Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online

the bright stream of gold and silver that helped sustain the empire, signaled a new opening in the struggle. England had placed itself perfectly “to obstruct the commerce of all the islands to the windward with the coasts of the mainland and of New Spain,” an officer of the court acknowledged. “The fleets and galleons will run great risk in passing Jamaica.”
    Philip tried to maintain his stoic façade in court, but when he wrote to one correspondent, his true emotions came pouring out. His deepest fear, the complete collapse of the empire, would be a distinct possibility if England really entered the fray and seized the American treasure:
                      
    If this should happen it would be the final ruin of this realm; and no human power would be able to stop it: the Almighty hand of God alone could do it; and so I beseech you most earnestly to supplicate Him to take pity upon us, and not to allow the infidels to destroy realms so pure in the faith…. Blessed be his holy name!

3
    Morgan

    O n the island of Jamaica, Philip’s inheritance was not yet lost to the English. A killer’s game of cat and mouse was under way. The Spanish holdouts had retired to the mountains, and the English held the shore and the new town of Cagway; beyond that was enemy territory. To English boys from Coventry or Dover, everything past the tree line or the small town was terrifying: when they’d slept on the shores of Hispaniola at night, the sound of the giant crabs emerging from the ocean and scuttling across the beach had shot them bolt awake; it sounded exactly like the clatter of bullet cartridges on an infantryman. And then there were the fireflies that were mistaken for the lit fuses carried by soldiers to light their muskets. Convinced that the Spanish soldiers were closing in on them, they stayed tense, trigger-happy until dawn. Even after they’d lived on the island for weeks and begun to grow accustomed to its sights and sounds, the beauty of the place turned sinister at night, when the oddly humanlike jabbering of the monkeys crescendoed with birdcalls and unidentifiable screams (animal? human?) to a deafening roar. For all along they knew that their true enemies—the former slaves—were watching.
    Gage had been wrong: The blacks had not turned against the Spanish; they’d disappeared into the jungle and become excellent guerrilla fighters. “They grow bold and bloody,” Major Sedgwick wrote, “a people that know not what the laws and customs of civil nations mean, neither do we know how to capitulate or discourse with them, or how to take any of them.” The soldiers could not even find their hiding places and were forced to send to England for hounds. The malnourished survivors of the invasion sent patrols into the bush to smoke out the last of the resistance; when they went in numbers, they were safe. But when hunger tempted a lone Englishman to walk out of the cleared settlement where his mates stood guard with muskets, into the trackless jungle, different rules applied. Tempted by the fish in the streams or the hope of capturing an iguana or guinea hen, a soldier might head out into the bush, then stop and listen. The jungle emitted a stream of snaps, low calls, whirls, and clicks; he understood none of it. He went on. All along, the black guerrilla was tracking him soundlessly, to English eyes a shadow among shadows, sensed but not seen. When the famished soldier at last let down his guard to chase a lizard or hook a fish, something would flash in the corner of his eye, and a machete would cleave his skull from the crown forward.
    Each side knew the stakes. When the English search party would see the vultures circling above and find their dead mate, the mutilations would be gruesome. Officers suffered worse fates: Captured and force-marched to the other side of the island, they’d be interrogated under torture (with methods learned from the masters of the Inquisition), then shipped off to