In the wake of the buccaneers

by A. Hyatt Verrill

PANAMA

The jungle, Darien, through which Sharp and his men tramped

In reply, the garrison at once began firing into the darkness, and with wild shouts and yells the pirates rushed this outer fort and, aided by the darkness and the terror which they always inspired, soon took the place. Having once threatened to destroy all within if they refused to surrender, Morgan was as good as his word. Herding the defenseless soldiers and officers in a single room, he set fire to the magazine, blowing the prisoners and the fort to atoms. The shouts, shots, and explosion had aroused the city and the other forts, [[305]]and, believing that a tremendous force of the enemy must be upon them, the inhabitants became panic-stricken, rushing hither and thither, throwing their valuables into wells and cisterns, striving to escape to the near-by forest, and utterly demoralized. As a result, there was little resistance, and, slashing and shooting their way through the wild-eyed throngs, the pirates dashed to the cloisters in the town and, battering in the doors, made prisoners of the priests and nuns.

Meanwhile the governor, unable to rally the townspeople, retreated to the main fort, San Jerome,[1] and from this point maintained an incessant fusillade upon the pirates. Unable to approach closely, the buccaneers sought what shelter they could find, and, being accomplished marksmen, picked off the Spanish gunners each time they attempted to recharge their cannon. For hours,—from daybreak until noon,—the conflict raged, and for a time it seemed doubtful which side would be the victors. Several times the pirates took their lives in their hands and, dashing under the walls, attempted to start fires at the castle’s doors, but each time they left dead and dying behind as the Dons threw bombs and blazing pitch upon them [[306]]from the parapets. Finding they were making no headway, even Morgan himself began to despair, and with ready devilishness he proceeded to carry out a scheme of such downright villainy that it could have been born only in the mind of a monster. Hastily constructing a number of broad ladders, he notified the governor that unless the place were surrendered, he would force the nuns and monks to place the ladders and scale the walls. He knew full well that the Dons would hesitate to shoot down the holy men and women.

But the governor of Porto Bello was a man of no ordinary courage and determination, and replied that never would he surrender as long as he remained alive. Thereupon the nuns and monks were dragged forward and, prodded and flogged, were forced to lift the ladders, place them against the walls, and form a screen for the pirates swarming in their rear.

Praying and crossing themselves, beseeching the governor to surrender, the monks in blood-stained cassocks, the white-faced nuns with garments stripped from their quivering bodies, swollen and bruised from cruel blows, lifted the heavy ladders only to fall dead and wounded by scores from the shots of their own countrymen. But others were forced forward, until at last the ladders were [[307]]in place and, with pistols and cutlasses drawn, the buccaneers swarmed up the walls. Heedless of the fire from above, shouting, swearing, and ever pressing on, they gained the parapet and like fiends incarnate leaped among the Spaniards, cutting and hacking, shooting and stabbing, and so terrorizing the soldiers by their onrush that many threw down their arms and fled.

Presently only the governor remained, fighting alone, his back to a wall, his sword flashing, his dark eyes gleaming defiance, his gray beard streaked with blood. Amazed at his courage, appreciating his bravery, the buccaneers offered him quarter, and even his own wife and daughters pleaded with him to surrender. But the old hidalgo would have none of this, and defiantly he shouted that he would die as a valiant soldier rather than be hanged as a coward. Over and over again the pirates, at Morgan’s orders, strove to rush the old man and make him prisoner, but each time his flashing sword formed a circle of death beyond which none could pass until he fell, shot down by the pirate chieftain.

Porto Bello was now in the buccaneers’ hands. Herding the people, wounded and well alike, into cells where, as Esquemelling says, “to the intent their own complaints might be the cure of their [[308]]hurts for no other was afforded them,” they were left under guard while the victors fell to eating and drinking. Soon the majority were outrageously drunk, and had the Dons rallied and attacked they might have retaken the place, for, again to quote Esquemelling, who was an eye-witness, “if there had been found fifty courageous men they might easily have taken the city and killed all the pirates.”

For several days thereafter Porto Bello was such a scene of debauchery, of inhumanity, of agony and suffering as the sun has seldom looked upon. The buccaneers went about looting and ravishing, and, realizing that much of the treasure had been hidden, they tortured the prisoners to compel them to divulge the hiding-places. Every devilish device of the Inquisition, and worse, was brought into play. Men and women were broken on the wheel and torn on the rack; they were spitted and roasted over fires, quartered and hacked to bits, flayed alive, blinded, dipped in boiling pitch, subjected to unspeakable agonies before their loved ones’ eyes, until, satiated with bloodshed, convinced that every centavo had been found, the pirates desisted. For fifteen awful days they remained in the stricken town, dying like rats of fever and excesses, daily casting scores of festering corpses into the sea, but so drunk with victory that no heed was [[309]]given to their own losses or to the threats of an overwhelming force approaching from Panama.