Captain Morgan and the Pirates of the Caribbean

Now, as I said, Captain Henry Morgan now has a rum brand named after him, which commemorates the longstanding connection between pirates like him and rum.

This is no accident.

Henry Morgan and many of the other pirates in today's story are operating in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean is the center of sugarcane plantations, and therefore rum production, because rum is made from the juice of the sugarcane.

Captain Morgan and other pirates like him were more than happy to drink the rum they found on board ships they seized, although they were equally content to drink their way through casks of port or Spanish wine, whatever was available.

But rum was most readily available in the many taverns and bars available on shore.

And so the drink of choice for pirates in the Caribbean was rum.

But Henry Morgan didn't start his life in the rum-soaked Caribbean.

In fact, he was born in the damp Welsh countryside, probably to a farming family, round about 1635.

And how he got to the Caribbean isn't exactly clear.

But what we do know is that two of his uncles served as soldiers of fortune in the British civil wars.

So essentially, they worked as mercenaries.

Therefore, undertaking adventure in very dangerous and violent situations was something that you could say ran in the family.

We don't know exactly how Henry Morgan made his way to the Caribbean, but we do know what he found when he got there.

The world of the mid-1600s, in which young Henry Morgan comes of age, is a world that is already full of piracy, and it's been that way for at least a century.

In our last episode on this podcast, we covered the career of Francis Drake, an English pirate, or privateer, if you like, who made his career attacking Spanish ships and Spanish colonies in the Spanish Main.

Now, the Spanish Main is just another label for the same area.

We can call it the Caribbean, because essentially it's a circle.

It contains all the famous Caribbean islands you're familiar with, places like Jamaica, The Bahamas, and Trinidad.

But it also contains the edge of Florida, parts of Mexico, Panama, and the coast of Venezuela.

Now, the Spanish called this the Spanish Main because they believed that they had exclusive rights to it.

So the Caribbean Sea and all the islands in that area were Spanish colonies.

But other countries had long contested this Spanish claim.

Francis Drake did so, and this has been going on for the last century.

So it's no longer just the Spanish inside the Spanish Main, or the Caribbean, as we're going to call it.

Confusingly, the same area is also referred to by the English as the West Indies.