Dispatches on piracy, privateering, and the merchant empires of the long seventeenth century.
How four hundred buccaneers walked through a fortified Spanish town in the dead of night — and why the Crown couldn't quite bring themselves to hang Morgan for it.
In the early summer of 1668, a Welshman of indeterminate origin and an apparently boundless contempt for diplomatic niceties anchored a small fleet at the mouth of the Chagres River. Henry Morgan had with him roughly four hundred and sixty men, twelve canoes purchased or stolen along the Mosquito Coast, and no document from any sovereign authorising what he was about to do. Portobelo, his target, was at that time the third most fortified town in the Indies. It had three castles. It also had, as Morgan had been carefully informed, the treasure of the year sitting in its warehouses awaiting the next galleon to Cadiz.
The conventional narrative — repeated in Esquemeling's Bucaniers of America and then in every drawing-room history since — has Morgan rowing his men ashore three leagues from the town and marching them overland through the night. This much appears to be true. What is rather less often discussed is how completely the operation depended on a single piece of intelligence: that the garrison of San Felipe, the smallest of the three forts, was understrength and demoralised after months without pay.
The assault began at dawn. By midday the lower town was in buccaneer hands. By the following morning the two larger castles had surrendered, after Morgan — and here the sources diverge somewhat unkindly — either did or did not force captured priests and nuns to climb the scaling ladders ahead of his men. Esquemeling says he did. Morgan, when he later sued Esquemeling's English publisher for libel, said he did not. The English court, perhaps unsurprisingly, sided with Morgan.
Read the full account →Before there was an empire, there was a single warehouse on the Gulf of Khambhat, three English merchants, and a Mughal governor who could not be bribed at the going rate. The story of how the EIC actually got a foothold in India is far less heroic — and far more interesting — than the version in school textbooks.
Mary Read and Anne Bonny have been romanticised so thoroughly that the historical women have nearly vanished. What the surviving Jamaican court records actually show is a very different story — quieter, sadder, and in places almost unbearably specific.
Libertalia almost certainly never existed. What did exist, off the northeast coast of Madagascar between roughly 1690 and 1720, was something stranger and bleaker: a string of trading posts where European pirates married into Malagasy political dynasties and were absorbed by them.
Between the legal fiction of state-licensed maritime violence and the practical reality of a hungry crew chasing whatever sail appeared on the horizon, there was a thick layer of paperwork, prize courts, and shockingly modern accountancy. A walk through the surviving Bermuda admiralty papers.