Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online Page A

the salt mines of the Main or the dungeons of Cuba, to which death was often preferable. (One captured English soldier told the Spaniards what they wanted to hear: that the Jews of Flanders, recently allowed into England, had financed the invasion—a complete falsehood.) The black guerrillas captured by the whites might face a punishment similar to that dealt out to disobedient slaves on Barbados, reported by an Englishman. The “rebellious negro” was chained flat on his belly and fire was applied to his feet until he was gradually burned to ashes while still alive. Others were starved to death with a loaf of bread hanging just out of reach, and they were known to gnaw the flesh off their own shoulders before dying. It was in this atmosphere that Henry Morgan came of age as a soldier.
    His deliverer—the man whose life had brought Morgan to Jamaica—did not live to see his rise. Thomas Gage succumbed to disease early in 1656; in the records of the Admiralty, his widow successfully applied for back pay in the amount of one pound 6 shillings and 8 fourpence, his last appearance in the ledgers of English foreign affairs. At the end of his book that had led the English nation to the shores of Jamaica, Gage had compared himself to one of the spies sent into the land of Canaan, Moses’s emissaries who had gone in search of the promised land and returned to describe a place filled with milk and honey, with clusters of grapes so large that two men had to carry them. (Gage did not mention that they also told their people of the strongly fortified cities and that “the land through which we have gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants.”) He saw himself as the scout for the great Protestant empire soon to rule the New World, and perhaps even a martyr, like his Catholic ancestors. “I am ready to witness with the best drops of blood in my veins,” Gage wrote. “Though true it is that I have been envied, jealousied, and suspected by many.”
    One would be naïve to take him at his word; our last glimpse of Gage brings us closer to his true character. It finds the ex-friar serving as the interpreter for the English commanders as they negotiate the surrender of the Spanish. Surely Hispaniola had been an appalling embarrassment for him; his sunny predictions had cost lives, and he was forced to witness his fellow Protestant crusaders falling left and right. But in the Spanish report on the invasion, he has recovered from any embarrassment, and we find him yelling at the
sargento mayor
of Santiago de la Vega (later Spanish Town) about insufficient supplies, basically lording it over his old compatriots. The writer’s dislike of the man comes through; he describes Gage as a man full of “noisy menaces” who “took the habit of Saint Dominic…and, ordained a priest, returned to England and fell from the Faith.” When the Spanish claimed that Jamaica belonged to them, having been granted to them by Pope Alexander and occupied for 140 years, Gage shot back that Cromwell had taken the island for the English and that “not right, but might of arms gave them possession,” tossing in that the pope had failed to snatch away Henry VIII’s realm when the king turned against him and adding “other blasphemous, licentious words.” At this the Englishmen began laughing.
    Gage had come to the Americas in search of a religious crusade, but he little realized that the war he was relishing would take a far different shape: It would be a confrontation not between two traditional faiths but between two radically different visions of men and society. Cromwell’s “banners of Christ” had been folded up and put away; in their place would come the flag of the pirates, whose way of life was utterly foreign to both Catholics and Protestants. Port Royal would not mark the beginning of Spain’s replacement with another theocratic empire. The town and its pirates would follow another path, one focused more intensely on the