Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (33 page)

33. D’Blossiers Tovey,
Anglia Judaica: A History of the Jews in England
(1738); retold by Elizabeth Pearl (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 143–44.

34. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 64. London Jews petition Cromwell: “to shelter himself from those tyrannical proceedings and enjoy those benefits and kindness which this commonwealth afforded to afflicted strangers as yr Highness hath bin pleased to show yourself on behalf of the Jews.”

35. Ibid., 65.

36. Ibid., 66.

37. Gilbert Burnet, Osmund Airy, ed.,
A History of My Own Time,
vol. 1 (London: Company of Booksellers, 1725), 76.

38. Carlyle, ed.,
Oliver Cromwell’s Letters
, vol. 22, 427–30.

39. Thomas Birch, ed.,
A Collection of State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq. Secretary, First to the Council of State to the Two Protectors Oliver and Richard Cromwell
(London, 1742), vol. 4, 543–44: Sabada’s journal entry dated February 1, 1656.

40.
State Papers of Thurloe
#4, 602.

41. Wolf, “Crypto-Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56.

42. Wolf, “American Elements in the Resettlement,” 96–97, Appendix VII, Invasion of Chile letter: Simon de Caceres’s scheme for the conquest of Chile. Carlyle,
Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,
vol. 3, 131; Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” 108–9.

43. Cecil Roth,
History of the Jews in England
(London: Clarendon Press, 1964), 56.

44. Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews,” 47. Samuel Tolkowsky,
They Took to the Sea
(London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), 245: In April 1661, the king of Denmark endorsed the Caceres brothers’ request to Charles II to live and trade in Barbados and Suriname.

45. Jonathan I. Israel,
Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 1540–1740
, Brill Series in Jewish Studies (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2002), 298–99, quoting Simon De Vries,
Historie van Barbaryen
: From 1626, when the port city of Salé, Morocco, just north of Rabat, formed “a self-governing pirate republic,” the leaders and financial backers of the corsairs were “a small resident community of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam [who] divided between them the captured booty taken from Christians.” The States General, in a dispatch to Morocco’s sultan, identified two familiar names, Moses Cohen Henriques and Aaron Querido, as “prominent” traders who supplied arms and munitions to Salé. Other familiar figures were the sons of the Palache brothers, members of the Bueno Mesquita family, and Moses’s cousin, Benjamin Cohen Henriques, described in 1634 as Salé’s “pre-eminent resident Dutch Jewish merchant.” Peter Lamborn Wilson,
Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes
(New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 73.

46. Richard Hill,
Lights and Shadows of Jamaica History
(Kingston, Jamaica: Ford & Gall, 1859), 37: “The Jewish families laid the foundation of the trade and traffic of Jamaica as soon as mercantile business became organized with the Freebooters. With the Jewish settlers, properly opens the connexion of the colony with the Buccaneers.”

Chapter Nine: The Golden Dream of Charles II

1. Benjamin Keen, ed. and trans.,
The Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), li: As Columbus wrote in his Book of Prophecies: “O, most excellent gold! Who has gold gets what he wants, imposes his will on the world, and helps souls to paradise.”

2. Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel,
History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles
(Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 40–43.

3. Samuel Oppenheim, “An Early Jewish Colony in Western Guiana and Its Relation to the Jews of Suriname, Cayenne and Tobago,”
Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society
16 (1907), 108–9.

4. Emmanuel,
History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles,
44: In 1659, David Cohen Nassi, who contracted with the Company to found a Jewish colony in Cayenne, bought “52 negro slaves from Abraham Cohen do Brazil who had paid the Company 2995.50 florins cash for them and he would reimburse Cohen within three years.” Zvi Loker,
Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times
(Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, Institute for Research on the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage, 1991), 59–60: In August 1659, Abraham Cohen and A. Luis, merchants in Amsterdam, ship “goods and passengers” to Cayenne with the agreement of the West India Company; in November 1659, Abraham Cohen and A. Luis, acting under Power of Attorney of the New Cayenne Company, send the ship
Abrahmas Offerhande
“laden with wares” to Cayenne. March, 3 1660: “Abraham Cohen chartered
the Hamburch
to ship cargo and several Jews to Curacao and Cayene” May 1660: “A. Cohen to ship to A. Luis \ part of his property from the island ‘Ayami’ on the river in the wasteland of the Wild Coast.”

5. Loker,
Jews in the Caribbean,
107.

6. Emmanuel,
History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles,
43.

7. Brian Masters,
The Mistresses of Charles II
(London: Blond and Briggs, 1979), 45.

8. Jean Plaidy,
The Wandering Prince
(New York: Fawcett, 1971), 164–65.

9. Quoted in Antonia Fraser,
Royal Charles
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 139, 173.

10. See
http://www.contemplator.com/england/phoenix.htm
.

11. Fraser,
Royal Charles,
139.

12. Masters,
The Mistresses of Charles II,
45.

13. Ibid., 47.

14. A. G. Course,
A Seventeenth-Century Mariner
(London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1965), 24–26.

15. Cecil Roth,
History of the Jews in England
(London: Clarendon Press, 1964), 167.

16. Lucien Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
5 (1896–98), 13.

17. Lucien Wolf, “Status of the Jews in England After the Resettlement,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
4 (1899–1901), 181–82.

18. Ibid., 182.

19. Edgar R. Samuel, “David Gabay’s 1660 Letter from London,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
25 (1973–75), 38–42.

20. Antonia Fraser,
Royal Charles,
195: Fraser quotes an entry in
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles II,
no. 140, November 30, 1660.

21. Roth,
History of the Jews in England,
160–61.

22. Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,” 15: María Fernandez de Carvajal, née Rodrigues, was maternal aunt of Antonio Rodrigues Lindo (brother of Lorenzo), who was arrested in Lisbon for Judaizing when he was twenty-three in 1660. Of María, a tough gal—“when the community was threatened in 1660, she called a meeting of her co-religionists at her house in Leadenhall St, that petitioned Charles II for ‘his Majesty’s protection to continue and reside in his dominions.’”

23. Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,” 15–16: While Charles hadn’t yet formally sanctioned their presence, he had reason to. While most Jews sided with the Protector, others in Amsterdam and London, led by the da Costa family, were sympathetic to his cause. Reportedly, they advanced Charles one million guiders (about $600,000). Thus, while Cromwell had his Jewish intelligencers, other Jews supported the exiled king.

24.
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661–1668
(National Archives, Kew, Surrey, England), 7/24/1661 #139: In April 1661, Charles approved their petition to live and trade in Barbados and Suriname, endorsed by the king of Denmark.

25. Within two years after his restoration, the number of London Jews holding bank accounts increased from thirty-five to ninety-two.

26. Albert M. Hyamson,
The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, 1492–1951
(London: Methuen, 1951), 19.

27. Yosef Kaplan,
Jews and Conversos: Studies in Society and the Inquisition
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981), 214, 221.

28.
Calender of State Papers, Colonial America and West Indies, 1661–1668,
no. 216, 69.

29. Charles II’s contract with Abraham Israel de Piso and Abraham Cohen, Egerton MSS., folios 152b–158b, British Museum.

30. Domestic Entry Book, Charles II, vol. 14, 57, National Archives, Kew, Surrey, England.

31. Samuel, “Sir William Davidson, Royalist,” 46.

32. Nigel Cawthorne,
Sex Lives of the Kings and Queens of England
(Chicago: Trafalgar Square, 1997), 72.

33. Samuel, “Sir William Davidson, Royalist,” 46.

34. Herbert Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews in the British West Indies,”
Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society
5 (1897), 69, transcribes the letter as “the gold finding Jew left…here
ore
and directions to find the gold.” Samuel transcribes the same passage as “
care
and directions…”

35. Nuala Zahedieh, “The Capture of the Blue Dove, 1664: Policy, Profits and Protection in Early English Jamaica,” in R. McDonald, ed.,
West Indies Accounts: Essays on the History of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic Economy
(Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1996), 29–47.

Chapter Ten: Buccaneer Island

1. 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), 111–12.

2. C. H. Haring,
The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966; reprint of 1910 edition), 92; Dudley Pope,
The Buccaneer King: The Biography of the Notorious Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–1688
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), 74.

3. Taylor,
The Western Design,
113.

4. Ibid., 118.

5. Michael Pawson and David Buisseret,
Port Royal, Jamaica
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1975), 62.

6. S. A. G. Taylor, ed., “Edward D’Oyley’s Journal,” part 2, transcribed by F. J. Osbourne,
Jamaican Historical Review,
vol. XI, 1978, 69: In September 1657, D’Oyley wrote the Committee of Officers and Merchants: “I am sending to Hispaniola for about 250 buccaneers, vizt. French and English that kill cattle who would come to us if they might have that liberty which I intend to give them.”

7. Taylor,
The Western Design,
133.

8. Ibid., 141–42: Privateers were empowered to attack Spanish ships. By attacking Spanish settlements rather than Spanish ships, they did not have to fork over some of the loot to the licensing authorities.

9. Pawson and Buisseret,
Port Royal, Jamaica,
80.

10. Ibid., 131.

11. Pope,
The Buccaneer King,
77.

12. Taylor,
The Western Design,
205; Pope,
The Buccaneer King,
80.

13. Pawson and Buisseret,
Port Royal, Jamaica,
220.

14. Haring,
The Buccaneers in the West Indies,
109.

15. Ibid., 110.

16. Pawson and Buisseret,
Port Royal, Jamaica,
97.

17. Ibid., 99.

18. Ibid., 83.

19.
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America & West Indies, 1901
, 593: January 28, 1692, the president of the Council of Jamaica to the Lords of Trade and Plantations: “The Jews eat us and our children out of all trade, the reasons for naturalizing them not having been observed; for there has been no regard had to their settling and planting as the law directed…they have made Port Royal their Goshen and will do nothing but trade…This is a great and growing evil.”

20. Pope,
The Buccaneer King,
86.

21. Salvador de Madariaga,
The Rise of the Spanish American Empire
(New York: Free Press, 1965), 162.

22. Pawson and Buisseret,
Port Royal, Jamaica,
119.

23. H. R. Allen,
Buccaneer: Admiral Sir Henry Morgan
(London: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1976), 23.

24. Quoted in Clinton Black,
Port Royal
(Kingston: Bolivar Press, 1970), 21.

25. Alexander Winston,
Pirates and Privateers
(London: Arrow Books, 1972), 30; a reprint of
No Purchase, No Pay
(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd., 1970), one of the best books on buccaneers.

26. Philip Lindsay,
The Great Buccaneer
(London: Peter Neville Ltd., 1950), 103.

27. Pope,
The Buccaneer King,
163.

28. Pawson and Buisseret,
Port Royal, Jamaica,
119.

29. John Esquemelin,
The Buccaneers of America. A true account of the most remarkable assaults committed of the late years upon the coasts of the West Indies by the Buccaneers of Jamaica and Tortuga by John Esquemelin One of the Buccaneers who was present at those tragedies
(New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 65–69.

30. Stephen Alexander Fortune,
Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650–1750
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984), 35.

31. Zvi Loker,
Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times
(Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, Institute for Research on the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage, 1991), 164–67; best one-stop source of period documents.

32. Egerton MSS., folios 152b–185b, British Museum.

33.
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America & West Indies,
1669–1674, 7, no. 968, 15-11-1672. Petition of Rabba Couty to the King; vol. 9, no. 306, 22-21-1672: The King to Sir Thomas Lynch re: Rabba Couty.

34. Loker,
Jews in the Caribbean,
181.

35. Ibid., 177–82; Richard Hill,
Lights and Shadows of Jamaica History
(Kingston, Jamaica: Ford & Gall, 1859), 120–21.

36. Hill,
Lights and Shadows,
125, cites: Appendix to the Journals of the Assembly, 22 Charles II. A. 1670.