Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (13 page)

The dissidents’ likely courier was the rabbi pirate’s friend, the slave merchant from Amsterdam, Diego Diaz Querido. Five years before, in 1618, King Philip IV had warned Brazil’s governor that Querido was a known smuggler of contraband and to keep a close watch on his ships. The governor took no action. As it happened, Querido had earlier loaned him thirty thousand crusados “from the stores of his ships.”
⁴⁸
It was not an outright bribe—the loan was repaid—but it served the same purpose: Querido continued his triangular trade, carrying manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to Brazil, and sugar to Amsterdam…and on one of his trips may have secreted in his cabin a pouch containing the rebel Jews’ invasion promise.

If, as alleged, Querido was the courier, he would have delivered the message to the Brotherhood of the Jews of Holland, a clandestine group dedicated to fighting the Inquisition. The secret organization was founded in the decade after Rabbi Palache’s death to carry on his struggle for Jewish rights and against Spain. Its existence was revealed in the tortured confessions of four convicted Judaizers.
⁴⁹
In separate Inquisition trials in Cartagena and Lima, they described La Cofradia de los Judios de Holanda as an underground organization headquartered in Amsterdam, with cells of three to five men each in various colonies in the New World that forwarded intelligence and funds to Holland to buy arms to aid the war effort against Spain. They testified that the cells also sent money from local conversos looking to move to Holland, which the Brotherhood invested and remitted to the owner when he settled in Amsterdam.
⁵⁰

Bento Osorio, the Amsterdam community’s richest trader, is thought to have been the Brotherhood’s leader.
⁵¹
He imported olive oil from Turkey, nutmeg and pepper from India, and sugar from Brazil. In a city that taxed the merchants’ dazzling homes (described by visitors as “palaces”), Osorio’s palatial mansion was the most heavily taxed on the Jodenbreestraat.
⁵²
Although the Dutch West India Company was founded without Jewish participation, an Inquisition document accuses Osorio of being in league with the Company: “[By] maintaining spies in many cities in Castile, Portugal, Brazil & elsewhere [Osorio] gives the orders and plans for plundering…thinking by this means to destroy Christianity.”
⁵³

Despite Brazil’s enormous area, the Company reckoned it would suffice to conquer the coastal province of Bahia to secure the colony. Assured by the Brotherhood of fifth-column support, Prince Maurice agreed to a policy of religious freedom in the conquered territory, and that Jewish soldiers could form their own company.
⁵⁴
On May 8, 1624, an invasion force of 3,300 men that included “several dozen” Jews arrived at Bahia on twenty-six ships.
⁵⁵
In the initial assault, Vice Admiral Piet Heyn easily captured the two main forts guarding the port. His quick victory panicked the defenders, who soon deserted.

The next night, Bishop Teixeira, the conversos’ nemesis, gathered his cassock and beat a hasty retreat. Described as “the most alarmed person in the city,” he fled with his priests into the forest.
⁵⁶
As the prince had promised, with victory a policy of religious tolerance was declared, and the Dutch invaders pledged to respect Portuguese property rights. The following day, two hundred conversos came forward to proclaim their adherence to their ancestral faith, and welcomed the Dutch Jews who participated in the invasion.
⁵⁷

While Bahia was under attack, a flotilla of Dutch ships sailed around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast to Peru’s Port Callao and laid siege to Lima. When the news reached Portugal that Bahia had fallen and Lima was blockaded, the governing council was understandably alarmed. Their quickly composed message to Philip noted that the Dutch invaders had been aided by the “
Hebrea da Nação…
not so much to make themselves masters of the sugar of Brazil as of the silver of Peru.”
⁵⁸

Spain’s king, convinced the Dutch were bent on further conquest, assembled a massive force to break the siege. He need not have bothered. The Dutch effort was already spent. After blockading the port for three months, they ran out of supplies and withdrew. Meanwhile, back in Brazil, Bishop Teixeira, having regained his courage, organized a guerrilla force that surrounded the city and prevented the Dutch from advancing. On March 29, 1625, a combined armada of fifty-two Spanish and Portuguese warships landed 12,566 men on the coast of Bahia and cordoned off the port. Defeat was inevitable, but for two weeks the Dutch held out, their resistance encouraged by the Jews. As a Spanish soldier noted in his diary:

A Dutch prisoner reported the enemy was very strong and that many Jews and Jewesses who had come with them from Holland, encouraged them to defend themselves and supported them with large sums of money.
⁵⁹

On May 1, the Dutch surrendered. To secure favorable terms for his Jewish contingent, Vice Admiral Heyn, in a communiqué to the enemy commander, requested that “Portuguese of the Hebrew nation who remained in Bahia during the occupation not be molested.”
⁶⁰
The Spanish leader refused, and demanded that the vice admiral hand over their names; but Heyn held firm. After a standoff, the matter was dropped. Although the surrender terms stipulated that only Hollanders could depart, most Jewish soldiers and their collaborators left with them. The few who remained behind shouldn’t have. In the aftermath of the reconquest, the Spanish commander hanged four of them as traitors. The Inquisitor’s report on the invasion blamed Bahia’s defeat on the Jews:

Secret Jews had written Holland and asked the Dutch to liberate them…had initiated plans for the invasion and agreed to share its costs. [The] Heretics had suckled at the breast of the Mother Church [and when the Dutch came] allowed themselves to be circumcised and openly professed the Jewish faith.
⁶¹

Later, an informer identified two of the collaborators who had gotten away:

Bahia was taken by order and plan of one Nuno Alvarez Franco, a Jew of Holland and resident of Bahia for more than 12 years and by order of one Manuel Fernandez Drago. Both lived in the said Bahia. Their fathers lived in Amsterdam and received from the States 200 pounds each year for their support.
⁶²

The Dutch occupied Bahia for a year and never took Lima. The ambitious pincer plan to capture Brazil and the silver mountain had failed. Disheartened, the army limped home to a near bankrupt country, made poor by the cost of the invasion and occupation.

Two years later, the nation’s spirits and fortunes were suddenly revived when Vice Admiral Piet Heyn and his young adviser Moses Cohen Henriques sailed into Amsterdam Harbor leading Spanish galleons, their holds filled with silver and gold. It was the biggest haul in history. For the first time since the discovery of the New World, the Spanish silver fleet had been captured and the Dutch were again on the offensive.

In the vanguard would be Moses and other young warrior Jews. Influenced by the likes of the pirate rabbi, the first generation born in freedom dominated Amsterdam’s nascent community. Their numbers tell the tale: In the 1620s, when there were fewer than two hundred Jewish families in the city, “several dozen” of them took part in the Brazil invasion, and the following decade, an Inquisition spy accused a hundred Dutch Jews of planning to invade Portugal and burn down the Inquisition prison.
⁶³
There is no record of this happening, but the informer’s charge gives an indication of the mind-set of these rebel youths—they had a Maccabean picture of themselves as militant Jewish deliverers, derived from their parents, their community, and Rabbi Palache. With the Holy Terror raging about them, these youths were called and encouraged to become a generation of warriors for Zion.

Chapter Six

ZION WARRIORS IN THE NEW WORLD

Antonio Vaez Henriques alias Moses Cohen is nothing but a spy to learn when the fleet comes and goes and when an assault can be made…as he did at the capture of the fleet by Piet Heyn in whose company was said Antonio Vaez.
¹

S
unrise, September 8, 1628: On board the admiral’s flagship, the
Amsterdam,
a few miles west of Havana, Moses Cohen Henriques, with his reputation on the line, was looking westward, scanning the sea. Unexpectedly, over the northern horizon, the topsails of the Spanish silver fleet, the
flota,
appeared: twelve ships loaded with ninety-two tons of silver, and treasure chests filled with pearls, rubies, and gold worth 16 million guilders, or in today’s currency, nearly one billion dollars.

Closing in on the unsuspecting fleet, the twenty-five ships of the Dutch armada cut off and captured nine ships without incident; but the three leading galleons, including the grand admiral’s, fled down the coast to the nearby port of Matanzas. The Dutch, in hot pursuit, boldly entered the harbor and drew abreast of two of the ships. Their soldiers, armed with cutlass, pistol, and musket, quickly clambered up the sides.

As quickly as we boarded, the Spaniards went over the side, swimming and paddling toward shore. Within minutes the flag of the United Provinces flew where the lions & castles had been. We then came to the admiral’s ship. We attacked with a musket charge and boarded her, calling to them “Buena Guerra.”
²

Writing in his cabin on his victorious voyage home, Vice Admiral Piet Heyn noted that this sardonic greeting (“Good War”) so demoralized the defenders that “upon hearing [it] they put down their muskets and went below deck.”

One lone sailor who jumped overboard, hoping to swim ashore, was hauled up from the sea and brought before the vice admiral.

I asked him how many Spaniards were aboard. He said about 150…I told him to go back and tell them I promised them quarter and would put them ashore. He asked me what kind of person I was. I said I was the fleet general, at which he asked me to let one of our men go with him so that he would not be killed by our people on board to which I consented.
^*6

The next day:

We unloaded the silver as fast as possible and divided it among all our ships. We figured there were about 46 lasts of silver, consisting of minted reals of eight, and bars of silver and silverware, altogether 2,851 pieces.

The plate fleet had been captured in a little more than three hours without the loss of one Dutchman’s life. A fast yacht carried the news to Holland. In early January, Heyn returned home, leading his fleet into the port of Amsterdam with the grand admiral’s galleon bringing up the rear. It took five days to unload the bounty on a thousand mule carts, which were then paraded in triumphal procession through the streets of Amsterdam behind the vice admiral’s coach. “Heyn was received as a visiting prince might have been.”
³
The country blazed with bonfires. Since the defeat at Bahia, the nation’s finances had been in dire straits. The government had exhausted its credit. Public debts were unpaid. Now suddenly Holland was rich again. The Company declared a dividend of 50 percent and, with its new wealth, prepared the fleet to again invade Brazil.

Moses Cohen Henriques, who had celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1616, sometime after the death of his mentor, had learned from Rabbi Palache to live as he dreamed. Moses wasn’t royal, but his ambitions were as grand as any aspiring noble’s. An early and valued member of the Brotherhood, he was sent undercover to Seville, where he soon acquired information that convinced the Company it made more sense to attack at sea the Spanish fleet that carried the ore to Seville rather than to mount a land invasion to capture the silver mountain. At twenty-five, Moses was half the admiral’s age, but he had proven himself in the Bahia invasion four years before, and so was invited by Heyn to sail with him.

Spain’s treasure fleet consisted of two heavily guarded armadas of twenty to thirty ships. The
Tierra Firme
group gathered the wealth of the Spanish Main; the
flota
picked up silver from Mexico at the port of Vera Cruz, along with the riches of Asia brought by the Manila galleons. After securing their bounty, the two fleets rendezvoused in Havana for a joint return to Spain. In 1628, when the
Tierra Firme
sailed north to Havana to meet up with the
flota,
it arrived too late. Except for the grand admiral’s galleon, all the ships were there, but their holds were empty; the plundered cargo was on its way to Holland.

The treasure fleet’s departure from Spain was a ceremonious occasion, but for security reasons the sailing date shifted radically from one year to the next, and was a closely guarded secret—one that young Moses Cohen Henriques somehow became privy to. How he acquired this vital intelligence is not known. Possibly he learned it from Bento Osorio’s agent there, who was fronting the Brotherhood leader’s illegal trade.
⁴
In any event, Moses was able to alert the Company of the
flota
’s intended sailing date. This allowed sufficient time to man and outfit twenty-five ships under the vice admiral’s command to sail to Cuba and await the fleet’s arrival.

To avoid the hurricane season, the
flota
had left Spain a month after the
Tierra Firme.
As always, its arrival in July 1628 transformed the marshy port of Vera Cruz into a carnival town swelled by merchants, gamblers, hustlers, and revelers. Traders from all over descended on the port, desiring not so much the
flota
’s cargo of European goods as the treasures of the Orient, the silks, jade, rugs, ivory, porcelain, and spices that had been carried by the Manila galleons to Acapulco, then by mule to Vera Cruz. The town rollicked until early August, when the
flota
sailed for Cuba, its holds filled with silver from Mexico’s mines and the bounty of Asia.
⁵
Havana was only a few hundred miles to the west, but that year contrary winds, the northers, forced the
flota
to follow the currents to the Florida Keys and approach Cuba from the north. Piet Heyn and his anxious young associate were waiting, having arrived two weeks earlier. In the course of two centuries, fifty attempts were made to capture the treasure galleons. Only theirs succeeded.

When the victorious fleet returned to Amsterdam, the young Jewish adventurers, who a few years before had joyfully participated in the Bahia invasion only to be depressingly dislodged, greeted Moses’s triumph with an enthusiasm that reflected their resurgent morale as much as his extraordinary deed. His victory, on the heels of their bitter defeat, had shown them that failure and success are best measured over time. It was a lesson they might have learned from their parents, who overcame Inquisition trials before gaining the free air of Amsterdam, or from Rabbi Palache, who first fled in retreat to the French diplomat’s home before renewing his fight.

Moses didn’t remain long in Amsterdam. The next year found him in Recife, the capital of Brazil’s Pernambuco province, plotting with the local underground to prepare for a renewed Dutch invasion. Moses then returned to Amsterdam to join the fleet. This was revealed four years later at a Madrid tribunal investigating the invasion. A turncoat who sailed with the Dutch testified:

The Jews of Amsterdam were responsible for the capture of Pernambuco & the principal one was Moses Cohen Henriques who went with the Hollanders & instructed them & gave them plans showing how to take the place, for he had spent many days in Pernambuco & was well acquainted with the entrances & the exits. The Hollanders did this by his secret counsel.
⁶

Historians have overlooked the audacious role of this dauntless young man who (1) participated in the first invasion of Bahia; (2) plotted and took part in the
flota
’s capture; (3) infiltrated Recife as an advance spy to coordinate fifth-column support; and (4) returned to Amsterdam to accompany the fleet for the second invasion. Scholars note only that in 1630 Moses was invited to go as a “guest of the Company,” but do not explain why he was so honored.
⁷
If not for the traitor’s account, quoted above, Moses’s role in Holland’s military adventures would be unknown. It was, however, no more than an opening salvo of an action-packed life, in which he would reign over his own pirate island, and later advise Jamaica’s famed buccaneer Henry Morgan.

On February 14, 1630, the Dutch fleet landed seven thousand soldiers at Recife. The next day, Moses, identified only as the Company’s “guest,” led three thousand more men ashore at a beach north of the port. Meeting him there was Antonio Dias Paparrobalos, the local underground leader who brought “two native mulattoes” to guide the invaders.
⁸
Encountering little resistance, inside of two weeks the Dutch were masters of northeast Brazil, an area embracing Pernambuco Province, the port of Recife, and outlying districts.

For the second time in a decade, Brazil’s conversos came out of the closet. This was noted by a Portuguese priest, Father Manuel Calado, who lived in Dutch Brazil from 1630 to 1646, and hated the Calvinists as much as the Jews: “[The conversos] welcomed the Dutch, greatly relieved that their double lives had come to an end, and they could cease feigning loyalty to Catholicism.” In his clerical report, Father Calado described the initial rush of freedom:

The Jews who had come from Holland had many relatives in Pernambuco who had lived in conformity with the law of Christ. However, after the Dutch had conquered the country, they lifted the mask which had disguised them and circumcised themselves, and declared themselves publicly as Jews…I heard it said many a time by the Jews that there was no man of their nation [i.e., conversos] in Pernambuco who was not a Jew, and if they did not declare themselves as Jews it was because of the fear that the world might turn and Brazil might return to Portugal, otherwise all of them would have already publicly declared themselves Jews.
⁹

One converso had cause to regret his unbridled enthusiasm. As Dutch officers, haughty in victory, strutted past his shop, the wine merchant Simon Drago threw open the doors of his cellar and welcomed them inside. Proudly, he declared himself a Jew, and in celebration of their victory and his personal freedom, he offered the officers a case of his finest wine. Quaffing that, they wanted more. Claiming they were entitled for having liberated his “kind,” they departed with eighty barrels of wine. This incident was revealed years later when Drago filed suit in Amsterdam, charging the officers had emptied his warehouse.
¹⁰

After the conquest, Moses settled in Recife and pursued a successful career as a licensed pirate, a privateer. With his share of the booty, estimated at one ton of silver, he bought ships, munitions, and an empty island off Recife to serve as his base. As a jab against his country of origin, he named the island, which today forms the heart of Recife, Antonio Vaz, cynically christening the redoubt with his old converso name.
¹¹
Joining him, as officers and crew, were other recusant Jews who, having rejected the stifling embrace of Amsterdam, shared his quest for unbridled adventure at the expense of the evil empire. It is not known how many enemy ships Moses seized, but Dutch privateers in the New World were very successful. For the period 1623 to 1636 (the year that Moses sold his island to Governor Maunce), Dutch privateers captured 547 Iberian ships, an average of nearly one a week.
¹²

Unlike Moses, who was a firstborn son, most Jewish settlers were younger sons. As such, they had not acquired a stake in the family business. It was reported they usually arrived with “only the ragged clothes they wore upon landing,”
¹³
to find their status quickly changed for the better. Fluent in Dutch and Portuguese, they bridged the language barrier between the newly arrived Dutch and the established Portuguese. Soon many occupied a profitable niche in Holland’s colony as middlemen in commercial dealings between the two groups. Prominent among them was Moses’s younger brother Abraham, who rose to become the colony’s buying agent, and was so widely respected that, in times of trouble, all sides turned to him to mediate their squabbles.