Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2013 - 36

geopolitically than it was ﬁnancially,” says Talty. Two months
before the attack, England had signed a treaty with Spain in
which England agreed to suppress piracy in the Caribbean.
Though Morgan’s sacking came within the treaty’s eight-month
grace period, it still proved politically inconvenient. Morgan was
arrested and called back to England, but it was likely for show.
He was knighted and, in 1676, was sent back to the Caribbean,
this time as part of the establishment—lieutenant governor of
Jamaica. He died in 1688, happy and drunk, on a 400,000-acre
sugar plantation. “Piracy is not all it’s cracked up to be, perhaps,”
says Hanselmann, “except for Morgan, it was.”

HERE ARE TWO “Old Panamas” in Panama City: Casco

Viejo, the historic district where the town was rebuilt
after Morgan’s attack, and Panama Viejo, the ruins of
the original. Next to Panama Viejo is the museum of Patronato Panamá Viejo, which includes the conservation lab that
is handling the cannons retrieved by Hanselmann and his colleagues. The six cannons rest in water baths in the facility, where
researchers hope to learn how they got to be on Lajas Reef.
Ruth Brown, formerly of the Royal Armouries in the Tower

The cannons retrieved from Lajas Reef are being conserved in
a laboratory in Panama City. Those freed of concretion display
marks that are consistent with the kinds of armaments Henry
Morgan’s ships would have carried.

of London, has several decades of experience studying cannons,
and was called on to help identify the Lajas Reef ﬁnds. The ﬁrst
telling detail is the size of the guns. They are short, of small caliber. The four smallest are likely to have been deck guns. Pirates
and privateers either seized their cannons or purchased them
on the secondary market, often resulting in a diverse collection
of sizes and makes. No two among them are the same.
Two have been treated, using saws and wire brushes, to remove
the stony concretion around them. Brown, who examined photographs of the cannons, has looked at their shapes, designs, ring
patterns, settings, build quality, and markings. The cannons carry
weight marks in English units and a “P” indicating they had been
“proofed.” “That means someone’s tried it out and it hasn’t blown
up in their face,” says Brown. After the 1690s, makers’ marks were
cast on cannon trunnions, but these cannons lack such marks,
strongly suggesting they were made earlier. The absence of broad
arrows means they were not military cannons, but were used by
English merchants or pirates. “Everything is consistent with what
36

you would expect [for a Morgan ship], but there’s no killer blow
either way,” says Brown. She hopes that one of the others might
hold a maker’s mark that will help pin the age of the cannons
down more securely. The evidence so far, and the fact that no
other ships from the period are known to have wrecked on the
reef, help make a strong circumstantial case that Hanselmann’s
team has indeed found the only known archaeological remains
of Morgan’s Panamanian raid.
There are tantalizing hints that more lies buried near the
reef. Damage on the reef suggests that much has already
been removed. Online auctions have oﬀered items claimed
to have come from Lajas Reef, including a hand grenade,
a breechblock, and a 17-inch pewter plate marked “Port
Royal”—perhaps direct evidence of Morgan’s presence. Also,
a report from a treasure hunter in the 1970s stated that there
were once more than 140 cannons on the reef, along with 22
anchors, thousands of cannonballs, buckles, muskets, and even
an inscribed pocket watch. When the same man returned
years later, most of the material was gone. But some may
remain, buried under the sand. “We have some really promising clusters of anomalies that are just to the west of the reef,”
says Hanselmann. “Given prevailing winds, river current, and
ocean current, that would be a good [resting] place for ships
that sank after having hit the reef and then being pushed oﬀ.”
Hanselmann and his team hope to ﬁnd remains of the ships
themselves, which could tell them about life in a privateer ﬂeet.
“We don’t know much about what it really, truly was like to be a
pirate or a privateer,” says Hanselmann. Pirate society was known
for a certain kind of egalitarianism. If signiﬁcant portions of ships
are found, spatial analysis of their layouts or modiﬁcations might
reveal some of these social dynamics, such as whether Morgan
had his own cabin or shared quarters with his men, as some pirate
captains had. The design of the ship itself could reﬂect its culture.
After announcing the retrieval of the cannons in a press
conference in 2010, Hanselmann’s team was approached by
representatives of the Captain Morgan Rum Brand. Sensing
an opportunity for marketing and media, they asked how they
could help. “Well, write us a check,” Hanselmann told them.
So they did—supporting the last two ﬁeld seasons. The 2011
expedition was the team’s ﬁrst full ﬁeld season of magnetometer surveys and circle searches, followed by another in 2012.
They have already found one shipwreck, perhaps a Spanish
merchant vessel (see “Horseshoe Wreck,” page 37), that is
helping provide some of the socioeconomic context into which
Morgan’s ﬂeet sailed in 1671.
It is thought—with good reason—that there are many more
wrecks to be found among the magnetic anomalies beyond
Lajas Reef. Twenty ships are known to have gone down in
the immediate area, with more than 12 from the Gold Rush
period alone, including Lafayette, a steamer that burned with
Gold Rush passengers aboard in 1851. There are possibly many
more. The search for Morgan’s ships is just one piece of what
will be a cluster of projects looking at diﬀerent wrecks, diﬀerent time periods, and related sites on land, including the fort
and the now-vanished Gold Rush boomtown known as Y
ankee
Chagres. “Through this overarching study, people can now pick
ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2013

Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2013