by Alec Waugh
They had now reached the last point to which canoes could be brought – a small village where the Spaniards stored their merchandise on their trips across the isthmus. Like all the other villages, it had been abandoned. Morgan sent back all his canoes but one, because he could not afford to leave a large company of men for their defence, and sent two hundred men ahead to reconnoitre the road. The paths were very narrow and he feared ambushes. His fears were justified; a rain of arrows descended on the advance party from a high and rocky mountain, but the pirates pushed on into the shelter of a wood, where they engaged in a skirmish with a group of Indians. They eventually routed the Indians, but they failed to capture any prisoners, which was their primary objective.
It was now the eighth day of the march, and heavy rain was falling. They had still had no real food since they left the boats. On the ninth morning they reached a mountain ridge from which they could see the Pacific. A ship and six small boats were sailing northward, presumably from Panama. Below them stretched a valley, well stocked with cattle. Their hunger was at an end. They could scarcely wait for the gobbets of meat to be roasted; they devoured them like cannibals, the blood running from their beards on to their chests. Their confidence was restored, and that night, when they saw the steeples of Panama, they threw their hats into the air, blew their trumpets and beat their drums as though the city were already theirs for plundering.
On the following morning, Morgan set out his forces and marched toward the city with his drums and trumpets sounding. The Spaniards had expected him to attack by the main highway and had constructed elaborate defences. But on the advice of one of his guides Morgan advanced through the woods, by a difficult road which the Dutch surgeon described as ‘irksome’. The Spaniards had, therefore, to leave their batteries and prepared positions. Even so, it was with a formidable force that the pirates found themselves opposed: two squadrons, four regiments of foot and a vast herd of wild bulls which a party of Indians would stampede at the psychological moment. But the pirates were used to being outnumbered. They must conquer or die who have no retreat, and they had the same advantage that the longbowmen had at Crecy. The ground was soggy and uneven; the cavalry could not manoeuvre freely; the advance party of two hundred buccaneers went down upon one knee and fired volley after volley with unhurried accuracy; the stampeded bulls were terrified by the noise and turned on the defenders. Within two hours the cavalry had been wiped out, the infantry had fled in despair and the pirates were engaged on their familiar task of massacring the survivors.
Morgan spared, however, a captain whom he could interrogate and from whom he learned the strength of the opposition that awaited him. It was a body of troops that would have intimidated most commanders. Four hundred horsemen; twenty-four companies of foot, each of a hundred men, sixty of whom were Indians; a herd of two thousand wild bulls. In addition to this, trenches had been dug, batteries emplaced, and at the main entry to the city was a fort mounted with eight great guns and manned by fifty men. This was a considerable body of troops, and Morgan’s own casualties had been heavy. But six hundred Spaniards lay dead upon the field; the spirits of his men were high. Morgan once again attacked from an unexpected quarter, after an outflanking march through difficult terrain. Within three hours the city was in his hands.
The capture of Panama was a notable feat of arms; the sacking of it during the next three weeks was one of the most brutal, ruthless, and in the last analysis pointless episodes in the Caribbean’s bloodstained history. Panama was the richest and most beautiful city in the New World. Its houses were built of cedar, and sumptuously adorned with tapestries and paintings. It contained eight monasteries, a cathedral and several churches. The altars were richly hung. Affluent merchants are said to have owned two thousand houses, while small tradesmen and artisans owned another five thousand. The Genoese had a large mansion from which they conducted their banking and mercantile business. All this Morgan destroyed. For no good reasons that have ever been given, he sent small groups of men into various sections of the city to start conflagrations. He then camped outside the city and watched it burn.
For twenty-four hours the fire raged; then Morgan returned to plunder the city. For the first day he managed to restrain his men by warning them that the wine was poisoned; he needed them to be in a fit condition to withstand a counter-attack. But absolute control could not be maintained, and it was through his men’s drunkenness that the galleon escaped in which had been stored all the King’s plate and much of the gold and jewellery of the richest merchants; yet in spite of this loss the plunder was very great. Morgan also captured a number of valuable vessels and their cargoes. His men were indiscriminate in their cruelty; no torture was too bestial if it might lead to the discovery of a cache of jewels. Finally, Morgan set out on his return journey with 167 mules laden with gold, silver and jewellery, and with six hundred prisoners, men, women, children, and slaves, whom he proposed to take with him to Jamaica unless amply ransomed. The prisoners marched in the middle, and their sentries prodded them in the back with muskets to make them march faster. They were kept short of food and water so that they would be the more anxious to raise their ransoms. When the women besought him to let them return to their families in Panama, he reminded them that he had not come to hear lamentations but to extract money.
At a town called Cruz, on the Chagres River, he halted for three days. He gave his prisoners three days’ grace in which to bring in their ransoms; otherwise they would be transported to Jamaica. A certain number failed to produce their ransoms and he continued his march to Chagres, where the divisions of the spoil were made.
According to Esquemeling, Morgan at this point behaved with great niggardliness toward his men, giving them no more than two hundred pieces of eight apiece, a reward with which they were highly discontented. But Morgan was not the man to listen to complaints of that kind at the end of a voyage, when he had no longer any use for his men’s services. Without saying good-bye to them, he set sail for Jamaica in his own flagship with his plunder aboard, leaving his late companions to their own devices, to find their own way home as best they could.
Esquemeling was one of those who were left behind ‘in such a miserable condition as might serve for a lively representation of what rewards attend wickedness at the latter end of life, whence we ought to have learned how to regulate and amend our action for the future,’ and no doubt this desertion is partly explanatory of the highly unfavourable impression that is given of Morgan in his memoirs. Morgan was indeed so dissatisfied with the portrait of himself that he sued Esquemeling for libel in the London courts and received two hundred pounds in damages.
Posterity, however, is not ungrateful. The account of the journey that Esquemeling made along the coast of Costa Rica is one of the most entertaining in his book. He spent a little while at the port of Bocas del Toro, which was well stocked with tortoises and where the Indians had never been subjugated, had made good friends and traded with the pirates and had offered asylum to a number of escaped Negro slaves. He then reached Cabo Gracias a Dios, where also cordial relations with the pirates were maintained, and where it was the custom for the pirates to purchase wives for the length of their stay with a knife, an old axe, a woodbill or a hatchet. It was a small community of some fifteen hundred inhabitants who lived together in amity, without any fixed laws, living off fish and fruit and brewing a kind of wine out of wild bananas, which they kneaded between their hands with hot water and often put in large calabashes with cold water, where in a week or so it would ferment. His stay here must have been a refreshing pause after the ardours of the Panamanian campaign, and he returned to Jamaica with his hold well stocked with provisions.
His was the first ship home out of Morgan’s fleet, and he found his captain busy with plans to transport a group of colonists to the island of St Catherine and fortify it as a base for pirates. But the days of piracy were on the wane. The sovereigns of Europe were agreeing to pool their differences. Louis XIV of France was on
excellent terms with his English cousin, Charles II, who in a secret treaty had promised to restore the Catholic creed when the time seemed appropriate. Louis XIV was planning to place a Bourbon on the throne of Spain. The high stakes of diplomacy were soon to make Flanders once again the cockpit of the greater nations, and all this was to be very costly. It was necessary to make the Caribbean a source of profit. The Pope had recognized the right of Britain to own possessions in the New World, and the King of Spain had conceded certain rights in the Caribbean.
Within a few days of Morgan’s return from Panama, a man-of-war arrived from England, recalling the governor to London so that he could give an account of his behaviour and the licence that he had accorded to privateers to interfere with the property and subjects of the King of Spain. The man-of-war brought with it a new governor, who had strict instructions to see that no ship sailing from a Jamaican port molested the comfort and prosperity of Spanish subjects. Within a few weeks, Morgan himself had been recalled to London to answer for his conduct. He was tried, but he comported himself with such efficiency and dignity that not only was he acquitted, but commissioned in the Royal Navy, and eventually installed and knighted as the governor of Jamaica. The great days of piracy were clearly ending when the scourge of Panama dispensed justice from King’s House; his French colleagues decided that they would be wise to retire to Tortuga.
But in Tortuga, too, the days of piracy were numbered. The western section of Hispaniola was now completely in French hands, and the French governor-general had moved his residence thither from Tortuga. The current governor was a reformed buccaneer called d’Ogeron. For twenty years he had been trafficking in these waters. Since all Tortuga could not have ruled d’Ogeron, there was a chance that he might rule Tortuga. He was Colbert’s choice when the trade of the Antilles was handed over to the Occidental Company. It was a sound choice. D’Ogeron was practical, hard and middle-aged. He knew the material with which he had to deal. The buccaneers were ready to trust him as far as they were ready to trust anyone. They were French, nine-tenths of them. They were prepared to admit the suzerainty of the King of France. But they had fought for Tortuga before anyone in Paris had realized that it existed. They had made favourable trading treaties. Without the Dutch they would have starved. They were not going to have anyone in Paris telling them that they could not trade with the Dutch.
D’Ogeron realized this; he also realized that it was no use explaining this to Colbert. In far away Paris the elegant minister would shrug his brocaded shoulders and repeat his instructions to the French marine that any Dutch vessel trading with French possessions was to be treated as contraband. It was no use arguing with Paris. He had to find another solution. He found a typically Latin one. The buccaneers needed to be domesticated. In only one way could you domesticate a Frenchman. Women, that was what he needed. ‘I will fetch chains from France for the fettering of these rascals,’ was the way he put it. He did not ask that the women should be beautiful, virtuous or well-bred. He merely asked that they should be capable of childbearing and unscathed of pox.
D’Ogeron got his women, fifty of them, shipped with a cargo of claret from Bordeaux. When he saw them his heart sank. They were the gleanings of the sorriest stock in Paris. They had been little enough to look at when they started. Now, after six weeks on a two-hundred-ton trader, for the first fortnight of which they had been profoundly sick; during the last month of which they had itched with scurvy; during the last fortnight of which they had been sunburned so that the skin on their cheeks and noses had begun to peel; during no period of which they had attended to their personal cleanliness; after six weeks of discomfort, of dirt, of unwholesome food, they looked, in their tawdry, draggled finery, infinitely less appetizing than the erect, firm-breasted Negresses who had gathered on the quay to watch the unloading of this unusual cargo. They were women and they were white. But that was the most that one could say for them. D’Ogeron was not the man to make the worst of a bad job, however. He did his best to cleanse and decorate his cargo; then he sent messages to Tortuga.
Five hundred or so of the buccaneers came over. In a mute, suspicious group they stood, glaring at the nervous, simpering but hard-eyed, hard-mouthed group that had gathered on the veranda of the governor’s house.
‘My friends,’ said d’Ogeron,’ with great courage and with the cherishing kindness that distinguishes their sex from ours, these gracious ladies, having heard in their country, which is your country too, of your hard and lonely lot, were moved with compassion, and have come across these many miles to share and make sweet that loneliness for you. As you see, there are fifty here. Each has consented to take unto her from among your number a husband whom she will obey and honour. It is fitting that the choice should be made not by her but for her, and by you. So, as there are more of you than there are of them, we have agreed that those of you who wish shall draw lots among yourselves as to the right and precedence of choice. I am confident, as a consolation for those who will be disappointed in the fall of the lots, that the example of these brave ladies will not be overlooked in France and that in a few months others will have come to follow them.’
And he looked blandly and encouragingly at the half-circle of surly, bearded faces.
They did not need encouragement. They were five hundred and there were only fifty women, but they were comrades in arms. They had not quarrelled in the past over the division of their booty; they were not going to quarrel now. They drew lots, and there on the veranda of d’Ogeron’s bungalow, the fortunate fifty swore each in his turn the marriage oath of the buccaneer, the oath that from history’s dawn has been sworn by the outlaws, the Bohemians of life, to one another.
‘I take thee,’ each cried,’without knowing or caring to know who thou art. If anybody from whence thou comest would have had thee, thou wouldst not have come in quest of me. But no matter. I do not desire thee to give me an account of thy past conduct, because I have no right to be offended at it at the time when thou wast at liberty to live either ill or well according to thine own pleasure, and because I shall have no reason to be ashamed of anything thou wast guilty of when thou didst not belong to me. Give me only thy word for the future. I acquit thee of the past.’ Then with a heavy clatter he smote the palm of his hand against the band of his musket, brandishing it above his head. ‘This will revenge me,’ he cried, ‘of thy breach of faith. If thou shouldst prove false this will surely be true to my aim.’ The Homeric days of the buccaneers were over.
Smuggling was to continue, as was inevitable when the life of the planters was to be harassed by navigation acts, when central governments were to place the interests of the colonists as secondary to their own, when the need for manufactured goods was paramount and such goods could be obtained more cheaply from privateers. For many years the Caribbean was to be the hunting ground of illicit traders. There were to be notable figures like Captain Kidd and Edward Teach, whose castle, ‘Bluebeard’s’, is now a fashionable hotel in St Thomas, and who was wont on occasions at the dinner table to discharge his pistols at his guests, on the grounds that if he did not shoot some of them sometimes they would forget who he was. But these men were smugglers rather than pirates, and they acted without the connivance of their governors. The era that had begun with Hawkins’ first journey, with its cargo of slaves, had ended; a new era had begun.
5 Black Ivory
Europe had by now realized what a treasure had been discovered for it by Christopher Columbus and what a treasure had been abandoned for the sake of the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru. The Caribee Islands, as they were originally called, lie for the most part in the semi-tropical zone; they are cooled by the trade winds that blow from the north-east. The early Spanish colonists divided them into two groups. They called the northern islands the Windward Islands, and the eastern the Leeward Islands. They were also known as the Antilles, after Antilla, the mythical continent that was supposed to exist east of the Azores, the northern islands being called the Greater
and the southern group the Lesser.
The ships bound for the West Indies made the island of Désirade. The trade wind always blew from the east, so that all the islands to the north and west of Désirade lay to the leeward, and all the islands of the east or south lay to the windward. Several of the islands are flat, Barbados, Anguilla, Aruba and Curaçao; Antigua, though it has a hilly section and a forest area, is mainly flat. But for the most part the islands are mountainous. The mountains attract the rain; in the majority of islands the rainless day is as rare as the sunless day; deep valleys run between the mountains and usually over one valley or another a rainbow will be curving. Some valleys are little more than gorges, but others run broad and fertile. Most products except the vine and certain berries flourished there, but it soon became apparent that sugar was the most profitable crop.
Originally cultivated in India, with the juice granulated by evaporation, sugar, although mentioned by Lucan in an incident in Pompey’s Eastern campaign, was not introduced into Europe till the Crusades. It was then regarded as a luxury and used medicinally. It flourished in Rhodes and Malta, thence it reached Sicily. The Spaniards transported it to the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries. Columbus took it to Hispaniola on his second voyage. But it is Labat’s view that it is indigenous to the Caribbean, since it was found in Guadeloupe in 1625, an island which the Spaniards had never colonized.