Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (18 page)

Your majesty [should] take the island [because Jamaica] is an outlet for all ships that reach there and defraud Your Majesty’s Royal Treasury…it is a large island with a great supply of provisions…it is sited so that all ships and fleets pass within its sight…If the enemy gets a footing there, none of our ships will escape from their hands and the fleets will run great risk.
²⁴

The report reflected the Cabildo’s view and had been prepared with their counsel. Relations between them and the loyal supporters of the Columbus family were further aggravated in 1640, when, after a sixty-year union, Portugal regained its independence. When the news reached Jamaica, it split the colony. The Spanish ranchers, loyal to Spain, turned against the Portugals loyal to the Columbus heir, who as fate would have it was a distant cousin of Portugal’s new king. As the Cabildo saw it, the protector of the Jews was now in the enemy camp. Through the ranchers’ intervention, troublesome Portugals began to be expelled from the island.

By 1643, the state of affairs had become so inflamed that the Portugals welcomed an English pirate as their liberator. Captain William Jackson, a privateer in the tradition of Sir Francis Drake, sacked Jamaica and went home convinced England could count on the Jews there to assist an invasion. His report to the Colonial Affairs Committee noted:

During our aboard in Town, divers Portugals who had been kept off by the Spanyards from coming into us, did Express great affection they had to the English & proposed to bring us where the Spanyards hid all their Plate & Treasure, which they affirmed to be greater than we could imagine, but we scorned to violate our former covenant…We understood what inward desire they had to change their old Masters and seemed greatly to rejoice when we told them we intended to shortly come and beat ye Spanyards from this Island, which fittingly corresponds with an old Tradition long rooted in them that they shall one day come under ye English.
²⁵

Jamaica’s Portugals were ready then and there to assist in the seizure of the island, a course affirmed by Jackson’s crew: “All our men allured desire to set up their station here and to that purpose moved our General to undertake ye settling thereof” (twenty-three of the crew deserted and remained in Jamaica). But Jackson wanted booty: “On the encouragement of Balthasar, a Portugal from Jamaica, we set sail for Rio de la Hacha [Colombia], a place very rich in Plate & Pearl. Balthasar persuaded our General to undertake this design which was very hopeful if ye success had proved as fortunate.” But good fortune was not theirs. Bad weather forced Jackson to return to Jamaica. Balthasar, not wanting the English to depart empty-handed, proposed they seize a ship in the harbor. “By the direction of Balthasar, we took a Spanish Frigate in the harbour next to where we had formerly rode at Anchor, being laden with Hides, Sugar & other provisions, & was bound with passengers for Cartagena.”
²⁶

Balthasar acted with the support of other Portugals. His help in the seizure of a Spanish ship was calculated to impress upon the English that their loyalty was not to Spain. This maneuver was not lost on the Cabildo, which, in all but name, governed the island. In the aftermath of Jackson’s raid, the colony nearly self-destructed. In October 1643, the governor “died a prisoner without guards in his own house.”
²⁷
Within hours, the Cabildo attempted a coup and again appealed to the king to retake the island. One account refers to a civil war.
²⁸
The charges are not detailed, but an early historian noted that as a consequence of Balthasar’s traitorous deed “internal divisions were soon to prove…disastrous. The Spanish settlers quarreled with those from Portugal and some of the latter were expelled from the colony.”

Among them was Balthasar, who went on to become a renowned pirate whose exploits and daring escapes were chronicled by the “Boswell of the Buccaneers,” the buccaneer author John Esquemelin. Figures on the number of Jews who were expelled range from thirteen families to “almost all the colonists of that nation.”
²⁹
A decade later, when the British conquered Jamaica and entered La Vega (where most Portugals resided), they observed more houses than occupants: “The deserted houses in the capital proved a want of tenants…The town was thinly populated compared with former years.”
³⁰

Captain Jackson submitted his report to the Colonial Affairs Committee, whose prominent members included Jamaica’s future conqueror, Oliver Cromwell. Historians claim Jamaica was not part of his plan to invade the Indies, as Jamaica is not mentioned. But considering what transpired during Jackson’s raid, and his lauding of Jamaica as a “Terrestrial Paradise…with the delight and plenty of all necessary conferred by nature,” it is hard to fathom why Cromwell would not have targeted Jamaica. Indeed, as the next chapter shows, the Spanish had no doubt Jamaica’s conquest was a prioritized aim of Cromwell’s “Grand Western Design” to secure a toe-hold in the fabulously rich New World.

Such was the situation in April 1654 when the “heretic ship” from Recife was brought to port in Jamaica. The Cabildo detained the Jewish and Calvinist refugees aboard the
Falcon
, and sent a messenger to Cartagena, the nearest Holy Office, requesting a hearing to determine what to do with the suspect heretics. Apparently their answer was to avoid trouble with Holland: to free the Calvinists and any Jews who had not been baptized, as the Inquisition’s jurisdiction was limited to
relapsos
—conversos who had openly returned to Judaism. In July, the Cabildo therefore released the Calvinists and twenty-three so-called born Jews (as many as seventeen were children). Those freed included Abraham and Isaac Israel, and Benjamin Mesquita’s two sons, Joseph and Abraham, but Benjamin himself was detained. How many other families were separated is not known, nor is the number of those still held.

The extended Ysassi family dominated the Cabildo, and held powerful positions in Puerto Rico and Cuba. But in their home base, Jamaica, the Columbus family stymied them. As
familiars
of the Inquisition, they hoped to use its power to stir up trouble—enough, they hoped, to warrant the Crown to intervene and appoint their leader, Francisco de Leiba, the equivalent of what he was already calling himself, “King of Jamaica.” The capture of a heretic ship furnished them with an excuse to summon the Holy Inquisitor from Colombia to investigate the suspect heretics and, once there, to likewise expose the island’s Portugals as Judaizers. No longer would they be subject to a feudal lord, and the Jamaica gold mine would revert to the king.

In detaining the Jews, the Cabildo overreached. Their action proved a lethal miscalculation, one that stirred a renewed effort on the part of Jamaica’s Portugals to overthrow Spanish rule. Fearful that any investigation of the refugees would spill over into an inquiry into their own lives, Jamaica’s Jews once more looked to entice a foreign liberator with the promise of gold. Since no vessel sailed direct from Jamaica to Holland, their message was carried first to New Amsterdam and then to Holland by Abraham Israel, who had convinced the Cabildo he was “born Jewish.”
³¹

The
Falcon
, allowed to depart Jamaica, sailed to nearby Cape St. Anthony in Cuba, a well-known port frequented by ships to and from Mexico and the Spanish Main. The refugees’ stay there involved no risk, as they had been cleared in Jamaica and had the necessary papers attesting to this. After a few weeks, they obtained passage to New Amsterdam on a small French frigate, the
St. Catherine.

On September 7, 1654, when the refugee ship dropped anchor in New Amsterdam harbor, they were met by an odd figure, floridly dressed like a peacock and walking about “with great state and pomp” on a wooden leg wrapped with silver bands. It was Peter Stuyvesant, the colony’s governor. Residents made a jest of his pretentious ways, calling him the “Grand Muscovy Duke,” but he moved among them with a show of force that made them understand he was a person to be obeyed.

Governor Stuyvesant welcomed the Calvinists, but not the Jews. He wanted them out. The seven-month voyage—from Recife, to Jamaica, to Cuba, to New Amsterdam—had left them destitute. They owed the ship’s captain, Jacques de la Motte, more than their belongings were worth. Stuyvesant wrote to the Company: “The Jews who arrived, nearly all like to remain, but fearing that owing to their present indigence they might become a charge in the coming winter, we required them in a friendly way to depart.”
³²

Stuyvesant went on to reveal his true feelings, which had nothing to do with their finances. Owing to their “customary usury and deceitful trading with Christians,” he wrote, “we pray that this deceitful race—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ—be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony.” His letter, dated September 22, 1654, corresponds with the sailing date of the first ship bound for Amsterdam since the
St. Catherine
arrived. Along with the letter, Israel was on board.

Nine months after Abraham Cohen saw his cousins off in Recife, he had heard nothing of them or the others on the
Falcon.
The feeling among his Amsterdam colleagues was that the ship was lost at sea. Alerted by the harbormaster that a ship from New Amsterdam was unloading, Cohen hurried to the wharf. Anxiety gave way to relief when Israel disembarked and assured him everyone was alive. But the rest of his news was not good: Cohen’s nephews, the Mesquita boys, had been freed, but their father, Benjamin, and others were still held in Jamaica, and those who had made it to New Amsterdam were broke, in debt, and threatened with expulsion.

The next morning, after religious services, the reunited friends conferred with the six officers of the synagogue, the Parnassim. Because their brethren in Jamaica were Dutch nationals, it was decided that their detainment was illegal. They thereupon submitted a petition to the government contending the incident was “an international outrage…[and that] the release of the Jewish prisoners should be requested of the King of Spain, and the Dutch consuls in Cadiz and San Sebastian should intervene in this affair.”
³³

The States General’s response was both immediate and forthright. On November 14, they wrote their consuls, “This business [is] considered by us as very serious,” and dictated an “urgent request” to the State Council of the king of Spain, “that Spanish authorities not allow the Inquisition or anybody else to molest [the Jews]…and permit them to return home…This request being in conformity with the treaty of peace existing between the King of Spain and the Dutch Government.”
³⁴
There is no record of the king’s response, but he evidently ordered Jamaica to free the detainees, as none were there six months later when English forces captured the island.

Following their successful protest of the Jamaica affair, Cohen and four members of the Parnassim, including Bento Osorio, the aforementioned leader of the Brotherhood, and Uriel da Costa’s brother Abraham, were confident that the Company in New Amsterdam would overrule Stuyvesant and authorize Jewish settlement. For years, the Company had encouraged others to settle there, even offering free transport, land grants, and tax exemptions. On the basis of the rights granted them in Brazil by the Patenta Onrossa, and the fact that all of them were major shareholders in the Company, they assumed that their people would likewise be welcome.

But although the States General acted quickly and forcibly to protest the detention of Jews in Jamaica, three months passed before the Company directors belatedly, and only reluctantly, rejected Stuyvesant’s request. On February 15, 1655, they wrote him: “We would have liked to fulfill your wishes that the new territories not be infected by the Jewish nation,” but citing pressure from Jewish shareholders and “the considerable loss sustained by this nation in Brazil,” a go-easy policy was recommended.
³⁵

In the coming year (1655–56), in light of the Company’s lukewarm endorsement, Stuyvesant, his sheriff, and the colony’s Calvinist leaders opposed the Jews at every turn. In a series of lawsuits, the sons of Abraham da Costa, Abraham Israel, and Abraham Cohen—Joseph, Isaac, and Jacob respectively—carried on their fathers’ fight. Ultimately the courts sided with them, winning basic rights for Jews in what in the future would be thought of as the land of the free.
³⁶

During their detention in Jamaica, Israel and Benjamin Mesquita learned of Columbus’s mine from the Portugals. Believing that the Cabildo’s real intent in sending for an Inquisitor was to have him expose their own covert Judaism, the Portugals confided in Israel that the island was ripe for takeover and offered to reveal the secret site of the mine as an incentive. Israel, therefore, not only carried news that Jamaica was holding Dutch Jews and that Stuyvesant wanted to expel them, he also told Cohen about the mine. This became evident eight years later, when the three of them—Israel, Mesquita, and Cohen—struck a partnership with the royal sons of Prince Charles I and George Villiers to fulfill their fathers’ quest for Columbus’s gold.

Chapter Eight

CROMWELL’S SECRET AGENTS

A
llow Jews back in England and the Messiah will come.” This, essentially, was the visionary promise that an Amsterdam rabbi shared with England’s new, Bible-quoting ruler. The date was September 1654, the same month that New Holland’s twenty-three Jewish refugees finally arrived in New Amsterdam, only to be told they were not welcome. The previous December, Oliver Cromwell had become Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, ending England’s twelve-year civil war.

Soon after the Puritans’ victory, Cromwell concluded his nation’s two-year war with the Netherlands. Although the outcome of what is known as the First Anglo-Dutch War was inconclusive (the maritime rivals would fight twice again in the next two decades), the Dutch had lost 1,500 ships.
¹
This blow to the republic’s sea power, coupled with the loss of their Brazilian colony, left Holland in no position to war with Spain, let alone invade Jamaica. So while Cohen and the Parnassim persuaded the States General to formally protest Jamaica’s detention of her Jewish citizens, the Dutch were not about to go to war over the incident.

Israel and Cohen, aware of this realpolitik, and knowing of the rabbi’s discourse with Cromwell, looked to England. They were privy to Cromwell’s plan to invade the New World and believed the two goals—the return of Jews to England and the liberation of Jamaica’s Jews—could augment each other. Despite their allegiance to Holland, national loyalty took a backseat to the possibility of securing two new homelands for their people, in England and Jamaica.

With the Dutch war settled, Cromwell spent the summer of 1654 formulating what he called his Grand Western Design, an ambitious plan to carve out a Protestant empire in the Spanish New World. The stage was thus set for his positive reception of Israel and Cohen’s proposal to invade Jamaica. There was only one hitch: they were too late. In late November 1654, as they were about to embark for England, one of Cromwell’s secret intelligencers and a possible relation, Daniel Cohen Henriques, told them not to bother; Jamaica was already targeted.
²

Israel and Cohen therefore turned their attention to the more immediate goal of securing Jewish settlement elsewhere in the New World. Over the next fifteen months, while they were thus successfully engaged, Cromwell’s effort to allow Jews back into England would be spurred by the role of Jews in Jamaica’s conquest, and the promise of their valued assistance to develop his New World empire. As strangers in a strange land, the wandering tribe of Abraham had acquired particular skills that Cromwell needed. To understand this development, we leave Israel and Cohen in Amsterdam, holding tight the secret site of Columbus’s mine until Cromwell’s demise, when the sons of the royals who first sought it—George Villiers and Charles I—were restored to power.

In August 1654, Cromwell summoned the Spanish ambassador and bluntly told him that friendship with Spain could continue only if Englishmen were granted freedom of trade and religion in the New World. The ambassador was shocked: “Impossible,” he said. “To ask for these rights is to demand of my Master his two eyes.”
³
To allow England trading rights in the New World was tantamount to recognizing England’s right to settle there. Monopoly of trade and propagation of the True Faith were cornerstones upon which Spain developed its colonial empire, and His Most Catholic Majesty was not about to share it with anyone, least of all a Puritan devil.

Cromwell, reportedly taken aback by the ambassador’s response, abruptly dismissed him. This was pure theatrics. Months earlier he had begun secret preparations to send an armed fleet to the Caribbean.
⁴
Freedom of religion and trade were the stated reasons, but securing a major chunk of the New World was his compelling desire. Thirty years before, England had colonized a few small, empty islands in the eastern Caribbean, outside the sea lanes. Barbados, Nevis, and St. Kitts were prospering, but a more strategic base was needed if Cromwell was to break Spain’s hold on the wealth of the New World.

To Cromwell, a ruler who framed every decision as being in accordance with Scripture, the invasion’s success was preordained: “The ships would sail in accordance with God’s dictates…Its triumph would signify God’s favor…more God’s favor assured its success.”
⁵
Cromwell was too confident, however—his vaunted plan would have failed if not for the advice of his Jewish intelligencers. With other advisers pushing Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Trinidad, the leader of London’s covert Jews, Antonio Carvajal, whose knowledge of Caribbean affairs was unmatched, counseled Cromwell to follow up on Captain Jackson’s raid.

An English prisoner captured in Jamaica would confess: “The Grand Western Design was designed and financed by Jews who planned to resettle England and buy St. Paul’s Cathedral and turn it into a synagogue.” While there is no hard evidence this was true, the Spanish defenders believed it, “since the example of Brazil exhibits similar treasons & inequities committed by this blind people out of their aversion for us.”
⁶
The prisoner, Nicolas Paine, was the interpreter for General Robert Venables, the co-leader of the invading force. He made this disclosure, recorded by the Spanish notary, after having “begged for his life in Spanish.” Where did Paine hear it? Was it scuttlebutt among the crew or something he overheard the general say? If so, where did the general hear it?

However skewed Paine’s admission, Cromwell would not have reached a decision about where to attack without first consulting Carvajal, who recommended Jamaica. One of the city’s prominent merchants, Carvajal owned ships that plied the seven seas. He had agents in most major ports, and the political intelligence he gathered made him one of Cromwell’s most valued advisers. But since exposure of his role might have led to the arrest of associates and relatives in the lands of the Inquisition, his consultations with Cromwell, via the ruler’s trusted secretary John Thurloe, were kept secret.

Though King John had formally expelled the Jews from England in 1290, by the mid-1600s a handful of wealthy Jewish families had managed to resettle there and became major players in international commerce. They called themselves Portuguese, attended Mass in the home of the ambassador (also a secret Jew), and were not circumcised.

Carvajal was forty-six in 1635 when he rode up to London’s city gates astride a white Arabian stallion, dressed in “fine armor” and leading a string of pack mules carrying gold bullion. Halted by the king’s guard, he announced that he was a merchant from the Canary Islands and had come to London to join his sister, whose husband was Portugal’s ambassador. Given his impressive appearance, he was allowed to proceed. Later it was revealed that he had departed the islands’ capital Tenerife a step ahead of Holy Inquisitors sent to investigate him.

Like Pasha Sinan and Rabbi Palache, Carvajal was a man of “superb and florid” personality who soon established himself as the leader of London’s covert Jewish community of thirty or so families. Though Carvajal dealt in many commodities, silver was his specialty. At a time when New World silver powered global currency, transporting it was a Jewish enterprise. Carvajal imported silver bars from converso merchants in Seville, who received them in turn from converso merchants in Peru and New Spain. From the time the ore left the mines and was melted into bars, his own were embossed with a particular stamp. He also imported annually about $1 million (in today’s money) in silver pieces of eight.
⁷

Jamaica marked the first conquest of the British Empire, and Carvajal, who hoped to persuade England’s new ruler to allow Jews legally back into England, played a major role. While invasion plans were going forward, his associate, Simon de Caceres, who traded extensively in the Indies, confided to him that a secret Jew in Jamaica, Francisco Carvajal, headed the army there and could be relied upon to assist an attack. While there is no evidence that the two Carvajals were related, Jamaica’s Carvajal helped cement the English conquest, and when news of victory reached London, Cromwell’s intelligencer was amply rewarded.

In December 1654, the fleet departed Portsmouth under the joint command of Admiral William Penn—father of the future founder of Pennsylvania—and General Venables with an army of 2,500 men. Unlike the disciplined soldiers Cromwell led in the civil war, these recruits had been hastily rounded up, and in the judgment of one observer, were mostly “common cheats, thieves, cutpurses (pick-pockets), and such lewd persons who long lived by sleight of hand and dexterity of wit.”
⁸
Their leaders were likewise described as “lazy dullards that have a large portion of Pride but not of wit, valor or authority.”
⁹

First stop was Barbados, where Venables tripled the size of his army by the beat of a drum in the public square and the promise “Any bond-servant who volunteers shall have his freedom.” With little to lose and much to gain, four thousand indentured servants, comprising fully a fifth of the population, signed on. Twelve hundred more were recruited from St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat. By the time the fleet embarked, Venables’s army had swelled to nearly eight thousand men but carried supplies for only half that number.
¹⁰
The invasion plan called for the army to first attack Santo Domingo. Significantly, the fleet halted at the small island of Nevis, where Admiral Penn enlisted Campoe Sabada, the Jewish pilot who had previously sailed with Jackson.

This slovenly army was primarily made up of servants who had signed on for freedom and plunder; accordingly, when the general announced that there would be no taking of booty, they threatened mutiny. Confronted by “an unruly and ignorant mass,” he canceled the order. Meanwhile, it was obvious that the admiral had no respect for the general, who, to the annoyance of all, had brought along his new young wife and rarely left his cabin. Always contending for command, it was said, Penn snickered whenever Venables made an error, which Venables tended to do whenever he gave an order.

Rather than a direct assault on Santo Domingo, Penn favored a surprise attack, and landed the army thirty miles up the coast. Unfortunately, the site was a desert, and as Cromwell’s brother-in-law, responsible for equipping the army, had forgotten to pack canteens, the soldiers had to march without water through hot, barren land without shade. They never reached the capital. Many collapsed from thirst; others were cut down by a cavalry charge of three hundred mounted Spaniards, who ran them through like knights of old with twelve-foot lances. Afterward, their leader boasted that had he had more “cow-killers” (as his men were known) he would have killed every invader. This singular breed of toughened Spaniard was a cowboy in reverse, expert not at herding cows, but at slaying them. It was later reported that during the attack, Venables hid behind a tree, “so much possessed with terror he could hardlie spake.” With no water, no discipline, and pursued by the lance-wielding cow-killers, the invading army retreated to the coast. As Cromwell’s relation also hadn’t packed any tents, the demoralized troops had to huddle in the open when days of torrential rain followed. In one week, Venables lost a thousand men, while Spanish losses numbered forty.
¹¹

The two commanders were now so distrustful of each other that the general refused to allow the admiral and his crew to board the ships ahead of his soldiers, suspecting they might sail away without them. At a council aboard ship, the officers rejected a further assault on the city, contending that any attack would have to be fought by them alone as “they could not trust their men to follow.”
¹²

What now? An attack on fortified places like Cartagena or Havana was out of the question, and if they simply retreated to London they could lose their heads. Historical accounts state that following the humiliating defeat at Hispaniola, the decision to invade Jamaica was first mentioned. However, this is disputed by a number of English prisoners. The first, an advance scout captured a day after the English landed, confessed, “Our purpose is to take this land…then pass on to Jamaica.” Prisoners, taken later, confirmed this sequence. According to the Spanish account: