Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  The men seeking the treasure rarely thought of the price paid for each ounce extracted. A Spanish visitor described the Inca workers who recovered the ore. He reported that they worked twelve hours a day, descending as far as seven hundred feet into the mine “where night is perpetual” and the air thick with fumes to gather the ore, and then climbing four or five backbreaking hours to rise again to the surface. If any of them slipped, they’d plunge to their deaths at the bottom of the pit. It was for the product of this misery that Morgan was coming to Portobelo.

  To attempt the town, Morgan again had to rally his men, among whom numbered mulatto pirates along with blacks, Portuguese, Italian, French, and English. Many of them considered him crazy even to suggest Portobelo; it was beyond them. But Morgan made them see. “If our numbers are small,” he cried, “our hearts are great, and the fewer we are, the better share we shall have in the spoils!” It was a wonderfully condensed battle cry tailored for pirates: It combined the David-versus-Goliath odds that they seemed to relish in certain moods with the brute economic reality that fewer men meant bigger shares. The pirates quickly signed on.

  The Welshman had prepared well. An Indian informant from inside Portobelo had given him an accurate picture of the garrison’s numbers and state of mind. The soldiers manning the various defenses hadn’t been paid in over a year and a half, leading some of them simply to disappear from their posts and others to take up side jobs as tailors or grocers in the town itself, where they slept at night, leaving the castles seriously undermanned. The mammoth Santiago boasted only 75 or 80 men on a typical night, when there should have been 200 trained soldiers on guard. The castle forces were supposed to be backed up by civilian militias (one each for Spaniards, mulattoes, freed blacks, and slaves), but they, too, were depleted by sickness or other duties. Many of the Spaniards were in Panama, away from the miasma that was Portobelo; the loyal blacks were chasing maroons in the hills around the town, leaving fewer than a hundred men able to fight.

  And then the pirates stumbled on unimpeachable witnesses: Half a dozen bone-thin and badly sunburned men approached the fleet in a canoe as it headed for Portobelo. It’s not clear if they’d heard rumors of Morgan’s approach or had simply happened on the fleet, but they knew the target city well; it turned out they were some of the long-lost English soldiers from the garrison who had been taken during the Spanish reconquest of Providence and shipped as slaves to Portobelo, where they’d suffered unspeakable torments. As he listened to the men tell of their inhuman treatment, Roderick looked at these half-dead wretches, knowing that the same fate awaited him if he was captured by the Spanish. His anger built to a fever pitch; not in years had he felt so English. He and the others swore they would see the Spaniards bleed for what they’d done to the captives. But two extra nuggets of information tantalized the coolheaded Morgan: The newly freed men reported that an expedition against Jamaica was being planned and that funds were being raised through a levy in the province of Panama. The rumors of war, it seemed, were true. The men also swore that one of their fellow captives was none other than Prince Maurice. Maurice was the king’s nephew who had fought for him throughout the Civil War after a youth spent drinking and dueling in The Hague and elsewhere. He and his brother Rupert had been cruising the Caribbean in 1652 when they’d run into a ferocious storm and Maurice’s ship had disappeared. “He was snatched away from us in obscurity,” wrote one cavalier who had been on the voyage, “lest, beholding his loss would have prevented some from endeavouring their own safety; so much he lived beloved, and died bewailed.” Rumors had flown ever since the sinking: Maurice was dead and at the bottom of the sea; he was alive and being held by the Spanish at Morro Castle in Puerto Rico. Now Morgan had a fix on him. To find Maurice would earn the eternal gratitude of the king, a useful thing considering that Morgan was set to attack Spain in a time of peace. “We thought it our duty to attempt that place,” Morgan wrote in his report on the mission.

  Portobelo sat at the southeastern end of a small bay. On the northern shore of the bay sat the fort called San Felipe and on the southern shore, farther in toward the city, sat Santiago, the Iron Fort. An approach through the narrow mouth of the bay was out of the question; the castles were undermanned, but it would take only a few decent gunners to blow the fleet to splinters. Instead Morgan devised a plan based on stealth. The fleet anchored at Boca del Toro, a quiet bay to the southeast of the town. There, according to Morgan’s own narrative, 500 of the men transferred into twenty-three canoes that the ships had been towing or carrying. These were the same type of forty-foot, single-sail canoes that Morgan had used in his odyssey to Central America, and now the men bent low over their sides, dipping the paddles into the black water and speeding the boats along with the strong easterly current. The canoes were becoming a Morgan trademark; so was traveling by night. The buccaneers paddled through the darkness “to be ye more undiscryed” and found hiding places on the deserted shore by day, sweltering beneath the trees. They slid under the guns of San Lorenzo, the fort that guarded the river Chagres, and sped on. It was like a journey through the primeval world, uninhabited and tomb-quiet except for the night cries of parrots and the growls of jaguars.

  For four nights the fleet of canoes remained undetected until it came upon a fishing boat manned by two blacks and a “zambo”; in other parts of the Americas, the term would come to mean someone who was three-quarters black and one-quarter white; here in the Spanish territories it meant a person who was half black and half Indian. The pirates began to torture the blacks, what the Brethren called “questioning with the usual ceremonies.” [Pirate argot tends to be drier, more English, than the “Avast!” and “Shiver me timbers” flung about by buccaneers in Hollywood films: Escaping from a tight situation was called a “soft farewell”; “a forced loan” was any theft from the Spanish; a pirate’s corpse left out as a warning to others was described as “sun-dried,” while poking captives with knives as they ran around a circle of laughing pirates was a “sweat.” These intermingled with sailor lingo such as “belly-timber” (food), “fudled,” (drunk), and “Davy Jones” (the devil’s minion), who lived at the bottom of the sea, aka “Davy Jones’s locker.”] The Negroes refused to guide the pirates to Portobelo. Morgan had learned the lesson of Puerto del Príncipe—the cutlasses came out, and the pair was soon fed to the sharks. The zambo quickly agreed to cooperate.

  Finally the men arrived at a position between the Isla de Naranja (Orange Island) and the shoreline, within sight of the castles of Portobelo. There were a total of four fortifications to overcome, beginning with a lightly manned blockhouse called La Ranchería, where sentries watched the coastline for unfamiliar ships on the southern shore of the bay that led to Portobelo. Two miles away, on the outskirts of the town, sat Santiago Castle. Then one reached the town center, with its merchant houses, churches, and slave quarters. Beyond the town proper, just off the shoreline in the shallow harbor itself, waited the still-uncompleted San Gerónimo fort, which the captured Englishmen had been working to finish. Across the harbor, on the northern tip of the bay, sat the final obstacle: San Felipe, guarding all entries and exits from the harbor.

  The men guarding these forts were a cross-section of the Spanish populace. Some had joined the Spanish army as early as age ten, fetching wood and cleaning the boots of the regular soldiers, and worked their way up the ranks. The bulk of them would have been from the lower classes, while the officers were often wellborn. Both were seeking their fortune in the New World. They were more rooted than the privateers; many of them were married and had side jobs such as cobbler or grocer; they had houses in the town and children to care for. They were often not hugely experienced: A minority of them would have been in battle before, although some of the older ones might have seen action in Flanders or elsewhere on the Continent. And they came from a long and proud tradition that decreed that death was preferable to surrender or defeat. But in the New World, that tradition seemed distant and in some ways beside the
point: The armies of Spain’s traditional enemies were thousands of miles away. Not to mention that they often went for months on end without pay, which hardly endeared their king to them.

  As it approached the prize, Morgan’s lead vessel was spotted by a group of sharp-eyed Negro woodcutters, who reported the rogue ship to the mayor of Portobelo. Reluctantly, as he’d have to pay for the expedition himself, the mayor sent out a canoe to inquire just what the vessel was: merchant, slaver, pirate, or advice ship? The people in the town were not unduly concerned with the matter: One boat sailing up the river was not much of a threat. As the canoe set out, the fleet, under cover of night, was angling toward the shore where the zambo advised a landing. The men had been given their assignments; they’d checked their powder, cleaned their guns one last time, adjusted their pistols in their belts, made sure they’d tapers to light them, sharpened their cutlasses, and ate a last bit of turtle or boucan to fortify them. Now they grimly eyed the spot on shore and drove the canoes forward. There was nothing left to say; the battle was imminent.

  In the middle of the night, Morgan’s spotter detected movement ahead, a silver flash against black. It was a paddle splash from the mayor’s canoe. The Spaniards must have noticed the fleet at the same time and instantly recognized that these were not Dutch traders or slavers but corsairs, because they turned and raced for home. The fleet could not hope to catch them; instead Morgan concentrated on getting his men ashore. An hour later the men heard the gravelly crunch of wood hitting a beach. They’d hit their target: Buenaventura, three miles from Portobelo. They’d skirt the shoreline and attack the city from the west. An Englishmen who had been one of the prisoners at Portobelo now took over as point man; he and three or four pirates were sent forward to take the sentry, “if possible, to kill him upon the place,” so that he would not fire his musket and raise the alarm. The men did one better: They captured the man and brought him back to Morgan, his hands tied and, no doubt, his legs weak with terror. Morgan asked the sentry about the local defenses while the other pirates stood close, cutlasses unsheathed, eyeing him meaningfully. “After every question,” Esquemeling tells us, “they made him a thousand menaces to kill him, in case he declared not the truth.” To ensure that his information was accurate, the man was marched bound and gagged at the head of the column as they made their final approach along the treasure road, pounded to a hard patina by the mules carrying Potosí silver. Any volley from an ambush would kill him first.

  The pirates reached the blockhouse on the outskirts of the city at La Ranchería and found it guarded by five men. The soldiers were told to surrender, “otherwise they should all be cut to pieces, without giving quarter to any one,” but the men answered Morgan’s shout with a quick barrage; two pirates sank to the ground, wounded. Screaming that they’d avenge the English captives, Roderick and the others swarmed over the blockhouse, put the men there to the blade, and soon had it under control. But the element of surprise was gone; the reports of the muskets could easily be heard in the city itself. Now Morgan shouted at his men to hurry as the town’s startled residents struggled from their sleep. Groggy and confused, they asked each other what the shots could mean and then heard more, repeated insistently. When the citizens looked out to the harbor, they saw the mayor’s canoe surging toward shore, the men in the boat firing their muskets and yelling, “To arms! To arms!” The canoe passed Santiago Castle, and, according to Spanish reports on the attack, the men cried to the soldiers there, “The enemy is marching over land!” The soldiers ran for their muskets, while families in town uncovered their silver plate and jewels from their hiding places and rushed to throw them down wells or bury them in their yards.

  The attack was a test of the Spanish colonial military, and the first sign was actually good. The sergeant on duty at Santiago lowered the castle gate so that the part-time grocers and bartenders who slept in the town could make it back, a smart move for an undermanned fortress. But things went downhill from there: The sergeant went to report to the lord of the castle, or castellan, Juan de Somovilla Tejada, and found the man still asleep in his bed. The sergeant informed his superior that the infidels were inside the city, but the lord simply brushed him off, saying it was only the English escapees causing trouble. The sergeant insisted: This was a large body of men, not the six pathetic souls who had fled Santiago in rags. Survivors of a shipwreck, the yawning castellan replied. His subaltern must have bitten his lip as he informed his lord that as he spoke, hundreds of armed corsairs were racing across the beach toward the castle. At this the castellan rose from his bed.

  Morgan’s men had indeed arrived at the beach near the foot of the castle, gasping for breath, having double-timed it the two miles from the blockhouse. And here Morgan experienced a crisis of faith. Seeing the soaring stone walls of the fortress, which rose out of the sand like some medieval Spanish colossus, he lost his nerve. “Many faint and calm meditations came into his mind,” Esquemeling wrote, in an account backed by Spanish sources. The Brethrens’ prisoners reported an even more nerve-racking scene, with the admiral reaching for the throat of the Indian guide and screaming, “We cannot go that way! This is a trick to slaughter us all!” It was a rare break in composure for Morgan, who was, in the pirate vernacular “pistol-proof”: calm under fire. His men soon laughed him out of his terror, and one of the former English prisoners told the captain that Santiago’s defenses were far less formidable than they looked. Morgan nodded, took a deep breath, and gave the command. The pirates burst in two groups from their hiding place and went tearing toward the castle.

  One group aimed at the base of the castle walls, while the other angled off and headed toward a hill that would give them a commanding view of the castle’s rear. The men ran across the open space expecting at any moment to be atomized by a blast of grapeshot, but Santiago’s constable of the artillery had mistakenly loaded the cannons with ball (a large cannonball designed to sink ships) and not partridge (small balls designed for killing men). The only cannonball that was fired at the men came nowhere near hitting them and instead kicked up a sheet of white spray as it slammed into the blue harbor waters. The main group of pirates, exhilarated at their survival, hugged the castle walls as they made their way past the fortress to the city streets, onto which they burst “firing off their guns at everything alive, whites, blacks, even dogs, in order to spread terror.” They met only token resistance and took control of the town within minutes. Now that they had Portobelo by the throat, they had to slowly disarm it, like a handler defanging a snake. First in their sights was San Gerónimo, the partially finished, lightly manned fort that lay across an expanse of water. The castellan there replied to the demands for surrender by saying that the men “would fight unto death like good soldiers”; it was the response the king expected of his officers. But he was bluffing: Spain’s decay was immediately evident at Gerónimo: The soldiers found only a single working cannon that could cover the direction from which Morgan’s assault had to come, and there was only damp powder to charge it. The Englishmen hid behind some canoes as Morgan and his commanders tried to gauge the depth of the water, to see whether canoes would be needed and what approach would be best. In the middle of their deliberations, a few of the fort’s former captives strolled by and began walking out into the water toward the walls of Gerónimo. The pirates watched as the captives failed to sink; the water, in fact, came up only to their knees. Laughing, the other pirates charged after them. Utterly exposed but by now scornful of the Spanish gunners, the men splashed their way across the gap. The castellan, seeing that his handful of men had no chance, surrendered; the first of the castles belonged to the pirates. Now the twin teeth at the mouth of the harbor, through which Morgan’s ships had to pass to load the expected treasure, had to be neutralized.

  In the city they found something to give them added motivation: the remaining prisoners from Providence. They were discovered chained in a dungeon, “eleven English in chains who had been there two years.” But Prince Mauri
ce was nowhere to be seen, only a clue that would continue the romantic myth of the man: “We were informed that a great man had been carried…six months before to Lima or Peru, who was formerly brought from Puerto Rico.” Having freed the English hostages, the men set out for Santiago, which they’d simply run past on their way to the city. The smaller squadron of men had remained on the hill overlooking its walls, picking off any Spaniard who dared stick his head above the ramparts. The French muskets were earning their ridiculous prices: With the pirates “aiming with dexterity at the mouths of the guns,” the Spaniards found they “were certain to lose one or two men every time they charged each gun anew.” The long-term advantage lay with Morgan, but the defenders inside could postpone the inevitable defeat almost indefinitely: Scaling the fort’s sheer walls under fire would be a nightmare. So Morgan, now fully committed to the ruthlessness his trade demanded, decided to use one of the most controversial stratagems of his career.

  Namely, human shields. Morgan “ordered ten or twelve ladders to be made,…so broad that three or four men at once might ascend by them.” He then had his men bring him a selection of the prisoners, chosen with care to appeal to Spanish sensibilities: the august (Portobelo’s mayor), the religious (friars and nuns), and the wretched (several elderly men). Shaking, the prisoners were marched at the head of a column that passed through the city streets and then out onto the open road that led to the castle. Now the Spanish could see what was happening: Their leading citizens screamed at them for God’s sake not to shoot, while the pirates—ladders, grenades, and cutlasses in hand—crouched behind them. It was a terrible dilemma for the men inside, but finally the gunners opened up, spraying the particularly lethal chain shot (two small balls of iron connected by an iron chain, designed for ripping apart the masts of enemy ships, which would rotate with a terrifying keen before beheading or delimbing anyone it caught in its path) into the advancing crowd. Two friars fell wounded, and the chain shot found one English victim. The rest of the party pushed the human shields out of the way and began hacking at the wooden gate with their axes and lighting it with their torches.