Empire of Blue Water (8 page)

The most extraordinary clauses in the articles were the ones addressing the “recompense and reward each one ought to have that is either wounded or maimed in his body, suffering the loss of any limb, by that voyage.” Each eventuality was priced out:

Loss of a right arm: 600 pieces of eight

Left arm: 500

Right leg: 500

Left leg: 400

Eye: 100

Finger: 100

Some articles even awarded damages for the loss of a peg leg. Prostheses were so hard to come by in the West Indies that a good wooden leg was worth as much as a real one. And other ships posted rewards for bravery: The first man to board an enemy ship or throw a grenade into a fortification would walk away with extra pieces of eight. “In case wee should meete with any strong opposition in any place…,” one set of articles read, “the first man entering such place or places shall have 20 pounds, alsoe he that first displayes his colores in such place…20 pounds; as alsoe to all those that carry ladders, for every ladder soe carried and pitched upp against the walls…10 pounds.” Generous medical insurance, incentive pay, and employee control: Most modern American corporations would not match the pirates’ articles until well into the twentieth century, if then.

The articles were a savvy psychological document. Each clause not only gave the ordinary pirate a voice and a stake in the mission but it sharpened their incentive to win, which would benefit the leaders even more than the common buccaneer. The pirates understood what drove men, and they used that knowledge as a tool of battle. Pirates did not get paid a yearly salary or pensions for long-term service, so they had to maximize their earnings during raids.

Its articles firmly established, the tiny fleet sailed northwest, skirting the tiny Isle of Pines off the west coast of Cuba, and then headed due west toward the Yucatán Peninsula. What today would be a modestly interesting sail for a yachtsman with a GPS system was in the mid-1600s a journey into blankness, only here and there illuminated by a known landmark or a familiar current. Speed was determined by dropping a piece of wood onto the sea’s surface and measuring the time it took to reach the stern. There were no charts to guide Morgan, no way of measuring longitude. Navigation in the New World was an art that drew on ships’ logs, lead lines (for measuring the ocean’s depth), collective memory, and gossip. Dead reckoning was also a primary tool; sailing due east or west from a “deduced” position (or “de’d” in the log, thus the term “dead reckoning”) was a reliable method: Sail due east from the Canary Islands and you would arrive at Africa’s west coast; sail west and you would find yourself in the Bahamas. But this kind of knowledge built up over decades; the West Indies had few such routes available to the captain. In the Gulf of Honduras, ships that had become hopelessly lost in the foul weather were reduced to listening into the night for the splash of migrating tortoises, the only thing that could lead them to land. Ships’ pilots prayed fervently to the Holy Virgin for guidance through a nest of reefs. Most pirates could attest to the truth of what a French soldier bound for the New World wrote in his journal, “Now we saw nothing but sky and water and realized the omnipotence of God, into which we commended ourselves.”

Morgan’s first foray into Spanish America retraced the expedition of Hernán Cortés in 1519, and he knew as little about the territory he was invading as Cortés had. The longhaired, woman-loving conquistador had sailed around the Yucatán Peninsula with twenty-two boats, artillery, cavalry, swords, arquebusiers carrying their fire-belching matchlocks, twenty women, and a crew of 600. The Spaniard was hailed by the native inhabitants, the Mexica, as the god Quetzalcoatl, who they believed was returning from the sea, where he’d disappeared millennia before on a raft of serpents. Cortés was in search, of course, of gold, colonies, and converts, but he’d also been charged with the duty of mapping the shores of Mexico and reporting back on the inhabitants of the territories, who were rumored to be “people with large, broad ears and others with faces like dogs.” Cortés found the Mexica to be incredibly hospitable and rich in gold and gems; their emperor, Montezuma, welcomed the white man with honeyed words: “O our lord, thou has suffered fatigue, thou has endured weariness, thou has come to arrive on earth.” But the conquistadors wanted to rule the Mexica, and inevitably they and the Mexica soldiers, fortified by rations of psychedelic mushrooms and peyote, went to war. The natives lost thousands, the Spanish hundreds, and Cortés finally prevailed after a series of battles that changed the face of the Americas forever. Morgan sailed into a world altered by swords, guns, and horses. But he and his men were in fact inheritors of the days when Spaniards were daring, independent thinkers who could earn their fortunes through war. If only Philip IV, back in Spain, could have recaptured that ethos, his kingdom would be protected.

In his report on the expedition, Morgan wrote that once the buccaneer ships had passed the western tip of the peninsula, they tacked southwest into the Bay of Campeche, using the lead line to avoid the shallow cays and reefs that make the coastline a mariner’s nightmare. Their target was Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco province. It had been founded in 1596 by the Spaniards and was a thriving trading post and settlement; how many people lived there was unknown, but it was a formidable target for the small force led by Morgan. The expedition’s lookouts watched for a telltale plume of brown in the brilliant blue water, indicating that a nearby river was pushing its silt as much as twenty miles out into the bay. The second such sighting told the men they’d found the Grijalva River, which would take them to Villahermosa. The ships anchored, and 107 men disembarked, leaving aboard a skeleton crew, and headed for Frontera, a small town three miles upriver. Here they came across the local Indians, a moment of high tension for any invader: On Cortés’s journey the conquistadors had stumbled on an Indian altar “covered with clotted blood,” the site of many human sacrifices. But the buccaneers soon learned that the Indians detested the Spanish and would be happy to join the expedition as guides. Their new allies had bad news, however: Marching the fifty miles straight to Villahermosa would be impossible. The banks of the river were dense swamps for twenty miles on each side, snake-infested and impassable on foot. Jumping into boats would get them to the capital quickly, but the advantage of surprise would be lost; surprise was necessary not only as a military tactic as it was to prevent the townspeople from digging holes and hiding their silver plate or running off to the countryside. So the English were forced to follow the Indians into the bush for a grueling three-hundred-mile slog that took them around the outer edge of the swamps and away from any settlers who might alert the town to their approach. By the time it was over, Morgan had far exceeded the famous trek of Sir Francis Drake across the isthmus ninety-one years earlier; in fact, he’d travel approximately thirty-seven hundred miles, the distance from Los Angeles to Caracas.

Villahermosa was many hundreds of miles away from the pirate haunts of Port Royal and Tortuga, and its citizens believed that distance ensured their safety. Towns might see ten or twenty years of peace before a horde of buccaneers suddenly appeared on the horizon one day. Guards slept at their posts; the roundshot (small cannonballs) for the cannons rusted in the soft night air until they’d no longer fit into the mouths of the guns. Keys to chests full of gunpowder hadn’t been seen in a decade. Vigilance under the hot sun was a challenge few commanders could meet. So when Morgan’s men burst into the town square, the Spanish defense collapsed; Morgan reported that he quickly took and plundered the village. The pirates searched the houses for plate and jewels, gathered a few hundred prisoners, and headed back to their ships. But when they arrived at the river’s mouth, Morgan’s heart must have dropped: He saw that his ships had been captured by a contingent of Spanish soldiers, who now attacked with three hundred men. Aiming their muskets with care, the privateers cut down the enemy one after the other, quickly repelling their charge. The Spanish retreated and sailed off. Morgan had not lost a single man, but his only means of returning to Jamaica was gone.

The young Welshman was now stranded hundreds of miles from home with no transportation, little food, and a passel of violent men under his command. In modern terms it was as if he’d crash-landed on the dark side of the moon. It was a precarious moment. Countless other buccaneer armies would disintegrate under such circumstances in the coming years; the history of the West Indies is littered with their pathetic stories, which often followed a similar plot: a minor setback, dissension, mutiny, breakup, starvation, or death from Spanish guns. Like soldiers caught behind enemy lines, Morgan and his men would now have to improvise, and quickly. Roderick was horrified at their situation; merchant ships sailed known routes and resupplied at regular intervals. But here it seemed as if they could die in the sun and no one would ever know. Roderick had come face-to-face with the realities of pirate life: There was no support network and no safety net.

As Morgan debated the options, two Spanish barks and four canoes suddenly sailed into view; Morgan’s troops pounced on their owners and commandeered the vessels. The canoes were of a type forty feet long and powered by a basic sail, paddles, and muscle; the privateers leaned into their strokes as they churned back to the Yucatán Channel, a five-hundred-mile journey, all against a one-knot current that added twenty-four miles to every day’s distance. The privateers were now living off the land: They had to find water and food and keep a sharp eye out for the small towns that dotted the coast. When opportunity presented itself, they attacked. At a place called Río Garta, the privateers “with 30 men…stormed a breastwork there killing 15 and taking the rest prisoners.” Morgan was not running back to Jamaica; in fact, he was becoming more aggressive. It would become an emblem of his expeditions:
Always act as if you have the upper hand, even if you don’t.

The men grew more confident with every skirmish with the Spaniards; a force of their size and sharpshooting skills would have little to fear unless they came across a significant garrison or a large body of hostile Indians. And there was even something reassuring in encountering Spaniards, who were at least a known quantity out here in Indian territory. These were the ancient lands of the Aztecs, and even in the 1660s the place had a dark history, a past made up of rumor and hearsay that prevented lesser men from venturing there. Who knew what lay around the next bend in the river? Thomas Gage had reported on a menagerie kept by Montezuma and filled with unspeakable things:

The hunters were maintained in that house because of the ravenous beasts which were also kept in the lower halls in great cages made of timber, wherein were kept in some lions, in others tigers, in others ounces, in others wolves…. There were also in another great hall…snakes as gross as a man’s thigh, vipers, crocodiles which they call caymans, of twenty foot long with scales and head like a dragon; besides many other smaller lizards and the other venomous beasts and serpents…. To these snakes and the other venomous beasts they usually gave the blood of men sacrificed to feed them. Others say they gave unto them man’s flesh, which the great lizards, or caymans eat very well…. the floor with blood like a jelly, stinking like a slaughter-house, and the roaring of the lions, the fearful hissing of the snakes and adders, the doleful howling and barking of the wolves, the sorrowful yelling of the ounces and tigers, when they would have meat.

The buccaneers safely passed by old Mexico, Morgan would later report, turned the northeast corner of the Yucatán Peninsula, and headed south along the coast, crossing the Gulf of Honduras. When they came to the Isle of Rattan, they rested, took on water, and prepared for a raid on Trujillo on the mainland coast. Trujillo had become a destination for epic journeys. Over a century and a half before, Christopher Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage to the New World, had anchored in the nearby Bay of Trujillo and made his first landing on the American continent here. His men said the first Catholic mass ever celebrated in the Americas. Later Cortés had arrived in Trujillo after a ghastly march from Mexico City overland through nearly impenetrable jungles. Now Morgan added his name to the list, as his men crashed into the town, quickly stormed the fort, carried away everything of value, and for good measure snatched a Spanish vessel.

Next in their sights was Monkey Bay, 450 miles due south, off present-day Nicaragua. To get there Morgan followed Columbus’s route along the dangerous, rock-toothed shoreline that now forms the coast of Honduras. Downpours could be torrential; on Columbus’s voyage the sky was the color of mist and merged with the sea at the horizon, making navigation difficult. Rain, sky, and ocean all turned the same color. The precipitation had come down in solid sheets, so the explorer could not see the other ships in his fleet, which covered only six miles a day. Columbus wrote that his sails were torn, that their anchors, shrouds, hawsers, and launches were stripped away. He’d never seen a storm “so terrible, that lasted so long.” The privateers swept around the belly-shaped coast and dropped down to Monkey Bay, where they recruited nine Indian guides who were not friendly toward the Spaniards. Granada lay at the far end of the huge inland Lake of Nicaragua; to get there they’d have to paddle up the San Juan River in their canoes. The men traveled by night, surprise still their best weapon, and slept hidden in the underbrush by day; they forded three falls where they had to carry their canoes, covering 111 miles before the river brought them to a “fair laguna, or lake, judged to be 50 leagues by 30, of sweet water, full of excellent fish with its banks full of brave pastures and savannahs covered with horses and cattle.” The grazing cows soon began dropping to the report of muskets, and the men enjoyed “good beef and mutton as any in England.” After feasting on the herd, the men approached the town, “hiding by day under cays and islands and rowing all night.” On the fifth night, they reached the outskirts of the city of Gran Granada. Founded in 1524 by Hernández de Córdoba, Gran Granada was a rich commercial outpost that just might, the buccaneers hoped, still contain some of the golden Aztec treasures that had astonished the conquistadors. The town was twice as big as Portsmouth and boasted seven stone churches, colleges, monasteries, and, more important, seven companies of cavalry and militia. But Gran Granada, like so many others, was unprepared for the buccaneers. What astonishment Morgan’s band must have caused when they marched into the town square, overturned the great guns, captured the sergeant-major’s house, which doubled as the town’s armory, locked “300 of the best men prisoners” in the great church, and went on a major spree. The privateers had been children’s stories told to wayward boys to frighten them. But now they swept in, real as life, with over a thousand of the local Indians, who, believing themselves liberated, joined in with the plundering and were on the verge of executing the Spanish prisoners en masse until Morgan reminded them that the English would be leaving and the natives would have to live with their colonizers when they were gone. The knives were stayed, and Morgan and his men collected their loot, headed back to their ships and set their course for Jamaica. Roderick counted his takings and was satisfied: He could pay off his debts, rent a better room, and look forward to more weeks of carousing back in Port Royal. It wasn’t just the money—it was the feeling of entering the town with as much cash in one’s pocket as the richest merchant, of being able to look anyone in the eye, hard if he liked. Money made the man in Jamaica; it didn’t matter who your father was or what you had done in the Old World. Roderick’s estimation of himself was rising by the week.