But every buccaneer sprawled to the ground as the Spanish militiamen fired in unison. Not many were hit. They rose as the Spaniards were reloading and charged across the plain. The Spanish cavalry countered the maneuver with a charge of its own.
Morgan had foreseen this. His men broke and turned tail before the cavalry charge, as he’d known they would. The cavalry drove the advance force back to the edge of the jungle and here Morgan’s main army suddenly charged forward to envelop the horsemen. Out of range of the Spanish riflemen now, the pirates massacred the cavalry to the last man.
Meanwhile, Don Juan was urging his foot soldiers to advance across the plain and go to the rescue of the cavalry. They were too slow. The cavalry had already been destroyed when their advance was greeted by a barrage of musket fire from the concealment of the trees at the edge of the jungle. The neat line of soldiers broke. Some fell and didn’t get up. Others bolted only to be run down by the pursuing musketeers and slaughtered in their tracks. Only Don Juan himself and a few of his officers were able to retreat quickly enough to reach the city. Here Don Juan tried in vain to reverse the cannon guarding the harbor so that he might shell the pirates. The buccaneers had already captured the artillery abandoned by the Spaniards on the plain and were turning it on the city. And the main pirate force was charging so rapidly towards the city walls that they were in danger of being shelled by the captured cannons.
Don Juan gave up on the seawall cannons and rushed to rally a defense of the landward side of the city. Here he came up with one last stroke of genuine genius that came very close to defeating Morgan’s attack.
When a massive pirate force battered at one of the huge gates, Don Juan gave the order to open the gate and let them charge into the city. Simultaneously, he ordered the release of a herd of bulls from the paddocks ringing the bullring in the center of the city. Indian slaves, obeying their Spanish masters, ripped out the nose rings and prodded the bloody-snouted beasts towards the pirate horde. The enraged animals stampeded towards us like some elemental force of nature gone out of control.
I was in the midst of the group of pirates which had charged through the city gates, not too far from Morgan himself. As the bulls charged, the buccaneers panicked. Fighting men was one thing; being trampled or gored to death by wild bulls another. For a brief moment the victory was turned into a rout and the pirates ran screaming back towards the gate by which they’d just entered Panama.
It was at this moment that Captain Henry Morgan displayed the mettle that had justly earned him his reputation. Grabbing a spear from one of the fleeing Caribs, he leaped to the low balcony of one of the stucco Spanish houses. He poised there carefully until the lead bull passed under the balcony. Then he leaped.
He could easily have run the bull through with the spear, but such was not his intention. Instead, he landed neatly on its back and proceeded to ride it as easily as if it were a well-broken saddle horse. With his cutlass he prodded its side to make it change direction. With the spear he stabbed out at the other bulls in the van of the charge to make them follow suit. A large, burly man, overweight by our standards, he balanced on that mad bull’s back as effortlessly as a ballet dancer. And soon he had managed to lead the entire herd of bulls around in a wide circle so that they were charging back towards the Indian slaves and their Spanish masters.
The pirates cheered their leader’s feat and rallied. By the time he’d leaped lightly from the bull’s back to another balcony they were streaming back towards the center of the city again, following in the wake of the angry bulls. “Go to it, me hearties!” Morgan roared from the balcony. “Panama is ours!”
It was the richest prize in the New World and it had indeed fallen to the pirates. Over a hundred years old, the city was a storehouse for the wealth of a continent. Enslaved Indians labored in deep mines until they died to fill the warehouses of Panama with gold. The precious metal was added to the treasure of the Mayans seized by the Spaniards over the past century. Pizarro had looted millions of dollars worth of gold artifacts from the Incas and brought the booty to Panama and then established the law of the whip by which the Incas were forced to gouge still more riches from the earth to add to the wealth of their Spanish masters. And now, in 1671, as always happens in history, all the jewels and the gold had passed from the hands of the initial conquerors to the white, pudgy, uncalloused hands of the merchants and politicians who came in the wake of these first conquering armies. Only now these soft men of commerce were to lose their city of gold to pirates who had no more compunction about them than the first Spanish army had for the Indians. There was some ironic justice in this.
But I lost track of it as the sack of Panama took place before my eyes. It was one of the most brutal and complete destructions of a city in history. Most of this was due to the zeal of Morgan and his buccaneers—but not all of it. The finishing touch was put to Panama by the slaves the Spaniards had held—-men and women of all races—-freed now by the invasion of the pirates. These slaves set the torch to the city. They poured crude oil over the most magnificent mansions and set them afire and cheered as the city burned to the ground.
It took three days before all was reduced to ashes. During this time the pirates engaged in an orgy of looting and rape. All of the booty was brought out of the city and gathered on the plain where the battle had taken place. The countless rapes took place in the city itself.
Like animals the pirates had at the Spanish women. Morgan made no move to stop it. His men had been a long time without sex. It was necessary to let them let off steam. And besides, he was busy formulating other plans.
Some of the pirates banded together in small groups to round up the women. Flames crackling over their heads, they drove the girls through the streets like cattle, whipping the clothes from their bodies as they ran. Then, in the still smoldering ashes of what had once been a cathedral, they would fall on the screaming females, taking turns ravishing them, turning them on their bellies and on their backs, and back on their bellies again until their orifices were soaked with blood from the constant, tireless rape. Finally, when the ravishment had reduced a girl to no more than an unattractive hunk of meat, some kindly buccaneer would slit her throat and the men would descend on another girl. When all were disposed of, they would storm back through the city, gorging themselves on food from the houses left standing, guzzling the Spanish wine from the cellars of those which had already been burned down, relieving themselves on priceless tapestries which had somehow survived the flames, vomiting into handmade, golden Inca urns and hand-carved, jewel-covered Mayan vases, and rushing onward to another part of town to round up more terrified maidens to sate their lust.
Others among the buccaneers preferred to function as individuals. One such would lay claim to a building before it was burned down, drag a woman into it and force her to feed him and pour his wine and suffer all manner of indignities according to his sexual whim before finally bashing her skull in and seeking another partner. But whether one alone, or part of a group, each pirate was consumed with lust for blood and sex and booty—and more blood, always more blood until the dust of the streats of Panama was transformed into a sticky scarlet mud.
I tried to stick close to Morgan. It seemed safest, and he didn’t seem to mind. As I’ve said, his mind was on the immediate future.
Morgan stayed aloof from the drunkenness, the carousing, the rape, the murder for the sake of murder. There was some comment on this, for he’d never before stayed temperate when wine and women were available. So the men who’d served under him in the past said, anyway. But they shrugged it off, thinking that he was only concerned with the arduous trip back to the coast where the ships were anchored and the problems of transporting the immense booty of Panama.