Born to Be Hanged

1

The Princess

HER NAME IS lost to time. What is known is that she was one of the Indigenous Kuna people in Panama’s Darien province. A description of her can be culled from the journals of European soldiers and adventurers who met her and her sisters and straightaway proposed marriage: “lively and sparkling” gray eyes, “long, black, lank, coarse, strong hair,” and dark, “copper-colour’d” skin streaked with red paint in the Kuna fashion. She wore a thick golden nose ring and, sometimes, multicolored beads roped around her lean, “well-featured” body. Her father was a regional Kuna chieftain, her grandfather the de facto king of the Kuna, and, in the spring of 1680, she was a sex slave, having been snatched from her father’s palace by Spanish soldiers and taken to their garrison.

The circumstances of her subjugation were not unusual. The Spaniards, who controlled most of the New World at the time, took the position that enslaving the Indigenous peoples was a beneficent act. As an official Spanish historian explained in a sixteenth-century essay, the “naturally inferior” Native populations benefited from Spanish tutelage as well as from conversion to Christianity, objectives that were easier to achieve if the would-be converts were first enslaved.

The Spaniards’ self-professed altruism was called into question, though, by their treatment of the enslaved Natives, a typical example being a woman in the colony of Hispaniola who, one morning, told her Spanish overseer that she needed time off from the mine to care for her newborn, whereupon the overseer took the baby in his arms, smashed its skull apart against a rock, and declared the problem solved. The issue was not merely that the conquistadors placed a higher value on gold than on human life, but, as the Incan leader Manco Inca put it, “Even if the snows of the Andes turned to gold, still they would not be satisfied.”

In 1501, when the Spaniards discovered Panama (insofar as land already inhabited for millennia by Indigenous peoples can be discovered), the Natives might have appeared relatively fortunate, because the Spanish effort was led by Rodrigo de Bastidas, regarded as the kindest and most humane of the conquistadors. In a seminal history of the Spanish conquest, Bastidas was described as a “gentleman” with “the unique distinction of acting like a human being in his dealings with the natives of America.” Yet just a year after his arrival in Panama, when two of his ships were sinking, Bastidas and his men rescued their gold and pearls while leaving their chained-up Kuna slaves to drown.

This was just the prelude. Over the following two centuries, Panama’s Indigenous peoples were devastated by enslavement, genocide, and European diseases. At its most harmonious, the Spanish-Kuna relationship was that of cats and mice. Many of the Kuna fled into the farthest reaches of the Darien province, five thousand square miles of mountainous jungle on Panama’s eastern border. Others left Panama altogether, settling in the San Blas Islands, an archipelago just off the country’s Atlantic coast.

On April 3, 1680, on Golden Island, a tiny slab of coral, sand, and palm trees at the eastern end of that archipelago, the princess’s grandfather devised a plan to rescue her. His Spanish name, Andreas, was a relic of his own time as a Spanish slave. Since his escape from the Spaniards, he had become the leader of the Kuna community in the San Blas Islands as well as a regional chief paramount, what the Europeans thought of as a king, his dominion extending well into the Darien. At his disposal was an army of warriors, many of whom may have been among the finest archers in the world. One English visitor told of eight-year-old Kuna boys able not merely to hit canes standing on end twenty paces away but, unfailingly, to split them in two.

Were Andreas to send his men to the Spanish garrison to rescue his granddaughter, however, they would be quickly torn apart by Spanish gunfire, against which they had no defense. But he saw a way to enlist a supplemental force whose firepower was as good as, if not better than, the Spaniards’: pirates.

His scouts had brought word that a company of 366 buccaneers—Caribbean-based pirates who preyed on Spanish ships and towns—had just landed at the Isle of Pines, a few miles north of Golden Island.

Mostly Englishmen, the buccaneers had banded together in Jamaica in December of 1679 to raid the Spanish port city of Portobelo, on Panama’s northern coast. The raid netted them a good deal of silver, but the most valuable prize would prove to be mail that merchants in Spain had intended for Spanish colonists. Again and again in their letters, the merchants lamented the vulnerability of Spanish settlements on the South Sea, as the southern Pacific Ocean was then known. The near impossibility of circumnavigating South America meant that English pirates rarely, if ever, sailed into the region. But the narrow Darien Isthmus (between Panama’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts), the merchants warned, could “open a door into the South Seas.”

Accordingly, the buccaneers circulated a new expedition plan through Caribbean taverns, brothels, and other pirate haunts. All comers were to rendezvous on the Isle of Pines, where they would leave their ships and then go by canoe to the Darien Isthmus, cross the isthmus on foot, and raid Panama City (then known simply as Panama), the repository for much of the gold, silver, and gems the Spaniards were extracting from Central and South America.

But before they could advance to the isthmus, the buccaneers needed a Native guide. Without one, they knew, they had little chance of surviving in the Darien, much less of finding Panama. The last company of buccaneers to raid Panama—1,200 men under the command of the legendary Captain Henry Morgan, nearly a decade earlier—had grown so hungry during the crossing that they’d eaten their leather sacks after first fighting one another over portions.

Andreas canoed from Golden Island to the Isle of Pines in hope that the buccaneers would choose him as their guide. His pitch was documented by first-time buccaneer Basil Ringrose, a gifted mathematician and navigator, fluent in Latin and French as well as his native English. Unlike his shipmates, mostly ne’er-do-wells and scoundrels whose curricula vitae made them sought after only by hangmen, Ringrose had had his pick of employment opportunities in the West Indies. But only piracy offered the twenty-seven-year-old an escape from the poverty and drudgery that had dogged him for most of his life.

Hoping to trade fruit and venison for axes and hatchets, a number of Kuna men and women had preceded Andreas to the Isle of Pines, canoeing up to the seven buccaneer ships anchored in the crescent bay and astounding Ringrose: “The men here go naked as having only a sharp or hollow tip, made either of gold or silver, or bark, into which they thrust their privy members; the which tip they fasten with a string about their middle,” he wrote in his journal in a loose, frilly cursive that contrasted starkly with the maps he often drew beneath the entries—rigid technical renderings shaded with precise crosshatching. The handwriting offered a hint of the romantic spirit that had lured the staid, ruler-straight Englishman into his current company. “They wear an ornament in their noses,” he added, “a golden or silver plate, in shape like unto a half-moon; which when they drink, they hold up with one hand, meanwhile they lift the cup with the other.”

Most of the Kuna had dark copper skin and black hair, but there were a few who stood out, appearing, in the words of Ringrose, “fairer than the fairest of Europe, with hair as white as the finest flax.” Lionel Wafer, a buccaneer surgeon with whom Ringrose would become fast friends, noted that these albino “Indians” (the buccaneers’ term for almost all the Indigenous peoples in the New World) had skin “much like that of a white horse” and “their bodies are beset all over, more or less, with a fine short milk-white down, which adds to the whiteness of their skins.” Indeed albinism was—and still is—150 times more common among the Kuna than the rest of the world’s population, and the tribe considered it fortuitous based on a pair of unusual beliefs: first, that lunar eclipses were caused by a celestial dragon trying to eat the moon; second, that albinos possessed superior night vision. Therefore, given the Kuna people’s renown as archers, their albinos aiming arrows at the night sky was enough to scare the dragon off.

Including Ringrose and Wafer, seven of the buccaneers assembled on the Isle of Pines were either keeping journals or would later write about their experiences. Those combined accounts paint an impressive portrait of Andreas in his mantle of pure gold, with a gravitas in keeping with his advanced age—“No less than an hundred years of age,” wrote one of the buccaneer captains, Bartholomew Sharp. In all likelihood, Andreas was closer to sixty. (On a perhaps not unrelated note, seamen at the time often consumed more than a gallon of beer or a pint of rum per day, and Sharp, as will be seen, did a good deal to perpetuate the popular image of pirates with a bottle of rum in hand at all times.)

In Spanish, which the buccaneers’ interpreter spoke fluently, Andreas offered to guide them first to Santa Maria (today, El Real de Santa María, in the Darien’s Pinogana District), where his granddaughter was being held, and then, if they were unsatisfied with the plunder there, on to Panama. But Santa Maria might be more than satisfactory. In addition to exclusive access to the richest gold mines in Central America, the settlement boasted a massive gold-panning and sluicing works. During each December-to-April dry season, Natives enslaved by the Spaniards panned gold dust that had washed down from the mountains during the rainy season, collecting a reported eighteen to twenty thousand pounds. Andreas would let the buccaneers keep it all if they rescued his granddaughter.

The buccaneers discussed his proposal before putting it to a vote: pirate crews were democracies ahead of their time, with egalitarian practices born both of their disdain for classism and their prior experiences at sea with whip-happy captains on exceedingly hierarchical European naval and merchant ships. Andreas more than met their criteria for a guide. Not only did he know the Darien, he was also Kuna: over the previous decade and a half, a shared hatred of the Spaniards had fostered an unofficial alliance between the Kuna and the largely mercenary population of buccaneers. Even better, as a monarch enlisting them to battle the Spaniards, Andreas elevated the buccaneers, arguably, to the status of “privateers”—a shortened term for private men-of-war, namely, the captains and crews of private ships who were given legitimate government-issued licenses to plunder vessels of other sovereign nations. (The term buccaneer originated in the second half of the seventeenth century, when English and French colonial governors began issuing such licenses—also known as commissions, or letters of marque—to the boar and bull hunters on Hispaniola and Tortuga known as boucaniers. The name is derived by most accounts from boucan, a French term—in turn adapted from Brazil’s Indigenous Tupi people—for the wooden grill the hunters favored for cooking meat, though other sources trace buccaneer to the French verb boucaner, meaning “to hang around with lowlives” as well as “to imitate a foul tempered billy goat.”)

Like their predecessors (most of whom were English, French, or Dutch), the buccaneers gathered on the Isle of Pines sought to be part of their nations’ sides in proxy wars with Spain waged by privateers. Following a spate of peace treaties negotiated among the European powers in the 1670s, however, legitimate privateering commissions had largely ceased. Still, any sort of commission, no matter how flimsy, would be useful to the buccaneers in case they wound up in court, where, lacking a legal raison d’être, they would be judged to be simply pirates, the meaning of which hadn’t changed since peiratēs in ancient Greek (and pirata in Latin): sea robbers who plundered indiscriminately. As pirates—rather than privateers—they would hang.

At the moment, the only credential in their possession was a license they’d purchased in Petit-Goâve (part of French Hispaniola) that permitted them to cut logwood trees in certain parts of the Spanish Main, the New World territory controlled by Spain. Although the license was expired, they believed the doctored expiration date would survive scrutiny in court. But whereas logwood might have explained their presence in Portobelo, on the Caribbean coast, they would require the world’s most sympathetic jury to buy the defense that they had trekked sixty miles across the Darien Isthmus to Santa Maria to cut it—only to find themselves under attack from a Spanish garrison and forced to return fire in self-defense. An actual letter of marque—or just about anything official that Andreas could give them—would be much sturdier.

But even lacking a commission—or a princess to rescue—the buccaneers would have been enticed by the eighteen to twenty thousand pounds of gold. At the going rate per ounce of fifteen Spanish pesos de ocho reales—the silver eight-real coins known as “pieces of eight”—such a haul would net the group a total of more than four million pieces of eight, or nearly twelve thousand pieces of eight per man, at a time when a plantation worker or a sailor earned just a hundred pieces of eight in a year. That would be enough for each buccaneer to buy his own plantation or to commission a new high-end two-hundred-ton Dutch ship and still have four thousand pieces of eight left in his sea chest (or, in fact, two chests, thanks to the size of the coins, which measured an inch and a half in diameter, about the size of a casino poker chip).

The biggest obstacle was the Spanish garrison in Santa Maria, which was manned, according to Andreas, by four hundred soldiers. Those soldiers would be firing a hail of musket balls at the buccaneers as they advanced—or, more likely, as they limped out of the jungle following nine or ten days of arduous trekking through swampland and mountainous, dense-to-the-point-of-impenetrable jungle. (On account of the same obstacles, the isthmus today constitutes the “Darien Gap,” the lone break in the 19,000-mile Pan-American Highway stretching from Alaska to Argentina.) Although Kuna archers could provide cover for the buccaneers’ advance, upon reaching the garrison the attackers would still need to climb the tall barricades while taking fire from directly overhead. And even if they somehow made it over the walls, how could they possibly get the better of an entrenched, larger, and better-rested Spanish complement? The plan was madness.

Nevertheless, the buccaneers put it to a vote. The result—and an analysis thereof—comes from another of the company’s diarists, the jocular New Englander John Cox: