Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  Even if Ovando did send a ship, Columbus had little faith his gold medallions would be safe in Hispaniola, whose previous governor, he wrote the queen, “robbed me and my brother of our dearly purchased gold.”16 He expected no less from Ovando. During the tense five weeks before two rescue ships arrived (one sent by Méndez, the other by Ovando), he rarely left his cabin. Never again did he set foot on Jamaica.

  What happened to the gold of Veragua? The Crown had instructed Columbus that if treasure was found, “you must draw up an account of all this in the presence of Our Notary…so that We may know everything that the said Islands and Mainland may contain.”17 Yet the sixty-three medallions from Panama are not mentioned in the notary’s account, nor are they listed in the inventory of the ship that brought him home to Spain.18 Unsure his gold would survive Ovando’s rescue, Columbus would not have left the gold in Hispaniola.19 Columbus also had reason to fear a renewed mutiny on the way back to Spain. It is therefore unlikely that he kept the gold with him.

  That leaves Jamaica. Since he never left the ship, and trusted no one but his son and brother and a core group of loyalists, he presumably asked members of this latter group to transfer his gold to safety.

  There were two good reasons he could count on these youths, whose unstinting loyalty he vowed to reward.20 First, they had a fiscal interest in the voyage, as their fathers helped finance it. Second, their families, being wealthy conversos, were targeted by the Inquisition. It is reasonable, therefore, to postulate that to keep their sons safe, Columbus’s backers persuaded him to take them along.

  While the Jewish youngsters may have looked to Columbus as their Moses (as he himself did), Jamaica was no Promised Land. Still, for teenagers forced to lead underground lives in Spain, a year’s idyll on a tropical island was nearly as good. When not swimming around their rotting ships, or diving off a yardarm, they wrestled on the beach and otherwise contested for the favor of the naked Indian girls who daily brought food and lingered to watch the young gods at play.

  If Columbus did entrust them with the cache of gold, he would undoubtedly have called the boys to his cabin and instructed them to deliver it to Chief Huero, his Indian ally and the island’s most powerful cacique, who had outfitted Méndez on his successful crossing to Hispaniola and remained loyal after a prophetic night when Columbus’s God “ate the moon.” Columbus had noted in Zacuto’s almanac that a full eclipse was due in the early evening of February 29, 1504. The natives, turned off by the rapacious ways of the mutineers, no longer saw their visitors as gods, and, having their fill of Spanish trinkets, had begun withholding food supplies from the Spaniards, who, Fernando wrote, “consumed more in one day than [the Indians] ate in 20.”21

  Columbus saw the celestial event as an opportunity to rectify this “by taking their moon away.” On the day of the eclipse, he summoned the chiefs for “a feast and a palaver,” and told them: “Attend tonight the rising of the moon: She will rise inflamed with wrath, signifying the punishment God will visit upon you.” When the eclipse began shortly after sunset, Columbus retreated to his cabin. “The Indians grew so frightened,” wrote Fernando, “that with great howling and lamentation they came running in all directions to the ships, laden with provisions, and praying for the Admiral to intercede with his God that He might not vent His wrath upon them.” When the moon was in full shadow, Columbus emerged. He had pleaded with his God, he told them, who agreed to forgive them as long as the Indians kept the Christians supplied. As proof, “they would soon see the moon’s anger and inflammation pass away…From that time forward,” wrote Fernando, “the Indians were diligent in providing us with all we needed and were loud in the praise of the Christian God.”

  The eclipse vindicated Huero, who afterward presented Columbus with a tribute of small disks of gold from his previously undisclosed mine. Considering Columbus’s desperate straits, it is thought he called on Huero to safeguard his gold. If so, he would have had his young allies transport it under the cover of darkness.

  Although there is no hard evidence for this account of Columbus’s alleged gold mine, it is supported by later developments, including the return to Jamaica of the converso youths after their rescue. Having left the land of the Inquisition, they chose to remain in Hispaniola when the rescue ships landed in Santo Domingo, rather than accompany Columbus and the crew back to Spain.

  In November 1504, Columbus had been back only three weeks when his patroness Isabella died. The following May, the king offered him a rich estate and pension if he would relinquish his rights of discovery. Ferdinand regretted allowing Isabella to persuade him to empower Columbus with all sorts of rights and privileges, but although Columbus was in declining health, he was not about to surrender his hard-won titles. A little more than a year later, he made out his will, and died the next day (May 20, 1506) with his loyal mate Diego Méndez and son Fernando by his side.

  Three years afterward, Columbus’s eldest son, Diego, having inherited his titles, arrived in Hispaniola to replace Ovando as governor. Accompanying him were his younger brother Fernando and his uncle Bartholomew. This was their first trip back to the Indies since their rescue. A contemporary painting shows them seated around a conference table in the governor’s mansion.

  One issue they hoped to resolve was dealt with right away when Diego recruited “Portugals from Hispaniola”22 to reconnoiter Jamaica in advance of settling the island. Since Diego’s uncle and brother left for Spain right after the “Portugals” returned, it is apparent they had come for the left-behind gold of Columbus. Nothing more is heard of the sixty-three gold pendants, but Chief Huero’s mine begat the legend of Columbus’s “secret golden mine, which hath not yet been opened by the King of Spain or any other.”23

  To lead the Jamaica expedition, Diego had appointed Juan d’Esquivel, a converso who served under Bartholomew.24 Landing on the coast of Huero’s domain, Esquivel founded Melilla, which is the name of a Spanish port in Morocco that—coincidentally or not—alone in the empire was exempted from the expulsion order and remained a haven for Jews after the port was captured by Spain in 1497.25 When Esquivel returned to Hispaniola, and, it is thought, delivered the sixty-three medallions to Bartholomew, Diego appointed him Jamaica’s governor and directed the loyal conversos to return to the island. Thus began the settlement of Jamaica, a Caribbean island that, like Melilla in Morocco, would henceforth serve as a haven for Jews.

  In 1511, a flotilla of ships, carrying more than a thousand settlers, dropped anchor in Santa Gloria near the beach where Columbus was marooned. Expecting to find gold and create a New World capital rivaling Seville, the settlers laid out a city two miles long and named it Nueva Sevilla del Oro (New Seville of Gold). Unlike the Portugals, the newcomers were of minor Spanish nobility and had come to seek their fortune. A contemporary wrote, “They fancied that gold was to be gathered as easily and readily as fruit from trees.”26 However, when they realized they had to dig for it, and even then with rare success, disillusion quickly set in. The toilsome job of excavating the ore from the bowels of the earth was given over to the Indians.

  Within a decade, gold was being mined in Jamaica. But after Diego Columbus and the king had taken their share, the amount from the smelting house was not enough to satisfy the hidalgos, among whom were some former mutineers and their leader, Francisco Poras.27 That these rebels chose to return to the island they had risked their lives to leave suggests they believed there was more gold in Jamaica than what was being mined.28 It is therefore not surprising that the Columbus family and their allies, the Portugals, kept Huero’s mine a secret.

  Despite the paucity of gold, island life was pleasantly rewarding. Jamaica was a fertile land, and the average allotment of 150–200 pacified Indians per settler meant that one could have a successful ranching operation, made all the more comfortable by a modest harem of baptized Indian women. Jamaica was developing nicely as a food depot supplying passing ships and breeding horses for the conquistadors. But then the Indians started
dying. Unused to the white man’s germs, they expired when they got sick, and a plague of smallpox finished them off. Soon everyone wanted to leave.

  In 1513, Esquivel reported that many of New Seville’s colonists had left for Cuba, leaving behind their caiguaes (Portuguese servants), who had moved to “the south side of the island to carry on the cultivation of foodstuffs.”29 The caiguaes had been considered personal baggage, and as such did not have to produce the “clean blood” certificates required of other settlers in the colony. Later developments indicate they were conversos.

  While New Seville struggled, the south coast settlement flourished. Though the community was never formally recognized, a cryptic remark by Peter Martyr—from 1511 the “Royal Chronicler of the Indies”—makes an oblique reference to the conversos. After being made abbot of Jamaica in 1514, he wrote the king: “There are two settlements but only one will have my church.”30 The following year, a report from Jamaica’s new governor, Francisco Garay, pointedly referred to the community. Having replaced Esquivel, Garay wrote his sovereign on the state of the island, and underlined his intention “to see the country and the site of the town on the other side.”31 Later, he too would desert the island to join in the conquest of Mexico, leaving behind more caiguaes to join those who had come before.

  From the time that Santangel financed Columbus’s Enterprise of the Indies and persuaded the royal couple to grant the explorer’s family hereditary rights to any new land he might discover, Columbus sailed with a hidden agenda: Along with his stated goal of gaining the riches of the East, it was hoped he would acquire a new land where Sephardim could live free from the terrors of the Inquisition. The discoverer of the Indies didn’t rule long enough to make good his promise to provide a homeland for converted Jews, but for more than a century his heirs kept Jamaica off-limits to the hooded Inquisitors who were empowered to root out heresy in all Spanish territories. As far as Jamaica’s proprietors were concerned, as long as their “Portugals” wore a Christian mask, no one might question the sincerity of their religious beliefs. Under the protection of the island’s rulers, covert Jews came disguised as conversos from Portugal, their presence there known and approved by the Spanish Crown.

  Chapter Two

  ADVENTURING IN THE NEW WORLD

  At the dawn of the Age of Discovery, when Spain’s monarchs banished the Jews to purify their nation, followers of the Law of Moses sailed with the explorers and marched with the conquistadors. With the discovery and settlement of the New World, they took solace in the hope of finding a safe haven, or at least putting distance between themselves and the Inquisition. Unlike other pioneers, they had no home to return to, and as seen in the preceding chapter, they were among the first foreigners to permanently settle the New World. Going about as bona fide Christians, most carried their secret to the grave. The adventures of some who did not paint an extraordinary tableau of their time. These include a turban-wearing pilot who sailed with three of the early explorers; the first capitalist to own and market New World flora; a suspect Jew who discovered California; a conquistador who was the first Jew burned in the New World; and other Judaizers, men and women, who joined in the conquest of Mexico.

  GASPAR, THE JEWISH PILOT

  Outlawed in the civilized world and vulnerable in the Diaspora, Jews became skilled in ways to find and explore new lands. They were the era’s foremost mapmakers, and also perfected the nautical instruments and astronomical tables the early explorers sailed with. When Jewish expertise was needed, prejudice took a backseat to expediency, and Jewish pilots, adept at reading maps and using navigational instruments, were recruited to interpret those tables. Had they not, many an explorer would have been lost in the vast oceans, and three of the most famous—Vasco da Gama, Pedro Cabral, and Amerigo Vespucci—used the same enigmatic Jew to show them the way.1

  The story begins in 1494, when the pope, believing (as all did) that Columbus had found the western sea route to Asia, divided the world between the two contending Iberian nations by drawing a line through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. His ruling, agreed to in the Treaty of Tordesillas, assigned all lands 370 leagues (about 1,175 miles) west of the Cape Verde islands to Spain, and all lands east to Portugal.2 Three years later, when Columbus was preparing his third voyage across the Western Sea, King Manuel of Portugal commissioned Vasco da Gama to seek the eastern route around Africa. In the event the two explorers should meet, King Ferdinand gave Columbus a letter of greeting for his rival.

  Da Gama, a learned nobleman, who credited his “Hebrew tutor” for teaching him navigation, mathematics, and astronomy, left Lisbon in July 1497 in command of four ships and 170 men. Two years later (in September 1499), he returned with two ships, fifty men, and a few spices to show for his effort. If not for his fortuitous encounter with the Jewish pilot, he might not have returned at all. But thanks to him, Portugal beat Spain in the race for India’s riches, and monopolized the lucrative spice trade.

  Approaching the subcontinent, da Gama had stopped at a small island off the coast of Calicut to careen and clean his ships when a small boat approached. In its bow stood a tall, bearded white man, richly dressed in Eastern attire. Calling to them in Spanish, the stranger asked to speak to the captain. Welcomed aboard the flagship, he introduced himself as Moncaide, the harbormaster of Calicut, and explained that his lord, Rajah Samorin, having heard of the “military valor and nautical knowledge of the Portuguese,” had sent him to welcome the foreigners.3

  Da Gama, whose voyage thus far had been marred by attacks along the East African coast, suspected a trap and ordered his men to seize Moncaide’s attendants, who immediately confessed their leader’s duplicity. Far from being the harbormaster, they said, Moncaide commanded the ruler’s navy, and if he perceived the visitors as a threat was to signal four warships, lying in wait, to attack. Da Gama held Moncaide and ordered him to confess or “be boiled in fat and whipped until he died.”4 Admitting his deceit, he agreed to pilot da Gama’s ships to port and present him to Samorin. Although Moncaide now claimed to be a New Christian forced to become a Moor, da Gama, writing in his journal, described him as a “renegade Jew” and noted that though his hair and beard were gray, he looked to be about forty.

  Samorin was ready to trade with the strangers, but was put off when da Gama offered cheap trinkets in exchange for priceless jewels. Insulted, Samorin sent them away. The two would meet again, but the initial impression persisted and their enmity escalated to hostage-taking on both sides. Eventually da Gama was allowed to depart with a small quantity of spices and jewels bartered from local merchants. Moncaide, meanwhile, having aroused his enemies at court by aiding the foreigners, gladly accepted da Gama’s invitation to return with him to Portugal.

  Back in Lisbon, Moncaide dropped all pretense. He now claimed to be Alonso Pérez, a Spanish Jew from Castille, and said he wished to be baptized and serve his new host country. With da Gama acting as his godfather, Moncaide took the explorer’s name, and was christened Gaspar da Gama. Although he was made a cavalier by King Manuel, who regularly conversed with him about lands he had visited, the king always referred to his new court favorite as “Gaspar, the Jewish pilot.”

  Manuel, not knowing that Columbus was sailing in circles in a far-off sea, thought Portugal was still in a race with Spain for the riches of Asia and asked the worn-out explorer to go again. But da Gama, newly married and not inclined to set off on such an arduous trip, recommended in his stead Pedro Cabral, a young nobleman and member of the court. Cabral had never been to sea, but he had a commanding presence and was trusted by the king. Given his inexperience, however, the king ordered Cabral to take the Jewish pilot and “follow his counsels in all and every matter.” The king also ordered his talented converso physician, Mestre João, expert at calibrating Zacuto’s improved astrolabe, to go with the fleet and chart the expedition.5

  In March 1500, Cabral set off with thirteen ships, loaded this time with better trade goods than those da Gama had tried to palm
off. As the fleet sailed past the Cape Verde Islands and approached the Gulf of Guinea, where the continent narrows abruptly to the east, Gaspar had Cabral stay west of the gulf to avoid getting stuck in its becalmed waters. But when it was time for the fleet to sail east to round the horn of Africa, the winds and currents in the South Atlantic drove them further to the west until one morning a lookout shouted Terra! Cabral had reached the eastern shore of South America.

  Two years before, Columbus, sailing south of Trinidad, had sighted the continent’s northern coast, but did not land. Observing the four mouths of the Orinoco River that emptied into the Gulf of Paria, the admiral, with one foot planted firmly in the Bible and the other in Renaissance science, declared them the four rivers flowing out of the Garden of Eden.6

  Cabral sailed north along the coast to a protected harbor he named Porto Segua (Safe Port). Suppressing his belief that he was trespassing on lands reserved for Spain, he stuck a wooden cross in the earth and carved on it the arms of Portugal. As it was Sunday, he celebrated Mass and handed out little tin crosses to the natives.7 The following day Mestre João aligned the sun with his astrolabe to determine their latitude. His measurement of 17 degrees south was off by only a half degree. In his report to the king (unpublished for five centuries), the physician included drawings of the Southern Cross and adjacent constellations. Brazil had been discovered.