Henry Morgan

3 Key excerpts on "Henry Morgan"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Dangerous Book of Heroes

  • Conn Iggulden, David Iggulden(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • William Morrow

    (Publisher)

  Sir Henry Morgan: Buccaneer

  H enry Morgan’s life is simply an astonishing story. The history of Spanish colonies isn’t taught in American or British schools, but Morgan was a pirate at a time when Britain had barely a foothold in the Caribbean Sea. Spain was the great power in those waters, with wealthy ports and cities in a vast bowl from Mexico to Venezuela and the Caribbean islands. Even today those countries have Spanish as their first language. Morgan’s combination of ruthlessness, leadership, and seamanship would make him the terror of the West Indies and strike fear into Spanish settlements.

   

  He was born in Glamorganshire, Wales, in 1635. At that time, his family worked as soldiers of fortune under foreign flags and achieved high rank in Holland, Flanders, and Germany. They also fought on both sides of the English civil war. Henry Morgan’s father, Thomas, took the parliamentary side and reached the rank of major general under Oliver Cromwell.

  Given the turbulence of the times, it is perhaps not too surprising that few records survive of Henry Morgan’s childhood. At the age of twenty, he traveled as an indentured servant to Barbados. He said later that he left school early and was “more used to the pike than the book.” It has been suggested that the young Welshman was kidnapped and sold as a white slave. In his latter, respectable days, he sued anyone who made this claim, but such events were not uncommon and the exact truth is now hidden in history. Another story is that he sailed as a junior officer on an expedition to the West Indies by Oliver Cromwell.

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  Available until 21 Apr |Learn more

  How History's Greatest Pirates Pillaged, Plundered, and Got Away With It

  The Stories, Techniques, and Tactics of the Most Feared Sea Rovers from 1500-1800

  • Benerson Little(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Fair Winds Press

    (Publisher)

  On this small plain the Spanish force now faced an army, many of whose men had long scourged the Spanish Main, and whose leader had proved his worth many times over. Once more he had done so by leading them for nine days across the treacherous jungle waterways of the Isthmus of Panama, through ambushes by Spaniards and allied Amerindians, and he intended today to lead them to victory. Defeat meant death or enslavement. It was not an option.

  Henry Morgan had risen from relatively humble origins to his place as the greatest leader of the Caribbean sea rovers. Little, though, is known of his early years. Even his appearance is somewhat conjectural. A woodcut made two decades later suggests he was a sturdy young man with intense eyes, a dominant nose, and a small mouth. His hair was probably shoulder length, although most certainly tied in a queue at sea, and very likely he already sported the small mustache he wore in his later years.

  By 1658 or 1659, the young Welshman Henry Morgan was in Port Royal, the capital of Jamaica, and one of the greatest pirate ports of the age. When or how he came in the Caribbean is still debated; he may have arrived as an indentured servant. Whatever his origins, Morgan quickly joined the buccaneers feasting on the Main. The call of plundering adventure and the rewards it could bring—riches, women, and renown—were impossible to resist.

  An 1880 illustration, artist unknown, of Henry Morgan’s surprise attack on the ships of the pirate hunting Armada de Barlovento at Maracaibo in 1669. The ship at the center is Morgan’s fire ship flying the Spanish colors as a means of deceiving the Spanish fleet long enough to bring the fire ship alongside. The Armada de Barlovento, long intended as a fleet to protect the Spanish Main against pirates, had only recently been brought into existence. In its first significant engagement against pirates, Henry Morgan destroyed the larger part of the fleet. © 2d Alan King/Alamy

  Soon Morgan signed aboard a privateer, quite possibly Richard Guy’s Hopewell Adventure

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  eBook - ePub

  Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer

  A Romance of the Spanish Main

  • Cyrus Townsend Brady(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Much research for historical essays, amid ancient records and moldy chronicles, put me in possession of a vast amount of information concerning the doings of the greatest of all pirates; a man unique among his nefarious brethren, in that he played the piratical game so successfully that he received the honor of knighthood from King Charles II. A belted knight of England, who was also a brutal, rapacious, lustful, murderous villain and robber—and undoubtedly a pirate, although he disguised his piracy under the name of buccaneering—is certainly a striking and unusual figure.

  Therefore, when I imagined my pirate story I pitched upon Sir Henry Morgan as the character of the romance. It will spare the critic to admit that the tale hereinafter related is a work of the imagination, and is not an historical romance. According to the latest accounts, Sir Henry Morgan, by a singular oversight of Fate, who must have been nodding at the time, died in his bed—not peacefully I trust—and was buried in consecrated ground. But I do him no injustice, I hasten to assure the reader, in the acts that I have attributed to him, for they are more than paralleled by the well authenticated deeds of this human monster. I did not even invent the blowing up of the English frigate in the action with the Spanish ships.

  If I have assumed for the nonce the attributes of that unaccountably somnolent Fate, and brought him to a terrible end, I am sure abundant justification will be found in the recital of his mythical misdeeds, which, I repeat, were not a circumstance to his real transgressions. Indeed, one has to go back to the most cruel and degenerate of the Roman emperors to parallel the wickednesses of Morgan and his men. It is not possible to put upon printed pages explicit statements of what they did. The curious reader may find some account of these "Gentlemen of the Black Flag," so far as it can be translated into present-day books intended for popular reading, in my volume of "Colonial Fights and Fighters ."

  The writing of this novel has been by no means an easy task. How to convey clearly the doings of the buccaneer so there could be no misapprehension on the part of the reader, and yet to write with due delicacy and restraint a book for the general public, has been a problem with which I have wrestled long and arduously. The whole book has been completely revised some six times. Each time I have deleted something, which, while it has refined, I trust has not impaired the strength of the tale. If the critic still find things to censure, let him pass over charitably in view of what might have been!

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