‘Just the buildings?’
‘No, they devastated the place. Set fire to the plantations, and took away both slaves and whites as prisoners. Old Cary and his daughter are both dead; and so are the two Lawton brothers, and Phil Burstall and his wife.’
There was a silence. Henry’s glance went back to the paper, and he read slowly: ‘“I am come to seek Admiral Morgan, with two ships of war of twenty guns each, and I challenge him to come out and meet me that he may see the valour of Spain.”‘
He stood a long moment looking at the paper.
‘The valour of Spain,’ he said. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. ‘Since the communication is addressed to me you will not object to my keeping it. You were not going to tell me about this?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘You were leaving today. It seemed a useless—exacerbation.’
‘Don’t tell me about that ratification either. That would be a far worse exacerbation.’
‘I shall have to send it to you in the Cays if it comes in time, Harry.’
‘Then mark it: “Not to be opened”.’
‘I can hardly do that.’
‘Then frank it: “The valour of Spain”,’ Henry said savagely, ‘and I shall keep it to read to Don Juan Perez de Guzman in Panama.’
And he went away with a hot heart and a cold mind to meet the fleet he had summoned to the rendezvous.
It was a very pretty sight, the fleet, if a little lacking in homogeneity—the smallest volunteer being a ten-ton sloop—and this time he had seen to it that his commission made him not only leader but master of it. Never again would he be helpless against the irresponsibility of the baser sort as he had been at Maracaibo. He was by his commission sole commander of those who chose to sail with him; and his fleet accepted that condition with a readiness that was flattering. Most of them had the wit to know that the strict discipline for which Harry Morgan was notorious had had no small share in the successes which had made him famous. And all of them would have served anyhow, with no conditions at all, under a man who had taken his first ship with eleven men in their stocking soles and Puerto Bello with a handful of men and some muskets.
Even the French came back, in the person of a tall, thin chestnut-coloured man who came on board and said, with his chestnut-coloured eyes twinkling: ‘I was right about the panache, Admiral. We should have trusted your flair, and followed you to Puerto Bello. Now that our peoples are friends again at home, may we perhaps follow you to Cuba?’
‘And if it happened not to be the rumoured invasion of Cuba, Captain Gascoone?’
‘We will follow you anywhere, Admiral. A man like you is born only once in a century.’
So the French came back; four fine frigates, a ketch and three sloops; and the seas in the lee of the Cays were thick with sail. Sometimes, looking across the anchorage at the little Fortune, Henry was filled with a regret that was one part sentimentalism and one part superstition. He had given the command of her to that Robert Delander for whom the English ambassador had spoken in Madrid and who had been turned loose, penniless and without compensation, in Spain; and he felt that no more appropriate transfer could have been found for her. But the regretful feeling, half love, half doubt, shot through him each time he caught sight of her, riding so lightly on the still water, so intimate, so familiar, so feminine; and the feeling annoyed him very much. How could he, Admiral of a fleet, sail in the Fortune, or receive visitors in that humble little cabin that Manuel had once made hideous with trophies of the chase? It was absurd even to think of it. Her name was mere chance; just something that he had thought up himself. He might as easily have called her the Prosperous or the Queen or a score of other names. It meant nothing that her name was Fortune and that he had deserted her. Nothing whatever.
They spent the bad weather months making ready, and adding to their provisions from the game on shore. But by November they were ready to sail, and Jack Morris had still not turned up at the rendezvous. And Henry was torn with anxiety. Not Jack, his mind said. Anyone but Jack.
But Jack came up over the horizon one morning in his usual leisurely, effortless fashion, in company with a twenty-gun frigate.
‘Who is your recruit?’ asked Henry, when he came on board.
‘That bastard’ said Jack ‘had the impudence to try to pot me like a sitting bird when I was watering at Two Mile Cay.’
‘Is she Spanish?’
‘She was,’ said Jack. ‘She came prancing in and fired a whole broadside at us without so much as a hail.’
‘What is her name?’
‘She’s the San Pedro y La Fama.’
There was a moment’s silence.
Then Morgan said: ‘Send me over the Captain of her.’
‘Pardal?’ said Jack. ‘I can’t. He’s dead.’
14
Don Juan Perez de Guzman, far away in the safe and lovely city of Panama, had not even remembered that gift of an emerald ring except as a story to tell sometimes over dinner. The elegance of the gesture had pleased him, and it had pleased him even more that he should have had the final word. For of course the affair was finished. Spain had suffered a disgrace at Puerto Bello, but he had by a fine gesture taken some of the blackness from her shame; and so he could sit back and feel at peace again. Over on the Atlantic coast the jealous mendicants who clung to the rich petticoats of Spain would no doubt continue to raid the settlements if opportunity offered; but here, on the other side of the continent, on the calm Pacific coast, there was only Spain. Nothing but Spain along the whole sweep of two continents. Spain unchallenged; rich, and settled, and secure.
So Don Juan heard the news of Maracaibo without being markedly discommoded. He noted that the hero of it was that Morgan creature again, and in a passing thought regretted that the creature was not Spanish. There was no doubt that Spain could do with an infusion of the ferocious energy and willingness to take risks which characterised the Islanders. He turned over his collection of gems, and decided to give the second-best string of pearls to the Virgin in the Cathedral, by way of averting the evil eye.
When his friend, the Governor of Cartagena, wrote to say that a great fleet of mixed English and French ships was at sea and making southward to the Isthmus, he was still undisturbed. But he did go and have a look at the little pistol and its six bullets. And he gave the Virgin the ruby bracelet that he had intended for his mistress.
The news that the fleet was actually approaching the Atlantic coast of Panama roused him to send reinforcements to Puerto Bello. And as a further insurance he presented the Virgin with one of his most prized relics: a toe-bone of St Peter.
And having done all that mortal man and faithful believer could in the matter, he left the Atlantic Coast to take care of itself. He propped his bad leg on its silk cushions, and prepared to go on enjoying his sunlit peace as much as his erysipelas would let him. Around him was all the best of two worlds: the elegances of the Old, and the beauty and fabulous wealth of the New. And he could enjoy it with no one to disturb or hinder.
When a messenger came to say that the English had made a landing on the Atlantic coast, he said: ‘Well, well. They have landed before. The road from Puerto Bello to Panama can be held by a handful of men: as we found to our cost when we wanted to go the other way.’
‘But they have not landed at Puerto Bello,’ said the messenger. ‘They have landed at Chagres.’
‘That is unusually stupid of them,’ said Don Juan. ‘There is nothing at Chagres but a quite impregnable fort on a precipice, and a quite impenetrable forest behind it.’
‘It is no doubt monumentally stupid of them, as your Excellency suggests, but it has been to a certain degree successful.’
‘To what degree, may one ask?’
‘They have taken the fort at Chagres.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Don Juan.
‘Yes, your Excellency,’ said the messenger, submissive.
‘By what mortal agency could a fort
on the top of a precipice be taken?’ And as the snubbed messenger did not reply: ‘Well?’
‘Hand-grenades and determination, your Excellency,’ said the messenger, goaded by the snubbing.
‘And what are the egregious English doing now that they have the harbour at Chagres?’ said the Governor, tacitly admitting the possibility.
‘They are coming up the river in boats.’
‘They will not get very far,’ Don Juan said. ‘Neither hand-grenades nor determination will provide them with water to float their boats after the recent drought.’
And this was the one thing that Don Juan was right about in all the story of the Panama campaign.
The thing he was most wrong about was the supposition that a lack of water in the river would stop the English. Even while the messenger was talking to him on the terrace above the blue Pacific, the ‘egregious English’ were transferring light arms, food and ammunition from the last of their lightest-draught boats to their own backs. If the river had failed them, then they would reach Panama by foot through the forest.
It was Joe Bradley who had taken the fort at Chagres, and he had died in doing it, and thirty of his men besides. It was the most spectacular achievement on the part of the English in all the story of the Americas, and it had been accomplished in the face of a Spanish resistance that was heroic beyond praise.
‘Tell Harry when he comes that we opened the way for him,’ Joe said when he was dying.
And Morgan, when he came into Chagres, felt that a bit of him had died with Bradley.
Morgan had stayed behind to collect Santa Catalina. If this was, as it seemed, to be his last voyaging, then it was time to see to it that Santa Catalina should be Old Providence again, and a place for Englishmen and their cherry-trees once more. He came into the harbour at Chagres thinking how pleased Mansfield would have been that his little island was English again (‘There it sits, my nice little island, on all the routes across the Caribbean’), only to learn that he had lost Bradley.
‘Was there nothing you could have done to save him!’ he said to Exmeling.
‘Nothing, Captain,’ Exmeling said with that oracular condescension that is so maddening to the layman.
But Morgan, too moved to be tactful, still looked doubtful; and Exmeling’s too thin skin was chafed. Not for the first time.
The English were dog-tired long before they reached the point where they had to abandon their boats. Their progress up the river had not been either a lazy water-borne journey or a steady pull. It had been an endless series of portages; of transferring equipment to shore and hauling the boats through the rapids and then wearily reloading. It had been sometimes, in the later stages, a matter of lugging the boats themselves overland to the next possible navigable water. So that it was with a sense of relief that the men, soldier and sailor alike, said good-bye to the river altogether and took to the forest ‘light’; with nothing but what they carried on their own backs.
It was with this equipment that they proposed to take Panama, and already the weaker spirits were vocal.
The hot, damp forest depressed them. The inability to see more than a few yards ahead. The steaming, oven atmosphere. The physical effort of shouldering loads over the pathless uneven ground. The million biting insects. The snakes. The creepers that felt like snakes. The rotten branches that looked like snakes.
And presently, worst of all, the glimpse of half-seen naked brown bodies through the leaves, and the knowledge that they were not alone in the forest. That they were being escorted every step of the way by Spanish Indians.
Not all that marching file of nearly twelve hundred men were easily impressed, by either the forest or the invisible enemy. Tom Rogers’ crew, to whom had been given the honour and ardours of advance guard, hacked their way hour by hour through the virgin forest; and when their turn to be relieved came refused to give up their place. And directly behind these came surely the strangest sight ever to have been witnessed by a Central American jungle: two hundred men in the red coats of the Commonwealth army. Nothing at all—snakes, Indians, mosquitoes, creepers or steaming heat—dismayed these veterans. When every sailor in the column had discarded everything but shirt and breeches, the old New Model men were still wearing their red coats; of which they were inordinately proud. And when every sailor in the column had consumed his last crumb of food, the red coats still had their rations almost intact.
It was in this matter of food that the rot became first apparent. Morgan had expected to provision his men from the country; from the small stockaded settlements that studded the river at intervals. But as they came out into each clearing by the waterside, they found the same deserted village and the same still-smoking ruins. The Spaniards had cleared out and had left nothing consumable behind them. The buildings had all been wood-built and thatched with palm, and they had burned with a satisfying ease and completeness. The hungry men prowled among the charred wreck for something that might still be eatable, and quarrelled bitterly over a handful of cindery corn or some brittle beans.
Then fever came to add its vapours to their misery. And men marched through an unreal world in which not texture, distance nor sound had any validity. On feet that felt like pillows, or on feet that seemed to have no existence at all.
The seriously ill were left in the deserted river clearings, to be fetched by canoe and taken back to Chagres, and the others who could still walk and keep direction stumbled on with the aid of their stronger fellows.
On the evening of their second day without food, they came on a cave with two sacks of meal, a few bunches of plantains, and two jars of wine; and Morgan stood over the food with a pistol while it was divided among the sick and exhausted. This saved a few more from having to be sent back by canoe, but even the fact that he had no mouthful of it himself did not endear him to the men who had discovered the cache.
‘Cheer up,’ said Morgan. ‘Tomorrow we shall reach Venta de Cruz, and there we can eat our fill. At Venta de Cruz the forest ends and the road to Panama is open.’
But between them and Venta de Cruz lay a new hazard and a new terror. The dim light of the forest grew darker and the country closed round them, soaring above them to unseen heights; and it was apparent that their only advance must be through a gorge in front of them. This was unnerving enough to men exhausted and half-starving, but it was now that the half-seen enemy who had tagged them so long chose to attack them. A soft flight of arrows fell on the first men to enter the gorge. By sheer luck the volley had been dispatched too soon, so that the arrows fell harmlessly in front of them, and with this warning they covered with continuous musket-fire each party to go through the defile. But even so, only the hope of food, and the sheer impossibility of retracing their steps to find any, hounded them through the pass. By now the soldiers were chewing their leather belts, and the crews were eating leaves.
They came out into the light, still attended by their invisible foes, and made their way down to Venta de Cruz like homing horses; all of a sudden confident and good-tempered. The Indians, kept by the covering fire too far away for accurate aim, fell back on mocking shouts in Spanish, and the men replied in kind. Presently they would eat. Venta de Cruz was the place where goods coming by road up from Panama were loaded on to boats for passage down the river to Chagres. At Venta de Cruz would be storehouses full of food. At Venta de Cruz would be an end both to their hunger and to the struggle through virgin forest. They were jubilant.
At Venta de Cruz, in fact, were one sack of bread, and fifteen jars of Peruvian wine.
Nothing was alive in the burnt-out village and the empty warehouses but a few stray dogs.
Those lucky enough to catch the dogs killed and ate them.
The first to reach the wine drank it down on their unprepared stomachs and dropped in their tracks insensible. The unlucky dropped in their tracks anyhow, and lay there; too far beyond emotion for either cursing or tears.
In the morning they got gingerly on to their swollen feet and began the
ir march over the cobbles of the road to Panama. It was their eighth day out from Chagres, and all that they had left was their muskets, their ammunition and the spirit that kept them going. It was fantastic that this column of dazed and unshaven scarecrows proposed to take a city.
Although they no longer had to hack their way, the forest was still round them as they hobbled over the rough mule-path, and the attendant Indians were still there. Every now and then the soft, bird’s-wing sound of a chance arrow would startle a man out of his coma, or a mocking yell from the bush would set the column cursing.
They came in the evening to open country at last; the blue haze of stinging flies grew less as the wind rose, and the Indians, deprived of cover, left them alone. They bivouacked for the night in open savanna, where three stone-built shepherd’s huts, empty but unburned, offered shelter for the sick. And there their final wretchedness came upon them.
It rained.
It rained as it can rain only in the tropics with the wind behind it. Like whips, like rods, like cats-o’-nine-tails. They lay on the wet earth, without cover, without hope, and almost without caring. Nothing more could happen to them.
Morgan, lying on the sodden grass and enduring his first bout of fever, was conscious only that he had been saved from disaster by the presence of those stone huts. For in the huts, along with the sickest men, was the ammunition. Whatever else had happened to them, their powder was still dry. They were still an army.
In the morning he was still light-headed enough to be full of secret plans for making the three little stone huts into a great church, as a thank-offering for his deliverance; and he had difficulty in collecting his thoughts when he addressed the men. The words would not come out of his mouth in the right order without the most careful marshalling. But the men were more interested in the matter than the style, and the matter pleased them. Today, he told them, on this ninth day of their march from the sea, they would reach the top of the slope from which they could look down on Panama. That was the ridge, in front of them, and they would reach it before noon.
The Privateer Page 24