Henry Morgan: The real man behind “Dido’s Prize”
Born in Wales sometime around 1635, Henry Morgan left the country as a young man and moved to Barbados where he was an indentured servant for a short period of time. After the English conquered the Spanish in Jamaica, Morgan relocated to that island and possibly took part in the continuing English military expeditions against their old enemies.
In 1662, Morgan received a privateering commission granting him license to loot Spanish merchant ships. While the records are sketchy here, it’s considered likely that he participated in Sir Christopher Myngs’s raids on Cuba and Mexico. A year or so later, Morgan joined a flotilla of ships led by John Morris which attacked and plundered several Central American cities. Morgan returned to Jamaica a rich man. He bought several plantations and got married but he wasn’t ready to settle down just yet.
In 1668, he received another privateering commission and assembled a force of ten small ships and about 500 men, pirates and former soldiers. This is the expedition that Dido joins and much of the novel from that point on is based on Alexander Exquemelin’s “Buccaneers of America” and other sources. Exquemelin took part in this raid and gives a vivid description of what took place as Morgan sacked first, El Puerto del Principe in Cuba and then Puerto Bello in Central America. Had Morgan stuck to his commission which only gave him leave to attack ships, he would have had to turn over a portion of his loot to the Lord High Admiral and another to the Crown. Looting only the cities meant he and his men could keep everything they got though it was illegal.
El Puerto del Principe wasn’t a rich town and yielded only 50,000 pesos to be shared among the pirates but Puerto Bello was substantially richer and netted the pirates around 250,000 pesos.
The raid on Puerto Bello wasn’t Morgan’s last – though now a very wealthy man, he led several other raids on Spanish cities and ships culminating in the destruction of the city of Panama. By this time, the Spanish and the English were on much friendlier terms. By the Treaty of Madrid (signed in July, 1670) Spain granted England recognition of its possessions in the New World and both nations agreed to work together to ban piracy. The Spanish demanded Morgan’s arrest and he was taken to England in 1672 but the English owed him too great a debt and he was never imprisoned. Two years late he was knighted and made lieutenant governor of Jamaica. At 39, he owned 6,000 acres but he died less than two decades later, a victim of heavy drink and a hard-driving lifestyle.
Ten Facts Behind Fictional Pirates
- The Pope granted Spain ownership of many lands in the New World and this is how the area became known as the Spanish Main.
- Henry Morgan received his first privateering commission in 1662 and participated in several raids before the time of Dido’s Prize.
- Solid gold jewelry plundered from the Aztecs and other peoples of the New World was often melted down by the Spanish to make doubloons.
- Puerto Bello was founded in 1595 and destroyed by Sir Francis Drake a year later. Though later rebuilt and fortified, it was a favorite target of the more daring pirates and privateers.
- El Negro’s name was inspired by the real life Diego Grillo who was known as El Mulato, a commander of a small ship which took part in Henry Morgan’s 1671 sack of Panama.
- After Britain captured Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, buccaneers were asked to attack the Spanish to prevent them from taking the island back.
- Pirate captains had different ways of punishing crew members who misbehaved. Their methods included flogging with the cat-o-nine tails, marooning, being locked in leg irons and keel hauling which entailed tying the person and dragging them under the ship from one side to the other.
- Port Royal forms a peninsula off Kingston, the capital of Jamaica.
- While El Negro in Dido’s Prize is reluctant to sell the slaves he captures, most pirates would have had no compunction about treating newly arrived slaves like booty.
- Mary Read and Anne Bonny are, perhaps, the best known pirate women but the most successful would have been those whose disguise went undetected.
An Interview with Dido
Q: You have an interesting name. How did you get it?
A: Many slaves were given biblical names like Mary and Isaac, while others, like me, were often named for the people and gods in Greek myths.
Q: Why did you become a healer?
A: My mother was a healer and she told me that, back in Africa, her mother and her mother’s mother were healers also. It felt natural to me.
Q: What are some of the plants you use to work medicine?
A: The Leaf of Life which I used on El Negro, of course, aloes, Spanish needle, turpentine, woman’s tongue, stinging nettle, lignum vitae, wild coffee – there are a lot of plants and all of them have their uses whether it is the leaf, the bark or the root. You can use them for anything from fevers to colds to cuts to skin problems and stomach problems.
Q: You often ask the goddess Oshun for guidance. Is your faith very important to you?
A: Without it, I could not live.
Q: Why have you not converted to Christianity or to Catholicism?
A: Should I abandon the faith of my mother and her mother’s mother and all those who came before? I could not do that, even if I wanted to. I could never deny the gods of Guinea. They are the memory of my ancestors within me.
Q: Was it hard for you to disguise yourself as a man and become a pirate?
A: Slave women are worked just like men. We are out there in the fields under the blazing sun just like our men. We aren’t treated any differently because of our sex so it isn’t like I was accustomed being treated like I was made of glass and then suddenly I had to toughen up and haul my weight. Life on ship was difficult at first, though. The rolling unsettled me but other than that it was better than what I’d had on land.
Q: But you never seemed really comfortable with the violence…
A: No, I wasn’t. That’s true. I’d seen violence on the plantations and even on the streets of Port Royal but what I saw in Cuba and then in Puerto Bello was in another league. It was war, though, and I had to get accustomed to it.
Q: The Taino, Yacahüey, became a good friend. Would you like to talk about him?
A: It is said that when the Spanish first arrived in Jamaica in the late 1400s, there were upwards of 100,000 Tainos on the island. By 1662 when I met Yacahüey there were less than three hundred still in Jamaica, if that many. Most had either been killed or died from disease. It was the same for all the indigenous peoples in the rest of the Caribbean and the Americas. I’d never talked to a Taino before though I’d see one here or there as I traveled to and from Port Royal so getting to know Yacahüey was an education for me. I count him as my best friend and, I think, El Negro would say the same.
Q: Were you happy to be assigned to El Negro’s ship?
A: I was conflicted because, on the one hand, I thought he’d recognize me and not let me on board since women aren’t allowed on pirate ships. On the other hand, because I already knew he was the one for me I was also terrified. Suppose he didn’t feel the same way about me? But apart from those feelings it was an honor to be part of his crew. Unlike mulattos, blacks didn’t command pirate ships and were rarely, if ever, even officers, so El Negro was unusual.
Q: What do you wish for your future?
A: I would like for the town of Liberty to grow and prosper and for my children to be safe from the slave hunters and to always know love. I want to grow old with El Negro and for the gods to claim me before they come for him. These are the things for which I pray to Oshun each night and every morning.