The Spanish carried them in chains to Portobelo, and staked them to the ground in a dungeon ten feet by twelve. They were made to work at building the port’s defenses, waist-deep in water from sunrise to sunset, naked, ill-fed, beaten, their hands worn raw with stones and mortar, and hectored and abused by priests into the bargain. Many died. Some few were taken out and sent to work on other defenses on the Spanish Main. Major Smith was released at last, sent back to let Jamaica know what pirates might expect who trespassed on the dominion of Spain.
He did not know what had become of the woman and her child.
The loss of Old Providence was bad enough; worse still was the rumor of the treaty that England was negotiating with Spain. Under its terms, it was said, the Spanish were to be left to do as they pleased in the West Indies, and the English must issue no more privateering commissions to those naughty pirates. Jamaica must just look out for herself as best she might.
In vain did Governor Modyford protest that the Spanish, pleased with their success at Old Providence, were arming a fleet for a new expedition to take back Jamaica herself. The King’s ministers wrote back that if any such attack took place, why then England would of course avenge it—maybe six months later. Maybe later still, depending on the amount of time it took for the news to reach home, and the wind, and the tide, and the dance-steps of the diplomats in London and Madrid…
To hell with all this, thought the governor, and he called in Colonel Henry Morgan.
Harry Morgan was now thirty-three, head of the family since his father-in-law’s death, uncle and godfather to many little Morgans, but father to none of his own. He it was who’d organized Port Royal’s militia, and commanded it now.
It was only of an evening he might be taken for a pirate, drinking in the tavern on Cannon Street or the one over on Thames Street, carousing into the late hours. He could drink any other man under the table, and remain upright and coherent a surprising while after too.
Sometimes, though, late at night, when the lamps had burned low and the other drinkers had fallen silent, he’d get a puzzled look in his black eyes. He could be seen putting out his hand cautiously, touching a glass or an onion bottle as though he expected it to vanish at his touch, like a soap bubble. Once he was seen to put his hand into the flame of a candle, as though to learn whether it would burn him.
On the day the bad news came about Old Providence, he went into the Cannon Street tavern at sundown and remained there till dawn, taking on board enough rum to make any other man paralytic drunk; but all he did was stare into a pool of spilled drink for hours, and answer in few words or not at all when approached.
Still, Harry was stone-cold sober when Governor Modyford called him in for advice. He walked out of the governor’s mansion Admiral Morgan, and sent word through the taverns of Port Royal that any member of the Brethren with a ship and a crew might want to get himself to the South Cays, where he would undoubtedly learn something to his advantage.
They came from all the winds’ quarters, did the Brethren of the Coast, to rendezvous with Harry Morgan. It was understood that the object was to strike where it might do the most harm, to prevent an attack on Jamaica, even as Sir Francis Drake had struck the shipyards of Cadiz. It was further understood that no man in the fleet would lift a finger, even to save Jamaica, unless there was plunder to be had. But there was always loot when you sailed with Harry Morgan!
They raided Camaguey first; then Portobelo, with its Iron Fort and Castillo de San Gerónimo and the battlements of Triana. Here there was rare butchery, and no wonder; for here Morgan found eleven Englishmen, chained together in a tiny space, covered with sores, blinking up at the torchlight from their own shite and piss to a foot’s depth. They were from the Old Providence colony.
When they could be made to understand they were free, Morgan heard again the tale of Spanish betrayal, with new particulars he had not heard before. He looked into their faces keenly and saw not one he knew, though never so changed. He inquired whether there were any other survivors. No, he was told, none at all.
He held the place for a month, and what he did there you may well imagine.
The viceroy of Panama ransomed Portobelo at last, for a sum that would take your breath away and one gold ring set with an emerald. Morgan sailed home with more loot than any privateer since Drake. He dipped his ensign as he passed over Drake’s grave, sailing back to Jamaica in triumph.
His luck held, and mad luck it was. Even when his own flagship was blown to hell—some fool with a lighted candle in the powder magazine—Morgan and all who drank with him on his side of the table were thrown clear, whilst all the men who’d sat across the table were killed.
Now, it was claimed afterward that Morgan’s men tortured prisoners to get information from them, and that may well be so; for in every Spanish town they found racks, brands and thumbscrews, thoughtfully provided by the Holy Inquisition for their New World outposts. And what would you expect of filthy English heretics, but that they should use these sacred instruments for profane purposes?
Treasure was taken; treasure was spent in Port Royal brothels, or used to engross estates with yet more acreage of sugar cane. Treasure was pissed against the wall in week-long drinking bouts, or carefully invested with prudent firms. But when it was all spent—why, to sea they’d go again, to get more.
1670: PORT ROYAL
There was once a young fool, and his name was John. He was big and he was strong and reasonably good-looking. His people weren’t rich—he was one of eleven children—but he was apprenticed to a bricklayer in Hackney, and his future was assured.
Then he went and killed a man.
Mind you, the man had been trying to kill him, and both of them in a low tavern, and he’d been drunk and the other man sober. The dead man had been a right bastard, himself up before the magistrate many a time for one kind of viciousness or other. And John’s mother had wept and wrung her hands so piteous at the trial, that the magistrate let her boy off with a sentence of transportation to the West Indies.
So Farewell Mother Dear and away went John, to sweat in the sun as a redleg bond-slave on a plantation in Barbados. It didn’t kill him. When he’d been there two years he escaped, in a dugout canoe he’d made with two other men. They thought they could paddle their way to some other island and shift for themselves there.
It didn’t fall out so. The canoe capsized the first day, and though they righted her again they’d lost their victuals and drink in the sea. They were in a bad way by the time they sighted a passing ship and got taken aboard. The captain was a sometime merchant, a pirate without even the least pretensions to being a privateer, and half his crew had been lost to yellow fever. He put a mug of water in John’s hand and made him take an oath to serve on board his ship. John gulped and reckoned he may as well take it, if it was a question of him living or getting tossed back overboard, which it seemed to be.
He learned the ropes, he learned how to reef a sail without getting himself or anyone else killed. But he did learn to kill when required.
He’d been raised to be polite to ladies and respectful to his superiors, and to sit in a pew of a Sunday and keep his mouth shut except when it was time to sing a hymn; that was morality. Still, the first time somebody came at John with a pike, he reacted just as he had in the tavern in Hackney, only faster.
He reasoned it out that a man may be forgiven for murder; why, if his country is at war it isn’t even murder, but duty. On the other hand, if a man stands like a stock and lets himself be slain, that amounts to suicide, which will send him straight to eternal damnation. Why take a chance with the eternal part of himself, when he was adrift in a land where it was so easy to lose the earthly part?