The dashing, swashbuckling, privateer hero is to Captain Morgan Rum as the benevolent-looking Quaker Man is to Quaker Oats -- a valuable brand identifier.

Henry Morgan did indeed ply the waters of the Caribbean in the 17th century. With the sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit support of the British monarch, Morgan amassed a fortune through violent attacks on ships and settlements throughout the Spanish Main. He and his pirate crews gained notoriety for plunder, torture, and rape.

Nevertheless, because his exploits enriched the crown, he was lionized in his home port of Port Royal, Jamaica and in Great Britain. His deeds caught up with him in the end, though. His last years, around age 50, he was prematurely aged, sallow, pot-bellied and too sick to take part in the government posts with which he'd been rewarded.

Morgan found his moment in history because of Food Disruptors like James Drax, a pioneering sugar planter of Barbados. Drax leveraged a family connection with Dutch merchant princes into vast wealth and a boost into aristocracy by cultivating and processing sugar cane.

A smart, ambitious, extremely hard-working businessman, Drax anticipated a European demand for sugar that sky-rocketed in the mid-17th century. He invested in capital-intensive machinery for the complex processing of sugar cane. He paid his creditors on time and made a huge return. And he did it by enslaving Africans abducted from their homeland.

The West Indies were at the nexus of a new economic paradigm based in exploitive mercantilism, including a huge slave trade as lucrative as it was deplorable. Morgan and Drax epitomize the colorful, successful white conquerors who ruined an entire ecosystem and rose to economic prominence through the most inhumane exploitation of other humans.

Drax and his fellow sugar barons drove their legions of slaves to perform grueling, dangerous, horrid work through techniques of unrelenting violence, degradation, and intimidation. Still, the white overlords of Caribbean sugar plantations lived in well-earned terror of slave uprisings, of which there were many.

The legacy of sugar barons and pirates of the Caribbean is sugar and rum.