Lore & Superstition 
The Night of the Burning Sea:
“I recall the evening quite vividly, even now, almost fifty years later. How could I forget? Never before or since in my long life have I been witness to such pure malice and cruelty as I was on that night…
... Cortés was backed into a corner. The bay that had kept him hidden while he loaded his ships with prisoners and gold had also served to trap him. As we closed on him, Hernán Cortés did the unthinkable. Realizing that he was outgunned and facing an impossible fight, he lit his entire fleet on fire and set them adrift…
... the ships came together, the flames grew. The large bay outside Puerto del Principe became a roiling sea of red and orange. In his haste to keep us from seizing his treasure, Cortés didn’t bother to release the prisoners from their bonds, and they, along with his ships and gold, were consumed by the fires…
... I remember the sun setting and the flames growing to their largest height. The light from the fires was a false second sun—visible as far east as Mathew Town, as far west as Trinidad, and as far south as Port Royale…
... Thousands died when Cortés’s fleet was torched to the waterline by his own hand—an event now known as the Night of the Burning Sea. ”
Recovered scraps of the memoirs of Rear Admiral Jack Soothby, Royal Navy, 1593
Captains Clay Holly and Arden Tellini:
If the capture of Tasca’s flagship was one of Holly’s most notorious deeds, his destruction of the small port town of Bella Ardenna is the most misunderstood. Holly had stormed the port when word reached him from a Spanish agent that gold had been discovered in the foothills overlooking the Tellini plantation—a plantation that was the economic engine of the town. Aiming to get to the gold first or not at all, Holly ordered all his ships (for he had built up a small fleet by then) to raze the town and take the gold. Hundreds died, but a young girl who said her name was Ariel Mendoza—a survivor of the bombardment—talked her way onto Holly’s crew. And when the pirate discovered that the gold story was a hoax, he and his crew sailed away, with Mendoza aboard.
“Mendoza” proved to be one of Holly’s most able seamen, and was rumored to be close – very close – to her captain. Though he rated her cook’s mate when she came aboard, the young woman’s natural abilities and a mysterious increase in onboard murders and fights soon saw her rise to the rank of first mate—Holly’s right hand. But Ariel Mendoza was not what she seemed. Cornering the captain in his cabin after the successful capture of a French frigate, Mendoza revealed a pistol—which she pointed at Holly’s heart—and the fact that her name was actually Arden Tellini. She demanded to know the identity of Holly’s Spanish informant, and when Holly gave her the name Diego Ortiz (in all likelihood an alias, in any case) she repaid him with a shot that destroyed the captain’s hand.
The loss of his hand and the traitorous desertion of most every woman on his crew (they joined Tellini and formed the core of her Iron Maidens) should have driven Holly to bloody revenge. But when Tellini also took the captured French frigate as her own and renamed her the Crimson Saber, Clay Holly walked to the very edge of madness. He is now determined not just to find and retake what he views as his rightful property, has also sworn to make Arden Tellini—who he cannot help but admire and hate at the same time—his first mate again. Though perhaps he will shoot her in the foot before he allows her back onboard. It is a testament to Holly’s arrogance and belief in his own abilities that he even thinks this is possible.
Excerpt from Sea Legs of the Spanish Main: An Educated Man’s look at Piracy in the 18th Century by Reginald B. Whitman, 1872.
Drake’s End:
Every British sailor knows the legend of Sir Francis Drake. He terrorized the Spanish Main, circumnavigated the globe, and won glory in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. He brought back gold, treasure, and spices for Queen Elizabeth and inspired every true Briton with his exploits. Sad to say the end of this great man was not so glorious. He undertook a final campaign against Spain in the Caribbean but failed to take San Juan. Then he contracted the flux and fell desperately ill. Despite this he dressed himself and addressed his crew to raise their morale. An hour after going back to bed he passed from this earth.
The body of Captain Drake was put in a lead coffin and given over to the sea’s embrace near the Spanish town of Portobelo. Some say that his body was brought back to England in a beer cask, but this is a lie. Drake was a man of the sea, and he was buried as such. He has rested beneath the waves for over a century. Some sailors say that when Captain Drake’s coffin is found once again, it will herald Britain’s final triumph over Spain. Others say that it will never be found because Drake is locked in an endless battle with Davy Jones himself. If any Briton could send the devil running, it’d be Sir Francis Drake. So let’s hoist a glass to Drake, wherever he might be!
From the letters of Captain Ian Kensington, Royal Navy, 1720
The Maqahauba:
I know what you’ve heard in the Paris salons, because I heard it too before I traveled to Hell. The whisperings of ancient knowledge and secret teachings, the lure of the forbidden. True wisdom, so they said, was not to be found in the Bible but in the wild places of the world. So I took passage on a ship out of Marseilles and traveled to the Caribbean, there to seek for signs of antediluvian lore.
I found others like me on the island of St. Lucia, and it was from them I first heard the name Maqahauba. It meant nothing to me, but the way the word hung in the air made me shudder. These seekers took me to Qualibou, site of an ancient volcano. There they met with natives, and in the dark of the night they enacted a profane ritual. I could not understand what they were saying, but one word was chanted over and over again: Maqahauba! I started to sweat, and I could swear that my clothes began to smolder. But it was not to be my time that night. It was a Spaniard who became one with the fire, a lost sailor who burned so brightly on the pyre. I could see him screaming, but I heard nothing. So I learned of the secret world.
Maqahauba. This is not ancient wisdom but ancient evil. Beware the Charred Serpent!
From The Caribbean Burns by Etienne LeClerc. Published by the Henri Brothers, Paris, 1703
The Fate of Captain Kidd:
To his enemies, there was no fighting captain more fearsome than William Kidd. He sailed with a letter of marque from the King and preyed upon England’s enemies, but one man’s privateer is another’s pirate, and Kidd’s foes claimed he was a cruel man, prone to the most vicious of depravities. When tales of these heinous acts—stripped free of the circumstances which made them necessary, in the captain’s opinion—reached the continental enemies of the English King, they declared Kidd nothing but a pirate, and grumbled so loudly his backers grew nervous. When rumors surfaces claiming Kidd hunted the very ships of the selfsame crown which granted him leave to sail as a privateer, his backers decided he was more trouble than he was worth, or so it seemed. And so they used landsman’s tricks—bureaucracy, declarations, contracts and the like—to set Kidd up for a fall. And so it was that he was captured in the colonial town of Boston at the dawn of the 18th century and brought to trial by the High Court of Admiralty. Kidd’s former patrons concealed documents that could have exonerated the captain of the Adventure Galley and her crew, and a rising tide of disenchantment and anger with the increasingly piratical privateers that once acted as England’s sword in the Caribbean sealed the bargain. Despite personal appeals to the English monarchs William and Mary, William Kidd and his lieutenants were found guilty of murder and piracy, doomed to hang at Execution Dock in Wapping on May 23, 1701.
Some said what happened that day was sorcery, or the hand of a righteous God. Perhaps it was as simple as a bribe to the hangman. Whatever the reason, when the trap opened beneath Kidd’s feet and he dropped into space, the rope that was to snap his neck snapped instead in twain. As a chaotic uproar swept through the crown at Execution Dock, men loyal to Kidd—crewmen who had escaped the bailiffs—swept to their captain’s rescue. Kidd, his lieutenants, and officers overpowered the Wapping guards and made a bold daylight escape, boarding an unattended sloop and making a perilous crossing under the nose of the finest navy in the world.
By the time Kidd and his crew brought the battered sloop Lucky Break into Tortuga several months later, the miraculous escape from the hangman’s noose had become legend among the pirates and privateers who called that infamous port home. Captain Kidd had little trouble gathering the allies he needed to exact his revenge. And exact it he did. Within months of his arrival in Tortuga, the moneymen and parliamentary ministers who had betrayed him were dead or destitute. And still the pirates of the Burning Sea flocked to his banner. Kidd had gone from privateer to pirate hero, and his followers dubbed themselves the Brethren of the Coast, taking up the mantle of Henry Morgan’s cohorts during the last golden age of piracy.
Some men, indeed, most men, given the power and wealth Kidd now found at his command, might have allowed his followers to run rampant throughout the West Indies; indeed, when word spread in Europe of his new status as de facto leader of an unofficial pirate confederation, many expected anarchy to erupt from New Orleans to Madagascar. Yet Kidd, having seen firsthand how corrupt nobility would exploit such violence, reined in the worst of the buccaneers; eventually these bloodthirsty sailors would form the core of Kidd’s Men of War. Nor does William Kidd wish to bring the freebooters and buccaneers he has come to lead—these new Brethren of the Coast—into the service of any crown. Kidd did not seek to lead a nation of pirates on this Burning Sea, but he has risen to the challenge admirably, keeping peace between the pirate factions through strength of will and force of personality.
Still, no man lives forever, and the folk hero the Tortugans call Captain Lord William Kidd now enters the autumn of his years. When his strength of will is gone, who will lead these new Brethren of the Coast? Who else can?
From the popular (and anonymous) pamphlet “Caesar of Tortuga, or, Capt. Wm. Kidd’s Fortune”
The Rise of El Dorado:
Decades ago, we—that is, the West India Company—had made the usual arrangement with the natives, a village of fisherman claimed to be descended from survivors of the old Mayan Empire. The usual arrangement, of course, granted the company complete control of the ports and harbors, leaving the El Dorado colony—for so the village had been fatefully named by the Spaniards many decades ago—under native rule. It is a more peaceful arrangement than anyone else would have offered them, especially the Spanish. The chief of the village signed all the standard treaties, we took control of the bay and all the ports within.
Then it all started to fall apart.
This was around the time I arrived, which earned me a reputation as a bad luck token, I’m afraid. The company lost a small merchant fleet along the inland coast during a frightful storm. Ships were sent to retrieve the cargo and survivors, but there were none to be found. Nothing but shattered barrels, and a few mangled corpses ensconced in the wreckage. It was assumed that the storm, which was quite powerful for that time of year, had washed the remaining bodies out to sea and destroyed what cargo remained. The fleet was written off as a loss.
Around this time Governor Jens Roorback started making frequent journeys alone into El Dorado village. It was assumed he had a Mayan woman there, naturally, but as his visits became more and more frequent, some—including me, who served Roorback in much the same capacity I now serve Governor Ingram—questioned his motives. He was letting important company business slide, allowing more and more of his job to fall to me. And then, one night, he simply disappeared and did not return … at least, he did not return to his post.
No, when Jens Roorback returned, he did so at the head of a small fleet of what he called the “Mayan Navy of El Dorado. ” He had been helping the Mayans—who were far more populous than we had originally realized, it seemed—to secretly build ships. He used as labor the lost sailors we had long ago written off as dead. In truth, those sailors had been taken by the upcountry Mayans, held hostage, and eventually assimilated into their society. And these upcountry Mayans … they weren’t the same as the ragged, poorly fed folk with whom we’d parleyed. They were strong, healthy, powerful—and they had gold. So much gold. They wore it on their bodies, adorned their beasts with it, their boats, their ships. Roorback told us of the new Mayan King, and how he and this King knew the location of the true El Dorado. A real city of gold and the unlikely namesake of that desparate fishing village. And they had no intention of telling anyone else where it was.
Personally, I believe these new Mayans were there all along, waiting for us to grow complacent. Perhaps Roorback was talking to them all along. Whatever the case, the company wasn’t ready for them. They drove us out of the bay around the same time the mad Sons of Cortez descended from the mountains and laid claim to the northeast cove.
They are another story themselves. They claim to be descendants of conquistadors, left long ago by the one they call the Great Father—the infamous Hernán Cortez of Spain.
But I digress. In the end, the company was forced to admit defeat, falling back to Maarhaven, now our last stronghold. They sent us a new governor, Mr. Ingram, and have poured all the resources they could into maintaining Maarhaven as a free, open port. For now, it is the best we can do. Roorback cannot live forever. Someday, we will return and show these Mayans and these wretched Sons of Cortez what it means to defy the West India Company. That day is not today, so I can only hope I will live to see it.
Excerpts from the diary of Alfons Claas, major domo to Governor Ingram of Maarhaven colony