Empire of Blue Water (19 page)

At the neck of the lagoon, Don Alonzo waited. A stream of informers stole toward his flagship and gave the admiral a series of reports: The pirates were working on a captured trading vessel; new gun ports were being added; shipwrights were working furiously in the ship’s hold. Clearly Morgan had transferred his flag to this ship, which was bigger than his own and could give him more brawn to go up against the
Magdalena.
Don Alonzo drilled his men, watched the horizon carefully, and put in place a series of defensive measures: Long poles were extended from the sides of his ships to prevent the pirates from getting too close (for boarding or other nefarious activities); barrels of water were placed on deck for fighting fires.

The stalemate lasted for a week. Then, just before dark on April 30, Alonzo looked toward the lagoon, and there, suddenly, was the outline of ships against the horizon: Morgan’s fleet, now thirteen in number with the captured vessels, had sailed twenty miles up the lagoon and taken a position within view of the Spaniards, but out of firing range. Aboard the
Magdalena,
Don Alonzo studied the enemy ships in his spyglass. The big Cuban trader the pirates had reportedly been working on was flying Morgan’s flag; that was comforting—at least the admiral’s spies were accurate. And when, two days later, the pirate fleet raised anchor and came sailing straight at Don Alonzo, it was in the lead, flanked by the old flagship
Satisfaction
and another frigate. Don Alonzo watched them approach; as soon as they were within range, he gave the order to fire. His ship’s forty-eight guns roared with a thunderous volley; ball tore into the sail of the oncoming ships. Morgan’s ships responded as best they could, but their barrages were decibels lower in volume.

To his astonishment, Don Alonzo saw that the buccaneers’ ships did not peel away as they drew closer. They were going to attempt a frontal assault, as if his man-of-war were a pathetic merchant sloop fleeing for its very life. Nothing could be more to his advantage, except a sustained artillery battle on the open sea. The pirates would not go for that; their ships were being blasted apart by his gunners, who inched down the mouths of their guns as the buccaneer fleet closed on them, until they were pointed almost level, firing across the gap of blue sea at the three fast-closing ships trailed by the slower boats. The admiral could see the outlines of pirates on deck in the morning haze, some of them wearing the soft
montera
hat, like bullfighters, their cutlasses poised by their sides. They were unmoving against the dawn sky. Don Alonzo had just a moment to admire their steadfastness in the face of barrages of shot aimed straight at their faces—
at least these infidels die like men
—before the ship plowed into the
Magdalena
with a crash of snapping, buckling wood, and grappling hooks came spinning through the air and snagged his sails. His men, their anticipation keyed to a point, didn’t wait for the attack but leaped over the sides onto the enemy’s deck.

And in that moment, realization. The decks were empty, except for wooden cutouts cunningly shaped by Morgan’s carpenters to resemble men with cutlasses. The Spanish musketeers looked around in bewilderment before the word unfolded in their minds and came tumbling out of their mouths:
brûlot.
It was a fireship, a floating trap designed to set the enemy aflame. They could smell the sweet odor of tar over palm leaves as the deck around them lit up like a Roman candle and a concussion blew them up into the rigging. Don Alonzo shouted orders as pieces of burning wood and cordage came tumbling through the air into his ship. A seventeenth-century warship was a conflagration waiting to happen: Apart from the magazines of gunpowder filling the hold, its seams were caulked with tar, its ropes were covered with a layer of fat, and its sails were made of flammable canvas. The flames engulfed the tackling and rope, swept over the decks, bellowed by a strong wind at their back, burning men alive as they fled; fire ran and shot up the masts. Men dived into the water and swam for the islands, while Don Alonzo tried futilely to get the fires put out and tossed planks of wood to drowning men. “The flames built up rapidly and violently…,” Don Alonzo wrote in his report on the confrontation. “So that in a brief moment everything was ablaze.”

The
Magdalena
was soon fully engulfed, “the forepart sinking into the sea, whereby she perished.” Disaster tumbled into disaster: Her sister ship, the
Soledad,
wheeled away from the burning vessel but had a malfunction in its rigging and was soon unnavigable; as it dawdled pilotless across the water, the buccaneers chased it down and prepared to board. The terrified crew jumped into the water, and the Brethren swarmed up the
Soledad
’s sides, corrected the rigging jam, and soon had a fine Spanish ship as plunder. The Spanish swimmers were cut down, as “they would neither ask nor admit of any quarter, choosing rather to lose their lives than receive them from the hands of their persecutors.” The sergeant major of the
Soledad
was one of the survivors, hauling himself “naked and wet” to the fort. The last Spanish ship, the
San Luis,
was luckier, making it to the fort, where its crew unloaded its provisions and armaments and then burned the ship down to the waterline, so that Morgan could not have it. Poor Don Alonzo survived the debacle and transferred to a longboat and headed for shore, pursued by Roderick and other pirates, paddling furiously in their swift canoes. He ended up running for his life from the men he expected to take back to the Main as “sun-dried” specimens for his queen.

The Brethren had prepared the Cuban decoy beautifully, cutting new gun ports into her side and, in place of the real cannon that should have jutted out of them, inserting logs filled with gunpowder and readied with fuses. Then they’d scoured Maracaibo for every highly flammable material available to them—pitch, tar, brimstone, palm leaves—and built their combustible doll men out of them. The carpenters whom the spies heard hammering away in the hold were not installing fortifications to the structure but removing them, so that when the ship blew, the explosion would not be dampened by excess timbers. They’d adorned the ship with banners and fitted it out like a flagship; in the history of naval warfare, fireships had usually been made of old and decrepit junks, not fine specimens such as the Cuban prize. Luck had been with Morgan in the following wind that blew out of the top of the lagoon into the narrow channel, giving the ship the necessary propulsion to ram it into the
Magdalena.
A skeleton crew of twelve men had steered it home and jumped into canoes just before the moment of impact. The costuming, the set design, the use of the murky glow of dawn to light the scene—the whole thing resembled nothing more than an amateur English theatrical.

Morgan’s reputation for command had been well established before Maracaibo, but after this stunning reversal of fortune, he became
the
buccaneer commander. There was no way he should have been able to outmaneuver Don Alonzo: Morgan was a brilliant soldier throughout his career, but a subpar sailor. He regularly lost ships to reefs or, in the case of the
Oxford,
carelessness. The pirates usually used terror and marksmanship to win battles, but Morgan had won this naval confrontation by wit. “The Pirates were extremely gladdened at this signal victory,” Esquemeling tells us. “Obtained in so short a time and with so great [an] inequality of forces; whereby they conceived greater pride in their minds than they had before.”

If Don Alonzo had considered Spain’s history, he’d have prepared more diligently. Indeed, the greatest disaster ever to strike his nation’s navies, the loss of the Spanish Armada in 1588, turned on a fireship attack designed by the English commander and future privateer Francis Drake. The mighty Armada was thought to be invincible, but when it anchored off Calais before the planned invasion of England, the Spanish were spooked by the sudden appearance, at midnight on August 7, of a fleet of burning ships, their sails towers of flame, rushing at them out of the darkness. The Spanish were terrified that these were the dreaded “hell-burners” or “explosion-machines” (vessels loaded with gunpowder, housed in hulls closed in with brick, that would explode with tremendous force when the fire reached it); they cut their cables and scattered to the wind, canceling their D-Day and opening up the Armada to attacks by the nimble English navy, which hounded them onto the Dutch coast and sent them back to Spain as abject failures. Morgan had, in miniature, recreated the famous attack with equally devastating results. (In fact, included in Esquemeling’s book was a rather fine rendering of the attack, titled
The Spanish Armada Destroyed by Captaine Morgan.
) Like Drake, he’d even volunteered his flagship for the conflagration.

What Morgan did not realize until days later was that Don Alonzo had been warned about the fireship. Although the pirates kept a strict guard on all their prisoners, a “certain negro” had made it to the
Magdalena
days before the attack and told the admiral, “Sir, be pleased to have great care of yourself, for the English have prepared a fireship with desire to burn your fleet.” The Spanish noble had scoffed at the idea. “How can that be?” he thundered at the spy. “Have they, peradventure, wit enough to build a fireship? Or what instruments have they to do it withal?” Don Alonzo was a Spaniard to the bone: He simply could not imagine that he could be out-thought by scum like the Brethren. But the collective wisdom of the pirates had defeated the noble.

Don Juan carried with him the kingdom’s certainty of its own rightness and superiority. When dealing with the privateers, who molded their thinking to the situation at hand, certainty could be a fatal flaw.

Morgan quickly divided up his men: Some dived to the wreck of the
Magdalena
and brought up silver cobs worth 20,000 pesos, some of them melted into gobs of pure bullion; another 20,000 in silver remained in the black hulk but could not be reached. Other men landed on the beach and began probing the fort’s defenses, shooting at the musketeers lining the tops of the armaments. The castle, now packed full with Spanish soldiers as well as a resupplied garrison from Maracaibo, blasted back at the evening attack the buccaneers attempted. The pirates were seriously outgunned, having only muskets and “a few fire-balls” (crude grenades) to contend with the cannon above their heads. Men dropped under the barrage, blood gushing into the sand and turning it black in the dusky gloom. “We refused them the whole afternoon,” reported the fort’s castellan, “causing [them] great harm…and the deaths of many people, injured and burned.” The Brethren lost thirty men, with many more wounded, before they realized they had no chance of storming the castle. But eventually it would have to be taken: The fort’s artillery would shred the pirate fleet as it tried to sail through the narrow channel if the guns were not silenced.

There was now a three-way standoff between the pirates, Don Alonzo, and the residents of Maracaibo. The first wanted to leave but could not; the second wanted Morgan’s head, and the last simply wanted the whole mess ended as soon as possible. Morgan interviewed the pilot of one of the vice admiral’s ships, who had been captured in the fireship raid, and got the background on Don Alonzo’s mission. He now learned, if he’d not already known, that he was the target of this mission; the pilot told him that it was the “loss and ruin of Porto Bello, and many others” that spurred the Crown to action and that the Spanish force was intent on “destroying as many of [the English pirates] as possible.” The news put into doubt Don Alonzo’s offer of free passage. The pilot spoke of the bitterness the Spanish people felt at Morgan’s raids: “Of all which damages and hostilities committed here by the English,” he told the Welshman, “very dismal lamentations have oftentimes penetrated the ears both of the Catholic King and Council, to whom belongs the care and preservation of this New World.” The pilot also divulged the battle orders given by Don Alonzo to his men, and they were tough: “Having given a very good supper to his people,” the man said, “he persuaded them neither to take nor give any quarter to the English that should fall into their hands.”

Time was against Morgan. As the pilot spoke, there were frigates full of musketeers cresting the waves of the North Sea on a rescue mission to Maracaibo. Morgan had jiggled a main strand of the spiderweb that was the Spanish Empire; the news had radiated along the trade routes, and soldiers would soon be on the way from Panama to check on the disturbance. Morgan had been fortunate with Don Alonzo, but he could not afford to linger to try his luck again. There was, however, one weak link in the system: the Maracaiboans. They wanted him gone. Morgan sent Don Alonzo an offer to leave the town unmolested in return for safe passage out, but he could have no expectation that it would be accepted. He offered the good citizens a deal: the return of their prisoners and no torching of the city in return for 30,000 pieces of eight and 500 beeves. The Spanish paid up: after, that is, getting Morgan down to 20,000 pesos, or $1 million in modern terms; they were merchants, after all, and used to haggling.