Read Empire of Blue Water Online
Authors: Stephan Talty
Tags: #Caribbean Area, #Pirates, #Pirates - Caribbean Area - History - 17th century, #Mexico, #Morgan; Henry, #17th Century, #General, #Caribbean Area - History - To 1810, #Latin America, #Caribbean & West Indies, #History
Empire of Blue Water (35 page)
The calamity put a hard stop to the golden era that Port Royal had embodied. The city was rebuilt, but it never again rose to the heights of the glory days. Pirates continued to cruise the waters off the city, and some were occasionally hung on Gallows Point during fits of law and order, including the randy and dashing “Calico Jack” Rackham, in 1720. His lover, the rare female pirate Anne Bonny, and her widely feared friend Mary Read, escaped the noose by “pleading their bellies” (both were pregnant). Bonny’s reprieve was short; she died of a fever in a Port Royal jail, while Read disappeared off the face of the earth. Officials in Jamaica and Tortuga often looked the other way when pirates strolled through town, as many of the locals had a soft spot in their hearts for the old Brethren, but the pirates no longer ruled the town and the entire region as they once had. Those privateers who had earned enough pieces of eight from Morgan’s raids and managed not to relinquish them to the Port Royal vice economy settled onto their estates and emulated the admiral’s final years. Jamaica, however, no longer belonged to them.
No longer would the city shelter large numbers of the men who had made it rich and infamous the world over. No longer could a buccaneer organize the largest army in the Western Hemisphere, made up of trash tossed out of half a dozen European countries, plus runaway slaves and restless servants, and roam far and wide over half a continent, facing down an empire and stealing its riches. The Royal Navy stationed warships at Port Royal; Admiral Lord Nelson did a tour of duty at Fort Charles, and the English fleet took over from the Brethren the role of naval enforcers. The remaining pirates often restricted themselves to small lightning attacks on merchant vessels, instead of the audacious land attacks on major cities that Morgan had perfected. In the 1700s the sugar-and-slave economy came into its own, and more and more Port Royal became a traders’ town where it paid to be good with an abacus and not a musket. Not long after Morgan’s death, young men clambered out of ships arriving in Port Royal no longer dreaming of pirates. They wanted to own plantations and as many Africans as possible to work them. A different kind of cruelty won out.
But somehow over the years, the exquisite cruelties of the pirates’ expeditions were forgotten, their exploits resonated louder, and they became romantic figures. Crazy, yes, but romantic. Perhaps the traders’ world was simply too boring and too successful to compete with the story of the flaming arrow at San Lorenzo, the Maracaibo fireship, and all the rest. Morgan would not have understood it; he wanted to be bound more closely to the king and the English empire that he loved. He was never a wild-eyed revolutionary; far from it. But the superoxygenated air that the pirates seemed to carry with them over the Atlantic, in which any act of barbarity or valor was possible at any given moment, stamped the image of the buccaneer indelibly on the imagination. The pirate can seem at times like the freest man who ever walked the Americas, freer even than the Carib or the Arawak.
If it’s a myth, and it partly is, the world will take the myth. But you can’t attempt to do what Morgan and his men did without seeing yourselves as a prince of the New World, deserving of every wonder it possesses. Men like that do not live very long, but they are not easily forgotten.
Glossary
Ambuscade:
An ambush launched from a concealed fortification.
Arquebus:
A heavy, notoriously inaccurate matchlock gun that first came into use during the fifteenth century. Also spelled
harquebus.
Ball:
A bullet.
Boucan:
The tangy smoked meat produced and traded by the buccaneers of Hispaniola.
Buccaneer:
A pirate, especially one who operated against Spanish shipping and settlements in the West Indies during the seventeenth century.
Castellan:
The military officer in charge of a castle or fort.
Colors:
A flag.
Commission:
Also known as a letter of marque, this was a document authorizing a private citizen to wage war on a nation’s enemy.
Corsaro:
A pirate.
Doubloon:
A gold coin used in Spain and Spanish America.
Galleon:
A large three-or four-masted sailing ship used from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, especially by Spain, as a war and treasure ship.
Grandee:
The highest-ranking noble in the Spanish hierarchy.
Hispaniola:
The Caribbean island now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Logwood:
A spiny tropical American tree whose heartwood was used to make a purplish red dye.
Low Countries:
A region in northwestern Europe consisting of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Maroon:
A fugitive black slave in the West Indies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; also, the descendant of such a slave.
Matelot:
Literally, “bedmate,” but most often used to mean companion, or friend. Used by the early buccaneers to describe the man they paired up with in the jungles of Hispaniola.
Mestizo:
A person of mixed race, especially of mixed Native American and European ancestry.
New Spain:
Present-day Mexico.
New World:
The lands of the Western Hemisphere.
North Sea:
The present-day Caribbean Sea.
Piece of eight:
A common Spanish silver coin used widely in the New World. Also known as a peso or a cob.
Purchase:
All monies and goods obtained during a raid. The commonly used phrase “no purchase, no pay” meant that the buccaneers would depend solely on the booty they recovered on an expedition for their pay.
Roundshot:
A cannonball.
South Sea:
The present-day Pacific Ocean.
Spanish Main:
The Spanish-held mainland of North and South America.
United Provinces:
The present-day Netherlands.
Woolding:
A commonly used form of torture in which a knotted cord was tied around a victim’s head and then twisted with a stick until the eyes popped out.
General Bibliography
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
Spain and Its World, 1500–1700.
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Gohau, Gabriel.
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Kamen, Henry.
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HarperCollins, New York, 2003.
———.
Spain in the Later 17th Century, 1665–1700.
Longman, London and New York, 1980.
Kietzman, Mary Jo.
The Self-Fashioning of an Early Modern Englishwoman: Mary Carleton’s Lives.
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Lane, Kris E.
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Langdon-Davies, John.
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Marx, Jennifer.
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Marx, Robert.
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McCullough, David.
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O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson.
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University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2000.
Parry, J. H.
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Payne, John.
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Peterson, Mendel.
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Petrovich, Sandra Marie.
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Stevens, John Richard, ed.
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Taylor, S. A. G.
The Western Design.
The Institute of Jamaica, Kingston, 1965.
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Todd, Janet, and Elizabeth Spearing, eds.
Counterfeit Ladies.
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Ure, John.
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Primary Sources
Barlow, Edward.
Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea in King’s Ships.
Transcribed by Basil Lubbock, Volume II. Hurst & Blackett, London, 1934.
Carleton, Mary.
News from Jamaica in a Letter from Port Royal Written by the Germane Princess to Her Fellow Collegiates and Friends in New-Gate.
London, Printed by Peter Lillicrap, for Philip Brigs Living in Mer-maid Court near Amen Corner in Pater-Noster Row, 1671.
de Lussan, Raveneau.
Journal of a Voyage into the South Sea in 1684 and the Following Years with the Filibustiers.
Translated by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur. Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland, 1930.
Dunlop, John.
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Neill & Company, Edinburgh. 1834.
Esquemeling, John.
Buccaneers of America.
Dover, New York, 1967.
Gage, Thomas.
The English-American.
George Rutledge, London, 1648.
Johnson, Captain Charles.
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, May 1724.
Carroll and Graf, New York, 1999.
Rogers, Woodes.
A Cruising Voyage Round the World.
Cassell, London, 1928.
Sloane, Hans.
Voyage to the Islands of Madeira, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christopher and Jamaica.
Self-published, London, 1707.
Wafer, Lionel.
A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America.
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