Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (32 page)

“Olivares’ opponents said he had invited the wolves into the hen house…His financial advisor was a prominent ex-Jew from Amsterdam, and his council was dubbed his
sinogoga…
Right before his downfall, Olivares’ own converso heritage was exposed. The king…threatened that should he return to court, ‘the public will not be appeased unless you are turned over to the Inquisition.’ With this change in climate, the grudging tolerance the conversos were accorded came to an end. Most of the community Olivares fathered soon departed for freer lands. For five years, Olivares kept the Inquisition at bay. In the free trade atmosphere of new business and fresh capital, Spain prospered. Innovative Portuguese letters of exchange and credit made capital portable and goods transportable to ports everywhere. But in the end, the Inquisition triumphed. An
auto da fe
on July 4, 1632 signaled the end to Olivares’ scheme. Olivares looked on as six Portuguese confessed to
judaizing…
The Grand Inquisitor, from atop a platform at one end of the square, condemned the six (four men and two women) to the
quemadero
(the burning place)…later that month the nephews of Olivares’ financial advisor disappeared into the secret cells of the Inquisition. Months later they…confessed under torture to
judaizing.
The message was clear: Spain was not ready to bring back her Jews.”

23. Using Jamaica as his base, he intended to recruit additional settlers from the French islands and capture the rest of Spain’s New World empire. Sweden’s account of the treaty is found in Aron Rydfors,
De diplomatiska forbindelserna mellan Sverige och England 1624–1630
(Uppsala: 1890), 100–113, trans. on request by Hans Linton, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Stockholm.

24. Cundall and Pietersz,
Jamaica Under the Spaniards,
39–40.

25. V. T. Harlow, “The Voyages of Captain William Jackson 1642–1645,”
Camden Miscellany
13 (1923), 19.

26. Ibid., 20–21.

27. Cundall and Pietersz,
Jamaica Under the Spaniards,
40: In October 1643, Governor Francisco Ladron de Zegama “died a prisoner without guards in his own house.”

28. John Taylor,
Taylor’s History of his Life and Travels in America and other parts, with An Account with the most remarkable Transactions which Annuallie happened in his daies,
vol. 2 (1688). See John Robertson, “An Untimely Victory: Reinventing the English Conquest of Jamaica in the 17th Century,”
English Historical Review
117 (2002), 14: “In St. Mary, the Spanish settlers built a nunnery to mark their victory in a civil war with their Portuguese fellow colonists.”

29. Bryan Edwards,
History of the British Colonies in the West Indies,
vol. 2 (London: John Stockdale Pickadilly, 1801), 193. “The Jealousy occasioned by the revolution which had placed the Duke of Braganza on the throne of Portugal, caused the expulsion of almost all the colonists of that nation. When the British forces entered Spanist Town, they found 2000 houses but few inhabitants. The deserted house in the capital proved the want of tenants. This was due to the expulsion of Portuguese settlers.”

30. Carol S. Holzberg,
Minorities and Power in a Black Society: The Jewish Community of Jamaica
(Lanham, Md.: North-South Publishing, 1987), 16n: “15 or 20 years before British invasion…13 Portuguese families were expelled.”

31. I first came across Israel’s name in Captain Fonseca’s 1634 testimony before the Inquisition in Madrid. The spy listed Israel as “adjutant” (administrative officer) of the Recife-bound supply ships that allegedly were to stop off in Portugal, storm the Inquisition prison, and free the prisoners. Israel’s name also appears in the testimony of Abraham Bueno Henriques, a young Dutch Jew taken prisoner in the fighting in Brazil and sent to Lisbon for trial. W. Samuel, “Sir William Davidson, Royalist (1616–1689) and the Jews,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
14 (July 1936), 49–50: In his confession to the Inquisitors, he noted that Abraham Israel was married to his niece. Since Israel’s full name “de Pisa” identifies him with Italy, and since the Bueno Henriques family also had links with that country, Samuel suggests that despite the commonality of the name Abraham Israel (one likely assumed by conversos upon their reversion to Judaism), the young prisoner was referring to his near kinsman Abraham Israel de Pisa. This relationship Samuel reinforces in the testimony of Sir William Davidson, who in urging the endenization [naturalization, or some rights of citizenship] of Daniel Bueno Henriques, a Barbados Jew, notes that Daniel Bueno Henriques is “a neir kinsman of the Portingall Merchand who goes for Jamaica for the discovery of the Myne ye know of.” However, the “neir kinsman” might just as likely have been Abraham Cohen, who was also an Henriques. My deduction is that all three were related. As Daniel M. Swetschinski has documented in his article “Kinship and Commerce: The Foundations of Portuguese Jewish Life in 17th Century Holland,”
Studia Rosenthaliana
15, no. 1 (1981), 65, the partners in most business dealings were “almost inevitably related.”

32. Morris U. Schappes, ed.,
A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654–1875
(New York: Citadel Press, 1950), 1–2.

33. Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Exodus from Brazil,” 319–20: That some were left behind in Jamaica is documented in a “Letter of Protest of the States-General of the Netherlands to the King of Spain,” dated November 14, 1654.

34. Ibid., 320.

35. Schappes,
Documentary History of the Jews,
5.

36. When the ship bearing the Company’s letter arrived in New Amsterdam granting the Jewish “boat people” admission, among its passengers were the sons of Cohen and Israel, Jacob and Isaac. Each was around thirty years old. Looking beyond the borders of New Amsterdam, the two friends applied for a license to trade for furs with the Indians, and Israel journeyed down to South River to barter for skins with the Delaware Indians. He returned with pelts, but their license was rejected, and only approved after Calvinists added their signatures. Hints of their characters are apparent in the court records: Cohen was charged with smuggling eleven carts of tobacco, and Israel with “punching [another Jew] in the face.” After securing rights for their people, the two wound up joining their fathers in Jamaica in the search for Columbus’s lost gold mine.

Chapter Eight: Cromwell’s Secret Agents

1. James Williamson,
A Short History of British Expansion: The Old Colonial Empire
(London: Macmillan, 1965), 249: The 1,500 ships were “double that of the English mercantile marine.”

2. Albert M. Hyamson,
The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, 1492–1951
(London: Methuen, 1951), 11: Daniel Cohen Henriques, aka Duarte Henriques Alvares from the Canaries, married a Jewess, Leila Henriques, in Amsterdam, and after their marriage they settled in England. “This was the first appearance in England of the well-known Sephardim family of Henriques.”

3. Antonia Fraser,
Cromwell: The Lord Protector
(New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1974), 521.

4. Ibid. Fraser wrote that the preparations were so secret that “one Scottish soldier involved wrote, ‘if he suspected his shirt knew of the plans, he would be compelled to burn it.’”

5. Ibid., 522.

6. Irene A. Wright, “The English Conquest of Jamaica,”
The Camden Miscellany
13, (1924), 11, quotes the Spanish captain Julian de Castilla’s report on the invasion: “Among the prisoners taken was an English youth who begged for his life in Spanish. He stated he was General Robert’s interpreter…He said his Protector…had received into London the greater part of the Hebrews of Flanders and sold them one of the best quarters in the city, with a church for synagogue. He understood that these Jews had urged the dispatch of this fleet and advanced a great loan for its fitting out. It is not difficult to believe this, since the example of Brazil exhibits similar treasons and iniquities committed by this blind people out of the aversion they have for us.”

7. Most information on Carvajal is from Lucien Wolf,
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
2 (1894), 14–46; and Lucien Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
2 (1893–94), 55–88.

8. Fraser,
Cromwell,
524.

9. S. A. G. Taylor,
The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean
(Kingston: Institute of Jamaica and Jamaican Historical Society, 1969), 10.

10. Ibid., 16, 19.

11. Taylor,
The Western Design,
34, 36.

12. Ibid., 36: Taylor quotes Henry Whistler, “Journal of the West Indian Expedition (1654–1655),” reprinted in
Journal of the Institute of Jamaica
2 (Kingston, 1899).

13. Wright, “The Spanish Naratives of Santo Domingo, The Notarial Account,”
The Camden Miscellany
13 (1924), 59: There is also the admission of a fourth prisoner: “he said their intention was to go to Jamaica.”

14. H. P. Jacobs, “Jamaica Historical Review,”
Jamaica Historical Society
1, no. 1 (June 1945), 109–10.

15. Wright, “‘The English Conquest of Jamaica’ by Julian Castilla (1656),”
The Camden Miscellany
13 (1924), 522.

16. John Elijah Blunt,
The Jews of England
(London: Saunders and Benning, 1830), 70–71: “The Rabbi’s extreme supporters embarrassed Cromwell when it was reported in the daily press that they had looked up his birth records to see if the
Lord Protector
was of the line of David and might himself be the Messiah!” When word of their investigation reached London, “Cromwell was suspected of being privy to their designs, and was exposed to raillery. At a meeting of the council the Jews were summoned…warmly upbraided and ordered to depart the country.”

17. Evidence that Carvajal and Acosta were Jews comes from their Jewish descendants resident in the Caribbean.

18. Taylor,
The Western Design
, 61.

19. C. A. Firth, ed.,
A Narrative by General Venables of His Expedition to the Island of Jamaica: with an Appendix of Papers Relating to the Expedition
, Royal Historical Society (London, 1900). Venables’s report to Cromwell. Richard Hill, Jamaica’s foremost nineteenth-century historian, writes in
Lights and Shadows of Jamaican History: Eight Chapters in the History of Jamaica (1508–1680) illustrating the settlement of the Jews on the island
(1868), 35: “The family influence of Diego Columbus had rendered it very considerably Portuguese. Several Jewish families already here are progenitors of families still living and commenced the nucleus of Jewish influence so remarkable and so paramount in Jamaica at this day.”

20. Taylor,
The Western Design,
63: When Duarte de Acosta, who was held by the English as a hostage, sent his slave with a message to his brother Gaspar, the slave was garroted as a spy. Acosta, “incensed” at the murder of his slave, went over to the English. Venables noted: “A good deal of information was obtained from Acosta.”

21. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56: De Caceres’s origins: born 1615 or 1623 in Amsterdam, died 1704 in England. He was the son of Moses de Casseres, one of the twelve founders of Neveh Shalom, and lived in Barbados from 1647 to 1654 and in Hamburg before he came to London. Maurice Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews in the Sephardic Century,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
24 (1970–73), 47: his family was from Caceres, in Spain, near the Portuguese border, where many Jews lived before the expulsion, on the same latitude as Toledo and Lisbon.

22. Lucien Wolf, “American Elements in the Resettlement,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
3 (1896–98), 97–98, Appendix VII.

23. Thomas Carlyle, ed.,
Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,
A Library of Universal Literature (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1800), Part 2, 428.

24. W. S. Samuel, “A List of Jews Endenzation and Naturalization 1609–1799,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
2 (1968–69), 113.

25. Lucien Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,”
Essays in Jewish History
(1934), 103: “sends first authentic warning of treaty…the text of which he conveys ‘is kept very close’ but he obtained a copy for 20 [pounds].” Source—Birch: Thurloe Papers, v. 645. March 56, Blake sailed from England to blockade Cádiz. When the galleons arrived, he captured six of the eight ships and two million pieces of eight, and the following year burned or sank the Spanish fleet in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This ended all hope of sending an expedition to the West Indies in the fall to retake Jamaica.

26. Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” 112.

27. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56.

28.
Interesting Tracts Relating to the Island of Jamaica which throw great light on the history of that island from its conquest down through the year 1702
(St. Jago de la Vega, 1702), 1–2: “A Proclamation of the Protector,
Relating To Jamaica:
we therefore,…[decree] that every planter or adventurer to that island shall be…free from paying any excise or custom for any…goods or necessaries which he or they shall transport to the island of Jamaica…for a space of ten years.”

29. Anita Libman Lebeson,
Pilgrim People
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 48–49; Arnold Wiznitzer,
Jews in Colonial Brazil
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 174–75.

30. Fraser,
Cromwell,
566.

31. Ibid., 561; Bernard Martin,
A History of Judaism,
vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 163.

32. Lucien Wolf,
Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell
(London: Macmillan, 1901), 78–79: Text of Menasseh’s address to Cromwell. Along with fulfilling the Messianic requisite, Menasseh noted: “Profit is the most powerful motive all the world prefers before all things,” and stressed the wealth their return would create. There is no record of what they discussed when they met, but it is easy to imagine a lively volley of opinions on Scripture, prophecy, and trade. Menasseh, in addressing him, assumed “a most submissive and obsequious posture imaginable,” but was quick to remind the Protector of the fate of leaders who treated Jews harshly: “No monarch has ever brought suffering to Jews without eventually being heavily punished by God.”