“Nothing is as good or as bad as the telling of it”
—John Steinbeck
Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck was only 27 years old when he published his first novel, Cup of Gold. Although this debut effort is considered a minor work relative to the masterpieces that followed, it brims with the lush prose and vivid imagination that mark the earliest signs of Steinbeck’s genius.
His subject is the infamous privateer Sir Henry Morgan, a 17th-century Welshman who went to sea as a boy to carve out his reputation among the pirates, buccaneers, and freebooters of the Caribbean. At the time, Panama was the richest settlement in the New World, an impenetrable citadel overflowing with the blood-soaked riches of Spanish conquistadors. In Captain Morgan’s time, every blackhearted marooner in the Caribbean saw Panama as the mythical Cup of Gold, a grand prize of piracy.
Can’t Spell “Privateer” without “Pirate”
Though often labeled a pirate, Captain Morgan was more accurately a privateer. He operated under official English commissions during the Anglo-Spanish Wars, raiding strongholds on the Spanish Main with brutal efficiency. His 1671 sack of Panama, in which he ascended the Chagres River (now the Panama Canal) and then bushwhacked through nearly impenetrable jungle to launch his attack, cemented his reputation as both a ruthless plunderer and a skilled tactician.
Eventually, King Charles II recalled Morgan to England and arrested him for violating a treaty with Spain. Soon realizing Morgan’s popular appeal as a national hero, Charles knighted the captain and sent him back to the Caribbean to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. There Morgan lived out his days drinking and amassing wealth through his pirate connections. As a government official, he also prosecuted and possibly even hanged some of the same buccaneers who had sailed alongside him.
Morgan’s fictionalized story is likewise one of contradictions. He rises from nothing, seizes vast riches, and yet finds no lasting satisfaction. In Steinbeck’s hands, Morgan becomes a tragic figure who achieves everything he desires, only to find himself haunted by an ever-present longing for something more. Cup of Gold is not simply a swashbuckling historical novel. Despite its lofty, romantic style, it is a serious meditation on unchecked ambition, loneliness, and the hollowness of worldly success.
Most remarkable is the fact that the author had limited maritime experience when he wrote it. Yet, Steinbeck displays an almost prophetic understanding of the call of the sea, the grandeur of ships, and the restless spirit of those who leave land behind in search of something greater.
In 2025, Cup of Gold became the first of Steinbeck’s novels to enter the public domain. The passages excerpted here begin in Chapter II as an adolescent Henry Morgan travels from his boyhood home in rural Wales to the bustling port of Cardiff. From there he sails across the Atlantic to the West Indies. But before he can go “a-buccaneering,” he will find himself betrayed and sold into indentured servitude in Barbados. Just as these scenes depict the naïve young pirate’s departure for infamy, they echo today with the bold young writer’s first steps toward fame.—Editor
Cup of Gold
A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History
With breaking day, Henry was in the outskirts of Cardiff, all his terror gone and a new blossoming wonder in him. For it was an unbelievable thing, this city of houses, rank on rank—no two of them exactly alike—the lines of them stretching out endlessly like an army in the mud. He had never considered such magnitude when people spoke of cities.
Down a long street he went until he came at last to the docks with their fields of masts like growing wheat, and their clouds and cobwebs of brown rigging in an apparent frenzy of disorder. There was loading of bundles and barrels and slaughtered animals into some of the ships, and others were sending out of their curved bellies goods in queer foreign boxes and sacks of braided straw. A tremendous bustle of excitement lived about the docks.
A loud song burst out of a ship just getting under weigh, and the words were clear, beautiful foreign words. The water slapping smooth hulls was a joy to him to the point of pain. He felt that he had come home again to a known, loved place, after days and nights of mad delirium. Now a great song of many voices came from the moving barque, and its brown anchor rose from the water; its sails dropped from the yards and caught the morning wind. The barque slid from its berth and moved softly down the channel.
Onward he walked to where the ships were careened, showing weeds and barnacles, gathered in many oceans, hanging to their shining sides. Here was the short, quick hammering of the calkers and the rasp of iron on wood, and brusque commands built up to roars by the speaking trumpets.
When the sun was well up, Henry began to feel hungry. He wandered slowly back to the town to find his breakfast, reluctant to leave the docks even for food. Now the crimps were coming out of their holes, and the sniffling gamblers who preyed on sailors. Here and there a disheveled, sleepy-eyed woman scurried homeward as though fearing to be caught by the sun. Seamen on shore leave rubbed their puffed eyes and looked into the sky for weather signs as they lounged against the walls. Henry wondered what these men had seen in the sailing days of their lives. He stepped aside for a line of carts and tumbrils loaded with boxes and bales for the ships, and immediately had to dodge another line coming away, loaded with goods from across the sea.
Editor’s note: On the Cardiff docks young Henry meets a sailor named Tim, who gets the boy passage on a ship. Tim conspires with the ship’s master to have Henry sold into indentured servitude when they reach Barbados. But first, Henry is captivated by the old sailor’s stories.
“And where is it that you go sailing?”
“Ah! any place that ships go I do be sailing,” replied Tim. “I’m an honest sailor out of Cork with no fault on me save never having the shine of a coin to my pocket. And I wonder, now, how I’m to be paying for the fine breakfast, and me with never a shine,” he said slowly and emphatically.
“Why, if you have no money, I’ll buy your breakfast—so you will be telling me of the sea and ships.”
They came again to the docks and the beautiful ships. The smell of tar and sunburned hemp and the sweetness of the sea breathed in to them from off the water. At last, far down the row, Henry saw a great black ship, and Bristol Girl painted in letters of gold on her prow. And the town and all the flat hulks became ugly and squalid beside this beauty of the sea. The curved running lines of her and the sensuous sureness of her were tonic things to make you gasp in your breath with pleasure. New white sails clung to her yards like long, slender cocoons of silk worms, and there was fresh yellow paint on her decks. She lay there, lifting slightly on a slow swell, champing, impatient to be flying off to any land of your imagination. A black Sheban queen she was, among the dull brown boats of the harbor.
“Oh, it’s a grand ship—a fine ship,” cried Henry, wonder-struck.
Tim was proud. “But only come aboard of her, and see the fittings—all new. I’ll be talking with the master about you.”
Henry stood in the waist while the big seaman walked aft and pulled his cap before a lean skeleton of a man in a worn uniform.
“I have a boy,” he said, though Henry could not hear; “a boy that’s set his heart in the Indies, and I’m thinking you might be liking to take him, sir.”
The hungry master scowled at him.
“Is he a strong boy who might be some good in the islands, Bo’s’n? So many of them die within the month, and there you have trouble the next trip.”
“He is there, behind me, sir. You can see him yourself, standing there—and very well made and close knit he is, too.”
The hungry master appraised Henry, running his eyes from the sturdy legs to the full chest. His approval grew.
“He is a strong boy, all right; and good work for you, Tim. You shall have drink money of it and a little extra ration of rum at sea. But does he know anything about the arrangement?”
“Never a bit.”
“Well, then, don’t tell him. Put him to working in the galley. He’ll think he’s working out his passage. No use of caterwauling and disturbing the men off watch. Let him find out when he gets there.” The master smiled and paced away from Tim.
“You can be going with us in the ship,” the sailor cried, and Henry could not move for his pleasure. “But,” Tim continued seriously, “the four pound is not enough for passage. You’ll be working a bit in the galley and we sailing.”
“Anything,” Henry said, “anything I’ll do, so only I can go with you.”
They were starting for the Indies—the fine, far Indies where boys’ dreams lived. The great sun of the morning lay struggling in gray mist, and on the deck the seamen swarmed like the angry populace of a broken hive. There were short orders and sailors leaping up the shrouds to edge along the yards. Circling men were singing the song of the capstan while the anchors rose out of the sea and clung to the sides like brown, dripping moths.
Off for the Indies—the white sails knew it as they flung out and filled delicately as silken things; the black ship knew it and rode proudly on the fleeing tide before a fresh little morning wind. Carefully the Bristol Girl crept out of the shipping and down the long channel.
” He would stand on the deck, braced against a mast, face into the wind, cutting it with his chin as the prow cut the water…”
The mist was slowly mixing with the sky. Now the coast of Cambria became blue and paler blue until it faded into the straight horizon like a mad vision of the desert. The black mountains were a cloud, and then a trifle of pale smoke; then Cambria was gone, as though it had never been.
Porlock they passed on the port side, and Ilfracombe, and many vague villages tucked in the folds of Devon. The fair, sweet wind carried them by Stratton and Camelford. Cornwall was slipping off behind them, league on blue league. Then Land’s End, the pointed tip of Britain’s chin; and, as they rounded to the southward, Winter came in at last.
The sea rose up and snarled at them, while the ship ran before the crying dogs of the wind like a strong, confident stag; ran bravely under courses and spritsail. The wind howled out of Winter’s home in the north, and the Bristol Girl mocked it across its face to the southwest. It was cold; the freezing shrouds twanged in the wind like great harp strings plucked by a demented giant, and the yards groaned their complaint to the tugging sails.
Four wild days the persistent storm chased them out to sea with the ship in joy at the struggle. The seamen gathered in the forecastle to boast of her fleetness and the tight shape of her. And in this time Henry exulted like a young god. The wind’s frenzy was his frenzy. He would stand on the deck, braced against a mast, face into the wind, cutting it with his chin as the prow cut the water, and a chanting exultation filled his chest to bursting—joy like a pain. The cold wiped off the lenses of his eyes so that he saw more clearly into the drawn distance lying in a circle around him. Here was the old desire surfeited with a new; for the winds brought longing to have sweeping wings and the whole, endless sky for scope. The ship was a rocking, quaking prison for him who would fly ahead and up. Ah! to be a god and ride on the storm! Not under it. Here was the intoxication of the winds, a desire which satisfied desire while it led his yearning onward. He cried for the shoulders of omnipotence, and the elements blew into his muscles a new strength.
Then, as quickly as the devil servants of the year had rushed at them, they slunk away, leaving a clear, clean sea. The ship rode under full sail before the eternal trade wind. It is a fresh, fair wind out of heaven, breathed by the God of Navigation for the tall ships with sails. All the tension was gone from them; the sailors played about the deck like wild, strong children—for there is young happiness in the trade wind.
Now they had sailed into a warm sea, and a warm wind drove them on. Henry and the cook would stand at the rail, watching the triangle fins of sharks cut back and forth across their wake waiting for refuse. They saw little brown clusters of weed go floating by, and the leisurely, straight-swimming pilot fish on the point of the prow. Once the cook pointed to the brown birds with long, slender wings following them; hanging, hovering, dipping, swaying, always flying, never resting.
“See these restless ones,” the man said. “Like questing souls they are, indeed; and some say they are the souls of sailors drowned, souls so thick with sins that they may never rest from one year to another. Others swear that these birds lay their eggs in floating nests built on the planks of lost ships; and others, still, that they have no nests at all but are born full grown of the white lip of a wave and instantly start their life-long flight. Ay! the restless ones.”
The ship started a school of fliers that skipped along the wave tops like shining silver coins.
“These are the ghosts of treasures lost at sea,” the cook went on, “the murder things, emeralds and diamonds and gold; the sins of men, committed for them, stick to them and make them haunt the ocean. Ah! it’s a poor thing if a sailor will not make a grand tale about it.”
Henry pointed to a great tortoise asleep on the surface. “And what is the tale of the turtles?” he asked.
“Nothing; only food. It is not likely that a man will be making romances about the thing he eats. Such things are too close to him, and the romance contaminated out of them. But these same beasts have been the saving of a number of ships, and the means of making flesh on some that might otherwise be white bones on the deck of a derelict. The meat of turtles is sweet and good. Sometimes when the buccaneers are not in the way of getting wild beef, they stock their ships with these and so sail.”
There is a peace in the tropic oceans which passes a desire for understanding. Destination is no longer an end, but only to be sailing, sailing, out of the kingdom of time. For months and years they seemed to slip onward, but there was no impatience in the crew. They did their work, and lay about the deck all in a strange, happy lethargy.
