Authors: James A. Michener
“Smell this,” Will cried bitterly to an imprisoned Spanish captain. “What is it?”
“Gunpowder.”
“Run for your lives,” Will shouted to Ned and the other sailors, and when they were gone, he ignited the powder trail in the room, watched it start down the stairs, and dashed to safety. Before the prisoners could break free, a tremendous explosion destroyed their corner of the castle and all were blown to bits.
Morgan had eliminated one of the castles, but another of significant strength remained, and it was commanded by a most valiant man, the governor himself, supported by soldiers of merit who repulsed one English attack after another, until even Morgan had to admit: “If we don’t do something powerful, they’ll prevail.”
What he did was teach even the Spaniards a lesson in the brutalities of pirating, for he halted his attack on the castle, turning instead to raid a monastery, from which he collected a group of monks, and a convent, from which he took many nuns. While this was being done, his carpenters were assembling extremely wide ladders, “so broad that four men could climb side by side to scale a wall.”
When all was ready he gave simple orders to the monks and nuns: “You and you, lift those ladders and carry them to the wall of that castle.” And behind the religious he marched the mayor of the city, the businessmen and the elders to help bear the weight of the ladders: “If anyone falters, man or woman, you’ll be shot in the back.” To ensure that the ladders went forward, he intermixed sailors with the group, and Ned was assigned the job of goading forward the nuns.
As this tragic procession started toward the walls, the men around Morgan said: “But the Spaniards will never dare fire at their own people, and religious ones at that,” and he said: “You don’t know Spaniards.”
Slowly the heavy ladders inched toward the walls. Nervously Ned bent double to hide behind the nuns. Urgently Morgan drove the column forward. And on the parapets the governor waited, deliberating.
He saw that the ladders were of such dimension that once planted, scaling his walls would be possible, and if that happened, all was lost. But he also realized that he could halt the progress of the deadly ladders only by firing directly at the best citizens of his city.
Now from the ladder-bearers rose pitiful cries directed at the governor: “Do not fire on us! Save us, we are your people!” Some called him by name. Others reminded him of past relationships, and all looked upward into the barrels of his guns.
“Fire!” he shouted, and the guns blazed into the mass of his friends. After the dead nuns and the shattered monks had fallen aside, Ned and the others goaded the survivors to keep plodding ahead with their ladders.
*2
“Fire!” Others fell, but then the ladders were tilted against the walls and a hundred sailors led by remorseless Will Tatum were up and over.
The fighting was wild and close in, and marked by great heroism on both sides. This was no easy victory like that at the first fort, no Spanish officer asking the English to shoot him. The Spanish governor in particular conducted himself with such outstanding bravery that even Tatum had to admire him: “Sir, yield with honor! Your life will be spared!”
Thinking that the governor did not hear him, for he fought on incredibly, Will called for Ned to interpret for him, and his nephew shouted:
“Honorable Gobernador, rindase con honor.”
This time the noble fighting machine heard the words, saluted, and half lunged at three assailants, who had no course but to cut him down.
To Ned, the next two days would always remain a blur, days that happened but which he preferred to erase from memory. The privateers, having won an incredible victory against one of Spain’s main cities, a key link in the Peru-Sevilla chain, felt themselves entitled to a victory debauch, and they launched one with no regard to the rights of the
defeated or the rules of decency. Rape and pillage, maiming and burning, turned proud Porto Bello into a charnel house, and many a Spanish man seeking to protect his woman ended with a saber through his chest. Ned, watching the saturnalia, thought: When I left Barbados, I wasn’t seeking this.
It was not a Spanish survivor who reported the bestiality of these two days, but a Dutchman who had served as one of Morgan’s captains. Many years after, when an old man in retirement at The Hague, he wrote:
What the English did at Porto Bello leaves a scar on my soul, for I did not believe that men who were such decent companions afloat could be such fiends ashore. After we captured the two castles we gathered all the citizens into the public square and told them: “Show us where you hid the money, or we will make you tell.”
This brought forth some money from people who knew what to expect from English pirates, because that’s what they were despite calling themselves privateers. Having gained the easy money, they now set about searching for the hard, and they did this by applying to men and women alike the most hellish tortures that man has devised. Racks were set up in various spots to tear limbs apart. Fire was applied to all parts of the body. They used a most terrible torture they called
woolding
, whereby a broad cord was placed around the head at the middle forehead. Then, with sticks knotted into the cord at the back, they drew the cord ever tighter, causing the worst pain a man could know, for even his brains were addled, his eyes began popping out of his head, until at last he fainted and often died from a crushed brain.
I saw them cut people apart, slowly and with repeated shouts “Where’s it hidden?” until body and soul fragmented at the same instant. I saw them do things to women that are best forgotten, but what haunts me to this day are the indecencies visited upon Catholic nuns who could not have had even one peso.
In this Dutchman’s horrified recollection of the sack of Porto Bello appeared a passage which threw oblique light on how these extravagances
affected young Pennyfeather on his first serious privateering adventure:
Each morning Captain Morgan sent scouting parties to search the woods for men and women who had fled at first gunfire: “If they were clever enough to flee, they were also smart enough to have gathered riches in years past. We must find where the jewels and silver are hidden.” These people, when caught, were subjected to the worst tortures, and on the fourth morning, when I was sent out at the head of a detachment to capture the last groups that had remained in hiding, I had in my command a fine English lad called Ned, and together we found three families of refugees, but as we were bringing them in, roped together, I saw Ned watch carefully the other pirates, and when they were not looking he untied the women and set them free. He caught me looking at him, but, not wishing to see acts I would have to report, I turned away.
When the tortures were concluded, emissaries were sent across the isthmus to the capital city of Panamá to demand a ransom of 350,000 pesos in silver, failing which, the entire city of Porto Bello would be burned to the ground. Officials in Panamá replied that they could not raise such a sum, but they did offer to give Morgan a promissory note on a bank in Genoa; he replied, sensibly: “Privateers feel safer with hard bullion.” In the end, 100,000 pesos were paid, and twenty-four days after the initial assault the privateering fleet weighed anchor and started the swift run back to Port Royal, where Will Tatum, Ned Pennyfeather and each of the other participants received at least a hundred and fifty English pounds, in those days a tremendous sum. Ned sent his share back to his mother.
If Ned Pennyfeather at the sack of Porto Bello in 1668 saw Henry Morgan at his brutal worst, in 1669 at the attack on Maracaibo he saw him at his strategic best. The story of how Morgan came to attack the nearly impregnable site is one of the dramatic tales of the Caribbean.
After his reverberating victory at Porto Bello the British government gave him, as their
soi-disant
Admiral of the Spanish Main, a powerful new ship, the
Oxford
, a 34-gun frigate with a crew of a hundred
and sixty. Naval warfare in the Caribbean was about to be drastically modified.
To a convocation held aboard his new ship anchored at Isla Vaca, a small Jamaican island halfway between the pirate strongholds of Tortuga and Port Royal, Morgan invited any captains who might be interested in a major privateering foray, and a cutthroat gang of desperadoes met to decide what rich city along the Main to attack next. As always, they would be guided by the rule: “If we capture a ship, the king gets his share, but if we sack a city, we get it all.” Before the discussion began, Morgan, in a show of schoolboy pride, wanted to display his new ship: “Look at the stoutness of this cabin, the heaviness of the holds. This is a fighting ship.” And then he added: “Gentlemen, in a few minutes we shall select our next target, and remember that for the first time we will have at the core of our fleet this powerful ship, stronger than anything the Spanish can muster against us.” And then, in his enchanting Welsh way, he could not refrain from adding a comic touch: “The
Oxford
was sent out here for one purpose only, to suppress piracy. So if you sight any pirates, let me be the first to know.”
Because of the
Oxford
, discussion of possible targets was animated, and lesser towns like those serving the logwood trade were not even considered. “Any profit in heading back to Porto Bello?”
“None,” Morgan said. “We picked that chicken clean.”
“What chances at Vera Cruz?”
“If Drake and Hawkins failed, how could we succeed? We’ve proved we’re good, and with this new one, we’ll be very good. But not invincible.”
“Campeche?”
“Not rich enough.”
“Havana?”
“Those new forts? No!”
And then Captain McFee named the target that all had been thinking of but none had been brave enough to mention: “Cartagena?”
This magical name evoked a flood of memories. Drake had gained much booty there. Dutch pirates had attacked it. The fierce French pirate, L’Ollonais, cruelest man ever to sail the Caribbean, had tried Cartagena, and many others had attempted investing it for its almost limitless wealth, only to be thrown back by its formidable defenses. One who had been defeated there described it as “a bay within a bay
whose forts protect a smaller, tighter bay rimmed with guns. It can be taken, but not by mortals.”
“Drake took it,” someone said, and another captain replied: “A century ago, before the new forts were built.” Before anyone could comment, he reminded them: “Spanish engineers can build a lot of forts in a hundred years.”
Then Morgan spoke: “The thirty-four big guns of our
Oxford
can silence whatever guns the Spanish have. It’s Cartagena!”
The more timorous captains would surely have advised against such boldness had not, at this precise moment, a careless spark from some source never identified fallen into the powder magazines, igniting an explosion of such enormous magnitude that it blew the
Oxford
completely apart, causing it to founder immediately and sink with more than two hundred men. Miraculously, Morgan and his senior captains were saved by the stout construction of the room in which they met, and as he said nonchalantly when fished from the water: “The Morgan luck held again.”
When the sea-drenched survivors huddled ashore, Morgan did not allow them even a minute to lament their great loss, for while the few members of the crew who had escaped built fires to dry off, he told the captains: “As we were saying a few minutes ago, we’re not strong enough to attack Vera Cruz, and now without the
Oxford
we can’t assault Cartagena. Well, men, what city is available?”
A French captain who had probed all corners of the Caribbean, and fiercely, said: “Admiral Morgan, there’s one no man has mentioned. Maracaibo,” and the English captains looked hesitantly, one at the other, and for good reason.
On the northern coast of Venezuela, nearly five hundred miles west of the great salt flats at Cumaná but only four hundred miles east of Cartagena, lay the huge gulf of Venezuela, at whose southern end a very narrow channel led to an inland fresh-water lake nearly as big as the gulf itself. It was called La Laguna de Maracaibo, to be famous in later centuries for its large deposits of oil, and it measured eighty-six miles north to south, sixty east to west, more than five thousand square miles. It was a world to itself, practically cut off from the sea and rimmed by fruitful fields, prosperous villages and, at the end of the channel, by the substantial town bearing the same name as the laguna.
Maracaibo was thus both a tempting target because of its wealth and a very dangerous one because of the risk of getting one’s ships
trapped inside the lake if a squadron of Spanish warships could be summoned while a raid was under way. Even well-armed privateers with ample gunfire thought twice about trying to sack the Maracaibo area: “The spoils would be vast, but there’s always that terrible risk of getting trapped in the channel. What happens then?”
Morgan, reflecting on the dangers involved in attempting this ticklish target, said: “Let’s get some sleep, if we can,” and in the morning he gathered his captains: “It’s got to be Maracaibo.” And that was how, on the morning of 9 March 1669, Ned Pennyfeather stood in the prow of the
Glen Affric
with a sounding line checking the depths of the tortuous entrance into the laguna. At times the passageway was so narrow, he felt he could reach out and touch the shore, but he was so busy attending to his job that he almost failed to see looming ahead on a prominent point a Spanish fort whose guns might destroy the ship. It was prodigious, a huge mass of stone wall and iron battlement with heavy guns pointed directly at the ten approaching ships.
“Guns!” he shouted belatedly, just as a shot, poorly aimed and elevated, screamed overhead, far wide of the invading ships. It was the Spanish tragedy repeated: a fine castle-fortress, perfectly placed and properly armed, but undermanned by troops lacking in either determination or skill. Ned was almost ashamed at how easily Morgan’s men took this excellent fort without the loss of a single sailor.