The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (9 page)

Morgan read the letter to his men—and as buccaneers are wont to do, they scoffed. If they had risked their lives to gain treasure, why would they not risk their lives to keep it? Morgan then dictated his official reply: “Sir, I have your summons, and since I understand you are so near, I shall save you the labor with your nimble frigates to come here, being resolved to visit you with all expedition, and there we will put to hazard of battle in whose power it shall be to use clemency (yours we are acquainted with; nor do we expect any).” It closed with a final insult, dating the letter “from his Majesty of England's city of Maracaibo. . . . ”
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That was the spirit—and it was backed by force, as Morgan, with the skill of a trained soldier and the cleverness of an entrepreneurial English sea dog, was about to outwit the Spaniards once again. He sent a captured Cuban ship—crewed by only a dozen men, and wooden dummies dressed in sailors' gear—to the Spanish flagship. When the ships were grappled together, the Spaniards discovered the ruse—but too late. The freebooters, plunging over the side, had set the ship ablaze, and the fire ship soon engulfed the flagship. The other two Spanish ships ran aground by the fort. One was scuttled by fire; the other captured by the buccaneers.

There was a temporary stalemate. Morgan didn't think he could run his ships past the fort's guns, so he mounted an overland attack, but it was repelled. A few days later Morgan made a show of landing a large raiding party for another landward attack—but it was merely a decoy to get the
Spaniards to move their guns to face inland. After they did, and night fell, Morgan sailed his flotilla safely away.

The overarching irony was that while England was trying to get Jamaica to cooperate with its policy of peaceful coexistence with Spain, the Spanish in their frustration had decided that the only rational course was to enlist their own privateers to attack the English, which they duly did. In retaliation, Governor Modyford, ignoring London (as was popular in Jamaica) named Morgan admiral and commander in chief with a commission to attack every Spanish ship that crossed his path.

Morgan embraced his roving commission and throughout the summer and fall of 1670 he raided the Spanish. The highlight came in December, by which time Morgan had gathered together a seaborne army of two thousand buccaneers—the largest ever assembled: Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, united by a hatred of Spain and a willingness to risk life for loot. On Christmas Day they recaptured Providence Island (a colony originally established by English Puritans). It was the first step on Morgan's path to sack Panama. In January 1671, he captured the fort guarding the entrance to the Chagres River at the narrow waist of central Panama. Morgan's plan was to lead his men across the Isthmus to the Pacific side where they would find the famously wealthy Panama City.

Morgan garrisoned the captured river fort with several hundred freebooters and then led fifteen hundred buccaneers on a seven-day trek through the Panamanian jungle. When they emerged outside Panama City, they found a Spanish army drawn up to meet them. But the buccaneers proved better soldiers, with steadier discipline. The Spanish militia, cavalry and infantry, charged impetuously—and then fled with equal dispatch when met by blasts from buccaneer guns. The buccaneers suffered fifteen casualties—the Spanish, four hundred to five hundred. Morgan's privateers stormed the city, only to find that most of its treasure had been moved
offshore, to ships Morgan couldn't reach. Morgan's expedition had been a military coup, but his men were in it for profit and there was very little of that to be had—certainly nothing large enough, in the minds of many of them, for the hazards they had endured and the long march back up to the Chagres that had to follow.

In Spring 1671, Jamaica received a new governor from England, Sir Thomas Lynch. Lynch bore orders to arrest his predecessor Sir Thomas Modyford, but assured him that his arrest was largely to impress Spain with England's good faith in trying to maintain the peace between their two countries (though Modyford was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two years and Lynch would soon be hanging pirates who failed to heed his warnings that Jamaica was no longer a haven for “the Brethren of the Coast,” the self-governing Protestant pirates who had so long been its protectors). Also, in due course, came orders that he was to arrest Morgan for his unauthorized (by London) raid on Panama.

Morgan, however, was unwell—a dangerous fever kept him bedridden, wrapped in sweat-sodden blankets—and Lynch did not want to alienate the affections of the people of Jamaica by mistreating their hero. It was not until April 1672 that Morgan was judged well enough to travel, and when he did so, he was borne away not as a convict but as a very important person who needed to return for consultations with the government in London. There too, the government seemed uninterested in pressing charges against him (he was not imprisoned, but left at liberty) and by the summer of 1673 the mood in London had reversed: Morgan seemed just the man to secure Jamaica's future. In 1674, he was knighted and returned to Jamaica as deputy governor to the newly appointed governor, Lord Vaughn.

Among other duties, Morgan was charged with ending piracy in the Caribbean, and this he did with all the mocking gusto he had brought to ravaging the Spanish Main. At times, his new career could make him appear cruel and hypocritical. But he was no crueler to his former friends the pirates than they had been to the Spanish.

As a private citizen Morgan increased his landholdings. In his social life, old habits died hard. He caroused in true pirate style, with a well-earned reputation for heavy drinking in a place and time when the standards for “moderate” drinking were rather capacious—and his waistline began to show signs of his regular debauches. The raffish privateer was fast becoming a supersized fatty. In 1683, he found himself bounced from the island council as no longer sober-minded enough to represent the new respectable face of Jamaica—a face that was being powdered by the return of Sir Thomas Lynch as governor. Before he died in 1688, Morgan was, by the king's consent, allowed to rejoin the council—but Morgan's last years were those of a cantankerous physical wreck.

Nevertheless, Morgan, like Drake, had always been driven by ambition—ambition for money, glory, and respect. Drake had bought his manor house to have the appurtenances, if not the bloodlines, of a gentleman. Morgan had become a planter, and he left his wife with holdings that, in today's terms, likely made her a modest millionairess. Both men were patriots, and like all patriots they no doubt wanted to be remembered by history.
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If you want to pay your respects to Morgan, it's impossible. His grave fell into the ocean when an earthquake collapsed Port Royal. Still, a burial at
sea was obviously suitable, and it would no doubt amuse the old rogue to learn that he is today best known as the grinning, bearded, red-coated, high-booted, sword-resting, caped, pistol-belted, and tricorned captain that is the label trademark of a well-known brand of rum. It is, after all, a fitting tribute.

“The reasonable object of ambition to a man is to have his name transmitted to posterity for eminent services rendered to his country and to mankind.”

 

C
ornwallis was a proto-Victorian. If he lacked the breed's eccentricity, he fully embodied its devotion to duty and high moral character. He was responsible, temperate, and industrious; domestic and countrified in his preferences, he nevertheless seemed to chafe when not employed by his country—which employed him quite a lot, across three continents.

Typical of his class, he was sent to a hard school—Eton, where pupils learned Latin declensions and Spartan habits. Also typical of his class—and a tribute to its education—he was undaunted by hardship, unimpressed by threats, indifferent to danger, sure in command, practical in his assessments, and high-minded in his duty. He was, his father noted, a “very military”
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young man; Cornwallis always thought of himself foremost as a soldier.

Cornwallis's military career began at seventeen, when he became an ensign in the fashionable 1st Grenadier Guards. Unlike many young officers, he took his military vocation seriously. He went to the continent to see action, and even finagled himself a staff appointment in Germany during the Seven Years' War. In 1763 he took up his political duties in the House
of Lords, where he joined the Rockingham Whigs and established himself as a liberal in favor of conciliating rather than taxing the American colonies. In 1768, he married Jemima Tullekin Jones, the daughter of a regimental colonel. The couple was ardently devoted; it was alleged she died (in 1779) because his long absences fighting the American colonists broke her heart. Her death, Cornwallis wrote, “effectually destroyed all my hopes of happiness in this world. I will not dwell on this wretched subject, the thoughts of which harrow up my soul.”
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