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Updated: June 23, 2025
This was nothing less than the descent upon and the capture of Panama, which was, next to Cartagena, perhaps, the most powerful and the most strongly fortified city in the West Indies.
The town is set at the foot of the hills, facing a vast plain, and towards the end of the colonial period was represented as a city of 3,250 families a population of upwards of 16,000. It was the centre of archiepiscopal authority, with jurisdiction over the Dioceses of Cartagena, Santa Marta, Panamá, Caracas, and Quito.
I had thought to have done with piracy; thought to have done with it for ever. Yet here have I been committed by this scoundrel to the worst piracy that ever I was guilty of. Think of Cartagena! Think of the hell those devils will be making of it now! And I must have that on my soul!" "Nay, Peter 't isn't on your soul; but on Rivarol's. It is that dirty thief who has brought all this about.
"Well, you see, Carrie, they were some distance off, and weren't likely to damage us much; and we ran straight in, and anchored with the rest under the guns of the battery, outside Cartagena. Seeing us fired at, of course, they never suspected we were English. Then, at night, we captured the two vessels lying next to us, and put out to sea.
But he saw nothing at all to indicate that anything unusual had taken place, or was taking place, in Cartagena, the only occurrence of a noticeable character that came under his observation that day being a violent quarrel among certain of the inhabitants of the fishing village below, which quarrel, he shrewdly conjectured, might possibly have something to do with a missing canoe.
Blocking Cadiz and Cartagena by the possession of Gibraltar, and facing Toulon with Port Mahon, Great Britain was now as strongly based in the Mediterranean as either France or Spain; while, with Portugal as an ally, she controlled the two stations of Lisbon and Gibraltar, watching the trade routes both of the ocean and of the inland sea.
There, after cruising about in those waters for about a fortnight without falling in with a vessel of any sort, at the end of that time they overhauled a caravel bound from Porto Bello to Cartagena, which vessel they took, and finding her loaded with nothing better than raw hides, scuttled and sank her, being then about twenty leagues from the main of Cartagena.
The negroes and Indians were all slaves; the former seized on the coasts of Havana and Cartagena, the latter brought over from Yucatan. The latter, when provisions ran low, were marooned on one of the Caymans, north-west of Jamaica, where they would have perished had not a Dutch ship found and rescued them.
Within three days after, we arrived at the place which our Captain chose, at first, to leave his ship in, which was called by our Captain, Port Plenty; by reason we brought to thither continually all manner store of good victuals, which we took, going that way by sea, for the victualling of Cartagena and Nombre de Dios as also the Fleets going and coming out of Spain.
All of which your honours shall better perceive in the general description of Guiana, Peru, Nuevo Reyno, the kingdom of Popayan, and Rodas, with the province of Venezuela, to the bay of Uraba, behind Cartagena, westward, and to Amazons southward.
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