Empire of Blue Water (24 page)

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; bankers 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.

On December 18, 1670, the great buccaneer fleet sailed.

The Spanish knew the trajectory of pirates’ careers as well as men like Morgan did. The only step up from places like Portobelo and Maracaibo would be Panama, Cartagena, or possibly Havana. Of these three, Panama was probably the most vulnerable, and the kingdom’s energetic president Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán was furiously working to protect it from the coming storm. This was the same Don Juan who had recaptured Old Providence from the English and sent their leaders to the dungeons. He’d just emerged from the shade of a prison cell himself at the castle of Callao in Lima, where a power struggle with the viceroy had landed him. He returned to Panama in the spring of 1669 and immediately set to improving its defenses.

Panama sat on the other side of the isthmus from the North Sea and the hunting grounds of the privateers. Its best hope for protection lay in the fact that the journey to reach it was a nightmare: Mountains, deep rivers, swamps thick with fever mist, warlike maroons, sudden violent rains, and carnivorous animals waited for anyone brave enough to attempt it. It was an ancient route; Sir Francis Drake had walked it, and Indians before him. And it would claim victims for centuries after Morgan attempted it. When the California gold rush struck in 1849, men from the East Coast swarmed down to the town of Colón and then tramped through the black muck to Panama City, where boats waited to take them to California. Snakes, yellow fever, and dysentery made it a memorable trip; one commander of a surveying mission reported seeing mosquitoes so thickly bunched that they snuffed out lighted candles with their burned corpses. “For no consideration take this route,” wrote one miner to a friend back home. “I have nothing to say on the other ones, but do not take this one.” In 1852, when a U.S. Army regiment and the soldiers’ families were assigned to new posts in California, they followed the same route, which now was now traversed via railroad, boat, and mule train, a much easier journey than in Morgan’s time. Even when he disembarked at the starting-off point, modern-day Colón, the regiment’s quartermaster was unimpressed. “I wondered how any person could live many months [there],” wrote the young Ulysses S. Grant, “and wondered still more why anyone tried.” The Americans were no match for the cholera and tainted water, and Grant watched men grow delirious and die by the hour. He later wrote about the expedition that cost him dozens of men, women, and children. His judgment of the place? “The horrors of this road in the rainy season are beyond description.”

Don Juan knew enough not to underestimate Henry Morgan, however, and he began to build up the fortifications on the trail. He begged the Crown for men to stock the garrisons at Portobelo and Chagres, the two main entry points to the isthmus. The authorities in Madrid relented, but when the treasure fleet finally arrived at Portobelo with his troops, Don Juan encountered some difficulties in claiming his men: A large portion of the soldiers had been assigned to other posts, had absconded, or had died from yellow fever or malaria. So many had died, in fact, that the captain of the treasure fleet snapped up the remainder meant for the defense of Panama and brought them back with him to guard the silver. A demoralized Don Juan was left to round up any stragglers he could find and press-gang them into service. It was a typical frustration for a Spanish leader facing the pirates: a top-down solution to his problems that was frittered away by distance and lieutenants eager to safeguard their own careers. “I myself am ready to die in the Kingdom’s defence,” the president of Panama wrote, “but that will not stop the enemy making war.” Don Juan was the canary in the silver mine, but Madrid was deaf to his message.

Spain did not want its New World settlers to act and think on their own, or to become too dependent on one another. That would jeopardize the flow of treasure; it would disrupt the autocratic system that had made the nation a world power. Spanish towns were connected more tightly to Spain than they were to one another. Governors competed with one another for scarce resources instead of pooling them. The vast distances multiplied the problem. By tying the colonies so closely to the motherland, Spain weakened them. The pirates preyed on these isolated outposts again and again.