equal to the admiral’s best. If Morgan could promise another rich target, they might be ready to take up with him. It seemed like the old wars were about to begin again.

  As he’d arrived before Vaughan, Morgan assumed the office of governor until his superior landed. He immediately took charge of the island’s defenses, which he found in a deplorable state, with only fourteen barrels of powder available for the fortress guns. He accused Lynch of selling the king’s supplies to the Spanish, a fair indication of the nasty tone of Jamaican politics that Morgan would help ramp up. Increasingly, as he grew older, Morgan needed enemies; he thrived on controversy and inclose fighting. “Nevertheless that shall not daunt him,” he wrote to his superiors in London on April 13, only five weeks after arriving and referring to himself in the third person, “for before he will lose his Majesty’s fortifications, he will lose himself and a great many brave men more, that will stand and fall by him.”