Empire of Blue Water (3 page)

By age twenty-five, Gage was studying at a Dominican monastery in Spain. Soon he’d fallen under the spell of a commissary of the pope recruiting young friars for service in the Philippines. The Spanish had centuries before battled the Moors for control of Iberia and won; in their minds the Crusades were still a going concern, and they were sending friars and priests to the New World as soldiers of Christ. Gage signed up for the mission and sailed for the New World in 1625.

The promised land of the Americas turned out to be far different from what he expected. Instead of fighting for God’s kingdom, he’d found the friars drunk and living like pashas. As he’d traveled through the empire, he’d seen up close how its religious men lived; here he writes about the disparity between how another order, the Franciscans, were supposed to dress and what they actually wore:

The rules of the order of the Franciscans demanded that they wear sackcloth and shirts of coarse wool, and that they go bare legged, shod with wood or hemp; but these friars wore beneath their habits (which they sometimes tucked up to the waist, the better to display such splendor), shoes of fine Cordovan leather, fine silk stockings, drawers with three inches of lace at the knee, Holland shirts and doublets quilted with silk. They were fond of gambling, and acquainted with gamblers’ oaths.

Everywhere he found the religious orders were feasting off the Indians, getting fat and rich; he called them
lupi rapaces,
“ravenous wolves.” One young prior in particular, whom he met nearly straight off the boat, drove him wild. While his books of theology collected dust on a high shelf, this “gallant and amorous young spark” had a Spanish lute within easy reach, which he took down and strummed to a song about one of the local lovelies, “adding scandal to scandal, looseness to liberty.” Gage was among the first witnesses to the corrosive effects of the New World’s great riches on the Spanish and their divine kingdom. The truth was that the living faith of their forefathers had hardened into corruption, hypocrisy, and bureaucratic form.

Gage had spent twelve years in the New World, paid attention to everything he saw, and acquired a modest fortune from his dealings with the natives. On his voyage back to Europe, a Spanish mulatto pirate in league with the Dutch quickly unburdened him of the 7,000 pieces of eight ($350,000 in today’s dollars) he’d so painstakingly filched, leaving Gage in despair. He’d returned to England in 1637 barely able to remember his English grammar; the relative upon whose door he knocked did not know him at first and said he sounded like “an Indian or a Welshman.” Gage’s father had been true to his word and left him unmentioned in his will; he was poor and Catholic in a war-torn country where the tide was turning toward Cromwell and the Protestants. Gage turned with it. In 1642 he was received into the Anglican faith.

And he’d become a Protestant warrior: He testified against his old Catholic comrades and helped the state convict them of high treason. The men faced an awful death: “that you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your privy members shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the King’s pleasure.” (It was a method of punishment invented in 1241, to punish one William Maurice, a pirate.) In a display of true Christian fortitude, one of the men he testified against prayed for Gage’s soul until the moment of his execution. The next year Gage gave evidence against two more priests and helped send them to their deaths.

But the reason that Gage was now sailing to America as part of an English invasion force was a book he wrote about his travel in the New World,
The English-American, or a New Survey of the West Indies,
first published in 1648 and then issued again in 1655 on Cromwell’s orders. It was an immediate sensation. An introductory verse told why Gage’s book would be different from others claiming to describe Spanish territories:

Those who have describ’d these parts before

Of trades, winds, currents, hurricanes do tell,

Of headlands, harbours, trendings of the shore,

Of rocks and isles, wherein they might as well

Talk of a nut, and only shew the shell;

The kernel neither tasted, touched nor seen.

Gage had tasted; in fact, he’d rolled the kernel around his mouth and savored its last bit of flavor.

At the time of the book’s publication, Spain and England were locked in a contest comparable to the shooting years of the Cold War: two mighty powers, two ideologies, fighting for supremacy in faraway lands. Gage was England’s Neil Armstrong, an astronaut who had journeyed unthinkable distances and returned to describe a new world. Of course, in this analogy the moon would have been colonized by Russia and fabulously rich in precious minerals; that added to the excitement that greeted Gage’s book.
The English-American
was also a reconnaissance report, in which Gage not only gave detailed accounts of populations and local defenses but emphasized several main points: The Spanish had few fortifications; the native Indians and the Negro slaves would rise up with any invasion against their oppressors; and the Spanish were debauched and would be easily defeated. There was even a prophecy among the enemy that would help the invaders: “It hath been these many yeares their owne common talke,” Gage wrote, “that a strange people shall conquer them, and take all their riches.”

To help the prophecy come true, Cromwell pulled Gage out of his modest parish, away from the baptisms and the confessions of yeoman farmers. Something much more important awaited him: Cromwell asked the preacher to write up a paper detailing how the Spanish empire in the Americas could be attacked and overthrown. Cromwell had no intelligence service, no spies, to rely on: Gage was it. The rector quickly boiled down the relevant sections of his book, and Gage predicted that an invasion of Hispaniola, followed by Cuba, would result in the toppling of Spain’s Central American kingdom—a vast, often impenetrable territory the size of France—within two years.

Twenty-nine years after he’d first sailed to the Americas, a very different Gage now traveled in a much larger fleet: 38 English vessels, carrying 2,500 men, journeyed out from Portsmouth. He was again on a religious mission: to exterminate Catholics from the New World and claim it for Protestantism. Gone was the heady innocence of his earlier voyage. These were not happy ships; the supply boats had not caught up with the fleet, and the men were already on half rations. They’d also learned to their disgust that they would not be allowed to keep any of the fabulous booty they expected to rake in on arrival at Hispaniola; and many believed that in fact the talk of invasion was part of a conspiracy and they were actually to be sold to a foreign prince as slaves on arrival. Mutiny was a live option; the ships were riven with anxiety.

The two commanders—Admiral Penn, in charge of the ships and sailors, and General Venables, in charge of the soldiers—were feuding over who led the mission. In fact, neither of them did; Cromwell’s orders were high on ambition but regrettably short on precise command structure. It is a mystery why the Hispaniola expedition was so badly planned; this was England’s first state-sponsored attempt at establishing an empire (the colonies in North America being private endeavors), and it was a hugely important moment in the nation’s history. But the expedition was a shambles. It is not enough to say, as Sir John Seeley would later comment, that England “seemed to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Cromwell was certainly distracted by domestic concerns, and he left the planning to a subordinate, only to send the men off with a cheery message: “Happy gales and prosperous success to the great enterprise you have in hand.” But the stage was set for disaster.

The Hispaniola fleet was meant to be the first strike in the “Western Design,” an ambition of English leaders back to the time of Elizabeth, when privateers such as Francis Drake raided the Spanish Main and pricked from Spain’s mighty empire drop after drop of blood. The Western Design called for England to conquer and settle the New World as a Protestant colony where the Bible’s vision of a just world would be put into place. As a young man, Cromwell had himself almost joined his Puritan brethren in their voyage to Massachusetts; the idea of founding a new and pure land had always had great appeal for him. Hispaniola was something of a second chance. “Set up your banners in the name of Christ,” Cromwell told an admiral. “For undoubtedly it is his cause.” But there were other advantages to an invasion: diverting the golden stream of treasure into his own ledgers would free up Cromwell from nasty budgetary battles with Parliament. Even Cromwell was not immune to treasure fever.

The fleet stopped off at the islands of Nevis, Montserrat, and St. Kitts and scooped up 1,200 more soldiers, then sailed on to Barbados to add 3,500 more, boosting the ranks to about 7,000 troops, an awesome force in the sparsely populated New World. Many of the fresh recruits were indentured servants so hopeless, so brutalized by the routines of sugar plantations, that mere war seemed preferable. The English soldiers, themselves looked on as fourth-raters, were not impressed by the recruits: “This Islland is the Dunghill whereone England doth cast forth its rubidge,” one sailor (most likely the sailing master of Penn’s flagship) wrote. The island’s blacksmiths churned out twenty-five hundred half-pikes—iron heads fixed to eight-foot handles; orders were given out, along with the password (“religion”). After waiting in vain for the storeships to arrive, the commanders listened to Gage’s advice and decided to attack Santo Domingo on the Spanish island of Hispaniola. Henry Morgan would have received the news of the target along with the other anxious soldiers.

On March 31, 1655, after many decades in the planning, the English spear finally landed—and was quickly blunted. The main body of troops went ashore thirty miles from the Spanish city in a maneuver, as historian Dudley Pope has written, “more suited to a comic opera” than a first strike at empire. The Negro slaves who Gage swore would run to meet them were nowhere to be found; instead the soldiers stumbled remarkably upon another white man, an old Irishman who had somehow ended up in this Spanish outpost, and press-ganged him into service. The hapless guide led the invaders around aimlessly for hours without bringing them any closer to their objective; the furious Venables had him hanged. When they did approach the Spanish fortifications, its soldiers, with indulgences around their necks granting them instant entry into heaven should they die fighting the English devils, peppered them with shot and ball. The ranks disintegrated; Venables hid behind a tree to escape the barrage, “soe much possessed with teror that he could hardlie spake.” He soon retreated to Penn’s flagship to commiserate with his wife as his troops retreated pell-mell from the slaughter. The soldiers set up camp on the shore, slapping away mosquitoes that slowly introduced malaria into their bloodstreams, and relieving their thirst with water infected with the organisms of dysentery and yellow fever. Troops began to drop left and right; a second attack days later was broken even more easily than the first. Twenty days after their landing, a retreat from Hispaniola was called, one that Penn and Venables would have dearly liked to continue all the way to Portsmouth. But they knew that Cromwell would be furious at the fleet returning empty-handed, and the Tower of London was not where they wanted to end their careers. The defeat at Hispaniola was Cromwell’s first loss as a military leader, and no one was eager to give him the news without offering up a consolation prize. (When he did hear about the debacle, Cromwell was shaken: “The Lord hath greatly humbled us,” he wrote.) The suggestion was made that the lightly defended island of Jamaica might appease the Lord Protector; and soon the fleet was headed there. The ships’ burden was lightened by the loss of 2,000 men, all of whom lay buried or rotting on the shores of Hispaniola.

Jamaica was named after the Arawak Indian word
xaymaca,
“land of wood and water,” and there wasn’t much else there in 1655. The Arawak had succeeded the original Tainos and then been decimated by the ferocious, man-eating Carib Indians, who would give white men nightmares wherever they encountered them throughout the West Indies. Jamaica was one-sixth the size of Hispaniola, 146 miles long by 51 miles at its widest point, covered with thick jungle and raked by mountains rising to 7,400 feet. Columbus had found the island nearly uninhabited when he sailed into what would become St. Ann’s Bay on May 3, 1494; he, too, was reeling from what he’d seen in Hispaniola—in his case, the graves of the settlers from his first voyage who had been slaughtered by the native inhabitants. With relief, Columbus named Jamaica “the fairest island that eyes have beheld,” its imposing mountains often wrapped in a blue-silver gauze. (The view is not the same that greets the modern tourist approaching on one of the huge cruise ships—most of the trees and flowers now flourishing on the island were introduced by the English after the invasion.) The Spanish maintained a small garrison that had been attacked once before by the English adventurer William Jackson, who had rhapsodized about the island, “Whatsoever is fabled by ye Poets, or maintained by Historians, concerning ye Arcadian Plaines, or ye Thessalian Tempe, may here be verified and truly affirmed, touching ye delight and plenty of all necessarys conferred by nature upon this Terrestrial Paradise, Jamaica.” His men asked to settle there, and when they were refused, twenty-three of them ran off to the Spanish as deserters, the first Englishmen to fall under the island’s spell.