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By Root 1201 0

audacious attack on the fortified town of Portobello in present-day Panama, where the Spanish unloaded the mule trains which had carried their treasure down to the coast for onward shipment by armed convoy to Europe. Military cunning and piratical enthusiasm overwhelmed Spanish unpreparedness: Morgan seized the town and in the following four weeks denuded it of spoils worth more than Jamaica’s agricultural exports for an entire year. He even forced the Spanish to pay him a ransom to leave Portobello. The individual pirate’s share of the plunder from Portobello was five or six times the annual wage of a seventeenth-century seaman. When news of the raid reached London, the Spanish Ambassador wrung his hands and moaned. The British gave their characteristic performance of sympathy, mild regret and practical indifference. What, they seemed to suggest, can we do? In truth, the British had discovered that contracting out the making of war – or money – was a policy which it was much easier to start than to finish.

When they would later come to justify their empire to the world (and to themselves), the political aspects of this robbery were presented as something rather more dignified. Early pirates talked of themselves as knights on some blue-water crusade against a corrupt, barbarous and lazy Spain. When someone had the impertinence to describe Henry Morgan in print as a buccaneer he sued the publishers for libel – and won. In 1664 the British had sent a new governor to Jamaica, bearing orders to improve relations with Spain and put a stop to privateering. Fortunately for Morgan, Sir Thomas Modyford’s political convictions were more than a match for the promiscuity of ‘No Conscience Nan’. He had brought with him hundreds of planters to whom he promised land on which they could grow sugar to feed the immense European appetite for the stuff. But clearing the dense jungle to create sugar plantations was a slow, laborious business – even when the work was done by slaves being imported from Africa. Within weeks of his arrival and his high-sounding proclamation to ban privateering, Modyford was writing home, explaining that he had changed his mind and would accomplish his mission step by step. In fact, the new Governor had decided there was simply too much money at stake in robbery. In 1667 he appointed Morgan admiral of the privateers and was already taking a cut of the proceeds himself.

Three years later came news that at long last the feuding between Britain and Spain was over. The Spanish had been plundering the New World since before the arrival of the British, but under the terms of the Treaty of Madrid they recognized Jamaica and other British possessions in the Caribbean. The pirates in Port Royal heard of the peace agreement when it was proclaimed with a drumbeat. But peace did not last long, and in August Modyford authorized Henry Morgan to put to sea, ‘to do and perform all manner of exploits, which may tend to the preservation and quiet of this island’, the sort of opaque instructions which in the centuries to come characterize so many imperial directions. Morgan’s reputation meant that he had no trouble assembling the biggest gang of privateers ever brought together in the West Indies, who promptly interpreted the promotion of quiet in Jamaica as attacking Panama City, a military operation so ambitious that the Spanish had assumed it to be impossible. Had it not been for the remarkable endurance of the attackers, who sailed upriver and then marched through almost impenetrable jungle without food for four days, the Spanish would have been right about Panama City’s security. But under Morgan’s leadership the attackers fell upon ‘the greatest mart for silver and gold in the whole world’. Although disappointed that the city was not holding more bullion, they still needed a train of 175 mules to carry their plunder down to the coast. Morgan arrived back in Port Royal in April 1671, to be greeted with the thanks of the colony and much business in the town’s grogshops.

But the privateers were about to fall victim to changing