CNJ+ August 2023

rooted out 250 frightened, hiding residents, whereupon he tortured them into divulging where their loot was. Before Morgan could depart, Espinosa arrived with three heavily armed warships and ordered Morgan to release his prisoners and relinquish his loot or prepare to get wrecked. Though utterly outgunned, Morgan put up his nautical dukes. Luckily, he was cunning. His crew converted a vessel into a fireship, meaning they equipped it with combustibles or explosives. To conceal the ploy, they fit ted the ship with objects meant to resemble guns and disguised pieces of wood as people. Their boat bomb annihilated a Spanish vessel, and another warship was run aground and set ablaze to keep Morgan from capturing it. However, the privateer wasn't out of the woods yet. In order to escape with his riches and life intact, he feigned preparations for a land-based attack so Espinosa would aim his weapons in the wrong direction. Then, when the Spanish weren't looking, Morgan's ships drifted to safety under the cover of darkness. In 1668, he pulled off what perhaps the most successful and audacious amphibious operation of the seventeenth century. Faced with the threats of disease and violent resistance, Morgan launched an assault on Portobel lo. Portobello was a treasure port in the Spanish Main where Panama City stored its riches during the dry season. Unwilling to risk a frontal assault on his ships, Morgan commandeered 23 canoes, sneaked along the coast, and ambushed the town by land. Morgan wasted no time bringing the place to its knees. He held all of Portobello for ransom, demanding 340,000 pesos from Panama City's governor in exchange for Morgan not setting the entire town on fire. And just to rub it in, he referred to Portobello as an "English town." The governor begrudgingly complied, and Morgan made a tremen dous amount of money. The exchanges between the two men got pretty ugly. The governor didn't think Morgan was fit to lick his boots and wasn't afraid to say it. In a letter he would live to regret a thousand times, the governor called Morgan an "inferior person" and a pirate. Morgan took his status seriously and considered himself a privateer. He vowed to would make him pay for calling him a pirate. He vowed a brutal revenge, which he inflicted three short years later. Panama City was one of the richest ports in the New World, and just get ting there would require surviving 70 miles of disease-infested jungle. But not only did Morgan attack Panama City, he did it with "the largest fleet ever seen in the Caribbean. In 1671, that fleet, consisting of 38 ships and more than 2,000 men, laid waste to the Spanish Main as they murdered their way to Panama City. When they finally reached the city, they spent a month torching houses and torturing residents. The governor had already escaped with literal boatloads of treasure, so the heist wasn't as lucrative as expected, but Morgan got his revenge. Afterward, if surgeon Alexandre Exquemelin is to be believed, after the sacking of Panama City, Captain Morgan left his men in a lurch and made off with the greatest and best part of the spoil, which had been concealed from them in the dividend. People who kill and pillage for a living are bound to do some gruesome things, and Morgan was reportedly no exception. In fact, his surgeon, Alex andre Exquemelin, portrayed him as exceptionally cruel. In his 1678 work Buccaneers of America, Exquemelin described the kind of violence that would make your nightmares have nightmares. In one such account, Mor gan held an elderly Portuguese man prisoner, believing him to be wealthy. When the prisoner insisted that he wasn't rich, Morgan’s men supposedly stretched the old man's limb with cords, "breaking both his arms behind his shoulders." There were many other tales of torture by Morgan but he had

wealthy backers behind him who seemed to turn the other eye. Morgan eventually sued his surgeon's publishers for libel. He didn't take kindly to the writings of Alexandre Exquemelin, who had essentially portrayed him as an abductee forced into indentured servitude who became the most ruthless and rabid of sea dogs under the tutelage of pirates. His main gripe was being described as an indentured servant. However, there were a few alleged acts of violence he wanted to have scrubbed from the record. According to the Marin Inde pendent Journal, Morgan took issue with the claim that he used nuns and priests as human shields while raiding a Spanish col ony. After being knighted by England and appointed Jamai ca's lieutenant governor, Morgan filed and won a lawsuit that forced Exquemelin's publishers to make a series of awkward retractions.

It's likely that Exquemelin took at some creativity when describing Morgan's exploits, but that doesn't mean he lied outright, and the claim Morgan de nied most vehemently, that he was an indentured servant, was supported by concrete evidence. Contemporary records indicate that someone with Morgan's name who came from his native Wales was absolutely sold into servitude. Today the U.S. is known for its world-class whis key and craft beers, among other beverages, but in colonial America, rum was king. By the 1630s, distilleries in the West Indies began transforming molasses into rum, a liquor perfectly suited for co lonial society. Rum kept better than beer and ci der, and with easily available raw materials (due to the grossly exploitative Atlantic slave trade) and a higher alcohol by volume than its competition, the liquor quickly became popular with colonists as both a libation and a medicine. The first co lonial rum distillery opened on Staten Island in 1664, and another opened in Boston three years later. By one account, colonists drank 3.7 gallons of the stuff annually per person by the time of the American Revolution, and the sweet liquor was so valuable that it was sometimes even traded as cur rency. As the colonies’ relationship with Britain soured — most directly in the forms of the Molas ses Act (1733), the Sugar Act (1764), and eventu ally a wartime blockade — distillers moved away from increasingly costly rum. Instead, they began producing more of a corn-based alcohol known as whiskey, a liquor that soon became synonymous with American patriotism. With that, the reign of rum was more or less over. Whether a pirate, or a privateer, a torturer of men or a more subdued gentlemen, or whether you would ever really want to have a little of the Captain in you, Captain Morgan seems to live on in infamy on the cover of a rum bottle.

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