The Golden Altar

By Michael Merry

In January of 1671 the pirate Henry Morgan captured and sacked Panama City. Morgan took considerable booty Panama but missed the fabled Golden Altar, a priceless artifact which a local priest had painted with creosote to avoid detection.
This story tells of Morgans rage when he discovered what he had overlooked. Continuing, it relates how a descendant, Major Henry Morgan, a British Army officer who passed through Panama after the Falklands War, returns in 1985 to steal the altar.
Descriptions of Morgans raid in 1671 and of the City of Panama in 1985 are accurate. However, the unviolated Golden Altar still resides today in the church of San Jose, close to where General Manuel Antonio Noriegas infamous Defense Forces headquarters stood until 1989, when the U.S. invasion destroyed the complex, and life in Panama changed forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palibrio
• Release date: Sep 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781463339111

Michael Merry

Michael J. Merry was educated at the Royal Liberty School in Essex, England. He moved to Panama in 1959. When the Panama National Guard staged their coup in 1968, he drove the escape vehicle with the President and several Ministers through the military blockade to safety in the Canal Zone. He became Division Vice President of a major U.S. news operation in Latin America, traveling widely in the process. He was in Argentina when the Army revolted in 1987 and in Venezuela during the attempted coup by Lt. Colonel (now President) Hugo Chávez in 1992. He eventually moved to Miami to script two nationally televised financial programs and became Managing Editor of a widely read financial report. Mr. Merry and his wife in Miami Shores, Florida.

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CHAPTER 1

It was raining. Not the cold, miserable rain the Europeans amongst them knew, nor the half frozen sleet familiar to the Scandinavians. Those of them who had been raised along the coast of the Mediterranean had felt something similar to this warm precipitation before. However, none of them had ever experienced the heaviness of the drops, the sheer solidness of the deluge or the relentless intensity of the seasonal rains of the jungles of Central America.

Some one hundred and fifty men were huddled in small groups beneath the mahogany trees. A few crouched beneath oiled canvas lean-to’s. Others, preferring the wetness to the humidity inside the shelters, lounged under growths of bananas and platanos whose huge leaves provided some comfort from the large drops. Despite the obvious physical discomfort of the gathering, no sense of discontent was apparent amongst them. In fact, there were smiles on the faces of some, and anticipation could be discerned amongst others. There was a subdued tingle of excitement in the air, rightly so perhaps, for approximately four hundred yards to the east and barely visible through the early morning light and the sheeting rain rose the walls of the richest city in the Western Hemisphere. The city founded by Pedrarias Davila in 1519 to serve as the hub of Spanish exploration throughout the Americas, the city built to act as the storehouse for all of the riches plundered by the conquistadores, the city from which the annual treasure convoys began their overland trip to Portobello on the Atlantic coast and thence back to the mother country, Spain, to finance further explorations and conquests. The city of Panama.

There was a movement amongst the outermost clusters of men. Some rose quickly to their feet, heedless now of the downpour. Their attention was directed to the movement that could be seen in the undergrowth between the band and the city. Someone or something was advancing towards them, its progress marked by the swaying of ferns and bushes in its path. A few moments later, a man appeared, a black man, short and wiry with ugly scars on his wrists and ankles. He was dressed in knee length britches and a canvas singlet. He looked at the ring of men who surrounded him and smiled. His teeth, badly decayed by sugar cane chewing, showing whitely against the black lips. From the ring of men, one of them crooked a finger at the black indicating that he, and then turned to wind his way through the now seated groups, to where a solitary figure sat beneath a shelter seemingly oblivious to what was going on around him.

The figure was dressed, despite the humidity, in a well cut broadcloth coat. Its original color had been blue. However, the wetness had turned it now to black. There was gold piping on the lapels and cuffs, and, on the left shoulder, there rested a battered epaulet, proclaiming the wearer to be a post captain in the Royal Navy. A once-white shirt, open at the neck, and a pair of canvas trousers tucked into sea boots, completed the inventory of the man’s clothing. From broad leather buckler hung a sheathed naval cutlass, and, in a sash around his waist could be seen the wooden butts of two pistols.

Above the collar of the shirt, a heavy beard reached back from a long chin and curled around the ears, one of which supported a ring the size of a sovereign. This in itself was not unusual; the occasional officer of His Majesty’s Navy was promoted from the ranks and retained the ring.

However, it was not the physical appearance of the man, nor his dress or adornments that denied he was what the epaulet proclaimed him to be. It was partly the aura of brooding menace, of violence and cruelty that seemed to radiate from him, along with wisps of steam that his body heat forced from the blackened coat. And it was partly the inherent evil that his appearance conjured up in the minds of people meeting him for the first time. Something that suggested that he was a player in the wrong costume, an angel in disguise with horns and a forked tail, the very thing with which parents threaten disobedient children and priests, unrepentant sinners. It was as if the devil himself had appeared in human form, dressed in the trappings of an honorable service.

The eyes above the dark beard had not missed the approach of the two men. His failure to acknowledge their presence was merely the way of the man to feign disinterest in events taking place around him. Those who knew him well however, were not lulled into carelessness by his seemingly benign attitude. For, as some of them had learned to their discomfort, very little escaped those pale green eyes set deep into sockets darkened by the equatorial sun.

Now the man suddenly stood, he was of medium height and of a heavy build. He dismissed the white man with a slight shift of his head, and his gaze rested upon the black. A slightly arched eyebrow, accompanied by a cocking of the head, made the ragged figure in front of him wet his lips with his tongue and then dry them quickly, sucking first the top and then the bottom one, the jagged edges of the teeth underlining the apprehension visible in the eyes.

He dipped his head respectfully and pointed back to the direction he had come from. His hands joined on his chest in a parody of prayer, his eyes screwed up and his hands reached towards them, brushing away imaginary tears. He beat his breast and then hunched his shoulders in the attitude of a man carrying a heavy weight, shuffling forward as he did so. His pantomime finished, he straightened up and looked at the white man for approval. He smiled as he saw the man’s eyes gleam and knew he had carried out his mission to his master’s satisfaction.

The man turned, his green eyes swept the gathering in front of him. He waited until all attention was focused upon him. Then, with a sweeping gesture, he drew one of the long barreled pistols from his sash and waved it above his head, pointing it eastwards where the first rays of the morning sun could be seen reflecting off the rain drenched walls of the city. Abandoning their crude shelters the men climbed to their feet. Henry Morgan’s cutthroats were ready to start their attack on the city of Panama.

CHAPTER 2

Their journey to this place west of the city had begun six days before. They had left their ships in the hands of skeleton crews anchored in the bay of Portobello. Many already knew the coast well; they had sacked and held the town for a week just two years before. At that time, Morgan had commanded eight ships and over six hundred pirates, no mean feat of organization considering that six lesser captains had been involved. They had looted the settlement at their leisure after killing the majority of the garrison. They then threatened the Spanish authorities in Panama with burning and pillage if a ransom was not paid. For more than a week they searched the town, torturing its residents into revealing the hiding places of their belongings. They had drunk every drop of distilled spirit the town possessed and had their way with many of the women. When the ransom was finally delivered, they departed, sated with their over-indulgences and happy in the thought that the return to Jamaica with their ill-gotten gains would make them heroes in every waterfront bar. Now, however, two years later, there were less than two hundred men, some of whom had at first questioned if this force would be enough to carry the city.

Morgan had explained to them that there were only two ways to attack Panama. One was from the Pacific Ocean and would involve a long trip around the tip of South America, with no guarantee that they would survive this hazardous journey. The other was to attack the city by land across the Isthmus of Panama, a feat that was considered impossible by military strategists of the day. But after talking to an escaped slave who had cross the isthmus via several trails and rivers close to the main Las Cruces track, known only to the Choco Indians, a tribe who had befriended the slave, Morgan believed that if someone could escape the city and reach the Pacific via these secret trails, the reverse could be accomplished. He had assembled his crews and now intended to put his theory to the test.

Panama City had long been coveted by pirates operating in the Caribbean. From time to time, attacks had been launched against it but had never succeeded. The island of Taboga a few miles offshore in the Bay of Panama had been the object of raids and had been burned on several occasions. However, the natural defenses of Panama made it a very difficult objective for the relatively small bands of buccaneers operating in the Pacific at that time. Its walls faced the sea and were thick and well laced with cannon. Its chief defense to seaward, however, was not the ability of these guns to fire upon an attacking ship, but that nature had deemed that this coast would experience tides of between twelve and twenty-one feet.

At low water, and indeed throughout fully three quarters of each tide, no vessel could approach closer than three to four miles. The treacherous mud flats of the bay were navigable via one narrow channel which was guarded at its entrance by a small islet upon which a heavy battery of twelve cannon stood ready to hurl shot at any would be attacker foolish enough to try to force the channel mouth. In addition to the guns, a garrison of fifty soldiers was based on the islet, and they had facilities for heating the chain and ball ammunition to white hot intensity, making an attack a very risky business indeed for wooden ships that feared fire more than any other disaster at sea.

In constant fear of attack from both land and the ocean, the governing authorities were forever experimenting with new methods of defense. Landward the walls ringed the city and were manned by guards who patrolled throughout the day and night. The two entrances to the city were protected by small rivers that were fordable only by bridges which in turn were defended by heavily manned forts. The Las Cruces trail across the Isthmus was patrolled by militia and guarded by small garrisons along its length. The trail ended at the northern entrance to the city where it crossed Kings Bridge. This was where travelers and their possessions were inspected by an alert garrison. The western approach from the country’s interior terminated at another bridge which was dominated by a strongpoint known as the Fort of the Nativity. Outside of the Las Cruces terminal, the Governor had caused large cattle pens to be erected. Within these pens he had collected several hundred semi-wild steers. These were to be set loose should any mounted attack threaten from the trail. To the east of the city, the low ground had been partially flooded by the damming of several streams, the resulting softness making it all but impossible to transit the area from the coastal trails on that side of the town. The well thought out precautions enabled both the garrison and the population to sleep easily at night. However, His Excellency and his military commanders had not taken two seemingly insignificant items into consideration when planning their defenses. The first was the escape of a black slave some six months previously. The second was the obstinacy of the Catholic Church, which despite many pleas from past and present authorities insisted on burying their dead in the consecrated ground outside the west gate of the city at the traditional time of five in the morning.

CHAPTER 3

The men formed quickly into four groups of approximately fifty men each. There was little talking, they had been given their instructions the evening before and their discipline was apparent this morning as they moved swiftly forward at their leaders signal. Through the light grass and bush they advanced, unsheathing their weapons as they did so. The low outer wall of the graveyard presented no obstacle to the trained bands and was swiftly traversed. Directly in front of them they could see the large thatched bohio that served as a last resting place for the early morning arrivals. They spread out along the inner wall and crouched down to avoid detection. From his position just inside the gate of the graveyard, Morgan could see the high walls of the city just twenty yards from where he knelt. He watched the small lynch gate set into the heavy wooden doors barring entrance to the city. It was this lynch gate, so he had been told, that would open at five in the morning for the funeral procession. The main gates themselves would remain closed until seven o’clock when the guard would open them to the travelers, farmers and artisans who required admission.

Slowly, the lynch gate swung open and the sound of chanting could be heard from within. Pushing the gate, two guards held it open while a youth in a white surplice, swinging an urn from which incense smoked, stepped through. Behind the boy came another figure bearing a large cross and behind him, a priest. Next, a party of six monks filed through, chanting in Latin, and, behind them, four white clad figures tugged a cart bearing a plain coffin through the gate. A file of mourners followed the cart and it was the sight of these that prompted Morgan into action. He leaped up from his hiding place and rushing forward with a blood curdling shout, slashed indiscriminately at the surprised clergy and mourners. A group of his men cut down the cart pushers and thrust the cart backwards so it blocked the lynch gate. Others attacked the guards who had opened the door.

Those who stood their ground were killed without mercy, those who fled, were not pursued. The golden cross was broken from its pole and the priest’s ring was taken by the simple method of cutting off its supporting finger. Two of the group donned the distinctive helmets of the murdered guards and seized their long pikes. The cart was pulled through the gate and the disguised pirates stepped into the fort and advanced on the strongpoint. The Fort of the Nativity stood to the right of the entrance, some thirty yards from the bridge. The two buccaneers walked towards the fort at a slow pace in order not to raise the suspicion of the guard at the entrance. As they drew level with the gates, one of them lowered his pike from his shoulder as if to relieve himself of the weight of it. As his arm came down, he twisted sideways and plunged the pike with such force into the chest of the sentry that the man was left hanging as the point penetrated the heavy wooden gate.

Seeing the way clear, the remainder of the pirates advanced quickly and infiltrated the strongpoint. Within minutes the fifty man garrison has been massacred in their beds and the six cannon on the walls had been manhandled with ease by the experienced sailors, onto the roadway. It was growing lighter now and the attackers hurried forward in order to obtain the maximum advantage of their surprise attack. Guards on the seawall, noting the unusual activity at the fort, peered forward in order to determine what was happening. As the cannon appeared in the street the first alarm was given. Musket shots were fired and word was frantically dispatched that the city was being invaded. The few guards on the seawall were chased back as the pirates advanced.

Word was spreading now of the invasion and the town was rapidly awakening. In those first minutes of the attack, the momentum was almost lost when the Convent of La Merced was reached. This was the first opportunity the bands had to loot and the delay that ensued could have provided the time the defenders needed to consolidate had they been better prepared to receive an attack from the west. As it was, Morgan himself grabbed steel and flint and started a blaze amongst the hassocks that were stuffed with dry straw. The smoke forced his men back into the street to continue their advance. Once this had been taken care of, he had them haul one of the cannon taken from the fort, to fire at point blank range at the hastily erected barricade across the main square where troops from the jail prepared to repulse the invaders.

Meanwhile, another group of men headed north through the side streets of the town. Bypassing the kitchens and meat market which bordered the square, they avoided the barricades where a line of resistance was forming. They turned left at the hospital of San Juan de Dios and then right at the church of La Concepcion. As they advanced they set fires in some of the wooden buildings in order to confuse the residents and eliminate any pockets of defense. North of the main square they encountered the convent of Santo Domingo and the Cathedral. They knew, from the black slave’s description of these buildings, that they had succeeded in flanking the defense line that had sprung up.

They gathered up the stragglers and formed up into two groups. The first attacked the so called ‘Royal Houses’ built on the rocky ground behind the cathedral. These contained the quartermaster store and the gunpowder deposit as well as the chancellery and courthouse. Meanwhile, the second group approached the main square from its undefended northern end. Falling upon the defenders from behind, they caused confusion and panic as they cut into the backs of the troops facing the attack from the now cleared Convent of La Merced. The surprise thrust succeeded and the entire surviving garrison from the jail was put to the sword. Fires were now burning out of control in at least four areas of the city. Resistance was sporadic and only the defenders on the higher ground, elite troops defending the Royal Houses, offered any serious resistance.

As soon as Morgan felt that the attackers had the upper hand he sent word to the leaders of the groups to detach the men who had been specially designated as looters. These were to remove any- thing of value from the churches and convents and to search dwellings for hidden money, jewels and artifacts owned by local residents. The remainder of the attackers were to continue their assault on the Royal Houses. He ordered the fire be extinguished at the La Merced convent and designated this as the collecting point for wagons of loot. The attack slowed as resistance collapsed and pleasure took precedence over haste and greed. The results of this change of mood were not noticed until early the following year when a surprising amount of blue and green eyed infants were born to the unlucky victims of the invaders pleasures.

CHAPTER 4

With almost the entire city under his control, Morgan walked back past the gutted Custom House and for a few moments watched the loading of the loot start at the Convent. He then called upon his personal bodyguards and walked with them along the main thoroughfare, oblivious to the screams and drunken laughter coming from the ransacked houses at the edge of the road.

On the steps of a small church some fifty yards from the gate, he came upon a group of priests who knelt praying under the watchful stares of two guards. Morgan mounted the steps and entered the church. Broken statues, candles and hassocks littered the floor. He advanced down the aisle and stood in front of the altar. There was a heavy smell of paint in the air and on the floor there were the stains of creosote. The altar and its backboard appeared to be of heavy, poorly carved mahogany, recently coated with a foul smelling protective which explained the stained aisle of the church. The carvings were no longer sharp and clear buy rounded by age and clogged by what appeared to be a lifetime of coats of paint. Every item of value had been removed. There were no candlesticks or altar plate and even the tabernacle had gone. Morgan had heard rumors in Jamaica of a fabulous treasure possessed by the Catholic Church in Panama. He had not yet received any report of an individual item worthy of such praise, and wondered if the story was invented and if any such article did indeed exist.

Morgan reflected upon this as he exited the church, pausing at the head of the steps and examining the priests below him. He commenced his descent, his shadow falling across the tonsured heads of the kneeling clergymen. From the corner of his eye he saw one of them make a most un-priestly gesture, a gesture Morgan was used to seeing in ports where the women were not the cleanest and lice were a hazard of the sailor’s trade. The movement, coming from a man of God, aroused his suspicions and he drew his cutlass from his belt. His bodyguards tensed, sensing something was amiss. Morgan gestured towards them with his hand, signaling them to relax. Stepping forward he examined the scratching man. The hands were stained with creosote and drops had spattered his cassock. It occurred to Morgan that in a city as rich as Panama, the church could pay any number of workmen to paint an altar. Still, he mused, perhaps this was one of the strange penances that these mad monks set themselves. The priest scratched again and Morgan’s eyes narrowed.

He extended the cutlass until its point was touching the rope that gathered the cassock at the man’s waist. The tonsured head bent in submission and as it did, Morgan slipped the blade between rope and cassock and twisted his wrist. The rope dropped to the floor. The prayers stopped and all eyes focused on Morgan’s sword. He placed the point under the skirt dragging on the floor and again the wrist moved upwards, causing the sharp blade to tear the garment to the waist. He signaled the priest to stand and when the man, visibly trembling, did so, he stepped forward and stripped the cassock from the man’s body. Beneath lay a linen shift which yielded easily to Morgan’s violent pull.

The crowd’s gasps turned to laughter and even Morgan smiled, for there, held between the skinny legs of the priest, was a wrought gold communion goblet, its embedded jewels reflecting the sun’s rays as they illuminated its hiding place. The beautifully fashioned cup that had held the body and blood of Christ was now the receptacle of the organ and testes of a very frightened Augustine monk.

The cup was retrieved from its temporary hiding place and Morgan marveled at its workmanship and the way in which the rubies and emeralds were set into its thick gold. This was, he thought, the most valuable item that would be found in the city and Morgan congratulated himself upon his alert and suspicious mind which had lead to the discovery.

CHAPTER 5

Over the next two weeks the pirates conducted themselves, without exception, in the cruelest manner imaginable. Individual citizens were tortured until they revealed the hiding places of their valuables. Women were raped, and any resistance meant death. Parties of pirates commandeered small boats and followed fleeing worthies to the islands of Taboga, Peruke and Flamingo where they robbed the refugees of the possessions they had tried to escape with and murdered those who refused to disclose the location of their belongings.

Morgan knew better than to try to stop his men from their terrible amusement. He realized that when they were tired of pillage and rape and once all spirits were consumed, they would sober up and could be commanded to return to the ships anchored at Portobello. Meanwhile he posted guards on the wagons and sat back until the men finished their orgy. He waited three weeks for this to happen. Finally, early one Sunday morning, the pirates, tired of their sport, assembled at the Convent and with their wagons and mules, exited the city across the single span of Kings Bridge and took the Las Cruces trail across the Isthmus.

The journey back took four days. There were the usual deaths due to fever and accidents, as well as a dozen or so that were the result of brawls over loot. Others were killed during attacks on the Spanish outposts along the trail. Some of the treasure was lost when mules tripped and stumbled down steep precipices. Other items, too heavy to carry, were abandoned. Finally, on the fourth day, they arrived at a small beach within sight of the bay where their ship was anchored. A signal fire was lit, and within four hours all one hundred and sixty survivors were back on board and the vessel had sailed for Jamaica. The men were dirty, tired and covered in insect bites. They had lost almost three dozen of their number and had killed more than a hundred of the defending troops and half that number of civilians. They had carried off treasure that would, in this day and age, carry a value of over one million dollars, and in doing so, had accomplished a task that military strategists had thought impossible.