Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  The supplies were divvied up and transported to the ships, which had been brought to anchor near the San Carlos beach. The next morning the ships set sail for their target, but twenty miles from Maracaibo their way was soon blocked by a shallow bank of deadly quicksand that the ships could not pass. Maracaibo’s natural defenses were proving more formidable than her human ones. Morgan’s second trademark was forced into play: canoes. They were lowered into the water, and the men dropped down onto their benches and pulled out their paddles. The Brethren rowed into a stiff wind and soon found the shore at the foot of the fort named de la Barra. Yesterday’s script was repeated: a beach landing, a cautious approach, an empty fort. The locals had escaped into the woods.

  It was savages like L’Ollonais who made such running-in-panic-before-the-barbarians possible. Indeed the Spaniards told awful tales about the pirates to their children and even came to believe the stories themselves. It was said the privateers were strange creatures “formed like monkeys” or “mad dogs” who could flit soundlessly through a jungle and then appear in a village like sorcerers, where they’d help themselves to a meal of townspeople. “This caused them to conceive a keen horrore and aversion for us,” recalled the gallant French pirate Raveneau de Lussan. He gave as an example one incident when he was escorting a Spanish woman who kept glancing nervously at him as they walked. Finally she could stand it in no longer. “Sir,” she cried, “for the love of God, do not eat me!”

  The Maracaiboans had not waited around to see if the pirates really did want to eat them. On hearing of Morgan’s approach, the captain of the city’s defenses had sent drummers to muster the men to defend it and rang the war bell summoning volunteers. The bell tolled again and again, echoing out over a town that seemed suddenly deserted and silent. Only a handful of citizens showed up. “It was discovered that no more than ten or twelve men had come to help him,” a Spanish report on the invasion said. “The witness who was present heard the captain curse some people for having left him alone.” The captain tried again, this time hanging two banners that told the town’s four hundred families that “there will be the penalty of death for traitors of the Realm of Spain.” Still, when Morgan arrived, Maracaibo was a ghost town. Roderick led a squad of men who searched every corner of the eastern section of the town, looking for people who “might offend them unawares,” but the wind whistled through empty doorways and swung doors left ajar. The men chose houses for themselves and chose the church as their headquarters, where they committed “many insolent actions.” This probably referred to the English habit of desecrating captured churches, much to the horror of their French allies. Roderick and some mates entered one Spanish church and raced up to the altar, slashing at the crucifixes with their sabers, knocking the heads off statues of saints, and bending their own heads in mock prayer before upending the altar. It was hilarious, but Roderick called a halt to it when he was nearly holed by a bullet meant for an image of some Spanish saint hanging on the wall. The buccaneers then marched out into the countryside in the next few days and brought back thirty prisoners, who were questioned for information on the missing citizens and their valuables.

  Much of what precedes this is recounted in Morgan’s brief report on the mission, in Spanish testimony on the raid, and in Esquemeling’s narrative, giving a reliable picture of the events. But for the dark passages that follow, Esquemeling is the only source, and one should draw a bright line around the descriptions to come and regard them as only a possible version of what happened. What the surgeon relates was not out of character for pirate missions, but whether they happened on Morgan’s watch at Maracaibo is not definitely known.

  According to The Buccaneers of America, the rack was used on some prisoners, while “others had burning matches placed betwixt their fingers, which were thus burnt alive.” The pirates lived in an age when torture was commonplace, almost expected. The rack and woolding were standard punishments during the Spanish Inquisition; the New Model Army in which so many of Morgan’s original raiders had been trained (and whose red coats many of them still wore, “for the terrible name thereof”) had committed hideous savageries while conquering Ireland; and armies and bandits alike thought nothing of lopping off their enemies’ heads and sending them to the other side. It was a message that was sure to be understood. The Spanish gave as good as they got: When in 1604 they intercepted English ships in West Indian waters, they “cut off the heads, feet, noses and ears of the crews and smeared them with honey and tied them to trees to be tortured by flies and other insects.” If the pirates were distinguished in anything, it was their inventiveness. Chinese pirates were known to nail prisoners to their wooden decks and beat them with rattans; a certain English pirate, Captain Low, ordered that a Portuguese captain’s lips be cut off and broiled as the man watched. Low had, in his defense, been provoked—the captain had kept a bag filled with Portuguese gold coins hanging from a rope outside his cabin window; when the pirates appeared, he severed the rope and let the bag drop into the ocean—an incredibly stupid thing to do. Low made another sailor eat his own ears “with pepper and salt.” The Irish mutineer and pirate Philip Roche initiated a massacre of his French mates that coated the entire deck with gore; the pirates were “all over as wet with the Blood that had been spilt, as if they had been dipp’d in Water, or stood in a Shower of Rain, nor did they regard it any more.” What in Esquemeling’s account is perhaps more amazing than the pirates’ cruelty is the behavior of the tortured. Many of them resisted giving up information about their silver plate until they’d been mutilated beyond recognition.

  This becomes clear in the next city that came under Morgan’s care: Gibraltar (not to be confused with the island in the Mediterranean). After pillaging the countryside for thirty miles around, taking captives and raking in piles of silver and cobs, Morgan decided to follow L’Ollonais’s path and take the city that sat at the far end of the bay. Morgan sent a group of prisoners ahead, to impress upon their neighbors that the city should surrender at once. Instead, when the pirates sailed up to Gibraltar’s fort, they were met “with continual shooting of great cannon-bullets.” After Maracaibo the men had expected an easy victory, but now they encouraged each other with this thought: “We must make one meal upon bitter things, before we come to taste the sweetness of the sugar this place affords.” Morgan reversed course, anchored beyond the range of the guns, and waited until morning. Then he ordered the assault. But one night of thinking about how little pirates liked to be trifled with was enough for the townspeople. By morning, when Morgan began his assault, the people were gone, “carrying with them all their goods and riches.” A bad reputation was as good as bullets to a pirate, and by now Morgan’s had spread far and wide. As Esquemeling put it, in a description seconded by the Spaniards’ own reports of encounters with Morgan, “the fears which the Spaniards had conceived…were so great, that only hearing the leaves on the trees to stir, they often fancied them to be pirates.”

  The only person left in town was a “poor man born a fool,” a mentally handicapped Spaniard. He was questioned closely by the pirates, but to everything he answered, “I know nothing, I know nothing.” The buccaneers put him to the rack and demanded to know where the residents had fled to with their valuables. Finally the man broke and cried out, “Do not torture me anymore, but come with me and I will show you my goods and my riches!” Esquemeling reports that the pirates believed that the man was a rich citizen who was faking idiocy so he’d be left alone, though it seems like a daft idea. The pirates left no one alone who might have a morsel of information. What happens next is one of the few passages in the many pirate narratives that could be described as poignant:

  Hereupon they went with him; and he conducted them to a poor and miserable cottage, wherein he had a few earthen dishes, and other things of little or no value; and amongst these, three pieces of eight which he’d concealed with some other trumpery underground. After this, they asked him his name; and he readily made answer: My name is Don
Sebastian Sanchez, and I am brother to the governor of Maracaibo. This foolish answer, it must be conceived, these men, though never so inhuman, took for a certain truth. For no sooner had they heard it, but they put him again upon the rack, lifting him up on high with cords, and tying huge weights to his face and neck….

  It got worse. The pirates took burning palm leaves and scorched the man’s face with them. He lasted only thirty minutes before dying; the pirates cut the cords and dragged him out to the forest and left him there, unburied.

  Roderick headed into the bush with his mates and soon came on an Indian; they offered him a “mountain of gold” if he’d give them information on his former masters. Morgan’s men regularly sought out informers to point them toward the richest men in the area; once they caught these people, the price of freedom was often calibrated to how much the pirates estimated the rich man would be able to pay or raise from his neighbors and family via desperate letters sent out into the bush. (At least some townspeople always managed to escape the privateers’ raids, as their targets usually received some advance word of the attack.) Those who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay would often be tortured and forced to march along with the privateers as they made their way back toward their ships. If no ransom materialized, and the prisoners were considered valuable enough to warrant the effort, they’d be carted on board the fleet. In these cases a last chance fire sale would be had where Morgan would give the captives one final opportunity to pay a sharply reduced price for their liberty just before sailing for Port Royal. Morgan would always rather have cash in hand than a prisoner. If they paid, they might be sent home on a rowboat or dropped off on shore. If they called his bluff, they might be freed or they might be put to death by the annoyed pirates and their bodies tossed to the sharks—a common enough practice among Morgan’s fellow buccaneers. There was no set price for any one captive and no hard and fast policy governing captives’ treatment. Occasionally whole towns and their captured citizens were ransomed en masse, and if the pirates were hungry, food (especially beef) could become an acceptable substitute for money. There was no policy, that is, except that every last piece of eight should be wrung from every last prisoner.

  The man led them to the hiding place of a group of Spaniards, and the usual ceremonies began, with a twist. According to Esquemeling, the pirates demanded that the slave kill some of the Spaniards as an initiation rite, “to the intent that by this perpetrated crime he might never be able to leave their wicked company.” The slave agreed, murdering one Spaniard after another and committing other, unnamed “insolent actions.” Meanwhile the other pirates tortured the captives, with a Portuguese getting special attention. The slave marked him as a rich man, and Roderick worked him over with gusto, forcing his hands behind his back, tying cords to them, and lifting his arms straight up until they rotated over his head, “breaking both his arms behind his shoulders.” (It was a torture method still in use up to the Vietnam War, when it was inflicted on American POWs.) The man still would not talk, so the furious Roderick tied his thumbs and big toes to stakes and stretched him out, “the whole weight of his body being pendent in the air upon those cords.” He then took a stick and thrashed the cords until the man’s body was whipped back and forth, up and down. Nothing. Swearing that he’d kill the Spaniard, Roderick found a heavy stone and carried it to the man’s side and placed it on his belly, but the man held out. Roderick turned away, but another pirate took a torch from their campfire and began burning the man’s face, beard, and hair. The Spaniard said not a word. Finally he was starved for five days before agreeing to pay a ransom of 500 pieces of eight, or $25,000 in current dollars.

  The pirates were underwhelmed. “Old fellow,” Roderick told him, “instead of five hundred you must say five hundred thousand pieces of eight; otherwise you shall here end your life.” Still the prisoner held out. The Portuguese man claimed he was just a poor tavern owner who could raise no more; a “thousand protestations” flowed out of him, until the pirates must have been sick of his voice. At last he agreed to 1,000 pesos for his release; he raised the sum in a few days, paid up, and then walked free, “although so horribly maimed in his body, that ’tis scarce to be believed he could survive many weeks later.”

  None of this is outside of the norms of battlefield behavior. But what Esquemeling reports next did go past the norms: crucifixions, men and women “lacerated in the most tender parts of their bodies,” the deaths of female prisoners and children from neglect and starvation. There is little in the record outside of Esquemeling’s account to suggest that Morgan was a monster capable of such things, and one should take the report with a grain of salt; the writer may well have been embellishing at the prodding of his publishers. If Esquemeling made it up, one has to say he had the makings of a novelist in him. The innocent fool chattering away to the pirates about his famous relatives, ensuring his own death, and the Portuguese miser who endured a Golgotha just to save 500 pesos—they are beautiful touches. The latter portrait was truer of the New World: Here it was money that brought respect, not honor. Men defended their gold the way they once had the names Jesus Christ and Santiago.

  How Morgan felt about the cruelty that went along with most privateering expeditions, he never said. But later in life he did show that he could sympathize with the unfortunate. When entreating his superiors in London over some English prisoners in Spanish jails, he pleaded, “They are all great objects of compassion, so I hope you will not be unmindful of them.” And in the same letter he agonized about granting sanctuary to a religious refugee. “I do not know if I have done right herein,” he confessed. “Sure I am that [I] wished to follow the dictates of humanity as well as those of law and reason.” But a Spaniard who was resisting probably got very little sympathy from Morgan the buccaneer: Everyone understood the rules of engagement, and those who fought opened themselves up to every kind of treatment. For his part, Roderick had been raised to fear God, and the brutality he witnessed sometimes shocked him. But he’d found in himself a capacity to join in. He’d realized that the price for the life he enjoyed was that he could never question the methods of the Brethren. Anyone who shied away from woolding a captive was instantly suspect and risked marooning or worse. He expected the same if he were captured by Spanish musketeers. The pirates were like the Indian captive: They all initiated one another into torture. Any lingering doubts, any images of the burned merchant’s face with the skin hanging off, were eradicated by Roderick’s increasing intake of rum.

  The buccaneers raked over Gibraltar for weeks and then left with their boats groaning under the weight of silks, slaves, and loot. The pirates were delighted and ready to begin the orgiastic spending of what they’d earned. But Morgan, one can be sure, had a clock ticking in the back of his mind. They’d spent a great deal of time gathering their prizes, and anytime the Brethren landed on the Spanish Main, riders galloped off to the centers of power to ask for help. Perhaps troops were on the way from Panama or Cartagena. As it happened, the situation was much worse. Waiting for the men of Port Royal was the dreaded Armada de Barlovento.

  The fact that the armada had been dispatched to the Americas spoke volumes about how worried the queen regent was about Morgan; its arrival on the Main was a direct result of the shock of Portobelo. The fleet of five ships and its commander, Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa, had been sailing up and down the coasts of Cuba and Campeche, hoping to catch the pirates as they lurked in the cays and off the islands. The return on the significant investment that the armada represented had been slim: one small ship nabbed in the North Sea. No wonder the queen, after only six months or so of the armada’s fruitless patrols, ordered the two most formidable ships in the fleet back to Spain. The dozen ships that had been initially approved for the protection of the Main were now down to three, but all of them outclassed anything Morgan had in his motley little navy. Alonzo commanded the Magdalena, a forty-eight-gun galleon, and was supported by the San Luis, which boasted thirty-eight guns, and the Nuestra Señora d
e la Soledad, a fifty-ton vessel that had last seen service as a French trade ship and carried ten guns. As historian Peter Earle has pointed out, the Soledad would have been an afterthought in the European navies, but it was still the equal of Morgan’s flagship.

  Alonzo had mile upon mile of open sea to patrol; to increase his chances of running into Morgan, he depended on seafront-tavern rumors and a web of informers. Pirates were inveterate gossips, and it was well known in West Indies ports that Morgan had assembled his fleet at Cow Island and that the Spanish Main was to be his next target; that could mean that Panama, Cartagena, Maracaibo, or a host of other towns were now in his sights. Any pirate fleet would likely sail east before attempting to sweep down onto the Main, so the admiral decided to head to Puerto Rico and surprise them en route. But it was a long shot, and when the fleet arrived in San Juan, the governor reported they hadn’t spotted the pirate’s flag. They were nine days too late: As Alonzo scoured the port for news of the buccaneers, Morgan was already in Maracaibo, deep into pillaging. Alonzo raced west to Santo Domingo, where he arrived on May 25, and finally got a hot lead: The president there reported that Morgan’s men had arrived in their port and attempted to push their way into the city and were only held off by the island’s infantry. A French prisoner chimed in that he’d been rounded up during one of the pirates’ cattle hunts on Hispaniola and the pirates had revealed they were victualing for a raid on the Main. This was confirmed by a Dutch trader; pirates had been buying meat and talking about a specific town: Maracaibo. The admiral pointed his ships south and went racing after Morgan.

  When they reached the Gulf of Venezuela, a mestizo who was acting as “corporal of the Indians” confirmed the admiral’s hunch. Morgan was at Gibraltar. It was incredible news: His enemy was now within his reach, trapped like a dog, without the possibility of escape. How the words must have sung in Alonzo’s ears! Morgan’s ships could overawe a town because of the men on them: ferocious soldiers who regularly churned through Spanish armies like a meat grinder. But on water Morgan’s outfit was vulnerable: His undersize ships were mere water taxis meant to shuttle the rogues from one sacking to the next. They were no warships. Now Alonzo would be the instrument of royal, indeed of divine, retribution. Henry Morgan was going to surrender or die. Or, since we are talking about the Spanish system, he was going to surrender and then die.