[Quick set-up: The pirate captain Henry Morgan and his crew are trapped by Don Alonzo, who was sent to Spain to deal with them, and their only route of escape passes underneath a fortress at the mouth of the bay where the Spaniard and his men are keeping watch. The pirates know they cannot escape while all of those men and cannons face the water, and so they come up with a clever scheme.]
He [Morgan] saw that Don Alonzo was digging trenches and fortifying his landward positions. The muzzles of the guns were pointed away from the sea. Don Alonzo was not a complicated tactician: What you saw was what you got. Morgan decided to play to the man’s uncertainties.
In plain sight of the castle’s lookouts, canoes were unloaded from Morgan’s ships, and men could soon be seen climbing down into them. The boats then rowed toward the shoreline. Once there they were concealed behind trees as they presumably unloaded the buccaneers and headed back to the main ships empty except for two or three oarsmen. This went on all afternoon, and Don Alonzo drew the obvious conclusion: Morgan was unloading his men for a land assault.
He was doing nothing of the sort. The canoes were full of men as they left the ships, but when they reached the shore, the men simply lay down on the bottom of the craft and returned to the ships, Roderick and the others lying with their backs in the brackish water that sloshed at the bottom of the rowboats, wondering if this childish trick could really work. When the small boats returned to the ships, Roderick and the others climbed up the ropes on the side hidden from Don Alonzo’s watchful eyes, then made their way over to the side facing the Spanish and repeated the process. Don Alonzo again underestimated the imagination of his enemy, convinced that the men he was facing were simple and crude. The battlements of the castle that looked out over the water were left practically deserted as Don Alonzo massed his men for a midnight raid.
Night came, and with it an ebbing tide. With his men hidden out of sight, Morgan softly pulled his anchors up and let the currents slowly take them through the channel. When they were even with the castle, the ships sprang to life: Sails suddenly blossomed white against the moonlight on vessel after vessel. The canvas billowed in the night breeze, and the ships picked up speed. With what must have been a sick feeling of dread, Don Alonzo saw what was happening and wheeled his cannon to the seaside ports. They blasted away at the departing ships, but Morgan was now just out of range and fired back not in self-defense but in a derisive salute.
The Spaniards could not reach him, and Don Alonzo could do nothing but watch his hopes sail with the buccaneers; the Crown would not take lightly his being outwitted twice.
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. 171-72. Print.
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