In the place of native discontent it would, at the present day, be difficult to find a more loyal, peaceful, and law-abiding people than this. And yet it is not more than two hundred and fifty years since the wildest of buccaneers figured upon the scene in Jamaica. In a biographical dictionary I note the somewhat amusing, though deeply satirical piece of information.
“Morgan, Sir Henry John, buccaneer, born about 1637, long ravaged the Spanish colonies, took and plundered Puerto Bello 1668; after a life of rapine knighted by Charles II. and made a marine commissary, died 1690.”
This great freebooter was as politic and shrewd as he was unscrupulous and daring. I cannot vouch for the truth of the following story, but it is characteristic of those days.
When summoned to England to answer for his piratical excursion on the Spanish Main, he offered King Charles such magnificent pearls for the adornment of his favourite ladies, that any thought of punishment was immediately banished from the royal brain. Instead, Sir Henry Morgan returned loaded with honours to the West Indies.
But I would like to relate how, by a brilliant stratagem, he extricated his ships from a position of great danger. In 1654, Maracaibo had been sacked by L’Olonnais, another notorious freebooter, but in 1668 it had regained its former reputation as one of the richest towns of Spanish America, and Morgan determined to attack it. Like Santiago in Cuba, it lay on the shores of a long bay with so narrow a mouth that almost one ship was sufficient to block it. Morgan entered the bay with three ships, stormed the town and took the fort. It seems that his victorious companions were celebrating their success with wine in the fort, left by their late enemies, when their indefatigable and valiant captain stepped outside to see how matters stood. All was silent, but Morgan despatched one hundred men into the woods to hunt up the late inhabitants, who had betaken themselves thither with their money and treasure. They returned with thirty prisoners, who were inhumanly tortured, to disclose the hiding-places of their wealth.
The Inquisition had taught the English mariners of those days how to rack and how to burn. When Morgan, after some thirty days of this cruelty, finally sailed away, to his consternation he found the mouth of the harbour blocked by three Spanish men-of-war, the crews of which had also rebuilt the fort at the entrance of the harbour. Full of resource, Morgan coolly ordered the plunder and prisoners to be removed from his largest vessel to the smaller ships. He filled the former instead with gunpowder, pitch, tar, and combustibles. He mounted wooden cannon upon the vessel and dressed up posts to resemble men. Having completed his preparations, he sent word to the commander of the Spanish warships saying, unless a heavy ransom was paid, he would burn Maracaibo to the ground. The reply of the Spanish Admiral was to the effect that unless Morgan surrendered in three days he would pay the ransom in lead. At this crisis the great freebooter next morning sailed in single file down the harbour, the dummy ship leading, in charge of some daring men, who, at a signal from their intrepid chief, were to light the fuses and escape in a small boat to the other ships.
When the Spanish Admiral thus saw Morgan’s first and largest vessel heading directly for him, he sailed into the harbour to meet him, grappling and making fast his ship to that of his enemy, expecting to fight hand-to-hand. Just at this moment the matches were applied, and in the noise and confusion the Spanish ship could not unfasten sufficiently quickly the grappling chains and irons which fastened the two ships together in a deadly embrace. The consequence was that it caught fire, and, in a few minutes, both were blazing from stem to stern.
Rather than fall into the hands of the buccaneers, the Spaniards jumped overboard. The crews of the two remaining ships ran them aground, and rushed to the woods to hide themselves. However, the fort further down had yet to be passed, but Morgan executed a manœuvre which so alarmed the garrison, who expected an attack in the rear, that they removed their cannon some distance from the fort. When this was done, Morgan sailed away out of the harbour, his crews jeering at the Spanish garrison, who were unable to bring their ordnance back in time to fire on the bold and resourceful pirate.
Passing on to events which took place in Caribbean waters over a hundred years later, one’s heart swells with pride when one remembers how Lord Rodney, of glorious memory, whose statue adorns Spanish Town, saved not only Jamaica, but our other West Indian possessions in 1782, upholding the honour of the nation at a most critical time in English history. The American colonies were lost. France, Spain, and Holland, our ocean rivals, had united to make one great effort to wrest from us our naval superiority. At home, Irish patriots clamoured then, as now, for what they conceived to be their rights.
Lord Rodney, who had taken the Leeward Islands from France, commanded in the West Indies. He had already punished the Dutch for taking part in the alliance by capturing the island of Eustachius and three millions’ worth of stores and money. Burke, whose policy somewhat resembled that of the little Englanders of these days, notwithstanding his successes, had him called home to account for his actions. In his absence the French fleet recaptured the Leeward Islands and Eustachius, and thereby became the paramount power in these seas. Things became so desperate that Rodney was immediately sent back to his post. After a mid-winter cruise of five stormy weeks he came upon the combined fleets off the mountainous coasts of Dominica. In number of ships the fleets were about equal, but in size and men the French were vastly superior, having 14,000 soldiers on board besides the ships’ full complement, destined for “the conquest of Jamaica.”