Empire of Blue Water (28 page)
Read Empire of Blue Water Online
Authors: Stephan Talty
Tags: #Caribbean Area, #Pirates, #Pirates - Caribbean Area - History - 17th century, #Mexico, #Morgan; Henry, #17th Century, #General, #Caribbean Area - History - To 1810, #Latin America, #Caribbean & West Indies, #History
It was afternoon before the privateers drew up to confront the Spaniards. Morgan took in the situation at a glance: Without any spies he couldn’t know the quality of the men who faced him or the caliber or number of their weapons; he had no idea that many of the black, Indian, and mestizo troops had “never in their lives…seen bullets.” It
looked
like a serious army; it could include reinforcements from the garrisons of any number of towns and cities. But Morgan soon spotted what he thought was a chink in Don Juan’s strategy: The small hill on the Spaniard’s right flank appeared undermanned. If he could take it and drive his men down it, he’d dramatically narrow the battlefield and reduce the ability of Don Juan’s cavalry to maneuver. He sent Prince and his vanguard to storm the hill; hidden by a ravine, the squadron dropped out of sight, then quickly swept up the incline at the rear. Now they looked down on the right wing of the Spanish cavalry. The horsemen saw the approaching buccaneers, wheeled their mounts toward them, cried,
“Viva el Rey!”
(“God save the king!”), and charged at the figures outlined in the blazing sun.
If the cavalry was to get into the vanguard’s ranks, the advantage would turn to them; the English musket and cutlass would be of little use against horsemen towering above them driving lances into their chests. But the Brethren, not panicking, dropped to one knee and took aim at the line of onrushing horses, and with a sharp crack of muskets the front line fell. The horses sprawled out on the plain, which along with the soggy ground made it difficult for the horsemen behind them to maneuver. Morgan noted an act of bravery by the cavalry’s leader: “One Francesco de Harro charged with the horse upon the vanguard so furiously that he could not be stopped till he lost his life.” But the advance had been quickly shattered. (The buccaneers left their mark everywhere—the hill is now known as El Cerro del Avance.)
Don Juan’s brightest hope, the cavalry, had been taken out of the picture. And now the infantry made a tactical mistake; seeing Morgan’s vanguard drop down into the ravine on their way to take the hill, they had assumed that the buccaneers were retreating. The left wing broke ranks and gave chase. “All of a sudden, I heard a loud clamour, crying out, ‘Fall on, fall on, for they fly!’” Don Juan recalled. Their commander tried to hold the men back, but he couldn’t stop the mad rush, “though he cut them with his Sword.” Don Juan’s hand was forced, and he wheeled his horse to the right and ordered his wing to follow the running troops as they raced toward the hill. “Come along, boys!” he cried out with a mixture of excitement and fatalism. “There is no remedy now, but to Conquer or Die. Follow me!”
Spaniards charging against buccaneers—it was a highly unusual situation. But Morgan’s men, descending the hill, responded like well-oiled killing machines. They took aim at the wild-eyed infantrymen and fired. The first volley tore through the first line of onrushing Spaniards, and a hundred of them dropped to the earth dead or severely wounded, gaping holes torn in their chests and stomachs. The sight dampened the Spanish ardor. “Hardly did our men see some fall dead,” Don Juan remembered, “and others wounded, but they turned their backs, and fled.” A moment before, Don Juan had been riding the crest of his soldiers’ courage; now he was left nearly alone, accompanied by a single Negro soldier and one servant. He watched his men run and must have wished he could have followed them. But he was an honorable man and felt
someone
had to make a show of sticking to their vow to defend Panama. Centuries of Spanish history resonated in that moment; Don Juan was sacrificing himself for a tradition his men had disgraced. “Yet I went forward to comply with my word to the Virgin, which was to die in her Defence,” he wrote. A bullet barely missed his face and ricocheted off the staff he carried in his hand. Seeing how exposed he was, a priest who knew Don Juan well and even said mass in his home caught up to the president and begged him to leave the battlefield. The old warrior twice refused and “sharply reprehended” the priest for suggesting retreat. The priest wouldn’t budge. “The third time, he persisted, telling me that it was mere desperation to die in that manner, and not like a Christian,” Don Juan remembered. With the buccaneers charging straight toward him, in pursuit of the fleeing troops, Don Juan saw the sense of the priest’s argument and relented. He was unhurt and considered it a miracle that the Virgin had protected him “from amidst so many thousand Bullets.”
Don Juan wheeled his horse and saw a scene of devastation: dead horses jackknifed on the grass, bodies of men littered across the savanna, arms and legs blown off by English ball, arquebuses tossed aside in terror, wounded soldiers being chased down by the buccaneers and chopped in the back of the neck with cutlasses, the wild bulls stampeding away from the buccaneers, terrified by the reports of the muskets and the screams. (The few that made it into the buccaneers’ lines merely tangled their horns in Morgan’s flag before being shot down by his men.) The Spanish defense collapsed. “I endeavoured with all my industry to persuade the soldiers to turn and face our enemies,” Don Juan said, “but it was impossible.” The pirates were moving through the plain executing the wounded, perhaps chopping off a finger with an attractive ring or snatching off a gold necklace. In the distance were the diminishing figures of Don Juan’s cavalry and infantry; as Morgan said, the retreat “came to plain running.” For three miles the buccaneers chased the terrified Spaniards, who attempted to hide in bushes and shrubs; discovered by a privateer, they would clasp their hands and cry out for mercy. But there was none to be had. Anyone who made the slightest resistance died.
The devastation was not over. Don Juan had given orders to the commander of the artillery, waiting back in the city: If Morgan won the day, he was to set a match to the garrison’s magazines and blow the fort sky-high. The Spanish had denied Morgan food on his trip across the isthmus; now they would deny him the means to go down the coast with fresh supplies. The commander could hear the sounds of battle in the distance, but he couldn’t know who was prevailing—until, that is, he saw the first of the retreating soldiers, running with buccaneers in hot pursuit. He lit the fuse and ran for safety. When the gunpowder ignited, the almighty boom could be heard six miles away. It was the opening salvo in the destruction of Panama itself.
As survivors from the battle streamed over the Matadero Bridge, the city still had some fight left in it. Some of the streets were barricaded, others booby-trapped with two hundred kegs of powder. Snipers took the occasional shot at the buccaneers as they smashed into the city, looting houses and drinking up the stores of wine. The flat
crump
of the detonating kegs could be heard in the distance; a fuse would reach a barrel, and a house in the next street would suddenly explode. Splinters came raining down on the privateers as they ruthlessly snuffed out any sign of resistance, taking time out to pillage as they made their way across the city; burning embers touched off fires. Soon flames crackled through the wood-frame houses of the merchants. The monk, and Don Juan’s fever, had been precise oracles. “Burn, burn!” cried out Spaniards in the street. “That is the order of Señor Don Juan!” The final touch came when black soldiers appeared on the streets with torches and began setting fire to the homes. If the buccaneers wanted Panama, its citizens would leave them a wasteland.
The strong winds that had swept the plains now acted as a huge bellows, blowing the fire up and arching it over the roofs. The pirates entered a city of black and orange, embers flying through the air, flames whipping from house to house, vortices of superheated air sucking the oxygen out of their lungs. Now they took on the strange role of firefighters, trying to save the city so they could pillage it. Morgan ordered barrels of powder to be detonated in lines ahead of the advancing fire, but the flames jumped the firebreaks and roared on. Valuable booty was being consumed: Silks and fine lace burned, beautifully wrought jewelry melted and streams of molten gold flowing along the floors of houses. The exhausted privateers fought throughout the day to put out the flames, “but in vain, for all was consumed by 12 at night.” There were exceptions: two churches, three hundred of the outlying houses, warehouses stocked with European linen and silk garments, the imposing stone civic buildings.
Morgan had done what the illustrious Drake had failed to do: crossed the fearsome isthmus and taken Panama. Leading a band of cantankerous individualists to Panama was a major accomplishment. “The hazard, conduct and daringness of their exploits,” wrote historian Robert Burton, “have by some been compared to the actions of Caesar and Alexander the Great.” Now Morgan watched Panama burn, as his men swarmed over it, mad to grab all the gold and wine they could before these were destroyed by the fire. Morgan’s report was touched with a sense of the scale of what he’d done; for one of the few times in his reports, a feeling for his place in history enters into the admiral’s voice. “Thus was consumed the famous and ancient city of Panama,” he wrote. “Which is the greatest mart for silver and gold in the whole world, for it receives all the goods that come from Spain in the King’s great fleet, and delivers all the gold and silver that comes from the mines of Peru and Potozí.”
The city burned through the night; it would take only thirty minutes for the flames to utterly ravage an entire street of wooden homes. Roderick lay in one of the stone monasteries and drank what wine he and his mates could find. He didn’t share Morgan’s sense of historical proportion; to him Panama was a storehouse of plunder, and he was anxious to begin raking in the swag in the morning. But when daylight came, Roderick and the others awoke to find Panama a place of cinders and ash. One of the few structures to survive was the stone tower of the cathedral. The tower had been transformed from the premier showpiece of a Christian civilization in its new frontier to what it would be for decades to come: a blackened, bitter landmark for Spanish mariners lost in coastal storms.
The dead city was only the outward manifestation of what had been lost. The illusion that the Spanish in the New World were crusaders cut from the old cloth had fled along with the ranks of fleeing soldiers. They would apparently no longer fight for God. They certainly wouldn’t die for their king. The buccaneers had torn away the illusions on which the kingdom had survived for so many years.
In full control, the buccaneers methodically searched Panama for swag. Morgan posted guards in key sectors and used the rest of his men to extract the remaining treasure from the hollowed-out city; the privateers sifted through the ruins of the finer homes. Roderick lowered a lighter comrade down a well where the water had been turned to mist by the raging fires so he could hunt for dumped plate and gems and helped rip apart the foundations and walls of buildings, looking for hidden stashes of gold and jewelry. Citizens unlucky enough to be caught up in the privateers’ dragnet were treated to hard questioning. Roderick had heard so many stories of Panama’s wealth that he found it difficult to believe that there were not piles of silver bars secreted somewhere in the city. He found melted blobs of gold here and there, but never the shining vaults packed tightly with plate that tortured his imagination. The interviewees paid heavily for their city’s reputation. There was one rumor in particular that haunted the buccaneers: There was said to be an altar made of gold that had been painted black to keep it out of the hands of the
corsarios.
It was never found. Instead of a torrent of loot, there was a slow, steady trickle of trinkets and chains tossed into piles and watched over jealously by the privateers.
The buccaneers didn’t restrict themselves to the city limits; realizing that the merchants and traders who hadn’t sailed out of the bay would be on the trails leading from Panama, they sent out squads of men to track the escapees down. “The men marched out in parties,” reported buccaneer William Fogg, “sometimes 100, sometimes 40 and 10, and took prisoners every day.” Morgan reported that they made “daily incursions on the enemy for 20 leagues without having one gun fired at them in anger.” Three thousand prisoners were brought back for interrogation and to be held for ransom. One triumph came with the capture of a bark that had run aground and been partially burned by its crew, who didn’t want it to fall into the privateers’ hands. Morgan desperately needed a boat to take command of the waters around Panama, and this modest vessel served his purpose. His men cruised the coastline and sailed to the nearby islands of Perico and Taboga and Taboguilla, capturing other traders and taking prisoner the fleeing Panamanians onboard. The trickle of loot grew into a modest stream. But the prize that would have made them all wealthy came within a hair of capture: Before Morgan reached the city, a ship called
La Santíssima Trinidada
had left Panama loaded down with “all the King’s plate and great quantity of riches of gold, pearl, jewels and other most precious goods, of all the best and richest merchants of Panama.” Not to mention a tremendous hoard of ecclesiastical treasures being transported by a group of nuns. The value of the loot easily ran into the millions. This was what the buccaneers had come to Panama for, but they let it slip through their grasp. When some of the Spanish crew left the ship to fill their water casks, they were captured and brought to the bark’s captain, Robert Searle, who soon learned that the
Santíssima
was loaded with booty. He ordered his men to take the Spanish ship, but by that time Roderick and the others were well oiled on “several sorts of rich wines” they’d confiscated, and they yawned in the captain’s face. Instead of boarding the
Santíssima,
the buccaneers watched through bleary eyes as it sailed away, and then went back to drinking themselves into a stupor. When Morgan heard about the fortune that had just escaped his clutches, he sent four boats looking for the galleon. The little fleet spent eight days searching for the
Santíssima,
without result; they did, however, stumble across a different vessel near the islands of Taboga and Taboguilla and found aboard “cloth, soap, sugar and biscuit, with twenty thousand pieces of eight in ready money.” A meager consolation prize.
The buccaneers first took out their frustration on the prisoners. Some, according to Esquemeling, “were presently put to the most exquisite tortures imaginable”: cutting off ears and noses, woolding, burning, and being put to the rack. The reports of cruelty were heard as far away as London, but the surgeon Richard Browne later gave a different account, in which he strongly defended Morgan’s conduct. His letter was shot through with a common soldier’s complaint: Civilians could not begin to understand the nature of battle, he wrote, denying that there were atrocities. His version had no pirates forcing themselves on the captive women and only one questionable action on the battlefield, a captain executing a friar after quarter was given. “For the Admiral,” Browne said, “he was noble enough to the vanquished enemy.”
As Don Juan’s Panama breathed its last (it would be rebuilt in a new location, where it stands to this day, and the old one abandoned forever), the president was in the town of Nata, seventy-five miles away. The contagion of fear had reached even this distant village. “I found not one soul therein,” Don Juan remembered, “for all were fled to the mountains.” Indeed, many of the rich merchants and administrators and church authorities were deep in the hills of central Panama, where they now faced the same privation through which Morgan and his men had suffered; starvation was a real threat, and the trader who had been used to earning a fistful of silver cobs for a week’s trading now had to forage through the jungle looking for fruit and roots.
Once he was safely in Nata, Don Juan tried one last time to rally the locals and the dispersed Panamanians to take up arms. Those who refused were milquetoasts who would “bear the infamy and stain for ever.” But there was little chance that men who did not have their life’s savings tied up in the great city would go to defend it when its leading citizens had run from the battle. Even the fact that many thought that Morgan had come to conquer Panama for England didn’t light a fire under the Spanish. “The pirates had brought with them an English Man,” Don Juan wrote, “whome they called The Prince, with intent there to Crown him King of Terra Firma.” The reference was probably to Captain Prince, who fought under Morgan, or to the still-fresh legend of Prince Rupert coming from over the seas. In any case very little was done to impede the buccaneers’ looting. The English scoffed at the Spanish defense of their jewel; when asked who had burned Panama, the buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp said that it couldn’t have been Don Juan, as he was miles away “saving his bacon.” Don Juan was philosophical about the defeat he’d just suffered; for a Spaniard, nothing so momentous as the destruction of a city could be achieved without being part of God’s plan. “This…has been a chastisement from Heaven,” he wrote. The same might have happened to any great Spanish commander, Don Juan thought, “as did to me, if his Men had deserted him, for one Man alone can do little.”
This was a comfort provided by the Spanish mind-set: The individual could never truly be responsible for disaster, as they didn’t have the power to turn history one way or the other. The lone Spaniard need not despair: defeat was part of a larger pattern.
As to why Panama had been lost, the Spaniards looked deep into themselves and acknowledged what they saw. “Fear has taken hold of the men of this Kingdom,” wrote a soldier from the castle of San Felipe. “to whom every single Englishman seems to be a strong squadron and it is for this reason, due to weakness, that the enemy is able to accomplish its plans to perfection.” This virus of terror was the result of decades of military neglect, underfunding, bureaucratic infighting, the huge territories to be protected, and Madrid’s indifference—in other words, all the ills of an empire that had shrunk within its enormous shell. But Don Juan was right: If all the Spaniards Morgan faced had fought like the heroes of San Lorenzo, he probably would have gone home without ever seeing Panama. The Spanish had let a myth get out of control.
Instead of an army, the Spanish sent a letter to Morgan. It came from the governor of Cartagena, the other rumored target of the privateers, and it recounted his exploits before making a ridiculous demand: “You should give satisfaction for the very serious damage that you have done and restore everything that you have robbed.” The letter did refer to one thing that had changed since Morgan set out from Jamaica: A peace treaty had finally been signed. The governor even included a copy of it with his rather whiny letter. Spain had made huge concessions; it now recognized Jamaica and the other English territories in the Indies and consigned to the past all the raids and outrages of the privateers against the Spanish Main. In turn, England agreed to stop its undeclared war against the kingdom and to bring in the privateers. The opening up of Spanish ports was not addressed, but there was a loophole that accomplished the same thing: English ships would now be allowed to enter Spanish harbors to get wood, water, and the other necessities of sailing life. In two quick strokes, Spain had renounced two founding principles of its empire in the New World: that the territories there belonged to them by divine right and that foreign trade would be outlawed forever.
Morgan had played no small part in this. His provocations had helped to force the Spanish to renounce their exclusive rights to the Spanish Main. The pressure from his relentless raids, the interruption of trading routes, the fact that their best-fortified cities were no longer safe from the admiral helped force the Spain into accepting that the New World had to be shared. Some officials saw the capitulation as a disaster. When the peace treaty was read in Lima, Peru, the viceroy wrote to the queen, “The Indies are lost, since there is no defence in the ports of this realm to resist them if they want to make themselves masters of the region where they come ashore.”
The Treaty of Madrid had been signed on July 21, and the English were given until November 28 to ratify it. Once that was done, there was a grace period of eight months in which both governments would inform their far-flung citizens to stop all hostilities against the other nation. The treaty finally put the relationships of the great powers in the Indies into black and white; the Caribbean would now cease to be a Wild West. The grace period introduced the only notes of gray—who was informed when could be argued forever. And now Morgan had just conducted the greatest raid in the history of buccaneering under the treaty. He’d helped create the pact; now he’d be the first to test it.
Morgan spent twenty-eight days raking over the coals of Panama. Before he left, he had to face down the first real mutiny he’d ever experienced. As the buccaneers prepared to leave Panama, the money had not yet been divided, but the buccaneers sensed that it was not the fabled sum they’d hoped for. Roderick was among a small group of pirates who formed a plan to steal away from Morgan and “go and rob upon the South Sea until they had got as much as they thought fit.” Morgan’s authority was gone. Like prisoners of war in a German camp, Roderick and the others had secreted away provisions, ammunition, powder, and muskets, even a cannon to load onto a ship they had commandeered. The extensive planning only pointed up how disgruntled the men had become. Morgan found out about the plans and had the mainmast of the ship cut down and burned; the renegades now had nothing to sail away on and so stuck with their commander. The admiral might need them to fight his way out of Panama, and who knew how many had emeralds or pearls sewn into their clothes?
