Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  To help the prophecy come true, Cromwell pulled Gage out of his modest parish, away from the baptisms and the confessions of yeoman farmers. Something much more important awaited him: Cromwell asked the preacher to write up a paper detailing how the Spanish empire in the Americas could be attacked and overthrown. Cromwell had no intelligence service, no spies, to rely on: Gage was it. The rector quickly boiled down the relevant sections of his book, and Gage predicted that an invasion of Hispaniola, followed by Cuba, would result in the toppling of Spain’s Central American kingdom—a vast, often impenetrable territory the size of France—within two years.

  Twenty-nine years after he’d first sailed to the Americas, a very different Gage now traveled in a much larger fleet: 38 English vessels, carrying 2,500 men, journeyed out from Portsmouth. He was again on a religious mission: to exterminate Catholics from the New World and claim it for Protestantism. Gone was the heady innocence of his earlier voyage. These were not happy ships; the supply boats had not caught up with the fleet, and the men were already on half rations. They’d also learned to their disgust that they would not be allowed to keep any of the fabulous booty they expected to rake in on arrival at Hispaniola; and many believed that in fact the talk of invasion was part of a conspiracy and they were actually to be sold to a foreign prince as slaves on arrival. Mutiny was a live option; the ships were riven with anxiety.

  The two commanders—Admiral Penn, in charge of the ships and sailors, and General Venables, in charge of the soldiers—were feuding over who led the mission. In fact, neither of them did; Cromwell’s orders were high on ambition but regrettably short on precise command structure. It is a mystery why the Hispaniola expedition was so badly planned; this was England’s first state-sponsored attempt at establishing an empire (the colonies in North America being private endeavors), and it was a hugely important moment in the nation’s history. But the expedition was a shambles. It is not enough to say, as Sir John Seeley would later comment, that England “seemed to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Cromwell was certainly distracted by domestic concerns, and he left the planning to a subordinate, only to send the men off with a cheery message: “Happy gales and prosperous success to the great enterprise you have in hand.” But the stage was set for disaster.

  The Hispaniola fleet was meant to be the first strike in the “Western Design,” an ambition of English leaders back to the time of Elizabeth, when privateers such as Francis Drake raided the Spanish Main and pricked from Spain’s mighty empire drop after drop of blood. The Western Design called for England to conquer and settle the New World as a Protestant colony where the Bible’s vision of a just world would be put into place. As a young man, Cromwell had himself almost joined his Puritan brethren in their voyage to Massachusetts; the idea of founding a new and pure land had always had great appeal for him. Hispaniola was something of a second chance. “Set up your banners in the name of Christ,” Cromwell told an admiral. “For undoubtedly it is his cause.” But there were other advantages to an invasion: diverting the golden stream of treasure into his own ledgers would free up Cromwell from nasty budgetary battles with Parliament. Even Cromwell was not immune to treasure fever.

  The fleet stopped off at the islands of Nevis, Montserrat, and St. Kitts and scooped up 1,200 more soldiers, then sailed on to Barbados to add 3,500 more, boosting the ranks to about 7,000 troops, an awesome force in the sparsely populated New World. Many of the fresh recruits were indentured servants so hopeless, so brutalized by the routines of sugar plantations, that mere war seemed preferable. The English soldiers, themselves looked on as fourth-raters, were not impressed by the recruits: “This Islland is the Dunghill whereone England doth cast forth its rubidge,” one sailor (most likely the sailing master of Penn’s flagship) wrote. The island’s blacksmiths churned out twenty-five hundred half-pikes—iron heads fixed to eight-foot handles; orders were given out, along with the password (“religion”). After waiting in vain for the storeships to arrive, the commanders listened to Gage’s advice and decided to attack Santo Domingo on the Spanish island of Hispaniola. Henry Morgan would have received the news of the target along with the other anxious soldiers.

  On March 31, 1655, after many decades in the planning, the English spear finally landed—and was quickly blunted. The main body of troops went ashore thirty miles from the Spanish city in a maneuver, as historian Dudley Pope has written, “more suited to a comic opera” than a first strike at empire. The Negro slaves who Gage swore would run to meet them were nowhere to be found; instead the soldiers stumbled remarkably upon another white man, an old Irishman who had somehow ended up in this Spanish outpost, and press-ganged him into service. The hapless guide led the invaders around aimlessly for hours without bringing them any closer to their objective; the furious Venables had him hanged. When they did approach the Spanish fortifications, its soldiers, with indulgences around their necks granting them instant entry into heaven should they die fighting the English devils, peppered them with shot and ball. The ranks disintegrated; Venables hid behind a tree to escape the barrage, “soe much possessed with teror that he could hardlie spake.” He soon retreated to Penn’s flagship to commiserate with his wife as his troops retreated pell-mell from the slaughter. The soldiers set up camp on the shore, slapping away mosquitoes that slowly introduced malaria into their bloodstreams, and relieving their thirst with water infected with the organisms of dysentery and yellow fever. Troops began to drop left and right; a second attack days later was broken even more easily than the first. Twenty days after their landing, a retreat from Hispaniola was called, one that Penn and Venables would have dearly liked to continue all the way to Portsmouth. But they knew that Cromwell would be furious at the fleet returning empty-handed, and the Tower of London was not where they wanted to end their careers. The defeat at Hispaniola was Cromwell’s first loss as a military leader, and no one was eager to give him the news without offering up a consolation prize. (When he did hear about the debacle, Cromwell was shaken: “The Lord hath greatly humbled us,” he wrote.) The suggestion was made that the lightly defended island of Jamaica might appease the Lord Protector; and soon the fleet was headed there. The ships’ burden was lightened by the loss of 2,000 men, all of whom lay buried or rotting on the shores of Hispaniola.

  Jamaica was named after the Arawak Indian word xaymaca, “land of wood and water,” and there wasn’t much else there in 1655. The Arawak had succeeded the original Tainos and then been decimated by the ferocious, man-eating Carib Indians, who would give white men nightmares wherever they encountered them throughout the West Indies. Jamaica was one-sixth the size of Hispaniola, 146 miles long by 51 miles at its widest point, covered with thick jungle and raked by mountains rising to 7,400 feet. Columbus had found the island nearly uninhabited when he sailed into what would become St. Ann’s Bay on May 3, 1494; he, too, was reeling from what he’d seen in Hispaniola—in his case, the graves of the settlers from his first voyage who had been slaughtered by the native inhabitants. With relief, Columbus named Jamaica “the fairest island that eyes have beheld,” its imposing mountains often wrapped in a blue-silver gauze. (The view is not the same that greets the modern tourist approaching on one of the huge cruise ships—most of the trees and flowers now flourishing on the island were introduced by the English after the invasion.) The Spanish maintained a small garrison that had been attacked once before by the English adventurer William Jackson, who had rhapsodized about the island, “Whatsoever is fabled by ye Poets, or maintained by Historians, concerning ye Arcadian Plaines, or ye Thessalian Tempe, may here be verified and truly affirmed, touching ye delight and plenty of all necessarys conferred by nature upon this Terrestrial Paradise, Jamaica.” His men asked to settle there, and when they were refused, twenty-three of them ran off to the Spanish as deserters, the first Englishmen to fall under the island’s spell.

  What also distinguished the island was its crucial position along the Spanish treasure routes: Jamaica
lay at the choke point between the Central American collection spots—where silver, gold, and gems from the empire were gathered—and the sea routes to Spain. The English, through no skill of their own, had stumbled on a strategic windfall. By taking Jamaica they’d be able to cause havoc with the stream of gold that helped sustain the Spanish Empire. Penn and Venables landed on May 10; by May 11 the capital had been taken and the governor was headed deep into the jungle. It was an easy victory: The total population on the island was only 2,500, and many of these people were farmers. Venables negotiated with the governor, who returned five days later to obtain food for his troops and to arrange for the Spanish to leave Jamaica for the Spanish Main (although some holdouts remained). The articles of capitulation were so detailed in their demands for treasure and slaves that the Spanish said “they read like an inventory drawn up by heirs in disagreement.” The Indians had marveled at the greed of the Spanish; now it was the Spanish’s turn to marvel at the Puritans.

  The English set up their colors and tried to begin the work of settlement; land was parceled out, patrols organized. But the diseases that had stalked the soldiers in Hispaniola returned, and the hungry men stood little chance against infection. Soon Jamaica resembled a “very Golgotha,” in the words of one soldier: “Poor men I pity them at the heart, all their imaginary mountains of gold are turned into dross.” Major Robert Sedgwick, who was sent out from England to take charge of the settlement, found the troops in worse shape, he thought, than any group of English fighting men in the history of the nation. “Many dead,” he wrote tersely, “their carcasses lying unburied in the highways, and among the bushes to and again; many of them that were alive, walked like ghosts or dead men, who as I went through the town, they lay groaning, and crying out, ‘bread, for the Lord’s sake.’” The men ate dogs and iguanas, snakes and rats; when they fell dead, the dogs then ate the men. They were hit by dysentery, the plague, “phrensies and madness,” and mysterious infections that caused a man to swell to the size of a barrel. When the soldiers were mustered in November 1655, it was found that only 3,710 of the original 7,000 were still alive, and many of these were already failing; eventually 5,000 Englishmen would lose their lives on Hispaniola and Jamaica.

  The invasion of Hispaniola was simply the latest front in an age-old religious war. But the vast riches of the New World and the men who sought them were about to transform the battle into something different. The man who would lead England was already on the scene: the twenty-year-old Henry Morgan. Morgan somehow survived the horrendous pandemic that swept through the English ranks on Hispaniola and Jamaica and learned firsthand several valuable lessons he’d never forget: how not to lead troops in the New World, how not to attack a fortified Spanish position, how not to enlist the local Indians to your cause, and how not to share power between commanders. When word of the Jamaican conquest reached the Spanish territories in Mexico, the church bells rang in sorrow. With this intrusion the Antichrist had breached the walls of the promised land. In the coming years, Henry Morgan would make those bells toll again and again. He was the genius of the next battle: a clash of worldviews made bloody by the treasure that lay beyond Jamaica.

  But there were soon ominous signs that Port Royal held its own dangers. In addition to the tropical storms and hurricanes that swept over Jamaica, the English settlers reported that the ground beneath their new settlement shook regularly with tremors. The Spanish could have told them about another phenomenon that visited the coasts of the New World: the maremoto, or tsunami. The first recorded maremoto in the New World had smashed into the several towns along the shores of Venezuela, one wave surge so powerful that it demolished a naturally formed dike and severed the peninsula of Araya from the South American mainland, drowning many Indians in its wake. The Spanish heard stories of the monster wave when they conquered the area decades later. In 1530 they witnessed their own tsunami, which struck various points along the South American coast. “The ocean rose like a miraculous thing to see,” said one report, while another spoke of a massive inflow of black, fetid salt water that smelled strongly of sulfur. The water surged twenty-four feet and destroyed a Spanish fort and may have drowned people as far away as Puerto Rico.

  Modern scientists could have told the English settlers that the Caribbean averaged some kind of tsunami event once every twenty-one years. In a sense the clock on Port Royal was ticking from the moment Morgan first set foot on Jamaica’s shore.

  2

  The Tomb at the Escorial

  As Morgan prowled the jungles of Jamaica, forty-five hundred miles away in Madrid, a dark mood prevailed. Not since Rome was in its twilight had there been such odd scenes in a court that ruled the known world. The atmosphere was embodied in the somber person of King Philip IV.

  At fifty, Philip had the long Hapsburg face; he was tall, with wounded eyes caught indelibly by the master painter Velázquez in his portraits of the king. An ex-sportsman and libertine who had spent his youth cavorting in the fleshpots of Madrid, he now required that all the grandees at court who wished to address him wear black from head to toe. He was stone-faced; famously, he’d smiled only three times in public. He was not naturally this way; in other circumstances Philip might have turned out very differently. The sadness that seemed to emanate from his royal person was less personal than historical. A tremendous weight was pressing down on Philip: The empire he’d inherited was tearing apart before his very eyes, and he felt powerless to save it. In fact, he believed—and here one runs up against the incredible narcissism of the Spaniard during the nation’s golden age—that his personal infidelities had caused every one of Spain’s recent disasters. It was as if his body were a map of the empire, and every eruption and desire that twitched through it caused upheavals and defeats from one end of the kingdom to the other.

  On the hot days of that spring and summer, as the news of Jamaica’s fall made its way to his court, Philip could be found at the Escorial, the palace built by his grandfather on the slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama outside of Madrid. Constructed in gratitude for the victory over the French at Saint-Quentin in 1557, it contained art galleries, a library, a college, and a monastery. But Philip was not studying the masterpieces that were hung on the gallery walls, though they were magnificent and featured the faces he knew so well, those of his own family of Hapsburg kings; instead he could be found in the mausoleum, where he’d recently had the bodies of his ancestors brought together and placed in the marble pantheon. Courtiers gossiped about the long hours Philip spent there; he emerged, they reported, with his eyes red from weeping. But for Philip the hours spent alone in the dark, cool tomb were his new pleasure. “I saw the corpse of the Emperor, whose body, although he has been dead ninety-six years, is still perfect,” he wrote to a friend, “and by this it may be seen how richly the Lord has repaid him for his efforts in favour of his faith whilst he lived.” Still, the bodies of his illustrious dead comforted him less than one empty space; he spent hour after solitary hour kneeling on the stone floors, staring into the slot where his own body would lie. “It helped me much,” he admitted. How he envied the dead, who could not be humiliated by events and whose bodies had ceased to rebel against them. How, in his quiet moments, he wished to join them.

  Philip held in his hands reins of power that with a single twitch could unsettle the lives of men and women across the globe; it was an empire nearly two hundred years in the making, which now held in thrall millions of people of many different cultures. Sir Walter Raleigh ticked off the things Philip’s forefathers had overcome: “tempests and shipwrecks, famine, overthrows, mutinies, heat and cold, pestilence and all manner of diseases, both old and new, together with extreme poverty and want of all things needful.” The Spanish had conquered them all and saw themselves as the new Israelites, chosen by God to drive the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula and then to reclaim the world for Christ. A Catalan author in the sixteenth century wrote that the Spanish Castilians believed “that they alone are descended from heaven
and the rest of mankind are mud,” but in some ways they could hardly be blamed. How could a thinly populated backwater like Spain become the first global superpower since the Romans if God didn’t have a hand in their victories? What were the spurting riches of the New World but God’s reward to His faithful? How could Cortés have conquered the Aztecs with 550 men? It was absurd! And hadn’t a visionary told King Ferdinand, the co-founder of the nation, that he wouldn’t die until he entered Jerusalem in glory, a prediction Ferdinand fervently believed? A skeptic looking at the remarkable series of conquests would have to say there was something at work that could not be explained by armaments, management style, or weak opponents. The variable x, to the Spanish, was God’s will. Machiavelli marveled at how Ferdinand had transformed himself from a “small, weak king” into the “greatest monarch in Christendom.”

  And Spain had extended that monarchy to the New World. When Spain’s explorers—native or not—discovered a new territory, they did what all such men did: clambered to the shore, jabbed a pole with a fluttering banner atop it into the ground, and declared the land the property of their monarch. But in the Spanish case, the statement was literal: Mexico, Peru, the islands of the Caribbean, and all of Central America belonged personally to the current king or queen of Spain. They were not annexed but taken as legal birthright; the long-absentee landlord had arrived to claim his ancestral home. When some locals were found, they’d be read (in Spanish, a language the natives could not understand) a long proclamation called the Requerimiento, which began with the creation of the world and showed how the pope had granted rights to all the piece of land the conquistadors were now standing on. The Requirimiento was in effect a property deed with a history going back to the beginning of time, and it had to be read before the property passed into the hands of the Crown and before the conquistadors could launch the inevitable attacks on their listeners. “This monarchy of Spain,” wrote Thomas Companella in 1607, “which embraces all nations and encircles the world, is that of the messiah, and thus shows itself to be the heir of the universe.”