Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (23 page)

How many illegal aliens were there, and how big was the silent trade? The Port Royal historians David Buisseret and Nuala Zahedieh do not even hazard a guess. Their detailed analysis of the port’s public record simply notes that the trade’s covert nature makes it difficult to quantify. However, an indication of the enormity of contraband trade throughout the New World may be gauged by the fact that while no Spanish galleons arrived for two years after Charles regained his throne, when the ships finally came loaded with goods in 1662, there were few buyers. Their wares, the colonialists said, were far too expensive, and the galleons “returned [to Spain] with most of their cargo unsold.”
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In the 1660s, Port Royal was the busiest port in the New World, and the most expensive. Employment was plentiful, with wages three times higher than in England. Only in the heart of London were rents so dear.
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The town’s permanent residents (numbering four hundred in 1664) were artisans, merchants, tavern owners, and ladies of the night who catered to the port’s transient visitors. Once the booty was shared out, the buccaneers made for the bars and bordellos—one for every ten residents. Each place offered its own brand of vice, and none were said to lack customers. In the cool of the evening, the unexpurgated fun began. The taverns threw open their doors and pipe-smoking, petticoat-clad courtesans strolled the lanes.

Next to the merchants, it was the owners of the pleasure domes who profited most from the free-spending wild men. It was said no true buccaneer would go to sea again until he had spent every last piece of eight “in all manner of debauchery.” He gambled it away, drank it up, and spent it on the ladies. “Pieces of eight were thrown around and no man bothered to count his change.”
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For a vivid picture of “wenching on a grand scale,” it is worth quoting a passage from the Dutch surgeon (and suspect converso) John Esquemelin, who served with Morgan. He wrote that as soon as a pirate received his share, all he desired was “strumpets and wine”:

Such of these pirates are found who will spend 3000 pieces of eight in one night, not leaving themselves peradventure a good shirt to wear on their backs in the morning…I saw one give a common strumpet 500 pieces of eight only that he might see her naked. My own master [Morgan] would buy on like occasions, a whole pipe of wine, and, placing it in the street, would force everyone to drink with him; threatening also to pistol them, in case they would not. At other times, he would throw these liquors about the streets, and wet the clothes of such as walked by, without regarding whether he spoiled their apparel or not, were they men or women.
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Such frantic moments ashore only partially reflect the complexity of men who began life in the Old World and ran away to the New. The stereotypical pirate with a kerchief round his head and a cutlass at the waist, singing “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” doesn’t begin to describe these untamed men who in Hispaniola had slept with their animals, “with no more estate than a knife, and a gun, the sky their coverlet.”
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The fellow behind the eye patch and the gold earring was a natural anarchist who followed his own way on an uncharted journey that eventually brought him to Port Royal. In Tortuga, he had found a refuge. In Jamaica, he found a home.

To maintain a semblance of order, Port Royal had two prisons, a cage, a ducking stool, and stocks. One jail was for sailors “and other unruly elements.” The other was for women, “to allay the furie of those hott Amazons.” A nightly roundup hustled into a cage those too drunk to make it to a bed. When not whoring, the buccaneers shot at targets and gambled at cards, dice, billiards, shuffleboard, cockfights, and on a beastly match that pitted a bull and a bear. It was a rum-soaked scene—tawdry, noisy, and violent. The taverns and brothels “sucked them in, sucked them dry, and then tossed them out to seek further gold.”
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A newly arrived cleric, shocked to his core, left on the ship he came in on, and afterward wrote: “This town is the Sodom of the New World, the majority of its population being pirates, cut-throats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world.”
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Another visitor concurred: “’tis almost impossible to civilize [the town]. Vile strumpets and prostitutes are a walking plague against which neither the cage, whip nor ducking stool prevails.”
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The setting cries out for a good novelist. It is an interesting challenge, as characters previously introduced now show up in Port Royal: Moses Cohen Henriques, whose citizenship paper was signed by Henry Morgan, lived here with his wife, Esther; Campoe Sabada, the invasion pilot, was likewise awarded citizenship; and Abraham Lucena, one of the half dozen Jews who with Jacob Cohen and Isaac Israel fought Stuyvesant, eventually owned land at the port.

Then there is the interesting figure of Batholomew (aka Balthasar) the Portuguese, whose misadventures are part of buccaneer folklore. Expelled from Jamaica after having assisted the English invaders in 1642, he turned full-time pirate and was in and out of the port on roving excursions. His tale is told by his contemporary John Esquemelin.
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Smarter and more persistent than most in his profession, the Jewish pirate didn’t know when to quit. In 1666, his ship heavily out-gunned and outmanned, he captured a “great vessel” off Cuba’s south coast with a rich cargo of cacao beans and seventy thousand pieces of eight. Contrary winds prevented his safe return to Port Royal and he was intercepted by three Spanish men-of-war, which took him to a nearby port, Campeche. Bartholomew having previously escaped imprisonment there (for “infinite murders and robberies”), his captors decided to keep him aboard ship “fearing lest he escape out of their hands on shore.”

Knowing he was to be hanged the following day, Bartholomew, unable to swim, fashioned a pair of crude water wings from two empty wine jars, killed his guard, and slipped overboard. Hiding in a mangrove swamp, he concealed himself from the search parties for three days in the hollow of a tree. Using nails salvaged from a board washed ashore, he built a raft of twigs and branches and floated downriver to a secluded harbor frequented by buccaneers. There he met up with a Jamaican pirate crew “who were great comrades of his own.” Relating his “adversities and misfortunes,” he promised them a share of the wealth if they gave him a small ship and twenty men to retake the great ship that had been his two weeks before. Entering the port undetected, he and his men were able to persuade those aboard that they were traders coming from the mainland. By the time the Spaniards realized their mistake, it was too late.

Bartholomew was again master of the ship where he had previously been held prisoner awaiting execution. Although the silver had been removed, the trade goods were still in the hold, and weighing anchor, he set sail for Jamaica “with extremity of joy.” But south of Cuba, “fortune suddenly turned her back upon him once more, never to show him her countenance again.” A “horrible storm” dashed the ship against the rocks, leaving him and his crew with only a canoe to return to Port Royal. Esquemelin concludes his monograph, noting that although Bartholomew survived to “seek his fortune anew…from that time on [it] proved always adverse to him.”

Critics cite the earlier presence in Port Royal of Abraham Cohen’s relative Joseph Bueno Henriques, and his purported knowledge of a secret Spanish copper mine, as evidence that Cohen’s purported search was “a fraudulent scheme…to gain entry into the economic life and trade of Jamaica.”
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In 1661, Joseph petitioned “Your Majesty to obtain permission to go to Jamaica…[to] discover a copper mine…the Spaniards…found to be productive.” He claimed that when he was living in Jamaica in 1658, an escaped Spanish prisoner “informed me of [its] whereabouts.” He had the gall to offer Charles a niggardly 10 percent of the proceeds, and the king rejected his proposal.
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However, Charles later granted him naturalization and in 1672 he is listed in a Port Royal census as one of sixteen Jewish merchants so certified.

The tale seems to validate the skeptics’ view. But a reading of the royal contract clearly dispels the notion that Cohen and his partners really came “for the sake of trade.” It states in no uncertain terms that the Jews will be awarded the right to export “all hollow pepper [pimento],
only in the event of the discovery…finding and working of the mine
” [emphasis my own].
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Therefore, if their search was indeed bogus, and there was no mine, there would be no trade benefits.

The never-before-accessed documents found in the archival vault also supported the view that the search for the gold mine was real and that Cohen, if he did not actually find the site, at least believed he knew where it was. They show that Cohen, despite his lifetime banishment, returned to Jamaica sometime in 1670, and in January 1671 secured 420 acres in an isolated river valley at the headwaters of the Oracabessa River (an area today confirmed as a gold-bearing region by Jamaica’s Ministry of Mining). Cohen’s actions—leaving behind his new family in Amsterdam and journeying to a far-off island from which he had been banished in order to buy land in a hidden valley—only seems plausible if he believed it contained the site of Columbus’s mine.

As for Beeston’s view that the mission was a fraud, this too demands another look, not just because of Cohen’s return, but also because Beeston’s later actions show he was no friend of the Jews. Along with policing the waterfront, he was a rival merchant, and more than once tried to expel Jews: In November 1671, the harbormaster seized a Jewish-owned ship on the pretext that Jews were foreigners and had no right to trade.
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The court overruled him, but when he became governor in 1700, he tried to drive Jews from the island. His means this time was to tax them in what they formally protested was “an extraordinary Manner hoping thereby to oblige [us] to quit the island.”
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Beeston’s unrelenting hostility was again evident in 1702, when Jews, citing unfair treatment, petitioned for voting rights. Beeston, with the Council of Jamaica concurring, declared their grievance “false and scandalous,” and suggested they should be “imprisoned for their presumption.” They weren’t, but they were ordered to pay a tribute of two thousand pounds. When the Jews appealed the fine, the Crown sided with them, but not in regards to suffrage.
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The archival documents highlight what was going on in Jamaica when Cohen was expelled in 1664, up until his final appearance in 1675. Twice during that decade, he was in and out of the island, first to buy the valley land, later to develop it. What the documents do not reveal is what allowed him to return to buy land in 1670, and what made him suddenly leave the following year. Nor do they explain why in 1674 he felt it was safe to come back, ostensibly to work the mine, only to leave again in haste.

In June 1664, two months after the “gold finding Jews” left Jamaica, the island’s new governor, Thomas Modyford, arrived from Barbados. Unlike Beeston, Modyford favored Jewish settlement. Weeks before, when he was still governor of Barbados, he testified “on the value of the Jewish Traders in the progress of settling the Colony…the Jews are our chief supplyers in Barbadoes, and would sell very cheap, and give one not seldom two years to pay, by which credit the poorer sort of planter did wonderfully improve their condition.”
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Modyford, at the time he assumed the Jamaica post, may not have been aware of the king’s decree that banished Cohen and his partners, but he undoubtedly knew of it when he approved Cohen’s land deed in 1671, and otherwise supported his presence.

Modyford ruled Jamaica during the heyday of piracy. From 1666 to 1670, the buccaneers and their leader Henry Morgan invaded the fabled cities of the Main and held its citizens for ransom. Using the same Inquisition tortures (and at times the same apparatus), they forced the Spaniards to surrender their wealth. In five years of nonstop plundering, Morgan, with Modyford as his patron and defender, and backed by Port Royal’s Jewish merchants, “attacked and plundered 18 cities, four towns 35 villages and unnumbered ships.”
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Morgan was born on a farm in Wales in 1635 to a prosperous family. An adventurous youth, he journeyed to Bristol, then the major port for the slave trade, and soon found himself caught up in it—literally. “Shanghaied” is a later term for what was referred to as being “Barbadoed”—kidnapped and transported to a foreign land to be sold as an indentured servant. So it was that the nineteen-year-old farm boy hanging around the docks was captured and put aboard a ship bound for Barbados. Sold to the owner of a tobacco plantation, he did not have to labor long. Cromwell’s fleet arrived shortly thereafter, and with the promise of freedom he joined Venables’s army and wound up in Jamaica. Nothing more is known of him until 1662, when he signed on with Mings. By then he had fought the “cow-killers” in Hispaniola and Ysassi’s guerrillas in Jamaica, gaining combat experience that served him well in the coming years, and from Mings he learned important lessons that made him a brilliant strategist. That he was also courageous, dauntless, and cruel were no less vital attributes.

Modyford and Morgan were a perfect pair to shape the colony. Though in many ways opposites, they complemented each other. A descendant of Morgan later contrasted the two: “[Modyford] was cunning, mannered, elegantly dressed and extremely popular; his sexual tendencies leant toward homosexuality.”
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Morgan, on the other hand, was lustful, boisterous, and prideful. Rum was his elixir, and he usually could be found with his mates in the taverns of Port Royal, where in his cups, he loved to spin yarns. Both men were charming, ambitious, duplicitous, and Machiavellian.

For all his licentiousness and volcanic temper, Morgan was a great leader, and when required, a disciplined and brilliant tactician. Morgan did whatever it took to conquer a place and wring the last piece of eight from a prisoner. If he and his men had scruples, they kept them hidden: They slaughtered soldiers and priests, raped women and nuns, tortured adults and children, and blew up churches. Modyford, for his part, ran interference, calling Morgan’s actions necessary for Jamaica’s defense.