QUARANTINE BLOG # 646

January 7, 2022

Today we conclude the story of Henry Morgan.

England and Spain were at peace; Morgan and his men were now public enemies. There was a grace period of eight months in which both governments would inform their citizens to stop all hostilities against the other nation, and three months had passed. There was no time to waste; Morgan had to make his case to Governor Sir Thomas Modyford and the Crown as quickly as possible. 

A Spanish war council was called, and the English ambassador swore that Charles II did not know of Morgan’s plans. Regardless, an order was issued for the arrest of Governor Modyford, calling the governor of Jamaica an enemy of the state.

Charles II

Sir Thomas Lynch sailed into Port Royal harbor with an order to arrest Modyford. Lynch invited Modyford aboard his ship, the Assistance, for a sumptuous dinner. Once he had the governor safely under the eyes of his loyal crew, he broke the news: Modyford was under arrest. He was to be the fall guy for Panama.

Next, an arrest order was issued for Henry Morgan. In this intricate game of kings and queens, Henry Morgan became an easily sacrificed pawn.

Morgan arrived in London, under arrest, in August 1672. He must have wondered if he’d join his friend Modyford in the Tower of London, but Morgan was allowed the freedom of London for three years. 

Why did Morgan remain free? Because even before he arrived, the political situation was shifting. The Dutch war was not going well. English commoners were growing weary of battle. Jailing Morgan would only have incensed Charles’s critics, and so he stayed out of prison.

And then the king asked Morgan to draw up a memo for Jamaica’s protection. From arriving in London as a doomed man, Morgan was being consulted by his king. The icing on the cake was receiving a knighthood and being named deputy governor of Jamaica.

In his forties Sir Henry Morgan could be found any night of the week in Port Royal, drinking himself into a stupor. If a pirate’s life was about excess, Henry Morgan died of it. Long years of alcohol abuse had weakened him. What Morgan really needed was rest and a different lifestyle, but he refused to change. On August 25, 1688, at about eleven in the morning, Henry Morgan died at age fifty-three. His will revealed holdings valued at $1.2 million. 

Admiral Sir Henry Morgan

His funeral featured a generous twist. The governor issued a 24 hour amnesty for anyone wishing to attend the ceremony, and pirates swarmed into Port Royal. Pallbearers carried the coffin to the cemetery on a gun carriage, where it was interred in the sandy ground. The ships in the harbor fired a 22-gun salute. 

Morgan’s estate included 109 slaves, and it’s likely his passing was marked with a ritual. The slaves in Jamaica believed that hotheaded people were survived by like-minded ghosts, or duppies, who would go through the world causing havoc if measures were not taken to stop them. The slaves would have performed one rite with nine days of singing, followed by a banishment ritual on the ninth night, expelling the duppy forever.

If the banishment was performed, it didn’t take. Morgan had one final appearance in the story of Port Royal.

Seventeen minutes before noon on June 7, 1692, the ground started to gently roll. They were not panicked; the town had suffered these rollings ever since the English had been on Jamaica. The ground swelled, but the buildings stood. Then a second, stronger heaving motion rolled in, and they heard a crash as St. Paul’s Church collapsed. The second wave gave way to a third tremor, which dwarfed the others in its ferocity.

The earthen streets on which  people were fleeing for their lives liquefied; saturated with sea water the sandy soil streets rose and fell in increasing ripples. People were swept along like corks tossed on a wave.

The earthquake, and the tsunami that followed, destroyed the city. Four of the town’s five forts dropped into the harbor, leaving only Fort Charles standing. 

The quake lasted six minutes. In that time 90% of Port Royal had been destroyed or simply vanished into the sea. 2,000 people were dead; another 2,000 would die in the coming weeks from injuries and disease. The death toll was twice that of the San Francisco calamity of 1906, but that had occurred in a city of 400,000. The Great Earthquake of 1692 took more than 70 percent of Port Royal’s 6,500 residents.

Sometime during those six minutes, Henry Morgan’s coffin erupted from the sandy ground of the cemetery and was spewed out into the churning waters of the Port Royal harbor, never to be found again.

 At 11:49 the great pirate city that he’d helped create ceased to exist. Today you can put on scuba gear and dive on the remains of Port Royal.

Port Royal was rebuilt, but it never again returned to its glory days. Pirates continued to sail, and some were occasionally hung on Gallows Point during fits of law and order, including “Calico Jack” Rackham, in 1720. His lover, Anne Bonny, and her widely feared friend Mary Read, escaped the noose by “pleading their bellies” – they were pregnant. Bonny’s reprieve was short; she died of a fever in a Port Royal jail, while Read disappeared off the face of the earth – some think her Daddy came from South Carolina, bribed officials and took her home.

Anne Bonny, Mary Reed, and “Calico Jack” Rackham

In the 1700s the sugar-and-slave economy came into its own, and Port Royal became a traders’ town.

The cruelties of the pirates’ expeditions were forgotten, but  their exploits resonated louder, and they became romantic figures. The traders’ world was simply too boring to compete with the flaming arrow at San Lorenzo, the Maracaibo fireship, and all the rest. If it’s a myth, and it partly is, the world will take the myth. But you can’t attempt to do what Morgan and his men did without seeing yourselves as a prince of the New World, deserving of every wonder it possesses. Men like that do not live very long, but they are not easily forgotten.

🛐   Today’s close is from Praying with the Psalms, by Eugene H. Peterson.

The Lord judges the peoples; judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me (Psalm 7:8).

None of us mind terribly being punished for a wrong we know we have done. It is the slights, discriminations, and rebukes we don’t deserve that rankle. We long for God to be our judge; not to escape judgment, but so that our judgment will be fair.

Prayer: O God, judge me. Weigh the evidence of my heart. Throw out the lies and excuses I use to defend disobedience and rebellion. Affirm my attempts at righteousness. In the name of Jesus who is my Advocate. Amen.

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