Read Online Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty - Free Book Online

his talents as a soldier during the guerrilla wars and that his talent for leading men—and making alliances with those richer or more socially prominent—was already evident. Morgan’s family and their illustrious military history also probably earned him a foot in the door, reputation-wise. But everything after that he earned himself.
    On September 21, 1661, Morgan and the other adventurers were given a hero’s send-off, with wives, whores, and merchants lining the shore to cheer the boys away. It was the middle of hurricane season, which runs from June to November, and the ships tacked to Negril in Jamaica and then headed north for Cuba at three knots. Off the coast the fleet encountered a surprise: a ship already anchored near a cay, commanded by none other than Oliver Cromwell’s scapegrace nephew, Sir Thomas Whetstone. Whetstone’s background was not unusual for a gentleman pirate. The Restoration of Charles II had brought with it a return to pleasure, and Whetstone had thrown himself into the whirl of parties and plays, spending wildly; he was soon being hounded by creditors. Luckily, he’d sided with the Royalists and not his uncle during the Civil War, and King Charles had released him from debtors’ prison with a loan of £100, with the understanding that he’d recover it on the high seas. Charles did not grant him a commission, however, so he was operating as a full-fledged pirate. His crew was almost entirely Indian, natives who had been forced off their land by the Spanish. They were out for more than treasure. Whetstone and his Indian crew soon joined Mings’s expedition.
    A council of war was held aboard Mings’s forty-six-gun ship,
Centurion,
and a final battle plan was worked out. Santiago was a defender’s dream: The port sat on a bay accessible only through a long, thin channel, sixty yards wide at its narrowest, with high cliffs towering on either side. At the entrance to this channel stood the Castillo del Morro, a major fort whose guns could easily reach any ship attempting to sail through the gap. Another battery of guns sat at the cliff’s foot, just below the Castillo, adding more firepower. And in this age of sail, the winds at the mouth of the channel were notoriously tricky.
    For the seventeenth-century sailor, winds were animate creatures, the physical manifestations of minor demigods and demons. Roderick believed they lived on mountain summits or in the hollows of caves, awaiting their orders to go and blow up a storm or hasten a ship to its destination, orders given by their commander, the great North Wind. The South, East, and West each had its own personality, as did all their various subalterns, from North by Northwest down to harbor breezes. Seamen imagined that the winds led sailorly lives; shouted into action by the blustery voice of the North, they’d go out, whip up a hurricane, then retire exhausted to the top of an Alpine peak for a game of cards or some storytelling over rum punch. These gales had feelings: They could be offended, wounded, or flattered, and sailors often called out to them encouragingly as they passed. Each had its own peculiar sound, which the mariner claimed to know by heart: lazy murmurs, keening gusts, voices angry or mournful. It is a testament to the loneliness of the seas and how much power wind had over the sailor’s life.
    The breezes off Santiago were chaotic and difficult to predict, so the men decided on a direct attack up the mouth of the channel. Capricious or nonexistent breezes slowed the fleet’s pace, but on October 5, the men spotted the Castillo del Morro, towering over the entrance to the bay. By now the fleet had swelled to twenty ships with late arrivals from Port Royal, and the captains used telescopes to gauge the action of the wind at the channel mouth. Old hands who had sailed this way before knew that at dusk an onshore breeze would kick up; Mings decided to use it.
    He swept the fleet in to the village of Aguadores at the