Selkirk's Island by Diana Souhami (best color ebook reader txt) 📕

So we sent our Linguist and a Prisoner with our final Answer, that if they did not in half an hour send us three more good Hostages for the 40,000 Pieces of Eight agreed on, we would take down our Flag of Truce, land, and give no Quarter, and fire the Town and Ships.

The Spaniards waved a white handkerchief. They would parley again. They offered 32,000 Pieces of Eight. They could not afford more.

Rogers lowered the white Flag of Truce, raised the English Ensign, and ordered his men to invade. At this point all semblance of discipline and restraint among the men ended. They ‘could be kept under no Command as soon as the first Piece was fired’ he wrote. The Spaniards confronted them on horseback. The English shot at them, loading and firing very fast. Twenty Spaniards and as many horses were killed or wounded.

The English marched to the church of St Jago, ransacked the houses in the square and set them on fire. Some of these houses were tall and built of brick, most were timber, the simplest were bamboo huts. They blazed all night and all the following day.

This army was a marauding mob. They looted gold and silver from the church then hoisted the English flag on its tower. They wanted to rip up the floorboards ‘to look among the Dead for Treasure’. For reasons of hygiene Rogers opposed this. A contagious epidemic of ‘malignant fever’ had killed hundreds of Guayaquil’s citizens. An open pit was filled with their half-putrefied corpses. The church floor was crammed with recent graves.

To escape the twin evils of epidemic and invasion, the town’s citizens had fled to the surrounding hills. The English torched and looted their empty houses and the smaller churches of St Augustin, St Francis, St Dominic and St Ignatius. They ransacked storerooms. They stole silver and clothing, peas, beans, rice, 15 jars of oil, 230 pounds of flour, 160 jars of wine and brandy, a ton of pitch, irons, nails, cordage, guns, indigo and cocoa, a ton of loaf sugar and the Corregidor’s gold-headed cane.†

An Indian prisoner told Rogers of safe houses up river where most of the town’s women and a great deal of money had been taken. Selkirk and John Connely were given charge of twenty-one men and sent in a boat with ‘a Cask of good Liquor’ to flush these women out.

They broke into their supposedly safe houses with crowbars. In one they found huddled a group of upper-class Spanish women. Rogers gave his version of what happened:

Some of their largest Gold Chains were conceal’d and wound about their Middles, Legs and Thighs, etc, but the Gentlewomen in these hot Countries being very thin clad with Silk and Fine Linnen, and their Hair dressed with Ribbons very neatly, our Men by pressing felt the Chains etc with their Hands on the Out-side of the Lady’s Apparel, and by their Linguist modestly desired the Gentlewomen to take ’em off and surrender ’em. This I mention as a Proof of our Sailors Modesty, and in respect to Mr Connely and Mr Selkirk, the late Governour of Juan Fernandoes.

So Woodes Rogers claimed in his edited journal. These men, who had been at sea for eight frustrating months and, in Selkirk’s case, marooned alone for four and a half years, who could not be controlled ‘as soon as the first piece was fired’, who had drunk a good deal of liquor, smashed their way into churches with iron crowbars and torched people’s houses, none the less when it came to sexual civility, defied the customs of war and behaved with modesty and respect as they groped women’s bodies to steal their jewels.

They stripped them of gold chains, earrings and jewels to the value of a thousand pounds. Then they moved on to other houses where there were other women. When they returned down river they called again on ‘these charming prisoners’.

The Spaniards pleaded with the English to leave. They could not defend this town. They offered 30,000 Pieces of Eight and all that had been looted, in return for their barks and hostages. They gave an assurance of payment in twelve days. Rogers told them they would see the whole town on fire if they did not pay up in six.

The Spaniards conceded defeat. An Agreement was signed. The English marched to their boats ‘with Colours flying’. Rogers picked up many ‘Pistils, Cutlashes and Pole-axes, which shewed that our Men were grown very careless, weak and weary of being Soldiers and that ‘twas time to be gone from hence’.

The air was humid and dense with mosquitoes. The soldiers were fatigued. It was hard for them to drag their guns out of the mud to the boats. Sixty men hoisted them to their shoulders on a bamboo frame then waded to the boats through the swamps. They sailed away on 28 April with Drums, Trumpets and Guns and ‘Shew and Noise’. The citizens of Guayaquil returned to what was left of their town.

1709 A Melancholy Time

IT WAS a Pyrrhic victory for the privateers. John Martin had been killed by a shell, which split as he fired it from a mortar. Lieutenant William Stretton’s pistol went off and shot him in the leg. In the dark a watchman shot Hugh Tidcomb who could not give the password. John Gabriel, a Dutchman, became paralysed with drink and passed out in a Spaniard’s house. And within days, one hundred and forty men were sick with high fevers and rasping thirsts. Rogers thought they had ‘contagious Distemper’, caught from the corpses in the Guayaquil churches. Probably they had malaria.

It was a ‘melancholy Time’. There were not enough medicines to attempt a cure. The men died, despite the efforts of John Ballett and James Wasse, who bled them and dosed them with alcohol and spices: Samuel Hopkins, the apothecary, who had read prayers every day, Thomas Hughes ‘a very good sailor’,