Yo Ho Ho
Eric Christiansen
The Sack of Panama Peter Earle (Norman & Hobhouse pp. 304, £9.95) Most people think of the London School of Economics as a pretty austere sort of place. No doubt this is only partly true, but the fact is that if the inmates do go round carrying teddy-bears they do so in a manner which has not as yet captured the imagination of the public. As far as the world is concerned, your LSE man is sheer magic on graph-paper but when it comes to the hour of ease, a bit of a sour-puss.
Well, the world had better think again. Mr Peter Earle, who is not only on the strength at the LSE but also a Reader in Economic History at the University of London, has spent the last ten years writing some fine unstatistical books, and now, in The Sack of Panama excels himself in an acute piece of scholarship which has all the excitement of a pirate yarn. The subject is the career of Henry Morgan and his Jamaican buccaneers from 1666 to its climax in 1671, when a large force of starving desperadoes crossed the Isthmus and destroyed the Spanish city of Panama. Despite the inviolable peace that was supposed to prevail between Spain and England, this expedition was considered by the Jamaican colonists as a lawful act of reprisal, and no-one was ever seriously punished for it.
The interest of these events lies firstly in the sheer excitement of an adventure, and secondly in the way they illustrate the workings of the outrageously cruel and disorderly world of the 17th-century Caribbean. Not until Morgan and his more successful partners settled down was the more orderly cruelty of the plantation system properly established. Until then, the French, English, Dutch and miscellaneous squatters on what had been Spanish islands lived in a state of homicidal savagery dignified only by the use of muskets that were longer and more accurate than those of the longsuffering Spanish colonists on whom they preyed. At times, in Mr Earle's account, the conflict seems to be one between the forces of civilisation and a flock of stinking subhuman criminals, who had regressed to a prehistoric level of existence.
However, as the narrative also makes clear, the contrast is misleading. Whatever the authorities claimed, Spanish settlers needed pirates to supply them with goods, and were quite prepared to engage their own privateers to hit back at the heretics when their governors failed to protect them. The pirates were following a trade, and were quite capable of forming disciplined associations for the pursuit and distribution of profit.
Each side had its code, and the codes touched at several points. Respect for birth and honour played a part in both — Morgan was a gent, and the ladder of gentility can be seen running from his captains upward to the two-faced deputy-governor of Jamaica, Modyford, and on to his abettor Albermarle, with King Charles II on the topmost rung. Hatred of each other's religion was another common factor, although the Spaniards were evidently ahead on the love they showed to their own.
There is no more moving passage in this book than the description of how the governor of Panama prepared for his one, disastrous encounter with the buccaneers by distributing his entire fortune to the religious houses of his city. And in the end, the buccaneer and the settler both seem to have wanted their own bit of land, some slaves to work it, respect in the local com munity, and a family. As it happened, the former could only achieve this at the expense of the latter, and often failed entirely.
If the profits of Morgan's last and greatest raid worked out at only £16 per man, it was not easy money.
The pirates and their self-made admiral make all the going in this book, but in the end they are not all that interesting. Their valour and their sadism become predictable. Morgan's triumphs made little dif ference to the balance of power in the Caribbean and contributed chiefly to his own advancement. The really absorbing subject is that strange tropical disease known as the Spanish colonial empire, which emerges from this and other such episodes as a vast and mysterious system of government and economy which somehow managed to survive in conditions that were almost incompatible with order, reason, sanity and life itself. It sometimes took a year for despatches to reach America from Madrid, and provincial governors had to beg for small handfuls of 'paid soldiers' to uphold their authority over thousands of recalcitrant subjects, or spend their own money in a service which they had been driven to by poverty. Yet the machine lumbered on, great cities of stone were built, and the treasure fleets kept sailing. Compared with this extraordinary phenomenon, the buccaneers seem as insignificant as flies on a lump of sugar.
Mr Earl has enriched the often-told story of Captain Morgan with information extracted from the General Archive of the Indies at Seville. As so often, the Castillian passion for paperwork, (so much more deeply engrained than the addiction to bullfighting) enables us to obtain a much clearer picture of what happened than our own patchy records and the imaginative yarning of Esquemelin. As work in a Spanish archive is sometimes as painful as hard labour in a Peruvian silver mine, this extra effort is a strong recommendation for the author, and his book is certainly the best I have read on Caribbean history since Mr Naipaul's astonishing Quest for El Dorado, which is in a class by itself.
One small criticism. It concerns the word Panama, over the final 'a' of which, Mr Earle consistently lavishes an acute accent. What on earth for? Is this some sort of penance for the English intransigence over Hee Vral Tar? Is it possible that some uninstructed reader might start asking the way to Pan-ama or P'na-ma and thus ruin the whole book? Or is it that the publishers think that a page of English prose presents an insufficient challenge to their compositor? Whatever the reason, I cannot believe that anything material is gained by having the odd one-eyed Chinaman peering out between the lines in solemn deference to the variety of orthographical notation. Apart from that, it is a well produced book with excellent maps and references, and a full index. To judge by his photograph, the author looks remarkably like Captain Morgan, except that one of Morgan's eyes was noticeably higher than the other. Well, presumably these photographs invite some sort of comment.
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