Michael Merry

The Golden Altar Michael Merry

In January of 1671 the pirate Henry Morgan captured and sacked Panama City. Morgan took considerable booty Panama but missed the fabled Golden Altar, a priceless artifact which a local priest had painted with creosote to avoid detection. This story tells of Morgan's rage when he discovered what he had overlooked. Continuing, it relates how a descendant, Major Henry Morgan, a British Army officer who passed through Panama after the Falkland's War, returns in 1985 to steal the altar. Descriptions of Morgan's raid in 1671 and of the City of Panama in 1985 are accurate. However, the unviolated Golden Altar still resides today in the church of San Jose, close to where General Manuel Antonio Noriega's infamous Defense Forces headquarters stood until 1989, when the U. S. invasion destroyed the complex, and life in Panama changed forever.