Empire of Blue Water (31 page)

1. A lateral quake, in which “the whole force of the inclosed wind and vapors [are] driven to one place and there is no contrary motion to preserve it.” This represents an early attempt to describe how land actually moved during earthquakes, which the author compared to “a man shaking in an ague [fever].”

2. The explosive upward event, where “the earth is lifted up with great violence so that the buildings are like to fall and instantly sink down again.” These kinds of tremors, it was believed, were caused by the earth actually collapsing into the cavern that had once been supported by the pressure of the escaping wind.

3. A split in the earth, “when the sea in some places has been drunk up so that people have gone over on foot.” This accounted for the phenomenon of disappearing lakes and rivers so common to powerful quakes.

4. The reverse, quakes that caused mountains “to arise out of the Earth.”

Morgan was appointed deputy governor of Jamaica, second-in-command on the island. The new governor and Morgan’s new superior was one Lord Vaughan, five years younger than the thirty-nine-year-old Morgan, a man of letters who had some claim to “discovering” the poet John Dryden. He was a fitting emissary from Restoration London: an aristocrat with a satyr’s face whom Samuel Pepys once called “one of the lewdest fellows of the age.” Still, he was no match for a veteran like Morgan. The young lord warned the buccaneer to stick close to his vessel on the voyage from England to Jamaica and under no circumstances set out ahead. If Morgan arrived first, he’d be acting governor of the island until Vaughan made it ashore. The admiral agreed and then completely ignored Vaughan; he set out in the
Jamaica Merchant
under the command of Captain Joseph Knapman, but there is some evidence that Morgan himself whipped the crew on to leave Vaughan in his wake. Knapman later said that some evil genius had plotted the
Merchant
’s route, and “never was any man more surprised considering the course they had steered.”

If past performance is any clue, Morgan was the evil genius in question, because the
Merchant
crashed into a coral reef off Île-à-Vache, the buccaneers’ old meeting place off the southern coast of Haiti. Morgan treated ships like disposable objects, to be wrecked, sunk, rammed, or turned into blazing weapons whenever necessary, and the
Merchant
was no different: The ammunition and cannon that he’d brought with him, as per his memo to the king, sank straight to the bottom of the ocean. Morgan had not been humbled by his time abroad; he reported solemnly to London that “they had all perished had Morgan not known where he was.” Undaunted, he soon caught a ride with a privateer who happened by and was brought in his old style to Port Royal on March 6. The parties commenced immediately; those who had been pining for a resumption of the town’s notorious ways and a strong man to face down all comers stood drinks for their returned hero. His wife, Elizabeth, fell into his arms, his nephews and nieces crowded around him, planters pressed invitations on the admiral, and all in all the wide-open spirit of the buccaneer paradise seemed ready to whir up again to its old dizzying heights.

His enemy, Lynch, was waiting for him with a scowl on his face. The governor had in November written to London to warn them that Morgan’s second coming would only lead to more bloodshed in the West Indies. The Spanish were reportedly sending a fleet of galleons, “biscaniers, Ostenders and Flushingers, which are likely to clear the Indies of all that Infest them,” adding with a sting, “one of the reasons of their coming is, the noise of Admiral Morgan’s favour at Court and return to the Indies, which much alarmed the Spaniards, and caused the King to be at vast charge in fortifying in the South Sea.” Morgan’s old cronies, including Roderick, who had lost two fingers in a grenado accident, were sailing under French commissions out of Tortuga and keeping to their old style of “rapine and libertinage.” Time had sweetened their memories somewhat, that and the fact that they had yet to hit a payday equal to the admiral’s best. If Morgan could promise another rich target, they might be ready to take up with him. It seemed like the old wars were about to begin again.

As he’d arrived before Vaughan, Morgan assumed the office of governor until his superior landed. He immediately took charge of the island’s defenses, which he found in a deplorable state, with only fourteen barrels of powder available for the fortress guns. He accused Lynch of selling the king’s supplies to the Spanish, a fair indication of the nasty tone of Jamaican politics that Morgan would help ramp up. Increasingly, as he grew older, Morgan needed enemies; he thrived on controversy and in-close fighting. “Nevertheless that shall not daunt him,” he wrote to his superiors in London on April 13, only five weeks after arriving and referring to himself in the third person, “for before he will lose his Majesty’s fortifications, he will lose himself and a great many brave men more, that will stand and fall by him.”

Even as he knocked heads together, the return of the rugged Morgan disguised the fact that there had been a fundamental change in his life. Over the next few years, he had a career that was marked by a series of long and bitter feuds, and he was a lively figure in domestic politics. There is little that compares in viciousness to the backbiting and infighting that goes on in a colonial council, especially when ambitious men are left to fight over the reins of power, and Morgan joined in with gusto. He stayed on as deputy governor, made enemies, and wrote suave, violent letters back to London reporting and complaining about everything from taxes to slanderous colleagues and the logwood trade. He built up Jamaica’s defenses, feuded with Lynch, drank like a pirate, and extended his holdings in the Jamaican countryside to include another fine plantation (his third), four thousand acres in the parish of St. Elizabeth’s. But it was a different kind of life, a far more ordinary one. The diversions of local politics are simply not as exciting as those that take place on blue waters when the course of empires is at stake. The first part of his life could have been written by Dumas, the second by Orwell, in a bleak colonial mood. There was, in fact, only one remarkable and revealing thing that Morgan did that sets him apart from the thousands of bureaucrats who underpinned the English empire in the next two hundred years, sweating and growing old in places from Bombay to the Falklands, and it had to do with his old comrades, the buccaneers.

Morgan was charged with exterminating piracy from Jamaica and the surrounding waters. He did it, as always, with a style balanced somewhere between mockery and brutality. Morgan most likely wrote a 1679 report that laid out the Jamaican government’s policy on pirates: They were “ravenous vermin” who used any Spanish cruelty against English sailors as justification for their raids on the enemy, thereby wreaking havoc on trade. Morgan kept up a constant stream of letters to London on his efforts against the pirates, issued arrest warrants, and sent squadrons of militia out into the surrounding waters to chase down suspicious ships. When one sloop anchored in Montego Bay and the sailors stayed aboard, his suspicions were aroused; only buccaneers uncertain of their reception acted in this way. Morgan invited the seventeen men aboard to King’s House in Port Royal (which Morgan preferred to the governor’s mansion in Spanish Town) and served them red snapper, lobster, beef, fruit pie, and goblets of the best local rum. As the alcohol worked through their veins, the men dropped their pretenses and admitted that they were indeed pirates. Morgan roared with laughter, and the party continued; for the younger men, it was like being feted by their boyhood hero, the greatest buccaneer who had ever lived. After a long night of storytelling and carousing, Morgan sent the boys to their beds. The next morning he greeted them, and with reluctance they strolled out the door. Waiting on the steps were members of the local garrison, and the confessed pirates were clapped in chains.

The seventeen were brought before the Admiralty Court, and there they found a far less jovial Henry Morgan, staring down at them from the bench, where he sat as chief judge, and regarding the crew as if he’d never seen them before. There is a portrait of Morgan in his later years that has never been found, but Charles Leslie, who saw the painting in 1740, gave a description of it. “There appears something so awful and majestick in his countenance,” he wrote, “that I’m persuaded none can look upon it without a kind of veneration.” This is the Morgan whom the pirates met that morning; this is the man who conducted a quick, businesslike trial and sentenced them to death. The unlucky crew were marched out of the courts and handed over to the “finisher of the law,” the hangman. It is moments like this that make one wish Morgan had written his memoirs; the sheer enjoyment he got out of being a ruthless bastard could have made him one of the great seventeenth-century characters. One of the maxims he used in later life was “Nothing but a diamond can cut a diamond,” and Morgan was certainly hard enough to deal with the average pirate.

The separation between Morgan and his former mates was now complete. The admiral had seen the future, and it was trade, not pillage. Privateering had given him estates and status, but he knew that only a rational system of trade and a lasting peace could ensure his family’s position for generations to come. Morgan’s writings never betray a flicker of doubt about his actions; he believed he’d turned privateer for the benefit of his family and his country. Now he was hunting pirates for the same reason. Morgan proved more inventive and flexible than the Rodericks of the world; he’d made the final turn that they were not capable of. The Brethren were a passing phase; he wanted to join that which would last.

Without hesitation the admiral terrorized his former comrades, whom he now described as “a dangerous pestilence.” Although with tongue in cheek he claimed to “abhor bloodshed,” he didn’t shy away from it when dealing with pirates. “I have put to death, imprisoned and transported to the Spanish for execution all English and Spanish pirates that I could get,” he wrote his masters in London. The fact that he was accused of secretly encouraging the pirates and taking a cut of their profits only increased his severity; any whiff of scandal weakened his position with London, and he was not going to have that. His letters to his superiors were filled with reports of “bloody and notorious villains” he’d sent soldiers to capture, “a powerful and desperate pirate” prowling out in the North Sea. When London pressed for even more action, he acidly replied that piracy could no more be ended in the West Indies that the brigands who terrorized people on the highways of London could be wiped out. Morgan spent five years hunting down buccaneers. Some he pardoned (if they returned to Jamaica and renounced their former lives); many others he hanged.

Pirate trials the world over tell us what kind of things happened at Port Royal. Outlaws were encouraged to confess before dying and to cleanse their souls of their many, variegated crimes. Some were broken by their impending doom, cried out for mercy, found Christ, or at least mumbled an apology and blamed their wrongdoings on drink. Asked what had drawn him into the life, one pirate recalled, “I may begin with gaming! No, whoring, that led on to gaming….” There were scenes of quite heartfelt regret and penance. Others reacted differently. “Yes, I do heartily repent,” one told the judge. “I repent that I had not done more Mischief, and that we did not cut the Throats of them that took us, and I am extremely sorry that you an’t all hang’d as well as we.” These kinds of mocking confessions run through the transcripts of pirate trials, and many a judge was incensed to see the condemned corsairs cracking jokes, laughing at the crowd, and generally living as they were about to die.

Another incident caused Morgan to further distance himself from his past: the publication of Esquemeling’s
The Buccaneers of America.
The book was an immediate sensation. “No other book of that time…,” wrote one observer, “experienced a popularity similar to that of
Buccaneers.
” It spawned a thousand imitators: Every fictional buccaneer from
Treasure Island
’s Billy Bones to Johnny Depp’s very postmodern Captain Jack sprang from its overheated pages. Originally titled
De Americaensche Zeerovers,
it was a smash success and would soon be translated into Spanish (where Morgan’s name was blackened even further by the translators) and then English. The book depicted Morgan as a bold and at times brilliant leader, but it also painted him as a rampaging, torturing, thieving pirate. The Spanish editors described him acidly in their preface, failing even to get his name right: “the English of Jamaica, under the command of the intrepid and valiant John Morgan, who would have gained greater honour for his skilful management and daring, if his tyrannical cruelty to the conquered had not blotted out all the splendour of his glory.” Morgan was livid. He sicced lawyers on the Dutchman and his publishers, and the libel suit produced intriguing testimony from Morgan. “The Morgan family had always held due and natural allegiance to the King,” he wrote, “were both by sea and land of good fame, and against all evil deeds, piracies, &c, had the greatest abhorrence and disgust, and that in the West Indies there are such thieves and pirates called bucaniers, who subsist by piracy, depredation and evil deeds of all kinds without lawful authority, that of these people Henry Morgan always had and still has hatred.”

Was Morgan a hypocrite? The line between pirates and privateers is a thin one to modern eyes; they often behaved exactly alike, and to their victims there was no difference whatsoever. But to Morgan those commissions with the king’s blessing were everything. A Welshman to the bone, he craved respectability, or at least respect, for his clan (notice that Morgan mentions his family in the testimony above). Esquemeling had cut him to the quick not by describing the lines of Spaniards that fell under his men’s swords but by classifying himself as a renegade and a criminal. Morgan got his revenge, however, by winning the suit; abject apologies soon followed from the publishers, along with heavily edited versions of
The Buccaneers,
which did not sell very well.

Morgan saw things in stark black and white. One was either with him, and England, or against them. To the admiral it was not he but the pirates who had betrayed the cause—the cause of getting rich while at the same time serving their country.

The realities of life in the Caribbean, where piracy still offered a chance at quick wealth possible in few other trades, kept the corsairs’ flag flying. Roderick sailed with a small, international outfit, attacking settlements along the coast of the Main and making only enough to sustain a regular drinking schedule. He still dreamed of hitting a galleon, but like many pirates he was reduced to hand-to-mouth living. The stories of Panama and Portobelo got told and retold.

Morgan was not sentimental about the past; he was now hunting all the Rodericks he’d helped create. Not only were many of the veterans who had studied buccaneering under him in his great raids now sailing under French commissions and passing along the lessons of his leadership to their acolytes, but the stories of his success echoed around the West Indies and even through the harbors of England and France, keeping the new recruits flowing in. The next generation of pirates would often be straight outlaws, not sanctioned by the English king. And they’d add new dimensions to the pirate life, just as Morgan had built on Drake’s example and made the privateer, in the words of one historian, into “that raffish instrument of foreign policy.”