Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (7 page)

Although little is known about the Portugals Charles sent to Jamaica, apparently there was trouble right away, because at the same time Charles was recruiting his crusading army, he hurriedly dispatched an abbot to the island to keep an eye on religious matters. In March 1535, Father Amador de Samano arrived in Jamaica. He had gone ahead on the king’s orders before being accredited by the pope. Unable to produce papers from Rome, he was not recognized by Jamaica’s governor, who “used many disrespectful words unto him and other things worthy of censure and punishment.” When Charles was notified that his governor had acted “in disservice of God and in disrespect of our royal decrees,” he ordered him to “purge his offence before the Royal Audiencia
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in Santo Domingo.”
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For Charles, Jamaica’s rejection of his abbot was a final straw. Years before, he had allocated money for a Jamaican church that was still being built and a hospital that never was. He received samples of gold ore, but not much more. His two haciendas and their livestock were valued at five thousand pesos, and though he also had two sugar mills, the only profit he made was selling produce to the starving settlers. Even then he had to loan them money to buy the goods, and if they didn’t pay, threaten to sell the produce to his other colonies.

Jamaica was a losing proposition, and the governors he sent there were no better. Each accused his predecessor of diverting funds and selling off the king’s acreage “as their own private property.” It had been ten years since a plague of smallpox wiped out most of Jamaica’s Indians and the island’s more ambitious settlers left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The allure to leave in 1536 was even more compelling as word spread that the search for El Dorado was on, with three conquistadors climbing over mountains in a competitive race to find the haunt of “the Golden One,” the Indian king bathed in gold dust. Between the island’s Portuguese, whom he needed but didn’t trust, and the lazy Spaniards who remained, Charles was convinced that he wasn’t going to realize much of a profit from Jamaica. The island, he concluded, would be good only as a trading post, a way station for ships en route to and from the New World.

The answer he settled on was to deed Jamaica to the Columbus kin. Since the summer of 1536, Charles had been negotiating with Diego Colón’s widow, María de Toledo, to settle a lawsuit she brought to recover Columbus’s rights of discovery on behalf of his grandson, her eight-year-old son, Luis Colón. In January 1537, she agreed to drop the suit in return for Jamaica. Charles did not question why Doña María wanted Jamaica; he was glad to get rid of it. But when he drafted the agreement to relinquish the troubled colony, she rejected it because it did not include power over the Church.

After a month’s stalemate he reluctantly gave in.
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This provision—subordinating the Jamaican church to the Columbus family—was unprecedented. For the next century, the family kept Jamaica, alone in the Spanish Empire, out of bounds to the Inquisition. Doña Maria’s decision was critical to the Portugals with whom she worked closely to develop the island’s trade. Like the court Jews who counseled Columbus on the issue of hereditary rights, Jamaica’s Portugals would have encouraged her to hold firm to this demand.

Unfortunately, the absence of an Inquisition in Jamaica also means there is almost a complete absence of information about these Portugals who opted for New World adventure over Old World connections. While most conversos fled east or settled around the Mediterranean, these Portugals chose Jamaica, an island in a new sea. Rather than reside in restrictive exile communities under the watchful eye of another ruler, they opted for the unknown. In these peak years of discovery and conquest, they looked to a New World where each man could be his own ruler and had the same hot blood for adventure that surged through all who came.

In February 1537, Charles formally ceded Jamaica to the Columbus family.
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It would still be a part of the Spanish realm and the family could not erect forts without Crown permission or pursue an independent foreign policy. Except for these stipulations, Jamaica, and “all the mines of gold” therein, were now the personal estate of the Columbus family whose heirs would bear the title Marquis de la Vega.
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After the matter was settled, Pedro de Manzuelo, royal treasurer of Jamaica, wrote the king. He had “heard that His majesty had bestowed the island of Jamaica on the Admiral” and cautioned:

This will be a loss to the Crown because Jamaica is another Sicily in Italy, for it provides all the neighboring countries as well as the Main and New Spain and is the centre of them all. If times should change…whoever is Lord of Jamaica will be Lord of these places on account of its situation…His Majesty should on no account part with it.
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Over time, the remaining Spanish colonists in New Seville joined the Portugals in La Vega. However, with ownership vested in the discoverer’s family, few Spaniards were interested in settling what came to be called Columbus’s island. Those already there were mostly ranchers, raising horses, cattle, and pigs. By midcentury, their power was at a low point, while the Portugals, who were mostly engaged in trade, prospered, in part by supplying passing conquistadors with horses and provisions.

Although the hidalgos were often in conflict with the Portugals, a century would pass before accusations of Judaizing surfaced. Apparently they maintained a Christian façade, attended church, and had their children baptized. Probably they adhered to some of the same practices as the secret Jews in Mexico and other Spanish colonies, who gathered in secret on certain nights to read from the Torah. They fasted twice a week for their apostasy, adored Purim’s Queen Esther as a covert Jew like themselves, and viewed Haman as the Grand Inquisitor.

Meanwhile, back in the Mediterranean, Charles’s nemesis Sinan, who never hid behind a Christian mask, continued the marauding that would seal Suleiman’s power in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1538, the Jewish corsair destroyed most of Spain’s naval fleet off the port of Preveza in Greece, and the following year he blockaded the Gulf of Cattaro on the Dalmatian coast and forced the surrender of the last Spanish garrison. These defeats for Charles, coupled with the death in childbirth in 1539 of his beloved wife, Isabella, plunged the emperor into a despair that was only dispelled by aggressive action against false conversos and planning a renewed war against the infidel.

Charles’s motive when he allowed Spain’s conversos to settle in Antwerp in 1536 was purely mercenary. What they believed didn’t concern him. But this attitude changed when King John followed suit, and soon Portugal’s conversos were outperforming those from Spain in the burgeoning East Indian spice trade, netting Portugal’s king nearly a million ducats a year.
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Accordingly, Charles reversed the policy. Knowing that Portugal’s Jews, having been forcibly converted, were more likely to Judaize, in 1540 he ordered Antwerp’s bailiff “to proceed with utmost severity” against suspect conversos.
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Charles next turned his attention to capturing Algiers, the Ottoman outpost closest to Spain. As he had taken Tunis, so he would conquer the sultan’s primary stronghold in his sector of the Mediterranean. In the fall of 1541, Charles advanced on Algiers with a force of fifty warships, two hundred support vessels, and an army of nearly twenty thousand. As the port was lightly defended by a garrison of four thousand men, he had good reason to be confident.

But on the night of October 23, as his army was disembarking on a beach near Algiers, thunderous black clouds out of the northeast darkened the landing site and burst upon them. For three days, an unceasing storm and gale-force winds wracked the invaders. Fourteen warships were dashed against the rocks and a hundred transport vessels destroyed, with the loss of eight thousand men. Those who made it ashore were stuck in a muddy quagmire. At the end of the tempest, Moorish horsemen charged down from the hills, their swords flaying the imperial troops. Charles, soaked to the skin, with sword in hand, tried to rally his men, but considering the situation, ordered his army to re-embark. When the fleet regrouped fifteen miles down the coast, the conqueror of Mexico, Hernando Cortés, whom Charles had invited along, advised a counterattack. But the emperor, his troops dispirited, exhausted, and ill-equipped, reluctantly ended the expedition, blaming its failure on the weather. During the invasion, the two thousand Jews of Algiers, knowing the fate that had befallen their brethren in Tunis, lived in great fear. Afterward, in commemoration of the three days when the heavens opened up in their defense, they instituted a special holiday with three days of fasting and celebration.
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In 1544, a year after his Algiers disaster, Charles left Spain for Flanders and did not return until 1556. As Charles departed in sadness, Sinan rejoiced. The Jewish corsair was at the Red Sea port of Suez that year, building a fleet to support an Indian prince’s effort to evict the Portuguese, when he got word that Barbarossa had rescued Sinan’s kidnapped son. Five years before, the boy had been taken by imperial forces on his way to rejoin his father after Sinan’s latest victory. He was eventually delivered to the Lord of Elba, who baptized the child and raised him at court. Several times Barbarossa tried to ransom the boy without success. Finally in 1544, when sailing near Elba, he sent an envoy to bargain for the youth’s return, only to be told that the ruler’s “religious scruples forbade him to surrender a baptized Christian to an infidel.” A furious Barbarossa landed his men, sacked the town of Piombino, and blew up the fort. At this point the Lord of Elba agreed to surrender his “boy-favorite.”
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In 1551, after a stint as governor of Algiers, Sinan, now Kaptan Pasha, commander of the Turkish navy, captured Tripoli. Occupying the port, he imprisoned the Knights of Malta, who had moved there from their island. After first hauling them back to Constantinople and parading them in chains before the sultan, Sinan—gracious in victory in contrast to Charles’s crusaders at Tunis—set the humbled knights free.

In May 1553, in his final recorded action, Sinan sailed down the Dardanelles from Gallipoli with 150 ships, including twenty French galleys, and ravaged the coastal districts of southern Italy and Sicily. Before returning to Constantinople, he landed on Corsica at the behest of the king of France and expelled the Genoese. That is the last we hear of “the famous Jewish pirate,” noted for his humane treatment of prisoners and his magical powers. His untutored crew bragged that he needed no more than a crossbow to find the height of the stars to determine their position at sea. (In truth, his crossbow was a “Jacob’s staff,” an early form of sextant.)

Charles’s final years were not as fortunate. In 1556, the pressures of the job drove him to abdicate in favor of his son Philip II, give half his empire to his brother Ferdinand, and retire to a monastery.
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The Venetian ambassador wrote that he was “not greedy of territory, but most greedy of peace and quiet.”
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Yet war was his constant affair and he was utterly worn out by it. In the company of monks, the emperor spent the last two years of his life fishing for trout from a tower window over a rushing stream and trying to synchronize his sizeable collection of 159 clocks. He is said to have exclaimed after giving up in vain: “How foolish I have been to think I could make all men believe alike about religion or unite all my dominions when I cannot even make these clocks strike the hour together?”
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In September 1558, after a long illness and tormented by the gout that left him an invalid, Charles cried, “Oh Lord, I go,” and died. Sinan, who had always been a thorn in his side, also died that year. His tombstone at Istanbul’s Scutari cemetery reads in part:

Towards his friends, Sinan was another Joseph; his enemies dreaded him like a dart. Let us pray to Heaven for Sinan; may God cause his soul to rejoice…The Kaptan Pasha has entered the realm of Divine Mercy.
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An assessment of Charles’s reign has to conclude that he overreached and overspent. The empire was too big, his enemies and the forces against him too powerful. The tides of history were not in his favor. Spain had stopped producing. Relying on gold and silver from the New World to import most everything doubled the prices of goods. Europe thereby profited, while Spain’s treasury by the time he abdicated was 20 million ducats in debt.

Moreover, Luther’s translation of the Bible into German in 1534 proved a capstone to Protestants. Although they would be fiercely opposed by the Society of Jesus, founded that same year, whose members saw themselves as soldiers of God and whose Counter-Reformation was supported by Charles, there was no stopping the heretical sect that spread like plague through his empire. Even Charles’s vaunted prestige as conqueror of Tunis dissipated when the son of his vassal there dethroned (and blinded) his father and thereafter favored the Turks; at La Goletta as well, his Spanish commander wound up renouncing his faith and became a Muslim.

Charles could not hold back the winds of change. He resented that his enemies made a point of aiding and abetting Sephardim, whom he saw as
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heretics. By midcentury, France’s new king, Henry II, allowed “Portuguese merchants” known as “New Christians” to settle at Bordeaux and Bayonne, two ports on the Atlantic just north of Spain enriched by peninsula trade, while in Constantinople an estimated fifty thousand Sephardim contributed their talents to his rival empire. In 1551, a Spanish visitor to Turkey cursed the Portuguese Jews’ rearming of the military:

Would that it had pleased God that they had drowned in the sea in coming hither! For they taught our enemies the villainies of war such as how to make harquebusiers, gunpowder, cannonballs, brass ordnance and firelocks.
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As they had in the Mediterranean during Charles’s reign, Sephardim would come to dominate Caribbean commerce and the flow of wealth. The discovery of the Americas and the establishment of new sea routes to the East placed world trade within the ambit of Sephardim resettled throughout the known world. By midcentury, the land routes of the Middle Ages had given way to ocean highways. In Jamaica, before her death in 1549, Doña María worked with converso merchants to transform a nonperforming colony into a major transshipment port, a natural development (albeit illegal) for an island astride Spain’s trade routes to and from the New World.