Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty

Empire of Blue Water: Henry Morgan and the Pirates Who Ruled the Caribbean Waves,

by Stephan Talty;

Simon & Schuster, 2008, $24.95.

In 1654, a man called Thomas Gage travelled to Portsmouth to step aboard the Fagons, a ship on a mission from God. This renegade Dominican turned informer had, in his Catholic days, spent twelve years in the West Indies as a missionary, and had written a best-seller based on his experiences which persuaded Oliver Cromwell to take on the Spanish in the New World. Gage convinced the Lord Protector that the Pope’s plans for universal domination could only be countered by a staunch Protestant invasion of Hispaniola as part of a grand “Western Design”.

So in 1654, they set out: an army of some 2500 on board a fleet of thirty-eight ships. Made up of the scrapings of English prisons, the idle, the violent, and countless opportunists, this mutinous and disorganised rabble died like flies under the tropical sun as the planned invasion came to nothing. Among that crew was a young Henry Morgan, who survived the jungles of Jamaica to become a ferocious and highly successful pirate.

Thus does Stephan Talty set out on his own fantastic voyage, which takes in a cast of thousands and provides a thorough historical tour of the seven- teenth-century world along the way. Ostensibly about Henry Morgan, this purported main character is instead continually upstaged by such class acts as Philip IV of Spain with his Habsburg jaw and bastard-induced melancholy; the buccaneer L’Ollonais, model pirate and utter psychopath; Don Juan José de Austria and his incestuous political ambitions; Fr Nithard, a sinister Jesuit (no seventeenth-century history is complete without one of those); and Cromwell himself, dead only three years after the disaster in the West Indies. It is interesting to discover how attractive Charles II appears against this less-than-stellar assembly: a shrewd, flamboyant, fundamentally kind Franco-Scot from a healthy bloodline and possessed of far better manners than any of the above.

Talty has done his work well; myth-busting abounds. Far from the broad West Country drawl familiar to all pirate movie aficionados, the authentic argot has a Cromwellian flavour: getting out of a tight corner was called “a soft farewell”, while stealing from the Spanish was described as a “forced loan”. Terrifying as it was, the black flag (with or without skull and crossbones) was the very thing the pirates’ victims longed to see flying aloft their ransacked town or fortress—it meant that prisoners would be taken. The red flag, on the other hand, meant “no quarter”.

English pirates were a funny lot. Like all buccaneers they were afflicted with positively bipolar spending habits, utterly unfit or unable to benefit from the massive acquisitions which they spent or gave away as quickly as possible. As fast as the silver came out of the extraordinary mine of Potosí in the kingdom of Peru, to be turned into the universal currency of pieces-of-eight, the pirates seized it and spent it. Having whetted their appetites for atrocity by serving with Cromwell’s New Model Army in Ireland, many pirate captains nonetheless ran effective workers’ compensation plans (600 pieces-of-eight for the loss of a right arm, and yes, loss of wooden leg was also covered). Pirates’ generosity to impoverished shipmates was also legendary. Yet at the same time, Port Royal in Jamaica—the Sodom of the New World—drew money from them like a vampire.

The allure of Burt Lancaster in tights tends to blind one to the harsher realities of the yo-ho-ho lifestyle. The Breton Francis L’Ollonais was cruel even by pirate standards, on one occasion cutting out a Spaniard captive’s heart and eating it in front of him. Blackbeard in his turn practised an extreme form of management philosophy, stating of his crew that “if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was”. In a recognisable seventeenth-century description of post-traumatic stress disorder, some retired French pirates’ “minds had given way from the suffering they had experienced to such an extent that they were always imagining Spaniards were coming, upon sighting from the deck of the boat some men on horseback riding along the seashore got out their arms ready to fire thinking they were enemies”.

Talty follows Morgan’s career with obvious enjoyment, including the many fascinating tangents which evolve from his narrative. He argues persuasively that the Spanish created the pirate culture: like Rome after the destruction of Carthage, a once-imaginative and dashing regime had become bloated with success. Ships which should have been laden with treasures and trade goods instead wended a long and weary way to Spain, stuffed to the brim with paperwork. Without any competition or free trade to use up their energy, vigorous and innovative men who could have otherwise prospered quite legitimately became bloodthirsty privateers and sworn enemies of all administration.

Having terrorised countless people for years, Morgan retired to Jamaica as a landed gent and eventually died of chronic alcohol-related illnesses in his early fifties in 1688. History being what it is, he was given the equivalent of a state funeral, attended by thousands. Talty’s grande finale is superb: in 1692 an earthquake of biblical proportions utterly destroyed Port Royal, and during the six minutes of seismic activity, Henry Morgan’s coffin was disgorged from Port Royal cemetery and swept out to sea. It was never seen again.

On the bright side, the Pope’s plans for universal domination were stopped in their tracks (we shall leave World Youth Day out of the equation for the purposes of argument). Piratical harassment seems to have helped keep the Spanish from further expansion up the coast of what is now the United States, but overall the balance of power began to tip slowly in favour of mercantile expansion rather than religious.

What would Oliver Cromwell have thought of this? I have a longstanding fantasy that the twenty-one-year-old Cromwell originally planned to sail on the Mayflower in 1620, but then decided to get married instead (clearly the more frightening of the two options). What if Gage’s fantastic stories of the New World had gotten the better of Cromwell, and he had actually led the expedition to Hispaniola? Stranded on Jamaica, his natural leadership qualities, organisational ability and ruthlessness would have made him a superb buccaneer, although lacking the necessary dress sense. A Cromwellian fleet of pirates might have succeeded where the freelancers failed, and the dreamed-of Western Design might have become a reality by foul means, rather than fair.