Henry Morgan’s piratical exploits during the Second Anglo-Dutch War took him not into combat with England’s allies, but rather against the Spanish of Cuba and Panama.
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Transcript
We’ve talked about Barbados handling the Second Anglo-Dutch War almost alone, and the question of what Jamaica was doing at the time follows from this. Jamaica had a group of privateers who were supposed to be an unofficial military force, protecting English interests for a chance at riches rather than a salary that the government couldn’t afford to pay. Military force, military conflict. So what happened?
Introduction
I mentioned in the episode before last that the privateers had taken Tobago and St. Eustatius from the Dutch. And, that there was some rivalry for conquered islands to enter Barbados or Jamaica’s sphere of influence. In fact, it was partially competition with Jamaica that pushed Willoughby to risk hurricane season to push his military endeavors earlier.
He didn’t need to worry, though, because the pirates had created their own society, in which national loyalty didn’t rank particularly high as a priority. The English were supposed to be at war with the French and Dutch, but English, French and Dutch privateers had been united against the Spanish, and in pursuit of plunder, since long before the war broke out.
Charles II had promised his cousin in Lithuania the Dutch island of Curacao, so Modiford ordered Henry Morgan to take it. Instead, though, Morgan joined Edward Mansfield, and the two agreed that they’d be much better off seeking Spanish plunder together, rather than following those orders. The risk was lower, the potential reward was higher, and they could justify this with rumors that the Spanish were planning to take advantage of the war to retake Jamaica. To this argument, they added rumors that Prince Maurice, Prince Rupert’s brother who had disappeared in a hurricane 15 years before, was a prisoner in Puerto Rico.
And before we go any further, it’s probably worth noting that the sources for this episode are unreliable even by the standards of this show. There’s effectively one primary source about this stuff, and every single other source is reacting to it. Some question it, accurately but not necessarily impressively pointing out that we have no proof of anything this one source discusses, and some build on it using tangential pieces of evidence. But that’s it. There’s no balance, no external context or corroboration, just one book written by Alexander Exquemelin, a ship’s surgeon who sailed under Morgan. Morgan actually sued the English-language publishers of this book for slander, but funnily this was mostly because Exquemelin said he’d been an indentured servant when he first arrived in the West Indies.
That said, there is one book which really stands out for me beyond this one primary source, and it’s available free on Google Play Books, and I will link it on the website. It’s a novelized biography of Henry Morgan by Edward Howard, written in like 1824, which drew on every conceivable potential piece of evidence and applied a bit of poetic license to create a narrative. It doesn’t appropriately cite its sources, or it cites things that I can’t possibly verify, like Morgan’s dying words, which is frustrating, but it is a really fun read.
Anyway, we know that Morgan made no effort to take Curacao, and according to Exquemelin, he instead decided with Mansfield that going against the Spanish would be easier and result in more riches than attacking the Dutch. It’s possible that Mansfield, himself, was Dutch, but it’s also possible that he was English, or Scottish. And one source swears he was actually peacefully running a sugar plantation at the time. Who knows.
And Mansfield decided to retake Providence Island, which was still perfectly located to be a privateering base for raids against the Spanish. The Spanish had owned Providence Island since taking it from the English on the eve of the English Civil War, and by now, it was little more than a place to dump petty criminals and prostitutes, so when the English took it back, they found no real resistance. And they treated the Spanish surprisingly well when they captured it. They dropped them off in Porto Bello, in Panama, and then left a 32 person garrison to guard the island. After that, Mansfield and Morgan spent a few weeks sailing the Costa Rica coast, ultimately landing near the mouth of the Colla River, only to find that the president of Panama had raised an army to meet them, which forced them to leave.
And they needed to protect Providence anyway, so they went back to Jamaica to ask for reinforcements. Modiford refused, saying he didn’t want to upset the king or send away people who could help protect Jamaica, so they moved on to Tortuga to recruit people, and in Tortuga, Mansfield died. This left Morgan on his own, head of a fleet, and already one of the most notorious pirates of his time.
Morgan was totally unable to recruit reinforcements in Tortuga, too, so he wrote to colonies across English and French America, including New England and Virginia, to try, and still, no one agreed to go. So when Spanish ships appeared off the Providence Island coast, and there were still only 32 English people on the island, they surrendered without a fight.
Funnily, the reason that Modiford hadn’t sent reinforcements with Mansfield and Morgan was that he wanted to put Providence under more direct Jamaican authority, with his brother as governor. So instead of sending people with the pirates, he secretly recruited and sent a ship full of his own reinforcements and colonists to the island. When they arrived, though, the Spanish had already taken the English garrison prisoner. As the English approached, the Spanish re-raised the English flag, and got one of the garrison members to guide the Jamaican ship to shore. And when they reached it, the Spanish emerged and imprisoned everyone on board.
Morgan had turned his attention to Cuba, though. He cited rumors that the Spanish were preparing to invade Jamaica from there, taking advantage of the fact that the English were distracted by their war with the French and Dutch. And, Modiford recognized Morgan as the head of Jamaica’s pirates, and issued him letters of marque which legalized his plundering activities. Letters of marque were the theoretical difference between privateering, which was supposed to be a form of military activity with a specific purpose, and which gave the king a share of the plunder, and piracy, which was purely criminal. The fact that letters of marque like this got issued blurred the line severely.
Morgan now rendezvoused at the Isle of Pines to plan his attack on Cuba. His men expected to attack Havana, perhaps by targeting the churches first, but instead, Morgan suggested Puerto Principe, now Camguey. He had a fleet of 12 ships and 700 men, about half English and half French. Puerto Principe traded with Havana, had never been plundered before, and was underdefended because it wasn’t a coastal town. It was fundamentally a sleepy farming community, but it was one within trading distance of one of the richest towns in the Spanish Empire. His men were convinced.
They sailed toward the town, but as they approached a Spanish prisoner who had pretended not to know English jumped over the side of one of the ships, swam to shore and told the townspeople what the pirates were planning to do. The Spanish governor gathered every able bodied man, whether free or slave, and armed them as best he could to counter the attack. He placed half of them in outposts to ambush the pirates as they approached, while half stayed in the town itself. Of the second half, he put a few dozen on mules and ponies to form a makeshift cavalry. He ordered trees to be cut down and placed as barricades along the streets, and then he waited.
He made a crucial mistake, though. He lined all his barricades and ambushes along the roads to the town, but when the pirates reached the first barricade and couldn’t pass, they simply walked through the forest. Without even trying, they’d avoided every trap the governor had laid, and soon emerged unscathed from the woods right outside the town, where even the troops there weren’t in the position to block their advance.
When he saw what’d happened, the governor ordered his cavalry to move over and meet Morgan’s men in combat, but the pirates formed a semicircle and over the course of about four hours maneuvered in a way that separated these people from the rest of the town and pushed them into the woods. The farmers had tried to mimic a professional fighting force, but the cavalry was completely wiped out in this confrontation, and the governor was killed, while the pirates lost virtually no one.
The remaining members of the town’s militia now rushed back into the town, and the residents hid in their homes and other buildings. They shot at the pirates from their homes and stores, and unlike the governor’s planned defense, this did kill a lot of them. And in response to this setback, Morgan called a parley. And at that Parley, he told the Spanish that if they didn’t immediately surrender to discretion, discretion as opposed to quarter, he would roast them alive in their own houses, together with their women and children. Morgan wouldn’t promise to be merciful if they surrendered, but he did promise to kill them all if they didn’t.
The farmers surrendered, and the pirates did their thing. Pillage, rape, torture, rape, drink, rape, torture, pillage. Women and children were placed in separate Churches and starved, most of them to death. Some killed themselves to escape. One man after another died on the rack, but the pirates didn’t find much loot.
There simply wasn’t very much wealth in the town at all. It wasn’t a commercial place. It was an agricultural place. Its residents made a comfortable living trading in hides, but nothing more than that. Even when Morgan demanded a ransom as he prepared to leave, there simply wasn’t the money to pay it. While he waited for the ransom, the president of Cuba raised an actual fighting force to push Morgan’s men out, and he was forced to retreat with 500 salted oxen and an amount of money not even big enough to pay most of the pirates’ bar debts.
It was a disaster, but more than that, it was a hyper-violent raid on a group of peasants. It was a tortuous slaughter of farmers for no real gain, and a pathetic, disgusting showing by all accounts. It was something that gave Morgan a uniquely notorious name among the Spanish, and it was a debacle that also split the English and French crews. The French already didn’t love some of the things the English did. The French were Catholic, and even said mass on board their ships every so often. This might have been hypocritical, but it still put them at odds with the English, who plundered Churches and made a point of using sacred images for target practice. The Dutch were anti-Catholic, but nothing like the English, and the French struggled with this in the best of times.
But, in the irritation over the lack of plunder from this raid, one English pirate stole a marrow bone from a French one. The French pirate challenged him to a duel, and before the duel could take place, the English pirate stabbed him in the back. The French as a group were incensed, and Morgan was able to prevent violence only by promising to hang the murderer when they reached Jamaica. Even with that promise, which Morgan did keep, the two groups split. The French went to Tortuga, and the English to Jamaica.
In Jamaica, Morgan justified his raid by saying that he’d gotten evidence of Prince Maurice being one of several Englishmen being held prisoner in Porto Bello, as well as more evidence of a planned Spanish attack. And meanwhile, the Spanish ambassador in Westminster protested the raid to Charles II, but the king simply said he had no control over Morgan. He wrote to Modiford chastising him for his support of the mission, but took his cut of the loot and let the issue die.
For the sake of his men, though, Morgan’s next raid had to be big, and big he went. He chose Porto Bello, Panama, as his target. It was one of the best-fortified cities in Spanish America, third only to Cartagena and Havana. It was the place where Francis Drake had died seven decades before, a trading hub which, a handful of times a year, held insane amounts of slaves and loot. It was guarded by four forts, two on the port, and two more on the other side of town. It was the big score, the shangri la, the holy grail of … nah, none of you are going to get that one.
A slightly interesting aside before we get into the story is that the sources for this raid use the term fort and castle interchangeably, which isn’t something I’ve often seen. And it kind of makes sense. This was still early enough that castles were still in use, but only barely, and the terminology didn’t stay around in America for long, but it did make its way here, which is cool.
As the sun set, Morgan’s fleet arrived about thirty miles west of Porto Bello, and they spent the night quietly making their way up the local river in boats, leaving their ships a few miles away. When they reached the town, they surprised and captured its sentinel before he had a chance to discharge his musket. And then they approached the first of the harbor’s forts.
Morgan ordered the sentinel to hail the fort’s troops, and when they met, it was clear that they were vastly outnumbered. The fort had only 130 soldiers instead of the 300 they were supposed to have, while the pirates had 400. Morgan ordered them to surrender silently, lest they be slaughtered to a man, but they refused. Instead of surrendering, they opened fire to warn the city that it was under attack. The pirates attacked and easily overpowered the troops and took the castle. There, they found eleven English prisoners, and released them, and after they were safely out, they set fire to the fort’s powder room and blew it up, killing every Spanish person inside.
The alarm had been raised, though, so the town’s inhabitants scrambled to hide their valuables while its soldiers fought. The battle raged until noon, a full 18 hours, and plenty of people on both sides died. After a bloody fight through the town’s streets, the second fort surrendered as soon as the pirates arrived. It was also under-manned, and potentially manned partially by English captives, and so now the pirates had taken two of the four forts. One of these was under command of the Spanish governor, himself, and that’s the one the pirates now decided to attack.
The plan was to climb over the walls of the fort, so Morgan’s men put together 12 ladders which would each hold four people climbing shoulder to shoulder. And they also captured the town’s priests, nuns and a good number of women and marched these people ahead of the ladders. When they reached the walls, they forced the women and clergy to hold the ladders in hopes of dissuading the Spanish from shooting. Any Spanish person who tried to shoot at the pirates would almost inevitably hit a priest, nun or woman first.
These prisoners begged the governor to surrender and spare their lives, but he refused. Like the guards of the first fort, he would not surrender, no matter what. He demanded his men continue the fight. They ended up killing a lot of these people, but they also got plenty of their attackers, and they prevented fully half of the ladders from being raised. Half just wasn’t enough, though. Climbing six ladders four abreast, Morgan’s men still managed to flood the fort and slaughter people with guns, grenades and fire balls until the soldiers started surrendering.
The governor, though, would not. He’d heard stories of Puerto Principe, and the towns along the coasts of Spanish colonies. He knew what was coming, and he knew who he was fighting. He would not surrender to the pirates. He would not be hanged as a prisoner, or die on the rack, or have his eyes gouged out with rope knots, when he could die fighting. The pirates might win, but it would be quite literally over his dead body because he would not submit to the likes of them. And he would kill his own people, soldiers, women, clergy, in the process of fighting, but those people could just as easily die anyway. He wouldn’t win, but at least he would fight.
A group of pirates approached to offer him quarter, and he shot them. His own soldiers encouraged him to take the offer of quarter, and he shot them, too. Some of his men refused to fight, and he also shot them. He killed as many pirates as he possibly could, and did everything he could to motivate his soldiers to do the same. Eventually, the pirates sent his own wife and daughter into his room to beg him on their knees to surrender, and he still refused. The pirates shot over their heads and he finally fell.
With the governor dead, the fight was over. His fort surrendered, as did the last one. The battle had raged for 18 hours. Now, male prisoners were put in one fort, female in another, and wounded shoved together in a room to die.
The victory was followed by a level of drunkenness and brutal debauchery that even exceeded the norm for pirates. It was so extreme that plenty of them died of alcohol poisoning. And again, rape, torture pillage, the rack, starving of women and children, the usual, but even more than usual.
But there are a couple of interesting side stories here.
The first is that one of the English prisoners was a man named Joseph Bradley, and now, Bradley joined Morgan’s fleet. Howard’s novelized history asserts that Bradley had actually been the man who gave that second fort over to the English, but whether or not that’s true, now he took a position as one of the ship’s captains, second in command to Morgan, himself.
The other is that one of the pirates was an African slave-turned-Morgan’s mistres, who had been sailing dressed as a man and acting as Morgan’s secretary. He says that she was killed in this battle, and that Morgan now buried her not only in the Church, but in the shrine with the holy relics of a dead saint. After forcing the priests to perform a twisted version of a Catholic burial, he then slit their throats so that no one would know her bones were there and take them out. He cites an account from Morgan as he was dying to verify this, but it’d be cool to see some archaeological evidence one way or another.
After their plundering of the town was over, Morgan issued a standard parting ultimatum. If the town didn’t find and give another 25,000 pounds worth of coins, the pirates would burn the buildings, destroy all the forts, and kill a bunch more people or kidnap them and take them to Jamaica. The town, like most, had nothing left and had to send messengers to neighboring towns to raise the money. Meanwhile, the president of Panama led a militia to fight the pirates, but the pirates blocked the pass they had to cross to enter Porto Bello and stopped them before they reached the town.
With this victory, the president sent Morgan a message, asking how he could have taken so great a city with only 400 men, and what kind of arms he used that seemed to make him invincible. To this, Morgan responded by sending a small pistol, some bullets, and a message that “he desired him to accept this slender pattern of the arms wherewith he had taken Porto Bello, and keep them for a twelvemonth, after which time he promised to come to Panama and fetch them away.”
The more honest answer might have been unspeakable violence and terror, but that didn’t have the same ring to it. Regardless, the president returned the pistol and sent a gold ring with it, saying that “the [pistol] he did not want, as he had plenty of weapons of his own, and he begged of Morgan not to give himself the trouble of coming so far as Panama, as assuredly he would not fare so well there as he had done at Porto Bello.”
As this exchange was happening, the townspeople’s messengers had collected 25,000 pounds and loaded it along with everything else the pirates had looted onto their ships. They took the useful guns with them, and disabled the ones they didn’t want, and finally they sailed back to the Isle of Pines to divide the exorbitant amount of plunder. There were only a couple hundred survivors from the pirate crew, and they had looted 140,000 pounds sterling worth of coins and merchandise.
That divided, they returned to Jamaica for a couple months of, again, debauchery which was excessive even by pirate standards. And they brought news to Modiford that the English prisoners had hinted that Prince Maurice might actually have been moved from Porto Bello to Lima six months before. Bad luck that the pirates kept just missing him.
In Jamaica, though, they also got news that the war had ended. Modiford now rewarded Morgan for his protection of the island from the Spanish, as well as what was probably more important, which was the sheer quantity of money the pirates brought. He gave Morgan a large frigate with 36 guns which had just arrived from England. This would be the first really nice ship that Morgan captained, and Morgan decided that if he was going to captain such a nice ship, he should actually have two. There was a similarly sized French ship in the local harbor, and Morgan asked to buy it. When they refused to sell, he invited the officers to dinner aboard his new ship, and then took them prisoner. His associates went to work persuading the French crew to turn to piracy, and seeing the kind of treasure they had managed to amass, they were convinced. After making their decision, the French crew celebrated their anticipated adventures in the classic way, drinking and shooting off guns and cannons.
One of those cannons, though, fired right into the new ship and sank it while Morgan’s prisoner-taking dinner party was still going on. Morgan and a few officers managed to escape, but the vast majority of prisoners and crew died, in part because they were too drunk to escape and swim to the shore. There had been 350 people on board, and 30 survived the debacle. The surviving French officers and crew were blamed for the attack and thrown in prison, and Morgan was back down to one nice ship.
And that’s the story of Jamaica in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The presence of pirates deterred the French and Dutch from attacking Jamaica in the way they did the Leewards, but they also didn’t contribute much to the defense of English colonists or interests. The Spanish again protested, and Charles again slapped Modiford on the wrist while taking his share of the treasure.
Next episode, we’ll discuss Barbados’s attempts to stabilize, and desire for self-governance after the Second Anglo-Dutch War.