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By Root 3010 0

to gain most from their suppression, and therefore he should foot the bills. The crown, for its part, was too far away to monitor expenditures closely. With no way to ensure that the isthmus’s short-termers wouldn’t pocket funds designated for the anti-maroon campaign, the king was reluctant to, so to speak, sign the check. The conflict was a version of what economists call “principal agent” problem: when one party pays another to act on its behalf but can’t readily measure its performance. And it was enough to stall large-scale action against the maroons, even though the stakes for Spain kept rising.

From the colonists’ point of view, it was bad enough when nude, grease-smeared ex-slaves and Indians swept into Panamá town with their “very big and strong bows” and iron-tipped arrows, as one colonial official wrote in 1575, stealing cattle, carrying off slaves, and “usually killing the [Europeans] they meet.” Worse, the maroons, out of spite, threw whole shipments of silver and gold into the river. But then the maroons joined forces with the man who would become Spain’s most hated enemy: Francis Drake, the English pirate/privateer.

Drake, then on his first major independent voyage, came in July 1572 to the isthmus, looking to loot Spanish treasure. Finding African slaves loading wood on an island outside Nombre de Dios, he asked them about the town’s defenses. (The slaves had been left by their owners, who presumably intended to return for them; Drake set them ashore, so that they could run away.) The English attacked at 3:00 a.m. on July 29 in a flurry of gunfire. The exchange wounded Drake badly enough that his men pulled back, regretfully leaving behind, according to his authorized biography, “a pile of barres of silver, of (as neere as we could guesse) seventie foot in length, of ten foot in breadth, and twelve foot in hight.” Drake was not discouraged. Just after he set off for Nombre de Dios, the men whom he had left behind to guard his ships were hailed by an African—a maroon offering the assistance of his fellows.

After some fumbling about, Drake met in September with a maroon captain, Pedro Mandinga. To the dismay of the English, Mandinga told them that the flow of silver from Peru had stopped for the year. The next shipments would not occur until March, when the rainy season ended. Drake decided to wait. With Mandinga, he devised a plan to steal silver not on the coast, but in Venta de Cruces, a transshipment area on the Chagre River where mule trains were unloaded onto barges. Mandinga sent spies into Panamá to find out when the silver ships would arrive. Meanwhile, the English hid from Spanish eyes in a cove west of Nombre de Dios, their victuals largely provided by maroon bows and fish hooks. Waiting was riskier than the English anticipated; yellow fever killed half their number in December. Among the victims was Drake’s younger brother, Joseph. (Another brother had died a few weeks before.)

Early in February 1573 Mandinga and twenty-nine other maroons led Drake and eighteen surviving buccaneers through the forest toward the Pacific. They moved in total silence, military style, maroons deploying ahead of the English, to mark the trail, and behind, to cover their tracks. After reaching Venta de Cruces in the morning of February 14, the party waited for the silver in the long grass by the side of the highway. Because the first stretch of the road on the Pacific side passed through low, open grassland, the mule trains traveled by night, to avoid the sun. (Later, in the deep forest, they traveled by day.) Within a few hours of Drake’s arrival one of Mandinga’s spies in Panamá delivered some news. The treasurer of the regional government in Lima was leaving town with fourteen mules, nine of them laden with gold and jewels. Behind him would follow two mule trains, each of fifty to seventy animals, carrying silver.

The pirates and maroons split into two groups, one led by Drake, the other by Mandinga, about fifty yards apart from each other on the road. Drake’s group would let the mule train pass until it could