Exquemelin devoted nearly half his book to the life of Henry Morgan, a Welshman whose exploits on the Spanish Main became legendary. Whether Morgan was a pirate, a corsair, or a privateer is a matter of debate. The Spanish regarded him as a corsair, and since some of his most spectacular raids were carried out when England was at peace with Spain, those actions, like those of Francis Drake, were acts of piracy. But Morgan always carried a commission from the Governor of Jamaica so that technically he was a privateer. He no doubt simply regarded himself as a soldier fighting the enemies of his country on behalf of the King of England. The one label we can give him is that of buccaneer, that romantic-sounding word which applied to several generations of fortune hunters who roamed the Caribbean looking for plunder. They included soldiers and seamen, deserters and runaway slaves, cutthroats and criminals, religious refugees, and a considerable number of out-and-out pirates.
On August 25, 1688, the greatest of the buccaneers died at home on his estate in Jamaica. When the news reached the Governor’s house, the Duke of Albemarle immediately ordered a state funeral. Across the harbor at Port Royal the commander of HMS Assistance, Captain Wright, noted in his log, “This day about eleven hours morning, Sir Harry Morgan died.”1 Morgan’s body was brought to the King’s House at Port Royal, where it lay in state to enable friends and relations and drinking partners to pay their last respects. The coffin was placed on a gun carriage, and the funeral procession moved slowly through the hot, dusty streets to the church of St. Peters. Morgan had been one of the wealthy benefactors whose money had gone toward building the church some years earlier. The stone tower was the tallest building in the town and provided an excellent lookout across the approaches to the harbor. Dr. Longworth led the service in the church, and then led the procession back through the streets to the cemetery at the Palisadoes on the edge of the town. As the coffin was laid to rest, Captain Wright gave the order to the gun crews on the Assistance to fire a twenty-two-gun salute. The regular booming of the guns was echoed by the guns of the other warship in the harbor, HMS Drake. There was a pause as the noise of the last gun died away, and then all the merchant ships at anchor and moored along the busy wharves fired their guns in a deafening barrage of explosions.
It was a remarkable send-off for a buccaneer, but then Henry Morgan was no ordinary buccaneer.2 He had received a knighthood and been appointed Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica by King Charles II. He had purchased several thousand acres on the island and set up his own sugar plantations. He was happily married for more than twenty years, and described his wife in his will as “my very well and entirely beloved wife Dame Mary Elizabeth Morgan.”3 He was well connected and influential: when he was arrested and sent back to London following his sacking of Panama City, Major General Bannister, who commanded the land forces in Jamaica, wrote on Morgan’s behalf to Lord Arlington, telling him that Morgan had received high praise from the Governor and the Council for his proceedings against the Spanish. “I hope without offence I may say he is a very well deserving person, and one of great courage, who may, with his Majesty’s pleasure, perform good public service at home or be very advantageous to this island if war should break forth with the Spaniard.”4 During his enforced stay in London, Morgan was welcomed in the drawing rooms of high society. John Evelyn, the diarist, met him at Lord Berkeley’s and talked to him about his gallant exploits, and he paid frequent visits to the London house of the Duke of Albemarle, who was a Member of Parliament, and a friend of the King.
It is a pity that there are no descriptions of Morgan’s appearance as a buccaneer leader, because he must have had considerable charisma to impose his will on the ragbag of pirates, hunters, and adventurers who carried out the daring raids on Portobello, Maracaibo, and Panama under his command. The only physical descriptions we have of him are restricted to the last few years of his life, when he was in his fifties and was suffering from the accumulated effects of tropical fevers, dropsy, and alcoholism. Hans Sloane, the physician and naturalist, attended him during his last few months and described Morgan as “lean, sallow-coloured, his eyes a little yellowish and belly jutting out or prominent.”5 Despite his precarious health, Morgan refused to abandon his dissolute lifestyle. “Not being able to abstain from company, he sat up late at night drinking too much, whereby he had a return of his first symptoms.…”6
Henry Morgan came from a good family in the county of Monmouth in Wales, and later in life insisted that he was a gentleman’s son. He was born around 1635, and though little is known of his parents, we do know that two of his uncles were distinguished soldiers: one of them was Major General Sir Thomas Morgan, and the other was Colonel Edward Morgan, who was briefly Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica and died while leading an expedition to Curaçao.7 At an early age Morgan decided to follow in the footsteps of his uncles and become a soldier. He later wrote, “I left school too young to be a great proficient in that or other laws, and have been more used to the pike than the book.”8 He joined the expeditionary force under General Venables and Admiral Penn which was dispatched from Britain in 1654 with the aim of capturing Hispaniola. An army of nearly seven thousand men landed at Santo Domingo on the south side of the island, but was compelled to withdraw, defeated by a combination of fierce Spanish resistance, incompetent leadership, and the deadly effects of tropical diseases.
Having failed to achieve the objective of the expedition, Penn and Venables decided to attack Jamaica, which was defended by only a few Spanish soldiers. This time the superior numbers assured success, and they captured the island, which henceforth became a British settlement and an important base for the operations of the Royal Navy and for privateers. Morgan spent the next few years taking part in raids on Spanish towns in Central America. In two of the successful attacks led by Captain Myngs, the records show that Morgan was one of the ship’s captains given commissions by the Governor of Jamaica. Morgan himself led a raid in 1663 which resulted in the sacking of Villahermosa, and the plundering of Gran Granada in Nicaragua. He returned to Jamaica in 1665, having established himself as a formidable military leader. When Edward Mansfield, the leader of the privateers, was put to death by the Spaniards in Havana, Morgan was the natural successor. At the age of thirty-two he became Admiral of the Brethren of the Coast, that loose association of privateers and pirates which made up the body of men who came to be known as buccaneers.
In the years following Drake’s attack on the mule train in 1572, the Spanish had abandoned Nombre de Dios as a treasure port and transferred their operations to Portobello, a few miles along the coast. Lionel Wafer, the buccaneer surgeon who visited the place in 1680, described it as having “a very fair, large and commodious harbour, affording good anchoring and good shelter for ships, having a narrow mouth and spreading wider within. The galleons from Spain find good riding here during the time of their business in Portobel; for from hence they take in such of the treasures of Peru as are bought thither over land from Panama.”9 The Spanish built two castles to command each side of the bay, and a third was in the process of construction at the inner end of the harbor. There were two churches, a hospital, stables and warehouses, and 150 houses built for the merchants and officials. In spite of its impressive appearance, the town suffered from the same humid atmosphere and fevers as Nombre de Dios. At low tide the receding sea exposed an expanse of shore, “which having a black, filthy mud, it stinks very much and breeds noisome vapours, through the heat of the climate.”10
Morgan had learned that the forts which defended the town from the sea were poorly manned, and he calculated that a surprise attack from the landward side would overwhelm them. In July 1668 he sailed with a fleet of twelve small ships to the Bay of Boca del Tora to the west of Portobello. There he transferred his attacking force of five hundred men into twenty-three canoes, which he had commandeered in Cuba. Under cover of darkness the buccaneers rowed the canoes along the coast until they were within three miles of the town. Around midnight they beached the canoes at Estera Long Lemos an
d marched across country, arriving outside Portobello half an hour before dawn on July 11.
The first task was to capture the lookout post on the outskirts of the town. It was defended by five men who bravely opened fire on the advancing buccaneers. They were quickly overwhelmed, but the shots were heard in the town and alerted the sentries in the castles. The alarm was also given by some men in a canoe who had spotted Morgan’s invading force and raced into the harbor shouting, “To arms, to arms!” and firing their guns in the air.11 There was confusion and terror as the citizens woke in the darkness: some fled the town, some cowered in their houses. The soldiers meanwhile ran to join the garrison in Santiago Castle. Morgan had lost the advantage of total surprise, but gave the order to charge. Shouting and screaming, his men ran across the open ground in front of the castle. They expected to be at the mercy of the guns of the castle, but only one shot was fired and the cannonball sailed harmlessly over their heads and splashed into the sea. Within a few minutes one group of buccaneers had passed out of range of the castle guns and was running into the town. Yelling and firing and slashing at anyone who attempted resistance, they herded the terrified men, women, and children into one of the churches. The other group of buccaneers mounted the hill overlooking the town and began picking off the soldiers on the castle walls with their long-barreled muskets.
As the early morning sun illuminated the rooftops, the buccaneers found themselves in possession of the town. The next task was to capture the forts. The half-built Fort of San Geronimo was situated on a small island near the quay, and at first the soldiers manning it refused to surrender. They changed their minds as a group of ferocious-looking buccaneers waded out toward them. Santiago Castle was a more formidable target, and Morgan made a ruthless decision. The Mayor, several women and old men, and some friars and nuns were dragged from the church and forced to precede the advancing buccaneers as a human shield. The soldiers in the castle fired a cannon loaded with chain shot, killing one of Morgan’s men and wounding two friars. There were no more shots from the castle, and the buccaneers reached the main gate without further casualties. Meanwhile another group of buccaneers had found some ladders and managed to scale the walls of the castle on the seaward side. They hoisted a red flag, and on seeing this, the buccaneers on the hill ran down to join in the attack. In spite of the overwhelming numbers of the attackers, many of the men in the castle refused to surrender, and forty-five of the eighty soldiers in the garrison were killed before the castle was captured. The constable of artillery, humiliated by his incompetent efforts to defend the castle, pleaded to be shot. One of the buccaneers obligingly executed him with his pistol. The rest of the day was spent in looting and drinking. According to Exquemelin’s account, “all the prisoners were brought inside the town, the men and women being housed separately, and a guard set to look after them. The rovers brought their own wounded into a house near by. Having put everything in order, they began making merry, lording it with wine and women.”12
Next morning Morgan sent two of his men across the harbor to the Castle of San Phelipe and demanded its surrender. The commander of the garrison had forty-nine men and plenty of ammunition, but no food because this was normally sent over each day from the town. At first he determined to hold out, but was shaken to see two hundred buccaneers, armed to the teeth, advancing across the harbor in canoes. They landed to the east of the castle and took up positions among the rocks. After several hours of desultory firing on both sides, the commander decided to parley with the English attackers. His officers refused to agree to this, and while they were arguing, some of the buccaneers sneaked inside the castle and flung open the main gates. The remaining buccaneers swarmed inside and the Spanish garrison surrendered. Morgan ordered the English flag to be flown above the ramparts, and at this signal his squadron of ships, which had been waiting outside the bay, set sail. The four warships and eight smaller craft swept into the harbor and dropped anchor.
Having captured the town, Morgan sent a letter to the President of Panama. He told him that he would burn Portobello to the ground if he did not receive a ransom payment of 350,000 pesos. Don Agustín rejected the demand out of hand: “I take you to be a corsair and I reply that the vassals of the King of Spain do not make treaties with inferior persons.”13 Morgan retorted with a letter which began, “Although your letter does not deserve a reply, since you call me a corsair, I write you these few lines to ask you to come quickly. We are waiting for you with great pleasure and we have powder and ball with which to receive you.”14 The Spanish sent an army of eight hundred men from Panama, but they were demoralized by the journey through the swamps, by the torrential rain, and by the shortage of food and powder. Most of all they were daunted by the fire from the buccaneers’ muskets and the guns of the English ships when they approached Portobello.
Negotiations dragged on for three weeks, but in the end Don Agustín capitulated. On August 3 two mule trains left Panama with the ransom. Morgan and his men were soon in possession of 40,000 pesos in silver coins, 4,000 pesos in gold coins, several chests of silver plate, and twenty-seven bars of silver worth 43,000 pesos. Together with the treasure already looted from the town, the buccaneers’ haul amounted to around 250,000 pesos. Morgan set sail for Jamaica and arrived in Port Royal to a hero’s welcome. For the next few weeks the town was the scene of spectacular orgies of drinking, gambling, and womanizing as the buccaneers blew their money in the taverns and whorehouses.
The capture of Portobello was one of the most successful amphibious operations of the seventeenth century. For sheer boldness it was comparable with De Ruyter’s attack on the British fleet anchored in the Medway the previous summer: De Ruyter had burned several warships, towed the British flagship Royal Charles back to Holland, and caused panic in the towns and villages of the lower Thames and Medway. This humiliating defeat had followed hard on the heels of the Fire of London and the Great Plague, so that news of Morgan’s exploit delighted the hard-pressed citizens of London. The fact that Britain had signed a peace treaty with Spain a few months before made little difference. King Charles listened politely to the protests of the Spanish Ambassador, but refused to recall the Governor of Jamaica, who had authorized the raid, or return the booty plundered by Morgan and his men.
The buccaneers soon ran out of money and began demanding that their captains put to sea again. In October 1668 Morgan let it be known that he was planning another raid and sailed to Isla Vaca (Cow Island) on the southwestern coast of Hispaniola. There he was joined by several French buccaneers from Tortuga and by the thirty-four-gun warship HMS Oxford, which had been sent out to Jamaica to help in the defense of the island. By January 1669 there were ten ships and eight hundred men gathered at the rendezvous. Morgan transferred his flag to the Oxford and held a council of war to discuss the next objective. It was agreed that the first expedition would be a raid on the city of Cartagena, which was one of the treasure ports on the Spanish Main. The night after this decision was taken a rowdy dinner was held in the cabin of the flagship. As was usual with buccaneer parties, the drinks and toasts were punctuated with the firing of the ship’s guns. At some point during the drunken proceedings, the gunpowder in the magazine was set alight and the ship was blown apart. Morgan, who seems to have had a charmed life, was picked up from the water and was one of only ten people on board to survive the blast.
The loss of the Oxford, and some two hundred men, put an end to the ambitious plan to raid Cartagena. Morgan sailed instead to Maracaibo on the coast of Venezuela. None of the forts or towns around the great lagoon of Maracaibo were well defended, so the buccaneers spent an easy week plundering and carousing. But word of their arrival had reached Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa, who was Admiral of Spain’s West Indian fleet. He took his three warships to the entrance of the lagoon and set a trap for Morgan. He repaired the guns of the fort, which Morgan’s men had spiked, and anchored his warships so they blocked the channel. When Morgan learned what was happening, he devised an ingenio
us series of deceptions. A Cuban merchant ship which he had captured in the lagoon was disguised as a powerful warship. Additional gunports were cut in her sides, and logs were used to simulate cannon. The decks of the ship were lined with more logs, which were roughly painted and clothed to look like seamen. The ship was then loaded with barrels of gunpowder fitted with fuses. With Morgan’s flag at her masthead the merchant ship led the attack, accompanied by two small frigates. They headed straight at the largest of the anchored Spanish ships, the Magdalena of 412 tons. The merchant ship was sailed alongside the Magdalena and secured to her with grappling irons. The fuses were lit and the twelve buccaneers on board escaped in the boats. Within a few minutes the merchant ship exploded and the flames swept across to the Magdalena, which was soon reduced to a burning hulk. One of the other Spanish ships hastily weighed anchor and headed for the protection of the fort but ran aground on a sandbank. The third warship was chased by Morgan’s ships and captured.
The fort still controlled the entrance to the harbor, and there were now several hundred soldiers and seamen manning the guns which commanded the channel. Morgan opened negotiations with Don Alonzo, but when these broke down, he came up with another plan. He hoodwinked the Spanish into thinking that he was going to make a land attack by sending boats ashore filled with armed men. The boats returned to the anchored fleet with the men lying hidden below the thwarts. The Spanish were so convinced that Morgan was planning a land assault that a number of guns were moved to cover the landward approaches to the fort. In the middle of the night Morgan’s fleet weighed anchor and drifted silently past the fort with the tide. By the time the Spanish spotted them they were out of range of the guns.
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