Empire of Blue Water (22 page)

Now one report tripped in on the heels of another. A privateer arrived in Port Royal having just interviewed one Edward Browne, an English turncoat who had gone native, converted to Catholicism, and moved to Cartagena; when the privateer captured the boat he’d been sailing on, Browne told him that a declaration of war against Jamaica had been broadcast in the streets there. News floated in that the same proclamation had been cried out in Portobelo, with the added specification that no quarter was to be given. The governor of the Dutch colony of Curaçao wrote to Modyford urgently, telling him he held in his hands a copy of the queen’s letter, suggesting that the order was being distributed widely. Then another English ship, the
Amity,
was captured by Spanish corsairs near Granada. Facts begot rumors: A new armada was on the way from Spain, an invasion was planned. Suddenly the whole North Sea seemed alive with enemy activity.

On June 11 came another escalation. Rivero appeared, not off the coast of the Main but right on the northern Jamaican shoreline, accompanied by a converted French prize,
La Gallardina.
Again disguised under English colors, again insulting his victims before the attack began (this time he called them “doggs and rogues”), he tried to run down a trader’s vessel, which managed to land on the beach before Rivero could board it. The Spanish landed right behind and chased the men on foot into the interior, exchanging musket fire. But the Spanish had little chance in the thick jungle and soon gave up, taking the trader’s sloop as a consolation prize. Modyford barely had time to digest the news of this probe before he learned that Rivero had brazenly returned to the north shore, landed thirty men, and burned houses of the plantation owners who lived there on the very fringe of the English empire. The war was drawing closer to Port Royal.

Rivero left a message behind, calling out Morgan to war by name:

I, Captain Manuel Rivero Pardal to ye chief of ye squadron of privateers in Jamaica. I am he who this year have done that which follows. I went on shore at Caimonos and burnt twenty houses and fought with Captain Ary and took from him a ketch laden with provisions and a canoe. I am he who took Captain Baines [Bernard] and did carry the prize to Cartagena, and am now arrived at this coast and have burnt it.

And I am come to seek Admiral Morgan, with two ships of war of twenty guns, and having seen this, I crave he would come out upon the coast and seek me, that he might see the valour of the Spaniards. And because I had no time I did not come to the mouth of Port Royal to speak by word of mouth in the name of my King, whom God preserve. Dated 5th of July 1670.

Rivero’s delusions of grandeur can bring only one figure to mind: Don Quixote. Cervantes could have been writing about the Portuguese adventurer as well as his hero: “He was seized with the strangest whim that ever entered the brain of a madman…. It was highly expedient and necessary, not only for his own honor, but also for the good of the public, that he should profess knight-errantry, and ride through the world in arms, and seek adventures…, redressing all manner of grievances, and courting all occasions of exposing himself to such dangers, as in the event would entitle him to everlasting renown.” Rivero, at least, tilted at more than windmills and sailors’ shacks. He’d taken the war to the English. He was attacking at will; he was exploiting the isolation of the Jamaican settlers; he was clearly as daring and independent as any of the privateers, not waiting for orders from Madrid. It was as if they were facing a Spanish double of Henry Morgan.

The Jamaicans were in a fever. One resident of Port Royal sat down to write this report on June 28: “The Spaniards have landed to leeward, burnt many houses, taken prisoners, and marched off,” he recounted. “They last appeared off Wealthy Wood, but finding armed men on the shore, stood off to sea…. We talk of nothing here but burning Santiago de Cuba, being the first places that granted out commissions against us.” The English had feasted on Spanish settlements for so long that it had seemed the natural order of things; and in fact the Spanish attacks paled beside the exploits of Morgan and other privateers. Now the hunters felt what it was like to be the hunted. Men watched the horizon in trepidation, hoarded their powder, met with the neighbors, and exchanged the latest rumors in low voices. There was only one solution, of course. The same letter writer revealed that all the privateers had been called in from other ports and assured they would not be arrested for fighting the Spanish.

It was an unsettled time. The Jamaicans were convinced that their colony was in danger from invaders. Preachers continued to predict that Port Royal was angering God into retribution. Seventeenth-century experts would have told Port Royalists to watch for signs that could predict the cataclysm suggested by the tremors that shook their town regularly: They should watch for the raging of the sea when there were no winds to cause it; a sulfurous smell “from the petulant Exhalations long inclosed within the Earth” (one author noted that landmasses with fewer “pores” were at a higher risk of tremors); any smoke, flame, and ashes shooting out of the ground; a sudden cold or calm breeze of air or a thin streak of “cold vapor”; noise coming from underground, especially “terrible groanings and thunderings”; and the forsaking of trees by birds, who then sat trembling on the ground. But the possibility of an earthquake concerned the people less than did an invasion by their archenemy.

Modyford yearned for word from London in this crucial time, but the ships that arrived from there carried no letters from Arlington. As in so many situations in the past, he was being left to his own devices. He called an assembly meeting for June 29, and there the planters and merchants stated that the queen regent clearly had decided “to make open Warr against the Subjects of our Sovereign Lord the King in these Parts.” If they did nothing, the assembly expected that an invasion would soon follow. The result would be an exodus: The plantations would be abandoned, their cattle and slaves run to the jungle, and the settlers forced to start over again or disappear from the West Indies.

Feeling themselves under threat, the assembly was in no mood to tie Admiral Morgan’s hands. Diplomatic language was tossed aside; the Jamaicans wished there to be no misunderstanding in what they wanted. If the Spanish surrendered, he was to act with mercy. But if they did not, Morgan was given a mandate for utter destruction:

If…the Spaniards and Slaves are deaf to your Proposalls you are then with all expedition to destroy and burn all Habitations and leave it as a Wilderness putting the Men Slaves to the Sword and making the Women Slaves Prisoners to bee brought hither and so sold for the account of your fleet and Army.

There were other powers thrown in: He could free any slaves who switched to the English side. He could impose martial law. He’d even be able to give commissions to any allied ships he encountered at sea. Modyford hedged his bets at the end of the instructions, in case a copy of a peace treaty arrived on the next ship from London. Morgan was told to “exceed [the Spanish] in civility and humanity, endeavouring to make all people sensible of his moderation and good nature and his…loathness to spill the blood of man.” Morgan must have chuckled over that last part. But the document was a deadly serious statement. It was a declaration out of the
Iliad.
Its message? Total war.

The quickness with which the English responded underscores how they repeatedly gained the advantage over their Spanish enemies. The locals made the decision to attack without waiting for London’s approval, placed the mission in the hands of one man, gave him every power to fulfill his objective, and then stood back and let Morgan shape the expedition. And on the crucial issue of money, which hamstrung Spanish governors again and again, the English didn’t need to raise a penny. The privateers would be paid in swag. The privateers and their backers had, by necessity, grown to regard themselves as masters of their own fate. Their enemies had never been granted the same privilege.

Drummers marched through the streets of Jamaican cities calling for volunteers to man Morgan’s ships, promising that all debts of those who sailed would be forgiven. Word came from Bermuda that the men there were eager to join, furious after a series of Spanish attacks on local ships. Morgan notified the Brethren at Tortuga that a major action was under way and that Île-à-Vache off the southern coast of Hispaniola would be the rendezvous point. “He wrote diverse letters to all the ancient and expert pirates there inhabiting…,” Esquemeling remembered, “and to the planters and hunters of Hispaniola giving them to understand his intentions, and desiring their appearance at said place….” Other sources confirmed that everyone wanted in. John Morris signed up for the expedition in his ship the
Dolphin.
Lawrence Prince pledged to bring his fifty-ton
Pearl,
which he’d bought from Commodore Mings years before, after the old admiral had captured it from the Spanish. The
Pearl
had recently added six more guns to its original four, and Prince signed on sixty men to man the ship. Morgan sent urgent word for his flagship, the
Satisfaction,
to return from its patrolling of Spanish waters, but no one knew exactly where she was. With its twenty-two cannon, the
Satisfaction
was a floating battery, and he needed her for the challenge ahead.

The twenty-nine-year-old Roderick had never risen to the status of captain, mostly because of his disdain for networking among the Brethren and his lack of capital to buy a boat. But he swore his allegiance once again to Morgan, and he was one of many. One captain of a merchant ship, ordered by the ship’s nervous owner to sail to Campeche for a load of logwood, thus putting himself out of reach of the war mobilization, secretly recruited some of the Port’s renowned buccaneers, loaded extra cannon into his hold, and went rogue. He quickly came across and overpowered a fast, eight-gun Spanish ship, renamed her the
Thomas,
and sailed both vessels to Morgan’s rendezvous. He was not alone. The buccaneers and hunters of Tortuga and Hispaniola “flocked to the place assigned in huge numbers, with ships, canoes and boats.” Some of the Hispaniola contingent could find no vessels, so they trekked across the island, battling the Spanish as they went, until they arrived at the shore looking out on Île-à-Vache. In calling out these cow skinners, Morgan was harking back to the very roots of West Indian piracy. As they emerged out of the woods, their leather stained black with blood, their hair filthy and matted, their faces splashed with mud but with muskets polished, they must have appeared like shades from the Caribbean past. The legendary sharpshooting
boucaniers,
the men who lived as free as wild animals, the fathers of them all. Morgan was summoning ghosts.

Taboos were broken. Among the recruits was, reportedly, one “small, old and ugly, woman…who was publicly said to be a sorceress.” The Spaniards reported that the buccaneers were disregarding the dire superstition against women on ships, let alone witches, and letting the Englishwoman aboard “to predict and warn them, telling them what they should do.” There were even rumors (soon to be proved false) that Prince Rupert was sailing from England with twenty-five men-of-war and 5,000 crack troops. “No doubt this noble fleet would in a short time overrun and conquer all these Indies,” wrote Richard Browne, surgeon general on Morgan’s fleet, “but without Admiral Morgan and his old privateers things cannot go as successful as expected.” For Morgan knew every creek, every Spanish tactic, and, even outnumbered and outgunned, the king could be assured that the Brethren “will either win…manfully or die courageously.” Browne and others began to speak of the coming mission as the first step in taking the whole Caribbean for England.

As pirates, fortune seekers, and disreputables streamed toward Île-à-Vache from every corner of the Caribbean, Morgan finally traced the
Satisfaction
to the Cayman Islands and ordered it back to Port Royal. Modyford sent one last letter to London, hoping to cover for what was shaping up to be a scorched-earth campaign. Modyford as always found a way to depict this battle as the last resort of courageous underdogs. It might be “a fond, rash action for a petty Governor without money to make and entertaine war with the richest, and not long since the powerfullest, Prince of Europe,” he wrote, but his hand had been forced. Jamaica was under attack, and his solution was to fight now to prevent a complete takeover, all at no cost to the English government. Arlington was also notified, and Modyford even asked that his superior send frigates in case of an attack launched on Jamaica from Spain itself. He must have known the chances of being reinforced from London were slim to none.

On August 1, Morgan received his official commission. The privateers would not be paid but would depend on “the old pleasing account of No purchase, No pay,” meaning that their only compensation for the raid would be the booty they recovered. The rest was open-ended; Morgan could attack where and when he chose. The fleet was coming together: The local merchants were lending money at a furious pace to privateers in need of sail, rigging, and powder. The
Satisfaction
was now ready to serve as Morgan’s flagship, while other substantial vessels and veteran captains lined up behind it: the frigate
Lilly,
commanded by Richard Norman, and the six-gun
Fortune,
commanded by Richard Dobson, along with the seventy-ton
Mayflower
with Joseph Bradley at the helm. Morgan’s old comrades from past battles played a large part in the new mission; clearly he valued loyalty and would later rail against the backstabbers and gossipers whom he saw around him. “The remoteness of this place gives so much opportunity to the tongue and hand of malice,” he wrote, “that the greatest innocence cannot be protected without much care and watchfulness.” He kept his early allies close throughout his life, but it would become clear that he trusted very few men.