[Quick set-up: Captain Morgan has captured Maracaibo, and the Spanish were sick of him and his pirates, so they finally stepped up their game and sent a giant warship, the Magdalena, captained by one Don Alonzo, to deal with him. Captain Morgan responded with his usual shenanigans.]
His [Don Alonzo’s] ship’s forty-eight guns roared with a thunderous volley; ball tore into the sail of the incoming [pirate] ships. Morgan’s ships responded as best they could, but their barrages were decibels lower in volume.
To his astonishment, Don Alonzo saw that the buccaneers’ ships did not peel away as they drew closer. They were going to attempt a frontal assault, as if his man-of-war were a pathetic merchant sloop fleeing for its very life. Nothing could be more to his advantage, except a sustained artillery battle on the open sea. The pirates would not go for that; their ships were being blasted apart by his gunners, who inched down the mouths of their guns as the buccaneer fleet closed on them, until they were pointed almost level, firing across the gap of blue sea at the three fast-closing ships trailed by the slower boats. The admiral could see the outlines of pirates on deck in the morning haze, some of them wearing the soft mantera hat, like bullfighters, their cutlasses poised by their sides. They were unmoving against the dawn sky. Don Alonzo had just a moment to admire their steadfastness in the face of barrages of shot aimed straight at their faces - at least these infidels die like men - before the ship plowed into the Magdalena with a crash of snapping, buckling wood, and grappling hooks came spinning through the air and snagged his sails. His men, their anticipation keyed to a point, didn’t wait for the attack but leaped over the sides onto the enemy’s deck.
And in that moment, realization. The decks were empty, except for wooden cutouts cunningly shaped by Moran’s carpenters to resemble men with cutlasses. The Spanish musketeers looked around in bewilderment before the word unfolded in their minds and came tumbling out of their mouths: brûlot. It was a fireship, a floating trap designed to set the enemy aflame. They could smell the sweet odor of tar over palm leaves as the deck around them lit up like a Roman candle and a concussion blew them up into the rigging. Don Alonzo shouted orders as pieces of burning wood and cordage came tumbling through the air into his ship.
[…]
The Brethren had prepared the Cuban decoy beautifully, cutting new gun ports into her side and, in place of the real cannon that should have jutted out of them, inserting logs filled with gunpowder and readied with fuses. Then they’d scoured Maracaibo for every highly flammable material available to them – pitch, tar, brimstone, palm leaves – and built their combustible doll men out of them. The carpenters whom the spies heard hammering away in the hold were not installing fortifications to the structure but removing them, so that when the ship blew, the explosion would not be dampened by excess timbers. They’d adorned the ship with banners and fitted it out like a flagship; in the history of naval warfare, fireships had usually been made of old and decrepit junks, not fine specimens such as the Cuban prize. Luck had been with Morgan in the following wind that blew out of the top of the lagoon into the narrow channel, giving the ship the necessary propulsion to ram it into the Magdalena. A skeleton crew of twelve men had steered it home and jumped into canoes just before the moment of impact.
[…]
What Morgan did not realize until days later was that Don Alonzo had been warned about the fireship. Although the pirates kept a strict guard on all their prisoners, a “certain negro” had made it to the Magdalena days before the attack and told the admiral, “Sir, be pleased to have great care of yourself, for the English have prepared a fireship with desire to burn your fleet.”
The Spanish noble had scoffed at the idea. “How can that be?” he thundered at the spy. “Have they, peradventure, wit enough to build a fireship? Or what instruments have they to do it withal?”
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “An Amateur English Theatrical.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 164-67. Print.
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