Having secured these Islands, proceed immediately to Cartegena, which we would make the Seat of the intended Design, and from which England will be Master of the Spaniards' Treasure which comes from Peru by the way of Panama in the South Seas to Porto Bello or Nombre de Dios in the North Sea . . .”
How presumptuous it all seemed from this vantage. Worse still, the Council of State had not even bothered taking notice of Jamaica, an under-defended wilderness now their only chance to seize anything held by the Spaniards.
Most depressing of all, Cromwell would surely be loath to spend a shilling on the men and arms needed to hold such a dubious prize. Meaning the Spaniards would simply come and reclaim it the minute the fleet set sail.
Surely, he told himself, Cromwell was aware they had shipped out without nearly enough trained men to attack Spanish holdings. Even his Council of State realized as much. But they had nourished the delusion that, once Barbados was bludgeoned back into the Commonwealth, its planters would dutifully offer up whatever first-rate men, arms, and cavalry were needed for the campaign.
What the Council of State had not conceived was how indifferent those islanders would be to the territorial ambitions of Oliver Cromwell. Barbados' planters, it turned out, wanted nothing to do with a conquest of the Spanish Americas; to them, more English-held lands in the New World only meant the likelihood of more acres planted in sugar one day, to compete with the trade they hoped to monopolize. Consequently, Morris' Barbados recruits consisted almost wholly of runaway indentures eluding their owners and their creditors, a collection of profane, debauched rogues whose only boldness lay in doing mischief.
Sugar and slaves. They might well have undermined Barbados' brief try for independence; but they also meant there would be no more English lands in the Americas.
Calvert's heart grew heavy as he remembered how their careful strategy for taking Hispaniola had been wrecked. They had decided to avoid the uncharted harbor of Santo Domingo and land five miles down the coast. But by a mischance of wind on their stern, it was thirty. Then Morris had disembarked his troops with scarcely any water or victuals. All the first day, however, he had marched unopposed, his Puritan infantrymen even pausing to vandalize Papist churches along the way, using idols of the Virgin for musket practice.
The Spaniards, however, had a plan of their own. They had been busy burning all the savannahs farther ahead to drive away the cattle, leaving a path of scorched ground. Soon Morris' supplies were exhausted and hunger began to set in; whereupon his infantry started stealing the horses of the cavalry, roasting and devouring them so ravenously the Spaniards reportedly thought horsemeat must be some kind of English delicacy.
Then came another catastrophe. For sport, the army burned some thatched huts belonging to Hispaniola's notorious Cow- Killers. Soon a gang of vengeful hunters had massed in the woods along the army's path and begun sniping with their long-barrelled muskets. After that, whenever fireflies appeared in the evenings, the English sentries, never before having seen such creatures, mistook them for the burning matchcord of the Cow-Killers' muskets and began firing into the night, causing general panic and men trampled to death in flight. Also, the rattling claws of the night-foraging Caribbean land crabs would sound to the nervous English infantry like the clank of the Cow-Killers' bandoliers. An alarm would raise—"the Cow-Killers"—and soldiers would run blindly into the forests and deadly swamps trying to flee.
When they finally reached Santo Domingo, Morris and his demoralized men gamely tried to rush and scale the walls, whereupon the Spaniards simply fired down with cannon and slew hundreds. Driven back, Morris claimed his retreat was merely "tactical." But when he tried again, the Spanish cavalry rode out and lanced countless more in a general rout, only turning back when they tired of killing. It was the most humiliating defeat any English army had ever received—suffered at the hands of the supposedly craven Spaniards, and the wandering Cow-Killers, of Hispaniola.