Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (20 page)

In October, a Cabalist rabbi from Amsterdam arrived at Cromwell’s invitation to discuss the divine argument proffered in his book
The Hope of Israel.
The religious sage was the former child prodigy Menasseh ben Israel, who it will be recalled stayed late at synagogue immersed in the mysticism of Cabala while the Henriques boys and their rebel pals frequented the docks, absorbing sailors’ tales of exotic lands. Menasseh held that the Torah contained divine revelations which prophesied the coming of the Messiah, and in
The Hope of Israel
he identified England as the Promised Land to which the Jews must return before the Messiah appears. (He and Cromwell agreed on that, disagreeing only on whether or not He had been here before.) Menasseh, a pragmatic scholar, peppered his prophecies with a discourse on what Jews could do for England’s economy.
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In December 1655, Cromwell called a conference of leading personages to debate the issue. The conference ended without making any recommendations, except to agree that there was no legal bar to Jewish resettlement. All that was required for readmission was for Parliament to approve it. Cromwell tried, but was unable to get Parliament to act. He was not deterred. As a royalist spy told Prince Charles, “Though the generality oppose, the Jews will be admitted by way of connivancy.”
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An opportunity presented itself when, shortly after Spain declared war, Parliament ruled that Spanish property would be confiscated. London’s Jews, though calling themselves Portuguese, were considered Spanish subjects, and their goods were therefore subject to seizure. The situation came to a head in what is known as the Robles trial.

In February 1656, customs officials seized two ships in the Thames carrying wine from the Canary Islands and a safe with forty thousand ducats in gold. London’s Jews were alarmed. The ships and strongbox belonged to Antonio Robles, a member of their community. If his property could be legally confiscated, their holdings could likewise be taken. What to do? With Carvajal and de Caceres leading the way, a decision was reached for the converso community to come out of the closet and declare that they were Jews, and loyal to England. On March 12, 1656, they confronted Cromwell with an either/ or demand, saying in effect: “Your conference accepted that there is no legal bar to our admission. The issue is therefore between you and us: as you well know, we are not Portuguese Catholics; we are Jews and we want the right to worship and bury the dead in our manner.” Not stated, but implied, was a threat—“otherwise we will look to Holland.”
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Robles followed suit. He petitioned the court for the recovery of his ships and goods on the grounds that he was “of the Hebrew nation.” He recounted how he had been on the run from the Inquisition that killed his father, tortured his mother, and burned at the stake many close relatives. He had come to England, he said, hoping to find a home among a people also considered heretics. In the course of the trial, ten London Jews sent in affidavits supporting his submission; others testified they knew Robles to be “of the Hebrew nation and religion.”
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When the six-week trial ended, the court declared Robles “a Jew borne in Portugal” and restored his ships, wine, and box of gold.
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On April 3, 1656, London’s thirty-five Jewish families gathered in the Great Jew’s home for Passover Seder to celebrate the Israelites’ freedom from Egyptian bondage and their current liberation. After 366 years, England’s Jews were no longer illegal aliens. Henceforth, as followers of the Law of Moses, they would seek their rights openly rather than hide behind a foreign identity and a Christian cloak. To consecrate this new day, Cromwell’s chief intelligencer proudly changed his name to Abraham Israel Carvajal.

Although Cromwell, still facing opposition in Parliament, never formally reversed the ban on Jewish admission, his religious convictions were sincere and only added to his desire for the mercantile skills and connections Jewish settlers would bring. As Bishop Burnett commented in his diary, “it was more on that account than in compliance with the principle of toleration that he gave them leave to build a synagogue.”
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Later that summer, their two leaders, Carvajal and de Caceres, rented a cemetery plot and a building for a synagogue, and sent to Amsterdam for a Torah.

In Jamaica, meanwhile, things were not going so well. With England’s occupying army having tripled the island’s population, there was not enough food to feed everyone. Weakened by hunger and “the bloody flux,” the ranks suffered from malaria. Many soldiers rebelled when ordered to plant food crops. They had been promised freedom and booty, not bondage. As for the officers, the only thing they wanted was to return to England. In October 1655, six months after the conquest, nearly half the army was dead. Cromwell’s newly arrived commissioner Robert Sedgwick wrote home:

For the Army, I find them in as sad, and deplorable, and distracted a condition as can be thought of; their commanders, some having left, some dead, some sick…the soldiery many dead, their carcasses lying unburied in the highways and among the bushes…As I walked through town many that were alive lay groaning and crying out, bread for the Lord’s sake…It is strange to see young lusty men, in appearance well, and in three or four days in the grave, snatched away in a moment with a confluence of many diseases. The truth is God is angry and the plague is begun, and we have none to stand in the gap.
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By January 1656, the mortality figure had risen to more than five thousand, and a month later included Sedgwick as well. Only the sailors aboard ship under Vice Admiral William Goodson, who had their own provisions, remained healthy. In these harsh circumstances, the Jewish pilot, now addressed as Captain Campoe Sabada, and known to be familiar with the island from his time with Jackson, was sent to reconnoiter the western end. In February 1656, he landed a hundred soldiers at Great Pedro Bay and captured the two rebel scouts who had been trailing them. The governor of Cartagena, they said, had got word to Ysassi that two galleons with a thousand men were being readied to join “an armada from Spain to come to Jamaica harbor to beat the English from the land.”
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Sabada hurried back to so inform Admiral Goodson, who wrote Cromwell (March 12) that he was sending ships to Cartagena to intercept the galleons, and was equipping others to patrol for the armada. Goodson’s letter went on to stress the advantages of strengthening island settlement and the need to complete fortifications:

once well peopled [Jamaica] is so advantageous, being in the midst of the Spaniards’ country, that having a considerable force here to make inroads upon the enemy, and a fleet to secure the seas, it might become the magazine of all the wealth in the Indies. To affect this we must have a considerable recruit of seamen, landmen and some commanders, to give life & vigor to the action; besides which, we must also hope for a good supply of provisions; those we have should last four months longer. In short, if your highness continues your resolutions to proceed in this great design, you must in a manner begin the work again.
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With the threat of a Spanish attack from without, and battling Ysassi’s forces within, it was essential to find a defense that did not depend on recruiting reinforcements for a disgruntled and dying army. The answer was to be found on a small island off the northwest coast of Hispaniola, where a rough breed of men once eked out a living hunting wild cattle and hogs. How this came about, and how these men evolved from hunters of cattle to hunters of men, is worth taking time out from this narrative. We begin with the man thought to have recommended their recruitment, Carvajal’s “close friend,” on whom Cromwell relied for on-the-spot intelligence of “things wanting in Jamaica.”

Though a generation removed from Rabbi Palache’s old boys, Simon (Jacob) de Caceres was cut from the same cloth. The temper of the man, who at the Robles trial proudly testified, “I am of the Jewish nation of the tribe of Judah,”
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is evident in a brazen proposal he submitted to Cromwell on the heels of his Jamaican shopping list. In it he offered to conquer Spain’s New World empire with “people of my nation” as an advance guard for English forces. If Cromwell would give him four ships of war and a thousand men, he would sail around Cape Horn and attack the Spanish Main from the Pacific side, à la Drake, and invade the continent via Chile. In the meantime, anticipating Cromwell’s favorable decision, he was off to Holland to recruit “young men of my own nation, [who] shall go as Englishmen for his Highness’ service only.” To finance the bold invasion, the would-be conquistador intended to capture Spain’s silver fleet. Although Cromwell did not respond to de Caceres’s grand scheme, there is evidence that he considered the Jew’s strategy.
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A flamboyant character, de Caceres was described by a friend at the Robles trial as a “proud Jew who made no more ado about not being a Christian than how he had fought the dogs of the Inquisition on the Sea & Land.”
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He named his ship the
Prophet Samuel.
Like the prophet, he believed it was his godly duty to unite all Jews and was known to frequent the docks hoping to persuade newly arrived conversos to come out as Jews.

De Caceres was a successful international merchant, and Carvajal’s friend (although twenty-five years his junior). He had offices in London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg, two brothers in Barbados, and relatives in Martinique and Suriname. Besides England’s leader, he was on friendly terms with the king of Denmark and the queen of Sweden.
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His plan to conquer the New World shows him as a man of militant vision, one that he likely followed with a further recommendation that set the course for Jamaica’s immediate future.

With England’s army dying and surrounded by enemy forces, it was not enough to build a fort. Cromwell knew that once he withdrew his army and navy, the colony would require a defensive force that could protect the colony, wage war on the Spanish, and at the same time feed itself. As a shipowner and illegal trader throughout the Indies, de Caceres knew precisely where to find such a force: the hunters of Hispaniola, a communal society of anarchists, exclusively male, who switched from hunting beef to robbing boats after the aforementioned cow-killers wiped out their prey. Crowded on a small offshore island, and now calling themselves the Brethren of the Coast, they were looking for new opportunities.

The challenge for Jamaica’s survival was to intercept Spanish shipping on the high seas, and thereby cut the umbilical cord that fed the Spanish Empire. The Brethren could do this, and knowledgeable Jews, like Jamaica’s Portugals, could both outfit and direct their attacks. From their extensive trade with fellow conversos in each colony, they knew what ship sailed, when it sailed, what it carried, and what the captain had hidden in his cabin.

De Caceres saw England’s conquest of Jamaica as the first step in the liberation of his people. Step two was assuring that the Grand Western Design stayed afloat. Bring the Brethren to Jamaica, legalize them as privateers, and their attacks on Spanish shipping and land settlements would keep the Spaniards on the defense (and make their backers rich in the process).

This sort of game was not new to exiled Jews. From the time of their expulsion, Sephardim in North Africa had profitably backed the corsairs of the Barbary Coast.
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De Caceres’s friend Carvajal, who came from Las Palmas, a pirate port in the Canary Islands where conversos also had a sponsoring role, would certainly have endorsed his proposal.

“It is with the Jews that the connection with the buccaneers began…” is how Jamaica’s foremost nineteenth-century historian, Robert Hill, links the two nomadic tribes whose alliance transformed the English colony into the pirate capital of the New World. Considering what de Caceres was up to, and the Sephardic involvement with the Barbary corsairs, Hill’s statement rings true.
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In any case, the strategy found favor with Cromwell, and by 1657, Jamaica was home to the formidable deterrent force known to history as the buccaneers of the West Indies.

In the first half of the sixteenth century, before the natives of Hispaniola died out, animal tending was Indian work. By the 1550s, with few Indians left, the animals ran free, and many settlers, lured by the attractions of the Main, quit the island. Those who remained abandoned the countryside for life in the city. Cattle, pigs, and horses, first brought by Columbus, returned to the wild, turning the island’s northwest region into a vast animal kingdom.

By the 1620s, the huge herds had attracted a weird assortment of hunters, New World outcasts who settled, one by one, the small offshore island of Tortuga. They were misfits of every stripe and color: runaway bondsmen, ex-soldiers, marooned seamen, escaped slaves, heretics, criminals, and political refugees. Here they found the anonymity they craved: last names were discarded; each considered his former life “drowned.” The hunters, mostly French and English, owed no allegiance to the Old World.

Unable or unwilling to return whence they came, they resigned themselves to a life of essentials. For a year or so, groups of six hunted with packs of dogs until they had enough hides and meat to sell. Known for the way they barbecued beef on a green wood grill called a
boucan
, they were called
boucaniers
, later Anglicized to buccaneers. Innocent enough, but to the Spanish across the island in Santo Domingo they were dangerous intruders.

By the 1640s, Tortuga had become a thriving settlement. Six hundred
boucaniers
moved between Hispaniola and Tortuga’s fortified port of Cayano, where they bartered beef and hides to passing ships for guns, bullets, and brandy. With a secure base, they began raiding ranches on the north coast and set up two permanent camps there. To the hidalgos on the other side of the island, the situation was intolerable. The
boucaniers
had effectively annexed the northwest coast. Spanish pride would not allow this. However, rather than a direct attack, they conceived a seemingly ingenious plan: they would eliminate the
boucanier
by eliminating his prey. They reasoned that with no game to hunt, the hunters would leave, and Tortuga’s raison d’être would cease.