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Henry Morgan and the Black Swan

• Message 1. 

  Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Monday, 19th December 2011

  I've just finished watching 'The Black Swan' on Film 4, which is a 1942 film starring Tyrone Power, and as usual for 'historical' films of those times, it was filled with inaccuracies. That said, it did a much better job of sticking to some semblance of the truth than a lot of the rubbish that came out of Hollywood at that time.
  
  It is true that Henry Morgan was sent back to England in chains, and was down to be hanged, but was granted a royal pardon, and returned to Jamaica as a representative of the Crown, determined to follow the orders of King Charles II to stamp out the piracy that had made him a rich man. But the truth deviates from there a bit....
  
  1) Morgan was never made governor of Jamaica. He served as lieutenant governor on three occasions, only serving as acting governor during the times when one governor went back to Jamaica, and before another one arrived.
  
  2) Morgan was not interested in ridding the seas of pirates, and certainly would not have gone to Maracaibo to fight pirates on behalf of the Spaniards. He and his governors were only interested in driving pirates out of Port Royal. They didn't really care about pirates and their bases in Tortuga or elsewhere.
  
  3) Tortuga is off the coast of Hispaniola, not Curacao....
  
  4) The Assembly had no power to impeach the governor. The Hollywood directors seem to be mixing up American laws with British laws at the time. The Assembly represented the white planters, while the governor was the representative of the Crown. Only the king could recall the governor.
  
  5) The 'government house' would not have been in Port Royal, which was only a port. The administrative centre of Jamaica at the time was Spanish Town.
  
  All in all, for an old movie, it didn't have that many historical flaws, compared to others. But it still annoys me to see what I perceive to be laziness in movies.

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Monday, 19th December 2011

  If you want this discussion to last more than 36 hours, you'd better join the 'EXbeeb' group on historum.com, shivfan, most of us have set up over there and on englistory.com.
  If you do join either keep your same name or post here to tell us your new one.
  This is also for anyone else who looks in.

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• Message 3

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Tuesday, 20th December 2011

  The 'government house' would not have been in Port Royal, which was only a port. The administrative centre of Jamaica at the time was Spanish Town. 
  Very good point.
  
  And I don't think that it's just Americans who might be tempted to believe that Port Royal was the administrative capital of Jamaica before Kingston. The word 'royal' would also push buttons and blow whistles for many casual British perusers of history and thus lead to automatic but erroneous assumptions.

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