Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean Read online

  It was from Port Royal that Henry Morgan, the greatest of the buccaneers, set out on his devastating raids on the Spanish Main. Born in the county of Monmouth in Wales, he always regarded himself as a gentleman’s son. Two of his uncles were distinguished soldiers (one was a major-general and another was a colonel who was briefly Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica). Morgan himself was a soldier in the expeditionary force which had captured Jamaica. He took part in a number of raids on Spanish towns in Central America and proved to be a brilliant leader of irregular forces. In 1668, in a bold attack at dawn on the fortified town of Portobello, he used the element of surprise to good effect and with only 500 men he took the castle, forced the garrison to surrender and negotiated a ransom. He returned to Jamaica with a haul of gold and silver coins and bars of silver worth around 250,000 pesos. The following year he led a fleet of ships and attacked Maracaibo on the coast of Venezuela in the Gulf of Mexico, but his greatest feat was the sack of Panama City.

  In August 1670 Morgan put out a call for men to join him in an attack on the Spanish Main. By September a multi-national fleet of thirty-eight ships and nearly 2,000 men had assembled at Isla Vaca on the south-west coast of Hispaniola. In December they sailed to San Lorenzo at the mouth of the River Chagres, captured the castle and commenced a gruelling march through the jungle to Panama. The army of mostly inexperienced soldiers and horsemen assembled on the plain outside the city were no match for Morgan’s battle-hardened men, who swept them aside, and entered Panama. Within hours the great city was on fire and the buccaneers were looting the houses of any valuables they could find. The Spanish were outraged by the attack, which had taken place after a peace treaty had been signed between England and Spain.12 Morgan, and Sir Thomas Modyford, the Governor of Jamaica, who had authorised him to carry out the raid, were both recalled to London. But just as Drake had been forgiven for his piracies against his country’s traditional enemy and had received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth I, so Morgan received a knighthood from King Charles II and was sent back to Jamaica as Lieutenant Governor to defend the island from any future attack by French or Spanish warships. He rebuilt the coastal defences but proved to have little appetite for the administrative duties of his post. In August 1688 he died of drink and dropsy on his Jamaican estate, attended by Sir Hans Sloane, the celebrated physician whose library and collections would later form the basis of the British Museum.

  Morgan was followed by the South Sea Men, who roamed all round the coast of South America and far out into the Pacific. Most of them were British but there were Dutchmen, Frenchmen, New Englanders and Creoles among them. Although they were regarded as bloodthirsty pirates by the Spanish whose ships they captured and whose towns they pillaged, it would be a mistake to dismiss them all as barbaric raiders. Their letters of marque were often of dubious validity, but they regarded themselves as privateers fighting an old enemy whose right to the riches of the New World they were prepared to challenge. As Protestants they had no hesitation in looting the Roman Catholic churches in South America of their gold and silver plate, and while they were merciless in shooting and slaughtering any who opposed their raids, they generally treated defeated enemies with respect and, unlike some of the earlier buccaneers and many of the later pirates, they rarely resorted to torture. While the Spanish had a dismal record of enslaving the native peoples and working them to death in the silver mines and on the plantations, the British buccaneers were invariably welcomed by the native Indians, who were prepared to supply them with food and shelter and to act as their guides in a hostile terrain.

  We know this because there were several educated men among the buccaneers who kept journals of their travels which were later published. Some of the journals reveal an intense curiosity about the little-known lands these buccaneers visited. They made maps and charts and included sailing directions for the benefit of mariners who might follow them, but they also recorded the appearance and customs of the native peoples, and recorded long, meticulous descriptions of the strange animals, birds, trees and plants they came across. The writings of William Dampier are deservedly the best known but he had several companions whose journals make fascinating reading, notably those of Lionel Wafer, a surgeon who spent three months living among the Cuna Indians of Central America, and Basil Ringrose, who fought alongside the buccaneers and frequently acted as their interpreter. William Dick, who also published his experiences, wrote that ‘we made use of one Mr Ringrose, who was with us in all this voyage, and being a good scholar, and full of ingeniosity, had also good skill in languages. This gentleman kept an exact and very curious journal of all our voyage, from our first setting out to the very last day …’13

  In December 1679 these buccaneer writers were among a miscellaneous crew of adventurers, logwood cutters, naval deserters and soldiers of fortune who had gathered on seven ships off the west coast of Jamaica. Under the leadership of captains Coxon, Sawkins and Sharp they set sail towards the Isthmus of Panama (then called the Isthmus of Darien), their aim being ‘to pillage and plunder in those parts’. They looted Portobelo and then sailed south to Golden Island, where 300 of them landed and marched inland across the Isthmus. After nine days’ march they reached the Spanish town of El Real de Santa Maria, which was situated at the head of a great river estuary. Warned of their coming, the Governor had despatched all the gold and valuables to Panama. El Real de Santa Maria was defended by wooden palisades and by a garrison of 200 men but the buccaneers had no difficulty in overcoming them. Disappointed to find a settlement of primitive houses with scarcely anything worth looting, they set fire to the church and the fort and set off downstream. Their next target was Panama.

  1

  Raiding the South Seas

  The buccaneers arrived off Panama shortly before sunrise. It was the morning of 23 April 1680, a day of good omen because it was dedicated to St George, the patron saint of England. The men had been rowing since four o’clock the previous afternoon and had kept going through the night, following the coastline but staying a few miles offshore to avoid detection. As the light increased they could see the church towers and tiled rooftops of the great city. To the east were the ruins of the old town, which had been burnt down following its capture by Sir Henry Morgan. The wooden buildings had gone but prominent among the remaining stone structures was the old cathedral, ‘the beautiful building whereof maketh a fair show at a distance, like unto that of St Pauls at London’.1

  Of more immediate concern to the buccaneers were the ships lying at anchor nearby in the lee of the island of Perico. Among the smaller local craft they could see five large merchant ships and three Spanish warships. As soon as the leading canoes of the buccaneers were sighted, the warships weighed anchor and got under sail. The Spanish had been warned of their presence in the area and had orders to intercept them and to give no quarter to those they captured. The ships had the wind behind them and, steering directly for the canoes, seemed intent on running them down.

  The buccaneers were exhausted after rowing more or less continuously for twelve hours and there were only sixty-eight of them, the rest having stayed behind at El Real de Santa Maria. Thirty-two of them were in a heavy piragua, a large dugout vessel made from the trunk of a cotton tree. The remaining thirty-six buccaneers were in five canoes commandeered from the local Indians. These were extremely unstable craft. Ringrose recorded, ‘Here in the Gulf it went very hard with us whensoever any wave dashed against the sides of our canoe, for it was nigh twenty foot in length, and yet not quite one foot and a half in breadth, where it was at its broadest so that we had just room to sit down in her, and a little water would easily have both filled and overwhelmed us.’2 His canoe had in fact capsized during their journey to Panama but somehow they had survived and managed to save their weapons.

  While the buccaneers were aware that the odds were heavily against them, having come so far they were in no mood to surrender. As John Cox later recalled, ‘we made a resolution rather than drown in the sea, or beg quar
ter of the Spaniard, whom we used to conquer, to run the extremest hazard of fire and sword’.3 The Spanish forces bearing down on them were overwhelming. They had a total of 228 men on their three ships and they were led by experienced commanders. The leading ship was commanded by Don Diego de Carabaxal, who had a crew of sixty-five men. This was followed by the flagship, commanded by Don Jacinto de Barahona. He was ‘High Admiral of those seas’ and had a crew of eighty-six Biscay men, who were reckoned the best mariners and soldiers among the Spaniards. The third warship was commanded by Don Francisco de Peralta, ‘an old and stout Spaniard, native of Andalucia’. His ship was manned by seventy-seven Negroes.

  Although tired and outnumbered, the buccaneers were a formidable fighting force. They appear not to have been affected by the heat, the humidity and the swarms of mosquitoes and they evidently had extraordinary reserves of stamina. They had survived a gruelling march across the Isthmus of Panama during which they had had to cut their way through the jungle. They had crossed mountains and fast-flowing rivers and endured days of being drenched in tropical downpours. Most of them had a long history of raiding coastal settlements and they had recently captured two Spanish towns. They were armed with pistols and cutlasses but their most deadly weapons were their long-barrelled muskets.4 These apparently unwieldy guns were made in France and came to be known as fusils bucaniers. They were extremely accurate in the hands of experienced sharpshooters and had proved deadly during Morgan’s attacks on Spanish treasure ports.

  In addition to their proven marksmanship the buccaneers had the advantage of being able to manoeuvre their canoes in any direction – unlike the Spanish ships, which were dependent on the strength and direction of the wind. As the first of the warships bore down on them the buccaneers simply rowed past and got to windward. Four buccaneers were wounded by a broadside from the ship’s guns as she passed but a volley from the buccaneers’ muskets shot dead several men on her decks. The admiral’s ship now drew abreast of the canoes and this time the buccaneers managed to shoot the helmsman. With no hand at the helm the ship rounded up into the wind and lay helpless with her sails aback. The buccaneers rowed up under her stern and shot every man who attempted to take the helm. They also shot through the ship’s mainsheet and the braces (the ropes controlling the sails), an astonishing feat to achieve with muskets from a moving canoe.

  The third ship, commanded by Don Peralta, now headed towards the flagship, intending to assist the admiral and his beleaguered crew. But before he could reach the admiral, Peralta’s ship was intercepted by the heavy piragua with its thirty or more buccaneers led by Captain Sawkins, which came alongside, ‘both giving and receiving death unto each other as fast as they could charge’.5 By this time the first ship had tacked and come about and was also intending to come to the aid of the admiral who was observed standing on his quarterdeck waving a handkerchief to attract the attention of his captains. To prevent the two ships joining forces the canoe of Ringrose and the canoe commanded by Captain Springer headed for the first ship and let loose a murderous fire which killed and wounded so many men that there were scarcely enough left to sail the ship. Don Carabaxal decided to take advantage of the freshening wind to flee from the scene of battle and save the lives of the few men who had escaped the buccaneers’ musket balls.

  The canoes of Ringrose and Springer now joined the canoes besieging the flagship and, coming close under her stern, managed to wedge her rudder, preventing the crew from getting the ship under way. They also shot dead the admiral and his chief pilot, ‘so that now they were almost quite disabled and disheartened likewise, seeing what a bloody massacre we had made among them with our shot’.6 Having refused up till now to surrender, the few Spaniards who remained alive cried for quarter. Captain Coxon, who was one of the leading buccaneers, climbed on board, taking with him Captain Harris, who had been shot through both legs.

  With one ship captured and the other having fled, it was time to deal with the ship commanded by Don Peralta, the ‘old and stout Spaniard’. He and his crew of black Africans were putting up a desperate fight and had three times beaten off attempts by Sawkins and his men to board the ship. Two canoes were despatched and these fired a volley of shot as they came alongside. As they did so there was an explosion on deck which was so fierce that it blew men into the air, some falling on the deck and others falling into the sea. Ignoring the shots directed at him, Don Peralta dived overboard to rescue his men and succeeded in getting several of them back into the ship. While he was rallying his men to renew the fight, another barrel of gunpowder exploded on the foredeck, causing several more barrels to take fire and blow up. Taking advantage of the thick smoke and confusion Sawkins boarded the ship, which surrendered to him.

  When Ringrose climbed aboard he discovered that ‘not one man there was found, but was either killed, desperately wounded, or horribly burnt with powder. Insomuch that their black skins were turned white in several places, the powder having torn it from their flesh and bones.’7 He later boarded the admiral’s flagship and found that only twenty-five of the eighty-six Biscay men were still alive, and of those twenty-five only eight were still fit to bear arms, the rest being grievously wounded. ‘Their blood ran down the deck in whole streams, and not scarce one place in the ship was found that was free of blood.’

  The battle had begun half an hour after sunrise and ended around noon. Of the buccaneers, eighteen men had been killed and twenty-two wounded. The Spanish casualties could only be guessed at because it was not known how many had died on the warship which had fled, but the accounts of Ringrose, Coxon and Bartholomew Sharp (who missed the battle but rejoined the buccaneers two days later) suggest that the Spanish lost more than 100 dead and a similar number were wounded. In Sharp’s opinion scarcely half a dozen escaped unharmed, ‘the rest being either killed or wounded, or else sadly burnt with the powder’.8 During his time as a prisoner of the buccaneers Don Peralta, who had himself been badly burnt during the fight, constantly praised the valour of his captors. The buccaneers in their turn were impressed by the fierce resistance they encountered, and Ringrose concluded that ‘to give our enemies their due, no men in the world did ever act more bravely than these Spaniards’.9

  To capture two warships and force a third to beat a retreat was a considerable achievement but the most useful outcome of the fight was the acquisition of the large merchant ship lying at anchor off Perico. Don Peralta tried to dissuade Captain Sawkins from taking the ship by telling him that it was manned by a crew of 350 but one of his men who lay dying on deck contradicted him. He told Sawkins that all the crew had been taken off to man the warships. When the buccaneers rowed across to the merchant ship they discovered that the dying man was correct and there was no one on board. An attempt had been made to scupper the ship by starting a fire and making a hole in the hull. Having extinguished the fire and stopped the leak, they found themselves in possession of a fine ship of 400 tons called La Santissima Trinidad. With her name anglicised to Trinity she served as a hospital ship for the wounded and then became the buccaneers’ flagship. During the next two years she would be used for carrying out a series of raids up and down the coast of South and Central America. According to Spanish sources the cost of the damage inflicted by this group of buccaneers on their ports and shipping amounted to more than four million pesos. During the course of the raids at least 200 Spaniards lost their lives and some twenty-five ships were destroyed or captured.10

  The Trinity’s cruises along the Pacific coast were frequently interrupted by mutinies and changes in the leadership of the buccaneers. Unlike the autocratic regimes on naval and merchant ships, where the captains ruled supreme, the buccaneers ran their ships on democratic lines. The loot was shared out equally; agreed sums of money were put aside to recompense men who suffered injuries in battle; and captains were voted in and out of office by all members of the crew.11 When he came to write the introduction to his Cruising Voyage Round the World Woodes Rogers was scathing about the buccaneers�
� exploits and their democratic ways:

  I must add concerning these buccaneers, that they lived without government: so that when they met with purchase, they immediately squandered it away, and when they got money and liquor, they drank and gamed till they spent all; and during those revels there was no distinction between the captain and crew: for the officers having no commission but what the majority gave them, they were changed at every caprice, which divided them, and occasioned frequent quarrels and separations, so that they could do nothing considerable.

  He was also scornful of the romantic accounts of their adventures and concluded that ‘they scarce shewed one instance of true courage or conduct, though they were accounted such fighting fellows at home’.12

  The first mutiny and change of leadership took place during an eighteen-day visit to the Juan Fernández islands. The buccaneers had been running short of food and water and so they left the coast of Chile and headed out into the Pacific, intending to renew their supplies, carry out necessary repairs and have some respite from coastal raiding. On Christmas Day 1680 they anchored in a bay on the south side of the main island – until a rising onshore wind caused the anchors to drag and they were forced to seek another anchorage. Ringrose was able to take a party ashore to hunt for goats and replenish their supplies of wood and water but was stranded when the ship had to put to sea again because her anchor cable parted. So rough was the weather that it was two days before the shore party could get back on board. The conditions continued to be difficult owing to fierce gusts of winds from the shore every hour or so. This may have contributed to the growing dissent among the buccaneers.