Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  Arriving at the Île-à-Vache on September 12, he found a handful of small vessels waiting for him with impatient buccaneers who had answered his call. Morgan knew that more were on the way, so he decided to build up the enormous stocks of food it would take to feed his pirate army. Sharpshooters were sent into the woods of Hispaniola to hunt, and they “killed there a huge number of beasts, and salted them.” Another large contingent of 400 men in five vessels was sent to the Spanish Main to roust up beef and maize. The rest of the men fell to repairing the damage done to the sails and rigging during the open-sea gale; more work was required after October 7, when “so violent a storm” hit the fleet that “all the vessels except the Admiral’s were driven on shore.” Three ships were lost, and the fleet was getting increasingly crowded with the droves of men who arrived daily in dinghies, in canoes, or on foot. Morgan wrote to Modyford complaining that he had more men than ships to carry them; the response to his call-up had been unusually strong.

  As the men at Île-à-Vache sweated in the broiling sun over ropes and planking, the 400 men under Morgan’s vice admiral Collier took five weeks to cover the 450 miles to their target, the grain port of Río de la Hacha, west of the Gulf of Venezuela. Once they arrived, they were becalmed and couldn’t make the harbor. The pirates fumed. The townspeople watched the limp-sailed ships, hid their goods, and made their decisions about whether to resist; Río de la Hacha had once been the center of a dazzling pearl fishery and had been visited by corsairs before, so the residents knew the drill. Finally, on February 24, Collier managed to catch enough of a breeze to land his men two miles from the town, where they disembarked at seven in the morning with such discipline and speed that the Spanish thought they must be soldiers from the king’s armies in England. The Spanish “were scared stiff at their first sight of the enemy and did not want to fight.” Some begged the English not to kill them, some ran deep into the woods, and others hid beneath baskets.

  Río de la Hacha was a backwater, and Collier expected an easy time of it. The town’s sole fort held four guns and a typically depleted garrison; the only difference this time was some unexpected visitors: a group of forty Spaniards who had attacked Jamaica with Rivero in their ship La Gallardina. The men probably suspected that burning houses and leaving posted threats had not endeared them to Morgan’s men, and so when Collier sent a trumpeter to demand that they lay down their arms, they replied with brio: “No, we cannot surrender because this is a castle belonging to the King. We will only surrender through force of arms.” That last bit indicated that the men felt a need to put up at least some resistance, for the sake of their necks if not their reputations. The Spanish fired their cannon, but casualties were light, and after blasting away at the heathen for a period of twenty-four hours, the Spaniards gave up the fight. Some of the soldiers were found hiding under mattresses, and Collier had two of them executed, one of them for refusing to produce some receipts for valuables; time was as good as treasure on the Main, and the men of La Gallardina had wasted his. “These men come once again from England…,” reported the governor of Santa Marta rather breathlessly, “and…the fifty vessels that compose their armada will come directly here to reunite.” Roderick fell in with one of the squads that now roamed the town and the countryside freely, torturing, gathering up plate, and collecting prisoners. Collier was not as skilled an inquisitor as Morgan, and although his men “in cold blood did a thousand cursed things, “the buccaneers failed to uncover 200,000 pesos ($10 million) hidden within the fort. Finally the locals, wishing to “rid themselves as soon as possible of that inhuman sort of people,” paid a ransom of maize and beef. Collier’s threat to behead those who did not contribute hastened their efforts, and soon the squadron was sailing back to join Morgan. They’d been away for a long five weeks, and every kind of nightmare scenario had been running in Morgan’s head: They’d been captured by the Spanish and given up his secrets; they had happened upon a galleon and decided to skip out on him with their winnings. When he saw all the ships returning, along with the eighty-ton Gallardina, a wave of “infinite joy” washed over the admiral. He needed the ships, the maize, and the information from Collier’s terrified prisoners.

  More good news arrived when John Morris sailed into the bay: The irrepressible Manuel Rivero Pardal was dead. Morris had come upon Rivero by sheer accident. After patrolling the coast of Cuba for intelligence about Spanish ship movements and war plans, he’d come up empty. When a storm whipped up, he put his ship in to a sheltered cove on Cuba’s eastern shore. At dusk another vessel came gliding into the bay: the San Pedro y la Fama, also looking for a place to ride out the storm. On seeing the English ship, Rivero was delighted: He had fourteen guns to the Dolphin’s ten, and his crew was primed for battle, “having taken on eighty musketeers and good stores of ammunition, grenadoes and stinkpots.” For Rivero it would be another notch in his belt, but this time he was facing hardened buccaneers, not frightened farmers in the Jamaican wilderness. But at the first shot, his men began abandoning their posts and diving into the water. Their appalled commander tried to rally them, but as he shouted at them to man their guns, a single bullet pierced his throat and he fell.

  A bitter moment for Rivero. The spars swayed above him against the blue sky as blood pumped out of his wound and across the deck. The sound of English barrages splintering the side of the Fama alternated with the screams of his soldiers, desperate to escape the privateers who were advancing on them, killing them in the water. If only his musketeers would die like men. Rivero had come to the West Indies to restore Spanish courage; he believed himself divinely ordained to do so. But his men had broken at the first report of a musket. The vision of the buccaneers as unconquerable demigods had triumphed over Rivero’s vision of a new Spanish fighter.

  It’s a pity that Rivero didn’t last longer, for with his death Morgan had lost his most spirited enemy. So many of his opponents did not die like men: Rivero had. Who knows what further brilliance the Welshman would have been forced to display had Rivero managed to infuse the Spanish with his outrageous gallantry? The English mocked the Portuguese commander; “that vapouring captain,” the surgeon Richard Browne called him, “that so much annoyed Jamaica in burning houses and robbing the people and sent that insolent challenge to Admiral Morgan.” Modyford sent the commissions from the queen regent that Rivero had been carrying on his vessel back to his superior in London, “whereby his Lordship will find him a person of great value amongst them.” He also sent the original canvas copy of Rivero’s bold challenge to Morgan, from which, Modyford said, one could guess at Rivero’s vanity. The cowardice of his men colored the English judgment of their commander. But Rivero had died like a conquistador, a rare event on the Spanish Main. At least one group of musketeers would soon follow his example.

  Other ships streamed in, fresh from their own adventures, but more men came than ships to carry them. The men were packed aboard even the tiniest boats until they were practically hanging off the sides: The French sloop Le Cerf had forty buccaneers crammed into every available space. Some vessels were so ill-suited for naval battle that they didn’t even have a cannon on board, such as the appropriately named Virgin Queen. Some impatient captains couldn’t restrain themselves from freelancing: Three privateer captains “went up the river of Nicaragua” and stormed a fort that had been built to stop French corsairs from penetrating to the cities farther inland. The Spaniards riddled the ships with shot, killing sixteen and wounding eighteen, but the buccaneers persevered and stormed the castle. When they interviewed the castellan at cutlass point, he admitted that four hours earlier he’d sent a canoe to warn the city of Granada, site of Morgan’s first triumph. The buccaneers put their strongest paddlers in a canoe and sent them rocketing up the river after them. It took the double-manned vessel three days to catch the messengers, but they did it, and stopped the alarm from spreading. The rogue buccaneers entered the sleepy town as conquerors. Not everyone had Morgan’s luck, however: His men extorted just ove
r £7 in silver per man, “which is nothing to what they had five years hence.” Modyford gave them a slap on the wrist when they returned to Port Royal and sent them to Île-à-Vache to bulk up Morgan’s forces.

  As Morgan’s army grew, the Spanish began to experience what Jamaica had suffered through months earlier: reports of war accumulating ominously one after the other. Letters arrived in Santa Marta from the terrified residents of Río de la Hacha, describing pitiless buccaneers gathering matériel for battle. Much of the intelligence was astonishingly up to date: fifty ships, 2,000 privateers, with Cartagena or Panama as the target. Other pieces of gossip were less so: The king had sent soldiers from the mainland, went one rumor, while another attested that the Duke of York was behind the entire operation. But all of the gossip pointed toward a mighty fleet on the waves. “Hardly a letter was written which did not report some news of an imminent threat,” wrote historian Peter Earle. Perhaps the most frightening piece of news came from Curaçao: A trader had just pulled into the harbor after having sailed along the coast of Hispaniola, home of the boucaniers. Usually when merchant ships arrived offshore, the blood-spattered wild men would appear from out of the forest to trade their cured meats for the necessities of life. But now few emerged. The woods had been swept clean; the buccaneers had gone to Morgan.

  The governor of Cartagena received the reports that pointed toward his city as the most likely destination for Morgan’s men and began to ramp up his response: Farmers in coastal areas were ordered to draw their herds away from any possible landing areas, cutting off the buccaneers from a food source, and citizens in the outlying areas were put on alert to rush to the city’s aid in the event of an attack. Finally the governor called a junta, and military capabilities were enhanced. The city’s defenses were, truth be told, lacking: Equipment was outdated or broken, soldiers had not received their wages for over two years, and the victualing of the garrisons had been neglected. The governor ordered a general call-up: All able-bodied men who could handle a firearm, “whether they were foreigners or citizens,” was ordered to stand ready to man the city’s fifty cannon.

  As Morgan’s endeavor sucked men and matériel into its vortex, the Spanish waited.

  With Rivero out of the way and his vessels reaching capacity, Morgan spent the days before sailing as a combination quartermaster and port inspector. He toured every ship and made sure it was “well-equipped and clean.” He divided up the maize and beef that had been brought in among the ships. He checked out the forecastles on the larger ships where the men had slung their hammocks and stored their sea chests, his nose flaring at the combined smell of burning sulfur (used to fumigate the vessels), damp canvas, tar, and decaying wood that was the fragrance of the wooden ship. He assigned his underlings double rank: On sea they’d be captains, on land they’d be majors and colonels. Realizing that the fleet was now too large for one commander to direct effectively, he split it in two and put Collier in charge of the second squadron. The little navy was formidable at the top—Morgan’s flagship was a twenty-two-gun floating fortress that would have been a significant warship even in Europe, and it was followed by the French standout St. Catherine with fourteen guns and 110 men. But the size and quality of the ships dropped away drastically, and indeed the more remarkable vessels were the tiniest ones, some too small to host even a single cannon; Morgan fielded five of these fishing smacks. They were essentially troop transports designed to get the buccaneers onto land, where they were at home. The names of the ships were a clue to the mind-set of the men who commanded them. Captains of Morgan’s generation in the West Indies tended to see themselves as gentleman adventurers, not rebels, and their ships were often given names such as Satisfaction, Endeavour, and Prosperous, as if they were nothing more than gleaming yachts that carried aging moguls from Portsmouth to Aruba every year. As later generations became more outlaws than patriots, the names got racier: Blackbeard sailed Queen Anne’s Revenge, and vessels prowled the oceans with names like Avenger and the Jolly Roger (named, of course, after the skull-and-crossbones flag). Morgan, however, would sail with his outlaw army under a respectable name.

  After inspecting his fleet, Morgan took it on a kind of shakedown cruise to Cape Tiburon on the southwestern coast of Haiti, accurately described by an eighteenth-century French traveler as a “narrow chain of mountains strewn in the middle of the sea” whose peaks give the scene a “magnificent, audacious character.” It was an appropriate setting for the mission that was to be launched from the blue waters surrounding Tiburon as the fleet of thirty-eight ships sailed in from points west. On December 2 the fleet was finally ready. Morgan invited the captains of each ship, thirty-six in all, for the council of war. As they stepped on board, along with their glass of rum punch they were each handed a fresh commission, made out in their names authorizing them “to act all manner of hostility against the Spanish nation…as if they were open and declared enemies of the King of England….” Roderick and the other commonpirates celebrated their imminent wealth by shooting off their guns and singing sea chanteys deep into the night.

  Aboard Morgan’s flagship the admiral proposed the articles under which the buccaneers would sail. He’d take 1 percent of every piece of plate, every emerald or pearl, every peso, and every slave. The captains would get eight shares (eight times the portion allotted to the ordinary crew member), with the surgeon getting a fee of 200 pesos ($10,000 in modern currency), the carpenter 100 ($5,000), in addition to their common salaries. Then Morgan listed compensation for injuries, at rates “much higher” than on previous voyages. Men who lost both legs would get a whopping 1,500 pesos ($75,000); one leg, “whether the right or the left,” 600 ($30,000). A hand, 600. An eye, 100 ($5,000). There were also generous terms for the especially brave: “Unto him that in any battle should signalize himself” by being the first to enter a fort or rip down the Spanish flag and raise the English, 50 pesos. Grenadiers would rake in 5 pesos for every bomb they lobbed into an enemy position. Men fight harder when they know they will have guaranteed months of rum should they lose a limb. The generous terms gave the mission a special status; Morgan would expect them to earn every peso.

  The contract showed the brilliance of the Brethren’s system as opposed to the Spanish. It rewarded greater risk with greater rewards. It gave individual men every reason to excel. The pirates understood what motivated their men. The Spanish, still drifting on the fumes of the Crusades, did not.

  Now came the real matter of the evening: Where would they strike? There were only four contenders: Santiago, Panama, Cartagena, and Vera Cruz. Santiago was the name on Jamaican lips; people there believed it was the seat of the anti-English warmongering. But it had tactical disadvantages: The Cuban city was defended by a fortress that overlooked the only approach to the city. Morgan had survived a potential shooting gallery at Maracaibo, and no one was lucky enough to do that twice. Besides, it was not known as a rich target, so the city was dropped. If the mission was for booty alone, Vera Cruz would have been a natural choice: It received all the silver from Mexico and stored it up for the galleons’ arrival. But Morgan had two objectives: to acquire a pile of treasure and strike a smashing blow to the empire. Vera Cruz could answer the first requirement, but not the second. There were no reports of its citizens arming for war against Jamaica, and so raiding it would not have the right political cover. Vera Cruz was out. Cartagena was a real power center on the Main, but its defenses were awesome (at least in the minds of the privateers): twice as many soldiers in its garrison as Panama and Portobelo combined, underground tunnels, fifty cannon, a large population of 6,000 free men and slaves to draw on for reinforcements. The city would come to be called La Heróica, and the mysterious explosion of the Oxford gave it a hexed quality. Cartagena would be difficult. So the buccaneers cast their eyes toward the oldest city in the Western Hemisphere.

  Panama City was the brains and guts of a rich portion of the New World; from here the levers of the sprawling province of Panama were pulled; bank
ers and administrators resided in its splendid wooden houses, riders rode out from its streets to direct the movements of mayors, soldiers, Indian workers. To take Panama would be to show Spain unable to protect its most valuable assets in the colonies. And besides, it was very, very rich; it had been said to rival Venice at its height. And once the terrible isthmus was overcome, the city lay open to invaders. The vote was taken, and the result was unanimous: Panama or death. As the serious drinking began, Morgan, who was important enough now to have his own secretary, had him draw up the Brethren’s intentions into formal language. The proclamation read that the buccaneers had gathered “to prevent the invasions of the Spaniards” and had resolved to take Panama, because commissions against the English had been issued from that city. As the word spread throughout the fleet, the buccaneers—never ones to underplay their own abilities—still must have regarded their decision with a touch of awe. This was not just another escapade; there was no greater city in the Western Hemisphere than the one they’d just committed to destroy. It was as if the barbarians had laid plans to take Rome itself.

  The plan immediately presented one problem: No one in the vast army that Morgan had assembled had ever been to Panama. Morgan never went into an attack blind, and so he decided to attack Providence, that old shuttlecock between England and Spain, on the way to his target. This is where the Spanish Empire housed its criminals, among which there were sure to be “many banditti and outlaws belonging to Panama.” They would be his guide. And retaking Providence, which had been taken from the Spanish by the Jamaicans and then reconquered, would give him a bauble to dangle in front of the king, a tiny nugget of the empire reclaimed. Morgan probably assumed he’d need many successes to distract Charles II from what he intended to do in Panama.