Today we digress from Port Royal to talk about a pretty fascinating pirate in Henry Morgan, who has a legacy that extends to the present day.

The Pirate

Captain Henry Morgan is probably more akin to Jack Sparrow than he is to Blackbeard. And with the release of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the type of person you picture when you think of a pirate is probably what Henry Morgan was like.

If you want to find a character who had a successful career as a pirate, then you really can’t look past Captain Henry Morgan. 

Believed to have been born in Wales around 1635, much like a lot of pirates, we actually don’t know very much about his early life, or really how he found himself in the Caribbean in the early 1650s. Although we do know that his uncle was the Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, so perhaps that had something to do with it. Shortly after arriving Morgan married his uncle’s daughter, his cousin, and then began his life at sea, oddly enough we don’t actually hear what happened to his wife after this.

Although he did begin his life at sea at the perfect time to become a pirate. The 1650s was the start of the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ and would attract swashbuckling men to the Caribbean for the next 30 years in the hope of gaining their fortune.

By the 1660s, Morgan was part of a fleet of privateers captained by Christopher Myng, and together, Myng and Morgan were a bloody terror throughout the Spanish Caribbean. In 1663, they sacked Santiago de Cuba, sailing away with a cart full of loot. By the time they sacked the heavily fortified city of Campeche in the Yucatan Peninsula they had a fleet of 14 ships and 1400 men under their command.

But Henry Morgan wasn’t all that stupid with his money. By 1665, he had made enough to buy his own plantation in Jamaica and diversify some of his income. Which kids you should always try to do, never get all your income from one source.

Morgan now felt a bit more confident in his pirateing ways and decided to get himself his own ship so he could strike out on his own. And what helped him out even more was that the Governor of Jamaica in 1667, a Sir Thomas Modyford issued Morgan with a Letter of Marque, which basically gave him authorisation to attack Spanish ships and Morgan wouldn’t face the consequences of what was very clearly piracy, which was semi frowned upon at the time. But one thing the letter made clear was that while Spanish ships were fair game, but Spanish cities were clearly off limits and any attack on land would be seen as a clear act of piracy.

But Morgan was a privateer in the Caribbean and hard line rules were very blurry to him. So of course Morgan began a number of attacks on Caribbean Spanish cities. But the cash and treasure reward that he captured from these cities wasn’t as much as Morgan had hoped for, so he turned his sights to bigger and richer cities like Porto Bello.

But Porto Bello had to be attacked a little differently thanks to it being so well defended. So Morgan had his men sneak onshore in canoes and then they captured the place before anyone even knew what was going on. Having only lost about 18 men and captured one of the greatest fortresses in the Caribbean, Morgan was in a strong position. He was even able to hold off an 800 men strong counterattack by the Spanish and ended up making a deal that would see Porto Bello ransomed back to the Spanish for 100 000 pesos. So Morgan now had a sizeable amount of treasure.

While Morgan was hailed as a hero for attacking the Spanish, who at the time weren’t really close friends with the English, Sir Thomas Modyfood officially denounced Morgan’s very clearly illegal actions. But this really didn’t dissuade Morgan, who spent the next two years attacking Spanish fleets and colonies, such as his 1670 attack on Panama City.

By this time, Morgan had 36 ships of his own and about 2000 buccaneers working for him. But the Spanish were ahead of him and caught wind of his plans to take Panama City. The Governor declared that he would rather burn the city to the ground than hand it over to Morgan. And that’s pretty much what happened. After trekking through the jungle and fighting off the Spanish to get to the city walls, the governor ordered the city’s gun powder stores to be set alight and the city came down in a series of explosions. They must’ve had a fair amount of gun powder because reports tell us that the fire burned for a good two days and destroyed almost all of the city’s wealth. Although Morgan was still able to pull 300 000 pesos from the ruins, with a large army demanding their payment it didn’t really go far as he had hoped.

At the time of Morgan’s attack on Panama, geopolitics were playing out in Europe. The Spanish and English had come to an agreement and had signed a peace treaty just a couple of weeks before the burning of Panama City and Morgan’s raid actually risked a war breaking out. So of course, the English had to make an example of him. So they arrested him and sent him back to London to face trial.

But as we know, things with the Spanish didn’t last forever, and by 1674 the English had done a complete backflip in regards to Morgan. Charles II, king at the time, ended up knighting Morgan and sent him back to Jamaica, this time as Deputy Governor. And Morgan wasn’t all that fussed with this arrangement as he lived out the rest of his life as a wealthy and respected planter.

And that is why Morgan is seen as one of the most successful pirates. He starts his career as a privateer, goes full pirate and ends his career as a Lieutenant Governor. Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

The Politician

But life as a politician didn’t always suit Morgan, who was used to a more exciting lifestyle and he began drinking quite heavily. And he wasn’t all above board. There are several allegations that he was investing in pirate expeditions which would eventually lead to him being removed from his position as Governor. But seeing as he had so much wealth, he did spend most of his days drinking and gambling.

While Governor of Jamaica, Morgan did try to improve the island. He refortified fortifications and helped to increase revenue and traffic through Port Royal, making it one of the busiest and richest ports in the New World.

Finally dying of complications from alcoholism, it is interesting that his legacy is him as the mascot for a rum company. But when he died he was an very wealthy man indeed, he was even given a state funeral with amnesty given to pirates so that they could come and pay their respects.

But unfortunately, Morgan wasn’t left alone even in death, when the 1692 earthquake struck Port Royal, it also destroyed the cemetery, with Morgan now resting at the bottom of the ocean, which perhaps is a more fitting place for him after all. You know, because he’s a pirate.

The Legacy

Sir Henry Morgan can be found in a couple of places in popular culture. In fact here’s a description of the man by historian P. Wood:

He was not a large man, but he was lean and strong, with a Welshman’s swarthy complexion, a prominent nose, sensuous lips and dark, arrogant eyes. In personality, he was difficult to judge. His tongue carried both a lilt and a lash.

Sounds like a pirate if you ask me. And we all know pirates love to drink rum, so I guess it does make sense for him to be the brand mascot and face of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum. His face is literally on the front of every bottle.

Now let’s have a quick look at Morgan’s literary legacy. While we don’t really know about his youth, there are several versions of it out there. In one version he was ‘barbadosed’, which meant he would have been kidnapped as a child and sent to Barbados to become an indentured servant. But we really do not know if it has any truth in it or not.

Captain Morgan did however become quite the legend in his own time with the publication of The Buccaneers of America in 1684, which told of his exploits, written by a fellow pirate, Dutchman Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin.

Not only does Exquemelin focus on Morgan but he also offers invaluable insights into this period of piracy and just how brutal and gruesome it was to be a buccaneer.

Exquemelin portrayed Morgan as a ruthless, unprincipled and bloodthirsty pirate, perhaps he wasn’t that much of a fan of Morgan after being left out of his share of the Panama loot. Either way Morgan didn’t like being portrayed as a man without morals and he sued Exquemelin for libel, meaning that parts of the book were retracted.

But Morgan’s portrayal didn’t stop with Exquemelin. John Steinbeck’s first novel A Cup of Gold, which came out in 1962, is believed to be a fictional account of Morgan’s life. And his life is also dramatized in Josephine Tey’s The Privateer published in 1952.

So perhaps by exposing ourselves to the horrors of The Buccaneers of America and the dramatizations of Steinbeck and Tey, we may be able to find a fairly realistic representation of Morgan somewhere in the middle.

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