Empire of Blue Water (13 page)

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 Maurice 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.

At the other side of the fort, a separate scenario was unfolding. A squadron of privateers had taken advantage of the spectacle unfolding at the main gate to slip away and stage a rearguard action. They scaled the walls of the fort with ladders while the Spanish fought them off with everything they could find, including “great quantities of stones and earthen pots full of combustible matter.” It took an extreme form of courage to climb a ladder into the barrel of a musket, but this was the privateer style: fast, unrelenting attacks that depended as much on psychological terror as they did on sharpshooting. “We must have put up a pretty stiff fight,” wrote Raveneau de Lussan of another battle; “in a word, we must have fought like regular
filibustiers.
” The men swarmed over the ramparts and cut down the last of the defenders in their section of the castle, then raised the infamous red flag. Red stood for “no quarter”; every enemy met under it would be sacrificed. None of the various black banners later used by the pirates—ones adorned with skull and crossbones, skeletons, hourglasses, spears, and bleeding hearts—was as terrible in the sight of their enemies, as black meant quarter would be given to those who surrendered. The pirates assaulting the front gate of the castle soon breached it and joined up with their compatriots. Seventy-four of the Spanish defenders lay dead, including the castellan. Morgan in the entire operation lost eighteen and thirty-two wounded, one-eighth of the number who had staged the attack. Roderick had a deep gash from a Spanish sword on his thigh; he was carried screaming to where the doctor was treating the wounded. Hours later, after the more badly wounded had been treated, the doctor held a sword in a blazing fire and then walked over to Roderick. Three buccaneers held him down as the doctor positioned the sword flat over the wound, then pressed it into the flesh. Roderick fainted from the pain, but the wound was cauterized. He’d sleep until the next day.

On the horizon, San Felipe remained in Spanish hands, but the pirates felt, with justification, that they’d accomplished enough for one day. They got so drunk that “fifty courageous men…might easily have retaken the city.” There was soon news of far more than fifty men who were intent on doing just that; the Spanish would not take the capture of one of the Main’s jewels so lightly. In Panama, just seventy miles away, a horseman brought the news of the city’s capture to the president of Panama, Don Agustín de Bracamonte, the rider arriving just one day after Morgan had begun his siege of Portobelo. Bracamonte instantly knew how the capture would be received in Madrid: It was as if Morgan had seized a state mint and was now cavorting in its vaults. When reacting to crisis, Spanish administrators believed devoutly in consensus, drawing as many important people into the process as possible, thereby sharing out the blame and reducing their chances of being summoned back to Madrid and prison. Calling a junta, or council of war, would be standard operating procedure. But young and new in his position, Bracamonte ordered that the city’s militias be organized immediately to save Portobelo. Drummers walked the city streets calling the men to arms. “I swore to God,” Bracamonte testified, “that I would leave on Friday morning and be at Portobelo on Saturday.”