Howard Pyle's Book of pirates : fiction, fact & fancy concerning the buccaneers & marooners of the Spanish Main
most thoroughly and completely, and had the governor thereof been as
brave as he who met his death in the castle of Porto Bello, there
might have been a different tale to tell. As it was, he surrendered it
in a most cowardly fashion, merely stipulating that there should be a
sham attack by the buccaneers, whereby his credit might be saved. And
so Saint Catharine was won.
The next step to be taken was the capture of the castle of Chagres,
which guarded the mouth of the river of that name, up which river the
buccaneers would be compelled to transport their troops and provisions
for the attack upon the city of Panama. This adventure was undertaken
by four hundred picked men under command of Captain Morgan himself.
The castle of Chagres, known as San Lorenzo by the Spaniards, stood
upon the top of an abrupt rock at the mouth of the river, and was one
of the strongest fortresses for its size in all of the West Indies.
This stronghold Morgan must have if he ever hoped to win Panama.
The attack of the castle and the defense of it were equally fierce,
bloody, and desperate. Again and again the buccaneers assaulted, and
again and again they were beaten back. So the morning came, and it
seemed as though the pirates had been baffled this time. But just at
this juncture the thatch of palm leaves on the roofs of some of the
buildings inside the fortifications took fire, a conflagration
followed, which caused the explosion of one of the magazines, and in
the paralysis of terror that followed, the pirates forced their way
into the fortifications, and the castle was won. Most of the Spaniards
flung themselves from the castle walls into the river or upon the
rocks beneath, preferring death to capture and possible torture; many
who were left were put to the sword, and some few were spared and held
as prisoners.
So fell the castle of Chagres, and nothing now lay between the
buccaneers and the city of Panama but the intervening and trackless
forests.
And now the name of the town whose doom was sealed was no secret.
Up the river of Chagres went Capt. Henry Morgan and twelve hundred
men, packed closely in their canoes; they never stopped, saving now
and then to rest their stiffened legs, until they had come to a place
known as Cruz de San Juan Gallego, where they were compelled to leave
their boats on account of the shallowness of the water.
Leaving a guard of one hundred and sixty men to protect their boats as
a place of refuge in case they should be worsted before Panama, they
turned and plunged into the wilderness before them.
There a more powerful foe awaited them than a host of Spaniards with
match, powder, and lead--starvation. They met but little or no
opposition in their progress; but wherever they turned they found
every fiber of meat, every grain of maize, every ounce of bread or
meal, swept away or destroyed utterly before them. Even when the
buccaneers had successfully overcome an ambuscade or an attack, and
had sent the Spaniards flying, the fugitives took the time to strip
their dead comrades of every grain of food in their leathern sacks,
leaving nothing but the empty bags.
Says the narrator of these events, himself one of the expedition,
"They afterward fell to eating those leathern bags, as affording
something to the ferment of their stomachs."
Ten days they struggled through this bitter privation, doggedly
forcing their way onward, faint with hunger and haggard with weakness
and fever. Then, from the high hill and over the tops of the forest
trees, they saw the steeples of Panama, and nothing remained between
them and their goal but the fighting of four Spaniards to every one of
them--a simple thing which they had done over and over again.
Down they poured upon Panama, and out came the Spaniards to meet them;
four hundred horse, two thousand five hundred foot, and two thousand
wild bulls which had been herded together to be driven over the
buccaneers so that their ranks might be disordered and broken. The
buccaneers were only eight hundred strong; the others had either
fallen in battle or had dropped along the dreary pathway through the
wilderness; but in the space of two hours the Spaniards were flying
madly over the plain, minus six hundred who lay dead or dying behind
them.
As for the bulls, as many of them as were shot served as food there
and then for the half-famished pirates, for the buccaneers were never
more at home than in the slaughter of cattle.
Then they marched toward the city. Three hours' more fighting and they
were in the streets, howling, yelling, plundering, gorging,
dram-drinking, and giving full vent to all the vile and nameless lusts
that burned in their hearts like a hell of fire. And now followed the
usual sequence of events--rapine, cruelty, and extortion; only this
time there was no town to ransom, for Morgan had given orders that it
should be destroyed. The torch was set to it, and Panama, one of the
greatest cities in the New World, was swept from the face of the
earth. Why the deed was done, no man but Morgan could tell. Perhaps
it was that all the secret hiding places for treasure might be brought
to light; but whatever the reason was, it lay hidden in the breast of
the great buccaneer himself. For three weeks Morgan and his men abode
in this dreadful place; and they marched away with _one hundred and
seventy-five_ beasts of burden loaded with treasures of gold and
silver and jewels, besides great quantities of merchandise, and six
hundred prisoners held for ransom.
Whatever became of all that vast wealth, and what it amounted to, no
man but Morgan ever knew, for when a division was made it was found
that there was only _two hundred pieces of eight to each man_.
When this dividend was declared, a howl of execration went up, under
which even Capt. Henry Morgan quailed. At night he and four other
commanders slipped their cables and ran out to sea, and it was said
that these divided the greater part of the booty among themselves. But
the wealth plundered at Panama could hardly have fallen short of a
million and a half of dollars. Computing it at this reasonable figure,
the various prizes won by Henry Morgan in the West Indies would stand
as follows: Panama, $1,500,000; Porto Bello, $800,000; Puerto del
Principe, $700,000; Maracaibo and Gibraltar, $400,000; various
piracies, $250,000--making a grand total of $3,650,000 as the vast
harvest of plunder. With this fabulous wealth, wrenched from the
Spaniards by means of the rack and the cord, and pilfered from his
companions by the meanest of thieving, Capt. Henry Morgan retired from
business, honored of all, rendered famous by his deeds, knighted by
the good King Charles II, and finally appointed governor of the rich
island of Jamaica.
Other buccaneers followed him. Campeche was taken and sacked, and even
Cartagena itself fell; but with Henry Morgan culminated the glory of
the buccaneers, and from that time they declined in power and wealth
and wickedness until they were finally swept away.
The buccaneers became bolder and bolder. In fact, so daring were their
crimes that the home governments, stirred at last by these outrageous
barbarities, seriously undertook the suppression of the freebooters,
lopping and trimming the main trunk until its members were scattered
hither and thither, and it was thought that the organization was
exterminated. But, so far from being exterminated, the individual
members were merely scattered north, south, east, and west, each
forming a nucleus around which gathered and clustered the very worst
of the offscouring of humanity.
The result was that when the seventeenth century was fairly packed
away with its lavender in the store chest of the past, a score or more
bands of freebooters were cruising along the Atlantic seaboard in
armed vessels, each with a black flag with its skull and crossbones at
the fore, and with a nondescript crew made up of the tags and remnants
of civilized and semicivilized humanity (white, black, red, and
yellow), known generally as marooners, swarming upon the decks below.
Nor did these offshoots from the old buccaneer stem confine their
depredations to the American seas alone; the East Indies and the
African coast also witnessed their doings, and suffered from them, and
even the Bay of Biscay had good cause to remember more than one visit
from them.
Worthy sprigs from so worthy a stem improved variously upon the parent
methods; for while the buccaneers were content to prey upon the
Spaniards alone, the marooners reaped the harvest from the commerce of
all nations.
So up and down the Atlantic seaboard they cruised, and for the fifty
years that marooning was in the flower of its glory it was a sorrowful
time for the coasters of New England, the middle provinces, and the
Virginias, sailing to the West Indies with their cargoes of salt fish,
grain, and tobacco. Trading became almost as dangerous as
privateering, and sea captains were chosen as much for their
knowledge of the flintlock and the cutlass as for their seamanship.
As by far the largest part of the trading in American waters was
conducted by these Yankee coasters, so by far the heaviest blows, and
those most keenly felt, fell upon them. Bulletin after bulletin came
to port with its doleful tale of this vessel burned or that vessel
scuttled, this one held by the pirates for their own use or that one
stripped of its goods and sent into port as empty as an eggshell from
which the yolk had been sucked. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and
Charleston suffered alike, and worthy ship owners had to leave off
counting their losses upon their fingers and take to the slate to keep
the dismal record.
"Maroon--to put ashore on a desert isle, as a sailor, under pretense
of having committed some great crime." Thus our good Noah Webster
gives us the dry bones, the anatomy, upon which the imagination may
construct a specimen to suit itself.
It is thence that the marooners took their name, for marooning was one
of their most effective instruments of punishment or revenge. If a
pirate broke one of the many rules which governed the particular band
to which he belonged, he was marooned; did a captain defend his ship
to such a degree as to be unpleasant to the pirates attacking it, he
was marooned; even the pirate captain himself, if he displeased his
followers by the severity of his rule, was in danger of having the
same punishment visited upon him which he had perhaps more than once
visited upon another.
The process of marooning was as simple as terrible. A suitable place
was chosen (generally some desert isle as far removed as possible from
the pathway of commerce), and the condemned man was rowed from the
ship to the beach. Out he was bundled upon the sand spit; a gun, a
half dozen bullets, a few pinches of powder, and a bottle of water
were chucked ashore after him, and away rowed the boat's crew back to
the ship, leaving the poor wretch alone to rave away his life in
madness, or to sit sunken in his gloomy despair till death mercifully
released him from torment. It rarely if ever happened that anything
was known of him after having been marooned. A boat's crew from some
vessel, sailing by chance that way, might perhaps find a few chalky
bones bleaching upon the white sand in the garish glare of the
sunlight, but that was all. And such were marooners.
By far the largest number of pirate captains were Englishmen, for,
from the days of good Queen Bess, English sea captains seemed to have
a natural turn for any species of venture that had a smack of piracy