All the other prisoners were brought safely to England and lodged either in Plymouth gaol or Exeter, “either to be arraigned according to the punishment of delinquents in that kind, or disposed of as the king and council shall think meet.” We need not stop to imagine the joy of welcoming back men who had been lost in slavery. We need not try to guess the delight of the west-countrymen that at last some of these renegadoes had been brought back to be punished in England. There is not the slightest doubt of this story of the Exchange being true, but it shows that even in that rather disappointing age which followed on immediately after the defeat of the Armada, there were, at a time when maritime matters were under a cloud, not wanting English seamen of the right stamp, men of courage and action, men who could fight and navigate a ship as in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth. Happily the type of man which includes such sailor characters as Rawlins is not yet dead; the Anglo-Saxon race still rears many of his calibre, and it needs only the opportunity to display such nerve, daring enterprise and tactful action.
CHAPTER XII
THE GREAT SIR HENRY MORGAN
About the year 1636 a certain London mariner, named Dunton, had an experience somewhat similar to that which we related in the last chapter concerning Rawlins. Dunton had the bad luck to be taken by the Sallee pirates, who then sent him out as master and pilot of a Sallee pirate ship containing twenty-one Moors and five Flemish renegadoes. The instructions were that Dunton should sail to the English coast and there capture Christian prisoners. He had arrived from Barbary in the English Channel and was off Hurst Castle by the Needles, Isle of Wight, when he was promptly arrested as a pirate and sent to Winchester to be tried by law. He was given his release at a later date, but his ten-year-old boy was still a slave with the Algerines.
Now about the year when this was taking place, there was born into the world Henry Morgan, who has become celebrated in history and fiction as one of the greatest sea-rovers who ever stepped aboard a ship. His career is one of continual success, of cruelties and amassing of wealth. He was a buccaneer, and a remarkably clever fellow who rose to the position of Governor-General of one of our most important colonial possessions. Adventures are to the adventurous, and if ever there was a Britisher who longed for and obtained a life of excitement, here you have it in the story of Henry Morgan. It would be easy enough to fill the whole of this book and more with his activities afloat, but as our space is limited, and there are still many other pirates of different seas to be considered, it is necessary to confine ourselves to the main facts of his career.
The date of his birth is not quite certain, but it is generally supposed to belong to the year 1635. He first saw light in Glamorganshire, and his existence was tinged with adventure almost from the first. For whilst he was a mere boy, he was kidnapped and sold as a servant at Barbados. Thus it was that he was thrust on to the region of the West Indies, and in this corner of the world, so rich in romance, so historic for its association with Spanish treasure-ships of Elizabethan times, so reminiscent of Drake and others, he was to perform deeds of daring which as such are not unworthy to be ranked alongside the achievements of the great Elizabethan seamen. But he differed from Drake in one important respect. The Elizabethan was severe even to harshness, but he was a more humane being than Morgan. All the wonderful things which the Welshman performed are overshadowed by his cruel, brutish atrocities. In a cruel, inhuman age Morgan unhappily stands out as one of the wickedest sailors of his time. And yet, although we live in an epoch which is somewhat prone to white-washing the world’s most notorious criminals, yet we must modify the popular judgment which prevails in regard to Morgan. To say that he was a pirate and nothing else is not accurate. At heart he certainly was this. But as Sir John Laughton, our greatest modern naval historian has already pointed out, he attacked only those who were the recognised enemies of England.
I admit that in practice, especially in the case of men of such piratical character as Henry Morgan, the difference between privateering and piracy is very slight. The mere possession of a permission to capture the ships belonging to other people is nothing compared to a real sea-robbing intention. Morgan was lucky in having been required for a series of certain peculiar emergencies. His help happened at the time to be indispensable, and so he was able to do legally what otherwise he would have done illegally. All those seizures were legalised by the commission which he was granted at various times. But this is not to say that without those commissions he would not have acted in a somewhat similar manner.
We are accustomed to speak of Morgan and his associates as buccaneers. Now let us understand at once the meaning of this term. Originally the word meant one who dried and smoked meat on a “boucan.” A “boucan” was a hurdle made of sticks on which strips of beef newly salted were smoked by the West Indians. But the name of buccaneers was first given to the French hunters of S. Domingo, who prepared their meat according to this Indian custom. From the fact that these men who so prepared the flesh of oxen and wild boars were also known for another characteristic, namely, piracy, the name was applied in its widest sense to those English and French sea-rovers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who employed their time in depredating Spanish ships and territory of the Caribbean Sea. Hence from signifying a man who treated his food in a certain fashion, the word buccaneer came to mean nothing more or less than a robber of the sea.
After young Morgan had finished his time in service at Barbados, he joined himself to these buccaneer-robbers after arriving at Jamaica. It should be added that Morgan’s uncle, Colonel Edward Morgan, went out from England in 1664 to become Governor-General of Jamaica, but his death occurred in the following year. There are gaps in Morgan’s life, and there has been some confusion caused by others possessing the same surname. But it appears pretty certain now that in the year 1663 Henry Morgan was at sea in command of a privateer. Even by this time he had begun to be an expert in depredation and in sacking some of the Caribbean towns, and striking terror into the hearts of the wretched inhabitants. We may pass over these minor events and come to the time when, his uncle having died, Sir Thomas Modyford was sent out from England as Lieutenant-Governor. Bear in mind that intense hatred of the Spanish prevailing at this time, and which had not been by any means quenched by the defeat of the Armada. To put it mildly, the Caribbean Sea was an Anglo-Spanish cockpit where many and many a fight had taken, and was still to take, place. Modyford wanted the island of Curaçoa to be taken, and there was then no better man to do the job than a very celebrated buccaneer named Edward Mansfield. Sir Thomas therefore commissioned Mansfield to seize this island. He got together a strong naval expedition and accomplished the task early in the year 1666, Henry Morgan being in command of one of Mansfield’s ships.
Off the Nicaraguan coast lies an island which has been called at different times Santa Catalina or Providence Island. This had been taken from the English by the Spaniards more than twenty years before, and Morgan was also present when Mansfield now recaptured it. A small garrison was left to occupy it, and Mansfield returned with his ships to Jamaica. But before long Santa Catalina fell again into the hands of the Spaniards, and Mansfield died. It is now that Morgan’s career begins to come into the limelight. For after Mansfield’s decease the buccaneers, bereft of their leader, thought the matter over and decided to make Morgan his successor, and the commissions which Mansfield had been accustomed to receive from Modyford now fell to the Welshman.