João shared his observations with Gaspar. Expert in nautical matters, the two conversos judged it a new continent. Cabral was not so sure: “We remained in ignorance,” he wrote, “whether it was an island or a mainland, though we are inclined to the latter opinion.” In a rush to get back on course, after five days he headed for southern Africa. His intention was to sail in the wake of da Gama, circumvent the continent, and proceed up the coast until he caught the trade winds to India. A simple plan, but owing to heavy storms and the poor skills of his captains, six ships were lost rounding Africa, and Cabral arrived in India with half his original fleet.
This time around, the Hindu Rajah Samorin, pleased by the foreigners’ more generous offerings, greeted the Portuguese warmly. For a while all went well—too well, according to competing Muslim merchants. Cabral was given a warehouse to store his trade goods and nearby quarters for his men. But the Muslim merchants gathered a mob to attack the crew’s quarters and loot the warehouse, killing many sailors and forcing the rest to retreat to their ships.
When informed of the action, Samorin did nothing. Gaspar, who had commanded Samorin’s navy, advised swift retribution. Heeding his pilot’s counsel, Cabral
ordered ten Moorish ships in the port to be taken and all the people in the said ships to be killed. Thus we slew 500 and captured 20 or 30 hiding in the holds of the ships…One ship had three elephants which we killed and ate; we unloaded and burned the ships; and the following day we bombarded the city, so that we slew an endless number of people and did much damage.8
As evident from the notary’s account, the temperament of the explorer was little different from that of a conquistador. If peaceful means did not bring the desired result, terror was the alternative. Cabral, having journeyed thousands of miles for spices, silks, and jewels, was not to be put off by recalcitrant rulers or angry locals—and when his men were hungry, elephant meat would do. After Calicut’s devastation, Gaspar recommended they head south to Cochin, whose ruler hated Samorin. With the renegade Jew smoothing the way, the rival rajah and Cabral concluded a trade treaty that laid the foundation of Portuguese rule in India. On a palm leaf, inscribed with an iron pen, Cochin’s ruler wrote King Manuel: “My country is rich in cinnamon, cloves, ginger and pepper. That which I ask of you in exchange is gold, silver, corals and scarlet cloth.”9 Cabral departed with the holds of his ships loaded with pepper, cinnamon, fine cottons, silks, and perfumes.10
Homeward bound, Cabral stopped off at Cape Verde to take on provisions. A chance encounter there with a Portuguese fleet on another voyage of discovery resulted in Gaspar’s meeting an Italian explorer whose name would become synonymous with the continent to which Gaspar directed him.
When the crews met and conversed, Gaspar shared his knowledge of the southern continent with the fleet’s adviser, Amerigo Vespucci, who had previously explored the continent’s northern coast for Spain two years before when he sailed with Alonso de Ojeda, one of Columbus’s captains. When Amerigo reported his find to Ferdinand, he expected the king to sponsor a return voyage. But although he was a trusted friend of Columbus, Vespucci was a foreigner, and preference was given to the proposals of Spanish explorers. Shunted aside, Amerigo turned his back on Spain. Having noted that his landfall on the continent might have fallen on Portugal’s side of the pope’s dividing line, he approached the Portuguese court. King Manuel, intrigued with the idea of a new land and having not yet received news of Cabral’s discovery, authorized an expedition to investigate further and sent the Italian along as adviser.
So it was that Amerigo and Gaspar happened to meet in Cape Verde, and as a result the Italian’s name would one day be attached to Columbus’s discoveries. According to Vespucci’s biographer, the Jewish pilot possessed “a storehouse of geographical knowledge and [was] an incomparable source of information for Amerigo who could discuss hundreds of things with him in Italian.” Amerigo soon took command of the fleet, and reaching the continent explored nearly a thousand miles of coastline as far south as Río de la Plata.
On his return to Lisbon, he confirmed the continent’s massive size and asserted that much of its coastal land was indeed “over the line.” Although sailing for Portugal, the loyal Italian wrote his Florentine patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, that he had not reached Asia but had discovered a “New World.” He also praised Gaspar as “the best informed man among Cabral’s followers…a trustworthy man who speaks many languages and knows many towns and provinces from Portugal to the Indian Ocean, from Cairo to the island of Sumatra.”11 The popularity of his account of these discoveries led a young German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller to label the southern continent “the land of Amerigo,” and by 1528 Columbus’s Indies were known as the Americas.12
Gaspar’s own story ends back in India. In 1502, he and his godfather, Vasco da Gama, sailed once more to the subcontinent. On this occasion, he reunited with his wife, who, having escaped from Calicut after the attack, was living in Cochin. Gaspar tried to persuade her to convert so that she could return with him to Portugal, but being a devout Jewess and learned in the Law, she adamantly refused.
After Samorin’s demise, Gaspar settled in Calicut in 1505 in service to the Portuguese viceroy. (In 1511, Goa was conquered and became the capital of Portugal’s Indian empire.) He often visited his wife, but she never forgave him for turning Christian. Such were the life and adventures of the Jewish pilot who, as Vasco da Gama wrote, “shed his faith with the ease of a reptile.”13
CAPITALIST PIONEER
A small, fertile island off the northeast coast of South America that Amerigo Vespucci called “a natural wonder” bears the name of Fernando de Noronha, a sixteenth-century converso who headed the first capitalist venture in the New World.
King Manuel, excited by Vespucci’s report of coastal forests of brazilwood, which was the source of a valuable red dye in demand throughout Europe, drew up a royal contract with the wealthy shipowning merchant Fernando de Noronha. With the likelihood of also finding valuable spices and other marketable commodities, Noronha recruited other prominent conversos to join his consortium in partnership with the king. Beyond a good business opportunity, however, their interest in the far-off land was to find a refuge to live free from persecution.
In 1503, they set forth on five ships and put in at the offshore island to regroup before proceeding to the mainland. Amerigo, who sailed with them as far as the island, wrote glowingly that its bountiful streams and woodlands attracted all sorts of birds, “so tame they allow themselves to be taken up by hand.” Although beguiled, he left to seek out a southern passage to India, which was not found until Magellan rounded the continent in 1519. The conversos he left behind had better luck. Cutting and loading logs of dyewood along the forested coast, they found ready buyers when they returned to Lisbon. Investing their profits, they established logging camps along six hundred miles of coastal land now known by the name of its valuable tree, Brazil.
By 1505, the dyewood business was netting the partners fifty thousand ducats a year. Next to gold, brazilwood was then the most valuable product to come out of the New World. A grateful king gave de Noronha a ten-year monopoly and ceded him the uninhabited island, and gave it his name.
Was de Noronha a secret Jew? He changed the name of his ship the São Cristóvão (St. Christopher) to A Judia (The Jewess), and a harbor he discovered and named Cananea lies 32 degrees south of the equator, just as Israel’s ancient city of that name lies 32 degrees north. Whatever his personal beliefs, it appears Fernando de Noronha did not forsake his heritage.14
CALIFORNIA DREAMER
In 1520, João Rodrigues Cabrilho, “a Portuguese,” led thirty men armed with crossbows from Jamaica to Mexico, where they joined Cortés in the conquest.15 Afterward, Cabrilho set forth to find the legendary Seven Golden Cities. No luck: they never existed. But after this fruitless search, he sailed into San Diego Bay in 1542 and discovered California. Over the next five months, he and his two Portuguese pilots explored the N
orth Pacific coast in hopes of finding a shortcut to Europe via the Northwest Passage, an elusive waterway believed to traverse North America from the Pacific to the Atlantic to Europe. Wounded in a skirmish with the Indians, he died near what is now Santa Barbara.
Like that of other conversos who obscured their past, Cabrilho’s ancestry is not known. His written reports and navigation skills show him to be an educated man, apparently from a good family. It is probable that João Cabrilho had Jewish ancestry.16 Recent scholarship argues he was not Portuguese but Spanish-born, from Cuéllar, a city known for its many Jews, who crossed the border to Portugal at the time of the expulsion.
Forcibly converted in 1497 by the threat of having their children enslaved, the newly baptized Jews referred to themselves in Hebrew as anusim (forced ones).17 Although they made up about 10 percent of Portugal’s 1.5 million people, conversos constituted nearly three-quarters of the mercantile community owing to the Portuguese upper class’s disdain for commerce.18 The king, considering his nation’s small population and large, talented converso community, viewed his New Christians as indispensable to the success of his expanding empire. Portugal’s conversos, who were otherwise forbidden to leave the country, were duly licensed to settle in the Indies.
Prior to the union of Spain and Portugal in 1580, few Portuguese nationals looked to serve the Spanish Empire. Portugal was an independent nation with its own New World empire. Why serve Spain when Portugal’s vast empire offered unbridled opportunity? Since Spain forbade their conversos to migrate, a self-proclaimed Portuguese national operating in the Spanish realm was likely to be a converso, and in this early period of forced conversion his loyalty to Judaism would probably have been strong. This is particularly true of those originally from Spain who initially chose exile rather than conversion. This supports the theory that Cabrilho, the discoverer of California, whose name appears throughout the state on roads, schools, and even drugstores, was a converted Jew who deliberately hid his origin.
There are, however, notable exceptions that serve as cautionary reminders not to jump to conclusions about the Jewish identity of all the Portuguese serving Spain’s empire. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, whose ships sailed around the world for Spain in 1519, was a bona fide pure-blooded Catholic. But even he had a Jewish partner who brokered his contract with the king. Juan de Aranda was a well-known converso, and while the contract he negotiated for Magellan called for the king to receive one twentieth of the profits of his voyage, Aranda himself was to receive an eighth share.19
HERETIC CONQUISTADOR
Hernando Alonso had it made. Six short years after serving with Cortés as a carpenter’s assistant, “hammering nails into the brigantines used in the recapture of Mexico,” he had become the richest farmer in the new Spanish colony. While most soldiers of his rank received nothing more from the conquest than “the cost of a new crossbow,” Alonso was awarded a large tract of land north of Mexico City. Turning it into a pig and cattle farm, Alonso became the biggest supplier of meat to the colony.
In September 1528, it was reported that Alonso, now thirty-six and getting as portly as his beef, in emulation of his commander, “swaggered about in a belt of refined gold he had exacted from the natives.” He had good reason: In March, his contract had been renewed by Cortés himself and he had taken a new wife, the “very beautiful” Isabel de Aguilar.
This information on Hernando Alonso comes from the trial records of the Spanish Inquisition.20 On October 17, 1528, Alonso became the first person in the New World to be burned alive at the stake. Alonso was a secret Jew, as was his deceased first wife Beatriz, the sister of Diego Ordaz, one of Cortés’s five captains. His undoing came when a Dominican friar charged that, years before in Santo Domingo, he had secretly observed Alonso and Beatriz, following their son’s baptismal ceremony, “washing the boy’s head with wine to cleanse him of the Holy Water.” When threatened with torture on the rack, Alonso confessed that after the wine ran down the child’s body and “dripped from his organ,” he caught it in a cup and drank it “in mockery of the sacrament of baptism.”
Beatriz, having accompanied her husband when he marched with Cortés’s army, died from fever during the conquest of Mexico. The trial recorded testimony of a witness who overheard Alonso telling his new wife not to go to church: “Señora, in your present condition [menstrual period] thou wouldst profane the Church.” To which Isabel, his New Christian wife, replied, “These are old ceremonies of the Jews which are not observed now that we have adopted the evangelical grace.”
Cortés had no part in the arrest of Alonso. After approving Alonso’s contract, he left for Spain to answer trumped-up charges of misrule. In his absence, a rival faction in the colony conspired with the powers of the Inquisition and introduced the Holy Terror to the New World. The holier-than-thou Inquisitors, who considered Aztecs savages for sacrificing prisoners to their gods atop their Great Pyramid, chose the plaza fronting the site, where a lofty edifice of the True Church had replaced the pyramid, to consign the heretic to the flames.
In a time of carefully arranged marriages, Hernando Alonso would not have married his first wife without the blessing of her brother, Diego Ordaz, one of the outstanding figures of the conquest. Alonso’s brother-in-law was the first man to climb the volcano Popocatépetl and look upon the Valley of Mexico as an advance scout of the invasion. Mesmerized by what seemed to be a floating city, he compared it to a vision out of the chivalric tale Amadis of Gaul, a sword and sorcery book of the time.
Before joining up with Cortés, Alonso and Diego were in Cuba, but on far different rungs of society. Alonso was a blacksmith in town, while Diego and his sisters lived in the governor’s mansion, where he served as majordomo. Despite this all-important class difference, Beatriz married the blacksmith. Apparently decisive was the one thing they did share: a common ancestry. Cortés’s captain wound up gathering pearls off the Venezuela coast, only to be poisoned by rivals in 1532.21 Although much is written about him, nowhere is it mentioned that he was a converso, much less a secret Jew. Like most conversos, Diego passed himself off as an Old Christian, and went to his grave with his masquerade intact.
Señoritas were a rarity throughout the New World. With fewer than one Spanish woman for every ten men, to marry one was considered a feather in the cap for the mostly poor, aspiring hidalgos. After Mexico’s conquest, some ladies felt the same about them. Most were servant girls who journeyed to New Spain to find themselves a newly rich husband. Exceptions were the four daughters of the royal treasurer Alonso Estrada, the natural son, or so he claimed, of King Ferdinand. Few women were as desirable as the Estrada sisters, who could choose from among many suitors, and it is therefore not surprising that they all married well. What is surprising is that their mother was from a well-known Jewish family and that their husbands would have known of their wives’ blemished ancestry. That their progeny would also be stigmatized seems not to have mattered. Despite the aggressiveness of the Holy Fathers, and repeated decrees against conversos, they were able to keep their wives’ and children’s Jewish heritage secret. The same held true of Beatriz and Diego Ordaz’s surviving sister. Only now is their story being told.
FRANCISCA ORDAZ
As Beatriz, the wife of the heretic Jewish conquistador, lay dying during the siege of Mexico, her sister, Francisca, was by her side. The two were among only six Spanish women known to have accompanied the conquistadors during the fighting in Mexico. After the final victory, Francisca was observed enjoying a wild night of celebration. According to an eyewitness, Francisca and three other “adventurous women went gaily to dance with men still in their quilted armor.” It may well have been that night that she danced with her future husband, the son of Ponce de León, one of the legendary figures of the New World.22
After Alonso’s undoing, Diego Ordaz was not about to fix Francisca up with another Judaizer. Instead he found Juan González Ponce de León, a valiant suitor of noble, unblemished credentials. His f
ather, the conqueror and governor of Puerto Rico and discoverer of Florida, is forever known for his quixotic search for the fountain of youth. His son was distinguished in his own right. Serving as a soldier under Ordaz’s command, Juan was the first man to reach the top of the main temple of Tenochtitlán and, despite being badly wounded, led a vanguard force that captured Montezuma. When Cortés asked him why, considering his injury, he had not withdrawn, but instead led the fight up the steps to Montezuma’s quarters, Juan answered: “Señor, this is not the time for men to be in bed.”23
Juan was aware of Francisca’s lineage even before Alonso’s trial had exposed her sister as a Judaizer. For years he and Alonso were friends, and up until Alonso’s flaming death the two men were partners.24 They shared a royal land grant, an encomienda, in Actopan in the modern state of Hidalgo, about sixty miles north of Mexico City, where Alonso had his farm.25
ALONSO ESTRADA’S WIFE AND DAUGHTERS
In 1522, King Charles V appointed his alleged uncle Alonso Estrada as Mexico’s royal treasurer, perhaps the most important position in the rich territory. In Cortés’s absence, Estrada served as acting governor and for a year (1529) was governor. It was a common belief that he was the bastard son of King Ferdinand, the result of a liaison with Doña Luisa de Estrada, the daughter of Don Fernan, Duke of Aragon, when both were teenagers.
Raised in Ferdinand’s court, Alonso inherited the title Duke of Aragon and sided with Charles V when he was contending for the throne. While some speculate that Alonso himself had Jewish ancestors, his wife certainly did. It was widely known that Marina Gutiérrez Flores de la Caballeria was from an old Jewish family whose wealth has been compared to the Rothschilds’. Although both sides of her family had converted to Catholicism, for three generations they were condemned as Judaizers by the Inquisition. Some who were already dead before sentencing had their bodies exhumed and burned. Doña Marina, having secured a forged affidavit attesting to her pure blood, followed her husband to Mexico.26
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