Caribbean (39 page)

That night, after the guests were gone and the Tatum slaves, including the cook, had more or less put the remainders of the food away, Sir Isaac and Lady Clarissa sat in their handsome front garden and looked down upon the roofs of Bridgetown as they glistened in the moonlight. Several ships rode easily in the bay, two showing lights which made silvery paths across the water, and a sense of ease came over the master and mistress of this fine plantation. At one point Clarissa did say reflectively: “I sometimes wonder what Will’s doing on a night like this,” and had she been told that he was at that moment in a Spanish prison waiting to be burned alive, she would have had no comprehension of how he could have reached such a conclusion to his life or what it signified.

Sir Isaac did not care to speculate on the whereabouts of his feckless brother: “Forget him. He was worthless when we knew him, and he’s sure to be worthless now. Besides, just before the dinner I received excellent news.” His wife leaned forward, for she enjoyed her husband’s triumphs and often felt that she had been of some help in achieving them: “The clerks who tracked down Henry Saltonstall to alert him to his knighthood and the fact that the agreement ending our war entitled him to reclaim his old plantation were told by him: ‘To hell with Barbados. Boston’s better, even with snow.’ ”

The two sat in silence for some time, reflecting on the turbulent storms their island had experienced in recent years, and finally, as Sir Isaac led his wife to bed, he said with justifiable pride: “With the price of sugar so high, and our slaves multiplying as they do, these lands for which we paid not over ninety pounds are now worth more than ninety thousand, thanks to our husbandry,” and when his wife clasped his arm to show her approval, he added: “No matter what the turmoil, we kept our balance, preserving the old virtues and proving to all witnesses that we truly are Little England.”

B
Y THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THE MOUNTAIN
-
GIRT INLAND
city of Potosí in eastern Peru was one of the most opulent settlements in the Americas, North or South. Its fabled wealth derived from the lucky chance that one of the nearby mountains was practically solid silver; there was nothing comparable in the world, and the city’s coat of arms justly boasted: “The king of all mountains, and the envy of all kings.”

On the morning of 6 October 1661 overseer Alonso Esquivel, in charge at the largest of the silver refining mills, directed his Inca slaves to break away the sides of the mold in which he had formed his final silver ingot. When the ironwood sides were removed, the precious ingot, a cone some nine inches high, stood in the sun.

It did not glisten, for the silver was not totally pure, and the wooden mold in which it had been formed did not have smooth sides, but in the bright sunlight its handsome roughened surface bore the unquestioned appearance of wealth. When purified in the smelters of Spain or the Netherlands, the ingots would be highly polished to form objects of great value or silver coinage to pay for the king’s adventures on the battlefields of Europe.

Proud of his accomplishment in meeting the strict requirements of the viceroy of Peru, with each ingot of his quota filled, all hundred
and nineteen of them at verified weight, Esquivel took a brush charged with heavy black ink and marked this last ingot P-663, a code number which would identify it as completion of the total Potosí contractual obligation for 1661.

When the fifty mules were loaded, muleteers stood ready at the heads of their beasts and thirty armed soldiers, helmets shining, awaited the commands of the captain-in-charge. Esquivel saluted, a bugle sounded, and the precious cargo started on its long mountainous journey down the slopes to the important Pacific Ocean seaport of Arica more than 340 miles distant.

At first, the ancient roadway, wide enough for two such caravans, passed through fairly open fields where the danger of assault by robbers was minimal and the military guards could relax and carry their heavy guns in any fashion, but for the last thirty miles the terrain roughened and a heavy growth of trees impeded progress. Now the caravan passed through tunnels of matted branches of trees, and the file became so strung out that one mule could scarcely see the tail of another. Here the danger of attack by robbers was great, so each soldier diligently guarded two mules, the one beside him and the one ahead.

On 10 November 1661 the captain-in-charge sighed with relief as his fifty mules brought their treasure safely to the dockside at the port of Arica, where it was quickly loaded onto the exquisite little Spanish galleon
La Giralda de Sevilla
, which set sail immediately for Callao, the seaport serving Peru’s nearby capital of Lima. This 750-mile stage of the journey was an uneventful run to the north, but at Callao many important things happened: the viceroy came down to inspect the galleon, the number and quality of the silver ingots were certified, officials headed home to Spain embarked, gold bars from the mines of northern Peru were added to the cargo, and a contingent of soldiers marched aboard to guard the increasingly precious cargo and the equally important official passengers.

Seven days were wasted at Callao, but on 2 December 1661 the
Giralda
set sail for the great Pacific Ocean city of Panamá. This 1,600-mile leg of the voyage was very dangerous, because in these waters French or English pirates sometimes struck, knowing that galleons from Lima were apt to be heavily laden. To capture one northbound galleon would justify ten years of fruitless prowling, so the Spanish soldiers remained alert, even titled passengers served as volunteer lookouts, and the captain reminded each watch: “It was in
these waters that Francis Drake captured the great
Cacafuego
in 1578.”

Again, the passage was uneventful, and after fifty-six days at sea, Ingot P-663 rested safely off the crucial port of Panamá, where the vast wealth of Spanish America became concentrated. Panamá was a city to enflame the imagination, where entire warehouses were crammed with gold and silver bars, where every household could accumulate its share of coins, and where rich goods imported from Spain, France and the Netherlands were stored before onward passage to the towns and cities of Peru. It should not, in those rich days, have been called an entrepôt—a port city into which goods came and out of which they quickly went—because Panamá was more a kingdom of its own, center of an incredibly wealthy empire, feeding goods east and west, north and south, as deemed best. It was also one of the largest cities in the New World, and one of the best defended, for as the governor boasted: “If Drake was unable to capture it in 1572 when it had only meager fortifications, what chance could an invader have today?”

A week was required for the
Giralda
to disgorge its holds, and it should have taken two, but the governor himself came to the dock to urge speed: the mule caravan which would carry the treasure across the isthmus had to depart early in February in order to meet the alleons from Spain that would be arriving at Porto Bello on the Caribbean side. So on 8 February 1661, after a stop far too short to appreciate the wonders of Panamá, the officials from Peru supervised the loading of the large caravan and sent it on its way across the isthmus. The trail from the Pacific to the Caribbean was only sixty miles long, but it was still as formidable as when Drake struggled to negotiate it. Rotting trunks of fallen trees still barred the way, wild animals and snakes proliferated, and if a soldier broke the skin on his leg, the wound might never heal, so infected with putrid material would it become.

When the perilous journey ended with beautiful Porto Bello in sight, even more danger was present, for the town itself was as pestilential as ever. Soldiers coming out of the jungle and seeing the place for the first time often stopped on the hillside to gape at the numerous ships clustered in the great harbor, each awaiting its cargo of gold and silver, at the huge warehouses lining the shore, and at the row of protective cannon jutting out from the surrounding heights. Often they would reassure one another: “No damned English pirates
would come near this port,” and they would feel great security.

But the captain of the mule train, who had made this journey three times before, uttered more sensible words: “Dear God in whom we find our salvation, let me be among those who will survive,” for he knew that of the ninety men in his mule train, not less than forty could be expected to die from the fevers lurking in the charnel house below. Crossing himself, he muttered to his lieutenant: “Sometimes the Spanish cannot be understood except by fellow idiots. They left famous old Nombre de Dios because it was unhealthy, moved a few miles west to this hellhole, which is five times worse.” When his aide, who had never crossed the isthmus before, asked: “What’s wrong with Porto Bello?” he snapped: “I’ll show you!”

As he led the mules down into the seaport, he pointed out the tragic weaknesses of the place: “This stream should be covered. Left open, it becomes a sewer, spreading disease everywhere. That rotting shed should have been burned years ago, only rats infest it now. That house seems fine, but look at its well. Stands right beside the latrine. The people who live there will drink themselves to death, and not on Spanish wine. Look at those carcasses rotting in the sun. They’ll account for a dozen deaths. And the shacks, crowded so close that what causes a death in one immediately migrates to all the others. And the air is heavy, the jungle so close.”

He concluded his indoctrination with sage advice: “I’ll tell you how to be one of the lucky few who stay alive in Porto Bello. Don’t eat the meat, it’s putrefying. Don’t eat the fish, they’re poisoned. Don’t breathe the air, it’s filled with jungle fever. And don’t fool with the Porto Bello girls, for their lovers will cut your throat.”

“You said you’ve been here three times before. How did you survive?”

“By following my rules.”

But even this observant visitor to Porto Bello failed to identify the mystery of the place. The chameleon town took its lethal coloring from whoever was the last to visit it. If an armada of ships lay in the harbor to collect silver, whatever diseases the sailors brought with them flourished. If no ships were in, the town caught such diseases as the latest mule train carried from the Pacific side of the isthmus. And when the streets lay empty, local diseases festered in the nearby swamps and gathered strength so as to strike whoever ventured within their reach.

The reason for this deadliness was complex: nearness to the rotting
vegetation of the jungle, lack of movement in the air because the town lay in a pocket into which breezes did not come, and a water supply that simply could not be purified. A Catholic priest who served the town throughout the year and who witnessed one plague after another said: “Porto Bello is like a beautiful woman who carries a deadly disease, fatal not to herself but to any who comes in contact. And, my friend, she is beautiful—the endless flowers, the wonder of that flawless anchorage, the surrounding hills burdened with great trees, the little streets with their inviting houses … and the noble forts to protect the charm. When people visit our town on the edge of the jungle they leave remembering two things: beauty and death.”

It was the custom for the townfolk to cluster about the dock when the mule trains arrived to unload their burden of silver, and although the precious metal could not actually be seen, the crates in which the heavy ingots were packed intensified the mystery of wealth. They looked like gifts intended for a distant king, and not until the silver was safely aboard and under the protection of the armed guards did the celebrations begin.

It was like a village play in some remote German hamlet in the year 900 when death stalked the celebrations, picking off this one and that while scrannel pipes played and dances continued on the green. This year the captain’s prayer was not answered; despite three earlier successful journeys and his studious care not to drink contaminated water, the fever caught him and a thousand others, and when the galleons hoisted anchor for the return trip to Cartagena, the ranks of their sailors and soldiers were also depleted by about half. For six frantic weeks Porto Bello had been the richest little town in the world, but also the most dangerous.

In these years, Our Noble and Powerful City of Cartagena, as it was often called in official documents, was still a majestically located settlement on the southwestern coast of the Spanish Main. The famous hook protecting the inner bay still functioned, but the scores of little islands were now fortified with castles and gun emplacements and batteries of cannon. Drake had once subdued it and some daring French pirates had held it for ransom, but no more. It was unassailable, and in its broad outer and inner harbors the great ships of Spain collected to wait for the gold and silver of Peru.

On 6 April 1662 the silver-laden galleons from Porto Bello sailed into Cartagena, and after provisioning from the copious stores assembled there, were ready for the 1,300-mile run north to Havana. As soon as Governor Alfonso Ledesma, lineal descendant of that notable second governor of Cartagena, Roque Ledesma y Ledesma, stepped aboard, the fleet headed out.