Captain Henry Morgan
Henry Morgan was the eldest son of Robert Morgan, a squire of Llanrhymny in Glamorgan, Wales. He said later that he left school early, and was "more used to the pike than the book." Richard Browne, his surgeon at Panama, said that Morgan came to Jamaica in 1658, as a young man, and raised himself to "fame and fortune by his valor". His uncle Edward Morgan was Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica after the Restoration of Charles II of England in 1660, and Henry Morgan married his uncle's daughter Mary.
In the autumn of 1665, Morgan commanded a ship in the old privateer Edward Mansfield's expedition sent by Sir Thomas Modyford, the governor of Jamaica, which seized the island of Providence Island and Santa Catalina. When Mansfield was captured and killed by the Spanish shortly afterwards, Morgan was chosen by the buccaneers as their admiral.
In 1667, he was commissioned by Modyford to capture some Spanish prisoners in Cuba in order to discover details of the threatened attack on Jamaica. Collecting ten ships with five hundred men, Morgan landed on the island and captured and sacked Puerto Principe, then went on to take the fortified and well-garrisoned town of Portobelo, Panama. It is said that Morgan's men used captured Jesuits as human shields in taking the third, most difficult fortress.
The governor of Panama, astonished at this daring adventure, attempted in vain to drive out the invaders, and finally Morgan consented to evacuate the place on the payment of a large ransom. These exploits had considerably exceeded the terms of Morgan's commission and had been accompanied by frightful cruelties and excesses, but the governor of Jamaica endeavoured to cover the whole under the necessity of allowing the English a free hand to attack the Spanish whenever possible. In London the Admiralty publicly claimed ignorance about this, whilst Morgan and his crew returned to their base at Port Royal, Jamaica, to celebrate.
Modyford almost immediately entrusted Morgan with another expedition against the Spaniards, and he proceeded to ravage the coast of Cuba. In January 1669, the largest of his ships was blown up accidentally in the course of a carousal on board, with Morgan and his officers narrowly escaping death. In March he sacked Maracaibo, Venezuela which had emptied out when his fleet was first spied, and afterwards spent a few weeks at the Venezuelan settlement of Gibraltar on Lake Maracaibo, torturing the wealthy residents to discover hidden treasure.
Returning to Maracaibo, Morgan found three Spanish ships waiting at the inlet to the Caribbean; these he destroyed or captured, recovered a considerable amount of treasure from one which had run aground and exacted a heavy ransom as the price of his evacuating the place. Finally, by an ingenious stratagem, he faked a landward attack on the fort which convinced the governor to shift his cannon. In doing so, he eluded the enemy's guns altogether and escaped in safety. On his return to Jamaica he was again reproved, but not punished by Modyford.
The Spaniards on their side were moreover acting in the same way, and a new commission was given to Morgan as commander-in-chief of all the ships of war in Jamaica, to levy war on the Spaniards and destroy their ships and stores - the booty gained in the expedition being the only pay. Thus Morgan and his crew were privateers, not pirates. Accordingly, after ravaging the coasts of Cuba and the mainland, Morgan determined on an expedition to Panama.
He recaptured the island of Santa Catalina on December 15, 1670, and on December 27, he gained possession of the castle of Chagres, killing three hundred of the garrison. Then with one thousand four hundred men he ascended the Chagres River, some of the worst swampland in the area. When his force finally appeared outside of Panama they were very weakened and tired.
On January 18, 1671, Morgan discovered that Panama had roughly fifteen hundred infantry and cavalry. He split his forces in two, using one to march through the forest and flank the enemy. The Spaniards were untrained and rushed Morgan's line where he cut them down with gunfire, only to have his flankers emerge and finish off the rest of the Spanish soldiers. After looting and taking booty that exceeded a hundred thousand pounds, Morgan had his men burn the city.
However, because the sack of Panama violated a peace treaty between England and Spain, Morgan was arrested and conducted to England in 1672. He was able to prove he had no knowledge of the treaty, and in 1674 Morgan was knighted before returning to Jamaica the following year to take up the post of Lieutenant Governor.
By 1681, then acting governor Morgan had fallen out of favor with the British king, who was intent on weakening the semi-autonomous Jamaican Council, and was replaced by long-time political rival Thomas Lynch. He gained considerable weight and gained a reputation for rowdy drunkenness.
In 1683, Morgan was suspended from the Jamaican Council by the machinations of Governor Lynch. Also during this time, an account of Morgan's disreputable exploits was published by Alexandre Exquemelin, who once had been his confidante, probably as a barber-surgeon, in a Dutch volume entitled De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (History of the Bouccaneers of America). Morgan took steps to discredit the book and successfully brought a libel suit against the book's publisher, securing a retraction and damages of two hundred English pounds. The book nonetheless contributed much to Morgan's ill-reputed fame as a bloodthirsty pirate over time.
When Thomas Lynch died in 1684, his friend Christopher Monck was appointed to the governorship and arranged the dismissal of Morgan's suspension from the Jamaican Council in 1688. Morgan's health had steadily declined since 1681. He was diagnosed with "dropsie", but may have contracted tuberculosis in London, and died August 25, 1688. It is also possible that he may have had liver failure due to his heavy drinking.
Buccaneers
Buccaneers
Buccaneer is a term that was used in the later 17th century in the Caribbean Islands to refer to pirates who attacked Spanish shipping. The term "buccaneer" draws its lineage from the Arawak word buccan which became corrupted into the French word "boucanier"(referring to French settlers who practiced the smoking of meat). Boucaniers originally were French hunters who were poaching cattle and pigs on western on the islands that are now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They would smoke the meat on wooden frames, boucans, so that it could be saved for a later time. The boucaniers were taught this technique by the local Arawak tribes from Santo Domingo, calling the method Barbicoa - which is where the word and method of Barbecue originated. The word was adopted in English as "buccaneer."
Conflict with Spanish forces from the east of Hispaniola drove many of the buccaneers from the mainland to the island of Tortuga. Here, they turned to piracy against Spanish shipping, generally using small craft to attack galleons in the vicinity of the Windward Passage. English settlers occupying Jamaica began to spread the name with the meaning of rebel pirates sailing in the Caribbean ports and seas. The name became universally adopted in 1684 when a book, The Buccaneers of America was written by Alexandre Exquemelin and translated from Dutch into English.
The Buccaneers were pirates who attacked Spanish, and later French shipping in the West Indies during the 17th and 18th centuries. The term is now used generally as a synonym for pirate. However, properly speaking only native Caribbean pirates, the original boucaniers or their later allies, are buccaneers. Generally, buccaneer crews were larger, more apt to attack coastal cities, and more localized to the Caribbean than later pirate crews who sailed to the Indian Ocean on the Pirate Round in the late 17th century or who bedeviled the world's shipping in the early 18th century during and after the War of the Spanish Succession
Viewed from London, buccaneering was a low-budget way to wage war on their rival at the time, Spain. So, the crown licensed Buccaneers as "privateers", legalizing their operations in return for a share of their profits. The Buccaneers were invited by Jamaica's Governor Modyford to base ships at Port Royal. Buccaneers were commissioned by the British to attack the French, Dutch and Spanish shipping and colonies, making Port Royal the most prosperous city in the West Indies. There even were navy officers sent to lead the buccaneers, such as Christopher Myngs. Their activities went on irrespective of whether England happened to be at war with Spain, the United Provinces or France.
Traditionally, buccaneer crews operated as democracies: the captain was elected by the crewmen and they could vote to replace him. The captain had to be a leader and a fighter—in combat he was expected to be fighting with his men, not directing operations from a distance.
Spoils were evenly divided into shares; while the officers had a greater number of shares, their portion was still far less than that of Royal Navy officers' shares of prize money. Crews generally had no regular wages, being paid only from their shares of the plunder, a system called "no purchase, no pay" by Modyford or "no prey, no pay" by Exquemelin. There was a strong esprit de corps among buccaneers. This allowed them to win sea battles: they typically outmanned trade vessels by a large ratio. There was also, for some time, a social insurance system guaranteeing compensation for battle wounds at a worked-out scale. Port
Port Royal
Port Royal was the centre of shipping commerce in Jamaica in the 17th century. During this time, it gained a reputation as both the "richest and wickedest city in the world". It was notorious for its gaudy displays of wealth and loose morals, and was a popular place for pirates and privateers to bring and spend their treasure. During the 17th century, the British actively encouraged and even paid buccaneers based at Port Royal to attack Spanish and French shipping
Port Royal, located along the shipping lanes to and from Spain and Panama, provided a safe harbor for pirates. Buccaneers found Port Royal appealing for several reasons. Its proximity to trade routes allowed them easy access to prey. The harbour was large enough to accommodate their ships and provided a place to careen and repair these vessels. It was also ideally situated for launching raids on Spanish settlements. From Port Royal, Henry Morgan attacked Panama, Portobello, and Maracaibo. Roche Brasiliano, John Davis (buccaneer), and Edward Mansveldt (Mansfield) also came to Port Royal.
By the 1660s, the city had gained a reputation as the Sodom of the New World where most residents were pirates, cutthroats, or prostitutes. When Charles Leslie wrote his history of Jamaica, he included a description of the pirates of Port Royal:Wine and women drained their wealth to such a degree that… some of them became reduced to beggary. They have been known to spend 2 or 3,000 pieces of eight in one night; and one gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and oblige everyone that passed to drink. Port Royal grew to be one of the two largest towns and the most economically important port in the English colonies. At the height of its popularity, the city had one drinking house for every ten residents. In July 1661 alone, forty new licenses were granted to taverns. During a twenty-year period that ended in 1692, nearly 6,500 people lived in Port Royal. In addition to prostitutes and buccaneers, there were four goldsmiths, forty-four tavern keepers, and a variety of artisans and merchants who lived in two hundred buildings crammed into 51 acres (206,000 m²) of real estate. Two hundred and thirteen ships visited the seaport in 1688. The city’s wealth was so great that coins were preferred for payment rather than the more common system of bartering goods for services.
On June 7, 1692, a devastating earthquake hit the city causing the sand spit on which it was built to liquefy and flow out into Kingston Harbour. The water table was generally only two feet down prior to the quake. The effects of three tidal waves caused by the earthquake further eroded the sand spit, and soon the main part of the city lay permanently underwater, though intact enough that archaeologists have managed to uncover some well-preserved sites. The earthquake and tsunami killed between 1,000 and 3,000 people combined, over half the city's population. Disease ran rampant in the next several months, claiming an estimated 2,000 additional lives.
1692 Earthquake that destroyed Port Royal
Try the BEST MySpace Editor and MySpace Backgrounds at MySpace Toolbox !