Empire of Blue Water (11 page)

The mission could not stop now; another city would have to be hit. Morgan’s reputation, his future as the admiral of the Brethren, was at stake. If he returned with such a small payday, he might be voted out of power. Already some elements of the force were withdrawing their confidence. The Frenchmen pulled out of the mission, even after Morgan used “all the persuasions” he could think of to convince them to stay. It was a shocking blow.

And Morgan must have known exactly what had gone wrong: He hadn’t been cruel enough. Failing to torture the captives, as most pirates would have done, and allowing them plenty of time to raise their ransom, went against the proven methods of buccaneering. A follower of the gallant Mansfield, he’d played the gentleman, only to have the Spanish string him along, toy with him as if he were an amateur. His softness had cost him dearly. The French made this point clearer when they left Morgan to join one of the legitimate monsters of the pirate world, Francis L’Ollonais. In his report on the adventure, Morgan would say that the Gallic pirates “wholly refused to join in an action so full of danger,” but danger was never the point. It was leadership. L’Ollonais represented the pirate code at its most extreme, but Morgan could not afford to ignore his methods. The privateers would sail with whoever found them the most gold, and L’Ollonais was a rising star who was making his boys rich. Morgan would have to meld his ideas with those of a ruthless killer if he were to avoid another embarrassment.

Born Jean David Nau, L’Ollonais got his name from the Sands of Ollane, the region in Brittany where he was raised. He came to the New World as an indentured servant and, after serving his time, arrived on Hispaniola as a free man. He joined some of the original
boucaniers
and then graduated to the Brethren at Tortuga. The pirates had not seen his like before; L’Ollonais was an innovator, as well as a complete and utter sociopath. His career gives an idea of what Morgan was competing against. The Frenchman began as a common pirate, boarding ships with the other men. “He behaved himself so courageously,” Esquemeling tells us, “as to deserve the favour and esteem of the Governor of Tortuga.” The governor recognized a good prospect and gave L’Ollonais his own ship “to the intent he might seek his own fortune.” (One can be sure that the governor got his cut of any proceeds.) Word of the Frenchman’s extreme cruelty immediately began to spread throughout the West Indies. “It was the custom of L’Ollonais that, having tormented any persons and they not confessing, he’d instantly cut them in pieces with his hangar [cutlass], and pull out their tongues,” Esquemeling tells us, “desiring to do the same, if possible, to every Spaniard in the world.” He delighted in putting men to the rack and in “woolding,” or tying a stick around a victim’s forehead and tightening with turns of a stick until the interviewee’s eyeballs popped out of the sockets. But that was standard procedure, on both sides of the war between Spain and its enemies in the New World.

After outfitting his ship, L’Ollonais ran into bad luck when he was caught in a storm off Campeche; his ship was destroyed, and he and his men were forced to swim for their lives. When they made it to dry land, they were hunted through the forests by the Spanish, who killed many and wounded their captain. To survive, L’Ollonais “took several handfuls of sand and mingled them with the blood of his own wounds,” then smeared the mixture all over his face and hands. Lying down among the slaughtered men, he played dead. When the Spaniards left, he disguised himself as a local and insolently marched into town; mingling with the Spanish, he overheard them calling to his ex-crewmen, now held prisoner, “What is become of your captain?” “He is dead,” the men replied. “With which news the Spaniards were hugely gladdened, and made great demonstrations of joy, kindling bonfires and…giving thanks to God Almighty for their deliverance from such a cruel Pirate.”

Returning to Tortuga, L’Ollonais scared up another ship and crew and set out to exact his revenge. The governor in Havana was informed by residents of a seaside town that L’Ollonais had risen from the dead and was again terrorizing them; he sent a small warship with ten cannon and fifty soldiers, ordering them not to return until they’d “totally destroyed those Pirates.” (He even sent along a Negro executioner, who was told to hang every pirate except L’Ollonais, who was to be brought to Havana for special attentions.) L’Ollonais and his men stormed the ship on its arrival, boarding even in the face of barrages from its cannon. One by one the captured crew members were brought up from the hold and were beheaded. Finally it was the executioner’s turn; the terrified man begged L’Ollonais for his life. “This fellow implored mercy at his hands very dolefully…and [swore] that, in case he should spare him, he would tell him faithfully all that he should desire to know.” L’Ollonais must have laughed at that; as if he were not going to find out everything he wanted anyway. He got the information he needed and promptly lopped off the man’s head. Only one man was spared, and he was sent back to the governor’s office in Havana with this message:

I shall never henceforward give quarter to any Spaniard whatsoever; and I have great hopes I shall execute on your own person the very same punishment I have done upon those you sent against me. Thus I have retaliated the kindness you designed to me and my companions.

Morgan would learn this: Pirates depended on their reputation for cruelty. If townspeople knew ahead of time that you cut off people’s heads for withholding information, they tended to talk a lot more readily. Armies surrendered. Mayors bargained. Loot materialized. It was the difference between seeing the Hells Angels pulling into your isolated town versus some strangers from the next county. You might be willing to take your chances with the latter, especially if you were guarding money built up over a lifetime of brutal hardship. But not with the Hells Angels—and not with the pirates. The Angels’ winged skull insignia sends the same message as did the pirate’s flag:
You know who we are. Do as you’re told.

Some pirates cultivated a reckless image: The first description that civilians throughout the Americas repeated over and over again when retelling their encounters with the Brethren was “barbarous”; the second was “crazy.” “I soon found that death was preferable to being linked with such a vile crew of miscreants,” wrote Philip Ashton, a young fisherman captured by pirates in 1722. The Spanish tended to torture captives according to a formula: There were probably in the advice ships crisscrossing the Atlantic booklets full of exact instructions for how to pull out a man’s toenails for stealing a loaf of bread. The Inquisition’s brutality was institutional. The pirates’ was often just insane. One buccaneer, Raveneau de Lussan, recounted that captives were often ordered to throw dice for their lives; whoever lost, lost his head. Blackbeard took this management philosophy to a new level. The pirate commander was once drinking in his cabin with the pilot and another man. Without any provocation he drew his pistols underneath the table, cocked them, blew out the candle, crossed his hands, and fired the guns. One of the men was shot through the knee and lamed for life, while the other escaped shaken but unhurt. Blackbeard did not have any quarrel with either man, which naturally led one of them to ask him why he’d shot them. “He only answered by damning them,
that if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was.
” [Emphasis in the original.]

This strategy also meant that the craziest often rose to the top of the trade. “He who goes the greatest length of wickedness,” wrote Captain Johnson, the author of
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates,
“is looked upon with a kind of Envy amongst them, as a Person of a more extraordinary Gallantry.” One Captain Taylor was pointed out as being popular for all the wrong reasons, “a great Favourite amongst them for no other Reason than because he was a greater Brute than the rest.” But other pirates were, after all, simply young men from coastal cities in England who had wanted a little adventure; they were not born lunatics but decent men who had sought out adventure and gold, not orgies of violence. A schism can sometime be detected in pirate narratives: Captain George Roberts was captured by pirates off the coast of the Cape Verde Islands in 1722; he was used to the rough ways of seamen, but the pirates’ wanton cruelty appalled him. Roberts had the guts to try to challenge them and eventually gave a speech to the whole crew about God and conscience. When he finished, the men responded:

Some of them said I should do well to preach a sermon and would make them a good chaplain. Others said, no, they wanted no Godliness to be preached there: That pirates had no God but their money, nor savior but their arms. Others said that I had said nothing but what was very good, true, and rational, and they wished that Godliness, or at least some humanity, were in more practice among them; which they believed would be more to their reputation and cause a greater esteem to be had for them, from both God and man.

After this, a silence followed….

The picture that emerges from many accounts is of new recruits lured by tales of riches and freedom, slowly being molded by peer pressure and constant alcohol intake until they succumbed to what might be called the culture of piracy and grew as savage as their mentors. John Fillmore, the great-grandfather of American president Millard Fillmore, was captured by pirates on a voyage from Massachusetts in 1723 and later wrote that anyone who practices a vice too long soon thinks it a virtue “and in such case conscience ceases to alarm the understanding.”

L’Ollonais pursued cruelty to its extremity; he was violent not only for effect but because he enjoyed violence. One instance, when he was reported to have cut a man to pieces with his sword and then licked the blade clean, suggests a level of pathology not found in the ordinary pirate. Only in the wilds of the Americas could he have flourished as he did. And in the summer of 1667, he was tearing through the Spanish West Indies like a cyclone and setting a mark that Morgan would have to match. In Tortuga, L’Ollonais put out the call for men and soon had at least eight ships and over six hundred pirates under his command; he set out for the Spanish Main. Almost immediately the crew spotted a Spanish ship out of Puerto Rico bound for New Spain, packed to the decks with “one hundred and twenty thousand weight of cacao, forty thousand pieces of eight and the value of ten thousand more in jewels.” L’Ollonais called off the rest of the fleet and took on the vessel alone with his ten-gun ship. Three hours later the prize was his. Another ship was caught off the Isle of Savona, and its holds revealed stacks of muskets, 12,000 pieces of eight, and, even better, “seven thousand weight of powder” for their guns. It was a smashing start.

L’Ollonais now set course for the city of Maracaibo, which lay on the huge inland lake beyond the Gulf of Venezuela. Maracaibo was a center for ranching and boasted huge plantations; its inhabitants had grown rich on hides, tobacco, and cacao-nuts. The Frenchman attacked the fort that guarded the city, and the Spaniards began to flee “in great confusion and disorder, crying:
The Pirates will presently be here with two thousand men.
” Maracaibo had been sacked by pirates before, and its people knew what lay in store for them. But they had not dealt with L’Ollonais. He hacked men to pieces as they stood before him and even threatened his own men: “Know ye withal,” he told them, “that the first man who shall show any fear, or the least apprehension thereof, I will pistol him with my own hands.”

The pirates fought ferociously, not only overcoming Maracaibo’s fortress but also putting to death an army of 800 men sent by the governor of Mérida, a military man who had fought for King Philip IV in Flanders. Faced with an artillery of twenty pieces and a determined band of soldiers, L’Ollonais outmaneuvered the governor by pretending to retreat pell-mell. The Spanish were overjoyed and began pursuing the bandits, crying,
“They flee, they flee, let us follow them!”
As soon as the soldiers had outrun the range of their artillery, the pirates turned on them and began slashing the ranks to pieces. It was a military maneuver of some sophistication, which many pirate captains could not match. L’Ollonais broke the Spanish force, captured the pieces, and occupied the town, starving many of its residents to death. And, most pointedly to Morgan, who surely heard of his exploits, he ransomed the surviving townspeople for 10,000 pieces of eight and gave them only two days to collect it. When they failed to do so, his men began torching the houses. “The inhabitants, perceiving the Pirates to be in earnest,…promised the ransom should be readily paid.” It was. When the pirates returned to Tortuga, the count of the assembled loot came to 260,000 pieces of eight ($13.2 million), a fabulous sum. L’Ollonais had squeezed Maracaibo for every last cob it possessed, faced down superior forces, and found his men food, drink, women, and gold. He quickly surpassed Morgan in the eyes of the Brethren. He “had got himself a very great esteem and repute at Tortuga by this last voyage,” Esquemeling tells us. “And now he needed take no great care how to gather men to serve under his colours…. They judged it a matter of the greatest security imaginable to expose themselves in his company to the hugest dangers that might possibly occur.”

If Morgan took a lesson from L’Ollonais’s use of cruelty in the Maracaibo campaign, he must have learned the cost of it from the Frenchman’s next, and last, exploit. Having gathered 700 men, L’Ollonais set off for Nicaragua but ran into a becalmed sea; they were unable to make any distance and so put into the first port they found and immediately began terrorizing the local Indians, “whom they totally robbed and destroyed.” They moved on to the port of Puerto Cavallo, where they took a Spanish ship and burned two huge storehouses to the ground, seemingly out of sheer willfulness. The local residents did not escape either: “Many inhabitants likewise they took prisoners, and committed upon them the most insolent and inhuman cruelties that ever heathens invented, putting them to the cruelest tortures they could imagine or devise.” L’Ollonais topped it off with a final flourish. The pirates found themselves on the road to a prosperous town; from their torture of locals, they knew that soldiers were waiting ahead of them in an ambush. What they needed was an alternative route, but one after the other the Spanish told them there was no other way forward. L’Ollonais finally snapped. “[He] grew outrageously passionate; insomuch that he drew his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spaniards, and pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth, like a ravenous wolf, saying to the rest: I will serve you all alike, if you show me not another way.”

The pirates pushed on, enduring wave after wave of Spanish ambushes. It must be said they fought with astounding bravery, regularly repelling superior numbers of soldiers hiding behind strong fortifications. After vicious fighting, the Spanish could finally take no more and put out the white flag. L’Ollonais granted them only one concession: They’d have two hours to assemble their things and run for the forests. Once the two hours had passed, the pirate captain ordered his men to chase the Spaniards into the forest and capture them. When it came to the king’s subjects, the Frenchman gave no quarter.

But his luck now began to run out. The buccaneers heard rumors of a rich-cargoed Spanish ship due near the mouth of the Guatemala River and, after three months of waiting, finally found that it had arrived. A ferocious battle ensued, where the pirates attacked under the blazing roar of the ship’s twenty-two guns, but when it was over, L’Ollonais found that the vessel held only “fifty bars of iron, a small parcel of paper, some earthen jars full of wine,” and little else. Now, like Morgan, L’Ollonais faced defections from his ranks. He held a council to rally the men for an attack on Guatemala, but some of them quit the whole business, mostly those “new in those exercises of piracy…who had imagined at their setting forth from Tortuga that pieces of eight were gathered as easily as pears from a tree.” The remaining pirates began to feel the pangs of hunger, as they’d run out of provisions and were forced to forage through the jungle every day. Finally they were reduced to killing monkeys, a notoriously tough business. Another pirate, Basil Ringrose, was on another voyage forced to hunt the macaques and found it unnerving. It would take fifteen or sixteen shots to kill three or four, “so nimbly would they escape our hands and aim, even after being desperately wounded.” In addition, there was something disturbingly human about the monkeys’ reaction when one of their troop had been shot. “The rest of the community will flock about him,” Ringrose reported, “and lay their hands upon the wound, to hinder the blood from issuing forth. Others will gather moss that grows upon the trees, and thrust it into the wound and hereby stop the blood or chew and apply as poultice.”

Things got steadily worse. L’Ollonais managed to beach his ship in the Las Pertas Islands, where it stuck fast. The Las Pertas were the last place you wanted to get stranded. The local Indians were reputed to be excellent hunters; it was said they could run “almost as fast as horses,” were fantastic divers, and hunted their prey using wooden spears with sometimes a crocodile tooth attached to the end. Rumor also held that they were cannibals. So with one eye on the woods, the pirates were now forced to begin the work of breaking up the ship for its wood and nails and constructing a new, much smaller longboat. While the work was going on, two pirates—a Frenchman and a Spaniard—went into the jungle looking for food and were spotted by a group of local Indians. A furious chase ensued; the Frenchman escaped, the Spaniard did not. Several days later a squadron of pirates was sent into the jungle to find out what had happened to him. Near the spot where the Frenchman had last seen his compadre, they found the remains of a recent campfire and near it “the bones of the said Spaniard very well roasted.” Farther out they found more evidence of the man’s fate: “some pieces of flesh ill scraped off from the bones” and a hand with two fingers left on it.

The increasingly desperate journey illustrated how badly things could go wrong for pirates. Once they were outside of their ports, the pirates had no guaranteed food supplies, no access to repair facilities for their ships, no sure alliances with locals, no stockades where they could get a solid night’s rest away from Indians, no way to call for reinforcements. The Spanish cities were distant from each other, but they were self-sufficient: An army had all the resources it needed to survive. L’Ollonais, the golden boy of the Brethren, was quickly learning a lesson that would haunt Morgan in the near future: One small setback could begin a cascading set of disasters. This meant that their leaders had to keep them moving forward constantly toward new sources of food and treasure, or they’d perish.

The new boat took six long months to build. When it was finished, L’Ollonais and a group of men selected by casting lots set out for Nicaragua, where they hoped to find some canoes, take them back to the Las Pertas, and carry the rest of the men back to Tortuga. But at the mouth of the Nicaragua River, the pirate’s trip came to a final end. L’Ollonais was attacked by both Spaniards and Nicaragua’s Darien Indians, who were one of the few tribes that the conquistadors were never able to defeat. The Frenchman, always lucky in battle, escaped and decided to try one last stab at fortune by heading for Cartagena, the great galleon port in present-day Colombia. But he did not get far. “God Almighty, the time of His Divine justice already being come,” Esquemeling tells us, “had appointed the Indians of Darien to be the instruments and executioners thereof.” They captured L’Ollonais and tore him to pieces while he was still alive, “throwing his body limb by limb into the fire, and his ashes into the air; to the intent no trace nor memory might remain of such an infamous, inhuman creature.” The men left behind suffered an equally bad ending; they were rescued by another pirate in canoes and set off for Cartagena. But starvation soon haunted them again, and they were forced to eat their own shoes and the sheaths of their swords, to hunt for Indians to eat (they never found any); the majority of them starved to death or faded away from hunger and disease.

L’Ollonais was the expression of how the pirates had turned away from civilizing influences. He’d become a legitimate monster, a savage throwback tramping through the savage jungle. To survive, Morgan would have to blend the Frenchman’s ruthlessness with subtler strategies. It was not going to be easy. For, in fact, every pirate, down to the fresh-faced youths like Roderick, had some of L’Ollonais in him; it was a prerequisite for the job.