A week was required for the Giralda to disgorge its holds, and it should have taken two, but the governor himself came to the dock to urge speed: the mule caravan which would carry the treasure across the isthmus had to depart early in February in order to meet the galleons from Spain that would be arriving at Porto Bello on the Caribbean side. So on 8 February 1661, after a stop far too short to appreciate the wonders of Panamá, the officials from Peru supervised the loading of the large caravan and sent it on its way across the isthmus. The trail from the Pacific to the Caribbean was only sixty miles long, but it was still as formidable as when Drake struggled to negotiate it. Rotting trunks of fallen trees still barred the way, wild animals and snakes proliferated, and if a soldier broke the skin on his leg, the wound might never heal, so infected with putrid material would it become.
When the perilous journey ended with beautiful Porto Bello in sight, even more danger was present, for the town itself was as pestilential as ever. Soldiers coming out of the jungle and seeing the place for the first time often stopped on the hillside to gape at the numerous ships clustered in the great harbor, each awaiting its cargo of gold and silver, at the huge warehouses lining the shore, and at the row of protective cannon jutting out from the surrounding heights. Often they would reassure one another: ‘No damned English pirates would come near this port,’ and they would feel great security.
But the captain of the mule train, who had made this journey three times before, uttered more sensible words: ‘Dear God in whom we find our salvation, let me be among those who will survive,’ for he knew that of the ninety men in his mule train, not less than forty could be expected to die from the fevers lurking in the charnel house below. Crossing himself, he muttered to his lieutenant: ‘Sometimes the Spanish cannot be understood except by fellow idiots. They left famous old Nombre de Dios because it was unhealthy, moved a few miles west to this hellhole, which is five times worse.’ When his aide, who had never crossed the isthmus before, asked: ‘What’s wrong with Porto Bello?’ he snapped: ‘I’ll show you!’
As he led the mules down into the seaport, he pointed out the tragic weaknesses of the place: ‘This stream should be covered. Left open, it becomes a sewer, spreading disease everywhere. That rotting shed should have been burned years ago, only rats infest it now. That house seems fine, but look at its well. Stands right beside the latrine. The people who live there will drink themselves to death, and not on Spanish wine. Look at those carcasses rotting in the sun. They’ll account for a dozen deaths. And the shacks, crowded so close that what causes a death in one immediately migrates to all the others. And the air is heavy, the jungle so close.’
He concluded his indoctrination with sage advice: ‘I’ll tell you how to be one of the lucky few who stay alive in Porto Bello. Don’t eat the meat, it’s putrefying. Don’t eat the fish, they’re poisoned. Don’t breathe the air, it’s filled with jungle fever. And don’t fool with the Porto Bello girls, for their lovers will cut your throat.’
‘You said you’ve been here three times before. How did you survive?’
‘By following my rules.’
But even this observant visitor to Porto Bello failed to identify the mystery of the place. The chameleon town took its lethal coloring from whoever was the last to visit it. If an armada of ships lay in the harbor to collect silver, whatever diseases the sailors brought with them flourished. If no ships were in, the town caught such diseases as the latest mule train carried from the Pacific side of the isthmus. And when the streets lay empty, local diseases festered in the nearby swamps and gathered strength so as to strike whoever ventured within their reach.
The reason for this deadliness was complex: nearness to the rotting vegetation of the jungle, lack of movement in the air because the town lay in a pocket into which breezes did not come, and a water supply that simply could not be purified. A Catholic priest who served the town throughout the year and who witnessed one plague after another said: ‘Porto Bello is like a beautiful woman who carries a deadly disease, fatal not to herself but to any who comes in contact. And, my friend, she is beautiful—the endless flowers, the wonder of that flawless anchorage, the surrounding hills burdened with great trees, the little streets with their inviting houses … and the noble forts to protect the charm. When people visit our town on the edge of the jungle they leave remembering two things: beauty and death.’
It was the custom for the townfolk to cluster about the dock when the mule trains arrived to unload their burden of silver, and although the precious metal could not actually be seen, the crates in which the heavy ingots were packed intensified the mystery of wealth. They looked like gifts intended for a distant king, and not until the silver was safely aboard and under the protection of the armed guards did the celebrations begin.
It was like a village play in some remote German hamlet in the year 900 when death stalked the celebrations, picking off this one and that while scrannel pipes played and dances continued on the green. This year the captain’s prayer was not answered; despite three earlier successful journeys and his studious care not to drink contaminated water, the fever caught him and a thousand others, and when the galleons hoisted anchor for the return trip to Cartagena, the ranks of their sailors and soldiers were also depleted by about half. For six frantic weeks Porto Bello had been the richest little town in the world, but also the most dangerous.
In these years, Our Noble and Powerful City of Cartagena, as it was often called in official documents, was still a majestically located settlement on the southwestern coast of the Spanish Main. The famous hook protecting the inner bay still functioned, but the scores of little islands were now fortified with castles and gun emplacements and batteries of cannon. Drake had once subdued it and some daring French pirates had held it for ransom, but no more. It was unassailable, and in its broad outer and inner harbors the great ships of Spain collected to wait for the gold and silver of Peru.
On 6 April 1662 the silver-laden galleons from Porto Bello sailed into Cartagena, and after provisioning from the copious stores assembled there, were ready for the 1,300-mile run north to Havana. As soon as Governor Alfonso Ledesma, lineal descendant of that notable second governor of Cartagena, Roque Ledesma y Ledesma, stepped aboard, the fleet headed out.
On 7 May, Ledesma anchored his treasure ships in Havana’s ample harbor, where the local governor rushed out in a small boat to deliver exciting news: ‘Don Alfonso! The king, in honor of your past braveries and your undoubted courage this time, has invested you with the position of Admiral of the Combined Fleets on their Atlantic voyage to Spain. Admiral Ledesma, I salute you.’
The other half of this great armada—hundreds of ships of all sizes— would arrive from the port of Vera Cruz bringing vast stores of silver from the mines at the Mexican city of San Luis Potosí, named after the more famous site in Peru, and when these huge galleons started coming into the harbor, Ledesma appreciated what a responsibility had been given him: ‘The wealth of Spain for the next ten years rides out there.’
When all ships were accounted for, the governor of Cuba gave a dinner for the departing captain, at which he asked: ‘Don Alfonso, you may be absent from Cartagena for several years, perhaps five … six. What arrangements have you made for your government, your family?’ and Ledesma raised his glass: ‘To Don Victorio Orvantes, son of my cousin, who will guard Cartagena for me. And to my wife, Doña Ana, who is at this moment on her way with our child Inés to stay with her sister in Panamá till I return … with glory, I pray.’
They drank to his health, asked that prayers be said for him and his fleet, and in the morning fired many salutes as the magnificent assembly of great galleons and little fighting ships sailed forth. It took all day for the tail-end members of the armada to catch enough wind and get under way, but when they were properly formed up outside the Havana harbor, the governor cried to those standing with him on the turrets of the fort: ‘No English pirates will dare attack that mighty flotilla!’
&nbs
p; It was a vain boast, for in November 1662, just as the armada was approaching the coast of Spain, ‘Right in the king’s featherbed,’ an Englishman later boasted, ‘seven of our swiftest raiders swept down upon the Spaniards, and would have cut out a galleon had not their admiral executed a sudden maneuver which left us bewildered. We accomplished nothing and instead lost one of our own ships, the Pride of Devon, with all hands.’
Flushed with the victory caused by his quick thinking, Admiral Ledesma led his fleet to the mouth of the Guadalquivir River and to the customs port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where officials properly registered the fact that on this day, 20 December 1662, the galleons from Cartagena and Vera Cruz arrived without the loss of even one of the small protecting ships, thanks to the courage and skill of the admiral, Don Alfonso Ledesma Amadór y Espiñal.’
The treasure which he had delivered so expeditiously despite all dangers did not remain in Spain; it was forwarded swiftly to foreign battlefronts where Spanish troops were fighting insurgency in their empire.
Potosí silver bar P-663 and many like it were rushed a thousand miles farther north to the Netherlands, where a last-minute, futile attempt was being made to regain control of that rebellious colony. There the silver was minted, and the new coins were distributed as wages to soldiers, as profit to the agents of foreign countries, and as interest to the powerful Fugger banking firm which seemed at times to hold half of Spain in fee because of past royal borrowings. So this tremendous fortune which required such effort to move—more than 11,000 miles in 526 days—accomplished nothing. But even as this was being conceded by the Spanish captains still struggling to hold on to the Netherlands, new ingots of silver were being cast in Potosí, and new galleons were gathering at Cartagena like a flock of hungry sea birds to collect the bullion at Porto Bello after it had crossed the deadly isthmus.
Erroneously the king and his advisers believed that the prosperity of a nation rested in its control of bullion; the more gold and silver the galleons brought to Sevilla, the richer the nation would be. This philosophy overlooked one timeless truth: the wealth of a nation derives from the hard work of its citizens at home, the farmers, the leather workers, the carpenters, the shipbuilders and the weavers at their looms; they create the usable goods which measure whether a nation is prospering or not.
In Spain in these critical years, when its entire future hung in the balance, her galleons continued to bring in untold wealth while her artisans and shopkeepers languished. Up the Channel, English ships brought little or no gold, but did bring the produce of the new lands and took back to them the surplus goods produced by England’s shrewd and industrious citizens. Year by year Spain imported only bullion while the English exported and imported the goods by which men and nations live, and although that year English watchers must have envied the enormous fortune which Don Alfonso delivered to Madrid, had they been all-wise they would have realized that their small trading ships were bringing to England the more important treasure.
On a bright January day in 1665 in the Spanish city of Cádiz, a grisly event occurred which, some years later, would have violent repercussions in the Caribbean.
During Admiral Ledesma’s resolute defense of his armada in the battle off the coast of Spain, nineteen English sailors from the Pride of Devon were captured. It had been the intention of the captain of the galleon under attack to hang the lot, but Admiral Ledesma was a political opportunist as well as a brave seaman, and he saw in these prisoners an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the religious authorities who played such an important role in Spanish life. Accordingly, he delivered these orders: ‘These men are heretics. Take them to Cádiz and turn them over to the Inquisition. But be sure to tell the authorities that it was I who sent them.’ And this was done.
For more than two long years, from November 1662 to January 1665, the Englishmen wasted away in the dungeons of Cádiz without light or exercise or adequate food, for if the creaking wheels of the Inquisition ground with inexorable force, they did so with aggravating slowness. During spells of activity the Englishmen might be interrogated five days in a row by their austere black-robbed judges and then ignored in silence for five months.
During their questioning the sailors were reminded that many years ago the headquarters of the Inquisition in Toledo had handed down an extraordinary three-part edict: in the early days of King Henry VIII all Englishmen had been loyal Catholics; but following his lead in 1536, in a final act of dissolution, they were forced to become Protestants; which meant that they turned their backs on Catholicism and the one and only true church of Christ. Thus, any sailors from England who were shipwrecked on Spanish shores or captured from English ships at sea were ipso facto guilty of heresy, for which the inevitable sentence was to be burned alive at the stake.
Of course, the Inquisition itself did not carry out this cruel sentence. It merely judged the men guilty, then turned them over to the secular government for the burning, so on this January day, with no members of the inquisitorial board present, soldiers herded out three Englishmen in black robes and with shaven heads, and led them to the stakes, where the other sixteen prisoners would be lined up to watch the punishment that would be repeated on them in the weeks ahead.
As they marched to their doom, the three unfortunates cried out to their brethren: ‘Resist! Cromwell and a free religion!’
They could have chosen no other words so guaranteed to infuriate the Spanish officials, who looked upon Oliver Cromwell, long dead, as an archfiend and the murderer of England’s King Charles I, a splendid ruler then on his way to leading England back to the pope. Cromwell had installed what they saw as a fierce atheistical Protestantism, and anyone who invoked his name in Spain deserved to die. So the fires were lit, and through the smoke and the screams came the defiant voice of one victim who would not be stifled: ‘England and freedom!’
When the fires died down and the ashes were scattered along the open road, the officials in charge passed among the surviving sailors, marking the men to be burned at the next auto-da-fé: ‘You and you and you,’ the last designation falling upon a stocky sailor with a deep scar showing the letter B on his left cheek. Thirty years old, he came from the remote island of Barbados in the Caribbean. He had reached Europe on a Dutch trading ship, the Stadhouder, and after it had discharged its cargo of brown sugar called muscovado and casks of rich golden rum, he had transferred to an English ship, the Pride of Devon, which had joined a group of other English vessels attacking a Spanish bullion fleet, and been sunk off the Spanish coast.
His name was Will Tatum, and the news that he was soon to be burned at the stake aroused in him such a fury that when he was returned to his cell he beat upon the walls in blind rage at prolonged intervals for two whole days. But on the third his frenzy subsided, and he looked at his bloodied hands in disgust: Fool! Fool! You have a few days to live. Think of something! Spurred thus by a fierce desire to remain alive, he considered even the most improbable opportunities for escape. The walls were too thick to be breached. The ceiling was too high. The door to his cell was never opened. But his feverish mind continued to leap from one impossibility to another, leading him always closer to the fiery stake.
Three days before he was to be executed, the door did open, and two armed guards entered, their guns pointed at his head, while behind them came an official of the Inquisition to plead with him to recant his Protestantism so that he could be mercifully hanged and thus escape the horror of the flames. Tatum, restraining his desire to leap at the man and kill him bare-handed, explained for the tenth time: ‘You have it wrong. Oliver Cromwell is long dead and his son fled. England has a king again and Catholics do not suffer.’
The austere official would not listen. Working so far from the capital, his knowledge was decades old, and all he knew was that Englishmen had expelled Catholic priests and denied the true religion. Heretics they were and as heretics they must die. Making one last appeal, he begged: ‘Sailor, will you admit error and rejoin the
Mother Church so that you may die the easy way?’
With a look of hatred that could never be extinguished, Tatum cried: ‘No!’ The two guards, their guns still pointed at his head, withdrew and the door to his cell clanged shut, to be opened again only when he would go to his death.
Then, the next day, when he could hear carpenters adding seats to the platform from which the officials would watch him die, the miracle for which he had hoped occurred. One of the other condemned men caught a guard by the throat as the man appeared with the evening meal of bread and gruel, strangled him, and grabbed from his dead body the keys to the cells. Realizing that with others to help he would have a better chance, he rushed to the nearest cells, opened them, and whispered: ‘No turning back. It’s sure torture if they take us.’ Thus, the five men, Will Tatum among them, moved stealthily down the stone corridor, surprised the two Spaniards guarding it, and broke their way to freedom.
Outside the jail, they kept close to the walls so that night shadows protected them, and in this manner covered some distance before a wild alarm was sounded and guards began fanning out in pursuit. In the first melee three of the men were caught and clubbed to death, but Tatum and the man who had made the flight possible, a fiery Welshman named Burton, managed to find their way to an impoverished part of town and spent the night hiding between two shacks.
Shortly before dawn they broke into a house, smothered the occupants in their beds, and stole new clothing and food to sustain them in the perilous days ahead. They felt no compunction over the murders, because, as Burton said when they were headed out of Cádiz: ‘It was them or us.’