Empire of Blue Water (25 page)

The president mobilized every resource he could: At San Lorenzo Castle at the mouth of the Chagres, new cannon stations were mounted on the riverside, while letters went back to Spain with more warnings and requests for able-bodied men to stock the garrison. Don Juan had called in a military engineer, and he outlined the suggested improvements to Santiago Castle at Portobelo in a letter to the queen. “It was resolved to build two high redoubts with their motes [sic] and stockades on top of the hills that serve as obstacles,” he reported. San Felipe received new stockades and raised parapets. San Gerónimo, which had been only partially finished when Morgan attacked Portobelo, was pushed near to completion. Beyond that, however, the Crown felt it had done all it could with its strained resources and Don Juan soon understood he’d have to fend for himself; there would be no warships or musketeers whipping their way from Spain. Meanwhile he was receiving reports that the pirates were building a fleet of thirty canoes for the assault. “I give you these warnings even though I know that you are a great soldier and you will not need them,” the governor of Cartagena wrote to Don Juan. It was perhaps the only thing he could think to say when the news was so obviously bad.

Worse was to follow. Don Juan’s informants turned out to have excellent sources in the Brethren’s camp, and by June of 1670 he was told that 1,500 buccaneers were going to attempt Panama by the Chagres route. It was, for the Caribbean, an enormous number of men; Panama itself held only 6,000 residents, and just a small percentage of them would be available to defend it. The final omen came in a form that was typically Spanish: A Franciscan monk, no doubt prompted by the rumors that swept the city of a black swarm of buccaneers waiting just over the horizon, had a vision one night of what lay in store for his city. In his dream, Jamaican privateers were rampaging through Panama, murdering and looting as they went, while maroons could be spotted spreading flames from rooftop to rooftop. Panamanians lay dying in the streets, with black smoke billowing in the background. The nightmare so impressed the monk that he convinced a local painter to render his vision in oils, and the portrait was displayed at the convent. The residents came to gaze upon the apocalyptic canvas and shiver with dread; it was a scene from the future of Spanish art, from the war scenes of Goya, not their beloved Velázquez.

Slowly Panama took on the aspects of a city under psychological siege. Many believed that the only question was not would Morgan come, but when.

Now the assault on Panama began. The city could be approached via two routes: by land or river. (Sailing down around the tip of South America and up the Pacific coast toward Panama was out of the question for the fleet’s tiny boats, and, of course, there was no Panama Canal to get Morgan’s ships across the isthmus.) The first passage began at the city of Portobelo, with which Morgan was already familiar. The pirates would have to take the city, then travel due south through thick woodlands laced with vines and choked with undergrowth, tramp over five-hundred-foot mountain passes, and then travel along mule paths to the city of Venta de Cruces, where they would pick up the road to Panama. If they chose the river route, they would begin at San Lorenzo, where a large and well-armed castle guarded the entrance to the Chagres, which would take them southwest to Venta de Cruces. Halfway there they would have to abandon their canoes and complete the journey on foot. Portobelo was tempting, as Morgan knew it so well, but the Spanish had surely learned their lesson and reinforced the city after his devastating raid. All in all, Portobelo was now a completely different proposition, and a much tougher one, so San Lorenzo and the Chagres it would be. Morgan estimated that the fort could be taken with 470 men in three ships, and he assigned a lieutenant colonel, Joseph Bradley, to lead the squadron. Bradley had been raiding the Spanish since the time of Mansvelt, Morgan’s predecessor; he was experienced and popular with the buccaneers, and Morgan was counting on him to open a crucial breach in the shield around Panama.

San Lorenzo was the door to the isthmus; it had been built to discourage men from thinking they could pass through it easily. It sat on the north side of the river mouth, on a high cliff that jutted out into the water, and it was really a network of defenses rather than just a single fort: two gun emplacements lower down near the water’s edge, at the base of the castle walls, with six guns each; above them a tower with eight cannon that could spray oncoming ships with shot; and at the top of the peak the castle itself, its walls consisting of two rows of thick logs, between which had been packed mounds of earth, a design that made the barricade “as secure as the best walls made of stone or brick.” The cliff top was divided into two sections, and the drawbridge over a thirty-foot ravine was the only entrance to the fortress. A single set of stairs had been cut into the mountain face, allowing men to climb from the shore to the castle.

Bradley and his men arrived off San Lorenzo on December 26. The element of surprise was gone: One of the buccaneers on the Río de la Hacha raid had deserted the ranks and fled to the Spanish side; the men in the castle had been preparing for battle for weeks. There were two ways to the castle: scale the cliffs on the seaward side or go up the stairway on the landward side. Bradley quickly saw that the dizzying cliffside was a nonstarter; the “infinite asperity of the mountain” barred all but the expert climber, and his men were no mountaineers. They would have to hit the beach, absorb the fusillades from the gun batteries and the tower, and take the castle. It was not going to be a repeat of Providence. The Spanish held the heights and seemingly every advantage, their garrison recently supplied with “much provision and much warlike ammunition,” as well as 164 more soldiers. “Although six thousand men should come against them,” the castle’s commander, Don Pedro de Lisardo, assured the president of Panama, “he should…be able to secure himself and destroy them.”

Inside San Lorenzo the buccaneers’ every move was being monitored. They had been spotted by the lookout in the castle watch-tower that very morning while four miles from the castle; as they approached, this man sent a series of running reports down to the commander: Three ships were disembarking men in six canoes, the canoes were ferrying the soldiers to the shore in shifts. When the canoes landed, they were observed by Spanish archers and lancers hidden in the woods. The buccaneers were not bothering to be crafty; their drummers pounded out a martial beat, their trumpeters sang of impending doom, and their color-bearers took their place at the head of the squadrons. The estimate? About 300 to 400 men, now moving off the beach and slashing their way through the jungle with machetes. The two sides would be close to evenly matched in numbers. Don Pedro dashed off a note to Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán, saying he expected the enemy within a few hours of midnight or at dawn. Three hundred men were reported to be advancing, but even if there were many more, he was confident he could smash them. “Here’s a scourge for these infidels!” he wrote, bristling with confidence.

At the fort the lookout and every man at the ramparts watched the brush line. Hours went by with only the chatter of birds and the sound of the surf. Finally movement at the edge: Bradley and his men came stumbling out of the jungle; their guides had miscalculated and brought them too close to the castle onto a
campaña,
or open plot of ground. The Spanish sharpshooters on the ramparts instantly opened up on the figures below as the gunners rained shot down on the English; in the first fusillade, the Brethren “lost many of their men.”

Bradley divided his men into three groups: a reserve force that would stay in the jungle and then two assault squads. In front of them lay an open stretch of bare land, where they would be vulnerable to Spanish fire, leading up to a deep crevice called the Ravine of the Slabs; only having crossed the ravine would they reach the walls of the castle. The men would have no artillery to cover their approach or armor to deflect the ball: “Being uncovered from head to foot, they could not advance one step without great danger.” At last they girded up their loins and charged screaming onto the open space. As soon as they did, the sound of musket fire erupted, and the privateers ran crazily for the castle. Roderick was grazed by a Spanish ball but made it to the ravine; when he turned to look back, he saw that many of his mates lay facedown in the dirt behind him. “One could not see the
campaña
for the dead bodies of the enemy,” wrote one defender with Spanish hyperbole. The survivors ran down into the ravine and then up and reached the castle walls. Now Bradley’s strategy was revealed: Roderick pulled out the grenadoes he’d tied to his belt and tried to set the castle’s wooden walls alight, and his comrades did the same with any combustible they carried. But the barrage from above was too fierce; Bradley finally had to call the retreat. As Roderick ran from a battle for the first time in his life, he was startled to hear the words
“Victoria! Victoria!”
ringing out from the fort. He swore underneath his breath.

The Brethren retired to the brush, nursed their wounds, gulped down water, and regarded the castle with malice. Roderick massaged his bad leg and debated with the others “whether to forsake the Enterprise.” But they decided there were things worse than death, namely “the Thoughts of Disgrace, and of being reproached by our Friends on board.” Like any proud fighting force, the Brethren were intensely protective of their reputation, and the thought of losing face made them “disregard even life itself.” As night fell, they charged a second time across the darkened field. The Spaniards, more confident than ever, welcomed them back: “Come on, ye English dogs,” they shouted, “enemies to God and our king; let your other companions that are behind come on, too; ye shall not go to Panama this bout.” Dusk provided cover, and the Spaniards fired at black shapes moving across black ground. The buccaneers dropped to their knees and raked the walls as their comrades slipped ahead and launched fireballs at the palm-leaf roof that sheltered the Spanish musketeers from rain and sun. The battle raged on until, according to Esquemeling, an act of sheer physical courage altered its course:

One of the pirates was wounded with an arrow in his back, which pierced his body to the other side. This instantly he pulled out with great valour at the side of his breast then taking a little cotton that he had about him, he wound it about the said arrow, and putting it into his musket, he shot it back into the castle. But the cotton being kindled by the powder, occasioned two or three houses that were within the castle…to take fire.

The fire crept onward until it caught onto a “parcel of powder” (in Spanish reports it was a loaded bronze cannon), which exploded, raining flame and burning thatch onto the roof and the wooden walls. Other buccaneers snapped up arrows and shot them toward the looming castle. The Spanish rushed to douse the flames, but every musketeer pulled into firefighting duty was a loss to the fort’s defenses, and the pirates began picking off figures silhouetted against the flames. The explosion had ripped a huge gap into the wooden palisades, and the breach became the scene of vicious, close-up fighting. Roderick found himself near the gap and blasted away at point-blank range through the gaping hole, falling back to reload while another buccaneer jumped into his spot and fired, as the Spanish tossed their combustibles at the Brethren’s heads.

The palisades were now aflame in several places, and the six-inch mahogany walls began to collapse, spilling out their earthen contents and exposing the soldiers inside. The perimeter of the castle was roasting hot; the bodies of soldiers lay near the walls, terribly burned or bullet-ridden, the wounded calling out for water. The garrison’s morale began to crumble; men deserted their posts and made their way down the stairway cut into the rock, escaping to boats tied along the river and then heading upstream toward Panama. The battle raged through the night, until even the privateers could no longer fight in the heat. They retreated and waited until the morning of January 6, which was a holiday known as the Epiphany of the Wise Kings. If the defenders of San Lorenzo had been back in Spain, they would have watched the burning of the Christmas tree, a tradition of the day, after children had swarmed over it and stripped it of its candies and treats. Perhaps a few remembered the date and called their minds back to happier times, for when first light came, showing jagged holes in the fort’s walls, with the remaining musketeers struggling to wriggle through the gaps, they must have known that many of them were not going to live out the day.

With a yell the Brethren attacked again, “shooting very furiously” and tossing grenade after grenade. The defenders wheeled their cannons down to the breaches and fired point-blank at their attackers, the castellan having ordered his men to fight to the death. The buccaneers had rarely seen Spaniards fight with such resolve; when their powder ran out, the Spaniards switched to lances and cutlasses and hacked at the men who attempted to slip between the splintered walls. It was now hand-to-hand, primeval war, with the castellan fighting alongside his men. When their lances broke, the Spaniards pulled out their cutlasses; when the cutlasses were knocked out of their hands, they picked up stones. Both Esquemeling and the Spanish letters written after the attack confirm that few conquistadors or musketeers in the legendary battles against the Moors had fought more bravely; the surgeon called their performance “very courageous and warlike.” Roderick and the other men were impressed; they would never speak of the men of San Lorenzo except with a frank admiration. The noise of the battle was so great that it reached the ears of Francisco González Salado, the man Don Juan had chosen to defend the isthmus. The forty-year old Spaniard had 400 to 500 men under his command and was waiting eighteen miles away at the River of Two Fathoms for news of the invasion. Hearing the cannon, he sent fifty soldiers to San Lorenzo. When they were six miles from the castle, they began meeting the desperately injured and terrified men who were running for their lives, and they relayed word of the attack back to González. The men abandoning the castle headed back toward Panama or melted away into the jungle.

At the castle, the pirates were simply proving too strong. They did not suffer deserters (or at least none are mentioned in the records), and what for the Spanish was heroic service was to the buccaneers their everyday fighting style. Eventually their numbers and their maniacal courage won the day; they streamed inside the castle and began slashing at the men with their cutlasses or executing them on the spot with their pistols. “The enemy refused quarter,” Morgan reported tersely, “which cost them 360 men.” As the buccaneers ran through the castle and had their vengeance on the enemy, those still at the foot of the walls looked up to witness Spanish musketeers diving from the top of the walls to the rocks below, dashing themselves to pieces rather than ask for quarter. As the buccaneers poured in, the castellan refused to yield; two cannons were wheeled in front of his position as he prepared for a last defense. But a privateer took aim with his musket and fired a shot, “which pierced his skull into his brain.” The defense of San Lorenzo was over. As the deserters paddled their canoes away from the burning fort, they heard the French buccaneers break into the song
they
had sung earlier:
“Victoire, victoire.”

The pirates killed everything that moved within the fort; the Spanish had not asked for quarter, and they didn’t receive it. Roderick had run out of ammunition, so he took his cutlass and chopped at the necks of the Spaniards he found cowering behind shattered remnants of the barricade. The buccaneers had lost thirty men and seventy-six wounded, including Lieutenant Colonel Bradley, who had been shot in the leg. The wounded suffered terrible agonies in the heat, their wounds festering. There is no record of whether the fleet’s surgeon accompanied the San Lorenzo mission, but even if he was on the scene, one man caring for seventy casualties would have been afforded little time for niceties. One account of a shipboard operation on a pirate named Phillips reveals the level of care a patient might receive. The ship’s surgeon was absent, so it was decided that the carpenter would have to remove the man’s wounded leg. The carpenter fetched his biggest saw, secured the man’s ankle underneath his arm, and cut off the leg “in as little time as he could have cut a…Board in two.” There is no mention of anesthesia, and the stump was treated by heating an ax in the fire and then cauterizing the wound, but the carpenter burned the patient’s flesh “distant from the Place of Amputation, that it had like to have morify’d.” A patient had to pray that the surgeon was competent and sober, two attributes that were quite rare on a buccaneer ship. But most of all, he had to hope that his wounds did not get infected; once they did, death almost always followed. Bradley was an example; his wounds turned gangrenous, and he lingered in agony for ten days before succumbing to his injuries. His squadron had lost more than a quarter of their strength; if this was an omen of things to come, Morgan might run out of men before he held Panama.