Empire of Blue Water (18 page)

The pirates were underwhelmed. “Old fellow,” Roderick told him, “instead of five hundred you must say five hundred thousand pieces of eight; otherwise you shall here end your life.” Still the prisoner held out. The Portuguese man claimed he was just a poor tavern owner who could raise no more; a “thousand protestations” flowed out of him, until the pirates must have been sick of his voice. At last he agreed to 1,000 pesos for his release; he raised the sum in a few days, paid up, and then walked free, “although so horribly maimed in his body, that ’tis scarce to be believed he could survive many weeks later.”

None of this is outside of the norms of battlefield behavior. But what Esquemeling reports next did go past the norms: crucifixions, men and women “lacerated in the most tender parts of their bodies,” the deaths of female prisoners and children from neglect and starvation. There is little in the record outside of Esquemeling’s account to suggest that Morgan was a monster capable of such things, and one should take the report with a grain of salt; the writer may well have been embellishing at the prodding of his publishers. If Esquemeling made it up, one has to say he had the makings of a novelist in him. The innocent fool chattering away to the pirates about his famous relatives, ensuring his own death, and the Portuguese miser who endured a Golgotha just to save 500 pesos—they are beautiful touches. The latter portrait was truer of the New World: Here it was money that brought respect, not honor. Men defended their gold the way they once had the names Jesus Christ and Santiago.

How Morgan felt about the cruelty that went along with most privateering expeditions, he never said. But later in life he did show that he could sympathize with the unfortunate. When entreating his superiors in London over some English prisoners in Spanish jails, he pleaded, “They are all great objects of compassion, so I hope you will not be unmindful of them.” And in the same letter he agonized about granting sanctuary to a religious refugee. “I do not know if I have done right herein,” he confessed. “Sure I am that [I] wished to follow the dictates of humanity as well as those of law and reason.” But a Spaniard who was resisting probably got very little sympathy from Morgan the buccaneer: Everyone understood the rules of engagement, and those who fought opened themselves up to every kind of treatment. For his part, Roderick had been raised to fear God, and the brutality he witnessed sometimes shocked him. But he’d found in himself a capacity to join in. He’d realized that the price for the life he enjoyed was that he could never question the methods of the Brethren. Anyone who shied away from woolding a captive was instantly suspect and risked marooning or worse. He expected the same if he were captured by Spanish musketeers. The pirates were like the Indian captive: They all initiated one another into torture. Any lingering doubts, any images of the burned merchant’s face with the skin hanging off, were eradicated by Roderick’s increasing intake of rum.

The buccaneers raked over Gibraltar for weeks and then left with their boats groaning under the weight of silks, slaves, and loot. The pirates were delighted and ready to begin the orgiastic spending of what they’d earned. But Morgan, one can be sure, had a clock ticking in the back of his mind. They’d spent a great deal of time gathering their prizes, and anytime the Brethren landed on the Spanish Main, riders galloped off to the centers of power to ask for help. Perhaps troops were on the way from Panama or Cartagena. As it happened, the situation was much worse. Waiting for the men of Port Royal was the dreaded Armada de Barlovento.

The fact that the armada had been dispatched to the Americas spoke volumes about how worried the queen regent was about Morgan; its arrival on the Main was a direct result of the shock of Portobelo. The fleet of five ships and its commander, Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa, had been sailing up and down the coasts of Cuba and Campeche, hoping to catch the pirates as they lurked in the cays and off the islands. The return on the significant investment that the armada represented had been slim: one small ship nabbed in the North Sea. No wonder the queen, after only six months or so of the armada’s fruitless patrols, ordered the two most formidable ships in the fleet back to Spain. The dozen ships that had been initially approved for the protection of the Main were now down to three, but all of them outclassed anything Morgan had in his motley little navy. Alonzo commanded the
Magdalena,
a forty-eight-gun galleon, and was supported by the
San Luis,
which boasted thirty-eight guns, and the
Nuestra Señora de la Soledad,
a fifty-ton vessel that had last seen service as a French trade ship and carried ten guns. As historian Peter Earle has pointed out, the
Soledad
would have been an afterthought in the European navies, but it was still the equal of Morgan’s flagship.

Alonzo had mile upon mile of open sea to patrol; to increase his chances of running into Morgan, he depended on seafront-tavern rumors and a web of informers. Pirates were inveterate gossips, and it was well known in West Indies ports that Morgan had assembled his fleet at Cow Island and that the Spanish Main was to be his next target; that could mean that Panama, Cartagena, Maracaibo, or a host of other towns were now in his sights. Any pirate fleet would likely sail east before attempting to sweep down onto the Main, so the admiral decided to head to Puerto Rico and surprise them en route. But it was a long shot, and when the fleet arrived in San Juan, the governor reported they hadn’t spotted the pirate’s flag. They were nine days too late: As Alonzo scoured the port for news of the buccaneers, Morgan was already in Maracaibo, deep into pillaging. Alonzo raced west to Santo Domingo, where he arrived on May 25, and finally got a hot lead: The president there reported that Morgan’s men had arrived in their port and attempted to push their way into the city and were only held off by the island’s infantry. A French prisoner chimed in that he’d been rounded up during one of the pirates’ cattle hunts on Hispaniola and the pirates had revealed they were victualing for a raid on the Main. This was confirmed by a Dutch trader; pirates had been buying meat and talking about a specific town: Maracaibo. The admiral pointed his ships south and went racing after Morgan.

When they reached the Gulf of Venezuela, a mestizo who was acting as “corporal of the Indians” confirmed the admiral’s hunch. Morgan was at Gibraltar. It was incredible news: His enemy was now within his reach, trapped like a dog, without the possibility of escape. How the words must have sung in Alonzo’s ears! Morgan’s ships could overawe a town because of the men on them: ferocious soldiers who regularly churned through Spanish armies like a meat grinder. But on water Morgan’s outfit was vulnerable: His undersize ships were mere water taxis meant to shuttle the rogues from one sacking to the next. They were no warships. Now Alonzo would be the instrument of royal, indeed of divine, retribution. Henry Morgan was going to surrender or die. Or, since we are talking about the Spanish system, he was going to surrender and then die.

Alonzo was not going to miss his chance; his career, not to mention the fortunes of his king and nation, now depended on stopping Morgan. The admiral sprang into action, arranging for pilots to steer his ships through the hazardous gulf, shooting letters to the general governor of Venezuela, the governor of Mérida, and other strongholds asking for men and vessels; one of his messengers drowned in the undertow on the beach at Maracaibo, but other couriers went racing inland spreading the alarm. Alonzo approached the fort at Maracaibo carefully, expecting Morgan at least to have left a skeleton crew manning it, but there was none. Morgan had gotten cocky, or greedy, or both; he probably judged that he’d need every man to take the towns of the interior lake. Alonzo immediately began to put the fort back into fighting shape, unearthing the buried cannon and restoring six of them to working order, restocking the garrison with forty soldiers and supplying it with food and ammunition. The fort would in effect act as a fourth ship barring the exit of any ship from the lagoon; the admiral’s vessels were arrayed across the channel so that no other vessel could pass without coming under direct fire from at least one of them. They acted as the cork in a bottle, and Morgan was caught inside. Alonzo gingerly steered his ships into position, struggling against strong gales (“the fury of the northern winds,” he called them) that were threatening to smash his armada on the nearby reefs. “I was invaded by a total indecision,” he confessed, “since serving His Majesty and the Glory of Spain, I had to prevent the enemy’s entry while being totally responsible for whatever happened to my vessels.” He tossed ballast into the water to lighten his ships and managed to avoid disaster. He was so confident of victory that, when seventy militiamen from Maracaibo arrived to bolster the blockade, he sent them to the fort, along with twenty-four of his own musketeers. He had more than enough men to stop the corsairs.

Morgan’s fleet had been weighed down with the fruits of his success; the pirates had gathered in slaves and captives as well as stray vessels he’d commandeered in Gibraltar and along the coast. To lighten the load, he released all the prisoners who had paid their ransom and kept four citizens of the town as collateral for the monies still owed him; the freed Spanish requested that Morgan hand over the slave who had informed on them, but knowing they’d “burn him alive,” Morgan quickly refused. His own affairs in order, he headed toward Maracaibo with “as much haste as he could to set things in order for his departure.” Four days later the fleet arrived back in town and quickly learned from the sole resident, a sick old man, that three ships were waiting for them and, “moreover, that the castle at the entry thereof was again put into a good posture of defence, being well provided with great guns and men and all sorts of ammunition.” Morgan was startled, and he sent his fastest boat to confirm the facts, which it did quickly: three ships, ninety-four guns between them. The lagoon they were trapped in was enormous: eighty-six miles long and sixty miles wide at some points. But at the top the lagoon narrowed, and it was blocked by several islands and shoals. The only navigable channel, through which Morgan’s fleet would have to pass, was approximately eight hundred yards wide. And the Spanish ships were arrayed in a line across it.

The news caused a “general consternation” among the pirates, and Morgan himself was said to “despond in his mind and be destitute of all manner of hopes.” Even an escape by land was impossible. Not only would the pirates have to throw away most of their hard-won booty, but once they’d disembarked, Don Alonzo could land his men and hunt the Brethren in the woods. And in the event they evaded the raids, they’d be confronted with the fact that the Maracaibo lowlands were surrounded by mountains on three sides. The route to the Caribbean was blocked by the northeastern extension of the Andes range, with jagged peaks rising to 14,500 feet. The image of salt-sea pirates, their beards rimed with ice, scaling sheer mountain cliffs did not present itself favorably to Morgan; his men would probably rather face loaded cannon than pick their way across fields of snowdrift. Plus, they would have no ships on which to return to Jamaica, and no certainty of hijacking any. The land route was out, and the water route was bristling with Spanish steel. It was by far the bleakest situation Morgan had faced as a commander.

If he did really sink into a depression, he soon recovered. His first move was to send Don Alonzo a letter, not of surrender but one “demanding of him a considerable tribute, or ransom, for not putting the city of Maracaibo to the flame.” It was typical of Morgan, who always bargained from a position of strength, even when that position was imaginary. The real purpose was to feel out the admiral, to see if Morgan was dealing with a time-server who didn’t want any trouble or with a real Spanish soldier of the old school. Don Alonzo’s reply ended speculation on that front. He wrote Morgan that he’d come to avenge the crimes against His Majesty and retake the castle “which you took from a parcel of cowards.” He swore he’d pursue Morgan to the ends of the earth to carry out his sworn duty. Don Alonzo’s tone was actually quite respectful; Morgan’s stock had obviously risen since Bracamonte had tossed the epithet “pirate” at Portobelo. And the admiral extended to the Welshman a generous offer: Leave your booty and slaves and return to Jamaica and you will be allowed to pass “without trouble or molestation.” Don Alonzo was a gentleman, and it is hard to imagine him setting up the same kind of double-cross with which the Englishmen at Providence had been suckered; but it’s equally hard to imagine him letting this high-profile enemy of Spain skate away without so much as a slap on the wrist. The offer of free passage was a direct contradiction of Don Alonzo’s orders to exterminate the pirates of the Caribbean. The letter spelled out what would happen if Morgan declined the offer: Don Alonzo would “cause you utterly to perish, by putting every man to the sword.” He warned Morgan not to refuse the offer, because he had with him soldiers “who desire nothing more ardently than to revenge on you and your people all the cruelties and base infamous actions you have committed upon the Spanish nation in America.”

Morgan studied the letter and called his men together in Maracaibo’s marketplace; he read the offer, translated it into French, and then asked the only question that mattered: would the pirates rather “surrender all they’d purchased, to obtain their liberty,” or fight? This scene is repeated again and again in the history of pirates: An offer is made by the authorities to surrender and give up the loot or die. To the pirates’ credit, one can find few instances of a vote for laying down arms. Pirates usually chose likely death over captivity. The Brethren kept with tradition and roared back their answer: They would fight.

But how? A patented buccaneer head-on charge would be suicidal. These were not frightened townspeople with children hanging around their knees; these were well-trained, well-equipped Spanish musketeers from the mainland, answerable to the Crown, with an overwhelming superiority in firepower, led by a capable commander. No ghost stories about monkey-faced buccaneers were going to cause them to turn and run. Morgan consulted with his men; the best idea would win.