Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  First stop was Barbados, where Venables tripled the size of his army by the beat of a drum in the public square and the promise “Any bond-servant who volunteers shall have his freedom.” With little to lose and much to gain, four thousand indentured servants, comprising fully a fifth of the population, signed on. Twelve hundred more were recruited from St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat. By the time the fleet embarked, Venables’s army had swelled to nearly eight thousand men but carried supplies for only half that number.10 The invasion plan called for the army to first attack Santo Domingo. Significantly, the fleet halted at the small island of Nevis, where Admiral Penn enlisted Campoe Sabada, the Jewish pilot who had previously sailed with Jackson.

  This slovenly army was primarily made up of servants who had signed on for freedom and plunder; accordingly, when the general announced that there would be no taking of booty, they threatened mutiny. Confronted by “an unruly and ignorant mass,” he canceled the order. Meanwhile, it was obvious that the admiral had no respect for the general, who, to the annoyance of all, had brought along his new young wife and rarely left his cabin. Always contending for command, it was said, Penn snickered whenever Venables made an error, which Venables tended to do whenever he gave an order.

  Rather than a direct assault on Santo Domingo, Penn favored a surprise attack, and landed the army thirty miles up the coast. Unfortunately, the site was a desert, and as Cromwell’s brother-in-law, responsible for equipping the army, had forgotten to pack canteens, the soldiers had to march without water through hot, barren land without shade. They never reached the capital. Many collapsed from thirst; others were cut down by a cavalry charge of three hundred mounted Spaniards, who ran them through like knights of old with twelve-foot lances. Afterward, their leader boasted that had he had more “cow-killers” (as his men were known) he would have killed every invader. This singular breed of toughened Spaniard was a cowboy in reverse, expert not at herding cows, but at slaying them. It was later reported that during the attack, Venables hid behind a tree, “so much possessed with terror he could hardlie spake.” With no water, no discipline, and pursued by the lance-wielding cow-killers, the invading army retreated to the coast. As Cromwell’s relation also hadn’t packed any tents, the demoralized troops had to huddle in the open when days of torrential rain followed. In one week, Venables lost a thousand men, while Spanish losses numbered forty.11

  The two commanders were now so distrustful of each other that the general refused to allow the admiral and his crew to board the ships ahead of his soldiers, suspecting they might sail away without them. At a council aboard ship, the officers rejected a further assault on the city, contending that any attack would have to be fought by them alone as “they could not trust their men to follow.”12

  What now? An attack on fortified places like Cartagena or Havana was out of the question, and if they simply retreated to London they could lose their heads. Historical accounts state that following the humiliating defeat at Hispaniola, the decision to invade Jamaica was first mentioned. However, this is disputed by a number of English prisoners. The first, an advance scout captured a day after the English landed, confessed, “Our purpose is to take this land…then pass on to Jamaica.” Prisoners, taken later, confirmed this sequence. According to the Spanish account:

  [After the cow-killers]…killed more than 800 men and compelled the enemy to retreat…two captured Englishmen [said] they intended to go to another island they had been before. In view of the prisoners’ dispositions…his Lordship immediately arranged to send a warning to Jamaica since this was the island the prisoners designated [italics added]. He sent it with all diligence to the governor, advising him of the form of fighting we employed [and] to use the same…He told him the enemy was badly used up, lost many men, and was short of victuals, in order that Jamaica might know the facts and be prepared.13

  Since no account of the invasion plan mentions Jamaica, historians have followed in lockstep the contention that Jamaica was “an afterthought.” Is this simply a case of historical confusion, or is something more convoluted involved? The island’s location in the middle of the Caribbean made it a natural target. After Jackson’s raid twelve years before, the local priest spelled this out in a letter to King Philip, wherein he called upon the Crown to reclaim Jamaica:

  The defense of the island is very poor…If the enemy takes possession there can be no doubt from it he will quickly infest all ports making himself master of their trade and commerce. As it lies in the way of the fleets voyaging from these kingdoms to New Spain and the plate galleons to Habana…it can be gathered how harmful it would be for ships in that trade if the enemy should take possession of this island.14

  Captain Jackson’s report to Cromwell’s Committee on Colonial Affairs the previous decade had exposed a divided, lightly defended colony with a Jewish fifth column that would welcome an invasion.15 With Carvajal’s intelligence endorsing this analysis, Cromwell was fully cognizant of Jamaica’s strategic site, poor defense, and the promised support of local Jews. These facts, along with the prisoners’ confessions and the recruitment of Jackson’s Jewish pilot who had previously led his ships into Jamaica’s harbor, all point to Jamaica being a prima facie target. Why then was it kept secret?

  The probable answer is revealing: When the fleet left Portsmouth, the commanders were kept in the dark as to their target. “We shall not tie you up to a method of any particular instructions,” Cromwell told them, but ordered the attack plan kept sealed, only to be opened when the army reached Barbados. Cromwell, already accused of selling out to Jews, apparently felt he would have been further tainted if even his advisers knew of their role in his Christ-ordained Grand Western Design. His far-reaching plan was to allow Jews back into England, both for economic reasons and because of his conviction that their return and mass conversion would hasten the Second Coming of Christ. But for now it was better to keep secret their role in his imperialist plans.16

  On May 10, 1655, four days after leaving Hispaniola, the Martin, piloted by Sabada with the two rival commanders on board, led the fleet’s thirty-eight ships into Jamaica’s harbor. The invaders had lost a thousand men, but the army was still an overwhelming force, more than four times Jamaica’s population of 1,500 Spaniards, 750 slaves, and a hundred or so Jews. (Following Jackson’s raid, many Jews were expelled from the island.) If they could land without incident, conquest was assured. Defending the port was a small garrison with three mounted guns. After an initial salvo while the ships were still at sea, the defenders fled. Their report smacks of terror: thirty-eight ships had become fifty-six ships, and the seven-thousand-man army was reported as twice that number.

  Unchallenged, Venables’s army marched eight abreast on a wide road linking the port with the capital of Villa de la Vega, and set up camp outside the city. The next morning, two Jamaican officers rode up under a flag of truce. They had come, they said, in place of the governor (a syphilitic old man with festering sores all over his body) to find out what the English wanted. They introduced themselves as the current and former Sargento Mayor (army commander). But something else the two men shared turned out to be more significant. The officers, Francisco Carvajal and Duarte Acosta, were secret Jews.17

  “We have come not to pillage but to plant,” Venables told them. After some dickering, Carvajal asked Venables: “By what right do you claim the island? Spaniards have had possession of it for 140 years and it was given to them by Pope Alexander.” Before the general could reply, his adjutant interjected:

  “It is ours by the right of might. Just as the Spaniards had taken Jamaica from the Indians, so we English have come to take it from them. As for the Pope, he could neither grant lands to others nor delegate the right to conquer them.” Besides, he added, only the weak get conquered: “Henry VIII offered England to any who chose to take possession, but none deigned to accept that gift.” At that, the English officers “laughed long and heartily.”18

  The next day, Governor Ramariez, carried i
n a hammock by African slaves and escorted by Acosta and Carvajal, entered the English camp to negotiate terms. He was there for show. His Portuguese officers signed the surrender treaty, and reportedly drafted it as well. They got what they wanted: Portuguese were encouraged to remain while Spaniards were to be transported to New Spain. Venables later reported to Cromwell that the “Portugals [accepted] our invitation to stay.”19

  No account of the conquest mentions the advance warning from Hispaniola that “his Lordship…sent with all diligence to the governor…in order that Jamaica might know the facts and be prepared.” Yet it was this warning that had spurred the Portuguese officers to be the first to meet with the invaders. With the ocean current favoring ships sailing west from Santo Domingo to Jamaica, the 480-mile distance would have been covered in four to five days. As such, Governor Ramariez should have received the warning more than a week before the English invasion. That he didn’t is evidence the message was intercepted. Given what transpired, it would appear that when the ship arrived, Portuguese merchants in control of the port got hold of the letter, and rather than deliver it to Ramariez, revealed its contents to the two officers who then positioned themselves to negotiate Jamaica’s surrender.

  Cromwell’s army had taken Jamaica, but the Cabildo, led by Francisco de Leiba, the self-styled king of Jamaica, along with his cousin Sanchez Ysassi and the latter’s son, Arnoldo, marshaled their supporters and retreated to a sugar estate west of the capital. They hanged the two servants whom Carvajal and Acosta sent with the treaty and, loudly rejecting the surrender terms, cursed the two officers as traitors.20 Arnoldo led a rebel group into the hills, where they formed a guerrilla force and ambushed soldiers who ventured outside the capital to hunt cattle.

  Jamaica was English, but in July, when Cromwell also received the news of the disaster at Hispaniola, he was not pleased. Later that month, when first Penn and then Venables returned to England, each blaming the other for Santo Domingo, Cromwell called them quarrelsome incompetents, and confined them in the Tower for deserting their forces.

  An opposite reception greeted Antonio Carvajal’s “great friend,” Simon de Caceres, who returned on the ship bearing Venables.21 An international trader from Amsterdam with offices in Europe and Barbados, he had been visiting his two brothers in Barbados when the English fleet arrived. When the greatly enlarged army set sail, he volunteered to secure the extra provisions that would be needed, and was with the supply ships that caught up with the fleet in Jamaica two weeks after the conquest. Meeting with Carvajal, who had taken charge of the army’s commissary, the two took stock of what was needed. Back in England he submitted a memorandum to Cromwell “on things wanting in Jamaica.”

  His “Proposal for Revictualing and Fortifying Jamaica” stressed the need to complete a harbor fort to defend against an expected counterattack from Cartagena. The report reads like a grand shopping list: 1,500 shovels, 1,000 pickaxes, 100 wheelbarrows, 2,000 hatchets, and so on. Further, “as an encouragement” for the fort workers, he recommended sending “plenty of brandy and wine…and fine linen stockings and handsome shoes [for the officers].” Self-interest likely played a part in these extra requests, as among the items he traded in were “shoes, linen, wine and brandy.”22

  De Caceres told Cromwell that before he left Jamaica, one Captain Hughes had begun fortifying the tip of the peninsula at the harbor entrance. (This was the beginning of the town of Port Royal that, in the next decade, would be known as the “wickedest city in the world.”) After receiving his report, Cromwell shipped the necessary supplies and ordered Jamaica’s commander to “study your security by fortifying.”23

  On August 17, 1655, with Penn and Venables in the Tower, Cromwell honored the one man who had correctly advised him on the invasion plan. Summoning Antonio Carvajal and his two sons to his office, Cromwell awarded them English citizenship, making them the nation’s first legal Jews in 365 years.24 Later Carvajal would warn Cromwell that the exiled Prince Charles had signed a secret treaty with the Spanish king, promising to return Jamaica for help in overthrowing the Commonwealth, and that Spain was outfitting a fleet to retake the island. So alerted, Cromwell’s naval forces were able to smash the fleet in Cádiz harbor before it sailed.25

  In 1658, Carvajal’s imports accounted for 8.3 percent of London’s customs revenue.26 A description of him that year shows that (like Pasha Sinan and Rabbi Palache) age had not mellowed him. The occasion was his arrest. Custom officers had seized one of his shipments. Feeling his goods unjustly impounded, he broke into their warehouse, and holding the guard at sword point, threatened to run him through while his servant emptied the place. The police report described him as “of grizzled beard and fiery temper…and no ’prentice hand with the rapier,” while his servant Manuel Fonseca “could double his fist with any Englishman.” Charges were dropped when the man known as the Great Jew died later that year.27

  In the fall of 1655, England’s leader announced a settlement policy for Jamaica that is significant in what it omits: His proclamation opened Jamaica to every “planter or adventurer” without regard to religion or national origin.28 He also granted citizenship in Barbados to a prominent Jewish refugee from Recife, Dr. Abraham de Mercado.29 Like the Cohen Henriques brothers, de Mercado was one of Rabbi Palache’s old boys. Considered the first Jewish physician in the New World, he proudly wore the title of doctor, but in spy circles went by the code name Plus Ultra, as when he tipped off Dutch authorities in Brazil that the Portuguese banquet they were to attend was to be an assassination party.

  Cromwell’s actions sent a message to Jews, albeit a circuitous one, that they might henceforth look to him as their defender. Cromwell evidently felt that for his Grand Western Design to succeed, he needed Jews in place. He is said to have looked on with envy at the boost they gave the Dutch economy. Jews had helped make Amsterdam Europe’s richest port, and as they helped Holland, he believed, so they could make London “the common warehouse of Europe.”

  Granting special favors was Cromwell’s way of demonstrating his intentions. England’s colonies were open to Jews. But not the mother country, at least not yet. However, in honoring Carvajal, Cromwell revealed his inclination to revoke the ban on Jewish settlement. Besides their business skills and trade, there was the matter of securing intelligence. As he confided to Bishop Burnett: “They are good and useful spies…skilled purveyors of foreign intelligence.”30 With England’s exiled prince ready to strike, and Spain’s declaration of war over Jamaica, Cromwell needed to work closely with London’s Jews and their agents. They, in turn, were grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty and economic clout.

  The midseventeenth century was a time when True Believers ruled and every action was righteous and backed by Scripture. It was the politics of Holy Inevitability, and Cromwell liked to frame his policies in those terms. Along with commerce, and intelligence, Cromwell’s religious convictions presented him with an irresistible motive for Jewish resettlement: Only when Jews were allowed back in England, he believed, would the Messiah return. His public expression of this religious rationale garnered him the fervid support of England’s philo-Semites, who saw this as necessary for the redemption of the whole human race.

  From 1607, when King James published an English translation of the Bible, the Old Testament had become required study among Puritans. Its influence was seen by their adoption of biblical references during the recent civil war: The Lion of Judah was inscribed on the Puritan banner; King Charles was referred to as Pharaoh, and his rule as the Egyptian Bondage. After Cromwell’s victory, a messianic group called the Fifth Monarchists proclaimed the Puritan Commonwealth to be the so-called Fifth Empire prophesied in the book of Daniel, which was destined to usher in the thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ. (The other four were Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.) They also quoted Deuteronomy (18:64) to argue that God would not reappear until his Chosen People were readmitted to England. The passage actually predicts that the Jews will be scat
tered to the “end of the earth,” but Puritan clerics preached that since the French called England Angleterre, a phrase which Jewish medieval literature used to signify the “angle” or “end” of the earth, it was clearly God’s will that they admit the Israelites, “so they might be brought to see the truth.” Whatever the merits of this twisted reading of Scripture, for Cromwell the message was clear: Allow Jews back into England, and the Messiah would return…and so would trade.31

  Meanwhile, in the Diaspora, homeless Jews favored any argument that would work. Their horizons were rapidly narrowing: New Holland was no more; in Spain and Portugal, Inquisition burnings were on the increase and the great autos-da-fé in Mexico and Peru had left the remnant of Jews in Spanish lands looking to move on. In New Amsterdam, they were engaged in a struggle to stay. In Eastern Europe, galloping hordes of saber-wielding Cossacks were killing Polish Jews by the tens of thousands.

  In October, a Cabalist rabbi from Amsterdam arrived at Cromwell’s invitation to discuss the divine argument proffered in his book The Hope of Israel. The religious sage was the former child prodigy Menasseh ben Israel, who it will be recalled stayed late at synagogue immersed in the mysticism of Cabala while the Henriques boys and their rebel pals frequented the docks, absorbing sailors’ tales of exotic lands. Menasseh held that the Torah contained divine revelations which prophesied the coming of the Messiah, and in The Hope of Israel he identified England as the Promised Land to which the Jews must return before the Messiah appears. (He and Cromwell agreed on that, disagreeing only on whether or not He had been here before.) Menasseh, a pragmatic scholar, peppered his prophecies with a discourse on what Jews could do for England’s economy.32