|
|
|
 |
What did the Pirates Drink?
Article from Modern Drunkard Magazine
on the alcoholic adventures of Pirates
Fifteen men on a
dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a
bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil
had done for the
rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a
bottle of rum!
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Pirates.
The word conjures images that have been with
us for centuries: a white skull and cross-bones
on a flag of black silk; a parrot on the
captain’s shoulder; buried treasure; daggers
clenched in teeth; walking the plank; eye
patches; black-bellied schooners roving free
under a Caribbean moon. Pirates were outlaws,
carousers and two-fisted warriors, epically
lusting after life. They drank with a gusto that
was truly magnificent. Their intoxicated
exploits are a vital part of our shared Drunkard
History. And while they weren’t always pretty,
in thought or in deed, pirates were and remain
symbolic of our desire to live our lives
according to nothing but our personal desires.
They lived, killed and died by a very simple
ethos: No Quarter Asked, and None Given.
What we understand about pirates, the
stereotypical picture in our heads, is a blend
of fact and fancy, coming to us in equal parts
from literature, the movies, and the reality of
their lives.
Daniel Defoe set the stage, from the literary
end, with his novels Robinson Crusoe
and Captain Singleton, as well as the
nominally non-fiction tome The Four Years
Voyages of Captain George Roberts, a
lengthy account of Roberts’ adventures while a
prisoner of the ed pirate Edward Low, which
is now believed to have been wholly invented by
Defoe. Defoe’s descriptions of pirates and life
aboard a sailing vessel are surprisingly
factual, though he is done one better by Robert
Louis Stevenson in his classic novel
Treasure Island.
Stevenson shows pirates simultaneously as
brutal and romantic. He also provides some of
the best-known pirate clichés, right down to the
parrot perched on Long John Silver’s shoulder.
Stevenson gets it mostly correct as his pirates
lust for money, rum, and glory, all while freely
indulging their anger and pompous brutality. The
pirates plot their strategy while sharing
gallons of rum. Before being discovered by young
Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver and his dastardly
mate, Israel Hands, bring recalcitrant crewmen
into their mutiny using the free flow of drink
as a persuader.
It’s in the movies, of course, that we get
some of our most enduring pirate imagery. Almost
always depicted in a romantic light, pirates
were often shown as good men fighting villainy
through the only means available. A notable
example from the early days of film is The
Black Pirate starring Errol Flynn. It is
remembered chiefly for the jaw-dropping moment
where Flynn, under attack and having been chased
up into his ship’s rigging, plunges his dagger
through a sail and rides the cutting blade down
to the deck. And many other movies followed,
including five treatments of Treasure
Island, culminating most recently with the
very fun and well-researched Gore Verbinski
movie The Pirates of the Caribbean. In
it, the characters of Captain Jack Sparrow
(Johnny Depp) and Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey
Rush) embody pretty much every pirate stereotype
known to western culture. Curiously missing from
the movie, though, is drink. About the only time
these pirates engage in boozing, they come
across more like guys hanging in a sports bar
than pirates swilling rye and grog and spitting
in the devil’s eye. It’s a sad reflection of our
modern culture.
But who were the real pirates? How long have
they been doing their thing? How and where did
they live? How were they so successful at
engendering fear in the masses for so long?
Pirates have been around for thousands of
years. Even before they were called pirates,
there were pirates. From the first moment
someone decided to transport something valuable
by ship, there’s been a pirate or two there to
steal it. Ancient history from around the world
is rife with tales of pirates harassing
innocents on the open ocean, and the oldest tale
is nearly five thousand old.
Somewhat more recently, the Scandinavians
were the scourge of the seas in the 5th century.
They accosted shipping from the North Sea to the
coast of Spain, lead by one Alwilda. Alwilda was
a woman, which was unusual, but not nearly so
unusual as the fact that she seems to have
commanded a pirate vessel crewed entirely by
women. She might have been counted among the
most successful pirates in history had she not
fallen in love with her pursuer and one-time
betrothed, Prince Alf of Denmark. They married
and so ended Alwilda’s career as a pirate.
Like many Scandinavians of the time, Alwilda
preferred mead on her ships. Distilled spirits
were almost non-existent in those days, but a
pirate had to have a way of getting her drunk
on. Clean water is very important when sailing
the open ocean, but sources were troublesome to
locate. Alwilda killed two ‘lubbers with one
stone by loading barrels of mead on her ships to
quench her crews’ various thirsts.
Sailing off to the Netherlands, a cabal of
Dutch pirates called the waterguezen
attacked ships and stifled shipping for fifty
years in the early 1400s. The Ilanun pirates,
mostly of mixed Spanish origin roved from the
Philippine coast to Papua New Guinea. The
Mediterranean was controlled, literally, for
over a hundred years by the famed Barbary
corsairs. They used captured slaves to power
their boats’ oars, and terrorized coasts from
Palestine to Spain. But the men we know as
pirates, the ones who comprise our mental
pictures, were most active in the Caribbean, the
Indian Ocean, and along the North American
Atlantic during the reign of King Charles II in
the late 1700s. Those guys were pirates,
baby.
From hidden coves and inlets in Newfoundland
in the north, to hundreds of small islands in
the Caribbean, to the bays of Madagascar,
classic pirates enjoyed a wide range, and a
plethora of secret (and some not-so-secret)
bases and hidey-holes.
For several years in the late 1600s the
entire island of Madagascar off the coast of
South Africa, was controlled by a pair of
pirates. Abraham Samuel, who called himself King
Samuel, ruled the northern end of the island,
while the southern was under the command of
James Plantain, the so-called King of Planter’s
Bay. Working separately, because the two men
hated each other, they preyed upon ships of the
British East India Company, and, for all intents
and purposes, ran the whole Indian Ocean. The
Pirate Kings eventually went to war against each
other—over liquor and women. Riches and kingdoms
were cool, but don’t go messing with a guy’s
liquor or his special lady friend.
Back in the western hemisphere, favorite
pirate dens included the Bay of Campeche and the
Bay of Honduras in Central America, Tortuga in
the Caribbean, Charleston in the Carolina
Territory, and New Providence in Nassau, the
Bahamas. Hands down, though, the port of call at
the top of every pirate’s list was Port Royal,
Jamaica. It was the Mecca of piracy, a place
where the men could sell their stolen goods and
drink up their profits.
Known by pirates and privateers alike as the
Port of Orgies, Port Royal was described, at the
time, the “most sinful and seditious city in the
world.” Surrounded by towering palm trees and
fronting waters so blue they begged for Prozac,
Port Royal was both the seat of the British
colonial government and a 24-hour-a-day frenzy
of drinking and debauchery. On no fewer than
twelve occasions revelers got going too hard,
too fast, and burned their taverns to the
ground. Can’t you just see them—dancing,
singing, and drinking around the biggest bonfire
in town?
One of the characters who prowled the streets
of Port Royal was a Dutchman known as Roche
Brasiliano. He was an occasional pirate, but
mostly a land lubber and the Port’s most
notorious drunkard. When feeling festive,
Brasiliano would purchase an entire keg of wine
and sit on it in the middle of a public walkway
suggesting that passersby drink with him. Almost
no one refused, since Brasiliano usually made
his suggestion by pointing a pistol at his
potential drinking partner.
A decent port, a place to call home, was
important to pirates (and all other mariners)
because life aboard a sailing vessel was far
from a picnic. It pretty much sucked, actually,
sucked more ass than a pharmaceutical lobbyist.
Sailors often went hungry and potable water was
tricky to come by, especially on long voyages.
It should surprise no one that ships generally
packed more wine and rum than water, for the
simple reason that liquor guaranteed a cleaner
drink. Disease was also a major problem, with
the men suffering from scurvy and dropsy
(edema), and an entire medical catalogue of
lesser ailments. The famous mariner’s beverage,
grog (a blend of sugar-water, lime juice and
rum), was carried by both navymen and sailors to
prevent scurvy. Navy men received grog as their
daily rum ration, while pirates drank it as they
pleased. Aboard a pirate vessel there was no
specific time set aside for hooching; they drank
whenever the urge took hold.
In the main, pirates were treated better by
their captains than were navy sailors. Surviving
records from the High Court of the Admiralty
(Britain) are stuffed full of brutal acts
dispensed by captains on crewmen. Flogging was
an everyday event on British ships for hundreds
of years, until a courageous young officer named
Winston Churchill ended the revolting practice.
And when sailors weren’t being whipped, they
were confined in shipboard crawlspaces
(“brigs”), lashed to masts to bake in the sun,
dangled over the gunwales by their ankles, and
deprived of their rum. Records indicate that the
road to a mutiny on a British Navy ship wasn’t
paved with floggings and danglings, but with the
anger of men deprived of their daily tot of rum.
Many pirates began their seafaring careers as
military sailors, but jumped to pirating to
escape the predations of navy commanders. The
pay was far better, too. As was the drink.
Not that every pirate captain exemplified
warmth and fuzziness. Pirates were an unruly
bunch and some captains resorted to extreme
punishments to keep order on their ships.
Pirates could be cruel to their victims, too,
but in many cases these “human sharks” were all
dorsal fin and no teeth. They learned early on
that things got done quicker when you had a
reputation for ruthless brutality. In as many as
half the recorded cases of piracy during the
golden age of the late 1700s, barely a shot was
fired. (The fact is that the two main things
victims complained about when interviewed after
an altercation with pirates were that the
pirates used too many dirty words and smelled
too strongly of liquor.) The mere presence of a
black sloop gaining on the horizon, Jolly Roger
flapping in the wind, was enough to cause your
average merchant captain to drop sail and invite
them aboard. Striking fear in their victim’s
hearts was the whole point for flying black
colors in the first place. Some pirates
preferred the sneakier tactic of approaching a
target flying a friendly flag, but few of these
met with high levels of success. No, the really
wealthy pirates, the ones with household names
even today—Black Bart, Captain Kidd, Blackbeard,
etc.—announced their piratical intentions with,
as the saying goes, flying colors.
In spite of all the tales of piratical
violence, most didn’t want to take lives, they
wanted to take goodies. The plunder was the most
important thing.
Everyone has heard about pirate treasure;
massive iron-banded chests, bulging with gold
and jewels, buried in remote locales and found
by following hand-drawn maps where “X” marks the
spot. While it is true that some pirates
accumulated vast hordes of shiny stuff, most
true pirate plunder was much more mundane. They
went after goods that could be sold for a
profit, and stuff they could make use of
immediately. As far as goods went, they looked
for large amounts of things like cloth, baled
cotton, salted meats, and so on. Loot in the
more immediate category included almost anything
of use aboard the pirates’ ship, such as sails,
rope, carpenters’ tools and weapons. Most pirate
vessels carried more armaments than the norm,
and most of these weapons, from cannon to the
pistols used by the men, were stolen from
prizes.
When all was said and done, however, the
single most popular thing to plunder was liquor.
It made the men happy, and had the ability,
through its availability or lack thereof, to
forestall or cause a mutiny. Check out the
following, from the personal journal of the
ed Edward Teach, better known as
Blackbeard:
Such a day; rum all out. Our company
somewhat sober; a damned confusion amongst us!
Rogues a plotting. Talk of separation. So I
looked sharp for a prize [and] took one with a
great deal of liquor aboard. So kept the company
hot, damned hot, then all things went well
again.
Yep. Pirates were drinkers. Whether they
bought their hooch in port, swiped it off
another ship, or distilled it themselves, they
loved their drink, and were some of the
grandest revelers of all time. Tales of their
debauches are the stuff of myth and legend.
Pirates drank while eating, they drank while
sailing, they drank before, during, and after
fighting, making them the first great
multitaskers. People molested by pirates
routinely complained that their oppressors
smelled of two things: tar and rum. While rum
was the most popular beverage, these guys
weren’t picky. You name it, they drank it. Mead,
brandy, red wine, and a hysterically
awful-sounding homemade concoction of distilled
grains and fish oil that I don’t even want to
think about.
Since every day aboard a pirate ship was one
long happy hour, music, dancing and toasting
were the order of the day. Many a buccaneer kept
his place in the shipboard hierarchy through his
ability to play a fiddle or squeeze box.
Impromptu serenades were common, with those who
couldn’t play instruments banging away on pots
or barrels, and every man singing his throat
raw, as they mangled a shanty like only a bunch
of drunken sailors could. Throughout the
festivities, men offered toasts to their
comrades, the captain, their mothers, their
captain’s mother, plunder, and the devil, whose
praises were hollered above all others. Pirates,
perhaps it is needless to say, felt a special
affinity for the devil and for deviltry in
general.
Sometimes they were forced to go sober for
reasons beyond their control, and those were
rotten days and nights. At other times they had
such a wealth of hooch that they managed to
screw up their lives in rather grand fashion.
Bleary-eyed pirates beached their ships on sand
bars and tore their hulls out on coral reefs.
Intoxicated decision-making lead to raids on
uninhabited islands and set-tos with larger and
better armed military vessels. One gang got
loaded on purloined French wine and killed the
only guy on board who knew how to use a sextant.
They sailed around in circles for days. Another
time, the captain of a pirate ship got too deep
in his cups and slept though his ship’s capture
by the British Navy. He was so shitfaced, in
fact, that his captors had to hoist his carcass
from the hold with a block and tackle.
In the late 1800s a crew of pirates attacked
and looted a ship in the Gulf of Mexico that was
bound for New Orleans. As they divvied up their
loot they came across a crate containing a
beautiful, hand-carved marble fireplace mantel
from Italy. They were about to toss it overboard
when one of the men read the shipping
information and stopped in his tracks. The
mantel was on its way to Lynchburg, Tennessee,
and the home of none other than Jack Daniel. The
pirates had so much respect for Old No. 7
whiskey, that they promptly repacked the mantel
and paid to ship it to its rightful owner.
For the ordinary pirate, liquor was mother
and father, it gave benediction and exacted
penance, it blotted out the heat of the sun and
intensified the light of the moon. It sang, it
danced, and it sometimes turned pirate itself
and gave crappy advice. In heavy weather and
mirrored calm, pirates were glorious drunkards,
all the way around.Almost anyone, if asked, can come up with the
name of at least one pirate; they remain that
famous today. Way back when they were household
names, the mere mention of which caused
outbreaks of twitching terror. At the
famous-then, not-so-famous-now, end of the scale
are men like Edward Low, scourge of the Indian
Ocean, and Jean-Bart, a Frenchman who captured
80(!) English ships in a single raid off
Dunkirk, and was subsequently knighted by King
Louis XIV. There was Bartholomew “Black Bart”
Roberts, who amassed greater riches from plunder
than any other pirate in history. The French
pirate Jean Lafitte, when captured by the
American Navy, offered, in return for a pardon
from President James Madison, to fight against
the British on the American side of the
conflicts at the end of the War of 1812. Without
his naval skills, New Orleans would’ve been lost
to England and the history of our country might
have gone quite differently.
Scores of pirates came and went during the
classic age of piracy, but history remembers
three above all others. They are, Captain
William Kidd, Edward Teach, better known as the
psychotic Blackbeard, and Captain Henry Morgan.
Their lives and exploits are the very definition
of the word Pirate. Let’s meet ‘em.
 Captain
Kidd
William Kidd was born in Scotland around 1645,
the son of a local landowner. He became
fascinated with the sea at a young age and
eventually enlisted in the Royal British Navy.
Considered an excellent seaman and capable
commander, Kidd quickly rose to the rank of
captain. He was given his own ship, the
Adventure Galley, and unleashed as a
privateer for the British crown.
Quickly, the difference between a pirate and
a privateer is this: pirates did their thing
illegally and without regard to national
allegiances, while privateers did the exact same
things, but with the approval of their
particular government. English privateers, like
Kidd, carried a document called a “letter of
marque and reprisal” giving them Royal authority
to harass the shipping of England’s enemies,
whether Spanish or French. It was essentially a
license to steal.
Captain Kidd received his letter from Charles
II, and set sail for the Indian Ocean to bother
the French. But he couldn’t find any. Had he
been able to locate even a single French vessel
his life might’ve turned out much differently.
But after 18 months at sea he hadn’t found so
much as a spare beret, and his crew started
getting the grumbles. Privateers weren’t given
ordinary sailors’ wages, but instead were paid a
percentage of their plunder. No prizes meant no
money.
Kidd didn’t help this troubling situation by
being a bully and a complete jackass. He treated
his crew like shit and they hated him. They
hated him so much that they once waited for him
to go ashore to arrange supplies, and sailed
away without him. He caught up with them after a
week by commandeering a small sloop. When he
demanded to know why they had ditched him, they
swore to a man that they had sailed on per
Kidd’s own orders.
That Kidd learned nothing from this incident
is well documented by the fact that he continued
abusing his authority, flogging the men and even
denying them their rum. When one crew member
complained too strenuously, Kidd beat him to
death with a bucket. The rest of the crew was,
needless to say, miffed. Sensing a full-blown
mutiny, Kidd decided he had better take a
ship—any ship—in order to pacify his angry crew.
Within days, he captured two ships, looted
them, and burned them each to its water line.
That they were merchant vessels belonging to the
British East India Company—the very ships he was
supposed to be protecting through his
privateering—didn’t seem to cause Kidd a great
deal of concern. The men got paid, got drunk,
and all was well aboard the Adventure Galley
for a time.
All was decidedly unwell, however, back in
England. Word had reached the Royal Admiralty
that Kidd had turned pirate, and he was
denounced in Parliament as a traitor. Ships were
immediately dispatched to bring him back to
England for trial.
When word reached Kidd that he was a wanted
man, he hot-sailed it toward his home base in
New York City where he had friends in high
places. He stopped along the way and instructed
his crew to sail into Chesapeake Bay, off
Maryland. While the Adventure Galley
waited at anchor, Kidd went ashore—alone—in a
dory laden with locked sea chests. When he
returned several hours later in an empty boat
the rumors started flying. Captain Kidd had, so
went the whispers, buried his entire horde of
gold somewhere on the coast of Chesapeake Bay.
He refused all comment, which could only have
made stories of hidden loot easier to believe.
Arriving in New York, Kidd sent his crew
ashore, their pockets stuffed with coin, while
he went immediately to the home of his friend,
Lord Bellmont, who was then the governor of New
York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where he
begged the man to save him from the Brits.
Bellmont, no friend of England, was more than
happy to help—right up to the moment he heard
the rumors of Kidd’s buried treasure, at which
point he invited Kidd for dinner, got him
liquored up, and turned him over to British
agents.
Kidd was taken in chains back to England and
tossed into the special hell that was Newgate
Prison, where he spent the next 11 months. There
was much ado over the Kidd situation in
Parliament, and Kidd was questioned there
several times. He blamed his crew for
everything, the weasel. He said that they had
mutinied and forced him to attack friendly
ships, but the details of his story changed from
one telling to the next. Members of his crew, on
the other hand, who still hated Kidd to the
depths of their salty souls, remained steadfast.
In the end, the crew was allowed to go free
while Kidd was sentenced to death.
England maintained a special place for the
execution of pirates, Execution Dock on the
Thames. Kidd was hanged there, and his corpse
dangled at the end of the rope for the
traditional span of three tides. Afterwards, his
body, now gull-pecked and crab-nibbled, was
dipped in tar and banded in iron straps, and
left to slowly decompose at the mouth of the
Thames, a warning to all future pirates of where
their destiny would take them if they continued
their criminal ways.
Today, at the former site of Execution Dock,
there is a pub called Captain Kidd’s. This is
ironic because Kidd didn’t particularly care for
the booze. This goes a long way toward
explaining why his crew hated him so much. He
usually allowed his men to indulge, but revoking
that right was always his first disciplinary act
if they got uppity. It seems apparent that the
crew of the Adventure Galley held
little trust for Kidd, a sober, mean-spirited,
stick-in-the-mud, and when he turned on them,
they were quick to hold his feet to the fire.
The drinkers went free while the temperate
buffoon got his neck stretched. There’s a lesson
there someplace. Drink about it.
Captain Edward Teach—Blackbeard
There is no doubt whatsoever that Edward Teach,
known the world over as Blackbeard, was one of
the most dangerous and unstable men to ever ply
the waters in search of plunder and drink. He
was crazy as a shit-house rat, stayed drunk
night and day, and would sooner kill a fella as
say “Ahoy!”
 A
native of Bristol, England, Teach joined (or
“jined” in his colorful parlance) the crew of a
pirate vessel at the age of twelve, fleeing
English justice for robbery and causing general
mayhem. The young hellion impressed his mates
with the sheer joy he found in stealing,
fighting and drinking. He drank rum by the cask
and bought whores three at a time (and would
eventually marry fourteen times) all
while solidifying his reputation as probably the
meanest man alive.
Blackbeard’s favorite territory was along the
Atlantic coast, especially Charleston Bay and
the islands around Hilton Head. He prowled those
shores in his flagship, the Queen Anne’s
Revenge, which he had refitted to allow
more room for plunder, and mounted additional
cannon and swivel guns loaded with grapeshot. He
liked to sail with friends aboard, and his wife
of the hour, who he often “gave” to a crewman as
a reward for excellent service.
Blackbeard was a holy terror in combat.
Already prone to dressing in colorful silks and
multi-hued scarves, before entering battle he
tied ribbons and beads in his beard and extra
scarves around his legs and arms. He had a
special harness made that he wore on his back.
It held six loaded pistols. He carried a cutlass
on each hip and a dagger in each boot. To
complete his look, he stuck lighted matches in
his hair, which glowed with demonic radiance
through the holes in his hat. Witnesses say that
his eyes, too, glowed red in a fight, glimmering
with a hellish bloodthirst.
Blackbeard liked to drink. He liked it a lot. A
really, really lot. And when he got good and
loaded, he liked to play drinking games. For
instance, he would gather his officers for a
drinking party in his private cabin, and they
would down a cask or two of rum. When everyone
was plastered he would put out all the lights,
except one candle. He would then instruct the
men to duck on his signal, snuff the candle,
draw his pistols, and fire at random into the
darkened room. If he hit someone, it was proof
that the man could not be trusted. The game
would go on until someone got shot or Blackbeard
got bored. This sort of casts having a few cold
ones with the boss after work in a whole other
light, doesn’t it?
On another occasion, he and two of his
trusted mates drank up a cask of stolen Jamaican
rum. Afterwards, Blackbeard grew bored and
started looking for entertainment. His eye fell
on the his munitions lock-up. “Come,” he
bellowed at his comrades, “Let us make a hell of
our own and try how long we can bear it.” With
that, he sealed the hold and set fire to three
pots of brimstone. The game was to see who
lasted longest in the smoke. It should come as
no surprise that Blackbeard won. He celebrated
by letting the crew get as drunk as they
pleased. Next time you brag about being the
Quarters champ at your frat house, remember the
history of your betters.
Eventually, the British colonial government
got tired of Blackbeard’s predations. They also
got tired of Blackbeard sharing his wealth (to
buy protection) with the governor of the
Carolinas. The crown told the governor to get a
grip on this Blackbeard problem or face the
consequences. The governor reluctantly agreed,
and asked for a stouthearted volunteer to go out
and relieve Blackbeard of his head. Only one man
came forward, a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant
named Maynard.
The chase lasted months. Blackbeard stayed
one step ahead of Maynard, dodging in and out of
inlets and islands. One fateful evening, though,
Blackbeard anchored and went ashore to get drunk
with some local farmers. Maynard spotted the
Revenge and waited beyond a curve of land
for her captain to return. When Blackbeard
returned a great sea battle ensued, with
Blackbeard’s ship duking it out with all three
of Maynard’s, sinking one and grounding another,
before the Revenge high-centered
herself on a sand bar. Maynard sailed close and
hailed the ship, stating demands for
Blackbeard’s immediate surrender. Blackbeard
stared across at Maynard, raised a glass of rum,
and said, “I’ll give no quarter, nor take none
from you.”
Maynard was left with no choice but to
attack.
It was recounted later by men who survived the
hour-long bout of hand to hand combat that the
deck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge ran
ankle-deep with blood. Blackbeard’s entire crew
was killed, save for one, who was captured
trying to set fire to the powder magazine.
Blackbeard was the last to go down. By the time
Maynard severed his head with two strokes from a
cutlass, the pirate was already reeling from
many wounds. He’d been sliced and gouged in over
a dozen places and shot more than 20 times.
Maynard took Blackbeard’s head and hung it from
the bowsprit. Folklore has it that, when
Blackbeard’s headless corpse was tossed
overboard it swam three times around the
Revenge before catching a hold of a shark’s
fin and riding the great fish down to Davy
Jones’ Locker.
Another story that circulated after the
ed pirate’s demise is that he left a vast
horde of treasure buried somewhere along the
Carolinas. A cottage industry has grown up in
the area devoted to this rumor. So far, treasure
hunters have come up with zilch, unless you
count the riches gained by local entrepreneurs
selling Blackbeard T-shirts to gullible
tourists.
Captain Henry Morgan
Think pirate and you probably get an
image in your head of Henry Morgan. Why? Because
his name and face appears on the label of the
second biggest-selling brand of rum in the
world. Morgan never made rum. His image was
borrowed by Seagram’s as a marketing ploy in the
early 1980s. But even though he never made his
own rum, Morgan did make a tremendous
effort to drink as much of it as humanly
possible. On a typical evening he could tip six
pints of the stuff and show no exterior effects
at all. Morgan’s epic appetite also extended to
women and wealth.
 Handsome,
genial, and well-educated, Henry Morgan moved
with ease through high society (King Charles II
was his personal friend), but his first love was
the high seas. He was an expert seaman and,
unlike his contemporary, Captain Kidd, his crew
loved him.
There has always been some question as to
whether or not Morgan was a pirate at all. He
always carried a letter of marque from the
British crown, after all, and confined his
attacks to Spanish shipping, striking blows for
king and country. On the other hand, his fleet
was made up of ships captained by known pirates
and he never hesitated to use pirate-style
trickery and brutality to achieve his goals. He
was also, at age 32, made admiral of a group
called the Brethren of the Coast, a loose
confederation of pirates and privateers who,
sailing the Caribbean, became known as the
Buccaneers.
Henry Morgan was born in Wales sometime
around 1635. He joined the British navy as a
steward and quickly rose through the ranks. As a
young officer, he participated in raids against
Spanish positions in Hispaniola (Haiti) and
Nicaragua, where he distinguished himself and
earned a promotion to captain. Soon after, he
lead the raid that forever wrested Jamaica from
Spanish control. This feat alone would’ve
cemented his reputation, but others were to
come.
He took the Spanish port, and the fort
protecting it, at Portobello, using a fleet of
canoes, and accrued zero casualties among his
crew. After securing this position, a mainstay
for the Spanish defense of Panama, he sent a
letter to Don Augusten, governor of Panama,
demanding 350,000 pesos (millions of dollars
today) or he would attack Panama City and raze
it to the ground. Don Augusten relented and gave
Morgan his ransom. Morgan and his crew sailed to
Port Royal, Jamaica for a hero’s welcome and an
eye-popping bacchanalia of drinking and
gambling.
A short time later the Spanish broke the
peace treaty. In retaliation, England decided to
go on the offensive and divest Spain from all
its holdings in the West Indies and the New
World. The man England picked for the job was
Henry Morgan, naming him Admiral of the Fleet of
Jamaica, and siccing him on all things Spanish.
The first thing Morgan did as admiral was gather
up all his old pirate buddies and plot strategy.
Over rum aboard his flagship, the Merchant
Jamaica, Morgan and his mates decided that
there was only one worthwhile point of attack
that would strike the needed blow against Spain:
They had to sack Panama City. There would be no
hostage-holding like last time around. They
would take it and hold it forever, the property
of Merry Ol’ England.
Panama had a new governor by this time, one
Don Juan, and he wasn’t about to let the hated
British set up shop in his town without a fight.
He plotted and planned, working on a surprise
for the British. When Morgan’s fleet of 38 ships
arrived, many flying pirate, not British,
colors, Don Juan let them land—and then blew city to smithereens.
Don Juan had rigged the whole town with
barrels of gunpowder, every building, barn,
horse trough and tree. On their way out, the
remaining members of the Spanish garrison
torched one building, which exploded and set
fire to the next, and the next, and the next and
so on. The chain of explosions lasted over an
hour and left a smoking crater where Panama City
once stood. Don Juan, his troops, and his
charges fled into the hills and jungles, where
Morgan’s men lost them. They tried to follow the
Spaniards but malaria, starvation, and a lack of
liquor stalled the chase almost at once.
Morgan sailed around for a while, looting
smaller settlements and ships until he paid off
his fleet, then sent them away with his
blessings. Morgan himself sailed back to
Jamaica, landing to another hero’s welcome. He
was promptly knighted by King Charles II and
appointed to the post of Lt. Governor of
Jamaica.
Henry Morgan settled easily into his new
role, though was largely ineffective as a
political leader because he was drunk day and
night. It’s said that if you wanted Governor
Morgan on some matter it was fruitless to go
looking for him at his estate. No, you were more
likely to find him in one of the many dockside
taverns he frequented. He would usually be found
whooping it up with a mug of rum in one hand and
a comely barmaid in the other, dancing, singing,
and generally enjoying a never-ending party at
which he was the permanent guest of honor.
People complained about his behavior all the
time, the same sort of people who always
complain when someone else is having a good
time. Morgan was usually able to fend off
complaints, however, largely because his prime
benefactor, King Charles II, was a well-known
hell raiser in his own right. Eventually,
though, the voices of propriety won out and
Morgan was removed from his post for
“irregularities.” A certain brand of Jamaican
citizen enjoyed branding Morgan a drunken
buffoon, and were glad to have him gone,
replaced by a sober doofus who rarely made noise
after dark. Before passing judgment on Morgan’s
leadership, pause to consider the number of
fools and jerk-offs who politicked around the
West Indies in those days. All in all, you can
make the claim that Morgan was a highly
effective leader, in that he did nothing to
upset the balance of the island.
After being evicted from his post, Morgan
retired to his estate, and the party never
stopped. He died in bed on August 25th, 1688.
Records indicate that he drank himself to death.
He went out the way he lived and never gave an
inch.
So. Pirates. They’ve been part of our
international history and folklore for hundreds
of years. They are equal parts myth and reality,
facts and romance. We like the myth and we like
the romance. Those things trump reality every
time.
Pirates are so much with us that September 19th is set aside as International Talk Like a Pirate
Day. I would like to suggest that we change it
to International Drink Like a Pirate
Day. We could have some rum, or mix up a batch
of ginger beer. If rum won’t get you sayin’
Arrrrgh, Jim lad, then you ought to turn in
your eye patch and parrot.
“Now . . . pour the rum and show me that
horizon.”
—Rich English
Note: the author
of this article is
indebted to the
works of Charles Ellms, A.J. Baime, David
Cordingly, and Charles A. Coulombe. |
|
Click on the Piece of Eight to return to the Main Page
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
