by Dudley Pope
“We can’t go down directly: we’ll have to descend at an angle and pick up the track,” Ramirez said.
“Yes,” Secco said, still angry with Sanchez, “at least we didn’t cross the track as we climbed – it’s still beyond us. Come on,” he said, “I can see a way down, even though I come from the marshes of Las Marismas…”
As they clambered down, dropping several hundred feet, Portobelo drew nearer and they could see the details of the forts and castles. While they were high up the mountains in the early morning, the air had been fresh, sharp and cold, stimulating and unlike anything they had breathed for months. Now, as they scrambled lower and the sun rose, it became hotter and more humid; the very air seemed thicker and the stench from the harbour and the town reached up towards them like an invisible fog.
Suddenly, when they seemed only a couple of hundred feet above the level of the town and perhaps a mile from it and had just then climbed down a few feet of cliff, they came round a huge boulder and found themselves on the track.
Secco immediately pulled the other two men behind the boulder while he looked carefully both ways.
“No one uses this track,” Sanchez announced. “Just look at the dust. Heavy rain washes the soil off the hills and on to the road; it dries and turns into dust. Then the wind smooths the dust. Look – the hoof marks of goats, many of them and some weeks old. But only an occasional ass and mule print, and no horses. Few people come and go to Panama.”
“Or they use another road,” Ramirez suggested.
Reluctantly Secco shook his head. “No, this is the only road.” At that moment he hated to agree with the Galician clod Sanchez, and wondered now why he had chosen him, but there was no question of there being another track. This one wound its way from Panama by way of Venta de Cruz, first crossing the flat plain just this side of Panama and then rising up into the Cordilleras which divided the Isthmus along its spine like a dragon’s back and then crowded the eastern side as far as Portobelo with ridges of mountains as though a baker was folding strips of dough on to trays ready for the ovens.
Secco went to the edge of the track and looked down at Portobelo once again. It seemed quite different: all the angles had changed of course, and it was difficult to realize now that the anchorage was rectangular. The forts and castles were larger than he expected and close enough now for him to see the weed and slime growing on the shaped stone of the walls of San Fernando, where the castle was built into the water, and the same for San Gerónimo. The stone blocks were enormous, cut to shape by prisoners and slaves. Portobelo itself was small indeed and the houses crowded together – it was said that when the ships arrived the Panama merchants slept five to a room and were glad to pay fantastic rents for the couple of weeks they spent here trading. Secco had also heard descriptions of the plate trains arriving from Panama to meet the fleet.
Apparently there were several trains, each comprising a hundred or more donkeys and mules laden with a canvas pannier each side packed with ingots of silver, a certain amount of gold, and leather bags of gems. The guards were soldiers, a company with a couple of officers, at the front, middle and end of the train which could stretch half a mile.
When the animals arrived in Portobelo they were simply halted near the jetty in front of the ships, or where the tallymen were standing on the quays with the royal assay master and all the rest of the king’s officials, filling in lists, attaching royal seals, hammering in numbers and symbols. The mules and donkeys were fed and watered and the ingots in their canvas panniers were apparently left unguarded in piles on the ground until just before nightfall, when they were carried out to the ships. No one thought of an enemy attack: at sea it would be different, but here with these forts, the guns and the garrisons, who would dare to try to rob the king of his bullion…? Who, indeed? Secco thought to himself, and grinned.
Then two years ago the plate trains had arrived and the merchants waited, but the ships never came: storm and fear of the French fleet had sent them back to Spain and, since then, it was said last year that there was not the money in the Spanish treasury to provision and re-equip either the galleons for Cartagena or a flota for Vera Cruz. But according to Leclerc – and there was no doubting it – that plate remained here in Portobelo, waiting for the day when the galleons did come.
Secco pictured all the people who were waiting month after month. On the other side of the Atlantic there was the king and all those powerful Italian and Austrian bankers and moneylenders who financed him and his policies: they (like the king) relied on the plate fleets. Although no ships meant no money for the bankers, it must be disastrous for the king – he had several armies and the navy to pay, quite apart from all the functionaries of government. Presumably the Spanish army in the Netherlands, for example, was not paid or provisioned. Did the soldiers spend a freezing winter in Flanders munching raw potatoes and parsnips, confiscated from the local people? Ships’ sails, rigging and planking rotted; the seamen would have been paid off and probably now starved.
Secco looked down on the Castillo de San Gerónimo. He could see the sun reflecting from the metal helmets of the two guards, one at the big gate on the southern side, facing Triana and looking towards the town, the other walking round the battlements. And “walking” was the word, not “marching”. The man was carrying his halberd (it might even be a pike; it was hard to distinguish at this distance) almost horizontally over his shoulder, as a peasant might carry a stick with his noon meal wrapped in an old cloth and tied to the end.
Inside there – well, they were almost sure it was San Gerónimo and not San Fernando: it certainly would not be San Felipe, the Iron Fort – was a year’s plate… A king’s ransom: the year’s cargo of the king’s silver and gems, brought along the track from Panama to Portobelo to load in ships which had never arrived, and which was at this very moment locked in one of the castles to save taking it back to Panama.
The track was so little used that Secco decided to risk walking down towards the town to make a final check over the whole length that they would want to use. A sudden rainstorm might have sent floods down the sides of the mountains to wash away a section of the track; a rock fall could have blocked it. Because few people ever used the track, no one would be in a hurry to repair it, and he wanted to make sure that when he reported to Mr Yorke, he could assure him it was open from the point where the buccaneers would join it all the way to the gates of Portobelo.
He looked critically at Sanchez and Ramirez. Ragged hair, faces unshaven for many days, unwashed for as long, with perspiration making lines in the coating of dust, hides stitched round their feet as boots…they could be buccaneers or they could be herdsmen or even itinerant tinkers in sore need of work. Their safety lay in the fact that they were Spanish; they could (and would) roundly abuse and probably draw a knife on any persistent questioner.
Secco needed to know not only if the track was clear but roughly the size of the garrisons of the four forts and castles; he also needed to confirm roughly how many people lived in Portobelo. Was there a night watch? (He thought not: the place had not been attacked for so many years that they probably relied on its name to protect it – its reputation and the castles.) Did many fishing boats go out at night? Mr Yorke would be glad of scraps of information. A report on the lackadaisical guard on the buttress of San Gerónimo would be important because it showed discipline was slack.
The three men walked down the track into Portobelo’s large and dusty plaza and Secco had the feeling of entering a small town abandoned by most of its inhabitants. A dozen pigs of varying sizes grunted and snuffled, barging each other and rooting through piles of garbage for the fiftieth time, obviously hoping against hope that someone had just added a fresh piece of rubbish. Several goats on the far side of the plaza wrenched and twisted blades of tired, brown grass and one, standing on its hind legs, tore at some leaves remaining on a high bush.
Once throu
gh the town gates, which were pushed open and held back by wooden props, they saw first a woman, a mestizo, sitting in the shade of a tamarind tree which was growing like a giant mushroom and speckled with pale yellow flowers. She had her back against the trunk, holding her baby with one hand and suckling it while the other flapped ineffectually at the flies.
Three old men sitting on a seat in the shade of a giant kapok tree, its roots like buttresses, a veiled woman in black walking slowly, followed by three servants, a drunkard slumped beside a low wall, a dozen or so lean hens pecking and scratching with a cockerel strutting… One lantern slung on a rope between the sides of the gate, lit every night judging from the fresh soot, two young boys with a barrow collecting the droppings of donkeys and quarrelling whose turn it was to use the shovel, a soldier opening the door of a house and calling as if telling his family he was back from guard duty… Secco and his two men walked through the town without anyone showing the slightest interest in them, although they were strangers, and it was clear that the town was not deserted: every house was inhabited, but with the rising sun increasing the heat, and humidity that drifted off the swampy land in waves, the men and women of Portobelo did only enough work to survive. For years they must have lived well on the profit from the arrival of the galleons and the traders, but now without either, they had to watch every hen to see where it laid its egg, milk every goat, slaughter pigs as soon as they were plump enough.
The three men walked back out of the town and ambled slowly past the Triana fort, counting the cannons, inspecting the great door, counting the number of gun loops – shaped like keyholes and through which the defenders could fire muskets or arrows – and from the number of soldiers on duty, trying to estimate the size of the garrison.
Secco decided that most of Triana’s men had been sent to Jamaica, but as they walked slowly up to San Gerónimo it was clear that this one was still properly manned. Only two men might have been visible from up the mountain, but through the open doors they could see a score or more drilling lethargically on the parade ground forming the centre of the castle. Secco looked at the cannons as they circled the building. There were four guns on each of the narrow sides and eight on each of the long sides, overlooking the harbour to the west and the swamp to the east.
The jetty was strongly built of stone, as he had seen from up the mountain, and seemed to have deep water all round it. There was no coral growing, nor the usual wreck which obstructed so many Spanish jetties.
“They load the plate from there,” Ramirez murmured.
Secco had been looking across at San Fernando, opposite Portobelo town, and decided that the plate definitely would not be stored there because when the ships arrived it would have to be carried back across the swampy land to the San Gerónimo jetty. If it was in the Iron Fort at the harbour entrance it must be carried a mile back to the jetty, and Secco knew the characteristics of his own people. San Gerónimo had the jetty, so San Gerónimo had the plate. Their information was probably accurate…
He was just estimating the height of the walls, after seeing the thickness at the entrance gate, when a soldier marched out, unstrapping the breast and back plates of his armour and obviously just coming off duty.
Secco assumed the stance and vacant grin of a near idiot and said in a heavy Murcian accent (copied from memories of his mother’s father, who used to tell lurid tales of when the Moors owned the kingdom of Granada: they had been driven out only fifty years before the old man was born): “It must be hot work being a soldier!”
“It is,” the man said. “Here, hold my helmet, this buckle has stuck!”
Secco giggled, as befitted an idiot delighted by such an important man’s attention, and took the helmet, holding it as though it was a smoking grenade. “Why do you wear armour in such hot weather, sir?”
“Orders. Guards wear breast plate, back plate and helmet.”
“What if you are not a guard, sir?”
“You’re a lucky man: no armour. Not enough suits to go round, anyway.”
“Ah, the king did not send enough!”
“No,” the soldier said, wrestling with a leather strap, “more than three quarters of our men are away and they had to be fully equipped.”
“To Cartagena on leave, I suppose. Lucky men!” Secco commented with another inane giggle.
“Leave! No, they’re away fighting: chasing those English out of Jamaica. They’ll have done it by now, I expect, and be back soon. I hope so, four hours on guard and only eight off duty, seven days and nights a week – it’s wearing me out. There!” He finally wrenched out the last strap and grabbed the breast plate before it slid off. The back plate fell with a thump and Ramirez picked it up and handed it to him.
Secco, still holding the helmet, nodded enthusiastically as he said: “This must be an important castle if all you soldiers guard it! And that one too,” he pointed to San Fernando and, indicating the Iron Fort, added in an awed voice: “That must be the most important of all, guarding the entrance.”
As Secco hoped, the soldier took the bait and sniffed contemptuously. “This is the only one that matters! San Fernando, Todo Fierra, Triana – they just guard the harbour. But in here –” he lowered his voice and jerked his thumb towards the great door “–is all the king’s silver. Locked up safely and waiting for the galleons to come!”
By now Secco had made himself look slack-jawed and wide-eyed with wonder. “The king’s silver? Do you guard that? No wonder you wear armour and a special helmet! Supposing the buccaneers came, or the English or French fleets!”
The soldier spat contemptuously. “None of them would ever dare think of it, let alone get within a cannon shot of Todo Fierro. Why, we could sleep on duty – to tell you the truth, some of them do. Not me, of course, but some I could mention, including a sergeant or two.”
He strapped the breast and back plates together to make them easier to carry, retrieved his helmet from Secco, and said: “Well I have a wife waiting for me, so good day to you.”
The three buccaneers watched him march past Triana along the track as it curved round to the town, and Secco murmured: “He could just as easily have arrested us as vagrants!”
“Oh, no,” Sanchez said sourly, “he could see clearly enough that you are the village idiot!”
He then bent double laughing at his own joke and suddenly disappeared.
Ramirez and Secco, several feet away, ran to where Sanchez had been standing and saw he had stepped back into an open cesspool and was now floundering up to his waist, speechless as he held his breath against the stench. Secco sniffed and eyed the walls of the cesspool. “You can climb up without our help. We’re starting back along the track.”
Two hours later the men arrived at the boats, Sanchez being forced to walk several paces behind Secco and Ramirez. His attempts to wash his breeches and himself in the water of the harbour had not been entirely successful: Secco swore that the harbour smelled only slightly less than the cesspool.
Secco reported at once to Ned, who was talking to Thomas. The three of them, Secco said, had marked the easiest path up to the track: it was about a mile long and met the track low down. The path was fairly smooth. They would have to cut away some low bushes with machetes and roll aside a few rocks to get the falcons through, but nowhere was it too steep to pull up the guns.
He then described their walk through the town and ended up with a report on the conversation with the soldier, which confirmed that the bullion was stored inside San Gerónimo, although not necessarily in the dungeon. He apologised for failing to discover the exact size of the present garrison, explaining that “acting as an idiot stopped the soldier being suspicious of me, but limited the questions I could ask…”
Ned grinned and patted Secco’s shoulder. “Once we’ve captured the castle we’ll have plenty of time to find the bullion! It’ll be in the dungeon: you can be sure o
f that. Old ladies hide their valuables under the bed; soldiers always choose dungeons.”
Secco spent the next hour with Ned, Thomas and Leclerc working out as precise a timetable as possible. The main task was hauling fourteen falcons over the mountains to Portobelo, along with five hundred roundshot, some langrage which the men had been making up while they waited, and a barrel of powder.
The armour, helmets, swords, pikes and halberds were no problem: they would be issued before the march started, and each recipient would be responsible for transport.
Because the hundred breast and back plates and fifty helmets were being issued to the Spanish-speaking buccaneers, Secco joked: “So there’s a tax on being Spanish: you have to carry your armour over the mountains!”
“Tax? A bonus more likely!” Ned said. “Anyone with any sense would prefer wearing or carrying armour to hauling on the ropes of a falcon.”
Ten men were chosen to carry satchels of boucan and five more would have water breakers. If they needed more food, Ned explained, they could always raid the Spaniards in Portobelo.
“That langrage,” Thomas said. “Pity we couldn’t have made up more.” Langrage was a wickedly effective weapon: it comprised shot made up of scraps of iron, rusted bolts, old nails and any piece of metal that could be fired from a gun. The long pieces were tied together like bunches of kindling the diameter of the bore of the guns, three inches; smaller and jagged pieces were put in roughly stitched canvas bags.
“Those roundshot won’t make any impression on the walls of the forts, but if we can get the Dons to rush us, a whiff of langrage will cut them down like hay under a scythe,” Ned said.
“They won’t rush us if they have any sense,” Thomas said, “but firing langrage at the gun loops will knock the heads off anyone trying to see what we’re doing.”