[Quick set-up: Captain Morgan and a massive force of pirates and privateers, approximately 1,500 strong, made a move to capture the Spanish city of Panama, part of the Spanish Main. During this campaign, the pirates overtook the castle of San Lorenzo, where the Spanish defenders refused quarter before the final assault on their positions.]
Eventually their numbers and their maniacal courage won the day; they streamed inside the castle and began slashing at the men with their cutlasses or executing them on the spot with their pistols. “The enemy refused quarter,” Morgan reported tersely, “which cost them 350 men.”
As the buccaneers ran through the castle and had their vengeance on the enemy, those still at the foot of the walls looked up to witness Spanish musketeers diving from the top of the walls to the rocks below, dashing themselves to pieces rather than ask for quarter. As the buccaneers poured in, the castellan refused to yield; two cannons were wheeled in front of his position as he prepared for a last defense. But a privateer took aim with his musket and fired a shot, “which pierced his skull into his brain.” The defense of San Lorenzo was over.
[…]
The pirates killed everything that moved within the fort; the Spanish had not asked for quarter, and they didn’t receive it. Roderick had run out of ammunition, so he took his cutlass and chopped at the necks of the Spaniards he found cowering behind the shattered remnants of the barricade.
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “The Isthmus.” 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. 217-18. Print.
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