Part 13 (1/2)
[Footnote 316: C.S.P. Colon., 1669-74, No. 608. Wm. Frogge, too, says that the share of each man was only 10.]
[Footnote 317: Add. MSS., 11,268.]
[Footnote 318: C.S.P. Colon., 1669-74, No. 542, I.]
[Footnote 319: Ibid., No. 542, II.]
[Footnote 320: S.P. Spain, vol. 57, f. 76; vol. 58, f. 27.]
[Footnote 321: C.S.P. Colon., 1669-74, Nos. 513, 531, 532, 544; Beeston's journal.]
[Footnote 322: S.P. Spain, vol. 58, f. 30.]
[Footnote 323: _Cf._ Memorial of the Conde de Molina complaining that a new governor had not been sent to Jamaica, as promised, nor the old governor recalled, 26th Feb. 1671 (S.P. Spain, vol. 58, f. 62).]
[Footnote 324: C.S.P. Colon., 1669-74, No. 272.]
[Footnote 325: Ibid., No. 331.]
[Footnote 326: C.S.P. Colon., 1669-74, Nos. 377, 424.]
[Footnote 327: Ibid., Nos. 405, 441, 452, 453, 552, 587.]
[Footnote 328: Ibid., Nos. 600, 604, 608, 655.]
[Footnote 329: Ibid., Nos. 653, 654.]
[Footnote 330: S.P. Spain, vol. 58, f. 156.]
[Footnote 331: S.P. Spain, vol. 58, f. 156.]
CHAPTER VI
THE GOVERNMENT SUPPRESSES THE BUCCANEERS
The new Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch, brought with him instructions to publish and carefully observe the articles of 1670 with Spain, and at the same time to revoke all commissions issued by his predecessor ”to the prejudice of the King of Spain or any of his subjects.” When he proclaimed the peace he was likewise to publish a general pardon to privateers who came in and submitted within a reasonable time, of all offences committed since June 1660, a.s.suring to them the possession of their prize-goods (except the tenths and the fifteenths which were always reserved to the crown as a condition of granting commissions), and offering them inducements to take up planting, trade, or service in the royal navy. But he was not to insist positively on the payment of the tenths and fifteenths if it discouraged their submission; and if this course failed to bring in the rovers, he was to use every means in his power ”by force or persuasion” to make them submit.[332] Lynch immediately set about to secure the good-will of his Spanish neighbours and to win back the privateers to more peaceful pursuits. Major Beeston was sent to Cartagena with the articles of peace, where he was given every satisfaction and secured the release of thirty-two English prisoners.[333] On the 15th August the proclamation of pardon to privateers was issued at Port Royal;[334] and those who had railed against their commanders for cheating them at Panama, were given an opportunity of resorting to the law-courts.[335] Similar proclamations were sent by the governor ”to all their haunts,”
intimating that he had written to Bermuda, the Caribbees, New England, New York and Virginia for their apprehension, had sent notices to all Spanish ports declaring them pirates, and intended to send to Tortuga to prevent their reception there.[336] However, although the governor wrote home in the latter part of the month that the privateers were entirely suppressed, he soon found that the task was by no means a simple one.
Two buccaneers with a commission from Modyford, an Englishman named Thurston and a mulatto named Diego, flouted his offer of pardon, continued to prey upon Spanish s.h.i.+pping, and carried their prizes to Tortuga.[337] A Dutchman named Captain Yallahs (or Yellowes) fled to Campeache, sold his frigate for 7000 pieces of eight to the Spanish governor, and entered into Spanish service to cruise against the English logwood-cutters. The Governor of Jamaica sent Captain Wilgress in pursuit, but Wilgress devoted his time to chasing a Spanish vessel ash.o.r.e, stealing logwood and burning Spanish houses on the coast.[338] A party of buccaneers, English and French, landed upon the north side of Cuba and burnt two towns, carrying away women and inflicting many cruelties on the inhabitants; and when the governors of Havana and St.
Jago complained to Lynch, the latter could only disavow the English in the marauding party as rebels and pirates, and bid the Spanish governors hang all who fell into their power.[339] The governor, in fact, was having his hands full, and wrote in January 1672 that ”this cursed trade has been so long followed, and there is so many of it, that like weeds or hydras, they spring up as fast as we can cut them down.”[340]
Some of the recalcitrant freebooters, however, were captured and brought to justice. Major Beeston, sent by the governor in January 1672, with a frigate and four smaller vessels, to seize and burn some pirate s.h.i.+ps careening on the south cays of Cuba, fell in instead with two other vessels, one English and one French, which had taken part in the raids upon Cuba, and carried them to Jamaica. The French captain was offered to the Governor of St. Jago, but the latter refused to punish him for fear of his comrades in Tortuga and Hispaniola. Both captains were therefore tried and condemned to death at Port Royal. As the Spaniards, however, had refused to punish them, and as there was no reason why the Jamaicans should be the executioners, the captains of the port and some of the council begged for a reprieve, and the English prisoner, Francis Witherborn, was sent to England.[341] Captain Johnson, one of the pirates after whom Beeston had originally been sent, was later in the year s.h.i.+pwrecked by a hurricane upon the coast of Jamaica. Johnson, immediately after the publication of the peace by Sir Thomas Lynch, had fled from Port Royal with about ten followers, and falling in with a Spanish s.h.i.+p of eighteen guns, had seized it and killed the captain and twelve or fourteen of the crew. Then gathering about him a party of a hundred or more, English and French, he had robbed Spanish vessels round Havana and the Cuban coast. Finally, however, he grew weary of his French companions, and sailed for Jamaica to make terms with the governor, when on coming to anchor in Morant Bay he was blown ash.o.r.e by the hurricane. The governor had him arrested, and gave a commission to Colonel Modyford, the son of Sir Thomas, to a.s.semble the justices and proceed to trial and immediate execution. He adjured him, moreover, to see to it that the pirate was not acquitted. Colonel Modyford, nevertheless, sharing perhaps his father's sympathy with the sea-rovers, deferred the trial, acquainted none of the justices with his orders, and although Johnson and two of his men ”confessed enough to hang a hundred honester persons,” told the jury they could not find against the prisoner. Half an hour after the dismissal of the court, Johnson ”came to drink with his judges.” The baffled governor thereupon placed Johnson a second time under arrest, called a meeting of the council, from which he dismissed Colonel Modyford, and ”finding material errors,” reversed the judgment. The pirate was again tried--Lynch himself this time presiding over the court--and upon making a full confession, was condemned and executed, though ”as much regretted,” writes Lynch, ”as if he had been as pious and as innocent as one of the primitive martyrs.”
The second trial was contrary to the fundamental principles of English law, howsoever guilty the culprit may have been, and the king sent a letter to Lynch reproving him for his rashness. He commanded the governor to try all pirates thereafter by maritime law, and if a disagreement arose to remit the case to the king for re-judgment.
Nevertheless he ordered Lynch to suspend from all public employments in the island, whether civil or military, both Colonel Modyford and all others guilty with him of designedly acquitting Johnson.[342]
The Spaniards in the West Indies, notwithstanding the endeavours of Sir Thomas Lynch to clear their coasts of pirates, made little effort to co-operate with him. The governors of Cartagena and St. Jago de Cuba, pretending that they feared being punished for allowing trade, had forbidden English frigates to come into their ports, and refused them provisions and water; and the Governor of Campeache had detained money, plate and negroes taken out of an English trading-vessel, to the value of 12,000 pieces of eight. When Lynch sent to demand satisfaction, the governor referred him to Madrid for justice, ”which to me that have been there,” writes Lynch, ”seems worse than the taking it away.”[343] The news also of the imposing armament, which the Spanish grandees made signs of preparing to send to the Indies on learning of the capture of Panama, was in November 1671 just beginning to filter into Jamaica; and the governor and council, fearing that the fleet was directed against them, made vigorous efforts, by repairing the forts, collecting stores and marshalling the militia, to put the island in a state of defence.
The Spanish fleet never appeared, however, and life on the island soon subsided into its customary channels.[344] Sir Thomas Lynch, meanwhile, was all the more careful to observe the peace with Spain and yet refrain from alienating the more troublesome elements of the population. It had been decided in England that Morgan, too, like Modyford, was to be sacrificed, formally at least, to the remonstrances of the Spanish Government; yet Lynch, because Morgan himself was ill, and fearing perhaps that two such arrests might create a disturbance among the friends of the culprits, or at least deter the buccaneers from coming in under the declaration of amnesty, did not send the admiral to England until the following spring. On 6th April 1672 Morgan sailed from Jamaica a prisoner in the frigate ”Welcome.”[345] He sailed, however, with the universal respect and sympathy of all parties in the colony. Lynch himself calls him ”an honest, brave fellow,” and Major James Banister in a letter to the Secretary of State recommends him to the esteem of Arlington as ”a very well deserving person, and one of great courage and conduct, who may, with his Majesty's pleasure, perform good service at home, and be very advantageous to the island if war should break forth with the Spaniard.”[346]
Indeed Morgan, the buccaneer, was soon in high favour at the dissolute court of Charles II., and when in January 1674 the Earl of Carlisle was chosen Governor of Jamaica, Morgan was selected as his deputy[347]--an act which must have entirely neutralized in Spanish Councils the effect of his arrest a year and a half earlier. Lord Carlisle, however, did not go out to Jamaica until 1678, and meanwhile in April a commission to be governor was issued to Lord Vaughan,[348] and several months later another to Morgan as lieutenant-governor.[349] Vaughan arrived in Jamaica in the middle of March 1675; but Morgan, whom the king in the meantime had knighted, sailed ahead of Vaughan, apparently in defiance of the governor's orders, and although s.h.i.+pwrecked on the Isle la Vache, reached Jamaica a week before his superior.[350] It seems that Sir Thomas Modyford sailed for Jamaica with Morgan, and the return of these two arch-offenders to the West Indies filled the Spanish Court with new alarms. The Spanish amba.s.sador in London presented a memorial of protest to the English king,[351] and in Spain the Council of War blossomed into fresh activity to secure the defence of the West Indies and the coasts of the South Sea.[352] Ever since 1672, indeed, the Spaniards moved by some strange infatuation, had persisted in a course of active hostility to the English in the West Indies. Could the Spanish Government have realized the inherent weakness of its American possessions, could it have been informed of the scantiness of the population in proportion to the large extent of territory and coast-line to be defended, could it have known how in the midst of such rich, unpeopled countries abounding with cattle, hogs and other provisions, the buccaneers could be extirpated only by co-operation with its English and French neighbours, it would have soon fallen back upon a policy of peace and good understanding with England. But the news of the sack of Panama, following so close upon the conclusion of the treaty of 1670, and the continued depredations of the buccaneers of Tortuga and the declared pirates of Jamaica, had shattered irrevocably the reliance of the Spaniards upon the good faith of the English Government. And when Morgan was knighted and sent back to Jamaica as lieutenant-governor, their suspicions seemed to be confirmed. A ketch, sent to Cartagena in 1672 by Sir Thomas Lynch to trade in negroes, was seized by the general of the galleons, the goods burnt in the market-place, and the negroes sold for the Spanish King's account.[353] An Irish papist, named Philip Fitzgerald, commanding a Spanish man-of-war of twelve guns belonging to Havana, and a Spaniard called Don Francisco with a commission from the Governor of Campeache, roamed the West Indian seas and captured English vessels sailing from Jamaica to London, Virginia and the Windward Islands, barbarously ill-treating and sometimes ma.s.sacring the English mariners who fell into their hands.[354] The Spanish governors, in spite of the treaty and doubtless in conformity with orders from home,[355]
did nothing to restrain the cruelties of these privateers. At one time eight English sailors who had been captured in a barque off Port Royal and carried to Havana, on attempting to escape from the city were pursued by a party of soldiers, and all of them murdered, the head of the master being set on a pole before the governor's door.[356] At another time Fitzgerald sailed into the harbour of Havana with five Englishmen tied ready to hang, two at the main-yard arms, two at the fore-yard arms, and one at the mizzen peak, and as he approached the castle he had the wretches swung off, while he and his men shot at the dangling corpses from the decks of the vessel.[357] The repeated complaints and demands for reparation made to the Spanish amba.s.sador in London, and by Sir William G.o.dolphin to the Spanish Court, were answered by counter-complaints of outrages committed by buccaneers who, though long ago disavowed and declared pirates by the Governor of Jamaica, were still charged by the Spaniards to the account of the English.[358] Each return of the fleet from Porto Bello or Vera Cruz brought with it English prisoners from Cartagena and other Spanish fortresses, who were lodged in the dungeons of Seville and often condemned to the galleys or to the quicksilver mines. The English amba.s.sador sometimes secured their release, but his efforts to obtain redress for the loss of s.h.i.+ps and goods received no satisfaction. The Spanish Government, believing that Parliament was solicitous of Spanish trade and would not supply Charles II. with the necessary funds for a war,[359] would disburse nothing in damages. It merely granted to the injured parties despatches directed to the Governor of Havana, which ordered him to restore the property in dispute unless it was contraband goods. G.o.dolphin realized that these delays and excuses were only the prelude to an ultimate denial of any reparation whatever, and wrote home to the Secretary of State that ”England ought rather to provide against future injuries than to depend on satisfaction here, till they have taught the Spaniards their own interest in the West Indies by more efficient means than friends.h.i.+p.”[360] The aggrieved merchants and s.h.i.+powners, often only too well acquainted with the dilatory Spanish forms of procedure, saw that redress at Havana was hopeless, and pet.i.tioned Charles II. for letters of reprisal.[361] Sir Leoline Jenkins, Judge of the Admiralty, however, in a report to the king gave his opinion that although he saw little hope of real reparation, the granting of reprisals was not justified by law until the cases had been prosecuted at Havana according to the queen-regent's orders.[362] This apparently was never done, and some of the cases dragged on for years without the pet.i.tioners ever receiving satisfaction.