Empire of Blue Water (9 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
Each of Morgan’s raids was remarkable for a different reason. His first was a feat of navigation and improvisation: He’d covered thousands of miles across portions of the globe for which no good maps existed, made alliances with Indians, learned to trust their advice, survived the loss of his vessels, and brought his men back safely and much richer. The Spanish had proved less of an adversary than sheer geography, and in fact Morgan had studiously avoided attacking the power centers of the empire: Havana, Cartagena, Panama. But he’d rampaged at will through the length and breadth of the empire. The sheer number of miles he’d covered demonstrated how the Spanish Empire had been distorted by the search for treasure: It was a collection of distant towns strung out over a huge continent. It had not been created with defense or sustainability in mind, only exploitation. What excitement Morgan must have felt as he set course for Jamaica: He’d just proved to himself that the empire was vulnerable to smart, driven men like himself. If he could mold the Brethren to his will, he’d be as rich and as respected as any of his illustrious kin. The West Indies were his for the taking.
Reports filtered back to Madrid about Morgan’s feats in territories previously thought out of reach. Morgan began to acquire the name that would pass the lips of terrified colonists for years to come:
El Draque.
The Spaniards were beginning to believe he was the reincarnation of the dreaded Sir Francis Drake.
5
Sodom
W
hen word reached Port Royal in the fall of 1665 that Morgan was on his way back in, the townspeople were amazed, having considered the men lost at sea or long dead in some wretched jungle. The buccaneers had been gone two years. Morgan, now only thirty years old, sailed triumphantly into the port, dressed in the spoils of war: new stockings, fine Spanish knee breeches, and a jerkin taken from the grandees of Granada. He sailed in a commandeered Spanish vessel, itself symbolic to the eager English faces that lined the wharves of a victory over Madrid’s minions. His face was weathered and tanned by the long days under the sun, with that salt-lashed glow that sailors have after months at sea. He was now fabulously rich; he’d gained unique experience in the voyage and perfected the sea-to land raid that would become his specialty; he’d naturally assumed command of the men as his skills as a soldier rose to the fore. Morgan had remade himself in the wilds of Honduras and come back a new man.
On his return the Welshman found that his luck was still good. His uncle Edward had been named lieutenant governor of Jamaica, a reward for his service in the Royalist cause. The cash-strapped and recently widowed Edward had arrived on the island on May 21, 1664, with his two sons and three daughters. His eldest daughter had died during the voyage, having succumbed to the great killer, not the Spanish but disease, “a malign distemper by reason of the nastiness of the passengers.” Jamaica was continuing to fill up with settlers, and the government was not picky about the class of folk who accompanied Edward. And installed as governor was one Sir Thomas Modyford, a former Barbados plantation owner and politician. In many ways Modyford would play the supporting role to Morgan in the coming years. They were an intriguing pair: Modyford the consummate politician, crafty, subtle, the author of ingratiating letters to his masters in London that, on second reading, were loaded with spiked resentment and canny forays. Morgan’s intentions were voiced out of the mouth of a musket, but Modyford was an artist of diplomatic subterfuge. He was the colonial administrator par excellence, furiously working to extract every inch of latitude he could from his English superiors while at the same time conducting a freelance war on the Spanish enemy that threatened his livelihood and his home.
The Morgans were delighted to see their semilegendary cousin, who must have been a figure of romance to them, the embodiment of the dashing buccaneer; his friends and followers had regaled them with tales of Morgan’s adventures. The Morgan daughters stood out from the usual female company of Port Royal as well; this was a town where a whore could graduate to being a planter’s wife, if she played her cards right, so scarce were white females on the island. Proper girls were sent back to England to find proper boys to marry; the roughnecks of Port Royal had to make do with what was left behind. Henry’s cousins had lived in upper-crust society in Prussia most of their lives, having fled England when the Puritans won out over their Royalist brethren, and had returned to Restoration London just in time to revel in its gaiety and social froth. They could gossip about the king’s dalliances and talk about the latest plays: John Dryden’s comedy
The Wild Gallant
(1663) had fizzled, while the king’s own troupe of actors, the Gentlemen of the Chamber, had inaugurated the opening of Drury Lane with a drollery called
The Humorous Lieutenant
(1663). Talk of culture and royalty must have been like champagne bubbles in Morgan’s nose; in Port Royal the only musical entertainments were choruses of drunken sluts and pirates down by the waterfront. When Henry fell for the eldest remaining daughter, Mary Elizabeth, he did not waste time in making his feelings clear. He risked his life for money, but he didn’t want to marry for it, as Elizabeth’s father was by no means rich. This was clearly a love match (and, as a union between first cousins, not as controversial as it would be today). Elizabeth accepted, and all that was left to do was to get the approval of Colonel Edward, who was off fighting the Dutch on the island of Statia. Then, a month and a half after Henry had sailed back into the harbor, news arrived: Statia was taken, but Colonel Morgan was dead. “The Lieutenant-general died not with any wound,” his second-in-command reported, “but being ancient and corpulent, by hard marching and extraordinary heat fell and died.” The islands often required a season of acclimatization; the colonel had gone out too fast and too hard.
There was also news of a change of opinion on the privateers. The Spanish were furious about the privateers like Morgan, “much dejected,” one English official reported, “at hearing of our hostile carriage toward them, which has wholly ruined their trade.” In the eternal minuet of European alliances, Charles was now wooing the Spanish as allies and trying to head off war with France and the Dutch, so he ordered that his Jamaican subjects stop their raids on all parties, which to the islanders was like an open invitation to every nation to attack them at will. If the privateers could not get commissions in Port Royal, they’d look to the French island of Tortuga to get permission to attack Spanish targets. The commission business can get confusing: Dutch or French privateers might carry English commissions against the Spanish. English privateers could sail with Dutch or French commissions. So long as
someone
was at war with Spain—the richest and most desired target in the West Indies—you could get a license to attack them. The letter didn’t have to be from your native government; the privateers were soldiers of fortune, even if men like Morgan preferred to sail for their home country.
Thomas Lynch, a rich planter and an advocate for better relations with Spain, doubted that the 1,500 privateers could be reined in without five or six warships. “What compliance can be expected from men so desperate and numerous,” he wrote, “that have no other element but the sea, nor trade but privateering?” The Spaniards were not the only ones threatened by the flourishing of the buccaneers; some in Port Royal were beginning to realize that the lure of gold was empowering the worst instincts among them. Here, unlike in England, there were few institutions to restrain the power of the Brethren. The old class structures meant little in Port Royal; nationalism, which could get the rabble of London primed for a war, was important, but in the final analysis it was trumped by gold and opportunity. The peculiar circumstances of life on the Caribbean frontier were molding a new kind of mind-set: that of an autonomous, geographically mobile, highly confident, heavily armed bandit-hero with few ties to nations or systems of belief.
A certain Jamaican, one Mr. Worsley, made that point in a letter that described the situation of the merchants and planters on the island. Mr. Worsley was convinced that the French were wooing the buccaneers to their side and that one day the townspeople of Port Royal would come to regret their alliance with the murdering bands. Like the townspeople in a Hollywood western who hire the disreputable, ex-alcoholic gunman to protect them, Mr. Worsley (and many like him) were secretly appalled by their guardians, and he wrote that if “such a crew of wild, dissolute and tattered fellows” had become so accustomed to preying on people, they were liable to turn on their own. The very individuality that made the pirates such marvelous fighters made them sorry material for a civilized society. And the treasure of the New World empowered them, made them stronger than decent men. As it turned out, Mr. Worsley was right to worry. The day would come when the traders of Port Royal would see the pirates turn away from the Spanish devil and, cutlasses raised, advance slowly toward their merchant allies.
What Worsley recognized was that the pirates were a kind of supervirus: They represented an extreme form of predatory capitalism, where the strongest, who produced nothing, preyed on the weak, who were forced to give up the goods they’d made or extracted from the earth with great effort. The merchants favored a milder form of trade, with some rule of law and payment for what was taken. But to dislodge the Spanish system they were forced to introduce the most virulent form of their own social code and watch it wreak havoc on their enemy’s economy. The problem was that, once set loose, such a virus could not be controlled. That was the merchants’ worry: that their experiment might lead not to a profitable trading network with the Spanish colonies but a complete breakdown of social order, in which men stopped obeying the rules of a market economy, went renegade, and pillaged and killed to make their profit. It was the risk you took when you invited men like Roderick to protect your interests.
But for now the town was booming. Huge warehouses were built on the harbor and packed with animal skins, logwood, sugar, and tortoiseshell. Three-and four-story homes, built of brick, stood shoulder to shoulder beside the mean huts that had previously served as shelter. A fine stone cathedral, the pride of the town, shot up. The English ignored the Spanish style of building: low-slung houses with thick wooden poles driven deep into the ground, giving the buildings a low center of gravity and anchoring them into the earth. The Spanish had learned that the unstable island required such a building style, but the English rejected this architectural folklore entirely. They were interested in re-creating England here in paradise and claiming their place in a way everyone would understand. Their heavy, rigid homes went up all over Port Royal, and their warehouses and civic buildings didn’t deign to recognize the local conditions: Stone piled on top of stone, that was the look. All of it was built on a layer of loose sand only thirty to sixty feet deep, beneath which lay coralline limestone and rough gravel brought to the area by glaciers during the Pleistocene era beginning 1.8 million years ago. It was not a solid place to build a city, but Port Royal lived for the moment.
Worrying, too, was the region’s continuing susceptibility to tsunamis, described by the Spanish as “seaquakes.” Spanish explorers reported discovering rich pearl beds near the Venezuelan island of Cubagua in 1499, but forty years later they were gone, and it is believed they were wiped away by an earthquake and tidal wave. Three ships a hundred miles off the coast of Honduras had felt the ocean shake beneath them so violently that they thought they’d hit a shoal. Convinced that “the sea was against them,” the fleet sailed for home. There were tales of cities destroyed, of residents looking out and seeing the sea mounted higher than the land, of towns moved to the slopes of mountains to avoid the rampaging waters.
There are different types of tsunamis: teletsunamis, caused by events remote from the affected area (such as a distant earthquake across the ocean); landslide tsunamis, caused by debris plunging into the sea after a mass movement of earth; self-explanatory volcanic tsunamis; and tectonic ones, generated by the sudden shifting of plates and crustal blocks underneath the sea. The first type was rare in the Caribbean; it wasn’t until the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that we have a recorded example of a tidal wave sweeping across the Atlantic for seven hours to pound the coasts of South America. Jamaica was protected from most teletsunamis emanating from the Atlantic by the massive bulks of Cuba and Hispaniola, which acted as buffers. But it was highly vulnerable to the last three.
In Madrid the final act of the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain was about to begin. Philip IV was failing: Nephritis pained him constantly, and his writing hand was now paralyzed. When a comet flashed across the sky in late 1664, many took it as a sign that Philip’s end was near. All eyes fell on the heir, but Carlos II had inherited his father’s bad luck in the form of debilitating sickness: He was weak, feeble-minded, with a massive, lolling head, his famous Hapsburg jaw so out of alignment that he could not chew his food, his body racked by fevers and mysterious pains. The Hapsburg mania for finding mates among their own, which kept power within the clan, had once been their signature; it was said that the family triumphed through marriage, not war. But in Carlos the tactic had produced a near monstrosity. It wasn’t enough that seven of his eight great-grandparents descended from a single female ancestor; she had, in addition, to be mad.
Her name was Juana, a plump-faced, intelligent, unusually well read daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain who had married Philip I and bit by bit grew obsessed with him. In his absence she’d fall into a kind of trance, staring dully into space and breaking out into fits of hysterical screaming. Soon the windows of her room were barred, and even her parents locked her away in a strong castle when she came to visit. When Philip died, she succumbed to her other world completely; she began a funeral march unlike any other before or after in the annals of royal madness. Philip’s heart was removed and sent home to Flanders, and his body was packed into a coffin. But Juana refused to relinquish him; instead processions of men with torches, armed guards, and chanting monks preceded the coffin as the queen journeyed from castle to castle through her realm. Juana never let the coffin out of her sight, and every day she’d open it and inspect the body for any signs of renewed life; disappointed, she’d kiss Philip and close the lid once again. Women along the roads were kept out of view; Juana believed they could still tempt Philip away from her. The macabre procession went on for weeks.
One day Carlos would grow obsessed with death as well. But first he had to survive the toxic genes bequeathed to him by his ancestors.
As the future monarch struggled to live, the Crown mobilized every tool in its power. A team of thirty-one wet nurses was mobilized to suckle him; they had to be between twenty and forty years old, with breasts of a certain size, decent and good-natured, and neither Jewish nor Muslim. Candidates endured a long and tedious examination of their family tree before being allowed to give Carlos the teat. All the while the Spanish court kept up the pretense that he was a robust child, but Louis XIV, who was married to Carlos’s sister, had his doubts about his brother-in-law (even suspecting that Carlos was really a girl disguised as a boy). He sent spies to confirm them. One after the other was rebuffed, until the French ambassador finally laid eyes on the heir. He immediately reported back that the boy “appears very feeble, he has a rash on both cheeks,…his head is covered with scales.” The French diagnosis would always be more accurate than the Spanish.
But Philip had fulfilled his final obligation to Spain; an heir, such as he was, was in place. As the end approached, he’d wished his son a happier life than he’d enjoyed. He did not seem to fear death; when it was asked whether the peripatetic bodies of the saints—miraculously preserved remains of Catholic holy men, which were believed to have healing powers—should be brought to his sickbed, he’d indicated they should not be moved: no extraordinary measures, as it were. When Don Juan José de Austria (no relation to the famous lover Don Juan), the only one of his bastard sons he’d recognized, arrived from his exile, Philip would not see him. “Tell him to go back to Consuegra,” he’d said wearily. “It is time now for nothing but death.” (This insult would burn with the proud Don Juan and cause years of trouble for Spain.) For Philip, death was not such an unhappy prospect. The curse had been passed on to Carlos; he could do no more harm to Spain, and God could do no more harm to him. When he died on September 17 and was carried to his place in his beloved Escorial, he passed on to his son a number of enemies and only a frail peace with England and its privateers.
If Carlos had been robust and strong-minded, his story would have been different. But his pale, deformed face was an invitation to conspirators, and soon they were gathered around him. His mother, Mariana of Austria, was appointed queen regent and given effective power over the affairs of state. Her closest adviser was Father Nithard, a Jesuit despised by the common Spaniard because he was Austrian. Carlos’s illegitimate brother Don Juan was constantly plotting to oust Mariana and gain control over Carlos.
The young king was the incarnation of his battered country, his weak constitution an accurate mirror of what he inherited. Corruption was so common that it was not even perceived as corruption; it was just the way things were done. It permeated the kingdom: Posts in the government, on the all-important galleons and elsewhere, were sold to the highest bidder. One college in Navarre paid handsomely for the right to confer medical degrees on its graduates, even though there wasn’t a single professor of medicine on the faculty. “The son of a shoemaker hates that occupation,” one government official wrote. “The son of a merchant wants to be a gentleman, and so on with the rest.” Rank was all: Some members of the titled classes avoided going to hospitals during the plague epidemics because it could have meant a slight to their honor; they found death preferable.
This attitude extended to the New World. A captain-general sailing to Cuba or New Spain would pay the Crown for the privilege, then make back his money and more by selling off positions to crew members. The Americas-bound ship was a microcosm of what Spain had become: A typical one would include a veedor, or legal counsel, who would see that all the king’s laws were obeyed even in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; there were eight gentlemen-in-waiting for the captain, four trumpeters, and a master of the plate, responsible for cataloging every piece of treasure brought on board and for delivering it to the Crown’s representatives on the ship’s return; there was a constable, a captain of arms, and the all-important notary who would affix his stamp to every piece of paper that the expedition produced. (The Archivo General de Indias in Seville, which stores the archives from the Spanish Empire in America, holds over 80 million documents.) There were even ships, called
navíos de aviso,
or “advice ships,” that hauled nothing but dispatches from Spain to America and back again. Copies, duplicates, triplicates—entire boats full of paper! Compare that to the average pirate ship, where every last ounce of extraneous material was tossed overboard in the name of speed, and you get an idea of the two worldviews that were about to do battle in earnest.
The differences were striking: The pirates were radical democrats; the Spanish, monarchists; the pirates prized daring and risk taking, while the Spanish prized conformity, and those who improvised often found themselves rotting in a squalid Madrid prison. The pirates were possessed by “an insatiable desire for riches”; the Spanish wanted power and honor. The pirates were often castoffs and godless heathens; the Spanish believed themselves to be God’s chosen ones. The pirates were commanded by Henry Morgan, who rose from nothing; the Spanish followed Carlos, the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty. The pirates were individualists; the Spanish represented a fantastically complex system. The pirate’s world was closer to our own; the Spanish lingered in a medieval dream.
The final confrontation between the two was now being held in check by London; Charles II had ordered that the privateers “desist those hostilities upon the Spaniards and other neighbours, as much disturbing the settlement of that plantation.” The king was being disingenuous; he did want to avoid turning Jamaica into “the Christian Algiers,” the worldwide headquarters for sea raiders, but reining in the buccaneers was actually a sop to his new allies. The island was a thorn in the side of Spain, and he needed Spain now. And so the privateers were called in. Town criers preceded by drummers went through Port Royal and two smaller towns reading the king’s directive. Many of the Port Royalists reacted with bitterness; the king did not seem to realize that they were living on a frontier where, on any given day, a Spanish, Dutch, or French ship could appear on the horizon and disgorge hundreds of soldiers or pirates, who would then proceed to plunder your house, rape your women, and squeeze your eyeballs out of your head (a favorite torture of the time). The king’s directive provided no funds for beefing up the island’s militia and no Royal Navy ships to protect the harbor. The lack of commissions was driving away the privateers, the only thing that kept the island safe.
The Spanish colonies did not sit back and wait for the English. In the same way that Modyford repeatedly beseeched his English superiors, the governors of the different territories kept up a constant stream of entreaties to Madrid, asking for ships, soldiers, and funds to arm them. There was a fleet in service called the Armada de Barlovento, or Windward Squadron, which in theory was permanently stationed in the West Indies. But, as always with the Spanish, the distance between “in theory” and “in reality” was large: Seven ships had been redirected for domestic use before they ever made the trip. And Spanish administrators were waiting impatiently for the other six to arrive in their waters and hunt down the Brethren.
Governor Modyford found that the revoking of commissions had the predicted results: The privateers drifted off to the Windward Islands, where they went pirate completely (attacking without commissions) or cadged letters of marque from the Portuguese or French. Modyford hanged a few of the locals who went out buccaneering without permission, but he pardoned more. He tried to entice them with commissions against the Dutch, but the privateers saw the Hollanders as fellow Protestants; it was difficult to get up a lusty hatred when contemplating a mission against them. Besides, they were not as rich as the Spanish. The trade that mushroomed from the privateers’ taking was shrinking, and Modyford could not even get answers to his frequent letters to Lord Arlington, his superior in London. He’d been given permission insofar “as should seem most to the advantage of the King’s service and benefit of the island,” but knowing the détente with Spain, he did not want to set Morgan loose on the Main.
By 1666, things were getting desperate. The Port Royal Militia, which had boasted Henry Morgan as one of its first leaders, had only 150 men, down from 600 the year before; even a modest Spanish force might conceivably take the island back. On February 22, Modyford called a meeting of the island’s council for the purpose of replenishing the militia. They agreed that the only way to achieve it was to start granting commissions against the Spaniards. The council gave many reasons that this would be a good thing for Jamaica: It would stimulate trade with New England; it would help the small farmer, who provisioned the privateer fleets; and, lest we forget what Jamaica would become, “it hath and will enable many to buy slaves and settle plantations.” The last justification was the most pressing: The Spanish, the council claimed, “continue all acts of hostility, taking our ships and murdering our people.” For this, the buccaneers were the only answer. “They are of great reputation to this island and of terror to the Spanish,” the council declared.
Modyford had sent a scout to entice back some of the disaffected pirates, and though “much wasted in numbers, many being gone to the French,” they agreed. The governor was still being careful, however, and issued a commission to raid the Dutch island of Curaçao. In charge would be the elected admiral of the Brethren, Edward Mansfield. Henry Morgan was not listed among the men recruited for the mission; Modyford had put him in charge of the Port Royal Militia and the defense of Jamaica. The Welshman was busy building the massive Fort Charles, at the entrance to Port Royal Harbor, and replenishing the ranks of the garrison.
Mansfield and his men set out for Curaçao, but once the Brethren were under way, his crew announced that “there was more profitt with lesse hazard to be gotten against ye Spaniard which was there onely interest.” The buccaneers decided to switch their target to Cartago, the capital of Costa Rica, but were soundly defeated after a long, starvation-haunted march, during which the different nationalities began bickering. (The contrast with Morgan-led expeditions could not be clearer.) With his men exhausted and famished, Mansfield knew that attacking a Spanish town without permission would be trouble. Attacking a Spanish town without
taking
it was worse: London tended to look with more favor on illegal missions that were at least successful. Desperate for a prize, the marauders turned toward two islands and a long-held dream: a pirate republic.
Providence and its smaller sister island, Santa Catalina, had been one of the first English colonies in the Americas, settled by Puritans from Bermuda and England in 1630. They lay almost halfway between Port Royal and the Spanish town of Portobelo, where the silver fleets came to fetch the king’s treasure every year. Providence would be a perfect home away from home for the pirates, perched as it was within easy striking distance of the Main’s lucrative cities. Santa Catalina had a less savory attraction: It was the home of criminals, adulterers, and women of disrepute sentenced to a term of exile away from their home cities in Panama or New Spain.