Empire of Blue Water (7 page)
Read Empire of Blue Water Online
Authors: Stephan Talty
Tags: #Caribbean Area, #Pirates, #Pirates - Caribbean Area - History - 17th century, #Mexico, #Morgan; Henry, #17th Century, #General, #Caribbean Area - History - To 1810, #Latin America, #Caribbean & West Indies, #History
In London the man who had set the invasion of Jamaica in motion was gone. Cromwell had died in 1658, and his Puritan revolution seemed to dissolve like morning fog. In his place came a far different man, Charles II, whose biography was touched early and often by piracy. The new king’s father, like many of the Stuarts, had married a Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France. This had enraged conspiracy-minded Protestants like Thomas Gage, who were always prone to rumors of papist plots to take over the country. When she was pregnant with Charles II, Henrietta had sent to France for a Catholic midwife. Her dwarf and dancing master were sent by sea to retrieve the woman but were captured by pirates and delayed past the blessed event. The man in the street rejoiced: Charles II was guided into the world by faithful Protestant hands.
At his birth, fortune-tellers predicted that Charles would be drawn to mathematicians, merchants, learned men, painters, sculptors—and sailors. Astrologers foresaw a man with a “mincing gait,” a high-pitched voice who would be lucky in both marriage and war. Charles’s father once stated that “the state of the monarch is the supremest thing upon earth: For kings are not only God’s lieutenants, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself are called Gods.” His son, however, came of age in a much more uncertain world. He had to fight for power from his exile in France, flitting in disguise through enemy ranks, endangered and hungry. He’d even turned pirate for a brief moment when he sailed up the Thames and held merchant ships for heavy ransoms to raise money for his armies. Cromwell’s death in September 1658 opened the way for Charles II to assume the throne, and he’d be the monarch whose court would be enriched and scandalized by Henry Morgan’s raids. He brought the Restoration to England, and with it a spirit of debauchery of which Morgan and his boys would have approved. By his return to the throne in 1660, Charles was a canny, passionate man with few illusions; in the marvelous description of one historian, he was “life-bitten.”
Charles inherited a monarchy with few assets and many lurking enemies. The main players in Europe were at war with each other for most of the seventeenth century, seeking dominance and riches, but only four were vying for colonies in the West Indies: France, England, the United Provinces, and Spain. During Charles’s reign France was the rising power, rich and led with supremely cynical brilliance by Louis XIV. Spain, despite her recent military losses, was still Spain; it was difficult for the English, who had been raised on tales of her immense power, to believe she was really as depleted as she seemed. The United Provinces (the modern Netherlands) were tough and resourceful and had a powerful navy that was increasingly able to challenge any of the European fleets. And England was dependent on its West Indies privateers to do the work of empire. Other countries of varying degrees of potency—including the behemoth Austria (the Holy Roman Empire), Sweden, Italy, Greece, and Russia—were not active in the Caribbean arena, while Portugal was preoccupied with Brazil. In the mid-and late seventeenth century, European nations switched allies constantly in their bids for domination on the Continent and in the New World. Religious affinities and popular opinion meant little in this furious grab for power: Protestant kings would ally themselves with Catholic monarchs one year and then switch sides the next. The colonies of the New World were chess pieces in this ever-changing game, to be milked for money to fight European wars and to trade away if absolutely necessary.
So when Charles went looking for a bride, it was power and not love that he sought. Eager for cash and new markets, Charles gazed longingly at Portugal, who wanted desperately to have England as an ally. Only recently freed from the iron grip of Spanish dominion, Portugal held rich colonies in the East; it dominated the vital trade in spices that went back to 2600 BC, when Egypt’s rulers fortified with hot pepper the diets of the workers building the pyramids of Cheops. Portugal was weak, and if it collapsed, its rich possessions might fall into an ally’s waiting hand, giving England lucrative assets around the world: “Bombay as the mart for the trade of all India,…Tangier as a centre for the commerce of the Mediterranean, and…Jamaica as the key that would unlock to England the great Spanish treasuries in America.” Besides which, the Portuguese had placed a well-funded spy in Charles’s court, and he distributed bribes high and low. Spain reacted with panic to the threat of an English-Portuguese alliance, but Philip IV had little money to spare for greasing the palms of Charles’s men. Portugal was offering the fabulously rich Catherine of Braganza, daughter of their monarch, while the daughterless Philip (again hampered by the mortality rate of his legitimate children) countered with the ruler of Parma’s daughter. But many doubted whether he’d be able to deliver the huge dowry he promised.
Jamaica was a pawn in this great game. When Charles was in exile, he’d signed a secret agreement with the Spanish to return the island and crack down on the privateers if Philip IV, his friend and fellow debauchee, would supply him with 6,000 troops. But once he returned to power, the giveback seemed inadvisable. Merchants were doing a busy trade with Jamaica, and they were furious that he’d think of returning the island to the Spanish. From an island full of renegades and drunks, Charles began to see Jamaica in a new light: as “the navel of the West Indies,” “a window on the power of Spain.” Philip, on the other hand, kept bidding up the price for the return of it; he was desperate to regain his inheritance.
But the Portuguese bribe, and the promise of more to come, won the day. Charles would keep Jamaica and accept Catherine; in 1662 he announced his engagement. Catherine brought not only her plain and retiring person but also Bombay, Tangier, and £300,000 (approximately $61.5 million in today’s dollars) to the union. The announcement caused a “great passion” in Madrid; the breach with England was now official. There were even rumors that the fleet Charles sent to retrieve his bride would double the insult by intercepting the galleons from the Americas and ransacking them. It wasn’t true, but the gossip only pointed up Spain’s nervousness. The empire seemed under attack on every front.
Having decided on holding Jamaica, for the next ten years Charles did little to govern it. When the Council of Jamaica shipped back a copy of its new laws for approval, the document was mislaid—for a decade. The “fit of absent mind” continued; policies often shifted with the winds and with whether a pro-or anti-Spanish adviser was in favor in Charles’s court. The pirates and their Jamaican allies would have a relatively free hand to roam the Caribbean, with one edgy eye on London but with a remarkably free hand to strike at will.
Charles’s snatching back of the Jamaican offer was another disappointment for Philip IV. His torments only intensified as he grew older and in 1661 were capped by one overriding concern: a male heir. If he did not produce one, on his death Europe would be plunged into a war of succession and his empire would be carved up by his enemies, his family’s legacy scattered to the winds. Philip felt that by denying him a son, God was mocking him, the great seducer, the man who had illegitimate children stashed all over Madrid. How better to illustrate that fact than the fates of the royal sons, starting with Baltasar Carlos, who had died one after the other? How could his bastard sons thrive while his heirs withered and died? It was clearly a message: God would not allow any product of Philip’s legitimate pleasures to survive, as punishment for his darker ones. To say, as one writer has, that Philip was “possessed of the greatest capacity for sexual pleasure recorded of any modern monarch” is unprovable, but he’d certainly rank high—and yet not one of his heirs had made it to adulthood. In 1661 his last surviving legitimate son lay dying.
In the early days of that January, the monarchy was desperately striving to save the last boy, three-year-old Felipe Próspero. One religious leader had led a pilgrimage of devout Spaniards to the convent of the Barefoot Nuns, praying for the boy’s survival. The bodies of revered saints were moved from sacred site to sacred site in an attempt to appease God; the incorruptible corpse of San Isidro, whose body miraculously had never decayed, was laid beside Felipe’s crib, as were the ashes of San Diego Alcalá. But it was all in vain. On January 11, the boy passed away and plunged his father into fresh despair. Philip wrote to a friend, his mind divided between two calamities:
I assure you that what has most exhausted me, much more than the loss of my son, is to see clearly that I have vexed God and that he sent this punishment to castigate my sins. Pray to Our Lord that He may open my eyes, that I may perform His holy will in all things…. There is nothing new in the English situation.
There was only one hope left: Months before, Philip had deliberately slept with his queen, Mariana, one last time as an insurance policy against Felipe’s death. Now she was pregnant, and a few days after the death of Felipe she went into labor. The eyes of Europe—certainly of its monarchs in France and Vienna—were turned toward Madrid as the fate of Spain was decided.
As Mariana prepared to give birth, she was brought to the Tower Chamber, which had been made ready for her. Around the room had been carefully placed the royal family’s most sacred relics: There was a Roman nail from the cross, three thorns from Jesus’s crown on Golgotha, an actual fragment of the cross. The relics represented the physical connection between Jesus and his heirs on earth, the Spanish monarchy. As the contractions came quicker and quicker, Mariana was bled. And then on Sunday, November 6, the news came: It was a boy, Carlos Próspero. The French king instantly sent his spies to check on the health of the child. The Spanish court proclaimed him “most beautiful in features, large head, dark skin, and somewhat overplump,” but the French communiqués painted a much different picture: Carlos was so small and tender that he was placed in a box of cotton. “The crown was firmer on his head than the ground now beneath his feet,” one spy reported. But Philip was satisfied. “Our Lord was pleased to give me back the son he had taken from me,” he wrote. With an heir, however fragile, in place, Philip had fulfilled his last duties to his ancestors, and his spirits improved.
The news did not. The raids of Mings’s privateers were just more in a continuing stream of bad omens: droughts, plagues, and a disastrous loss to the Portuguese army in 1665. A possible cause was uncovered when the authorities raided a suspected counterfeiter’s house and found secreted away two plates; on them was engraved a heart pierced by an arrow and the words “Philip IV son of Philip III and Margaret” on the first and another man’s name on the second, along with some biblical verses and the chilling words “Thou are mine and I am thine.” Witchcraft was suspected, and the investigation went on for months, with the woman who lived at the house interrogated by the Inquisition. Delving deeper into the sorcery, Philip’s court priests confiscated the small bag the king had always worn around his neck to keep him safe. Instead of the relics it was believed to hold, inside were a portrait of Philip pierced with pins, a book of charms, and other tools of the devil. Convinced at last that they’d found the source of Spain’s disasters, the ecclesiastics burned the contents.
But the true devils lay to the west. Henry Morgan was beginning his career in earnest.
4
Into the Past
I
n November 1663 the twenty-eight-year-old Morgan finally set out on his own to test his mettle against the Spanish Empire. Along with three other captains, he left Port Royal and sailed for Central America bound for New Spain (current-day Mexico). Most likely the crowds were thinner for his departure than they’d been for Mings’s: Morgan was not yet a name to conjure with in Jamaica.
What kind of ship Morgan commanded is not known, but privateer and pirate ships were often specially modified by the raiders to suit their purposes. In the weeks before the mission, Roderick, who had joined up with Morgan, worked with the other privateers to get the ships ready; the first order of business was to rip out the wooden bulkheads in the holds, which were used in merchant ships to keep barrels and trunks from sliding. Cabins—first class and steerage—were gutted, creating an open space belowdecks, for reasons both practical (to accommodate the large number of men these ships often carried) and philosophical (pirates were democrats and decreed that no man should have better quarters than the next). Carpenters would reinforce the deck to support extra cannon and cut slots in the hold for guns or mount them fore and aft as “chasers,” cannon that could be fired on anyone trying to pursue or escape them. Aboveboard, the forecastle and any superstructure behind (in seaman’s terms, “abaft”) the mainsail was removed, as were the cabins (“roundhouses”) in the stern, creating a clear deck ideal for boarding vessels or stashing excess numbers of privateers, captives, or booty. Finally, the rig of the converted vessel could be altered by stepping the mainmast aft, for increased power in the wind. Pirates adored speed; an extra knot could mean the difference between riches and hanging. Like grease monkeys cackling as they dropped a supercharged V-12 into their father’s vintage Olds, Roderick and the other Brethren took a stock mercantile vessel and made it into a thing built to fly.
Onto their customized ships, the privateers loaded
boucan,
water, hard tack, and their most valuable possessions, prized above women and even Spanish gold: their muskets. The long, broad-butted muskets and the pirates’ skill with them were so essential to their success that one must pause to linger over these unique seventeenth-century creations. Like Lewis and Clark heading into the vasts of the western territories, the privateers depended on their firearms for their very lives; Lewis and Clark needed them for killing buffalo, the privateers for killing men. They bought them from French and Dutch traders who plied the waters of the New World, and getting a good musket and a pair of working pistols would have been one of the first priorities for a buccaneer. They paid small fortunes to obtain them, using any seed money they’d brought with them from the Old World, from their wages as indentured servants, or from selling
boucan
or animal skins; there were a dozen ways to get the necessary cash. They cleaned the guns obsessively and would slit the throat of anyone who dared touch them.
The pirate musket was an objet d’art, often originating in the shops (one might almost say studios) of the great French gunsmiths: Brachere of Dieppe and Galin of Nientes. Mass production of firearms would not be perfected until the middle of the eighteenth century, when interchangeable parts were produced and assembled into a piece. So the privateers and pirates carried one-of-a-kind matchlocks (in which a burning taper was placed into a pan of gunpowder) and the later wheelocks (in which a metal wheel spins against a flint, causing sparks to fly and touching off the powder, a technique supposedly invented by Leonardo da Vinci). The finest of these heavy iron guns were considered near counterparts to Renaissance paintings and sculpture. On a typical French musket, you might find the hammer shaped into the form of a leaping dolphin, while on the blued barrel would be etched intricately worked portraits of gods such as Jupiter and Mars throwing thunderbolts or reclining on billowy clouds. Producing these firearms was a complex process involving a designer, a stockmaker, a barrelsmith, a metal carver, an inlayer, and an engraver. To achieve the scenes that made the French guns distinctive, the craftsman would work much as a sculptor like Leonardo would, his chisel and chasing tools guided by his free hand as he pounded shapes into the cold metal. The craftsman was a metallurgist who had to know how to forge metal, reduce it, soften it to a working consistency, harden it, then “clean it white,” shining it until it gleamed like porcelain. Gunsmiths also strove for lightness; due to their innovative design, the French-produced wheelocks were lighter than their competitors on the Continent, a wonderful attribute when you’re carrying a weapon on twenty-mile marches through Central American jungles. Ironically, the buccaneers, whom many regarded as civilization killers, carried into battle an instrument that was at the forefront of Renaissance artistry. A Spanish soldier sometimes had to face off against the privateers with an outdated arquebus, which was less accurate than the long-barreled musket, a crucial disadvantage when trying to pick off a buccaneer. The musket gave the pirate a distinct tactical advantage.
The Spanish monarchy’s grip on the lives of its settlers extended even to firearms. The rather shocking truth was that the Crown strictly limited the amount of weapons that could be imported into the New World by private citizens. The only weapons legally available were the ones supplied by the government in Madrid, which often took the best ones for its soldiers in Europe. Ensuring that the weapons that were shipped to the New World reached the soldiers at the other end meant trusting in a long supply line, where greed or simple necessity might mean that the muskets disappeared. Like a mistrustful parent, the Crown wanted to control the firepower that guarded its treasure. This official fear of private enterprise at every level meant that the Spanish would often face Morgan with only a few decent muskets equivalent to what the buccaneers carried. The Spanish settlers could and did trade with the illegal Dutch and French merchants who trawled their shores, but they could not always pay the prices that the privateers could for a musket in working order, and so they often went without. Morgan didn’t depend on London for his guns; if he had, the Welshman might never have won a battle.
Roderick, now twenty-two, had quickly learned the value of having a good musket. He’d bought his from a Dutch trader who had come through Port Royal, borrowing some of the purchase price from his mates and getting the rest out of his stash from the Mings expedition. He was hoping to earn enough to pay off his debtors (he’d run up a tab in several of the taverns, for meals and rum, and with a certain prostitute) with a solid payday from this modest expedition. And he was enjoying the newfound respect he got on the streets of his adopted town. Tradesmen and merchants nodded to him; townspeople gave him a wide berth when he was blind drunk on rumbullion. Perhaps it was actually fear and not respect, but Roderick would take it. He was no longer a scrub boy on a merchant ship; he was the protector of Jamaica and, more important, a customer with the potential for fantastic future earnings. He’d come up in the world.
As he sailed out to make his fortune, Henry Morgan was much changed from the cherubic Welsh boy in his early portrait. He was now lean, broad-shouldered, and bronzed by the Jamaican sun. He wore his beard short and pointed, in the style of Sir Francis Drake, and around his forehead tied a scarlet kerchief. In later expeditions he’d carry a wig among his things, in case he was called to accept a surrender from a Spanish noble. Captains liked to dress well, in the manner of English gentlemen: In 1722 the captain “Black” Bart Roberts was described as being “dressed in a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain round his neck with a diamond cross hanging around it.” But Morgan’s working clothes would have been much less glamorous: a cotton shirt, breeches, leather boots. He was dressed for war.
Here on the eve of Morgan’s first expedition is where one John Esquemeling (or Alexander Exquemelin, another variant that has come down to us) enters the story. The details of his life—in fact, his very identity—are incomplete, but it’s clear he was a surgeon who accompanied Morgan on some of his raids. Some believe that “John Esquemeling” was a pseudonym for Hendrik Barentzoon Smeeks, a surgeon who left his hometown of Zwolle in central Holland to serve aboard a merchant ship with the Dutch East India Company, during which service he shipwrecked, landed on a boat that sailed to Java, and eventually ended up at the French pirate port of Tortuga, where he came into contact with the Brethren. Others believe that he was in fact French, from the town of Honfleur, and had sailed to the West Indies as an apprentice before learning his trade and hooking up with Morgan. Whatever Esquemeling’s true background, out of his exploits came a memoir,
The Buccaneers of America,
published in Holland in 1678 and then in many subsequent translations. Esquemeling’s reports are sometimes contradicted by the Spanish accounts, but he knew Morgan and fought under him, and if some parts of his book smack of embellishment, key passages are verified by Spanish accounts, by Morgan’s reports, and by other sources. His stories of the buccaneers almost single-handedly created the pirate craze that obsessed Daniel Defoe and enchanted Robert Louis Stevenson and gave birth to the image of the pirate as cruel, wild, and free.
Buccaneer expeditions followed a routine. The privateers would first meet over a bowl of rum punch on the captain’s flagship. (Refusing a drink would often bring “a Man under a suspicion of being in a Plot” against the Brethren of the Coast.) The first order of business was fresh meat, especially tortoise. What the buffalo was to the American settler in his wagon train, the tortoise was to the pirate: Without the sustenance that animal provided, it’s unlikely that the buccaneers could have achieved half their victories. They could distinguish among the four species common to the West Indies and knew their breeding grounds intimately. “The choice of all for fine eating is the turtle or sea tortoise,” wrote one visitor to Jamaica in 1704. “The flesh looks and eats much like choice veal, but the fat is of a green colour, very luscious and sweet; the liver is likewise green, very wholesome, searching and purging.” Pork was also a favorite, and to get it the buccaneers would hit Spanish hog yards in the middle of the night. “Having beset the keeper’s lodge, they force him to rise,” Esquemeling tells us of Morgan’s fledgling fleet, “and give them as many heads [of swine] as they desire, threatening withal to kill him in case he disobeys their commands or makes any noise.” Having seen to their rations, the Brethren would then call a second council, where the central issue was “what place they shall go, to seek their desperate fortunes.” The men would often suggest towns they’d raided before or toss out a piece of secondhand information on weak defenses, lazy sentries, warlike mayors, a particularly large stockpile of silver. Finally a target would be agreed upon, and the real drinking would begin in earnest.
One cannot help but compare the process to the situation aboard the Royal Navy ships that brought Morgan and so many others to the islands. On the Hispaniola expedition, the men were so uninformed and demoralized that many of them believed that their commanders were going to sell them as white slaves. They were given no incentives to fight, and they fought terribly. They were allowed no share in the prizes, and so they didn’t seek them. As a merchant seaman, Roderick had gained nothing from the successful completion of his mission; with the Brethren he could earn a different kind of life.
Roderick had joined a uniquely democratic institution. Back in England he’d heard odd stories about the Levellers, who had recently proposed universal suffrage (except for those under twenty-one years of age, servants, those on charity, and a few other categories). The Levellers believed that men were citizens who could be ruled “no farther than by free consent, or agreement, by giving up their power each to other, for their better being.” To the average Englishman, this was madness, “utterly revolutionary and even frightening.” The Levellers were crushed for talking about these ideas, but Roderick was beginning to see that the average pirate would have garroted you had you tried to deny him his basic rights. He lived in a democracy where the most important decisions were often made from the bottom up; it was a tradition that would save Morgan more than once. Nothing like it existed in the Spanish colonial system.
Once they had a confirmed destination, the buccaneers agreed to the articles that governed the ship for the duration of the voyage. Too timid at this point to speak up, Roderick watched the proceedings from a distance, his back pressed against the ship’s wall. He soon learned that the captain was in charge only when the crew was fighting, chasing a ship, or being chased. The rest of the time he got no more respect than his peers. There was an election for the quartermaster, who would look after the rights of the pirates, take command of any prisoners, settle disputes, and all in all act as a “trustee for the whole.” The pirates voted on how many shares of treasure each pirate would get. The captain got five or six shares to the common pirate’s one; the master’s mate got two; the cabin boy one-half. Skilled tradesmen were well compensated: The carpenter who’d be responsible for fixing any breaches of the hull from cannonballs or storm damage was often was paid 150 pieces of eight; the surgeon and his “chest of medicaments” got 250. Men of both professions were so sought after that pirates would sometimes attack merchant ships just to steal away their shipwright or doctor, who was then forced into piracy.