Sir Henry Morgan

Overview

Henry Morgan was a Welsh privateer in English service whose career as the leading commander of the Caribbean buccaneers in the 1660s and early 1670s marked the high point of the era. Operating with English commissions issued by the governors of Jamaica, he led the raids that sacked Portobelo (1668), Maracaibo (1669), and the city of Panama itself (1671). After the second Treaty of Madrid retroactively rendered the Panama raid illegal, Morgan was arrested and sent to England, where the political winds shifted again; he was knighted, appointed Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, and spent the remainder of his life in colonial administration.

Origins

Morgan was born in or around Llanrhymny in Glamorgan, Wales, around 1635. He arrived in the Caribbean in the mid-1650s, probably as a soldier in the Western Design expedition that took Jamaica from Spain in 1655. Through the late 1650s and early 1660s he established himself among the buccaneers operating from Port Royal, the boom town that grew up on the Jamaica side of Kingston harbour to receive their prizes.

Career

Morgan’s major operations were authorised by the Jamaican government as colonial defence against a Spain officially at peace with England but actively contesting English settlement in the Caribbean. The 1668 sack of Portobelo on the Panamanian Caribbean coast, then one of the principal collection points for the Peruvian silver fleet, took the city after a coordinated land-and-sea assault and yielded 250,000 pesos in ransom. The 1669 Maracaibo expedition crossed Lake Maracaibo under fire from the Spanish forts at the entrance and returned with prize cargoes from the lakeside towns of Maracaibo and Gibraltar.

The Panama expedition of January 1671 marched a force of around 1,400 buccaneers across the Isthmus of Panama from the Caribbean coast and stormed Panama City — then the principal collection point for silver from the Pacific viceroyalties. The city was sacked and burned, but the gold and silver of the Spanish treasury had been embarked on a vessel that escaped. The take was substantial but considerably less than the buccaneers had expected, and the campaign produced lasting bitterness within the company; Alexandre Exquemelin’s subsequent De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (1678) gave the version of events that has shaped Morgan’s subsequent reputation.

The Panama raid took place after, but before news had reached the Caribbean of, the second Treaty of Madrid (8 July 1670) under which England undertook to suppress its Caribbean privateering against Spain. Morgan was recalled to England, briefly imprisoned, and then — the political situation having shifted — knighted and sent back to Jamaica as Lieutenant Governor. He served, with intervals out of office, until his death in 1688.

Notable raids & captures

Treasures

Documented

• The Portobelo ransom (1668)

  250,000 pesos in silver, paid to lift the buccaneer occupation of the city. The take is documented in the surviving Jamaican prize-court records.

• Maracaibo prize cargoes (1669)

  Cargoes condemned at the Port Royal prize court included specie, indigo, hides, and several Spanish vessels taken at the lake exit. The prize-court returns survive in the Colonial Office records at the National Archives, Kew.

• Panama haul (1671)

  Substantially smaller than the buccaneers had expected, owing to the escape of the city treasury by sea. The official Port Royal returns recorded a per-share payout that produced lasting recriminations among the participants and forms the substantive basis of Exquemelin’s 1678 critique.

Legacy

Morgan successfully sued the English publishers of Exquemelin’s account in 1685 for libel — one of the earliest known successful libel actions in English history — on the grounds that Exquemelin had misrepresented him as a pirate rather than a commissioned privateer. The distinction mattered to Morgan and to the Crown. In modern usage the name is most commonly associated with the Diageo rum brand established in 1944, the licensing of which has had no connection to the Morgan estate.