Empire of Blue Water (20 page)

10

Black Clouds to the East

W
hen it comes to rating the enemies of the buccaneers, disease has to be mentioned first. It carried off more pirates than did enemy bullets. Then the Spanish. And then weather. Morgan had been lucky in his expeditions to avoid shipwrecking storms. But when one sails the Caribbean year after year, one eventually gets hit. And now, on the return trip from the magical victory at Maracaibo, it was Morgan’s turn.

Esquemeling is light on detail, but the ships clearly hit a tropical storm, if not a hurricane, while fairly close to the shoreline. “They were surprised by a great tempest,” he writes, “which forced them to cast anchor in the depth of five or six fathom water,” or thirty to thirty-six feet. The boats, many of them undecked, could not ride out the tempest and were forced to pull up their anchors and face into the waves. It was not just drowning that concerned them: “If on either side they should have been cast on shore,” says the surgeon, “either to fall into the hands of the Spaniards or of the Indians, they would certainly have obtained no mercy.”

A storm in the age of sail was a terrifying event. The wind could tear the rigging to shreds. “What especially astonished us,” wrote Raveneau de Lussan, who barely survived a “tornado” at sea, “was the fact that our yards, sheets, braces and other rigging were cut off as clean as if hatchets had been used.” The mainmast could come down if the sails were not lowered quickly. The rats that lived in the holds would sometimes emerge during violent gales, seemingly maddened by the storm, and attack passengers, especially the sick and injured. And the men worked in terrible conditions: If the storm hit at night, they’d be tossed out on a slippery deck unable even to see the man next to them. Ropes caught in the blocks, spars snapped and flew off into the blackness, and flying tackle could brain an un-suspecting crewman.

The ocean a buccaneer sailed into was not the mapped, GPS’ed body of water we know today. Once they left the harbor, even the most forward-thinking buccaneers entered a world of superstition and hearsay. There were a thousand legends of the sea that mariners still adhered to, and many of them concerned storms. It was a world in which the elements were subject to the whims of witches and war-locks who “at their pleasure send hail, rain tempest, thunder and lightning” to sink their enemy’s vessels. Roderick believed that witches could disturb the air by digging a hole in the ground, filling it with water, and then stirring the water lightly with a finger, or by boiling hogs’ bristles in a pot; his father had told him the evil wretches could call up a hurricane by tossing a little sea sand into the air. This led to a ban on women aboard. As late as 1808, the English admiral Cuthbert Collingwood wrote that “I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel.” One Mrs. Hicks and her daughter went to trial for witchcraft in 1716, and the prosecution claimed they’d created storms by swirling their bare feet in a pot and stirring up soapsuds into a foam. Or storms could be caused by a black dragon that emerged from the clouds and plunged its head into the sea, drinking up the water and any unlucky ship that happened into its way. The dragon might be a waterspout, but the danger was just as real; the only way to avoid it was to shout at the monster or to hold a knife with a black handle, read the Gospel of St. John, and then slice the knife across the waterspout (as Columbus’s crew did once, successfully).

It was not just raging seas that concerned seamen. Above a sailor’s head was another world, the cloud sea that sat atop the white cirrus vapor. It was believed that vessels sailed on this ocean in the sky. Roderick told the story of the sailor from Bristol who, when navigating this sea, dropped his knife overboard; the knife fell through the clouds and impaled itself in the wooden table in his home. As there was a world above, there was also a subterranean civilization of which mariners could catch only glimpses. Sailors swore that in clear water they sometimes saw buildings, church steeples, whole cities underneath the sea, and even heard the tolling of the cathedral bells on lonely nights when no ship or lighthouse was in view. In the huge troughs that followed powerful waves, sailors claimed to have seen the peaked roofs and winding stairs of the houses of the giants that lived below. Even the more familiar waters of the North Sea were subject to visions: St. Elmo’s fire, the electrical phenomenon that seems to touch sails and ropes with a white flame, was believed to be a sign that St. Elmo, patron saint of sailors, was protecting the ship against tempests. “On these occasions, the sailors first recite hymns and litanies,” wrote a French author in the eighteenth century, “and when, as if often happens, the light still remains, they salute it by a whistling sound.” When the light disappeared, sailors would call “Lucky journey” after it. Certainly, on that voyage home, Morgan’s men would have searched the black horizon for some sign of the saving light.

The buccaneers made it through the tempest, only to face another one when they arrived home. If the privateers had a champion in London, it was George Monck, the Duke of Albemarle, who had once depended on Henry Morgan’s uncle Thomas as his second-in-command. This unabashed imperialist led the anti-Spanish faction in Charles II’s circle, and to him Jamaica was an outpost of the empire, an empire that should be expanded and fortified wherever and whenever possible. Monck had begun his career as a Royalist but switched sides twice, first to Cromwell, when his star was on the rise, and then to Charles II, whom he’d almost single-handedly brought to power, something Charles never forgot. Winston Churchill described him with sincere if cynical admiration as the ultimate soldier’s soldier, the kind who “waited about doing their duty on a short view from day to day until there is no doubt whether the tide is on the ebb or the flow; and who then, with the appearance of great propriety and complete self-abnegation, with steady, sterling qualities of conduct if not of heart, move slowly, cautiously, forward.” That sentence, which imitates Monck’s sluggish and deliberate style, doesn’t make him seem a romantic figure, but the privateers and their supporters were romantics only to novelists. To men in power, they were a heavy lever with which to prod and dislodge the Spanish. And so Monck argued their case with vehemence.

But Portobelo and now Maracaibo had been turning points. “We interpret what these nations have done, and are still doing, as insults,” read a report to the queen of Spain from the Council of War of the Indies. “It can be said that there isn’t a port or a coast in the Indies that they have not tried to invade or have indeed invaded.” The councilors went on to say that it was clear the English did not respect any treaties and that they’d taken advantage of the “passivity of Her Majesty’s subjects,” something the council was determined to change. The Spanish, in their fury, considered every option, even the crackpot schemes of an Irish slave trader named Sir Richard White who came up with a host of options for getting to Morgan: paying off the governors of Jamaica and Barbados to rein in the privateers; seeding Cartagena, Havana, and other cities with 1,500 Flemish or Milanese mercenaries who would rise up and “help in the confrontations” when the Brethren attacked; and even penetrating the enemy’s cities himself and spying on their fortifications. White was clearly something of a con artist: He demanded 7 million pesos ($357 million) and “a frigate to Cádiz” to arrange the truce, along with the right to continue trading in slaves on the Main (which was illegal for a non-Spaniard), the guarantee that the queen would pay all his expenses and additional, unspecified “voluntary donations” from the viceroys of Peru and New Spain. For this he tantalized the queen with his personal access to the governors of the English colonies and the rather hazy intelligence that the pirates “are not united, have no government and are not able to feed themselves well.” White’s high intrigue came to nothing, but the Spanish anger did not abate, and others in the English leadership nodded sympathetically at their complaints. The privateers
were
a menace. The secretary of state, Lord Arlington, was the leader of those who wanted closer relations with Spain and an end to the pirates’ reign. (He’d spent several years in Madrid and was so identified with its causes that his code name in the French ambassador’s dispatches was “the Spaniard.”) The news of Portobelo had infuriated him; the queen regent was insisting on reparations and that Modyford be sacked. Arlington replied with the threadbare party line: The attacks were simply in response to Spanish provocations, and the only way to end them was by a treaty that recognized English interests in the region; only then would the king’s subjects treat the queen’s subjects “with love and respect.” In the streets of London, however, Morgan was a hero, a Protestant avenger in a time when English military victories were rarer and rarer (the Dutch having recently humiliated the navy not once but twice). London had been consumed by the Great Fire of 1666, and plague had struck high and low; it seemed that one
annus horribilis
followed another. It would be difficult for the king to chastise the hero of Portobelo, especially as suspicions of Charles’s Catholic affinities lingered among the common people. Hemmed in by circumstances, Arlington fobbed off the Spanish demands while sending Modyford cryptic, icy notes. Arlington’s hopes lay with William Godolphin, the emissary working in Madrid to get a treaty signed. But Morgan’s escapades were making his job impossible. “This way of warring is neither honourable nor profitable to His Majesty,” Arlington wrote Modyford, “[and] he is endeavouring to put an end to it.”

So when Morgan returned from Maracaibo on May 16, 1669, some things were the same as always: A significant percentage of the town’s populace was going wild at the dockside, their shouts interrupted by the throaty salutes of cannon. The tavern owners were pulling the barrels of Madeira from their basements and buying every drop of rum they could get their hands on; the whores’ prices were rising by the minute, as 450 nouveau riche buccaneers would soon need servicing; the merchants readied their scales for the gobs of melted silver the pirates would soon be bringing in and slamming down on their counters with their filthy hands. In short, Port Royal was humming. But there was one face that was missing in the revelry: Modyford’s. When Morgan scanned the line of dignitaries waiting to grasp his hand and realized the governor was not there, he instantly knew that something in London had changed. Morgan hurried to Spanish Town to get the news. As he sat glumly over a glass of punch, he learned that Modyford’s son had sent a letter on the last ship to arrive from England, painting a depressing picture of the privateers’ fortunes. Monck was dying of dropsy (he’d pass away on January 3, 1670, surrounded by his veteran comrades, “like a Roman general…with all his officers about him”). The government was leaning toward calling Portobelo a rogue action. The Spanish demands were getting a hearing.

Morgan must have winced. He’d just returned from sacking Maracaibo and blowing up the queen regent’s Armada de Barlovento. What, he surely wondered, would Lord Arlington say to that?

Just over a month later, as bleary-eyed corsairs spent the last of their credit, Modyford announced the new era. Port Royal’s leaders—including Morgan—marched into the marketplace on June 24 as a drummer called the crowds to attention. Rumors had swept through the town of a coming change, and now it was made official. A proclamation was read, praising Morgan for destroying the enemy fleet and making null and void any commissions he’d issued. “From now on,” the crier proclaimed, “[we] prohibit any acts of hostility against the vassals of His Catholic Majesty by whatsoever person or persons.” And just like that it was over. The glorious tear of the Port Royal pirates had run its course. The crowd dispersed, some of them surely bewildered by what they’d just heard. The Spanish were now their “good neighbours and friends”? It was as if Modyford had announced that Jamaica had been declared an arctic region and rum was to be outlawed.

Still, Modyford had been a friend to the buccaneers, and he was now telling them to cease and desist. Lord Arlington had even asked him, on behalf of the king, how to “best dispose of this very valuable body of privateers, and whether it were not practicable to oblige them to betake themselves to planting, merchandizing, or service in his Majesty’s men-of-war.” The question of what to do with the Brethren once the Crown no longer had use for them was a tricky one. The old fears of a pirate army’s terrorizing Jamaica resurfaced. Modyford must have shaken his head at the question: It was as if the king were asking if he couldn’t find a few nice jobs for the drunken murderers they’d used to protect the empire and of whom they now wanted to dispose. Lord Arlington did not have to meet the pirates on High Street on his way to church. Some of these men would as soon cut off your face as say hello.

Modyford came up with a novel solution. On June 25, 1669, he sent the Conde de Molina, the Spanish ambassador to England, a letter. The fact that he was the governor of an upstart colony, completely illegal in Spanish eyes, addressing the representative of a world-straddling empire did not seem to cross his mind in writing this amazing document. “I know and perhaps you are not altogether ignorant of your weakness in these parts,” he wrote, “the thinness of your inhabitants, want of hearts, armes and knowledge in warre, the open opposition of some and doubtfull obedience or of other of the Indians.” Modyford warned the ambassador that, in the event of a permanent peace between England and Spain, the French corsairs would simply take up where Morgan had left off—unless the Spanish agreed to his proposal: namely,
that they hire the Brethren as a mercenary army to protect the Main.
“What we could have donn, the French will doe, unless these men may by your intercession be brought to serve your Master.” If the queen regent refused, Modyford predicted that the Port Royal privateers would join their Gallic counterparts or sail without commissions, taking any job they could rather than starve. Modyford was apparently serious, but the letter fairly seethes with the Jamaicans’ deep disdain for the Spaniard. Lord Arlington admonished Modyford: The proposal, he wrote, “will scarce be believed a practicall one.” The Spanish recognized it as a barely disguised insult and never responded. Modyford did come up with more practical ideas later on: that the ex-privateers join the dangerous and lucrative logwood trade, which was thriving. He predicted that two-thirds of the Jamaican pirates could be employed this way and that the English could soon dominate the market, providing handsome tax revenues to the king. He did advise Arlington not to try to get tough with the privateers: “Other more violent ways will but make them in despair or revenge join with foreign nations or set up for themselves.” It was the old fear of the merchants: the buccaneers’ turning their guns on them.