The Dangerous Book of Heroes Page 22

  It is in that context, in 1659, that Henry Morgan became captain of a privateer at the age of twenty-four. He had taken part in several raiding voyages, but instead of squandering his share of the booty, he lived simply and saved his money until he could buy a small ship of his own.

  The government in England was desperate to keep hold of the threatened Caribbean ports and not too worried about who fought for them. It suited British interests to have a raiding fleet in the area, though each ship acted alone and profit was always the first motive. A report on the fledgling colony stated: “We had then about fourteen or fifteen sail of Privateers, few of which take orders but from stronger Men of War.”

  From raids, slavery, and plantation crops, Jamaica quickly became a wealthy colony. From 1662 to 1688, exports doubled to more than four million pounds’ worth of goods. One law passed by Parliament said that produce from all English colonies could only be transported on English ships. It meant that every colony brought a trading fleet into existence and eventually led to Britain’s domination of the seas.

  Thousands of miles from Europe, a smaller war was fought between Britain, Holland, and Spain for command of Caribbean waters. New men were clearly needed, and Charles II sent Henry Morgan’s uncle, Edward Morgan, as senior military officer. From his years as a soldier of fortune, Edward Morgan knew the Dutch well and spoke the language. It must have been a surprise to Henry to have his uncle come out and take such a powerful position. The king made Thomas Modyford the governor and the ultimate power in Jamaica.

  Modyford’s first proclamation as governor was that all hostilities with Spain were to cease. In theory, all the privateers should have returned to port and been paid off. Predictably, however, they turned a blind eye to the order, Henry Morgan among them. Attacks on rich Spanish fleets continued, and King Charles II wrote to Modyford to complain about it.

  Shortly after Henry’s uncle arrived, one of the privateers turned pirate, raiding English shipping as well. Under Modyford’s orders, the ship was captured and the crew hanged on the docks of Port Royal in Jamaica. An example had been made, but the governor’s ability to stop the privateers was limited and they carried on with their “prize taking” of foreign ships.

  As the war with Holland intensified, battles took place in the East and West Indies, the Mediterranean, Africa, and North America. In England, Parliament voted £2.5 million to equip the Royal Navy for the fight. The commercial future of the world was at stake, and they were determined that Britain control the seas and trade. The privateer fleet was still terrorizing Jamaican waters, and rather than try to hunt them down, they offered them letters of marque—official recognition and powers to attack Dutch ships on behalf of the British Crown. The alternative was to see them go over to the French colony on Tortuga, whereby Charles II would lose all control.

  The privateer captains accepted the letters of marque, and Colonel Edward Morgan led them in an expedition to seize Dutch islands in the West Indies. A fleet of ten “reformed privateers” left Jamaica, well armed and manned. Henry Morgan was captain of one of them and already becoming known as a good man in a fight.

  Colonel Edward Morgan was old and overweight. After landing on the island of Saint Eustatius, he pursued enemy soldiers on a hot day, then had a heart attack and died. His privateer captains were not the sort to return home at this setback and they went on to take the island and one other from Dutch control, gathering Spanish plunder at the same time. More than three hundred Dutch settlers were deported, but his regular soldiers had to come back to Jamaica when the privateers went off to Central America in search of more prizes.

  To explain how they had managed to sack Spanish settlements as far away as Nicaragua, Captains Jackman, Henry Morgan, and John Morris claimed not to have heard that war with Spain had ended. It was hardly necessary. Anti-Spanish feeling was still running high in official quarters, and they were in no danger of being seized as pirates.

  In 1666, Modyford and his council granted Morgan and the other privateer captains new letters of marque against the Spanish. The official record gives one reason: “It is the only means to keep the buccaneers on Hispaniola, Tortuga, and Cuba from being enemies and infesting the plantations.” Modyford may not have liked the idea of employing what was effectively his own pirate fleet, but he felt he had no choice. The privateers would defend the wealth of Jamaica if they had an interest in it and a safe port there. At the same time, the French governor on Tortuga was doing his best to bribe the privateer fleet to sail for him. It was a dangerous game, with both sides trying to feed the wolves.

  By then, Henry Morgan was thirty years old and well known as a successful and wealthy captain. His uncle had left a number of children in Jamaica, and Henry Morgan didn’t abandon them. Far from it. The exact date is not known, but he married his first cousin Mary and spent a couple of quiet years on Jamaica, enjoying married life. Two of her sisters married officers on the council, and so the Morgan family achieved considerable influence in a very short time.

  Officially sanctioned attacks on Spanish settlements and forts continued, the combination of huge wealth and poor defenses a tempting prize for fortune hunters. Privateers raided Costa Rica and Cuba as well as small islands. The Spanish attacked settlements and islands themselves, on one occasion massacring a British garrison of seventy men after they had surrendered. Some of the survivors were tortured, then sent to work in mines on the mainland. It was an unofficial war but as ruthless as any other kind. It is always tempting to take the Hollywood view of piracy as somehow romantic, with swarthy men walking the plank and crying “Yo ho ho!” to one another, but the reality was brutal and settlements that fell to privateers or pirates suffered torture and murders before being burned to the ground.

  In 1667, Holland agreed to peace with England, and Spain renewed a peace that had never really happened in the Caribbean. British power in the West Indies remained fragile, and in 1668, the Admiralty finally sent a formidable twenty-six-gun frigate, HMS Oxford, to the area.

  Henry Morgan had been made colonel and given command of the militia in Port Royal, Jamaica. Before the Oxford arrived, he took a raiding expedition of ten ships to a wealthy Spanish town in Cuba. He and his men landed on March 30 and fought off an attack by Spanish militia before storming the town and stealing everything they could lay hands on. He then accepted a ransom of a thousand head of cattle in exchange for not setting the town on fire.

  Other raids on Cuban towns and ports followed, often against much larger forces. However, as Morgan said: “The fewer we are, the better shares we shall have in the spoils.” It’s not quite an Agincourt speech, but he and his men caused havoc on Spanish settlements, removing anything of silver and gold from cities and churches. His crews ran wild in the sacking of towns, and only the payment of large ransoms would send Morgan away. By the time he returned to Jamaica, he had a hold full of Spanish gold.

  Morgan welcomed the arrival of the Oxford as the most powerful ship in those waters. The Spanish had warships, but they were slow and heavy in comparison. He made immediate plans for an attack on Cartagena, the strongest fortress on the coast of what is Colombia today.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  Disaster struck. The Oxford’s magazine exploded while Morgan was on deck. Five captains who had sat on one side of a table were killed in the explosion, while Morgan and the rest were thrown clear and survived. His choice of chair had saved his life, though he lost a quarter of his men.

  Without the Oxford, Morgan was forced to give up the idea of attacking Cartagena. Instead, he gathered the privateers off the eastern coast of Hispaniola. Fiercely independent, some preferred to sail alone, so Morgan went without them and attacked Spanish ports in Venezuela. In 1669 he sacked the city of Maracaibo and went on to the settlement of Gibraltar on Lake Maracaibo. His men tortured the city elders there until they revealed where their treasures were hidden. Morgan was not present at the time, but his name was further blackened with the Spanish as a r
esult. The Spanish citizens of Gibraltar agreed on a ransom to Morgan’s captains but could not raise all of it, so some of them were sold as slaves to make up the deficit.

  It was not all raids on towns and villages. When Morgan encountered a small fleet of three Spanish warships, he and his captains captured one, sank another, and watched the crew burn the third rather than let him have it. That single raid brought more than thirty thousand pounds back to Jamaica, a vast sum for the times. In port, Morgan’s men taunted the captains who had not sailed with him and flaunted their sudden riches.

  With new wealth, Morgan turned his hand to owning a plantation. He leased a tract of 836 acres, still known as Morgan’s Valley today, from the governor. He might have settled down, but in 1670, Spain renewed hostilities in the West Indies, capturing ships and ravaging British settlements in Bermuda and the Bahamas. In response, the governor of Jamaica appointed Morgan to command all warships in Jamaican waters. His fame, experience, and ruthlessness made him the obvious choice. At age thirty-five, Morgan was an admiral and in his prime.

  With unlimited funds, Morgan equipped a fleet at Port Royal for an attack on Panama, another Spanish territory. He crewed them with six hundred men, of the rough sort he knew best. The red-coat uniforms of Cromwell’s army still struck fear into Spaniards, so Morgan arranged for his men to wear them.

  In England, negotiations for peace with Spain were under way and Governor Modyford had orders to cease all operations against the Spanish. He made the instructions clear to Morgan, and the admiral replied that he would observe them except for landing on Spanish coasts to replenish water and supplies. Morgan also added the caveat that he would of course respond if attacked, or to relieve a British settlement. With those somewhat dubious assurances, Morgan sailed in August 1670.

  He sent one ship, the Dolphin, to the coast of Cuba, to gather intelligence on Spanish forces in those waters. The rest of his squadron anchored around Hispaniola, gathering fresh meat and water while he waited for other privateers who had promised to join him. Three French captains came from Tortuga to aid him against the Spanish and of course share the spoils. Morgan was a charismatic “pirate’s pirate,” and national interest came second to the opportunity to sail with him.

  The captain of the Dolphin met a Spanish ship in a bay off Cuba, and though the crew were outgunned, they attacked. The Spanish panicked, their captain was killed, and many jumped overboard. In the Spanish captain’s cabin, Morgan’s men found letters of marque from Panama, giving the Spanish authority to raid British ships and towns.

  Governor Modyford sent five more privateer ships to join Morgan as they came back from taking the island of Grenada. By then he had the most powerful fleet of privateers ever assembled in the Caribbean. It was a chance to strike a crushing blow against Spanish power.

  Morgan interrogated the prisoners taken by the Dolphin and learned that Cartagena and Panama were poorly defended. He allowed his captains the final choice, and they decided on Panama as the target. They set sail in December 1670, a fleet of some thirty-six ships and eighteen hundred men, including two or three hundred French. As it happened, peace with Spain had finally been agreed, but it took months for the news to reach the Caribbean and Morgan was not told by the time he set off.

  His first stop was at Old Providence, to the north of Panama. It was a well-fortified Spanish island, but with a small garrison. Morgan landed a thousand men, and the Spanish abandoned their gun battery. With Morgan’s men pursuing them, they retreated to a smaller island only linked to Providence by a drawbridge. From there, they accepted Morgan’s request to surrender peacefully, accompanied as it was by a threat of slaughter if they didn’t.

  The president of Panama, Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán, had been told that Morgan’s fleet was on the way. On the north coast, he reinforced his garrisons with men and supplies of gunpowder, convinced that the English force could not break his defenses. His confidence was understandable. To reach Panama City on the south coast of the isthmus, Morgan’s men would have to cross land that would one day become the site of the Panama Canal. It was dense jungle all the way, complete with deadly snakes and spiders as well as aggressive native tribes.

  The jewel of Panama’s fortifications was the fortress of San Lorenzo de Chagres, built on a sheer cliff and, at that time, filled with three hundred soldiers and native Indian bowmen. In addition, it had heavy artillery guns with which to hammer enemy ships. One of Morgan’s captains, Joseph Bradley, came as close as he dared to survey the fort and decided it could only be taken from the land side. Bradley landed along the coast with 480 men and marched to a ravine leading to the rear of the fort. The drawbridge that was usually there had vanished. Spanish troops opened fire from the fort as Bradley looked into the ravine.

  His men retreated out of range but were shamed in doing so. “Thoughts of disgrace and being reproached by our Friends on board” spurred Bradley’s small force into a slow descent into the ravine. They endured enemy fire the whole way until they climbed the fortress side and attacked the main gate. Bradley himself was shot in the attempt, his legs badly crushed by a cannonball. The first assault was driven back, but his men were undeterred and returned again and again, firing their muskets and throwing primitive grenades at the walls. At least one of those began a fire in the fort that took hold quickly. Wooden palisades burned to the ground, making a breach. Bradley’s best marksmen then came forward and fired at anyone trying to quench the flames.

  The Spanish garrison held their ground until Bradley sent a storming party armed with cutlasses and muskets. They forced their way in and the Spanish soldiers fled, leaving only the commandant, who continued to fight until he was shot. The fort was theirs. Bradley died of his wounds along with two officers and many of his men, but a crucial defense had been taken from Panama. Morgan flew the flag of England from the battlements of the fortress when he arrived in January 1671. He was only thirty-five miles from the fabled wealth of Panama City, though as yet he had no idea of the hostile nature of the terrain in between.

  In January he and his men went inland by river until it became too shallow even for canoes. Morgan disembarked with the plan of marching across the isthmus for twenty-four miles through “wild woods where there was no path.” He took twelve hundred men with him, armed with just cutlasses and two muskets each. He was always a lucky man, and his good fortune continued as Spanish garrisons inland set fire to their own positions and abandoned them, believing he was coming with a much larger force.

  It was hard going, as every step had to be cut in dense jungle. Morgan had a group of thirty men whose sole task was to hack through the vegetation. As workers on the canal would suffer in the nineteenth century, so his men were tormented by ticks and mosquitoes and terrified by poisonous spiders and snakes, all the while laboring in humid, stifling heat. Some of them grew sick and others fell in exhaustion and had to be sent back. By the sixth day, they had run out of food and were starving. They found some fruit and a planted field of maize, which they devoured like locusts before moving on.

  On January 16 they were attacked by natives. The sight of half-naked tribesmen appearing and vanishing around them caused great fear in the ranks, but they fought them off, losing some thirty men in the process.

  The next day they came across a village in the wilderness and found it burning. Morgan’s men discovered jars of wine in the ruined houses and drank themselves sick. Around the same time, one of them was carried off as a prisoner and Morgan gave orders that any foraging party should be at least a hundred strong.

  Ten days after leaving the fortress of Chagres, Morgan climbed a hill and saw the towers of Panama City in the distance. His men had survived the jungle, the attacks, and the heat. Even better, they came across a herd of cattle and shot enough to fill their bellies properly for the first time in days.

  In the city, the Spanish were furious that Morgan’s force had come so close. Yet they knew as well as anyone what Morgan’s men had suffered to make the trip a
nd fancied that their Spanish gentlemen would have no difficulty in bloodying their cavalry swords on a ragged group of exhausted, half-starved sailors.

  As the sun rose, the cream of Spanish nobility rode to Morgan’s camp, brandishing their swords and shouting elaborate and colorful insults. That task complete, they then rode away and Morgan ate breakfast with his men.

  The Spanish had almost double Morgan’s numbers, but his sailors were hard-bitten pirates, well used to hand-to-hand fighting. Morgan made a stern speech to them, ordering each man to make two pistols ready but not to fire until he did, or he would shoot them himself.

  When his ragged crew formed up, the Spanish cavalry charged them with great excitement and war cries. Morgan waited until the enemy were almost on top of them before he fired both his pistols. The volley that followed completely destroyed the Spanish attack. The survivors fled in panic, and Morgan’s men pursued them ruthlessly, for three miles, killing hundreds.

  Morgan’s men then entered Panama City and set fire to a great deal of it, burning the wooden houses to the ground. He sent another party to seize the ships in the city docks.

  At that time, Panama City was a center of Spanish trade. Wealth mined in appalling conditions by slaves in Peru passed through the city, and rich families had collections of gold and silver plates. They had removed some of it by sea when Morgan was still far off, but most of it was recovered when one of Morgan’s captains, Robert Searle, captured a Spanish ship in the port and used it to hunt fleeing vessels. Searle missed the best prize of them all, a galleon stuffed with jewels and gold, when his men became drunk on wine they found. However, they captured another ship with twenty thousand pieces of gold on board. Exact estimates are difficult, as Morgan was required to pay a percentage to his superiors in Jamaica, so he was never likely to declare all of it.