Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (16 page)

New Holland’s historical record supports the notion that nothing of consequence happened in the colony without Abraham Cohen knowing and abetting it. When the Supreme Council decided to capture the guerrilla leader Vieira, they hired Cohen to spring the trap; when the Dutch ran out of money to pay troops, Cohen advanced the funds; when merchants looked to flee, he had the Supreme Council issue arms to Jews who vowed to stay. A sonnet composed by a Jewish poet of Amsterdam, Daniel Levi de Barrios (1625–79), celebrated Cohen’s patriotic behavior.
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It reads, in part:

Today Abraham Cohen enjoys the spotlight of the Empire…in nine years continuous, with great magnanimity [he] helped without number Jew and Christian alike in the atrocious misery with what they needed.

On January 26, 1654, New Holland surrendered. Two days later, Recife was occupied; agents of the Inquisition moved into Prince Maurice’s castle, and Zur Israel was converted into an army barracks.
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Jews were given three months to leave or be handed over to the Inquisition. Among the 650 Jews who remained to the very end were the Cohen Henriques brothers and their Amsterdam comrades. For twenty-four years, Recife had been a Rock of Israel. Now, threatened with the Holy Fire, the Jews were forced to hit the familiar Diaspora road again. The question that concerned them was, Where next?

While the Rock of Israel still stood firm on the Rock of Brazil, elsewhere in the New World, Inquisition flames blazed. In Peru and Mexico in the late 1630s and 1640s, the leaders of the empire’s two major secret Jewish communities were arrested for conspiring to overthrow Spanish rule. In each case the Judaizers were charged with being part of La Complicidad Grande, the Great Conspiracy. Peru’s Jewish leaders were imprisoned for three years before being burned at the stake, while those in Mexico were confined in “secret cells” for up to eight years before suffering the same fate.

The destruction of the New World’s two major covert colonies of Jews weighed heavily on those about to flee Recife. To realize the Holy Terror’s impact on the psyches of all pioneer Jews, we need to review the rise and fiscal dominance of these mercantile outlaws. The following accounts are condensed from the writings of noted historian Seymour Liebman on the Great Conspiracy in Peru and Mexico.
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The richest Jewish community in the richest colony in the New World began when a shepherd pulling up a weed bush saw, to his astonishment, that the stones sticking to the roots were actually chunks of silver. A mountain of silver had been discovered, and in its shadow a community of Jews evolved to manage it. From all over the New World, they came to deal in the precious metal that circulated as pieces of eight, the major currency of the period. The best became the silver merchants of Potosí.

With its silver mountain and gangs of Indian slaves, who kept the mine working nonstop, Potosí was a surreal combination of California during the gold rush and Pharaoh’s Egypt. In 1622, the city was the largest in the New World (population 120,000, mostly Indian) and was reported to be “overrun” with Jews. The Inquisition report stated: “Potosí is filled with Portuguese, all of the Hebrew nation…the export of silver is almost exclusively in the hands of crypto Jews.”

In the 1630s, before the arrival of the Grand Inquisitor and his white-hooded minions, the Jews in Recife, Peru, and Mexico were in regular contact with one another, their transactions fueled by the silver merchants. Jewish wealth and power in the New World was at its peak. But by the end of the decade, the mountain of silver had attracted holier-than-thou claim jumpers crying heresy, and Peru’s secret Jews were targeted. Thousands of names are contained in the trial records of the Lima Inquisition. Chief Inquisitor Andrés Juan Gaitan, who presided over the trials, said that heresy and conspiracy, not greed, had caused him to act. Others questioned his motives when he began traveling about in a silver coach drawn by six horses in silver harness, sporting silver horseshoes.

Still, considering what happened in Brazil, where false conversos assisted the Dutch invasion, there is no reason to doubt that overthrowing Spanish rule, in league with the Dutch, was an option Peru’s covert Jews considered. As previously noted, when the Portuguese authorities received the news, they immediately warned Spain’s king that the capture of Brazil by Hollanders and Jews was “not so much to make themselves masters of the sugar of Brazil as of the silver of Peru.”

In Lima, Peru’s capital, the silver merchants’ agents funneled silver skimmed from the mines out of the country, and soon were as wealthy as their suppliers. Not content to play by the rules of mercantilism, they avoided Seville and dealt directly with Europe. At the time of Peru’s Great Conspiracy of 1636, their contraband trade with Europe was greater than Peru’s legitimate trade with Spain. An informer’s letter to Inquisitor Gaitan, as quoted by Liebman, charged:

The city is thick with them. Everything goes through their hands. They are in absolute control of the traffic in merchandise ranging from brocade to sackcloth, diamonds to cumin seeds…to the most precious pearl and vilest Guinea black. They are the masters of commerce.

Jewish merchants reportedly regarded Spanish Christians as “interlopers” whose interest was “confined to the extraction of silver,” and allowed them entry into the silver market only if they took on a Jewish partner approved by Manuel Batista Pérez, described in the Inquisitor’s report as the city’s “wealthiest and most cultured Jew.” Born in Seville in 1593, Pérez moved to Lima with his wife and three children and a hefty bankroll to invest for his brothers-in-law back in Spain. Though Spanish, Manuel called himself Portuguese because, as noted, Spanish New Christians were not allowed in the New World.

The Inquisitors reported that Pérez had a huge library, “[was] well versed in theology…foremost in the observance of the Law of Moses, [and was] held as an oracle by the Hebrew nation.” He owned silver shops, invested in banking, and owned a number of mule trains that carried the bars of silver on a thousand-mile journey across the Andes to Lima (and on the sly, via the Río de la Plata, south to Buenos Aires).

Pérez, addressed by fellow Jews as “the Great Captain,” was tried as the head of La Complicidad Grande. He was accused of having raised funds to finance a Dutch invasion, and of plotting to assist the Dutch army. The conspiracy began unraveling when a Lima merchant was charged with “adhering to the Law of Moses” for refusing to trade on a Saturday. Tortured, he revealed names; additional arrests and tortures followed, revealing more names.

In two days, over a hundred Jews were arrested. More would have been taken except, as the Inquisition reported, “the prisons are full. For lack of space we do not carry out a number of warrants in this city…people no longer trust each other, but go about in constant astonishment at the charges against a friend or comrade of whom they thought so much.” The city’s “most Christian gentlemen” were arrested:

No one of the accused Judaizers is being taken into custody who did not go about loaded with rosaries, relics, images, the ribbon of St. Augustine, the cordon of St. Francis and other devotions and many with horsehair shirts and disciplines; they know the whole catechism and they always say the rosary.

In Lima’s public square on January 23, 1639, an auto-da-fé condemned sixty-one Jews, and consigned Pérez and eleven others to be purified by fire. Many of the rest were sentenced to serve as oarsmen on Spanish galleys, in effect a death sentence, as oarsmen usually died before their time was up.

Pérez’s estates were auctioned off for the modern equivalent of nearly $20 million. And that amount was undervalued: Inquisitor Gaitan had his agents bid for the property, and it was probably not a good idea to challenge their bids. When leading merchants accused Gaitan of having used his powers for mercenary reasons, he justified the arrests: “First because they are Judaizing heretics. Second, they conspired with the invading Dutch to blow up the city of Guadalupe by which they had begun to bore a hole in the powder magazine.”

Whatever the truth of the charge, a noted researcher concluded that Gaitan’s primary motive was greed: “The real crime against these and the two thousand Portuguese residing at that time in the country was that they made great fortunes…a plot imputed to them to seize the Kingdom of Peru from Spain was a political pretext to go with a religious pretext. Branded Jewish revolutionaries, there was no escape for them.”

In the aftermath of the great auto-da-fé of 1639, the money world of Peru was overturned, Lima’s leading bank failed, and Old Christians became the new power brokers. Gaitan and his assistants “speculated with the money of the Holy Office, and waxed rich thereon, took mistresses and dressed like young bloods in silk and lace.”

Some of Lima’s Jews escaped to Mexico, including Manuel Pérez’s cousin, who married into the “first family” of Jews there, headed by Simon Vaez and his wife, Juana Henriquez. But there was no escape. The following year the Inquisition descended on Mexico.

In a period of relative peace, before their eight-year nightmare, about three thousand Jews were secretly settled throughout Mexico. In Mexico City, there were three congregations that can be roughly classified as orthodox, conservative, and reformed. There were contacts between them, but each had its own social structure and business dealings that carried over into imprisonment. Their downfall came when a priest’s servant claimed that he overheard four Portuguese speaking on a city street one summer night. They reportedly said: “If there were four more men as courageous as they in the city, they would set fire to the House of the Inquisition and the Inquisitors would burn.”

On July 7, 1642, the resulting investigation announced: “The Kingdom of Mexico is in the hands of Judaizers!” Authorities sealed the borders, and Jewish leaders began disappearing. Seized after midnight, they were confined to “secret cells.” Eventually more than four hundred Jews were imprisoned, overflowing the Inquisition prison and a convent next door (the nuns had to move).

Spies and tortured interrogations with the
porto
had the prisoners scrambling to keep their confessions in line with those of others in the community. The
porto
was Mexico’s version of the rack: a naked prisoner lay faceup on an iron bedframe, tied by cords attached to handles on the side of the bed. Each turn of the handle tightened the cords’ viselike pressure. The torturer was limited to six turns of a handle, as more would cause the cords to cut through to the bone, and it was against Inquisition rules to draw blood. At first each group resisted, confident that
they
would be released, that
their
connections or plan would work. But as time went on, and their expected release did not occur, confessions were made. Individual files, compiled over the decade, run to hundreds of pages. The torturous years produced extreme effects, including an alleged Messiah; when he proved not to be the one, another group looked to a baby born in an Inquisition cell; others said a lovely child they called “Little Dove” was to be the Madonna.

In 1646, four years after the first arrest, the trials began. Each year, from 1646 through 1649, an auto-da-fé was held and a few dozen Jews were tried and sentenced. The autos-da-fé were treated as a fiesta, and the whole country turned out for these Judgment Days in the capital. No prisoner knew until the eve of the auto-da-fé if he or she would be tried on the morrow. Some of the accused spent eight years in the secret cells before being brought to trial. Only four Jews were acquitted. The usual sentence was two hundred lashes and life imprisonment. Nearly a hundred were burned at the stake.

During this nightmare decade, the prisoners never stopped seeking their release: Rumors were hot—“the Portuguese are sending an Armada to conquer New Spain and liberate us.” Plots were convoluted—one leader’s uncle was married to the sister of the wife of the king’s attorney…and a little more “George” (money) would do the trick. Wishful thinking was the order of the day—“The Holy Pontiff and the king will send a general pardon on the next flotilla because they would not permit such important families to go out in autos.” But they did.

Portugal’s independence at the beginning of the decade had halted the
penetración Portuguesa
, the flow of Portuguese Jews to Spanish colonies, and in the 1640s those who were there came under increasing scrutiny. King Philip no longer relied on Jews for assistance in his colonies, and without his intercession, the arrests and autos-da-fé in the aftermath of Mexico’s Great Conspiracy destroyed the community.

By the time of the Brazil exodus, the elimination of these two enclaves once again made the New World off-limits to Jews. On the eve of their expulsion, their options were few: They might settle one of the small Caribbean islands,
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return to Holland, or venture farther north to a colony known as New Amsterdam. Moses Cohen Henriques at this time was fifty-three and Abraham forty-nine. They and their mates had been championing Jewish rights most of their lives. Taking a cue from their childhood rabbi, who had shown that age was irrelevant when it came to continuing the struggle, Rabbi Palache’s old boys were spurred into action. Although they had been defeated in Brazil, and were well into middle age, their determination, creativity, and courage over the next two decades would win most of the freedoms that Jews in the West enjoy today.

Chapter Seven

EXODUS TO HERETIC ISLAND

I
n February 1654, Abraham Cohen bade a solemn farewell to friends and family at the Recife dockside. After a decadelong civil war, Dutch Brazil was no more; Jews had until April to quit the land or be turned over to the Inquisition. Cohen and the remaining hundred or so Jewish families would depart the following month aboard fourteen ships sent from Holland to carry them to Amsterdam. All hoped to meet again in another New World sanctuary, but for now their futures were unclear.

Two ships embarked that day—one to Curaçao, the Dutch island north of Brazil, the other to a faraway island in the northern climes purchased by a Dutch settler thirty years before for twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets and named New Amsterdam by its optimistic owner. Aboard the Curaçao-bound ship were Cohen’s twenty-four-year-old son Jacob, who would be attending the wedding of a namesake cousin,
^*7
and his brother Moses, who intended to return to his seafaring ways. Taking passage on the other ship, the
Falcon
, on the more ambitious voyage, were Cohen’s cousin Benjamin Bueno Mesquita and his two sons, as well as a lifelong friend, the widower Abraham Israel and his son, Isaac.

The Curaçao sailing was uneventful. Not so the
Falcon
’s. Intending to put in at the French island of Martinique to drop off passengers and take on provisions, the ship ran into a ferocious storm. For ten days, gale-force winds, howling out of the northeast, blew the
Falcon
far off course into the western Caribbean. By the time the storm let up, the refugees found themselves in enemy waters “driven against their will by adverse winds to the island of Jamaica.”
¹

Jamaica lay in the middle of the shipping lanes linking the New World with the Old. With its surrounding waters frequented by pirates lying in wait for Spain’s treasure-laden ships and cargo vessels, all foreign boats were suspect. In late April, the
Falcon
was spotted off Jamaica’s southeast coast, and an armed squadron was dispatched to bring it to port. Although its captain, Jan Craeck, explained that his passengers—a few dozen Jews and a small congregation of Calvinists—were refugees fleeing Brazil, Jamaica’s authorities refused to allow them to depart.

Despite the obvious truth of the captain’s statement, the local Spanish leaders had a vested interest in rejecting it. Years before, they had devised a nefarious scheme to overthrow the island’s owners, Columbus’s heirs, and gain legal right to their lands. As the island belonged to the progeny of the great explorer, no matter how large or prosperous a settler’s estate, it was not his. The discoverer’s family owned every inch, rendering the ranchers little more than legalized squatters. In order to obtain title to their estancias, they would first have to arrange for the Spanish Crown to reclaim the island. The arrival of an enemy ship with “suspect heretics” aboard enabled them to put into play their plan to oust the family.

The detained passengers had no way of knowing that they had become pawns in a century-long conflict that had been simmering since the island had been given away. While converted Jews, working with the Columbus family, operated the island as a profitable way station for ships of any nation, and as a transshipment port for cargo going to and from the New World, local hidalgos stewed over their legal status, and were determined to end it by any means. The Jews’ protected status was about to change, but not the way the local Spaniards envisioned.
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From Jamaica’s founding in 1511, its converted Jews had lived peacefully under the protective wing of the Columbus family. They called themselves “Portugals” and though their religiosity was suspect, no one could seriously question their bona fides while the family kept the island off-limits to the Inquisition. This prohibition ended in 1622, when an ecclesiastic coup transferred local authority over the Church to the archdiocese of Santo Domingo.
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With a foreign bishop allied with Jamaica’s hidalgos dictating policy, the Holy Inquisition was granted access to the island. Jamaica’s big ranchers thereupon appointed themselves
familiars
of the Inquisition, and patiently awaited an opportunity to charge that the island was riddled with heresy. Such an accusation would give the Crown the excuse it needed to void its treaty with the family and take back Jamaica.

King Philip IV had been alerted from the start of his reign that the Columbus family was secretly mining gold and, working with the Portugals, ran the island as a major smuggling port. The capture of a heretic ship thus furnished the hidalgos with the excuse to summon the Holy Inquisitor from Colombia to investigate the suspect heretics and likewise expose the Portugals as Judaizers. No longer would Jamaica be subject to a feudal lord, and the hidden gold mine would revert to the king.

After the union of the Iberian nations in 1580, Jamaica’s conversos had felt themselves secure. The Columbus family had not only kept the Inquisition from darkening Jamaica’s shores, but had also kept out all high church officials. In 1582, a visiting cleric declared he was the first abbot to ever visit the island. Given Jamaica’s patrimony, the island attracted few permanent settlers. In the final decades of the sixteenth century, with the island population at a low point, nearly half were Portugals, and two successive governors were themselves conversos.
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As the century drew to a close, so did the halcyon days of the covert Hebrews. In 1596, a lawsuit between two contending Columbus heirs put Jamaica’s ownership on hold. With neither claimant having the right to appoint a new governor, Spain’s king named his own man. Dire consequences followed. Within days of his arrival, the governor, Don Melgarejo de Córdoba, reported to the king that Jamaica was a rogue island, existing solely on “illicit trade”: “The island is like a keystone, a convenient stopping place for corsairs & traders who infest the coast to fit out their ships and get provisions from its abundant store.” He was equally shocked by the lack of religious fealty: “The temples are ill-treated. No mass is said in the principal church because it leaks all over and the walls are falling down.”
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The Portugals had no compunction about doing business with Spain’s enemies. Trading with the Dutch and English ships was profitable, and their wares were more affordable than the manufactured goods and textiles carried from Spain, whose ships only stopped in Jamaica to take on provisions on their way to the rich cities on the Spanish Main. One illegal trader was the pirate known as Motta the Portuguese, whose Jewish descendants are prominent today in Jamaica and Panama. The governor charged that Motta and his partner Abraham, “a Fleming,” regularly called on Jamaica from a base in Cuba where they “put up shops and [play] games of bowls, and people go there from the country to be cured.” Apparently Motta and the Portugals shared a Judaic interest in literature, as the governor accused the pirate of trafficking in “prohibited books which sowed a bad seed among the natives and Negroes.”
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Melgarejo, in his crackdown on illicit trade, initiated a sea patrol by a brigantine and two naval launches to discourage foreign ships. The Portugals, faced with a leader out to destroy their livelihood, turned on him. The governor complained to His Majesty:

Lampoons are insolently made on me, saying that I should let them live and not oppress them. They say that some night they will send 100 Englishmen to take me prisoner. All these enmities arise from my defending Your Majesty’s reputation and commands. I would punish these people but there is no strong jail, nor is there anybody of whom I could ask assistance except the delinquents themselves and their relatives, for they are all over the country…I am very much in danger that these people may take my life.
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To secure his person, he recruited four hundred soldiers from Puerto Rico and quartered fifty of them in his home. His action was endorsed by Jamaica’s Cabildo, a five-man governing body of wealthy planters. Although they also profited from what was known as the “silent trade,” they saw its suppression as an opportunity to discredit the Columbus family. Eventually the divergent interests of the Portugals, loyal to the Columbus family, and the Cabildo ranchers, who stood to gain title to their lands only if the Spanish king reclaimed Jamaica, made a clash between the two groups inevitable.

Melgarejo ruled for ten years and accomplished much: he repopulated the island, built up its defenses, and suppressed piracy and illegal trade while holding off accusations he was heavily engaged in it.
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But he came up empty in his search for Columbus’s gold mine. In his final communiqué to the king, he wrote that he was sure the mine was secreted in the Blue Mountains, but the two expeditions he sent out had not found it.
⁹

In 1622, an ill-suited Columbus heir, Don Nuño Colón, was confirmed as the island’s ruler. However, before he was able to reassert his family’s control over Jamaica, two leaders of the Cabildo engineered an ecclesiastic coup that threatened to expose the Portugals as Jews. Operating with the connivance of the Crown, their leader, Francisco de Leiba, the self-styled “King of Jamaica,”
¹⁰
together with his cousin, Sanchez Ysassi, plotted with Ysassi’s eldest son, a member of the Church hierarchy in Santo Domingo, to wrest control of the Jamaican church. The occasion was the 1622 Synod of Caribbean Churches.
¹¹
Philip III had died the previous year, and following the coronation of his son, Philip IV, the region’s prelates called on the new king to sponsor a church conference in Santo Domingo to reformulate policy on issues of Christian doctrine.

During the ensuing four-month synod, hundreds of decrees were passed, including one in the final session that—unlike the others—received no comment. Details are not known, but the upshot of this particular ruling was to transfer jurisdiction over the Jamaican church to the archbishop of Santo Domingo and his suffragan (assistant bishop), who happened to be Ysassi’s son. When the conference ended, the chief plotters, Leiba and Ysassi (whom Melgarejo had lauded as “the leading colonists who sustain, protect and defend the State”), were sworn in as officers of the Inquisition.
¹²

With this, a new force entered Jamaican politics, one that opposed the Columbus family and its chief allies, the Portugals. Under the nose of Don Nuño Colón, an inept ruler who may not have even visited the island, members of the Cabildo began to use their power in support of secret moves by the Crown to reclaim Jamaica. Their maneuvers were given impetus by the king’s loss in September 1622 of his gold ship, the
Nuestra Señora de Atocha.
Returning from Havana, the galleon was battered by a hurricane off the Florida Keys and sank with forty-seven tons of gold and silver that Philip desperately needed to pay his creditors. Whatever value Jamaica had, he now wanted.
¹³

The Portugals, sensing their days were numbered, looked first for aid from Holland. Dutch privateers were active in the Caribbean, and regularly stopped at Jamaica’s ports. But, like Moses Cohen Henriques, they were individual corsairs whose specialty was capturing ships, not countries. The one Dutch group that could pull off a full-scale invasion—the Dutch West India Company—was then preoccupied with mobilizing for their two-front invasion of Brazil and Peru the following year.

Although the Dutch were not interested in capturing Jamaica, England was. In 1597, Sir Anthony Shirley, a privateer whose marauding was in part financed by Queen Elizabeth, invaded Jamaica. For two weeks, he occupied the capital, La Vega, and plundered the countryside, and afterward wrote: “We have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place. It abounds with beef and cassava, & most pleasant fruits. It is a marvelous fertile island, & is a garden or store house for the Spanish Main.”
¹⁴
English traders who frequented Jamaica’s ports shared Shirley’s enthusiasm. But however tempting the conquest, it would take the Portugals’ promise of acquiring Jamaica’s golden legend to lure the English to invade.