WHERE A PIRATE RULED
Against the soft azure of the tropic sky Jamaica lifts its lofty peaks,
crowned with a diadem of clouds, above a sapphire sea. Faint and
phantasmal as a vision it hangs above the waves, beautiful as a
painting by a master’s hand, as slowly the hills and valleys take on
form and substance. Opulently rich, with wooded mountain sides, wide
fields of golden cane, and endless banana walks, it is as fair a scene
as one could hope to see. As the Vigilant bore steadily toward
Kingston, and we watched valley after valley, wave-washed beaches,
surf-beaten crags, and endless rows of palms unfold before us, the
island seemed a veritable earthly paradise.
But Jamaica’s history is far from that of an Eden, for its past has
been one of bloodshed, debauchery, and death. From both God and man it
has suffered much, and, as the Vigilant passed the long, low sand spit
known as the Palisados and dropped anchor off the quarantine station at
Port Royal, we were floating above what was once notorious as the
wickedest city in the world; for beneath the placid waters here at the
harbor mouth are the ruins of old Port Royal, the metropolis of the
buccaneers.
Above the beach with the lazily lapping waves, modern Port Royal
straggles upon the low, sandy point, a sleepy, sun-drenched spot of no
importance save as a barracks and quarantine station. It is hard to
realize, as one strolls through the roughly paved lanes or across the
broiling-hot parade-ground, that this was once the chief port in the
West Indies, the richest city in the New World, and one whose name was
synonymous with every deviltry and vice known to man.
And yet there is much of interest to be seen in Port Royal to-day.
There is the ancient, crumbling Fort Charles, looking seaward, with its
moats and drawbridges, its quaint corners and damp underground rooms.
And from the grass-grown embrasures the same ornate guns look grimly
forth as in the days when Admiral Nelson was stationed here. Upon a
tablet let into the coral-pink bricks is inscribed:
In this place
Dwelt
HORATIO NELSON
You who tread his footprints
Remember his glory
Also, leading from a heavily beamed guard-room in one corner of the
ancient fortress is a little flight of stairs that opens on a paved
platform known as “Nelson’s Quarter-deck.” Here, upon these time-worn
flagstones, the famous admiral paced to and fro, no doubt regretting it
was not in reality the deck of a great ship, and with longing eyes
looked seaward for the French fleet which was expected to attack Port
Royal. But the fleet never arrived. Had it attacked Jamaica, the
history of the isle would, mayhap, have been very different, for the
garrison at Fort Charles was pitifully weak, while the French flotilla
was of immense strength. Perchance, too, had the attack been made,
Nelson might never have won fame, for he was a mere lad of twenty-one
when in 1779 he was placed in charge of the fort at Port Royal.
A year later he was once more in Jamaica, near to death with dysentery
contracted on the San Juan expedition, and in the home of a noted black
nurse, Cuba Cornwallis, he slowly regained his health and strength.
Strange sights and famous men has this old fort of sun-faded brick
seen. It has seen Port Royal in all its vicious wickedness and
flamboyant sin; it has seen the heaving earth and angry sea sweep the
city and all its villainy into the depths. It has seen shot-riddled
buccaneer ships returning, triumphant and deep-laden with loot, from
piratical forays. It has witnessed many a wild revel of drink-flushed,
foul-mouthed corsairs, and has listened to many a plan and plot of the
freebooters as they argued and swore over some projected raid on the
Spanish Main. Within its walls Morgan as well as Nelson and many a
lesser light have dwelt and drunk the health of the king, and through
storm and battle and cataclysms its walls and battlements have passed
unscathed. The earthquake of 1692 wrought devastation and took
thousands of lives, but left the old fort solid and strong. And even in
1907, when in a space of a few seconds modern Kingston crumbled to dust
and newer forts fell like houses of cards, the flower-decked old
fortress at the tip of the Palisados remained unharmed save for a
single crack in one of its hoary walls.
Of the ancient buccaneer Port Royal, Fort Charles alone remains, and
great indeed have been the changes the antique pile has seen take place
about itself. From the ruin of the pirates’ stronghold has risen the
sleepy little town,—a village of narrow streets and darkey houses, of
stately residences with balconies and balustrades richly carved by
shipbuilders now long dead, of trim, well-kept gardens and struggling
lawns, and with a naval yard wherein repose the giant figureheads of
many famed old British ships and frigates—while across the harbor has
grown the island’s metropolis of Kingston. Few visitors now stop at
Port Royal, few strange feet tread the old flagged esplanades and
weed-grown ramp; and yet the little hamlet is well worthy of a visit,
for it has a strange Old-World atmosphere and a fascination entirely
lacking in Kingston. Its huge barrack square and parade-ground might
well be those of some English port, were it not for the nodding palms
and scorching sun. There is the old court-house, stately, austere, with
shingled roof and flanked by arcades. There is the naval hospital,
woefully damaged by the earthquake of 1907, and so out of place in the
tropics with its typically English gardens and uncompromising
architecture that it reminds one of the conventional houses equipped
with chimneys which the old engravers and artists always introduced
into their pictures of tropical scenes. And there are the swarded
cricket-pitch, the bowling-green, and the tennis-courts on which the
British officers and their women folk pass the cool of the afternoons.
But the pirates’ church, built from the proceeds of robbery and murder,
is gone like its builders beneath the sea; the once-busy docks are
silent and all but deserted; the warehouses, once filled with casks and
bales and barrels, are empty save for rusting chains, bits of cordage,
and other odds and ends; the great sail-lofts are bare, and the whole
place has the air of a town aloof, communing with itself over its sins
and errors of the past, and, like some once-famous courtesan, living in
a state of faded gentility away from prying eyes and wagging tongues.
How different was the Port Royal of olden days—a flourishing, noisy,
hustling town of several thousand houses, of thousands of inhabitants,
of great warehouses filled almost to bursting, of busy shipyards and a
“hard” whereon always a dozen vessels might be seen careened; a port
before which scores of armed ships rode ever at anchor; a place whose
people were as familiar with the Jolly Roger as with the British
ensign; and withal the notorious rendezvous of the English buccaneers.
Indeed, Jamaica’s prosperity was built upon the business of the
corsairs, and the port was scarcely more than a clearing-house for
them.
Here came the Brethren of the Main from far and near, bringing their
treasures: chests of plate and bullion, doubloons, onzas, and
castellanos; pieces of eight and louis d’or; altar-pieces ablaze with
precious stones; bales of velvets and satins, of silks and brocades;
casks of brandy and wines, tobacco and coffee; the cargo of many a
scuttled ship and galleon; the booty from many a ravished and sacked
town; the holy vessels of countless desecrated churches; vestments
heavy with gold and silver thread dragged from the bleeding bodies of
butchered priests; jeweled trinkets torn from tortured, shrieking
women; the output of many a famous mine; aye, and many a weeping,
hapless captive girl, many a groaning slave, until within Port Royal so
vast an accumulation of riches was gathered together that it was
celebrated far and near as the greatest center of wealth the world had
ever known.
And with its fame was coupled an even greater reputation for
wickedness. Proud of the one as of the other was Port Royal; its evils
were never hidden, never denied; brazenly to the world it proclaimed
itself the nearest thing to hell on earth that man could devise.
Here came the swaggering, red-handed cutthroats to spend the gold they
had won by robbery and murder, and ever the streets of Port Royal
echoed to the drunken shouts and curses of the buccaneers. Sin in every
form ruled; murder was of hourly occurrence, and far and wide the
depravity of Port Royal was a byword.
A huge, bewhiskered rascal, clad in filched garments of many hues,
would land fresh from a successful foray and, striding into a tavern,
would fling down a handful of coin and order the cringing innkeeper to
broach a pipe of wine in the street. Then, standing beside it with
drawn pistols and with a drunken leer on his ill-favored face, the
pirate captain would command all who passed to drink. Gladly enough
would most accept this pressing invitation, and those who dared refuse
would be shot down and their carcasses kicked into the gutter. Or
again, merely to show the wealth at his command, he would buy out the
tavern’s stock of liquor and order it poured into the highway,
meanwhile dipping it up in a pannikin and playfully throwing it over
the garments of passing men and women. Such were mere pleasantries as
recorded by Esquemelling; harmless jokes, to the pirates’ minds; the
forerunners of less-appreciated amusements such as running amuck and
slashing or shooting all who were met, or, again, hanging prisoners in
chains or roasting them over slow fires on wooden spits, or perchance
flogging a slave to death for an afternoon’s sport. Luckily the
debauches did not last long. In a single night the revelers would often
spend two or three thousand pieces of eight, not “leaving themselves
peradventure a good shirt to wear on their backs in the morning,” their
chronicler tells us, and being compelled to lead a quiet life
thereafter until the next corsairs’ ship set sail.
But among themselves and to one another the buccaneers were liberal and
loyal, and a contemporaneous account states that “If any one of them
has lost all his goods, which often happens in their manner of life,
they freely give him and make him partaker in what they have.”
By some queer whimsy in their complex make-up, some inexplicable,
paradoxical twist in their psychology, the pirates felt that their sink
of iniquity in Jamaica was incomplete without a church. So forthwith,
in this hell-hole, they built themselves a house of worship, erecting
it with the gold won by rapine and murder, fitting it with the
candlesticks and altar-pieces, the holy vessels and chalices, the
tapestries and paintings looted from other houses of God. And, as they
never believed in doing anything by halves, the pirate chiefs decreed
that now they had a church all buccaneers must attend services therein.
Indeed, it is said that the notorious Morgan more than once shot down
some scoffing buccaneer who had the temerity to interrupt the sermon,
and that, on his own ship, whenever a clergyman fell into his clutches,
he compelled the prisoner to hold service. History fails to relate what
disposal the famous chieftain made of the unfortunate priest or
minister thereafter, but he probably compelled him to walk the plank or
ended his career in some equally abrupt and pleasant manner, for that
was “Harry Morgan’s way,” as he was fond of boasting.
But the church at Port Royal was the veriest mockery, and not one jot
did it influence the behavior or the lives of the town’s execrable
denizens. Notoriously a pirates’ resort, winked at by the British
(indeed, encouraged by the government as long as the buccaneers preyed
upon the Spaniards and left British ships in peace), the city grew and
prospered until one pleasant day in June—the seventh, to be exact—in
1692, when, as though an outraged God could no longer suffer this blot
upon the universe, Port Royal was wiped from the face of the earth in
an instant. Without warning, with no time granted the carousing,
roistering fiends to repent, an earthquake shook the island to its
foundations, and Port Royal, with over three thousand of its houses,
nearly all its inhabitants, and all its vast accumulated treasures,
dropped bodily into the sea.
One can picture the awful scenes of that fatal day: the terror-stricken
people rushing, shrieking, from the crumbling houses and through the
heaving, rocking streets as the first tremors rent the town; the
drunken pirates stumbling red-eyed and cursing from brothel and
drinking-place, as timbers splintered and masonry fell, and ruthlessly
cutting down all who hampered their flight. And all in vain. Tripping
over the bodies of their fellows, choking the narrow streets, felled by
tumbling walls, milling, pushing, crowding; befuddled with rum; the
solid ground dropping from beneath their feet; blaspheming, screaming,
the mob fought madly to save their worthless lives, until, swallowed by
the inrushing water, overwhelmed by the relentless sea, men, women, and
children, merchant and pirate, harlot and slave, innocent and guilty,
were buried deep beneath the waves, while on the placid surface of the
harbor floating bits of wreckage, a few struggling figures, and
countless corpses were all that marked the scene of the awful
punishment meted out.
And above the limit of the devastation, serene, uninjured, aloof, Fort
Charles still gazed seaward. Of all Port Royal the old fortress alone
remained—this and a few gruesome, buzzard-picked skeletons turning,
twisting in the wind, swinging by their creaking chains from the
gibbets beyond reach of the waves.
At one fell swoop Port Royal, the buccaneers’ stronghold, had been
wiped from the face of the earth, never to be rebuilt. To-day, when the
water is calm, one may still trace the coral-incrusted outlines of the
ruined town, while the negro boatmen relate uncanny tales of ghostly
pirate ships sailing in the teeth of the wind, riding the crest of
storms, ever striving to make the lost port, and of the phantom bells
of the pirates’ church tolling the requiem of the dead buccaneers
beneath the tempestuous waves.
A few survivors there were, who had found refuge in boats or ships or
who had escaped from the stampede to higher ground, and these, spared
as by a miracle, saw the error of their ways and, repenting of their
sins, moved across the bay and founded the city of Kingston. They had
been taught a wholesome lesson. Piracy was given up in favor of honest
pursuits, and as, in the years that followed, the buccaneers were
driven from the Caribbean, Kingston grew and prospered, order reigned,
and peaceable planters, honest merchants, and vast estates brought
wealth and riches to the isle in place of pirates’ loot and corsairs’
treasures.
But Nemesis seems ever to hover above the fair island whose early
prosperity was built on bloodshed and villainy. From time to time
destructive hurricanes have swept it, leveling buildings, destroying
crops, and killing people, as in 1880, when thirty lives were lost in
Kingston and most of the wharves as well as countless houses were
destroyed. Fire swept the town in 1882, leveling over six hundred
buildings, and then came the earthquake and fire of 1907, which snuffed
out the lives of over one thousand persons, crumpled Kingston to dust,
and wrought awful havoc upon the isle.
And as though these acts of God were not enough, between times there
have been wars and bloodshed and to spare. Uprising slaves burned,
slaughtered, and destroyed. The Cimmaroons or runaway blacks waged a
relentless guerrilla warfare, and bandits and brigands made life and
property insecure for years. From the very beginning of its history,
Jamaica has been a stage for deeds of violence. Indeed, its turbulent
days were inaugurated when first Columbus beached his unseaworthy ships
on the northern coast in June, 1503. Here he remained for a year, until
rescued by an expedition from Santo Domingo,—twelve months of mutiny,
suffering, and hardship,—and here he saved his men and himself from
death by impressing the Indians with his famous prophecy of the moon’s
eclipse.
The site of his encampment, known as Christopher’s Cove, is between St.
Ann’s Bay and Anotta Bay, and is one of the most historic places on the
island, although, aside from its natural beauties, with its lovely
beaches, its transparent water, and its setting of luxuriant foliage,
there is nothing to be seen. Needless to say, Columbus, who discovered
Jamaica in 1494, claimed it for the King of Spain, and Spanish it
remained until 1655, when the British, under sturdy Admiral Penn and
General Venables, vanquished the Dons and established the capital at
Spanish Town in 1664.
It was during this period of warfare between the great nations that
thousands of negro slaves escaped and, fleeing to the fastnesses of
mountain and forest, became transformed into a half-savage race known
as Cimmaroons, or, more commonly, Maroons. Fortifying themselves in the
almost impenetrable mountain jungles, the Maroons harassed the
planters, murdered and robbed travelers, burnt estates and outlying
hamlets, and wreaked deviltry and destruction for years. Expedition
after expedition was sent against them unsuccessfully, until, in the
end, the British were forced to meet the wild negroes halfway, and,
despairing of conquering them, made a treaty whereby the Maroons were
granted their freedom and twenty-five hundred acres of land.
Then, for a space, the Jamaican whites breathed freely, but not for
long. In 1760 the slaves rose, burning, butchering, and pillaging with
their usual savagery, and five years later the Maroons once more burst
out, leaving a wide trail of blood, of smoking fields, and of blackened
ruins behind them, until a second treaty was made and half a thousand
of the blacks were exiled to Sierra Leone. But even after this the
islanders were seldom left in peace. In 1838 slavery was abolished, and
yet in 1865 the negroes rose and slaughtered the whites and burned
their homes at Montego Bay, brigandage was rampant in the hills, and
altogether the wonder is that Jamaica has survived at all.
Just as Jamaica’s old-time prosperity was founded upon the Brethren of
the Main, so the island’s present prosperity depends almost wholly upon
the modern prototype of the pirates—a gigantic trust. In place of
high-pooped, low-bowed ships with grinning guns along their sides
Jamaica’s harbors now shelter the spotless white hulls of the
fruit-boats. While the telling arguments of shot and shell and the
pistol and cutlass have given way to the all-powerful dollar and the
peaceful if no less persuasive methods of modern business to compel
others to come to terms, yet the Fruit Company is scarcely less
domineering in its line than were Morgan and his associates in theirs.
Not that the Fruit Company has not done much for Jamaica and the other
lands where it has holdings. The worst enemy of the great organization,
the most rabid anti-trust fanatic, cannot deny that the company has
improved land, made for livable conditions, instituted sanitary
reforms, circulated money, given employment to thousands, established
hospitals, built railways, erected palatial hotels, maintained a
steamship service, and done countless other admirable things. But one
and all have been done with an eye to personal gain and not for the
good of the world or of the countries where it controls politics,
finances, policies, and the very existence of the inhabitants. Like
every trust, it is utterly selfish, and in Jamaica it has a strangle
hold, controlling business and people, body and soul. With the
octopus-like grip of this colossus on the lands about the Caribbean,
there can be no successful competition, no open market, no independent
profitable enterprise where fruit, and especially bananas, are
concerned.
Let any one who doubts this attempt to establish an industry where the
trust holds sway, and see how long it will be ere he feels the effects
of the political influence, the control of labor, the monopoly of
shipping which the owners of the White Fleet hold in their hands.
As an example, let me mention the experience of a friend of mine who,
finding that little Samana in Santo Domingo produced the largest and
finest pineapples in the world and that luscious navel oranges were a
drug on the market there at fifty cents a barrel, thought to establish
a tiny fruit business of his own. Samples were sent to the leading
commission fruit merchants in the States and to the big fancy-fruit and
grocery houses, and one and all declared the fruit exceptional, and
marketable at high prices, and stated that, coming as it did in
midwinter, it would be in great demand. But one and all regretfully
stated that they could not handle it, could not touch it, for if they
did they would be boycotted and blacklisted by the Fruit Company!
Jamaica may have prospered through the banana industry, fostered and
built up by the Fruit Company, but already there is dire complaint
among the planters, in regard to the treatment they are getting. The
prosperity built upon such a basis will be no more lasting, of no more
benefit than the affluence the island once obtained from the
buccaneers, and sooner or later the Jamaicans will wake up to find they
have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.