Empire of Blue Water (12 page)

7

Portobelo

M
organ, abandoned by the French in the South Cays, now showed why he would outshine L’Ollonais. He began by giving a speech. By all reports the thirty-three-year-old Morgan had the common touch and was able to motivate even the most hardened privateer; one of his peers wrote about his “generous and undesigning way of conversing.” Seeing the doubt in his compatriots’ eyes, he “infused such spirit into his men as were able to put every one of them instantly upon new designs,” Esquemeling writes, “they being all persuaded by his reasons that the sole execution of his orders would be a certain means of obtaining great riches.” Among the listeners was an anonymous pirate from Campeche who had rendezvoused with Morgan’s tiny remaining fleet and was obviously judging whether to throw in his lot with them or go off hunting with someone else. Morgan, who “always communicated vigour with his words,” won him over. Soon Morgan’s fleet was back up to strength, boasting nine ships. A further mark of Morgan’s renewed confidence is that he persuaded the pirates to sail without voting on a destination, a violation of the pirate code. Fresh off a defeat, he was reasserting control. Roderick and the other English privateers now formed the backbone of his army.

The privateers sailed to the coast of Costa Rica in July of 1668, and Morgan revealed the target: Portobelo. Some of the pirates protested instantly. The Panamanian city (originally known as Porto Bello) was a major stronghold; it boasted two large castles, the mammoth Santiago and San Felipe de Todo Fierro (the Iron Fort), one on each side of the harbor mouth, bristling with forty-four guns that would fix any enemy ship in a withering fire. (It was also said that the Italian who had laid out the city chose the spot because it stood on a peculiar type of coral that could withstand cannon blasts.) Should a pirate ship miraculously make it past the two castles, farther up the river toward the town there were layers of military redundancy: sentry posts, blockhouses, lookout positions manned by armed soldiers. Near the quay another huge fort was being built by the unfortunates who had been captured at Providence, slaving away during the day and chained in a prison at night. There were only two cities with stronger defenses in the entire Spanish Main: Havana and Cartagena. Even the great Sir Francis Drake had died outside Portobelo harbor, unable to penetrate its defenses.

Portobelo was a seasonal Fort Knox: It was the terminus for the tons of raw silver dug out of Potosí and made into pieces of eight at the king’s mints. For most of the year, it was a tropical hellhole: hot, breezeless, full of “noisome vapours,” a place where various diseases competed for supremacy and fresh victims, where the smell of the rotting, fetid mud that the low tide revealed would blast into a visitor’s nostrils, never to be forgotten. To be posted to Portobelo was the Spanish noble’s biggest dread; it boasted few of the amenities of bustling Cartagena or sophisticated Havana. It existed only for those four or five weeks when the Spanish treasure fleet appeared on the horizon and Portobelo went from backwater to boomtown in record time. Merchants from Peru, Colombia, and the far reaches of the Spanish Empire, including Madrid itself, would pour into the city, sending rents spiraling. The wealth of the king’s dominions, which had been brought up the coast of South America and loaded onto mules at Panama, flooded into the town. The population exploded from 2,000 permanent residents to perhaps 10,000. Traders brought their best slaves. Farmers brought chickens (whose price would increase twelvefold). Two thousand mules were kept at the ready for transporting the king’s treasure; long trains of the sturdy animals that had laced the hills above the town in the days before would suddenly appear in the streets, loaded with jewels and bullion from Peru and beyond. Thomas Gage, while a Dominican friar, had visited the town before a fair and counted two hundred mules entering the town square in one day and dumping their load of treasure there. “Silver wedges lay like heaps of stone in the street,” he marveled; but with the town crawling with Spanish soldiers, no one dared touch a bar. Instead of coins, wedges of silver were traded for the rich spun cloth, the fine muskets, and the hundreds of other goods that arrived from Spain on the treasure ships. The assembled treasure during the fleet’s visit could amount to 25 million pieces of eight, double the king of England’s annual revenue.

Portobelo was the result, in many ways, of one man and one day in the summer of 1544. A young Inca named Diego Huallpa had spent a long morning tracking an elusive deer on the mountain called Potosí in the kingdom of Peru (now Bolivia). The lining of this throat began to parch as he ascended beyond the thirteen-thousand-foot mark, high even for an Inca who spent his life in thin air. But fresh meat was precious, and Huallpa pressed on, determined to claim his prey. As he reached for a shrub to steady himself on the slopes, the plant tore away, and in its thick, dangling roots was entwined something that flashed in the sun, distracting Huallpa. He brushed away the clots of dirt; the metal gleamed under his thumb. Silver, unmistakably.

The Spanish were soon knocking on his door, threatening Huallpa with the rack, one of their earliest imports to the Americas. He pointed them to the mountain. Even when their Indian workers began to dig out piles of silver from the spot where Huallpa led them to, the colonial administrators could not conceive of what they had found. In the next two centuries, Potosí would yield almost 2 billion ounces of high-grade silver ore, at a time when the metal was just as valuable as gold. The entire European economy, tamped down for decades because of a lack of precious metals to serve as currency, took on a new life when the first ships began arriving in Spain groaning under the weight of the mine’s silver bars. The famed city of El Dorado, the city of the Golden Man, drove the conquistadors mad with its tales of unfathomable riches, but it was a myth. Potosí was real. To this day when a Spaniard wishes to talk of any crazily wealthy thing, he simply says, “It’s a Potosí.”

The men seeking the treasure rarely thought of the price paid for each ounce extracted. A Spanish visitor described the Inca workers who recovered the ore. He reported that they worked twelve hours a day, descending as far as seven hundred feet into the mine “where night is perpetual” and the air thick with fumes to gather the ore, and then climbing four or five backbreaking hours to rise again to the surface. If any of them slipped, they’d plunge to their deaths at the bottom of the pit. It was for the product of this misery that Morgan was coming to Portobelo.

To attempt the town, Morgan again had to rally his men, among whom numbered mulatto pirates along with blacks, Portuguese, Italian, French, and English. Many of them considered him crazy even to suggest Portobelo; it was beyond them. But Morgan made them see. “If our numbers are small,” he cried, “our hearts are great, and the fewer we are, the better share we shall have in the spoils!” It was a wonderfully condensed battle cry tailored for pirates: It combined the David-versus-Goliath odds that they seemed to relish in certain moods with the brute economic reality that fewer men meant bigger shares. The pirates quickly signed on.

The Welshman had prepared well. An Indian informant from inside Portobelo had given him an accurate picture of the garrison’s numbers and state of mind. The soldiers manning the various defenses hadn’t been paid in over a year and a half, leading some of them simply to disappear from their posts and others to take up side jobs as tailors or grocers in the town itself, where they slept at night, leaving the castles seriously undermanned. The mammoth Santiago boasted only 75 or 80 men on a typical night, when there should have been 200 trained soldiers on guard. The castle forces were supposed to be backed up by civilian militias (one each for Spaniards, mulattoes, freed blacks, and slaves), but they, too, were depleted by sickness or other duties. Many of the Spaniards were in Panama, away from the miasma that was Portobelo; the loyal blacks were chasing maroons in the hills around the town, leaving fewer than a hundred men able to fight.

And then the pirates stumbled on unimpeachable witnesses: Half a dozen bone-thin and badly sunburned men approached the fleet in a canoe as it headed for Portobelo. It’s not clear if they’d heard rumors of Morgan’s approach or had simply happened on the fleet, but they knew the target city well; it turned out they were some of the long-lost English soldiers from the garrison who had been taken during the Spanish reconquest of Providence and shipped as slaves to Portobelo, where they’d suffered unspeakable torments. As he listened to the men tell of their inhuman treatment, Roderick looked at these half-dead wretches, knowing that the same fate awaited him if he was captured by the Spanish. His anger built to a fever pitch; not in years had he felt so English. He and the others swore they would see the Spaniards bleed for what they’d done to the captives. But two extra nuggets of information tantalized the coolheaded Morgan: The newly freed men reported that an expedition against Jamaica was being planned and that funds were being raised through a levy in the province of Panama. The rumors of war, it seemed, were true. The men also swore that one of their fellow captives was none other than Prince Maurice. Maurice was the king’s nephew who had fought for him throughout the Civil War after a youth spent drinking and dueling in The Hague and elsewhere. He and his brother Rupert had been cruising the Caribbean in 1652 when they’d run into a ferocious storm and Maurice’s ship had disappeared. “He was snatched away from us in obscurity,” wrote one cavalier who had been on the voyage, “lest, beholding his loss would have prevented some from endeavouring their own safety; so much he lived beloved, and died bewailed.” Rumors had flown ever since the sinking: Maurice was dead and at the bottom of the sea; he was alive and being held by the Spanish at Morro Castle in Puerto Rico. Now Morgan had a fix on him. To find Maurice would earn the eternal gratitude of the king, a useful thing considering that Morgan was set to attack Spain in a time of peace. “We thought it our duty to attempt that place,” Morgan wrote in his report on the mission.

Portobelo sat at the southeastern end of a small bay. On the northern shore of the bay sat the fort called San Felipe and on the southern shore, farther in toward the city, sat Santiago, the Iron Fort. An approach through the narrow mouth of the bay was out of the question; the castles were undermanned, but it would take only a few decent gunners to blow the fleet to splinters. Instead Morgan devised a plan based on stealth. The fleet anchored at Boca del Toro, a quiet bay to the southeast of the town. There, according to Morgan’s own narrative, 500 of the men transferred into twenty-three canoes that the ships had been towing or carrying. These were the same type of forty-foot, single-sail canoes that Morgan had used in his odyssey to Central America, and now the men bent low over their sides, dipping the paddles into the black water and speeding the boats along with the strong easterly current. The canoes were becoming a Morgan trademark; so was traveling by night. The buccaneers paddled through the darkness “to be ye more undiscryed” and found hiding places on the deserted shore by day, sweltering beneath the trees. They slid under the guns of San Lorenzo, the fort that guarded the river Chagres, and sped on. It was like a journey through the primeval world, uninhabited and tomb-quiet except for the night cries of parrots and the growls of jaguars.

For four nights the fleet of canoes remained undetected until it came upon a fishing boat manned by two blacks and a “zambo”; in other parts of the Americas, the term would come to mean someone who was three-quarters black and one-quarter white; here in the Spanish territories it meant a person who was half black and half Indian. The pirates began to torture the blacks, what the Brethren called “questioning with the usual ceremonies.” [Pirate argot tends to be drier, more English, than the “Avast!” and “Shiver me timbers” flung about by buccaneers in Hollywood films: Escaping from a tight situation was called a “soft farewell”; “a forced loan” was any theft from the Spanish; a pirate’s corpse left out as a warning to others was described as “sun-dried,” while poking captives with knives as they ran around a circle of laughing pirates was a “sweat.” These intermingled with sailor lingo such as “belly-timber” (food), “fudled,” (drunk), and “Davy Jones” (the devil’s minion), who lived at the bottom of the sea, aka “Davy Jones’s locker.”] The Negroes refused to guide the pirates to Portobelo. Morgan had learned the lesson of Puerto del Príncipe—the cutlasses came out, and the pair was soon fed to the sharks. The zambo quickly agreed to cooperate.

Finally the men arrived at a position between the Isla de Naranja (Orange Island) and the shoreline, within sight of the castles of Portobelo. There were a total of four fortifications to overcome, beginning with a lightly manned blockhouse called La Ranchería, where sentries watched the coastline for unfamiliar ships on the southern shore of the bay that led to Portobelo. Two miles away, on the outskirts of the town, sat Santiago Castle. Then one reached the town center, with its merchant houses, churches, and slave quarters. Beyond the town proper, just off the shoreline in the shallow harbor itself, waited the still-uncompleted San Gerónimo fort, which the captured Englishmen had been working to finish. Across the harbor, on the northern tip of the bay, sat the final obstacle: San Felipe, guarding all entries and exits from the harbor.