Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (17 page)

Early in the century, Englishmen had pioneered the New World’s northern climes, maintaining barely surviving colonies in Virginia and Bermuda and a dissident settlement of Pilgrims in a land they called New England. But these places had neither gold nor silver, and were far from the trade routes that carried the New World’s riches to the Spanish king. And so they looked south. As Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, “It is his Indian gold that indangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe.”
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Raleigh was another son of Devon, the home of John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake, the English heroes who had exposed the vulnerability of the Spanish Empire and the wealth that awaited a daring adventurer. But, unlike them, Sir Walter was not interested in smuggling or piracy. Having squandered his fortune colonizing Virginia, it was Indian gold he sought.

Chief among the golden legends was El Dorado, a mythical city in the Andes with riches surpassing those of Mexico and Peru. It was said to be by a large lake, backed by a hill of gold. Twice during Elizabeth’s reign, Raleigh set out to find the ephemeral kingdom. Like dozens of adventurers before him, all he found was jungle, swamps, pestilence, and hostile natives.

When James I became king in 1603, Raleigh was sent to the Tower of London on a trumped-up charge of treason, but due to his popularity, James waived his death sentence. For the next thirteen years, Raleigh languished in the Tower and dreamed of again attempting to find El Dorado. Two young royals who visited him often and shared his fantasy were James’s son Charles and George Villiers, the king’s favorite, who together managed to obtain their hero’s freedom so he could again seek the golden city.

When Raleigh’s expedition set sail, King James, in one of history’s great betrayals, confided in the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, what Raleigh was up to. In doing so, he hoped to mend fences with the ambassador, because relations had been strained since the Palache trial three years before. If Raleigh realized his dream, James would not have turned down his royal fifth, but just the same, he felt it prudent to distance himself from the deed by handing Gondomar “a precise inventory of Raleigh’s ships, armaments, ports of call, even a chart of his proposed route.”
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When Raleigh arrived at the headwaters of the Orinoco River on the north coast of South America, the Spaniards were waiting with loaded cannon and routed his expedition. Sir Walter limped back to England a broken man. Gondomar demanded an audience with James. Furious, he spat: “I will be brief. Raleigh and his captains are pirates and must be sent in chains to Spain to be hung in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor.”
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The king promised satisfaction. Five weeks later, he sent Raleigh to the chopping block.

Raleigh lost his head, but his quest for legendary riches in the New World was taken up by the young royals who had befriended him. Rather than El Dorado, they would embrace another gilded fantasy that had been bantered about in court circles from the time the Admiral of the Ocean Sea returned from his voyages of discovery. Extraordinary legends about the New World abounded, and there was ample reason to be a believer, as the land was filled with riches. By 1600, Spain had gained triple the amount of gold that had been in circulation before Columbus’s voyage, and Peru’s silver mountain was mined for a hundred years in increasing amounts, only to be surpassed by the discovery in Mexico of yet another mountain of silver.

So it was that the legend of the lost gold mine of Columbus was taken up by the king’s son and George Villiers. While perhaps not as seductive as Raleigh’s El Dorado, nor as wistful as Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, or as elusive as Coronado’s Seven Golden Cities, Columbus’s hidden mine, “not yet…opened by the King of Spain or any other,”
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had its own magnetic attraction. It was said to be somewhere in the mountainous island of Jamaica, where the great discoverer had been marooned for a year. Its allure was such that when Raleigh was preparing for his final voyage, Gondomar (until James told him otherwise) thought Jamaica was targeted, and notified Madrid to alert the island to fortify and prepare for invasion.

In the summer of 1623, George Villiers, with young Prince Charles in tow, was in Madrid on a fanciful marital mission that he and Gondomar had hatched to wed the prince to Spain’s infanta, seventeen-year-old Princess María. When it became apparent, through a succession of misdeeds, that the so-called Spanish Match would not materialize, a court spy, in contact with Jamaica’s Portugals, got word to Villiers: In return for a successful invasion of the island, they would reveal to their liberator the concealed site of the legendary mine.
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The Spanish spy’s offer appealed to Villiers, whose egotism knew no bounds. He had been presented to King James at a London theater ten years earlier, and had become lover and confidant to both the king and his son Charles, the reticent Prince of Wales. He had risen from royal cup bearer to become the Duke of Buckingham, and his swift rise bound him to no one but the king.

The “secret overture” was made at the Escorial Palace, where Villiers and Charles were encamped in adjoining suites during their mission to bring off the Spanish Match—a marriage that would avert a pending war with Spain and make Villiers the godfather of a united Europe. Unfortunately, when Charles attempted to woo the infanta in the royal garden—strictly off-limits to all but the royal family—the gentle, reverent girl ran off screaming that she’d “sooner enter a convent” than marry him.
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In the days that followed, the duke comforted Charles. They would return home, declare war on Spain, and pursue a treasure that had been spoken of since the time of discovery: the lost gold mine of Columbus. He had gotten the idea from a clandestine report he received from the Spanish king’s secretary, Don Hermyn, who saw in the apparent collapse of the match an opportunity to acquire a share of the mine for himself.

Hermyn’s secret memo to the duke presented a detailed account of his experience the year before, when he had been sent undercover to Jamaica by the king and his first minister, Count-Duke Olivares, to find out about the mine from the Portugals, the only people thought to be privy to its secret location. Once he had gained their confidence, he was taken to an isolated valley in Jamaica’s rugged interior: “where the earth is black, Rivulets discover the source of the Mine.” The gold, he observed, “is found neere the superficies of the Earth and slides down in the Rivers…The Vayne between the Rocks is but two inches wyde.” As proof he had been to the mine, Hermyn engraved his initials on a rock which he hid near the mine’s entrance.

Delighted with his find—he had been promised a tenth part of the proceeds—he returned to Spain and reported his discovery to Olivares. To acquire the mine, he proposed that the Crown expose Jamaica’s Portugals as heretic traitors to justify reclaiming the island. To his astonishment, instead of welcoming the news, Olivares had him imprisoned and he was released only after being sworn to silence by the minister, who warned that if he spoke of the mine to anyone it would mean his death.

Olivares rarely left Philip’s side. From the time his royal charge was thirteen, he supervised his learning. In 1621, when sixteen-year-old Philip became king, Olivares sought to mold him in the grand style of Charles V. There was one major impediment: Spain was in debt. In order to restore its fiscal health, he needed to befriend the very people Hermyn proposed they expose.

Count-Duke Olivares was a sincere converso, a devout Catholic who wore a piece of the True Cross around his neck, and kept other relics with which he regularly prayed. However, his faith did not interfere with his primary goal: to revitalize Spain’s economy by courting those he would later label, in defending himself from the Inquisition, “the most perfidious of all heretics—the Jews.”
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New World silver fueled the Empire. Needing bridge loans until the annual silver fleet arrived, Olivares contracted Genoese bankers, who, to his chagrin, regularly raised the interest rate. After one excessive spike, Olivares declared he would not let Spain be held ransom by their collusion, and turned to converso financiers in Lisbon who offered lower interest. Although their allegiance to Christianity was suspect—some had been living as secret Jews for a century or more—Olivares encouraged them to move to Spain, promising a general pardon and other inducements.

The Lisbon bankers were one part of Olivares’s plan to fund the empire; another was to attract those they dealt with: the merchants, traders, accountants, insurers, and commodity buyers, conversos all, who with their foreign agents dominated empire commerce. Olivares saw this exiled entrepreneurial class as unparalleled creators of wealth, and believed that their presence in Spain would generate new revenue. In the New World, they had helped implement the system that routed all registered trade through Spain, while at the same time setting up a parallel trade network that illegally funneled a large portion of New World wealth outside the empire. In Olivares’s day, this unregistered commerce, called the “silent trade,” siphoned off upward of 25 percent of the silver stream to pay for European goods and slaves brought illegally to the New World. In return, the converso entrepreneurs shipped goods from the New World directly to Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Leghorn, and other ports where Jewish merchants were welcome as long as they maintained a Christian facade. By encouraging these exiled conversos to move back, Olivares hoped to make Spain the home base for this heretofore illegal trade.

His master plan to co-opt the conversos included those in Jamaica. Beyond the island’s link in the “silent trade” network, its strategic location was integral to his defensive plan for the Caribbean. As Hermyn had written, “Jamaica lies in the belly of the New Spanish Sea and commands the Gulf of Mexico…all the fleets which come from the mainland must pass in sight of it.” To protect the shipping lanes, Olivares called for fourteen warships to be based principally in Jamaica to patrol the sea. It therefore did not bode well to implement his Caribbean defense and his courtship of conversos by adopting Hermyn’s plan to unmask those conversos living in Jamaica.
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Rejected and imprisoned by his former patrons, Hermyn turned to Villiers, who agreed to grant him “the same conditions promised him by the King.” But now, instead of exposing the Portugals, Hermyn proposed that Villiers ally with them to conquer the island for England. Jamaica’s covert Jews, long safely settled as Portuguese conversos, had told Hermyn they were now being threatened with exposure by the Inquisition and offered to assist an invading army. Success was assured because Portugals made up “most of the island’s 800 man defense force…[and] long for nothing so much as to be free from the Spanish yoke.” Their hatred of the Spanish “was so great that they could never be brought to discover their secrets to them,” but would reveal to their liberator the location of “the secret golden mine, which hath not yet been opened by the King of Spain, or by any other.”

Hermyn told Buckingham he would go to Jamaica to prepare the ground for the invasion, but when the Englishmen left, the turncoat’s ambitions were neutralized when Olivares had him poisoned.

After the Madrid fiasco, and the death of King James in 1625, the duke was involved in a succession of failed escapades that would terminate with his assassination. Over a four-year period (1625–28), he engineered England’s foreign policy so as to avenge personal slights and advance momentary interests. The duke thought he could achieve his foreign aims by attacking boldly. He could surprise the Madrid court and make off with the infanta, invade Cádiz, Spain’s home port, and seize the treasure fleet, relieve La Rochelle and free the Huguenots. His vision was heroic, but his campaigns were poorly equipped and ill planned. After every misadventure, his defeated men limped home.

Historians agree that at the time of his assassination in 1628, the duke was set to embark on another expedition to relieve the Protestants of La Rochelle. However, there is persuasive evidence this mission was a sham. This is revealed in an examination of a cache of state papers, compiled in 1668 by Charles II’s chief minister, Lord Clarendon, and kept at the Bodleian Library. This collection, never more than footnoted by historians, includes Clarendon’s transcription of Hermyn’s fourteen-page “Secret discovery…to the Duke of Buckingham,” a step-by-step plan for New World conquest using Jamaica as a base.

Additional evidence is found in Clarendon’s translation of a signed treaty by Villiers and Sweden’s King Gustav Adolphus, which reveals Villiers’s plan to capture Jamaica, possess the gold mine, and proclaim himself absolute monarch. The treaty, in the form of a contract, written in Latin and signed in Stockholm, is dated March 28, 1628, just two months before Buckingham’s murder. It concerns Gustav’s promised assistance in the conquest and his share in the proceeds of the “secret golden mine.”
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The Swede pledges to recognize the duke as “Absolute prince and Sovereign” of Jamaica, and send along “four thousand foote and six Men of War each of five hundred Tunne with Cannon and Munitions.” The flotilla’s expenses are to be paid for “out of the revenue of the Territory and Golden Mines.” Gustav pledges to defend the duke not only from Spanish attack, but interestingly, “from all Puritans from Barbados or other places.” In return, “The Duke of Buckingham makes good unto us a tenth part of the profits [payable] monthly.”

Twelve days prior to the duke’s murder, Gustav’s new warship, the
Vasa,
which would have taken part in the Jamaica invasion, was “heeled over by a stiff breeze just after launching.” With the ship’s gun ports left open to proudly display her sixty-four bronze cannons, the
Vasa
sank like a stone in Stockholm Harbor, drowning fifty of her crew.

Meanwhile, back in Jamaica, the Inquisition threat had cooled somewhat. In 1626, a new Columbus heir, known as the Admiral, was confirmed in his position, and appointed Francisco Terril, a strong governor who opposed the Cabildo. His “high handed ways” led to his recall, so in 1631, the Admiral appointed one he could trust: Juan Martínez de Arana, a descendant of Columbus’s Jewish mistress Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, mother of Fernando. Although the Cabildo’s power had diminished, the king’s earlier dominion over Jamaica during the first quarter of the seventeenth century had whetted his appetite to recover the island. In 1635, he instructed the Royal Audiencia of Santo Domingo to “report secretly what benefits the Admiral has in the island of Jamaica and if it is advisable for His Majesty to take it.” The report issued in 1638 recommended: