Empire of Blue Water (23 page)

Morgan sailed on August 24, but soon after he was back at Port Royal: a letter had arrived from Arlington. Dated June 12, it dashed cold water on the Jamaicans’ war fever. Rivero’s attack “is not at all to be wondered at after such hostilities as your men have acted upon their territories.” The king was seeking to put an end to privateering once and for all. A breakthrough in Madrid is “daily expected”; the English negotiator, William Godolphin, was working feverishly to finish the treaty. The main obstacle, as Arlington saw it, was the Spanish resentment over what the privateers had done. All in all, there was not much in the letter except a rehashing of Arlington’s old complaints, but there was one key sentence that changed everything. “His Majesty’s pleasure,” Arlington wrote, “is, that in what state soever the privateers are at the receipt of this letter he keep them so till we have a final answer from Spain.” This gave Arlington room to maneuver in any eventuality, and he cannily included a final injunction to Modyford: All attacks on land were strictly forbidden.

But Modyford had spotted the out: The fleet had been at sea when the letter arrived, and Modyford would not bring them in. Morgan could drive his fleet straight through that loophole, and there was nothing Arlington could say about it. The governor mouthed some words to Morgan about acting “with all moderation possible in carrying on this war,” and Morgan promised to follow orders, except, that is, if necessity required him to land on Spanish territory for supplies or if he learned that the Spanish were laying up ammunition and provisions for an attack on Jamaica. With a little playacting, Arlington’s language had been unspooled. Modyford assured Arlington that “those rugged fellows [had] submitted to a stricter discipline than they could ever yet be brought to,” but something closer to the opposite was true: The attacks on Captain Bart and on Jamaica had made this mission personal for the buccaneers. Modyford wrote Arlington and insisted that the Spanish were still “borne up with false measures of their strength” and that Godolphin’s mission was in vain. Knowing that he’d just unleashed the largest pirate army in the history of the West Indies, Modyford spoke with macabre wit of what awaited the enemy gathered in their towns and cities, unaware of the storm gathering over the horizon. “A little more suffering will inform them of their condition,” he told Arlington. “And force them to capitulations more suitable to the sociableness of man’s nature.”

Morgan finally sailed for Île-à-Vache. But first he headed northwest to Cuba and scouted for any activity in the South Cays. John Morris stayed to monitor the area while Morgan headed to Santiago, the focal point of Jamaican anger. His first move was in keeping with his mandate: Destroy any invasion force. But there was no Rivero, no ships of any kind. Having done this basic reconnaissance, Morgan headed for Tortuga; in the West Indies, hurricane season runs from about June through the end of November, and Morgan was now in the heart of it. A storm struck, whipping spray into the pirates’ faces as they rushed to bring down the sails, with the wind howling in the rigging. When the gales had died down, Morgan reassembled his little navy, and all arrived safely in Tortuga, where he recruited some French buccaneers to his cause.

Arriving at the Île-à-Vache on September 12, he found a handful of small vessels waiting for him with impatient buccaneers who had answered his call. Morgan knew that more were on the way, so he decided to build up the enormous stocks of food it would take to feed his pirate army. Sharpshooters were sent into the woods of Hispaniola to hunt, and they “killed there a huge number of beasts, and salted them.” Another large contingent of 400 men in five vessels was sent to the Spanish Main to roust up beef and maize. The rest of the men fell to repairing the damage done to the sails and rigging during the open-sea gale; more work was required after October 7, when “so violent a storm” hit the fleet that “all the vessels except the Admiral’s were driven on shore.” Three ships were lost, and the fleet was getting increasingly crowded with the droves of men who arrived daily in dinghies, in canoes, or on foot. Morgan wrote to Modyford complaining that he had more men than ships to carry them; the response to his call-up had been unusually strong.

As the men at Île-à-Vache sweated in the broiling sun over ropes and planking, the 400 men under Morgan’s vice admiral Collier took five weeks to cover the 450 miles to their target, the grain port of Río de la Hacha, west of the Gulf of Venezuela. Once they arrived, they were becalmed and couldn’t make the harbor. The pirates fumed. The townspeople watched the limp-sailed ships, hid their goods, and made their decisions about whether to resist; Río de la Hacha had once been the center of a dazzling pearl fishery and had been visited by corsairs before, so the residents knew the drill. Finally, on February 24, Collier managed to catch enough of a breeze to land his men two miles from the town, where they disembarked at seven in the morning with such discipline and speed that the Spanish thought they must be soldiers from the king’s armies in England. The Spanish “were scared stiff at their first sight of the enemy and did not want to fight.” Some begged the English not to kill them, some ran deep into the woods, and others hid beneath baskets.

Río de la Hacha was a backwater, and Collier expected an easy time of it. The town’s sole fort held four guns and a typically depleted garrison; the only difference this time was some unexpected visitors: a group of forty Spaniards who had attacked Jamaica with Rivero in their ship
La Gallardina.
The men probably suspected that burning houses and leaving posted threats had not endeared them to Morgan’s men, and so when Collier sent a trumpeter to demand that they lay down their arms, they replied with brio: “No, we cannot surrender because this is a castle belonging to the King. We will only surrender through force of arms.” That last bit indicated that the men felt a need to put up at least some resistance, for the sake of their necks if not their reputations. The Spanish fired their cannon, but casualties were light, and after blasting away at the heathen for a period of twenty-four hours, the Spaniards gave up the fight. Some of the soldiers were found hiding under mattresses, and Collier had two of them executed, one of them for refusing to produce some receipts for valuables; time was as good as treasure on the Main, and the men of
La Gallardina
had wasted his. “These men come once again from England…,” reported the governor of Santa Marta rather breathlessly, “and…the fifty vessels that compose their armada will come directly here to reunite.” Roderick fell in with one of the squads that now roamed the town and the countryside freely, torturing, gathering up plate, and collecting prisoners. Collier was not as skilled an inquisitor as Morgan, and although his men “in cold blood did a thousand cursed things, “the buccaneers failed to uncover 200,000 pesos ($10 million) hidden within the fort. Finally the locals, wishing to “rid themselves as soon as possible of that inhuman sort of people,” paid a ransom of maize and beef. Collier’s threat to behead those who did not contribute hastened their efforts, and soon the squadron was sailing back to join Morgan. They’d been away for a long five weeks, and every kind of nightmare scenario had been running in Morgan’s head: They’d been captured by the Spanish and given up his secrets; they had happened upon a galleon and decided to skip out on him with their winnings. When he saw all the ships returning, along with the eighty-ton
Gallardina,
a wave of “infinite joy” washed over the admiral. He needed the ships, the maize, and the information from Collier’s terrified prisoners.

More good news arrived when John Morris sailed into the bay: The irrepressible Manuel Rivero Pardal was dead. Morris had come upon Rivero by sheer accident. After patrolling the coast of Cuba for intelligence about Spanish ship movements and war plans, he’d come up empty. When a storm whipped up, he put his ship in to a sheltered cove on Cuba’s eastern shore. At dusk another vessel came gliding into the bay: the
San Pedro y la Fama,
also looking for a place to ride out the storm. On seeing the English ship, Rivero was delighted: He had fourteen guns to the
Dolphin
’s ten, and his crew was primed for battle, “having taken on eighty musketeers and good stores of ammunition, grenadoes and stinkpots.” For Rivero it would be another notch in his belt, but this time he was facing hardened buccaneers, not frightened farmers in the Jamaican wilderness. But at the first shot, his men began abandoning their posts and diving into the water. Their appalled commander tried to rally them, but as he shouted at them to man their guns, a single bullet pierced his throat and he fell.

A bitter moment for Rivero. The spars swayed above him against the blue sky as blood pumped out of his wound and across the deck. The sound of English barrages splintering the side of the
Fama
alternated with the screams of his soldiers, desperate to escape the privateers who were advancing on them, killing them in the water. If only his musketeers would die like men. Rivero had come to the West Indies to restore Spanish courage; he believed himself divinely ordained to do so. But his men had broken at the first report of a musket. The vision of the buccaneers as unconquerable demigods had triumphed over Rivero’s vision of a new Spanish fighter.

It’s a pity that Rivero didn’t last longer, for with his death Morgan had lost his most spirited enemy. So many of his opponents did not die like men: Rivero had. Who knows what further brilliance the Welshman would have been forced to display had Rivero managed to infuse the Spanish with his outrageous gallantry? The English mocked the Portuguese commander; “that vapouring captain,” the surgeon Richard Browne called him, “that so much annoyed Jamaica in burning houses and robbing the people and sent that insolent challenge to Admiral Morgan.” Modyford sent the commissions from the queen regent that Rivero had been carrying on his vessel back to his superior in London, “whereby his Lordship will find him a person of great value amongst them.” He also sent the original canvas copy of Rivero’s bold challenge to Morgan, from which, Modyford said, one could guess at Rivero’s vanity. The cowardice of his men colored the English judgment of their commander. But Rivero had died like a conquistador, a rare event on the Spanish Main. At least one group of musketeers would soon follow his example.

Other ships streamed in, fresh from their own adventures, but more men came than ships to carry them. The men were packed aboard even the tiniest boats until they were practically hanging off the sides: The French sloop
Le Cerf
had forty buccaneers crammed into every available space. Some vessels were so ill-suited for naval battle that they didn’t even have a cannon on board, such as the appropriately named
Virgin Queen.
Some impatient captains couldn’t restrain themselves from freelancing: Three privateer captains “went up the river of Nicaragua” and stormed a fort that had been built to stop French corsairs from penetrating to the cities farther inland. The Spaniards riddled the ships with shot, killing sixteen and wounding eighteen, but the buccaneers persevered and stormed the castle. When they interviewed the castellan at cutlass point, he admitted that four hours earlier he’d sent a canoe to warn the city of Granada, site of Morgan’s first triumph. The buccaneers put their strongest paddlers in a canoe and sent them rocketing up the river after them. It took the double-manned vessel three days to catch the messengers, but they did it, and stopped the alarm from spreading. The rogue buccaneers entered the sleepy town as conquerors. Not everyone had Morgan’s luck, however: His men extorted just over £7 in silver per man, “which is nothing to what they had five years hence.” Modyford gave them a slap on the wrist when they returned to Port Royal and sent them to Île-à-Vache to bulk up Morgan’s forces.

As Morgan’s army grew, the Spanish began to experience what Jamaica had suffered through months earlier: reports of war accumulating ominously one after the other. Letters arrived in Santa Marta from the terrified residents of Río de la Hacha, describing pitiless buccaneers gathering matériel for battle. Much of the intelligence was astonishingly up to date: fifty ships, 2,000 privateers, with Cartagena or Panama as the target. Other pieces of gossip were less so: The king had sent soldiers from the mainland, went one rumor, while another attested that the Duke of York was behind the entire operation. But all of the gossip pointed toward a mighty fleet on the waves. “Hardly a letter was written which did not report some news of an imminent threat,” wrote historian Peter Earle. Perhaps the most frightening piece of news came from Curaçao: A trader had just pulled into the harbor after having sailed along the coast of Hispaniola, home of the
boucaniers.
Usually when merchant ships arrived offshore, the blood-spattered wild men would appear from out of the forest to trade their cured meats for the necessities of life. But now few emerged. The woods had been swept clean; the buccaneers had gone to Morgan.

The governor of Cartagena received the reports that pointed toward his city as the most likely destination for Morgan’s men and began to ramp up his response: Farmers in coastal areas were ordered to draw their herds away from any possible landing areas, cutting off the buccaneers from a food source, and citizens in the outlying areas were put on alert to rush to the city’s aid in the event of an attack. Finally the governor called a junta, and military capabilities were enhanced. The city’s defenses were, truth be told, lacking: Equipment was outdated or broken, soldiers had not received their wages for over two years, and the victualing of the garrisons had been neglected. The governor ordered a general call-up: All able-bodied men who could handle a firearm, “whether they were foreigners or citizens,” was ordered to stand ready to man the city’s fifty cannon.