Chapter I: Tumultuous Port Royal

Jonathan Dickinson is best known for the “Journal” that tracks his shipwreck in southeast Florida and his perilous trek to safety. But the story really begins in Port Royal, a bustling, brawling Jamaican port town.

The first thing to know about Port Royal is to confront the man whose ghost still pervaded its steamy wharfs, warehouses, bars and bordellos eight years after his death.

His name was Henry Morgan. In 1655, when the twenty-year-old Welshman first arrived in Jamaica as a low-ranking naval officer, England had recently wrested the island from its arch-rival, Spain. Port Royal was a four-mile finger of seafront sand fifteen miles from the capital of Kingston, and settlers boasted that its large, protected harbor could accommodate 500 ships.

When young Morgan first set foot on Port Royal, roughly 600 persons had already settled there because its harbor was thirty feet deep and ships could glide directly into its wharfs for unloading. The narrow streets had already begun to teem with warehouses, merchant shops, taverns, brothels, and slave markets.

But the bigger Port Royal grew, the more its colonial governor worried about predators. England prized its new conquest because Jamaica was a poke in the eye to Spanish Cuba, a mere hundred or so miles to the north. Yet, London seemed to ignore his requests for naval ships to ward off a revenge attack from Havana.

What to do? The governor had no choice but to fall in line with the growing practice of privateering, or “buccaneering.”

An efficient system was already being refined in other English colonies. The governor would issue a commission, or a letter of marque, to any Englishman who could produce a ship full of armed men to ply the Caribbean and capture, sink, or plunder a Spanish vessel. When the spoils were tallied up, 15 percent would go to King Charles II and ten percent to the Lord Admiral to signal their official support. Owners of ships leased to bu