arrests might create a disturbance among the
friends of the culprits, or at least deter the buccaneers from coming in
under the declaration of amnesty, did not send the admiral to England
until the following spring. On 6th April 1672 Morgan sailed from Jamaica
a prisoner in the frigate "Welcome."[345] He sailed, however, with the
universal respect and sympathy of all parties in the colony. Lynch
himself calls him "an honest, brave fellow," and Major James Banister in
a letter to the Secretary of State recommends him to the esteem of
Arlington as "a very well deserving person, and one of great courage and
conduct, who may, with his Majesty's pleasure, perform good service at
home, and be very advantageous to the island if war should break forth
with the Spaniard."[346]

Indeed Morgan, the buccaneer, was soon in high favour at the dissolute
court of Charles II., and when in January 1674 the Earl of Carlisle was
chosen Governor of Jamaica, Morgan was selected as his deputy[347]--an
act which must have entirely neutralized in Spanish Councils the effect
of his arrest a year and a half earlier. Lord Carlisle, however, did not
go out to Jamaica until 1678, and meanwhile in April a commission to be
governor was issued to Lord Vaughan,[348] and several months later
another to Morgan as lieutenant-governor.[349] Vaughan arrived in
Jamaica in the middle of March 1675; but Morgan, whom the king in the
meantime had knighted, sailed ahead of Vaughan, apparently in defiance
of the governor's orders, and although shipwrecked on the Isle la Vache,
reached Jamaica a week before his superior.[350] It seems that Sir
Thomas Modyford sailed for Jamaica with Morgan, and the return of these
two arch-offenders to the West Indies filled the Spanish Court with new
alarms. The Spanish ambassador in London presented a memorial of protest
to the English king,[351] and in Spain the Council of War blossomed into
fresh activity to secure the defence of the West Indies and the coasts
of the South Sea.[352] Ever since 1672, indeed, the Spaniards moved by
some strange infatuation, had persisted in a course of active hostility
to the English in the West Indies. Could the Spanish Government have
realized the inherent weakness of its American possessions, could it
have been informed of the scantiness of the population in proportion to
the large extent of territory and coast-line to be defended, could it
have known how in the midst of such rich, unpeopled co