But his uncle Will voiced the apprehension of all old-timers: ‘It was easy getting in, but will we get out?’ and in subsequent days, while the fleet stormed through the great lagoon, achieving victory after victory, the older sailors kept wondering: ‘How do we get our booty out of this trap?’
The booty was enormous, for the smaller towns perched on the banks of the lagoon were rich indeed, but the citizens had cleverly hidden their gold and jewels, so that Ned was confronted with a grave moral crisis, realizing that if the buccaneers hoped to collect the great wealth, someone must capture rich citizens who had fled into the hills, bring them back in shackles, and somehow force them into revealing their secret hiding places. Doing the latter was horrible, involving as it did the rack, the fire and the terrible woolding. But he never participated in the tortures. He did track down and deliver the people to the quarters in which the questioning took place, and when the hiding places were revealed, he did hurry there and dig up the jewels.
During a drinking celebration when the buccaneers were celebrating the success of their raid, a lookout who had been stationed at the entrance to the lagoon arrived with the news all had feared: ‘Spanish warships have moved in to block the escape route.’ Instantly men hovering on the edge of drunkenness sobered and all faces turned to watch Morgan, who showed that he was not surprised by this unlucky turn. He asked the messenger to sit down, take a drink of ale, and answer questions.
‘How many ships?’ One big and six or seven smaller, about the size of Captain McFee’s.
‘Any attempt to reactivate the fort we partially destroyed?’ Oh yes! Heavy rebuilding, new cannons, first-class troops moving in.
‘Any attempt to move the Spanish ships into the laguna?’ None. They’re bunched in the channel, waiting for you to try to break through.
At this point Morgan took an apparently unrelated tack: ‘The big ship? Has it high sides?’ … ‘Is there an area near the fort where a canoa could land and discharge men?’ … ‘Any forest in the vicinity?’ When he had heard enough, he calmly told his captains: ‘Problem is simple, gentlemen. We break through their blockade, sail back to Port Royal, and distribute our prize money,’ and none of the captains dared ask him ‘How?’
He had only one option: to run the gauntlet even though the forces arrayed against him seemed overpowering, and on 27 April 1669 he prepared to do just this. Ned, who now served aboard the flagship, had an opportunity to observe at close hand the brilliant manner in which Morgan prepared to make his dash for freedom. Moving his ten-ship flotilla toward the contested exit, he addressed his sailors: ‘We don’t have to do it the way they expect. We’ll do it our way.’ And he assigned the men diverse tasks. Some cut lengths of wood from which to make a host of imaginary men, others dressed them in improvised hats, while still others armed them with sticks. Having learned that Will Tatum was a man to trust with important tasks, Morgan summoned him from another ship: ‘Will, I want you to bury this deck with everything you can find that burns. Especially tar, pitch and loose gunpowder. Then cover the mess with dry leaves and sticks.’ Will asked quietly: ‘You’re not going to sacrifice your own flagship?’ and Morgan replied: ‘No Spanish admiral would do it, but I shall.’ And while Will and Ned prepared the ship for the flames, Morgan directed his blacksmiths: ‘Forge me six huge grappling hooks, twice as big as any you’ve made before,’ and when they were done, great clawing monsters, Morgan himself helped reeve heavy ropes to them.
When all was ready, with three smaller ships pared to the gunwales so they could fly over the water, Morgan gave the signal, and his fearfully overmatched fleet set sail as if trying to break through the cordon, but when the fire ship, controlled only by Tatum, Pennyfeather and eight daring men, plus the wooden sailors who stood ferocious along the deck, drew abreast of the big Spanish ship that formed the heart of their defense, the pirate craft did not try to steal past, but turned suddenly to head straight for the midquarter of the enemy ship, while two of the smaller English vessels attacked fore and aft. The three English ships smashed simultaneously the great Spanish warship, grappled themselves to her, and caused the Spanish defenders to break into three groups. They would have done better by opposing only the big ship in the middle, for once the hooks were set and separating made impossible, Tatum and Pennyfeather shouted to the other Englishmen: ‘Flee! We fire the powder!’ and the men leaped overboard to be rescued by a trailing ship while Will did what gave him pleasure: setting fire to the chain of powder which, even before he and Ned leaped into the sea, exploded in a vast fireball that ignited all the inflammables on deck, leaving the huge Spanish warship prey to the roaring flames.
In one gigantic blaze the two ships intermingled their fates, iron grapples binding them together as they burned to the water line and sank as one. The major Spanish plug in the escape route had been removed.
Meanwhile, the second largest Spanish ship had fled toward the fort in an attempt to beach itself so that its crew could get ashore and help man the fort, but one of the swift English vessels trailed it and with fireballs set it ablaze, leaving it a smoking hulk. The third big Spanish ship was chased right out of the laguna and into the narrows, where it was captured and where Morgan adopted it as his flagship to replace the one he had sacrificed to the burning. The lagoon was cleared of Spanish ships and the first of the impediments to freedom had been removed.
In the morning Captain Morgan addressed himself to the problem of how to get past that menacing fort whose restored guns could destroy any enemy trying to sneak by. The task looked impossible.
But on that morning more than a month ago when he had sailed his ships past the fort, he had seen a way to get them back out, and now he put it into effect. Gathering about him all the big canoas his men had captured within the laguna, he placed in each twenty well-armed men, clearly visible, and directed the steersman to head for shore near the approaches to the castle but to land in the midst of tangled trees. There the canoas ostensibly unloaded what would become an assault force on the fort, but when they returned to the pirate ships, with only two rowers visible, the other eighteen were stretched flat in the bottom with leaves covering their bare arms, lest they glisten and betray the trick.
In this clever manner, Morgan appeared to have landed at the foot of the fort an immense assault party, whereas in reality all his men were back aboard their ships, but hidden belowdecks. The occupants of the fort, determined not to be taken by surprise, switched their heavy guns away from the seafront and pointed them directly at the spot where the sailors had landed and from where they could be expected to launch their attack.
It never came. Instead, a lone lookout attending the sea passage shouted: ‘They’re escaping!’ And when the defenders rushed to that side of their fort, armed only with pistols and swords, their guns having been pointed the wrong way, they saw Henry Morgan and his fleet of ten heading serenely into the narrow channel that would lead them to freedom. One Spanish officer who had a navigator’s glass studied the lead ship, and cried to his fellows: ‘That swine! He’s using our Soledad as his flagship and he’s sitting there drinking what has to be rum.’ Morgan was free and on his way back to Port Royal.
The deadly trio, Captain McFee with his Glen Affric, Will Tatum as his first mate and Ned Pennyfeather as a hanger-on, wasted the year 1670 in diverse and unproductive ways: loafing around the inns of Port Royal, drinking and carousing. A Quaker missionary, come down from Philadelphia to serve on Barbados, was laid over in Port Royal when his ship lost a spar, but after one horrendous day ashore he retreated to his cabin, from which he would not budge so long as his ship remained in that hellhole: I often read about Sodom and Gomorrah, and I thought: They could not have been real, just symbols of evil. But Port Royal is very real, and if this were the old days, God would sweep this place off the face of the earth.
Grown irritable in their idleness, the Glen Affric men set out to sea with no sensible plan in mind. ‘The logwood jungles we don’t want,’ the sailors insi
sted, and they kept hoping to intercept a Spanish treasure ship, but none appeared. So they wandered first toward Porto Bello, but the unexpected arrival of an entire Spanish convoy from Cartagena scared them away from certain disaster.
In their random wandering, they never called the sea upon which they were traveling the Caribbean. That word had in those years not yet come into common usage. Because of the curious way in which the Isthmus of Panamá ran—west to east and not, as one might have expected, north to south—the Caribbean was always referred to as the North Sea, which it was, and the Pacific as the South. So Drake fought the Spanish in the North Sea, then crept through the Strait of Magellan to come home by way of the South Sea, not the Pacific. And Sir Harry Morgan ravaged the North Sea, not the Caribbean.
One sailor kept telling McFee: ‘Mexico is where the silver is,’ so for want of anything better, the Affric sailed northwest to the first Mexican land they could find. It turned out to be the historic island of Cozumel, but when they stormed ashore, guns ready, they found nothing but a collection of decaying temple ruins from some ancient period. Will, studying the fallen rocks, announced them to be Egyptian and the others accepted his opinion, but there was much discussion as to how the Egyptians had reached this forlorn spot.
At Cozumel they found not one peso, but Ned did come across a small carved head which must have been broken from a larger statue, and this he carried back to the ship with him, but when his uncle saw it on the boy’s hammock he threw it overboard: ‘We don’t want no heathen idols on this Christian ship. Bad luck.’
In the last days of 1670, Captain Morgan himself let it be known that he had in mind ‘to try one of the vastest enterprises ever attempted in these seas,’ and as the rumor spread, captains like Angus McFee with his small tough Glen Affric swarmed back into Port Royal, to hear the official confirmation: ‘Captain Henry Morgan, with official papers from the king and from the governor of Jamaica, has been appointed admiral and commander in chief of all forces arranged against the Spanish, and he invites any ships and crews interested to meet with him at Isla Vaca off the southwest corner of Hispaniola to lay plans.’ Within a few days the roadstead at Port Royal was deserted as a small armada converged upon the little island off whose shore the great warship Oxford had exploded two years before, and Morgan was delighted to see that nearly a dozen battle-scarred French ships were among them, for he had high regard for the fighting ability of the French buccaneers. ‘Best in the Caribbean,’ he frequently said, adding: ‘If properly led,’ and he intended leading them to gold and glory. When Morgan as admiral addressed his assembled captains, he stunned them with the boldness of his vision: ‘Gentlemen, we have assembled here thirty-eight ships and nigh three thousand fighting men.’ Morgan halted the cheers which greeted this with a warning finger: ‘But we have just learned that England is now formally at peace with Spain.’ Loud groans. ‘All is not lost, for we have further instructions that if we uncover any Spanish plot to invade Jamaica or any other English possession, we are commanded to attack Spain wherever vulnerable in order to render said attack impossible.’ More cheers. Then the sober news: ‘Gentlemen, we have no proof of any such Spanish plan, and I would be most grateful if you could find me some.’
What happened next is best described in a memorial which Ned Pennyfeather composed to Admiral Morgan when the latter was long since dead:
To capture proof of Spanish duplicity, several small ships ranged far and wide to take prisoners who would testify that Spanish forces in Cartagena were planning to mount a major effort to retake Jamaica. I judge there was no such plan, for we captured two Spanish ships, one after the other, and despite the most prolonged interrogations at which I served as translator, we learned nothing, whereupon the obstinate Spaniards were loaded with weights and thrown into the sea.
However, one of our sister scouting ships did capture two prisoners who were willing to betray Spanish secrets, and I was moved to that ship to ensure the accuracy of their reports. The two were not Spaniards, really, but Canary Islanders of a base sort and I was never convinced that they told the truth or that, indeed, they knew anything at all about which they testified, but after they saw three of their companions, who had refused to talk, well weighted and tossed overboard, they were willing to swear on the Bible I provided that in Cartagena a massive fleet of many vessels and untold soldiers was preparing for an assault on Jamaica. And when I handed my copy of their statements to Admiral Morgan, he crunched them in his right hand, raised them high in the air, and shouted: ‘This is all we need!’ and that very afternoon he informed the assembled captains: ‘We sail for the isthmus, march across it, and sack the great and rich city of Panamá.’ When I heard these words I trembled, and so did many of the captains.
There were two routes across the isthmus, leading from the Caribbean on the east to the Pacific on the west. The first was by land, the infamous one traversed by Drake and the mule trains from Peru. The second, a route utilizing the Chagres River some miles to the north and fearsomely protected by a stupendous fort at its mouth, so ingeniously located and fortified that one of Morgan’s men would later require two closely packed pages to describe its frightening armaments: ‘Built upon a high mountain … surrounding ditch thirty feet deep … supported by a smaller fort with eight great guns commanding the river.’ And finally: ‘Besides all this, there lies in the entrance to the river a great rock, scarce to be perceived unless at low tide.’
The attack on the fort by four hundred of Morgan’s men against the same number of resolute Spanish defenders was long and terrible. Dusk fell with no resolution, and it looked to Ned, fighting with the grenadiers whose perilous job it was to run close to the walls and throw in grenades and lighted brands, as if the defenders might repulse the raiders and throw them back to their waiting ships. But, as light faded, one of those unforeseen events occurred which determine the outcome of battles: a skilled Indian marksman fighting with the Spaniards sent an arrow that passed completely through the shoulder of a grenadier standing beside Ned. Cursing, the Englishman ripped it out of the wound, tipped it with a mixture of cotton and powder, set it ablaze, and shot it back into the fort, where it landed on a dry roof. Within minutes that portion of the fort was aflame, and through the long night daring forays of other grenadiers including Ned lobbed additional fireballs into the fort, so that by morning most of the wooden portions blazed.
Then followed a day of horror. More than a hundred privateers, a number never matched before, died in their attempt to subdue this stubborn fort, whose Spanish defenders lost all but a few of their force. And never in Ned’s prior experience had so many Spanish soldiers fought with such valor, especially the castellan, who was driven back by concentrated fire first to a corner of his fort, then from room to room, fighting with cutlass all the way, until he was at last forced into a corner, where he held off three buccaneers until a fourth rushed in to administer the coup de grâce. Ned, who had been one of the three and nearly slain by this heroic man, knelt over the corpse, retrieved the Spaniard’s sword, and placed it over his fallen body with the handle serving as a cross. There the castellan lay as flames embraced him and his fort.
On 19 January 1671, when Admiral Morgan and his near two thousand men started their trip up the Chagres River in their fleet of canoas, none were aware, Admiral Morgan least of all, that they were engaged in what would turn out to be one of the most ill-prepared expeditions in military history. For when one of his sailors, seeing that he had left behind all their food supplies in order to carry weapons needed for the assault on Panamá, asked: ‘What are we going to eat on our march?’ he said lightly, as had many other generals in history: ‘We’ll live off the land.’
Unfortunately, there was no land. The Chagres River did not drain into fine farmlands populated by Indians in little grass huts tending cattle, harvesting fruit trees, and growing vegetables. It drained only into swamps that contained no huts, no cattle, and to the amazement of the sailors, not even any fruit trees. So
this huge army of men went three days without one bite to eat. On the fourth day there was a perverse kind of joy among the troops, for scouts cried: ‘Ambush ahead!’ To the starving marchers it did not mean danger, but a chance to fight a devil-may-care battle and capture some food. However, when they reached the site of the supposed ambush, they found to their horror that the Spaniards had fled, leaving behind not a morsel of food. All they left was a half-score of leather field bags such as soldiers in all countries prefer for the safekeeping of their valuables, and these the famished sailors ate. One of them wrote later:
You ask how men can eat leather? Simple. Scrape off the hair, cut it into strips, beat it between two rocks as you soak it in river water, then boil it to make it tender and roast it to make it tasty. You still can’t bite it, but you can cut it in very small bits and roll them around in your mouth for the delicious taste, and finally swallow them. They carry no nourishment to your belly, but they do give it something to work on, and this ends for a while the terrible gripe when a belly works but finds nothing.
Ned almost missed this feast, such as it was, because he was scouting up the river when the leather was distributed, but when he returned and saw the men chewing on what he assumed was food, he cried in panic: ‘Where’s mine?’ and Mompox took him by the arm, sat him down, hushed the protest, and explained what the sailors were trying to eat. Then he separated his apportionment of roasted leather and gave his friend half. Ned later told Will Tatum: ‘It saved my life. I couldn’t have gone another day.’
The ninth day was one never to be forgotten, for after an excruciating climb to the top of a sizable hill, the starving men looked south and saw a sight which stunned them with its beauty and significance, as Ned Pennyfeather wrote when he recalled it: