Modern seismologists use the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale to measure the “shaking severity” of an earthquake (the more popular Richter scale measures magnitude). Invented by the Italian vulcanologist Giuseppe Mercalli in 1902, its grades range from I to XII. A Value I earthquake would not even be felt by humans standing on affected areas; a Value IV would cause chandeliers to swing, wooden walls to creak, and glasses to clink in the cupboard. It is the earthquakes at Value VIII and above that are the great ones. At VIII, towers and chimneys can collapse, poorly built houses suffer severe damage. At X, most buildings are completely destroyed and landslides add to the devastation. In recent times the Northridge, California, earthquake in 1994 registered scale values from the extremely mild I to the devastating IX rating at the epicenter. The 1906 San Francisco quake reached a value of IX to X. Anything above X is an apocalyptic quake. The tremors shaking Jamaica month after month were nothing close to that. Not yet.
Back in Port Royal, few thought about the inner workings of the earth; people focused on their daily lives. Dr. Sloane was concerned about Henry Morgan, a rare colonial species in decline, and the young doctor studied him with an exacting eye. Sloane’s writings, which are admirably precise and alive, would later become the basis for the British Library and would form its first collection. In his words the old privateer was
lean, sallow-coloured, his eyes a little yellowish and belly jutting out or prominent…. He complained to me of want of appetite for victuals, he had a kicking or roaching to vomit every morning and generally a small looseness attending him, and withal is much given to drinking and staying up late, which I supposed had been the cause of his present indisposition.
Sloane prescribed a thin gruel and a feather (for sticking down Morgan’s throat), so that he’d vomit and bring up the fluids in his stomach. Once that had been done, Morgan tried some “Madeira wine in which roots of gentian, tops of centaury had been infused with Mich.Vomit.” What Morgan really needed was rest and a different lifestyle, but he refused to change. He spent his days lolling in a hammock, his bloated body straining against the cords, and received friends, who could not be turned away without a drop of rum. The nights were the worst: The heat, the buzzing insects (but not a guilty conscience) kept him awake; he could not pass water and croaked like a night frog, belching to relieve his stomach of the intolerable feeling of swelling. Finally he’d reach, against Sloane’s express orders, for the liquor bottle and drive away the boredom and the more unpleasant memories with a long pull. Sloane despaired of his muleheaded patient: “Not being able to abstain from company, he sat up late at night drinking too much.” Morgan grew tired of hearing the young Englishman chide him about the rum and called for another doctor. Sloane’s rival diagnosed timpany, or an excess of wind in the belly; the contrary opinion must have pleased Morgan, who one can imagine repeating it to Sloane with a broad smile on his face, as it meant he could keep on drinking.
Morgan must have known he was dying. In one of his last public outings, he returned to the Council of Jamaica, which by permission of the king he’d been allowed to rejoin. The summer heat was roasting, but Morgan was transported in his carriage and made it to his seat with the help of a cane, and there he heard a last vale-dictory by the Speaker of the assembly. Morgan’s time as lieutenant governor was described as a golden age. “His dispensations of favour and kindness were great and many,” the Speaker said, “even to those who, true hornet like, lay buzzing about him during his government.”
But finally Western medicine could do him no more good, and Morgan went to the black doctor the local slaves depended on for cures. He was given urine enemas and covered with clay plasters, but the treatment only gave him a persistent cough. He moved on to another. What other remedies the folk doctor prescribed have not been passed down, or if a desperate Morgan in fact consulted with an obeah man, spirit doctors who used ghosts as assistants for their curing, bribing the shades with doses of rum and offerings of silver. But all measures failed, and on August 25, 1688, at about eleven in the morning, Henry Morgan died at age fifty-three.
In his will the admiral revealed himself as he rarely did in his letters. His holdings were valued at 5,000 pounds, or $1.2 million in today’s dollars. He left the bulk of his sprawling estates to Elizabeth, whom he described with uncharacteristically tender language as “my very well and intirely beloved wife Dame Mary Elizabeth Morgan.” She’d be the caretaker of his wealth until her death, when the lands would pass to his nephew Charles—on one condition. Charles would have to change his last name from Byndloss to Morgan “and always go thereby.” Morgan’s almost desperate desire to continue his line had extended even after death. There is no doubt that Henry wished to be remembered: He left mourning rings not only to his godsons and nephew but to his friends and secretary and even his servants.
His funeral proceeded along the lines of any farewell for a major government official, with one twist. The governor of the island quietly issued a twenty-four-hour amnesty for anyone wishing to attend the ceremony; soon ships flying no flag were arriving in the harbor and discharging groups of men into the evening gloom, men with no fixed address who were now making a living raiding ships of all nations as they caught the trade winds on the North Sea. Armed as always with pistols, their faces scarred and grim, on any other day they’d have been met by members of the local militia, who could spot their kind on sight and would have clamped them in irons and marched them off to hear their death sentences. But Morgan’s day was a one-of-a-kind legal holiday, and so they made their way along the pier toward King’s House, the home of the governor and the official seat of government on the island, where Morgan lay in state until the funeral on August 26. Every sort of person passed by his lead-lined coffin and stood to regard the face of the man who had made Jamaica: French corsairs, fantastically wealthy merchants, madams, tavern owners, skilled tradesmen, Morgan’s cousins and drinking mates, prostitutes, government officials. Morgan was by no means an uncontroversial figure in the city; there were certainly men who came to look on his face with barely concealed satisfaction; there were buccaneers from the Panama mission who still could not forgive him for, they believed, violating their trust and stealing their silver plate. But Panama had been fourteen years ago, and Morgan was, in death, bigger than any single expedition.
Roderick came. Now forty-seven, he’d survived two recent bouts of malaria and was living in Nassau. The teeth were rotting in his head, he was lean, he had new scars on his face (some martial, some nightlife-related), and, to judge by his general appearance, it didn’t seem he’d outlive his leader by many months. Why had he come? Because the raids with Morgan now seemed like his halcyon days; he’d never been involved in anything on the same scale again, nothing so daring or rich. The fact that Morgan the governor would have hanged him didn’t bother Roderick; he’d accepted years ago that the world wanted him dead. Pirates recognized that self-interest was at the bottom of most things. Many of them didn’t bear the admiral a grudge—that is, after the bitterness about the Panama money had gone, which had taken a few years. Still, Morgan had brought things off with style. He’d made the world take notice of the Brethren, and pirates had a love of the world’s regard. They sought it out. And here was the man who had spread their name to every corner of the earth. Roderick took his hat off at the coffin, tilting slightly as he did (he was not entirely sober), and studied the admiral’s face. He was in many ways the sum of the urges that had brought white men like Roderick to the New World, minus any spiritual ones, and the qualities that had allowed the hugely outnumbered English to battle the Spanish Empire to a draw. Roderick had come because, despite it all, he was proud to be a pirate, proud of the unconventional and wicked life he’d led. The Brethren had been his family, and Morgan was the greatest of his kin.
As the time for the ceremony approached, Morgan’s old partner in crime, the Duke of Albemarle, arrived, looking anything but healthy himself (he’d be dead in two months, the victim of the same
ills that killed Morgan). The pallbearers carried the coffin to a gun carriage, the conveyance that would be used for royal funerals such as Queen Victoria’s, and the procession wound its way to St. Peter’s Church, where the funeral mass was said. The mourners then marched to the cemetery on the Palisadoes, where the coffin was interred in the sandy ground. The ships in the harbor fired a twenty-two-gun salute, one more than even Albemarle would receive at his death. Governors came and went. Morgan’s passing was unique.
Perhaps there were other ceremonies that were never recorded. Morgan’s estate included 109 slaves, and he was said to have fathered children by several of them; today there are even rumors of his descendants living near Montego Bay, though no ancestry can be proven. One colonial administrator in the early 1900s reported that the wild behavior of a number of Jamaican families in the Yallahs Valley proved they were descended from the Welshman. If Morgan did indeed have family, whether by force or through a relationship, however oppressive, it’s likely his passing was marked with a ritual. The slaves in Jamaica believed that hotheaded people were survived by like-minded ghosts, or duppies, who would go through the world causing havoc if measures were not taken to stop them. There were several methods available to restrict the duppy’s progress: sticking pins into the dead man’s feet, so that the ghost could not walk without pain, and cutting out the pockets in the burial suit, so that the duppy would not have rocks to throw at his enemies. The slave family would not have had access to Morgan’s body, but there was one rite that could be performed without it: nine days of singing, followed by a banishment ritual on the ninth night, expelling the duppy forever.
If the banishment was performed, it didn’t take. Morgan had one final appearance to make in the story of Port Royal.
14
Apocalypse
The day of June 7, 1692, came in hot and airless. As the lamplighters moved through the blue-and-violet dawn, snuffing out the streetlights, there wasn’t a breath of wind or a cloud in the sky to give the promise of rain. It was growing unbearable. For the last five months, the weather had continued in this nervous-making pall of heat. A sharp burst of rain in May had served only to increase the mosquito population, which was now feasting on pale English skin. The lack of wind was not only annoying, it was bad for business: The ships waiting in the harbor with their holds full of logwood and sugar couldn’t exit Port Royal and sail out to the open seas to markets in Europe and North America. Nor could the merchant ships loaded with the latest Parisian brocaded dresses and fine linens make the dock and unload the European trade goods that Port Royal was rich enough to buy. The term “earthquake weather” had not yet been coined, but the townspeople would have understood it instinctively.
The stifling heat was connected, in locals’ minds, with the tremors that had shaken the town every year of its brief history. The smoldering air also tended to agitate the more sensitive members of the population; doctors were kept hurrying from home to home to minister to the neurasthenic wives of merchants who could not leave their beds because of black moods and bouts of low energy. Many of that morning’s patients had their conditions worsened by the latest gossip. An astrologer had visited the island weeks before and left it with a prediction: There would be a major earthquake in the near future. Four years earlier another mystic had given a similar reading, and a quake followed, strong enough to topple some of the brick-and-mortar buildings constructed in English style (the residents living as if they were on a floating remnant of Sussex or Coventry and building their homes accordingly). The sick were prone to rumors, of which Port Royal had plenty. The crazed-looking men who strode up and down Market Street loudly proclaiming that “judgment was at hand”—did the doctors think they knew something? The physicians tried to comfort the patients, but, sweating and wild-eyed, they broke in with the latest gossip: Dr. Heath in his sermon that Sunday had reminded his congregations about the wife of his colleague John Taylor. She’d suddenly quit Jamaica, left Port Royal and her husband behind, because she could no longer stand “the badness of this place.” It was not as if she were being original: Ever since its founding, Port Royal had been the scourge of religious men and women, who were constantly predicting, even praying for, its destruction. “Port Royal could not stand,” went the refrain, “but would sink and be destroyed by the judgment of God.” It was just that all the signs—religious, astrological, meteorological—were now conspiring to make the nervous women call for the rum punch and the doctor. The physicians came promptly and soothed their patients, dispensing advice and “cooling, diluting drinks,” but not what the women truly wanted: the Bolus of Diascord, an elixir that contained one-tenth of a grain of opium. The merchants’ wives were high-strung enough; all they needed was a dose of it, and a rumor of unrest in the slave quarters, for pandemonium to infect the white community of Port Royal.
Down by Fishers Row, the markets were open. Meat in the tropics spoiled within hours, so fish and fowl were brought fresh and slaughtered just before cooking. In the fish market, the huge local tortoises swam placidly in the “turtle crawl”; June was the month when they emerged from the sea to climb onto the beaches and lay their eggs, only to have them snatched up by local fishermen. Along with turtles, there were lobsters and crabs and manatee and snapper and eighteen other varieties of fish for the servants coming down from High Street to choose from. Out in the harbor, the water was as smooth and reflective as a pane of silvery glass; the only ripples came from porpoises surfacing to snipe at a school of minnows or sharks snatching the offal thrown into the water by the butchers and fishmongers. Everyone glanced occasionally at the horizon for unfamiliar shapes against the sky; England and France were at war again, and the French had in late May swooped down onto the north of the island, sacking and torching sugar plantations and killing anyone they came across. The next logical step was a strike at Port Royal itself, especially as one of the town’s two guard ships, the HMS Guernsey, was becalmed to the east and couldn’t reach the port in an emergency. Port Royal lay open to any strong force. The lieutenant governor, John White, had scheduled an assembly of the Council of Jamaica to assess the threat, but there was little one could do; this was Jamaica, a jewel envied by foreign powers. Martial law had been declared, and the local garrisons had been called to arms in Port Royal, Liguanea, and Spanish Town. Lookouts at the town’s formidable military forts—including Morgan’s Fort, finished in 1680 and named after the great Welshman—watched the horizon.
Just the night before, a strange ship had been spotted lurking at the eastern end of the harbor, flying no flag. Was it a pirate—or a scout for a fleet waiting over the horizon? The commander of Fort Charles had sent an armed squadron to investigate; as they had approached the vessel, the soldiers were on standby with their muskets. But it was just a merchant ship out of Bristol that had coaxed enough speed from the occasional breeze to make it this far and was waiting for dawn to unload its goods and passengers. The commander reminded the ship’s captain to have the newcomers brought to the King’s Warehouse to sign the register; if they refused, they’d be thrown into the prison as suspected spies or provocateurs. If they signed, they’d be handed a certificate giving them each fifty acres of land; the interior needed fresh men—white men, that is—and Port Royal was their entryway into the dream they had nourished back in England. Soon they would most likely be either building their fortunes or dead from malaria.
The men who had made it in Jamaica emerged from their brick homes dressed as any London gentleman would be; when a fashion was all the rage in London, it was all the rage on the streets of Jamaica. In the 1670s, down the paths of this steamy tropical town, you might find a man striding toward his offices dressed in “a Turkish garment of black watered chambles lined with crimson taffety, a black cloathe coat lined with blew sarconet, creeches, black silke stockings and a pair of garters with christial stones, a Turkish capp of crimson velvet, a silke crimson Turkish sash, a pair of Turkish shoes, gloves and a periwig,…a sealed gold ring, a silver
ring with a blew stone in it and a pair of silver buckles.” What a sight he must have been, every fold and stitching in his clothes brought into sharp focus by the Jamaican sun! It didn’t matter that such an outfit was far better suited to chilly London than to sweltering Port Royal; the Turkish outfit was based on the wardrobe of Charles II, and thus one wore it. There was so much money flowing through the town, licit and illicit, that it had to be spent. The merchants did their level best, living “to the height of splendour, in full ease and plenty, being sumptuously arrayed, and attended on and served by their Negro slaves, which always waits on them in livereys, or otherwise as they please to cloath them.” The traders’ wives were not left behind. The local shops carried a full line of materials—Persian silks, fine serge—ready to be whipped into a ball gown or a fashionable tucked-up skirt. Unlike their predecessors, their men did not get rich off the privateers’ spoils. Port Royal had become a hub of the West Indies plantation economy, a huge trading post, and an important slave mart. Between 1671 and 1679, nearly 12,000 African men and women had emerged from the holds of ships in her harbor and taken their miserable place as slaves on the vast sugar plantations that now covered the island. It was a different sort of pillaging, but Port Royal had found it just as lucrative.
Empire of Blue Water Page 31
