In the wake of the buccaneers

by A. Hyatt Verrill

A year later he was once more in Jamaica, near to death with dysentery contracted on the San Juan expedition, and in the home of a noted black nurse, Cuba Cornwallis, he slowly regained his health and strength.

Strange sights and famous men has this old fort of sun-faded brick seen. It has seen Port Royal in all its vicious wickedness and flamboyant sin; it has seen the heaving earth and angry sea sweep the city and all its villainy into the depths. It has [[260]]seen shot-riddled buccaneer ships returning, triumphant and deep-laden with loot, from piratical forays. It has witnessed many a wild revel of drink-flushed, foul-mouthed corsairs, and has listened to many a plan and plot of the freebooters as they argued and swore over some projected raid on the Spanish Main. Within its walls Morgan as well as Nelson and many a lesser light have dwelt and drunk the health of the king, and through storm and battle and cataclysms its walls and battlements have passed unscathed. The earthquake of 1692 wrought devastation and took thousands of lives, but left the old fort solid and strong. And even in 1907, when in a space of a few seconds modern Kingston crumbled to dust and newer forts fell like houses of cards, the flower-decked old fortress at the tip of the Palisados remained unharmed save for a single crack in one of its hoary walls.

Of the ancient buccaneer Port Royal, Fort Charles alone remains, and great indeed have been the changes the antique pile has seen take place about itself. From the ruin of the pirates’ stronghold has risen the sleepy little town,—a village of narrow streets and darkey houses, of stately residences with balconies and balustrades richly carved by shipbuilders now long dead, of trim, well-kept gardens and struggling lawns, and with a naval yard [[261]]wherein repose the giant figureheads of many famed old British ships and frigates—while across the harbor has grown the island’s metropolis of Kingston. Few visitors now stop at Port Royal, few strange feet tread the old flagged esplanades and weed-grown ramp; and yet the little hamlet is well worthy of a visit, for it has a strange Old-World atmosphere and a fascination entirely lacking in Kingston. Its huge barrack square and parade-ground might well be those of some English port, were it not for the nodding palms and scorching sun. There is the old court-house, stately, austere, with shingled roof and flanked by arcades. There is the naval hospital, woefully damaged by the earthquake of 1907, and so out of place in the tropics with its typically English gardens and uncompromising architecture that it reminds one of the conventional houses equipped with chimneys which the old engravers and artists always introduced into their pictures of tropical scenes. And there are the swarded cricket-pitch, the bowling-green, and the tennis-courts on which the British officers and their women folk pass the cool of the afternoons. But the pirates’ church, built from the proceeds of robbery and murder, is gone like its builders beneath the sea; the once-busy docks are silent and all but deserted; the warehouses, once [[262]]filled with casks and bales and barrels, are empty save for rusting chains, bits of cordage, and other odds and ends; the great sail-lofts are bare, and the whole place has the air of a town aloof, communing with itself over its sins and errors of the past, and, like some once-famous courtesan, living in a state of faded gentility away from prying eyes and wagging tongues.

How different was the Port Royal of olden days—a flourishing, noisy, hustling town of several thousand houses, of thousands of inhabitants, of great warehouses filled almost to bursting, of busy shipyards and a “hard” whereon always a dozen vessels might be seen careened; a port before which scores of armed ships rode ever at anchor; a place whose people were as familiar with the Jolly Roger as with the British ensign; and withal the notorious rendezvous of the English buccaneers. Indeed, Jamaica’s prosperity was built upon the business of the corsairs, and the port was scarcely more than a clearing-house for them.

Here came the Brethren of the Main from far and near, bringing their treasures: chests of plate and bullion, doubloons, onzas, and castellanos; pieces of eight and louis d’or; altar-pieces ablaze with precious stones; bales of velvets and satins, of silks and brocades; casks of brandy and wines, tobacco [[263]]and coffee; the cargo of many a scuttled ship and galleon; the booty from many a ravished and sacked town; the holy vessels of countless desecrated churches; vestments heavy with gold and silver thread dragged from the bleeding bodies of butchered priests; jeweled trinkets torn from tortured, shrieking women; the output of many a famous mine; aye, and many a weeping, hapless captive girl, many a groaning slave, until within Port Royal so vast an accumulation of riches was gathered together that it was celebrated far and near as the greatest center of wealth the world had ever known.

And with its fame was coupled an even greater reputation for wickedness. Proud of the one as of the other was Port Royal; its evils were never hidden, never denied; brazenly to the world it proclaimed itself the nearest thing to hell on earth that man could devise.

Here came the swaggering, red-handed cutthroats to spend the gold they had won by robbery and murder, and ever the streets of Port Royal echoed to the drunken shouts and curses of the buccaneers. Sin in every form ruled; murder was of hourly occurrence, and far and wide the depravity of Port Royal was a byword.

A huge, bewhiskered rascal, clad in filched garments of many hues, would land fresh from a successful [[264]]foray and, striding into a tavern, would fling down a handful of coin and order the cringing innkeeper to broach a pipe of wine in the street. Then, standing beside it with drawn pistols and with a drunken leer on his ill-favored face, the pirate captain would command all who passed to drink. Gladly enough would most accept this pressing invitation, and those who dared refuse would be shot down and their carcasses kicked into the gutter. Or again, merely to show the wealth at his command, he would buy out the tavern’s stock of liquor and order it poured into the highway, meanwhile dipping it up in a pannikin and playfully throwing it over the garments of passing men and women. Such were mere pleasantries as recorded by Esquemelling; harmless jokes, to the pirates’ minds; the forerunners of less-appreciated amusements such as running amuck and slashing or shooting all who were met, or, again, hanging prisoners in chains or roasting them over slow fires on wooden spits, or perchance flogging a slave to death for an afternoon’s sport. Luckily the debauches did not last long. In a single night the revelers would often spend two or three thousand pieces of eight, not “leaving themselves peradventure a good shirt to wear on their backs in the morning,” their chronicler tells us, and being compelled [[265]]to lead a quiet life thereafter until the next corsairs’ ship set sail.

But among themselves and to one another the buccaneers were liberal and loyal, and a contemporaneous account states that “If any one of them has lost all his goods, which often happens in their manner of life, they freely give him and make him partaker in what they have.”

By some queer whimsy in their complex make-up, some inexplicable, paradoxical twist in their psychology, the pirates felt that their sink of iniquity in Jamaica was incomplete without a church. So forthwith, in this hell-hole, they built themselves a house of worship, erecting it with the gold won by rapine and murder, fitting it with the candlesticks and altar-pieces, the holy vessels and chalices, the tapestries and paintings looted from other houses of God. And, as they never believed in doing anything by halves, the pirate chiefs decreed that now they had a church all buccaneers must attend services therein.