The Monarchs of the Main by George W. Thornbury

Author:George W. Thornbury [Thornbury, George W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781499563887
Google: ZIUDoQEACAAJ
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
Published: 2014-05-15T03:31:54+00:00

The lady, like other Spanish women, had been told by their priests and husbands, that the Buccaneers had the shape of beasts and not of men. The more intelligent reported they were robbers, murderers, and heretics; men who forswore the Holy Trinity, and did not believe in Jesus Christ. "The oaths of Morgan," says Esquemeling, with most commendable gravity, "soon convinced her that he had heard of a God." It was said, that a woman of Panama who had long desired to see a pirate, on their first entrance into the city cried out, "Jesu Maria, the thieves are men, like the Spaniards, after all;" and some volunteers, when they went out to meet Morgan's army, had promised to bring home a pirate's head as a curiosity.

Morgan, refusing to restore the beauty to her friends, treated her with more flattering care than before. Tapestries, robes, jewels, and perfumes, lay at her disposal. Such kindness, after all, was cheap generosity, and part of this treasure may even have been her husband's. In her innocence, she began to think better of the Buccaneers. They might be thieves, but they were not, she found, atheists, nor very cruel, for Captain Morgan sent her dishes from his own table. She at first received his visits with gratitude and pleasure, surprised at the rough, frank kindness of the seaman, and loudly denounced his slanderers, that had so cruelly attempted to poison her mind against him, her guardian and protector. The snares were well set, and the bird was fluttering in. But Heaven preserved her, and she passed through the furnace unhurt. Morgan soon threw off his disguise, and offered her all the treasures of the Indies if she would become his mistress. She refused his presents of gold and pearl, and resisted all his artifices. In vain he tried alternately kindness and severity. He threatened her with a thousand cruelties, and she replied, that her life was in his hands, but that her body should remain pure, though her soul was torn from it. On his advancing nearer, and threatening violence, she drew out a poignard, and would have slain him or herself, had he not left her uninjured. Enraged at her pride, as he miscalled her virtue, he determined to break her spirit by suffering. She was stripped of her richest apparel, and thrown into a dark cellar, with scarcely enough food allowed her to support life, and the chief demanded 30,000 piastres as her ransom, to prevent her being sold as a slave in Jamaica. Under this hardship the lady prayed like a second Una daily to God, for constancy and patience. Morgan, now convinced of her purity, and afraid of his men, who already began to express openly their sympathy with her sufferings, to account for his cruelty, accused her to his council of having abused his kindness by corresponding with the Spaniards, and declared that he had intercepted a letter written in her own hand. "I myself," says Esquemeling, "was an

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