Empire of Blue Water (16 page)

The plantations became factories for rebels and pirates; servants who were sick to death of the hellish life sneaked away to the ships waiting in Port Royal’s harbor. The pirates offered the only other outlet for men who were tired of being beaten. Port Royal was the way station: Indentured servants and slaves were trundled off the boats arriving in the harbor by day. By night, runaways from the interior would appear in the town, looking to join a pirate crew. The planters constantly complained that the privateers were a menace and drained off badly needed manpower from their fields. But the planters had no army. Little did the pirates know that their long-term enemies were not the Spanish but these planters and merchants who slapped their backs and bought their illicit goods at cut rates. As the plantations grew more and more profitable, as the global model of trade built on the currency minted from Potosí silver solidified and grew, the white gold produced by black slaves and poor “buckras,” or white men, became more valuable than the latest haul of pirate booty.

The Brethren believed they were helping to kill off an oppressive system—the Spanish Empire—as they enriched themselves. But they were also helping to bring into being a different system that would become their worst enemy.

The privateers were the sole protection for Jamaica; the English Crown could not afford to send warships to Jamaica—or to any of their colonies, for that matter—and so the privateers became the navy, the intelligence service, and the infantry. Ever fearful of attack from the Spanish or French, the merchants and planters relied on Henry Morgan and his men for protection. The pirates “were very welcome guests at Jamaica,” one Jamaica historian recounts; “the planters and men in power caressed Morgan, while the inferior sort contrived every sort of bait to drain his associates of their money.”

And the pirates were willing; they sprayed pesos around the harbor as if the money were water. Portobelo stood out in Morgan’s résumé for one reason: loot. And the privateers did their best to distribute it in the vice industries of their hometown. This is perhaps the greatest mystery the pirates have left us: why they spent their money the way they did. Men like our representative pirate, Roderick, endured incredible hardship to get their rewards: They were felled by malaria, beheaded by Indians, separated from loved ones, excommunicated from the church, hanged from gallows; they ate rats, dogs, grass, leather sheaths, or nothing at all; they had poisoned arrows shot at them, flaming pots of oil dumped on their heads, pikes thrust through their entrails, and were faced with “instruments made especially for cutting off the legs” of those attacking Spanish forts; they were stung by scorpions, bitten by poisonous snakes, or drowned (one out of seven ships that sailed out of harbors in the age of sail were never seen again); they hacked their way through godforsaken jungles and marched or paddled their way through crocodile-infested swamps and across half of the Spanish Main. Despite the happy-go-lucky image, pirates were hunted like vermin, and the memories of that fear often stayed with them for years. One pirate reported symptoms among his comrades similar to shell shock after they arrived home in France. “Some of our men whose spirits were so misguided,” he wrote, “and whose minds had given way from the suffering they’d experienced to such an extent that they were always imagining Spaniards were coming, upon sighting from the deck of the boat some men on horseback riding along the seashore got out their arms ready to fire thinking they were enemies.” They did all this in the hopes of getting a small fortune, and, once they did, an astonishing number of them immediately gambled and whored the money away within a matter of days. “Men who had been the owners of millions,” wrote one observer, “were in a brief space totally ruined, and finding themselves destitute even of raiment and provisions, returned again to sea.”

Poor men live by a different logic than those who have never starved; being rich means spending money on all those things one has been denied, not soberly stashing the money away for future needs. Woodes Rogers, another privateer turned pirate hunter, offered some corsairs plots of land if they’d give up the profession and build a home on it. He was hoping to make them into prosperous farmers, but many refused the offer or built only miserable shacks and planted just enough to get by. “For work they mortally hate it,” wrote Rogers. “They thus live, poorly and indolently, seeming content, and pray for wrecks or pirates.” But the pirates went beyond any Lotto winner or Bolivian miner who hits a rich vein: L’Ollonais’s men were reported to have blown through 260,000 pieces of eight, or $13.5 million in today’s dollars, in three short weeks after one of their expeditions, “having spent it all in things of little value, or at play either cards or dice.” One buccaneer was said to have showered a whore with 500 pieces of eight, or about $25,000, just to watch her strip; others, according to a historian of Jamaica, went through 2,000 or 3,000 pieces of eight in a single night. The men practically threw the money away with contempt. And when they weren’t spending, they were giving the stuff away. “Among themselves, and to each other, these Pirates are extremely liberal and free,” Esquemeling wrote, in an observation that was backed by other chroniclers of the pirate life. “If any one of them has lost all his goods, which often happens in their manner of life, they freely give him, and have him partake of what they have.”

Why, when they’d earned it at so high a cost? In fact, there were only a few options for the common pirate who came into money. With his hefty shares, Henry Morgan could (and did) buy large estates and stock them with slaves; other captains or even thrifty buccaneers sailed back to England and bought property. But on his share a common pirate would have to buy a smaller plot in Jamaica, purchase some cheap indentured servants, watch them closely, whip them when needed, and husband his money. In other words, become a kind of tight-fisted farmer with regular hours and work seven days a week. He might set up shop in town, but these were uneducated men used to a life of drinking and freedom. How could they go and buy a grocer’s stall and nickel-and-dime their way to a living? It went against the whole joy of being a pirate. After years in the life, pirates had become accustomed to long periods of drunken tedium interrupted by binges of extreme violence and spending. If they had been meant to be shopkeepers or yeoman farmers, they would never have ended up on Henry Morgan’s ship in the first place.

Now walking with a pronounced limp from the wound suffered at Portobelo, the twenty-seven-year-old Roderick dreamed of gushers of wine, of staining his newly grown beard with groaning platters of meat running with savory juices, of specific prostitutes and specific acts he wished to commit with them. The silver begged to be spent. Money attached him to the land; there was the danger he could buy a piece of property or do something equally respectable and leave the pirate life forever if he didn’t get rid of it now. And there was no better town in the world to be sailing into on a pile of gold than hot Port Royal; Roderick had in his short time in the Brethren lost sight of anything besides the next score, the next woman, the next adventure. He dealt only in immediate gratifications; it was almost as if the pirate code had short-circuited his ability to think of a regular life outside it.

Treasure had transformed the Spanish Empire and heightened its flaws. It did the same thing to the pirates: From being ragamuffins scraping out a living on the edge of civilization, they had become the avatars of the New World. No one was freer than they were, but the easy money meant they never had to think beyond the next stake. However, forces were gathering that would end their reign, and there was a turncoat in their midst who would help bring their flashy ride to an end.

In the meantime Port Royal was their playground, and it was earning a reputation as the baddest place in the Americas. “This town is the Sodom of the New World,” wrote one clergyman, “and since the majority of its population consists of pirates, cutthroats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world, I felt my permanence there was of no use and I could better preach the Word of God elsewhere among a better sort of folk.” He was as good as his word, leaving Jamaica on the same ship that had brought him. Every few years it seemed a preacher would come through town and, horrified at what he saw, would predict that God would destroy the city.

It was the biblical Sodom and its sister city Gomorrah to which the Jamaican port was compared. The two ancient towns had sat on a beautiful plain near the Jordan River. Although they became the byword for vice, Sodom and Gomorrah were accused of specific crimes: “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned,” the accusation goes in Ezekiel 16:49. “They did not help the poor and needy.” To these charges were added sexual offenses (which means either homosexuality or rape, depending on which scholars you believe) and inhospitality. As with Port Royal, the towns had a bad reputation that even reached the ears of God. “The outcry…is so great and their sin so grievous,” the Lord tells Abraham, that he was forced to investigate the rumors. Once he’d seen the sinful ways of the towns’ rich inhabitants, he rained down burning sulfur on them and wiped Sodom and Gomorrah utterly off the face of the earth. The devastation was so complete that when the Allies decided to launch the most destructive aerial bombing campaign in history to that point, against the city of Hamburg in 1943, they named the raid Operation Gomorrah.

Every society must have its Sodom, the place that absorbs the evil expelled from more righteous communities. In the Bible it was Sodom. In the modern world, New York, Las Vegas, and other metropolises have played the role. In the late 1600s, in the New World, it was Port Royal.

The city’s days were, it was believed, numbered in the hundreds, and at times it seemed as if the moment of judgment were at hand. The English had been on the island for a decade and a half, and by now they noticed that the notoriously tremor-ridden sands of Port Royal were restless, especially during spells of hot weather. The earth would tremble under their feet when the heat came, and the longer the spells lasted, the more severe the tremor.

The earth was largely a mystery to the seventeenth-century mind. But the leading theory centered on caves: Many “natural philosophers” (there was no such thing as a “scientist” in the late 1600s) believed that the earth was honeycombed with caves and caverns, in which tremendous gales swept back and forth, looking for a place to escape from the brimstone-filled underworld. In 1692 the astrologer Edmund Halley would expand the cavern idea to a much more intriguing theory, proposing that the planet consisted of four separate spheres: Inside the outer crust were three smaller planets, the size of Mars, Venus, and Mercury, respectively, each placed inside the other like Russian
matryoshka
dolls and each spinning at its own rate on its own eccentric axis.

The theory of tectonic plates was, of course, centuries away. That model would not have calmed Port Royalists, for in fact the city lay in a major tectonic region laced with faults and active volcanoes. The Caribbean Plate that Jamaica sits on dates back tens of millions of years, to when molten rock from the earth’s mantle surged up into the waters of a nameless sea. For millennia it has been grinding, slipping, and bucking against three other plates, the North American, the South American, and the Cocos. The border with the North American Plate lies just off the northern coast of Jamaica; that huge mass is pushing west, while the Caribbean moves east. The resulting fault is a treacherous “strike-slip” zone, prone to low tremors and shattering earthquakes.

All that the Jamaican citizen knew was that something odd was happening beneath his city.

9

An Amateur English Theatrical

A
fter a few weeks in port, most of the pirates had exhausted their credit in the taverns and with the street-walkers. Roderick, now sporting a beard, a new gold earring, and a scar of unknown origin across his cheek, was nearly broke. He’d been forced to sell his pistols to pay off his debts and had slept rough on the beach for a few nights. He and other buccaneers came to Morgan, practically demanding another mission. There was a certain logic to the careers of pirate captains: Their expeditions tended to become progressively more ambitious after each success. Like any businessman, a privateer needed richer and richer targets to sustain the momentum of his own growing reputation. And there was something in the pirate code that disdained conservative business plans. Morgan now had in mind an even more dangerous target: Cartagena. It was the biggest port in Spain’s vast empire; here was collected the treasure from all of Peru. If in modern-day terms Portobelo was Fort Knox, Cartagena was New York, the center of trade and culture. But it was also a fortress. After Drake and his English and French peers had ransacked the city in the late 1500s, the Spanish Crown had begun a massive building program that studded the lagoons that led to the city with castles and forts, which were now manned by 400 soldiers and fifty cannon. The story was told that one of the kings of Spain looked out his westward-facing window one day and remarked that he expected to see the battlements of Cartagena visible across the ocean, as he’d spent so many fortunes building them.

It was an audacious target for Morgan. If he took Cartagena, Morgan would prove he was the strongest force in the New World, bar none. And become filthy rich in the process.

Like L’Ollonais in the wake of his great raids, Morgan and his captains had little trouble raising men. “There flocked to them great numbers of other pirates,” writes Esquemeling, “both French and English, by reason of the name of Captain Morgan was now rendered famous in all the neighbouring countries, for the great enter-prizes he had performed.” Roderick was now considered a veteran privateer, and he signed up for the next expedition without a second thought. He admired Morgan, the way he’d walk into one of the taverns and buy a round of drinks for everyone in the place and then match any of them rumbullion for rumbullion. He didn’t put on airs. He was one of them, but he wasn’t, too—he could speak eloquently, as if from a book, and he snapped out commands with the assurance they’d be obeyed immediately. Roderick had never been invited to the admiral’s estate, but he’d listened to him tell stories of the English Civil War at a tavern and had caught the great man’s eye and nodded. It was a moment he relived again and again. Despite his poor background, Roderick had pressed into him an unthinking respect for the gentry, and Morgan had a touch of the gentleman about him. Roderick, despite his newfound self-regard, respected it. That is, so long as Morgan produced.

As the admiral gathered in his fleet at Cow Island, off Hispaniola, the English government showed its appreciation in the form of the
Oxford,
a twelve-year-old, seventy-two-foot frigate armed with twenty-six guns and 125 men that had been sent over “for the defence of his Majesty’s plantation of Jamaica, and suppressing the insolence of privateers upon that coast.” It was the Crown’s first material gesture of support for the Brethren. Morgan was enchanted with the vessel; it immediately became the most powerful pirate ship in the Caribbean, and he made it his flagship. The
Oxford
was exactly the kind of floating arsenal needed to give him a fighting chance at Cartagena.

There was some dissension between the English and French pirates in the fleet, which the appearance of the
Oxford
only heightened. As soon as the frigate arrived at Cow Island, its captain arrested the crew of the French ship
Le Cerf Volant,
who had been accused of robbery and piracy by a Virginian captain. (The fine line between privateering with a commission and piracy without one was murky—the famous privateer William Dampier found that some French “commissions” carried by so-called privateers were actually hunting licenses.) The French were hauled back to Port Royal, where the captain was sentenced to death and the boat renamed
Satisfaction,
at which point both it and the
Oxford
returned to Cow Island, ready for duty. The French captain’s harsh sentence was later commuted, but the incident rankled in the Gallic camp.

With the fleet now at twelve ships and 900 men, Morgan was ready to begin. On the first day of 1669, he sent a message to the other ships’ captains that the next day they’d hold their war council aboard the
Oxford.
The morning came, and the captains boarded the spacious vessel and began their deliberations. Names flew back and forth, but the bulk of the ship that lay under their feet practically demanded they try Cartagena, and finally Morgan’s wish was approved. Now the punch bowl was replenished and the party began in earnest, one whose atmosphere was heightened by the glow of certain riches that lay just over the horizon. “They began on board the great ship to feast one another for joy of their new voyage and happy council,” Esquemeling writes, describing a scene echoed in other privateer narratives. “They drank many healths and discharged many guns, as the common sign of mirth among seamen used to be.” They fired guns under the table, another buccaneer tradition. They toasted 1669; they toasted Cartagena; they toasted the king; they toasted the whores back in Port Royal. They drank themselves insensible.

As the mellow Caribbean dusk descended, candles were brought out. The ship echoed with laughter and shouts in different languages; since pirates were fond of music, it’s likely the sound of a fiddle or a guitar went floating over the water toward the dark woods of Hispaniola. On deck the spidery white rigging would suddenly be illuminated with a flash of a pistol shot as the pirates fired away at the stars. The smell of burnt powder drifted down into the ship’s cabin, where the gregarious Morgan was playing host and telling his guests to sit down to a lavish (by pirate standards) dinner. It was going to be a long night, and they needed to fortify themselves, as this would be their last unhurried meal before the rigors of the approach to Cartagena. The flashes of pistol shots continued; the singing never stopped. And then a huge white flash followed by a shocking concussion blinded the captains, and they were lifted into the air and then down into the sea, with splinters of the
Oxford
showering upon their heads. The living surfaced and floated on the black water for a moment, pieces of burning sail drifting down, their eardrums shattered or ringing with the echo of the massive boom. Limbs of the men they had been sitting next to a moment ago bobbed on the waves.

The ship’s magazines had exploded, touched off by an errant spark, “the negligence of the gunner” or (some said) the French, still nursing their grievance. The latter seems unlikely, as the saboteurs would have gone up with the ship. But the magnificent
Oxford
was gone, along with 200 of its men. Only ten buccaneers had survived the blast. Miraculously, Morgan and the other captains who had been sitting on his side of the cabin table had all come away shaken but alive. One by one they were picked out of the water by the other ships in the fleet. (Roderick had been lying drunk on the deck of a smaller ship and had shot bolt upright when the
Oxford
went off, then rushed to join in the rescue.) The pirates spent little time mourning. When Morgan dispatched boats to search for the bodies of the dead, it was “not out of any design of affording them Christian burial, but only to obtain the spoil of their clothes and other attire.” If the dead were wearing gold rings, their bloated fingers were snipped off with a cutlass and the jewelry collected, while the bodies were left “exposed to the voracity of the monsters of the sea.”

The Spanish rejoiced at the news of the
Oxford
’s demise, especially the citizens of Cartagena. They credited their patron saint, Nuestra Señora de Popa, with the deliverance; she dwelled in the convent that looked over the city from a high hill that can be seen well out to sea. For decades to come, any Cartagena schoolboy could tell you that the morning after the explosion the saint was seen returning over the water from the direction of Hispaniola, her clothes wet and torn, her face lined with exhaustion from the work she’d done against the diabolical Morgan.

The disaster forced a change in the privateers’ plans; Cartagena was no longer a realistic target without the
Oxford
and the extra men. Morgan sent out a call for more ships and buccaneers and set up a rendezvous for a month in the future. Meanwhile he sought out supplies, even landing on Santo Domingo in Hispaniola to hunt for some of its famous cows. The Spanish, who knew that Morgan was resupplying on the island, set a trap for fifty of his men by assembling a great herd to draw the privateers in as the Spanish watched from a hiding place. At a signal, the soldiers attacked. “They set upon them with all fury imaginable,” Esquemeling tells us. “Crying,
Mata, mata!
that is,
Kill, kill.
” The privateers ran for their lives.

The
Oxford
accident hadn’t damaged the admiral’s reputation; in fact, his miraculous escape probably burnished his name as an invincible leader among the buccaneers. “While Morgan was safe,” the historian Leslie writes, “they thought success sure.” Morgan was less sanguine; a “huge impatience” was gnawing at him. Too many things could go wrong on a pirate expedition, as the
Oxford
disaster proved, as the lesson of L’Ollonais reinforced. After resupplying the ships, he set out for the rendezvous, Saona Island. When Morgan arrived weeks later, the news was not good. Saona lay at the southeast end of Hispaniola toward Puerto Rico, directly north across the North Sea (now known as the Caribbean Sea) of the Gulf of Venezuela, meaning that the privateers, once assembled, could swoop straight down into the heart of the Spanish Main. But it was also windward of Port Royal and the other major pirate haunts, which meant that the ships had to tack and beat against the trade winds to get there. It was a rugged haul, especially in the small, open ships that offered little protection from the whipping spray; three of the ships gave up, claiming that their vessels could not handle the pounding. “Sails chafed and stitching rotted in the alternate bright sun and heavy rain,” writes Morgan biographer Dudley Pope, “hull planking spewed caulking, rigging stretched, chafed and parted, men became worn out, unable to remember a time when they were not crashing to windward, their ships rolling violently and pitching as though every wave was a cliff edge over which they were falling.” The Spanish seemed to be stalking Morgan: Another mission to Hispaniola for supplies returned empty-handed after encountering a strong contingent of soldiers, “now so vigilant and in such good posture of defence” that it was not worth the risk of battle. Morgan’s very success was making him a target.

The Welshman finally decided he’d have to set out with the assets at hand: 500 men in eight ships. Morgan had been thinking of ransacking Venezuela’s eastern shores, “having hitherto resolved to cruize upon the coasts of Caracas, and plunder all the towns and villages he could meet,” but the ships had taken a beating already, and there was little appetite for a long slog to windward. He began talking with a French captain who had served with L’Ollonais in his glory days, when the Gallic terror had pillaged the city of Maracaibo for 260,000 pesos. This man knew the approach to the city, its “entries, passages, forces and means,” and he convinced Morgan that the fleet was perfect for the mission. And besides, it had been two years since L’Ollonais’s raid.

The cities of the Spanish New World were amazingly resilient. The elite tended to diversify their holdings: They might have interests in agriculture, in hides or textiles, in silver recovery, in real estate and other concerns. The buccaneers could devastate one aspect of their wealth, but they rarely stayed around long enough to damage everything. And the cheap labor and innate riches of the treasure territories meant that there was always another mule train of silver on the way. In the meantime governors would write Madrid reporting the raid and asking for engineers to be sent out and new forts and castles to be built, but there was a limit to what could be done. Cities often had to be located where they were to accommodate the treasure fleets or other business of the empire, and if they were moved, the buccaneers would find the new locations anyway (as was the case with a future Morgan target, Panama). Combining far-flung towns didn’t fit the needs of the king, and that was paramount—one needed his permission to relocate. Buccaneers knew that the coffers of their favorite towns replenished quickly, and they tended to let cities lie fallow until jewelry boxes and hidden reserves could be filled again. The French had pillaged Maracaibo a full two years earlier. It was ready.

The fleet set off, dropping due south with the trade winds to port. They sighted the island of Ruba (now Aruba) and stopped for supplies: wood from the island’s forests and sheep and goats from the local Indians. Two days later the ships set off for the Gulf of Venezuela; they were on war footing now and sailed only at night. By morning they’d entered the vast gulf, a large bay on top connected to the inland lake named Laguna de Maracaibo by a narrow channel, the whole formation from above looking like a figure eight, with the gulf on top and the lake below. The gulf is a notorious ship eater; its shallow waters hide sandbars, and its featureless coast makes navigation difficult, especially for the inexperienced. Luckily, the French captain knew the waters well and guided the fleet to an anchorage just off the three islands lying across the twelve-foot-deep channel that led to the bay. There they spent the night. The next morning the navigators would have to slalom between two of the islands, San Carlos and Zapara, without wrecking. It would be a pretty piece of sailing.