Keith Thomson - Born to Be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune

H ER NAME IS lost to time. What is known is that she was one of the Indigenous Kuna people in Panamas Darien province. A description of her can be culled from the journals of European soldiers and adventurers who met her and her sisters and straightaway proposed marriage: lively and sparkling gray eyes, long, black, lank, coarse, strong hair, and dark, copper-colourd skin streaked with red paint in the Kuna fashion. She wore a thick golden nose ring and, sometimes, multicolored beads roped around her lean, well-featured body. Her father was a regional Kuna chieftain, her grandfather the de facto king of the Kuna, and, in the spring of 1680, she was a sex slave, having been snatched from her fathers palace by Spanish soldiers and taken to their garrison.

The circumstances of her subjugation were not unusual. The Spaniards, who controlled most of the New World at the time, took the position that enslaving the Indigenous peoples was a beneficent act. As an official Spanish historian explained in a sixteenth-century essay, the naturally inferior Native populations benefited from Spanish tutelage as well as from conversion to Christianity, objectives that were easier to achieve if the would-be converts were first enslaved.

The Spaniards self-professed altruism was called into question, though, by their treatment of the enslaved Natives, a typical example being a woman in the colony of Hispaniola who, one morning, told her Spanish overseer that she needed time off from the mine to care for her newborn, whereupon the overseer took the baby in his arms, smashed its skull apart against a rock, and declared the problem solved. The issue was not merely that the conquistadors placed a higher value on gold than on human life, but, as the Incan leader Manco Inca put it, Even if the snows of the Andes turned to gold, still they would not be satisfied.

In 1501, when the Spaniards discovered Panama (insofar as land already inhabited for millennia by Indigenous peoples can be discovered), the Natives might have appeared relatively fortunate, because the Spanish effort was led by Rodrigo de Bastidas, regarded as the kindest and most humane of the conquistadors. In a seminal history of the Spanish conquest, Bastidas was described as a gentleman with the unique distinction of acting like a human being in his dealings with the natives of America. Yet just a year after his arrival in Panama, when two of his ships were sinking, Bastidas and his men rescued their gold and pearls while leaving their chained-up Kuna slaves to drown.

This was just the prelude. Over the following two centuries, Panamas Indigenous peoples were devastated by enslavement, genocide, and European diseases. At its most harmonious, the Spanish-Kuna relationship was that of cats and mice. Many of the Kuna fled into the farthest reaches of the Darien province, five thousand square miles of mountainous jungle on Panamas eastern border. Others left Panama altogether, settling in the San Blas Islands, an archipelago just off the countrys Atlantic coast.

On April 3, 1680, on Golden Island, a tiny slab of coral, sand, and palm trees at the eastern end of that archipelago, the princesss grandfather devised a plan to rescue her. His Spanish name, Andreas, was a relic of his own time as a Spanish slave. Since his escape from the Spaniards, he had become the leader of the Kuna community in the San Blas Islands as well as a regional chief paramount, what the Europeans thought of as a king, his dominion extending well into the Darien. At his disposal was an army of warriors, many of whom may have been among the finest archers in the world. One English visitor told of eight-year-old Kuna boys able not merely to hit canes standing on end twenty paces away but, unfailingly, to split them in two.

Were Andreas to send his men to the Spanish garrison to rescue his granddaughter, however, they would be quickly torn apart by Spanish gunfire, against which they had no defense. But he saw a way to enlist a supplemental force whose firepower was as good as, if not better than, the Spaniards: pirates.

His scouts had brought word that a company of 366 buccaneersCaribbean-based pirates who preyed on Spanish ships and townshad just landed at the Isle of Pines, a few miles north of Golden Island.

An English pirate

Mostly Englishmen, the buccaneers had banded together in Jamaica in December of 1679 to raid the Spanish port city of Portobelo, on Panamas northern coast. The raid netted them a good deal of silver, but the most valuable prize would prove to be mail that merchants in Spain had intended for Spanish colonists. Again and again in their letters, the merchants lamented the vulnerability of Spanish settlements on the South Sea, as the southern Pacific Ocean was then known. The near impossibility of circumnavigating South America meant that English pirates rarely, if ever, sailed into the region. But the narrow Darien Isthmus (between Panamas Atlantic and Pacific coasts), the merchants warned, could open a door into the South Seas.

Accordingly, the buccaneers circulated a new expedition plan through Caribbean taverns, brothels, and other pirate haunts. All comers were to rendezvous on the Isle of Pines, where they would leave their ships and then go by canoe to the Darien Isthmus, cross the isthmus on foot, and raid Panama City (then known simply as Panama), the repository for much of the gold, silver, and gems the Spaniards were extracting from Central and South America.