Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (22 page)

When I was in the Synagogue I counted about a hundred Jews…all merchants…not one mechanic person of them; most were rich in apparel, with various jewels glittering (for they are the richest jewelers of any). They are generally black and may be distinguished from Spaniards or native Greeks, their hair a more perfect raven black; they have a quick piercing eye and strong intellect; several of them are comely, gallant, proper gentlemen. I knew many who I saw daily upon the Exchange.
²⁶

Across the North Sea, four months earlier, Abraham Cohen and Abraham Israel decided the time was opportune to pay the king a visit. Their friend Benjamin Bueno Mesquita, just back from Jamaica,
²⁷
had told them that the Jamaican Jews who first revealed the mine, namely Abraham Suares and Jacob Vilhoa, had followed his lead and kept it secret all these years. Now that Jews were legally settled in Britain and the colonies, and the king had shown himself an ally, the partners sailed for England to set in motion their long-delayed design to gain Columbus’s mine. It was in this connection that in February 1662, Charles’s agent in Reading alerted him of the arrival from Amsterdam of “certain Jews having knowledge of the gold mine which a Spaniard told His late Majesty existed in Jamaica.”
²⁸
They were on their way to London and were seeking a royal audience.

On March 5, 1662, Sir William Davidson, the king’s agent in Holland, introduced to Charles the three Dutch Jews who claimed to know the location of Columbus’s lost mine. They were Abraham Cohen, Abraham Israel, and the latter’s son Isaac. The two older gentlemen, he said, were well respected in Amsterdam, where they were major players in Holland’s colonial trade, and wealthy beyond need.

Israel recounted how he had learned of the mine from Jamaica’s covert Jews when he was imprisoned on the then-Spanish island. He told the king they had confided in him because they feared their feigned Christianity would be exposed by the Inquisitors due from Colombia. Knowing he was about to be released, they asked him to use this knowledge to encourage a foreign invasion. But by the time he got back to Europe, Cromwell’s army had already sailed, and Jamaica was already targeted. But rather than dicker with a contentious Parliament, they had waited seven years until the king was restored to his throne before coming forward.

Although Charles had earlier promised to return Jamaica to Spain, the prospect of the mine’s supposed riches changed his mind. It is not known what the Jews said to convince him, only that, as stated in their contract, “reposing trust & confidence in ye abilities, [he was] well pleased and contented [to] grant [them] full power…and authority…in Jamaica…to search for, discover, dig, and raise…a Mine Royal of Gold…whether the same be opened or not opened.”
²⁹

The Jews, at their expense, would command a two-year expedition to find and work the mine, for which the king was to receive two-thirds of the gold “gotten into wedges,” and the Jews one-third. Once the mine was found, they would be awarded a trade monopoly in brazilwood and pimento spice, Jamaica’s major exports. In addition, each miner (including slaves) would receive thirty acres. As a show of good faith, they were made English citizens, and when the draft of the contract was initialed, Charles, in an expansive mood, removed the gold necklace he was wearing and placed it over the head of Israel’s son. With his friend George Villiers Jr., the second Duke of Buckingham, looking on approvingly, he told his Hebrew partners he was “bestowing a gold chain for their encouragement.”
³⁰

Villiers, the orphaned son of the unfortunate first duke, had been taken into the king’s household after his father’s assassination and raised as a kind of surrogate brother to the young prince. From childhood, the two had known about the mine, which was first offered to their fathers as an inducement to invade. They knew that it was somewhere in Jamaica, but as the vein of gold was reportedly only “two inches wyde,” finding it on a 4,500-square-mile island of thickly forested mountains was like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Columbus’s family reportedly kept the mine hidden to prevent others “from invading an island as weakly manned as Jamaica.”
³¹

Charles had accompanied his father during the first years of the civil war, but after the king’s army was defeated in 1646, he went to live in France with his Catholic mother. Buckingham, after a three-year frolic in Italy, where his family had sent him, soon joined Charles, and the two immersed themselves in the pleasures of Paris. The bishop of Salisbury, one of their six tutors (among them was Thomas Hobbes) blamed the eighteen-year-old duke for introducing the sixteen-year-old prince to “all the vices and impieties of the age.”
³²
The two aristocrats shared a love of women, adventure, and theater, particularly actresses. They were fascinated as well by the era’s scientific findings. Charles founded the Royal Society of Science in July 1662 to encourage serious researchers like Sir Isaac Newton, while Buckingham’s involvement was more dilettantish. In an early address to the Society, he promised to donate a unicorn horn.

This was the extravagant duo that contracted the Jews to fulfill the lifelong dream that had first galvanized their fathers.

In March 1663, HMS
Great Gift
put into Port Royal with a trio of fathers and sons on a mission to find and work the fabled mine. Disembarking were Abraham and Jacob Cohen, Benjamin and Joseph Bueno Mesquita, and Abraham and Isaac Israel, the last sporting a heavy gold chain.

With England, Holland, and France competing along the trade routes, Jewish merchant adventurers, particularly those from Amsterdam, were courted, and sometimes given credibility beyond their due. Was this the case with these so-called “gold finding Jews”? The harbormaster thought so. Suspicious from the start, William Beeston wrote in his diary:

Six Jews arrived (with a rich cargo) under the specious pretext that they came in search of a vein of gold known to them during the Spaniards government…[but] this was basely a pretence for their design was only to insinuate themselves for the sake of Trade.
³³

As with Spain’s exclusive trade policy, England’s Navigation Act forbade foreigners from trading with her colonies. Beeston’s judgment is supported by the fact that not only were the partners granted citizenship, but the second part of their contract awarded them a monopoly to ship “hollow ground pepper,” aka pimento or allspice, for which the island is still famous. A year later, when no mine had been found, the Jews were accused of fraud. Charles revoked their privileges and ordered them expelled from Jamaica. In his pique, he further demanded that they return his gold necklace. But in May 1664, when his banishment decree reached Jamaica, the partners were already gone. The president of the Council of Jamaica wrote the king: “The gold finding Jew went hence a month ago…he has left here ore and direction to find the gold, but we are all infidels, because the miracle is to be wrought in our country.”
³⁴

Every historian who has looked into this story has endorsed the harbormaster’s derisive judgment that Cohen and his partners came “for the sake of Trade,” and that the search for the mine was a ruse of these conniving Jews who spellbound a king with the promise of treasure. Later doings by the harbormaster reveal that he had a private reason for rendering his verdict. Even so, Beeston’s bias didn’t necessarily negate his charge. Further support was seen in a charge in 1664 that Mesquita was engaged in illicit trade with Cuba while he and his partners were supposedly looking for the mine.
³⁵

This cynical view has largely prevailed. However, a sheaf of seventeenth-century documents discovered by the author in the Island Record Office in Spanish Town, Jamaica’s old capital, suggests that, to the contrary, the only fraud the partners may have perpetrated was in declaring they had
not
found the mine. This archival evidence is best understood in the context of events in Jamaica during this period, later memoralized as the golden age of piracy.

Chapter Ten

BUCCANEER ISLAND

I
n the decade after the English takeover, more people were dying than arriving in Jamaica. Cromwell’s liberal policy to give “Encouragement to such as shall transplant themselves to Jamaica” promised English citizenship to every child born there, and an allotment of twenty acres to every male over twelve years (ten acres to each female).
¹
But his stated resolve “to people and plant that Island” had few takers, as word seeped out that Jamaica was a land of famine and disease with enemies all about bent on reconquest. Cromwell’s plan to send a thousand Irish boys and girls was stillborn; another to transport from Scotland, “all known idlers, robbers and vagabonds, male and female,” was abandoned when he was warned “this would set the whole country ablaze.”
²
Cromwell’s appeal to fellow Puritans in New England also came up empty when their delegate returned from Jamaica “horrified at the mortality among the soldiers.”
³

Even his single success was short-lived. Responding to his offer, the governor of Nevis arrived with a party of 1,500 men, women, and children, and settled on the eastern end of Jamaica. Being farmers, the newcomers immediately set to work clearing and planting many acres. Soon they had a bountiful crop, but others had to harvest it: In the three months the crops took to mature, a thousand of them had died.
⁴
Reluctantly, Cromwell continued to send more soldiers and food supplies (termed “survival stores”).
⁵
But this was no answer.

In 1657, he instructed Jamaica’s commander, Colonel Edward D’Oyley, to extend a formal invitation to the buccaneers of Tortuga to call Jamaica home.
⁶
As they began to dispose of their wares, the “fair beginning of a town sprung up around the fort” that de Caceres had recommended to guard the harbor entrance. Occupying the tip of a long and narrow peninsula, the port town could only grow up, not out. Freshwater had to be brought in by boat, which was the only way to reach the town. However, the port’s offshore depth was such that the biggest ships could unload at its wharfs, and hundreds more could anchor in the Caribbean’s largest harbor, sheltered by the seven-mile-long peninsula.

At first, each buccaneer crew was a force unto itself, electing (and disposing) captains at will to cruise the sea for merchant ships and stray galleons. This changed in 1659, when Jamaica’s naval commander, Commodore Christopher Mings, called them all together. Only a strong leader could unite men so fiercely individualistic, and Mings, who rose through the ranks from cabin boy, was a tough old sea dog who fit the bill. Rather than run down ships at sea, he proposed that they unite under his command and attack Spanish towns. On their first venture, Mings and his men plundered three towns on the Main, and returned with a haul valued at 1.5 million pieces of eight. The sight dazzled the people. After a few days of raucous celebration, so much silver changed hands that one wrote, “Not a man in the island reaped not a benefit of that action.”
⁷

The higher-born English officers were offended at the wild frolicking and scoffed at Mings for having allowed his buccaneers to keep so much of the spoils. They called him “a proud speaking, vain fool and a knave in cheating the State and robbing the merchants.”
⁸
This was sour grapes. There was no arguing with success. News of Mings’s exploit brought other buccaneers, merchants, tavern owners, prostitutes, and assorted and sordid pleasure-seekers to the port, so that in a few years the Point, as it was known, grew from “a barren sandy spit, to the largest, most opulent town in the English Americas.”
⁹
Mings’s triumph paved the way for the golden age of piracy under the command of one of his young captains, known to history as the Buccaneer Admiral, Sir Henry Morgan.

In August 1660, news of Charles’s restoration reached Jamaica. It was no longer a secret that he had promised to return Jamaica to Spain when he regained his throne. With the island’s future in doubt, merchants in England and Jamaica waited nervously to see what their king would do. They need not have worried: Charles was quick to renounce his promise, saying he had made it solely to secure Philip’s assistance to regain his crown, and as no help had been forthcoming, Jamaica would remain English.

This assurance, together with the defeat of Ysassi’s guerrillas and the success of Jamaica’s growing port, gilded by plunder and protected by buccaneers, put the island on a more secure footing. In the previous five years, Jamaica had been a burial ground for fully three-quarters of the nearly twelve thousand men, women, children, and slaves who had come to the island.
¹⁰
But now every ship arrived with new colonists, mostly from England. With the guerrillas no longer a threat, settlements spread inland. More acreage was planted and food was plentiful. Spanish silver, gained through plunder and contraband trade, poured into Jamaica. Now solvent, the colony began a regular trade with Boston, shipping hardwoods and cattle hides for fresh food and salt fish. Fort Cromwell was renamed Fort Charles, and the Point christened Port Royal.

Fed by plunder, nourished by merchants, and spiced with sensuous pleasures, Port Royal attracted English and French buccaneers, as well as men of no nation, or at least none they acknowledged. Here they found what they needed most: a ready market for Spanish loot, facilities to repair and equip their ships, and the ribald pleasures they sought between voyages. By the end of 1660, there were always “at least a dozen armed ships in the area.”
¹¹
Owing to their fearsome presence, Charles felt comfortable enough that Christmas to recall the fleet to England, and the following year disbanded most of the army.

Iberian Jews, welcomed by Cromwell and Charles II, now arrived in Jamaica from all over the New World and abroad. Here they could throw off their converso cloaks and live free and prosper. Together with brethren from Holland and England, the Jewish community included shipowners from Mexico and Brazil, traders from Peru and Colombia, and ship captains and pilots from Nevis and Barbados. Joining with Jamaica’s Portugals, their combined knowledge of New World trade (both legal and illegal) was unsurpassed.

An island census in August 1662 put Jamaica’s population at 6,000 (including 552 slaves), and found that Port Royal was home to thirty “stout vessels” manned by three thousand buccaneers.
¹²
At the time, Mings was abroad with 1,500 of them, plundering Santiago, Cuba’s second largest port, and sacking Campeche in Mexico. In December, he returned to a hero’s welcome, and shortly after was recalled to England to be knighted by Charles and made admiral.
¹³

When news of Mings’s exploit reached Spain, Philip was furious. He wrote Charles demanding satisfaction. Hadn’t he and Charles agreed to a truce only months before? Campeche was near Vera Cruz, where the
flota
was loaded with silver and other treasures. Fearing Vera Cruz could be next, Philip hurriedly dispatched an armada to escort the
flota
home.

Charles assured Philip that Mings’s raids had been without his knowledge and that he would put a stop to it. He wrote Jamaica’s governor: “Understanding with what jealousy and offence the Spaniards look upon our island and how disposed they are to make some attempt upon it…the king signifies his displeasures of all such undertakings and commands that no such be pursued for the future.”
¹⁴
His condemnation not withstanding, the king’s draft of his letter conveyed his truer feelings. While he called for a cessation of such attacks, he first wrote: “His Majesty has heard of the success of the undertaking which he cannot choose but please himself in the vigor and resolution wherein it was performed.” His subsequent letters to Jamaica’s governor indicated that, if given the right excuse, his orders to desist could be ignored.
¹⁵

Versions of this episode were repeated again and again in the decades that followed. In a century that began with the Thirty Years’ War, peace was a rarity. When Europe’s rival powers agreed to a truce, more often than not it was so that the two signatories could jointly attack a third. At times the buccaneers would be reined in, and licenses to attack other nations’ ships revoked. But these licenses, known as letters of marque, would soon be reissued on some pretext. Spain was the preferred target, but sudden shifts in alliances meant that, at times, the ships of Portugal, Holland, and France were also fair game. In 1665, the French and Dutch were at war with England. The Dutch bombarded Barbados, and the next year the French routed the English at St. Kitts and threatened Jamaica.

Publicly Charles castigated the sea rovers; privately he turned a blind eye. Governors were dispatched to Jamaica “with strict orders to keep the peace,” but quickly learned to holler wolf: “The Spanish are coming!” An alleged need to preempt a foreign invasion was the usual excuse for unleashing the buccaneers. Besides, it was argued, if Jamaica denied them the freedom of Port Royal, they would resort to other havens, and perhaps even target English ships.

In March 1663, “the gold finding Jews” entered a town that had grown to near three hundred buildings. When they left the next year, another hundred had been built, all crammed together at the end of the otherwise barren peninsula. A visitor described Port Royal’s crooked streets and narrow lanes, lined with shops, taverns, and warehouses topped with balconied homes, as having the look of “an English shire town perched on the end of a tropical spit.”
¹⁶
At the time of the conquest, the site was “nothing but loose Sand [with] neither Grass, Stone, fresh water, Trees, nor anything else,” and only used by the Spaniards to careen ships to clean their hulls.
¹⁷
A decade later, the land spit had morphed into the treasure house of the Indies, so dubbed for its plunder-filled warehouses along the wharves, packed high with cases of sugar, cocoa, dyewoods, precious stones, plate, bullion, and other commodities. With buccaneer ships unloading their spoils, while others waited in the harbor to disgorge their ill-gotten gains and rowboats plied passengers and goods to and fro between ship and shore, the waterfront was a noisy, nonstop scene of bustling human activity.
¹⁸

The pirates captured the riches, but it was the merchants, both Sephardim and rival English, who profited most, buying the booty “dogge cheape” on the dock, and selling it dear abroad. Wrote one visitor: “The merchants live here to the height of splendor, in full ease and plenty, being sumptuously arrayed…not wanting anything to delight and please their curious appetites.” Their elegant homes were spectacular, furnished with plunder—silver plate, crystal chandeliers, and other accoutrements that had once graced a noble’s casa or a bishop’s dining table. Not to be outdone, by 1663, twenty-two pirate captains had equally grand residences, and shod their horses with silver horseshoes, loosely nailed and carelessly dropped to show their disdain for hoarded wealth.

It is not known how Cohen and his partners spent their time in Jamaica. Inside of a year they were gone. Gone too, at least from the historical record, are the two Portugals who welcomed the English, Duarte Acosta and Francisco Carvajal. Sephardic names appear on the island’s early land deeds, bills of lading, wills, lawsuits, immigration records, hostile petitions, and so on. Port Royal had a Jew Street and a synagogue. The port’s leading Jewish merchants are named (15 from a list of 125 merchants), as are their enemies, the rival merchants who petitioned to expel “the crucifiers of our Lord…who eat us and our children out of all trade.”
¹⁹

Most ships sailed to England in accord with the Navigation Act; others snuck in and out to avoid registration. In Jamaica’s public registry, the amount of cargo consigned to Jewish merchants is relatively small. As in Spanish Jamaica, the Sephardim dominated the so-called silent trade. It is in this undocumented trade with converso merchants in Spain’s colonies that Jamaica’s Sephardim specialized, supplying them with European goods at bargain prices.
²⁰
Unregistered merchandise bound for Vera Cruz, Havana, Nombre de Dios, Cartagena, and Santa Marta left Port Royal and the surrounding mangroves on unmarked sloops in the dead of night. Archival records contain the names of ninety-six Jews who lived in Port Royal during this era. That there were more is certain, but their names are absent from the public record. With trade restricted to English citizens and Jews who had been naturalized, undocumented Jewish traders kept their participation secret.