The Golden Altar

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Michael J. Merry was educated at the Royal Liberty School in Essex, England. He moved to Panama in 1959. When the Panama National Guard staged their coup in 1968, he drove the escape vehicle with the President and several Ministers through the military blockade to safety in the Canal Zone. He became Division Vice President of a major U.S. news operation in Latin America, traveling widely in the process. He was in Argentina when the Army revolted in 1987 and in Venezuela during the attempted coup by Lt. Colonel (now President) Hugo Chávez in 1992. He eventually moved to Miami to script two nationally televised financial programs and became Managing Editor of a widely read financial report. Mr. Merry and his wife in Miami Shores, Florida.