Pirates: The Golden Age of Piracy: A History From Beginning to End by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2016-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Pirate King Henry Morgan

Most pirates ended their lives with a noose around their necks, but Henry Morgan was the exception to that rule. He started out inauspiciously enough as the son of a local Welsh squire, born around 1635 in Wales. He somehow ended up in the New World, either as an indentured servant who traveled to Barbados and later joining an expedition led by General Robert Enables and Admiral William Penn to escape his indenture, or else he was recruited at Plymouth in 1654 to take part in the expedition. He was part of a failed attempt to invade Jamaica, but he found the island to his liking and chose to stay. He was joined by his uncle, who was appointed the lieutenant governor of the island when Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660. Morgan married his cousin, Mary Elizabeth, and then turned to buccaneering as part of the English attack on the Spanish settlements.

As a captain under Christopher Myngs from 1662-1663, he was part of the plundering against Santiago de Cuba and Campeche Mexico. In late 1663, he was sailing with a new captain. When he looted Villahermosa and returned from the raid to find that the Spanish patrols had captured the ships, he and the other buccaneers captured two other Spanish ships, sacked Trujillo and Granada, then returned to Port Royal. The governor of Jamaica sent him as part of an expedition to capture Providencia and Santa Catalina Islands, but when Captain Edward Mansfield was killed, Morgan was elected as the admiral.

Morgan proved to be adept in his role. The Jamaican governor sponsored more attacks on Spanish outposts. In 1667, Morgan sailed to Puerto Principe Cuba with ten ships and 500 men to free English prisoners being held there. Morgan’s men liberated the prisoners, sacked the city, and sailed on to Panama. When he occupied the town of Porto Bello, he accepted a ransom before he agreed to leave. He had gone beyond the terms of his commission, but since the offense was against the Spanish, he was a hero rather than an insubordinate seaman. He continued his plundering and was named commander-in-chief of all the warships in Jamaica. His assignment was simple: make war against Spain.

His strategy to capture the city of Panama duped the Spanish and routed them; Morgan seized more than 400,000 pieces of eight, a pirate fortune. Yet when he returned to Jamaica, he learned that the complicit governor had been recalled, peace had been declared between England and Spain, and he was under arrest. During his trial in England in 1672, he was acquitted when he was able to prove that he didn’t know a treaty had been signed. Two years later, he was knighted by Charles II and returned to Jamaica—as the lieutenant governor. His political fortunes were unpredictable, as he fell out of royal favor in 1681 and was removed from the governing council in 1683. However, when a friend became the governor of Jamaica in 1689, he was reinstated to the council.

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