Empire of Blue Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

pity them at the heart, all their imaginary mountains of gold are turned into dross.” Major Robert Sedgwick, who was sent out from England to take charge of the settlement, found the troops in worse shape, he thought, than any group of English fighting men in the history of the nation. “Many dead,” he wrote tersely, “their carcasses lying unburied in the high-ways, and among the bushes to and again; many of them that were alive, walked like ghosts or dead men, who as I went through the town, they lay groaning, and crying out, ‘bread, for the Lord’s sake.’” The men ate dogs and iguanas, snakes and rats; when they fell dead, the dogs then ate the men. They were hit by dysentery, the plague, “phrensies and madness,” and mysterious infections that caused a man to swell to the size of a barrel. When the soldiers were mustered in November 1655, it was found that only 3,710 of the original 7,000 were still alive, and many of these were already failing; eventually 5,000 Englishmen would lose their lives on Hispaniola and Jamaica.
    The invasion of Hispaniola was simply the latest front in an age-old religious war. But the vast riches of the New World and the men who sought them were about to transform the battle into something different. The man who would lead England was already on the scene: the twenty-year-old Henry Morgan. Morgan somehow survived the horrendous pandemic that swept through the English ranks on Hispaniola and Jamaica and learned firsthand several valuable lessons he’d never forget: how not to lead troops in the New World, how not to attack a fortified Spanish position, how not to enlist the local Indians to your cause, and how not to share power between commanders. When word of the Jamaican conquest reached the Spanish territories in Mexico, the church bells rang in sorrow. With this intrusion the Antichrist had breached the walls of the promised land. In the coming years, Henry Morgan would make those bells toll again and again. He was the genius of the next battle: a clash of worldviews made bloody by the treasure that lay beyond Jamaica.
    But there were soon ominous signs that Port Royal held its own dangers. In addition to the tropical storms and hurricanes that swept over Jamaica, the English settlers reported that the ground beneath their new settlement shook regularly with tremors. The Spanish could have told them about another phenomenon that visited the coasts of the New World: the
maremoto,
or tsunami. The first recorded
maremoto
in the New World had smashed into the several towns along the shores of Venezuela, one wave surge so powerful that it demolished a naturally formed dike and severed the peninsula of Araya from the South American mainland, drowning many Indians in its wake. The Spanish heard stories of the monster wave when they conquered the area decades later. In 1530 they witnessed their own tsunami, which struck various points along the South American coast. “The ocean rose like a miraculous thing to see,” said one report, while another spoke of a massive inflow of black, fetid salt water that smelled strongly of sulfur. The water surged twenty-four feet and destroyed a Spanish fort and may have drowned people as far away as Puerto Rico.
    Modern scientists could have told the English settlers that the Caribbean averaged some kind of tsunami event once every twenty-one years. In a sense the clock on Port Royal was ticking from the moment Morgan first set foot on Jamaica’s shore.

2
    The Tomb at the Escorial

    A s Morgan prowled the jungles of Jamaica, forty-five hundred miles away in Madrid, a dark mood prevailed. Not since Rome was in its twilight had there been such odd scenes in a court that ruled the known world. The atmosphere was embodied in the somber person of King Philip IV.
    At fifty, Philip had the long Hapsburg face; he was tall, with wounded eyes caught indelibly by the master painter Velázquez in his portraits of the king. An ex-sportsman and libertine