First Moves
Captain Henry Morgan was different to his contemporaries as well as to the pirates and buccaneers that came after him. For a start, he was successful. He was married to the same woman for twenty years. Despite the atrocities he is alleged to have committed or that were committed in his name upon the Spanish he was never punished for them; instead he was made a hero and knighted by the English. He was appointed as Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica and then was relieved of his position by a vindictive and rather paranoid governor who believed that Morgan was at the heart of everything wrong in Jamaica. Nothing was further from the truth and we will look into this in detail later in this book.
Perhaps one of the chief differences between Morgan and pirates like Roberts, Vane, Blackbeard and many others is that he did his fighting on land and did not take ship after ship. He rarely got involved in great sea battles. While he was elected as admiral by the men who served with him, he was more of a general than an admiral.
Of course there is a lot of other material that has been written about Morgan. This book attempts to look at the different sides of the man. How do we marry the ruthless man capable of bringing so much misery and misfortune to his enemies with the man who was devoted to his wife and family and who was given one of the highest offices in the thriving colony of Jamaica? To the civilized twenty-first-century mind this can be hard to reconcile. Was he just a butcher, a monster, a man driven by greed and power, or was he driven by patriotism? Was he truly responsible for the torture and murder of Spanish prisoners? Some scholars say yes, others disagree.
The only way for us to find answers to these questions is to put the man into context, look at his actions, at the times in which he lived, at his letters and the people who influenced him the most. One key point is that Morgan always thought of himself as a privateer. He never embarked on an expedition without a commission from the government of Jamaica, no matter how tenuous that commission might be. History labels him a buccaneer, or a pirate in some cases, but he was, technically, a privateer. ‘The one label we can give him is that of buccaneer, that romantic-sounding word that applied to several generations of fortune hunters who roamed the Caribbean looking for plunder.’1
What do we know of Morgan? Certainly we don’t know what he looked like as there is no physical description of him, save for the one given by the physician attending him in the last months of life. By then, the power and might of the man had gone out of him and he was reduced to a sallow, lean and gaunt figure with a swollen belly. But to lead hundreds of men—who were not military men but largely buccaneers, privateers and fortune hunters—on expeditions against the Spanish, and be able to instil enough discipline in them to successfully carry out his military plans, takes a man of considerable power, discipline, strength and self-confidence. As we have seen in the introduction, Morgan was able to improvise in the middle of an operation by skirting blocked roads and marching his men through thick, humid rain forest. For this to work the improvisation had to go all the way down the line from Morgan’s commanders at the top to the men at the bottom.
Many writers suggest that Morgan was born around 1635 to a good Welsh family from the county of Monmouth. His father was Robert Morgan, a farmer living in Llanrhymni. This branch of the family was related to the Tredegar House Morgans, who lived just a few miles away to the east. Robert had a brother, William, of Llanrhymni Hall, in the same area. Inside the Church of St Mellons, not far from Llanrhymni, there are many memorials to the Morgans. Indeed, during this time in the counties of Monmouthshire and Glamorgan there were a handful of other ‘great families’, such as Herbert, Stradling and Matthews.
Henry had two distinguished uncles, both brothers of his father: Edward, who was a colonel in the Cavaliers during the Civil War fighting for the Royalist cause; and Thomas, who also fought in the Civil War but on the side of the Parliamentarians under Cromwell. Edward was later to become Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, a post that Morgan himself would hold.
One thing is certain about Morgan—he was the product of his time. He could not have flourished as the greatest of the buccaneers had he been born twenty years earlier or twenty years later.2
Henry Morgan married the daughter of Edward Morgan in Jamaica. Deciding to follow in the footsteps of his uncles, Henry joined an expeditionary force that left Britain in 1654 under the command of General Venables and Admiral Penn, with the objective of taking the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba from the Spanish. The force arrived in Barbados on 29 January 1655, when Morgan was just twenty years old. Venables needed men, so from the islands of St Kitts and Nevis he recruited 1,200 men, and then once in Barbados took on another 3,500. It didn’t matter that they were barely trained for the task in hand.
Arriving at Hispaniola they headed for the south side of the island, landing at Santo Domingo, where Penn and Venables sent 7,000 men ashore to capture the town and the rest of the island according to the original plan. But things went badly for the English force. The men were affected by tropical disease and this, combined with incompetent leadership, left the expedition in chaos and more than 2,000 men died, not from battle, but from sickness. The English were forced to withdraw.
Undaunted, Penn and Venables turned their attention to another Spanish settlement that was lightly defended—Jamaica. Had the defences been much stronger the poor leadership could have spelt disaster, but the English had the greater numbers and they overwhelmed the Spanish. However, this was not the end of the matter.
The last Spanish governor of the island, Don Cristoble Arnalso de Ysassi, fled to the hills, where he commanded an effective guerrilla war against the English. But two expeditions from Cuba sent to reinforce the courageous Don were met off the north coast of the island and defeated while the Don and his forces were defeated in 1657 near Ocho Rios. By 1660 the Don’s forces were few; the slave allies (known as the Maroons) he’d brought with him after fleeing the city deserted and before the year was over he and what was left of his guerrilla force escaped under the cover of darkness, rowing in canoes to the safety of Cuba.3
At that time, the war in Europe against Spain was officially over but in the West Indies the situation was much more fluid. The Spanish continued to capture English ships cruising off the Spanish Main4 and considered all English ships as pirate ships and treated them accordingly.
By early 1660 Morgan was heavily involved in the skirmishing that continued as the former Spanish governor did his best to hang on. When Morgan was not involved in expeditions against the guerrillas he was a privateer operating under the command of Commodore Christopher Myngs. The main port was called Cagway, or Caguaya, and the English built a fort there to protect the natural harbour. Hearing of the regular expeditions of Myngs’s fleet against the Spanish, privateers began to flock to the new settlement.
The young Morgan proved to be popular and soon made friends amongst the privateers. As a captain he distinguished himself by taking three ships on a single raid. ‘Captain John Morris, a friend of Morgan’s, bought one and renamed it the Dolphin.’5 Captain Robert Serle bought another, the largest of the three, which had eight cannon and weighed more than 80 tons. He named this ship the Cagway. Along with Captain John Lawrence, who renamed his ship the Pearl, these four men became fast friends and the most popular and daring of all the Cagway privateers.
News arrived from England in August 1660 when the Convertine sailed into the harbour. Charles II was back on the English throne having been restored to it by General Monck. Peace had been declared now between England, France and Spain, while Monck was made Earl of Albemarle for his help in getting Charles II back on the throne. However, Jamaica was not returned to the Spanish in the peace deal.
Colonel D’Oyley as the first governor of Jamaica was tasked with defending the new English settlement. He had a twelve-man council to assist him and one of its members included a close friend of Henry Morgan, Henry Archbald, who had arrived on the Convertine. Another friend, Thomas Ballard, was also elected to the council. The task of defending Jamaica was a daunting one as there were no resources other than the privateers and any help from England was months away. After less than a year in office, D’Oyley, who had proved to be an unpopular governor, decided he couldn’t cope and asked to be relieved.
His replacement, Lord Windsor, immediately began to make changes upon his arrival in Jamaica. To honour the newly restored king, Port Royal became the new name for Cagway and the fort was given a new battery of cannon and renamed Fort Charles. Lord Windsor then created a militia that was made up of five regiments and Henry Morgan was given a commission in the Port Royal Regiment for his work in fighting the Spanish guerrillas under the hapless Don. But there was a thorn in the side of the young colony. The Spanish rebels had been supplied by the Spaniards in Cuba from the closest settlement to Jamaica, Santiago de Cuba, on the island of Cuba, only 150 miles away from Jamaica. Lord Windsor believed this would be a perfect place for the Spanish to launch their invasion of Jamaica. Even though there was peace between England and Spain in Europe, the council in Jamaica voted to send an expedition to destroy Santiago de Cuba.
Myngs led the fleet towards Cuba and, once again, Morgan was commanding his own ship as captain, along with his friend Robert Serle in command of the Cagway. Myngs’s flagship, the Centurion, was a forty-six-gun vessel and sailed at the head of the fleet.
On 5 October 1660 they sighted Santiago de Cuba and having obtained information from former prisoners of the Spanish who knew the town, they realized that a frontal assault would be a disaster because of the Spanish cannon protecting the narrow entrance to the huge harbour. Instead, they landed 2 miles down the coast, near the mouth of the San Juan River, and began landing men and supplies. They marched and hacked their way through the dense forest heading for the town in an assault from the rear.
The following morning, Myngs’s forces reached the town, having cut through 9 miles of forest, and attacked. The Spanish were taken by surprise and fled, leaving riches behind them. The privateers began a systematic looting, which ended when they blew up the town and the fort with 700 casks of Spanish gunpowder they’d seized.
On 22 October, Myngs returned with the rest of the fleet and vast amounts of plunder taken from the town including ‘six ships, cannon, wine, silver plate, church bells, hide and more. Just six buccaneers were killed and twenty went missing.’6
By 1662 Lord Windsor had stepped down as governor due to ill health and Sir Charles Lyttleton, who had been Windsor’s lieutenant governor, was now temporarily in charge. But Lyttleton was a man of peace and refused to attack the Spanish. Since the end of the war in Europe, envoys had been sent from Jamaica to the Spanish Main to negotiate peaceful trade. However, the Spanish flatly refused to allow trade with the new English colony. Concessions and diplomacy weren’t working. To make matters worse, when Windsor had been governor, he’d received instructions from King Charles II to force trade, if necessary.
Since the attack on Cuba the privateers had been idle and there was no pay for them while they sat and waited for Lyttleton to issue the necessary papers enabling them to go out and plunder the Spanish.
Myngs was impatient. He knew that the privateers could turn to piracy if they didn’t have some direction. He also knew that on the coast of Mexico there were English log cutters who had great difficulty getting their wood from the coast to England via Jamaica because of the Spanish. It was these log cutters that Myngs wanted to protect and ensure their trade routes were secure. Day after day he approached Lyttleton, slowly wearing the man down until, finally, on Christmas Day 1662, Lyttleton relented and letters of marque were issued to the privateers to attack the Mexican coastline, specifically a prosperous town built on a Mayan site known as Campeche. Its full title was San Francisco de Campeche and it was called Campeachy by the English.
It would not be an easy victory. To the north and south the town and its harbour were guarded by two fortresses, the Castillo San Jose, 2 miles north of the town, and the Castillo San Miguel, 2 miles south. Both these fortresses stood at the tops of hills overlooking the town. There were also ‘three batteries of cannon between the fortresses, protecting the town and the port’.7
In Jamaica preparations were under way for the expedition against the Spanish. Myngs chose his captains, giving each of them letters of marque. Those captains included 27-year-old Henry Morgan, his two friends, Captain John Morris and Captain Jackman, along with Captain Abraham Blauveldt and Captain Edward Mansveldt—the latter an experienced and famous Dutch buccaneer more usually known as Mansfield. The fleet Myngs assembled included fourteen ships from Port Royal, three French ships from Tortuga and three Dutch privateers, along with more than 1,100 men. Leading the fleet in the Centurion, Myngs raised his sails and hoisted his anchor, setting sail from Port Royal in January 1663.
Along the way, one ship was lost in a storm and three more were separated from the fleet. They sailed for days, crossing more than a thousand miles of ocean. By 9 February 1663 they anchored a mile down the coast from Campeche and began landing their men.
While they did this, Myngs sent a boat to the governor asking for his surrender. He waited for the response.
Realizing that the Spanish were stalling, he decided not to give them time to move or hide their valuables and prepare for a fight so he attacked the town, his men only armed with pikes, swords and pistols against the cannon. The fighting was intense.
For almost an entire day they fought. The buccaneers had to take the stone houses one by one while being shot at by Spanish snipers and soldiers. Shot whizzed around, bouncing off cobblestone, embedding into stone walls, tearing through clothing and ripping into flesh and bone. Men shouted as they attacked. Spanish soldiers were impaled by pikes. In close combat men were cut down by pistol shot and swords. Shards of wood, stone and metal flew in all directions from pistol and cannon shot.
Myngs was wounded three times but by the end of the day, the buccaneers were successful. In the harbour they captured fourteen vessels, and crews were chosen to take them back to Port Royal. ‘The Spanish counted their losses at 150,000 pieces of eight, and the damage done to the town and the fort costing another 500,000 to repair.’8
Myngs and the rest of the fleet left Campeche on 23 February but did not arrive in Port Royal, Jamaica, until 13 April. In his book Admiral Sir Henry Morgan, Terry Breverton suggests that the delay was down to the fleet spending some time sharing out the loot they had plundered from the Spanish ‘rather than bring it back to Jamaica for the English royal family and assorted ship owners to take their commission.’
But what of Henry Morgan? The captains and crews that sailed with Myngs and sacked Campeche had made a considerable amount from that action.
Morgan and three other captains—John Morris, William Jackman and David Marteen—set sail from Port Royal in December 1663. They told no one where they were going. Their letters of marque were still valid. Their little fleet had been prepared and supplied, and more than 200 men signed on . . . but for what purpose no one knew. They effectively vanished for almost two years. The question is, where did they go?