Empire of Blue Water (32 page)

To find out what happened to Morgan’s former enemies, we must skip ahead. By the late 1600s, the empire Morgan had fought was reeling; Queen Mariana had died in 1696 of breast cancer, after her doctors had given up and called in a
santiguadore,
a faith healer from La Mancha, the seventh son of a daughterless couple. This unlettered peasant was rumored to have miraculous powers, and he’d hurried to Madrid to work his art. But when he arrived, the man simply produced a crucifix, stood holding it over the royal patient, and chanted “I cross thee, God heal thee” over and over. The queen’s enormous, melon-size tumor showed no change, and soon she was dead. The devastated Carlos II, the last of the Spanish Hapsburg kings, was left alone. In 1679 he’d married Marie Louise, the niece of Louis XIV, but he had proved impotent, and the deeply depressed queen ate herself to an early death, passing away at age twenty-seven. The race for an heir became even more urgent: Carlos the Bewitched had then married a neurotic German queen, Maria Ana, whom he openly hated. Their unfortunate marriage produced no heirs, and Carlos spent his last years as a weakling sitting atop a golden chest, with the great powers of Europe waiting impatiently for him to die so the spoils could be distributed. He began to suffer from the death obsession that ran through his family’s history, even to the point of ordering his ancestors’ bodies exhumed so that, like his father before him, he could sit and contemplate the illustrious corpses. For a Spanish king, it was not as macabre a thing to do as it would be for an Englishman or a Frenchman, and for Carlos it made a special kind of sense. In many ways his dead ancestors were the only ones who could truly understand his dilemma; even the deformed, impotent Carlos considered himself to be a divine prince, without equal on earth. Only death would release him from the monstrous body that disgusted his wife and made a mockery of his greatness. It comforted him to know that he’d soon join his family and meet the Lord he’d striven so hard to serve.

Month by month he grew sicker, more spectral. The English ambassador wrote that the king was so weak he could barely lift his head to feed himself and that he was “so extremely melancholy that neither his buffoons, dwarfs nor puppet shows can in the least divert him from fancying everything that is said or done to be a temptation of the devil.” The king’s bewitchment was now regarded as official fact; his inability to produce an heir was, in fact, taken as a sign that Carlos was possessed by the devil. The court was convulsed with talk of witches, charms, and ciphers with the king’s name written in diabolical code. The exorcist assigned to the case conducted interviews with the devil to find out how the king had been enchanted, and he reported that it had been “done to destroy his generative organs, and to render him incapable of administering the kingdom” and that the enchantment had been achieved using “the members of a dead man” mixed into a chocolate drink. Carlos was paraded before the public, staggering and pale as a ghost, with one eye sunken into its socket; he was clearly failing. On his sickbed freshly killed pigeons were laid on his head to ward off vertigo, and the entrails of slaughtered animals were placed on his stomach to warm it. But nothing could save him, and on November 1, 1700, Carlos died, and his body was placed alongside the other descendants of Juana the Mad. Despite much back-channel negotiation and maneuvering by all the major powers, the question of who would get Spain had not been settled, and so the War of Spanish Succession was joined in 1702, with England and Holland battling France and Spain over who would rule in Madrid and lay claim to the wonders of Potosí and the rest of the American treasure. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, in which Spain lost Portugal and its territories in the Netherlands, marked the nation’s retirement from the ranks of first-tier world powers.

Morgan had helped, in his own way, point a path toward the future. Some historians have even argued that without Morgan the Spanish would have been able to settle and defend Florida more vigorously and even extend their control along the Gulf Coast, creating an impregnable empire stretching to Texas. Without him who knows what the map of the Caribbean and even of the United States might look like? He battled a divine empire on behalf of men interested in trade and gold and rational society (but certainly not freedom for every member, as the pirates had insisted on). The next great world empire, the British, would be a mercantile, not a religious, one. The world had turned Morgan’s way, and he’d nudged it along.

We have skipped ahead of the final chapter of Morgan’s story. As his inheritors sailed to every corner of the known and unknown world, Henry Morgan was back in Port Royal. He’d grown increasingly cantankerous against his enemies, including Sir Thomas Lynch, who returned to the island in 1682 to serve as governor and resumed his duel with the Welshman. The sickly Lynch reported to London that Morgan, although friendly in the beginning, had soon shown his deep enmity and in fact was “mightily elated by the hopes of my death.” Old sea captains do not make good followers, and old buccaneers make even worse ones. Over the years the stories had become memorized, the rum had become a necessity, the glory of fighting the Spanish was whittled away to battles between planters and merchants. In his forties Morgan developed a heavy paunch and could be found any night of the week drinking himself into a stupor with a passel of cronies who treated him as a vilified hero. Lynch petulantly wrote of his rival that he sat in his regular haunts drinking for days on end with the “five or six little sycophants” with whom he traveled. “In his drink,” Lynch wrote, “Sir Henry reflects on the government, swears, damns and curses most extravagantly.” The thing that finally caused Morgan’s downfall was almost ridiculously petty: Leaving a tavern one night, he was heard to say, “God damn the Assembly.” The ex-buccaneer denied it, but he was removed from the council and from public service in October 1683. He was forty-eight and had five years to live.

If a pirate’s life was about excess, it could be said that Henry Morgan died of it. Long years of alcohol abuse had weakened his system; his stomach grew to an enormous size so that his tailor could not even design a coat that would button over it, his appetite disappeared, his legs became swollen and painful. The admiral was suffering from dropsy, in which the body’s tissues retain excess fluid. The doctors who treated him were using concepts of the body that went back fifteen centuries to Claudius Galen, who was physician to the gladiators and, later, to Marcus Aurelius. The medical care that was directed at Henry Morgan was little different from that which would have been received by a Roman warrior clawed by a captive lion in AD 190. Galen took Aristotle’s theory of the four elements—earth, water, fire, and air—and developed them into the corresponding theory of humors. Health depended on a correct balance between the humors at work in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humor had a condition linked to it (dryness, heat, cold, wet) as well as an organ (liver, kidney, gallbladder, and spleen). Balancing these competing elements was the physician’s delicate work.

Morgan was lucky enough to have one of the best doctors in the West Indies, perhaps even in the world, attending him. Dr. Hans Sloane was a rising physician and naturalist who would go on to treat the royal family. He arrived in Port Royal in 1687, accompanying the star-crossed Duke and Duchess of Albemarle; the duke was assuming the governorship of the island. The new arrival was the same young rake who had murdered a beadle in London and later escorted Morgan through the delicious byways of Restoration vice. Now he was married to the ex–Lady Cavendish, a shopper of epic proportions who was showing signs of mental instability, while he himself was deteriorating from the effects of years of riotous living. One of their initiations into Jamaican life came on February 19 of that year, when a minor earthquake struck. “It was felt all over the island at the same time,” wrote Sloane. “Houses were near ruin with few escaping injury.” The tremors seemed to be getting more frequent: Just about a year later, Sloane reported three short shocks over the span of a minute, with the sounds of thunder that seemed to be coming from under the ground. Two years later a quake rocked the eastern Caribbean, with a huge chunk of a rock formation on the island of Redonda splitting off and crashing into the ocean. Sugar mills were swallowed up on St. Kitts, and people died on Antigua. The governor of the island of St. Thomas reported that the sea withdrew, and townspeople could walk out onto the seabed and collect fish flopping on the dry land.

Modern seismologists use the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale to measure the “shaking severity” of an earthquake (the more popular Richter scale measures magnitude). Invented by the Italian vulcanologist Giuseppe Mercalli in 1902, its grades range from I to XII. A Value I earthquake would not even be felt by humans standing on affected areas; a Value IV would cause chandeliers to swing, wooden walls to creak, and glasses to clink in the cupboard. It is the earthquakes at Value VIII and above that are the great ones. At VIII, towers and chimneys can collapse, poorly built houses suffer severe damage. At X, most buildings are completely destroyed and landslides add to the devastation. In recent times the Northridge, California, earthquake in 1994 registered scale values from the extremely mild I to the devastating IX rating at the epicenter. The 1906 San Francisco quake reached a value of IX to X. Anything above X is an apocalyptic quake. The tremors shaking Jamaica month after month were nothing close to that. Not yet.

Back in Port Royal, few thought about the inner workings of the earth; people focused on their daily lives. Dr. Sloane was concerned about Henry Morgan, a rare colonial species in decline, and the young doctor studied him with an exacting eye. Sloane’s writings, which are admirably precise and alive, would later become the basis for the British Library and would form its first collection. In his words the old privateer was

lean, sallow-coloured, his eyes a little yellowish and belly jutting out or prominent…. He complained to me of want of appetite for victuals, he had a kicking or roaching to vomit every morning and generally a small looseness attending him, and withal is much given to drinking and staying up late, which I supposed had been the cause of his present indisposition.

Sloane prescribed a thin gruel and a feather (for sticking down Morgan’s throat), so that he’d vomit and bring up the fluids in his stomach. Once that had been done, Morgan tried some “Madeira wine in which roots of gentian, tops of centaury had been infused with Mich.Vomit.” What Morgan really needed was rest and a different lifestyle, but he refused to change. He spent his days lolling in a hammock, his bloated body straining against the cords, and received friends, who could not be turned away without a drop of rum. The nights were the worst: The heat, the buzzing insects (but not a guilty conscience) kept him awake; he could not pass water and croaked like a night frog, belching to relieve his stomach of the intolerable feeling of swelling. Finally he’d reach, against Sloane’s express orders, for the liquor bottle and drive away the boredom and the more unpleasant memories with a long pull. Sloane despaired of his muleheaded patient: “Not being able to abstain from company, he sat up late at night drinking too much.” Morgan grew tired of hearing the young Englishman chide him about the rum and called for another doctor. Sloane’s rival diagnosed timpany, or an excess of wind in the belly; the contrary opinion must have pleased Morgan, who one can imagine repeating it to Sloane with a broad smile on his face, as it meant he could keep on drinking.