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mouth of the San Juan River, two miles from Santiago. The Spanish, who thought the attack would have to wait until the next day, were startled to find riders arriving from Aguadores saying that the English were pouring off their ships onto the rocky shore. By nightfall Mings had landed 1,300 men without losing a single soul. The privateers lit fires and waited for morning. At Santiago the troops were put under the command of Don Cristóbal Arnoldo y Sassi, a well-connected Spanish-Jamaican who had led the Jamaican guerrillas in their battles with the English invaders. Perhaps the governor hoped for some of the guerrillas’ success in picking off the English; but this was to be an old-fashioned frontal attack. The next morning the English marched to Santiago and, just after sunrise, sent wave after wave of musketeers toward the castle. The Spanish broke in short order, with Arnoldo leading the retreat. The privateers spent five days looting the town, taking anything that could be resold for the tiniest sum, down to the iron fixtures in the church. During the whole operation, Mings lost only six men to enemy fire, while twenty succumbed to sickness. When he sailed into Port Royal on October 22, the crowds along the shore erupted in celebration. Roderick and the boys flowed off the ship and straight into the taverns. By now our nineteen-year-old privateer was an experienced binge drinker. The pieces of eight jingling in his pocket promised weeks of nonstop carousing. He’d killed his first man at Santiago, a Spanish musketeer he’d shot in the face with his pistol, now tucked safely into his leather belt. Roderick would spend all he’d earned on rum and women, but Morgan, although it is likely he dropped a few cobs in the taverns, husbanded most of his share for the future. His plans were grander than Roderick’s.
    The raid on Santiago was a preview, in miniature, of Morgan’s expeditions to come, which shows how much he learned from the irrepressible Mings. One more expedition to Campeche, which netted the privateers fourteen Spanish ships in addition to the usual assortment of trade goods and silver plate, and Morgan was ready to set out on his own. Privateering was confirmed as a business proposition: Fabulous riches lay strewn across the length and breadth of Central America, and Mings had proved that the rabble London had flushed out of its sewers and its army ranks could take it when motivated. Now the English blade had been placed at the jugular that fed Philip IV’s empire. Soon Morgan would begin to press it home.

    In London the man who had set the invasion of Jamaica in motion was gone. Cromwell had died in 1658, and his Puritan revolution seemed to dissolve like morning fog. In his place came a far different man, Charles II, whose biography was touched early and often by piracy. The new king’s father, like many of the Stuarts, had married a Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France. This had enraged conspiracy-minded Protestants like Thomas Gage, who were always prone to rumors of papist plots to take over the country. When she was pregnant with Charles II, Henrietta had sent to France for a Catholic midwife. Her dwarf and dancing master were sent by sea to retrieve the woman but were captured by pirates and delayed past the blessed event. The man in the street rejoiced: Charles II was guided into the world by faithful Protestant hands.
    At his birth, fortune-tellers predicted that Charles would be drawn to mathematicians, merchants, learned men, painters, sculptors—and sailors. Astrologers foresaw a man with a “mincing gait,” a high-pitched voice who would be lucky in both marriage and war. Charles’s father once stated that “the state of the monarch is the supremest thing upon earth: For kings are not only God’s lieutenants, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself are called Gods.” His son, however, came of age in a much more uncertain world. He had to fight for power from his exile in