CHAPTER XV

WHERE A PIRATE RULED

Against the soft azure of the tropic sky Jamaica lifts its lofty peaks, crowned with a diadem of clouds, above a sapphire sea. Faint and phantasmal as a vision it hangs above the waves, beautiful as a painting by a master’s hand, as slowly the hills and valleys take on form and substance. Opulently rich, with wooded mountain sides, wide fields of golden cane, and endless banana walks, it is as fair a scene as one could hope to see. As the Vigilant bore steadily toward Kingston, and we watched valley after valley, wave-washed beaches, surf-beaten crags, and endless rows of palms unfold before us, the island seemed a veritable earthly paradise.

But Jamaica’s history is far from that of an Eden, for its past has been one of bloodshed, debauchery, and death. From both God and man it has suffered much, and, as the Vigilant passed the long, low sand spit known as the Palisados and dropped anchor off the quarantine station at Port Royal, we were floating above what was once notorious as the wickedest city in the world; for beneath the placid waters here at the harbor mouth are the ruins of old Port Royal, the metropolis of the buccaneers.

Above the beach with the lazily lapping waves, modern Port Royal straggles upon the low, sandy point, a sleepy, sun-drenched spot of no importance save as a barracks and quarantine station. It is hard to realize, as one strolls through the roughly paved lanes or across the broiling-hot parade-ground, that this was once the chief port in the West Indies, the richest city in the New World, and one whose name was synonymous with every deviltry and vice known to man.

And yet there is much of interest to be seen in Port Royal to-day. There is the ancient, crumbling Fort Charles, looking seaward, with its moats and drawbridges, its quaint corners and damp underground rooms. And from the grass-grown embrasures the same ornate guns look grimly forth as in the days when Admiral Nelson was stationed here. Upon a tablet let into the coral-pink bricks is inscribed:

In this place Dwelt HORATIO NELSON You who tread his footprints Remember his glory

Also, leading from a heavily beamed guard-room in one corner of the ancient fortress is a little flight of stairs that opens on a paved platform known as “Nelson’s Quarter-deck.” Here, upon these time-worn flagstones, the famous admiral paced to and fro, no doubt regretting it was not in reality the deck of a great ship, and with longing eyes looked seaward for the French fleet which was expected to attack Port Royal. But the fleet never arrived. Had it attacked Jamaica, the history of the isle would, mayhap, have been very different, for the garrison at Fort Charles was pitifully weak, while the French flotilla was of immense strength. Perchance, too, had the attack been made, Nelson might never have won fame, for he was a mere lad of twenty-one when in 1779 he was placed in charge of the fort at Port Royal.

A year later he was once more in Jamaica, near to death with dysentery contracted on the San Juan expedition, and in the home of a noted black nurse, Cuba Cornwallis, he slowly regained his health and strength.

Strange sights and famous men has this old fort of sun-faded brick seen. It has seen Port Royal in all its vicious wickedness and flamboyant sin; it has seen the heaving earth and angry sea sweep the city and all its villainy into the depths. It has seen shot-riddled buccaneer ships returning, triumphant and deep-laden with loot, from piratical forays. It has witnessed many a wild revel of drink-flushed, foul-mouthed corsairs, and has listened to many a plan and plot of the freebooters as they argued and swore over some projected raid on the Spanish Main. Within its walls Morgan as well as Nelson and many a lesser light have dwelt and drunk the health of the king, and through storm and battle and cataclysms its walls and battlements have passed unscathed. The earthquake of 1692 wrought devastation and took thousands of lives, but left the old fort solid and strong. And even in 1907, when in a space of a few seconds modern Kingston crumbled to dust and newer forts fell like houses of cards, the flower-decked old fortress at the tip of the Palisados remained unharmed save for a single crack in one of its hoary walls.

Of the ancient buccaneer Port Royal, Fort Charles alone remains, and great indeed have been the changes the antique pile has seen take place about itself. From the ruin of the pirates’ stronghold has risen the sleepy little town,—a village of narrow streets and darkey houses, of stately residences with balconies and balustrades richly carved by shipbuilders now long dead, of trim, well-kept gardens and struggling lawns, and with a naval yard wherein repose the giant figureheads of many famed old British ships and frigates—while across the harbor has grown the island’s metropolis of Kingston. Few visitors now stop at Port Royal, few strange feet tread the old flagged esplanades and weed-grown ramp; and yet the little hamlet is well worthy of a visit, for it has a strange Old-World atmosphere and a fascination entirely lacking in Kingston. Its huge barrack square and parade-ground might well be those of some English port, were it not for the nodding palms and scorching sun. There is the old court-house, stately, austere, with shingled roof and flanked by arcades. There is the naval hospital, woefully damaged by the earthquake of 1907, and so out of place in the tropics with its typically English gardens and uncompromising architecture that it reminds one of the conventional houses equipped with chimneys which the old engravers and artists always introduced into their pictures of tropical scenes. And there are the swarded cricket-pitch, the bowling-green, and the tennis-courts on which the British officers and their women folk pass the cool of the afternoons. But the pirates’ church, built from the proceeds of robbery and murder, is gone like its builders beneath the sea; the once-busy docks are silent and all but deserted; the warehouses, once filled with casks and bales and barrels, are empty save for rusting chains, bits of cordage, and other odds and ends; the great sail-lofts are bare, and the whole place has the air of a town aloof, communing with itself over its sins and errors of the past, and, like some once-famous courtesan, living in a state of faded gentility away from prying eyes and wagging tongues.

How different was the Port Royal of olden days—a flourishing, noisy, hustling town of several thousand houses, of thousands of inhabitants, of great warehouses filled almost to bursting, of busy shipyards and a “hard” whereon always a dozen vessels might be seen careened; a port before which scores of armed ships rode ever at anchor; a place whose people were as familiar with the Jolly Roger as with the British ensign; and withal the notorious rendezvous of the English buccaneers. Indeed, Jamaica’s prosperity was built upon the business of the corsairs, and the port was scarcely more than a clearing-house for them.

Here came the Brethren of the Main from far and near, bringing their treasures: chests of plate and bullion, doubloons, onzas, and castellanos; pieces of eight and louis d’or; altar-pieces ablaze with precious stones; bales of velvets and satins, of silks and brocades; casks of brandy and wines, tobacco and coffee; the cargo of many a scuttled ship and galleon; the booty from many a ravished and sacked town; the holy vessels of countless desecrated churches; vestments heavy with gold and silver thread dragged from the bleeding bodies of butchered priests; jeweled trinkets torn from tortured, shrieking women; the output of many a famous mine; aye, and many a weeping, hapless captive girl, many a groaning slave, until within Port Royal so vast an accumulation of riches was gathered together that it was celebrated far and near as the greatest center of wealth the world had ever known.

And with its fame was coupled an even greater reputation for wickedness. Proud of the one as of the other was Port Royal; its evils were never hidden, never denied; brazenly to the world it proclaimed itself the nearest thing to hell on earth that man could devise.

Here came the swaggering, red-handed cutthroats to spend the gold they had won by robbery and murder, and ever the streets of Port Royal echoed to the drunken shouts and curses of the buccaneers. Sin in every form ruled; murder was of hourly occurrence, and far and wide the depravity of Port Royal was a byword.

A huge, bewhiskered rascal, clad in filched garments of many hues, would land fresh from a successful foray and, striding into a tavern, would fling down a handful of coin and order the cringing innkeeper to broach a pipe of wine in the street. Then, standing beside it with drawn pistols and with a drunken leer on his ill-favored face, the pirate captain would command all who passed to drink. Gladly enough would most accept this pressing invitation, and those who dared refuse would be shot down and their carcasses kicked into the gutter. Or again, merely to show the wealth at his command, he would buy out the tavern’s stock of liquor and order it poured into the highway, meanwhile dipping it up in a pannikin and playfully throwing it over the garments of passing men and women. Such were mere pleasantries as recorded by Esquemelling; harmless jokes, to the pirates’ minds; the forerunners of less-appreciated amusements such as running amuck and slashing or shooting all who were met, or, again, hanging prisoners in chains or roasting them over slow fires on wooden spits, or perchance flogging a slave to death for an afternoon’s sport. Luckily the debauches did not last long. In a single night the revelers would often spend two or three thousand pieces of eight, not “leaving themselves peradventure a good shirt to wear on their backs in the morning,” their chronicler tells us, and being compelled to lead a quiet life thereafter until the next corsairs’ ship set sail.

But among themselves and to one another the buccaneers were liberal and loyal, and a contemporaneous account states that “If any one of them has lost all his goods, which often happens in their manner of life, they freely give him and make him partaker in what they have.”

By some queer whimsy in their complex make-up, some inexplicable, paradoxical twist in their psychology, the pirates felt that their sink of iniquity in Jamaica was incomplete without a church. So forthwith, in this hell-hole, they built themselves a house of worship, erecting it with the gold won by rapine and murder, fitting it with the candlesticks and altar-pieces, the holy vessels and chalices, the tapestries and paintings looted from other houses of God. And, as they never believed in doing anything by halves, the pirate chiefs decreed that now they had a church all buccaneers must attend services therein.

Indeed, it is said that the notorious Morgan more than once shot down some scoffing buccaneer who had the temerity to interrupt the sermon, and that, on his own ship, whenever a clergyman fell into his clutches, he compelled the prisoner to hold service. History fails to relate what disposal the famous chieftain made of the unfortunate priest or minister thereafter, but he probably compelled him to walk the plank or ended his career in some equally abrupt and pleasant manner, for that was “Harry Morgan’s way,” as he was fond of boasting.

But the church at Port Royal was the veriest mockery, and not one jot did it influence the behavior or the lives of the town’s execrable denizens. Notoriously a pirates’ resort, winked at by the British (indeed, encouraged by the government as long as the buccaneers preyed upon the Spaniards and left British ships in peace), the city grew and prospered until one pleasant day in June—the seventh, to be exact—in 1692, when, as though an outraged God could no longer suffer this blot upon the universe, Port Royal was wiped from the face of the earth in an instant. Without warning, with no time granted the carousing, roistering fiends to repent, an earthquake shook the island to its foundations, and Port Royal, with over three thousand of its houses, nearly all its inhabitants, and all its vast accumulated treasures, dropped bodily into the sea.

One can picture the awful scenes of that fatal day: the terror-stricken people rushing, shrieking, from the crumbling houses and through the heaving, rocking streets as the first tremors rent the town; the drunken pirates stumbling red-eyed and cursing from brothel and drinking-place, as timbers splintered and masonry fell, and ruthlessly cutting down all who hampered their flight. And all in vain. Tripping over the bodies of their fellows, choking the narrow streets, felled by tumbling walls, milling, pushing, crowding; befuddled with rum; the solid ground dropping from beneath their feet; blaspheming, screaming, the mob fought madly to save their worthless lives, until, swallowed by the inrushing water, overwhelmed by the relentless sea, men, women, and children, merchant and pirate, harlot and slave, innocent and guilty, were buried deep beneath the waves, while on the placid surface of the harbor floating bits of wreckage, a few struggling figures, and countless corpses were all that marked the scene of the awful punishment meted out.

And above the limit of the devastation, serene, uninjured, aloof, Fort Charles still gazed seaward. Of all Port Royal the old fortress alone remained—this and a few gruesome, buzzard-picked skeletons turning, twisting in the wind, swinging by their creaking chains from the gibbets beyond reach of the waves.

At one fell swoop Port Royal, the buccaneers’ stronghold, had been wiped from the face of the earth, never to be rebuilt. To-day, when the water is calm, one may still trace the coral-incrusted outlines of the ruined town, while the negro boatmen relate uncanny tales of ghostly pirate ships sailing in the teeth of the wind, riding the crest of storms, ever striving to make the lost port, and of the phantom bells of the pirates’ church tolling the requiem of the dead buccaneers beneath the tempestuous waves.

A few survivors there were, who had found refuge in boats or ships or who had escaped from the stampede to higher ground, and these, spared as by a miracle, saw the error of their ways and, repenting of their sins, moved across the bay and founded the city of Kingston. They had been taught a wholesome lesson. Piracy was given up in favor of honest pursuits, and as, in the years that followed, the buccaneers were driven from the Caribbean, Kingston grew and prospered, order reigned, and peaceable planters, honest merchants, and vast estates brought wealth and riches to the isle in place of pirates’ loot and corsairs’ treasures.

But Nemesis seems ever to hover above the fair island whose early prosperity was built on bloodshed and villainy. From time to time destructive hurricanes have swept it, leveling buildings, destroying crops, and killing people, as in 1880, when thirty lives were lost in Kingston and most of the wharves as well as countless houses were destroyed. Fire swept the town in 1882, leveling over six hundred buildings, and then came the earthquake and fire of 1907, which snuffed out the lives of over one thousand persons, crumpled Kingston to dust, and wrought awful havoc upon the isle.

And as though these acts of God were not enough, between times there have been wars and bloodshed and to spare. Uprising slaves burned, slaughtered, and destroyed. The Cimmaroons or runaway blacks waged a relentless guerrilla warfare, and bandits and brigands made life and property insecure for years. From the very beginning of its history, Jamaica has been a stage for deeds of violence. Indeed, its turbulent days were inaugurated when first Columbus beached his unseaworthy ships on the northern coast in June, 1503. Here he remained for a year, until rescued by an expedition from Santo Domingo,—twelve months of mutiny, suffering, and hardship,—and here he saved his men and himself from death by impressing the Indians with his famous prophecy of the moon’s eclipse.

The site of his encampment, known as Christopher’s Cove, is between St. Ann’s Bay and Anotta Bay, and is one of the most historic places on the island, although, aside from its natural beauties, with its lovely beaches, its transparent water, and its setting of luxuriant foliage, there is nothing to be seen. Needless to say, Columbus, who discovered Jamaica in 1494, claimed it for the King of Spain, and Spanish it remained until 1655, when the British, under sturdy Admiral Penn and General Venables, vanquished the Dons and established the capital at Spanish Town in 1664.

It was during this period of warfare between the great nations that thousands of negro slaves escaped and, fleeing to the fastnesses of mountain and forest, became transformed into a half-savage race known as Cimmaroons, or, more commonly, Maroons. Fortifying themselves in the almost impenetrable mountain jungles, the Maroons harassed the planters, murdered and robbed travelers, burnt estates and outlying hamlets, and wreaked deviltry and destruction for years. Expedition after expedition was sent against them unsuccessfully, until, in the end, the British were forced to meet the wild negroes halfway, and, despairing of conquering them, made a treaty whereby the Maroons were granted their freedom and twenty-five hundred acres of land.

Then, for a space, the Jamaican whites breathed freely, but not for long. In 1760 the slaves rose, burning, butchering, and pillaging with their usual savagery, and five years later the Maroons once more burst out, leaving a wide trail of blood, of smoking fields, and of blackened ruins behind them, until a second treaty was made and half a thousand of the blacks were exiled to Sierra Leone. But even after this the islanders were seldom left in peace. In 1838 slavery was abolished, and yet in 1865 the negroes rose and slaughtered the whites and burned their homes at Montego Bay, brigandage was rampant in the hills, and altogether the wonder is that Jamaica has survived at all.

Just as Jamaica’s old-time prosperity was founded upon the Brethren of the Main, so the island’s present prosperity depends almost wholly upon the modern prototype of the pirates—a gigantic trust. In place of high-pooped, low-bowed ships with grinning guns along their sides Jamaica’s harbors now shelter the spotless white hulls of the fruit-boats. While the telling arguments of shot and shell and the pistol and cutlass have given way to the all-powerful dollar and the peaceful if no less persuasive methods of modern business to compel others to come to terms, yet the Fruit Company is scarcely less domineering in its line than were Morgan and his associates in theirs.

Not that the Fruit Company has not done much for Jamaica and the other lands where it has holdings. The worst enemy of the great organization, the most rabid anti-trust fanatic, cannot deny that the company has improved land, made for livable conditions, instituted sanitary reforms, circulated money, given employment to thousands, established hospitals, built railways, erected palatial hotels, maintained a steamship service, and done countless other admirable things. But one and all have been done with an eye to personal gain and not for the good of the world or of the countries where it controls politics, finances, policies, and the very existence of the inhabitants. Like every trust, it is utterly selfish, and in Jamaica it has a strangle hold, controlling business and people, body and soul. With the octopus-like grip of this colossus on the lands about the Caribbean, there can be no successful competition, no open market, no independent profitable enterprise where fruit, and especially bananas, are concerned.

Let any one who doubts this attempt to establish an industry where the trust holds sway, and see how long it will be ere he feels the effects of the political influence, the control of labor, the monopoly of shipping which the owners of the White Fleet hold in their hands.

As an example, let me mention the experience of a friend of mine who, finding that little Samana in Santo Domingo produced the largest and finest pineapples in the world and that luscious navel oranges were a drug on the market there at fifty cents a barrel, thought to establish a tiny fruit business of his own. Samples were sent to the leading commission fruit merchants in the States and to the big fancy-fruit and grocery houses, and one and all declared the fruit exceptional, and marketable at high prices, and stated that, coming as it did in midwinter, it would be in great demand. But one and all regretfully stated that they could not handle it, could not touch it, for if they did they would be boycotted and blacklisted by the Fruit Company!

Jamaica may have prospered through the banana industry, fostered and built up by the Fruit Company, but already there is dire complaint among the planters, in regard to the treatment they are getting. The prosperity built upon such a basis will be no more lasting, of no more benefit than the affluence the island once obtained from the buccaneers, and sooner or later the Jamaicans will wake up to find they have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.