Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  Despite Lynch’s advocacy, the census was ordered. Only sixteen Jews were able to show “patents of naturalization,” and were deemed legal traders.54 How many others there were without papers is not known. The community’s insecurity was heightened the following month (November 1671) when Beeston had the temerity to seize a ship owned by a Jew from New Amsterdam (now temporarily in English hands and called New York) on the grounds that Jews were foreigners and had no right to trade. Cohen, having secured his valley land and fearing exposure, hastened back to Amsterdam, leaving his brother Moses, protected by Morgan, to oversee his properties.

  Cohen wasn’t in Amsterdam long before his wife, Rebekah Palache, reported that he had died, and as his widow collected debts due him. But this was a subterfuge. He had faked his death to cover his forbidden trips to Jamaica. Leaving Amsterdam, he moved to Salé, the pirate republic in North Africa where he had many associates and where both he and his wife’s family were well established.55

  Port Royal’s Jews, adhering to the basic survival principle their people had acquired in the Diaspora, had a foot in both camps: They outfitted the buccaneers, advised them of potential targets, and received priority to purchase spoils. But if piracy was outlawed, there was the lucrative Spanish trade. It made no difference that the trade was still illegal. Everyone wanted a piece of it, including Jamaica’s new governor. In March 1672, Lynch wrote Arlington that the presence of the buccaneers had forestalled a Spanish attack, and he was no longer interested in pursuing legal trade with those he termed “the most ungrateful, senseless people in the world.”56

  Lynch was not as naive as he let on. When he first sent his emissaries, he had instructed them that if the Spanish rejected his offer of peaceful trade, they should try to establish ties with the local merchants, whose names Lynch had obtained from his intelligencers who specialized in the “silent trade.” As long as such trade was illegal, the Sephardim of Port Royal were the preferred agents of foreigners of whatever religion. For a 10–15 percent commission, they would “adjust the cargoes, strengthen the crews, provide commercial information and accompany the vessels to Spanish markets.”57

  The English merchants’ animosity toward those they labeled “descendants of the Crucifiers of our Lord” didn’t let up. In June 1672, Lynch received a petition from seventy-two Christian merchants stating that they were threatened “by the infinite number of Jews who daily resort to this island and trade amongst us, contrary to all law and policy.” Ironically, the merchants, like those in Recife, accused the Jews of engaging in what is today normal business practice:

  The great Mischief we suffer by them is that their trading is a perfect monopoly, for they are a kind of joint stock company, and not only buy the choicest and best goods, but frequently buy up whole cargoes, and undersell petitioners, which they can better bear by their penurious way of living…His Honor must have [seen] in Europe how Jews do engross the whole trade where they are…Although their trading seems to give credit and reputation to the island, yet England receives no benefit for all their merchandizes come from Holland, where they will certainly transport themselves again with all their gains and his Majesty’s island will be drained and subjects will suffer.58

  In urging Charles to reject the petition, Lynch renewed his case in the Jews’ favor. The king, in continual need of hard currency, approved a liberal policy toward them. Their buying power and experience as importers and exporters of precious metals, together with their commercial ties with Spanish America (which had the silver), and Holland (the leading bullion market) made their presence in Jamaica vital to England’s capital flow, and the colony’s continued prosperity. Lynch’s views were adopted, and the King-in-Council recommended steps to encourage even more Jews to settle the island. In December 1672, Charles wrote Lynch, declaring Beeston’s seizure of a ship the year before on the grounds that its owner “being a Jew was to be accounted a foreigner” was “undue and illegal,” and that “said owner, Rabba Couty, ought to enjoy the benefit of a free citizen…and his ketch and the value of her lading be restored.”59

  Prejudice could not stand up to economics. The Jews’ contribution to Jamaica and England’s prosperity determined the Crown’s position in their favor. In two decades (1656–76), in large part due to the role of these proven entrepreneurs in the “underhand trade” and their dealings with the buccaneers, Jamaica funneled to England an estimated four million pounds of silver. England’s Committee of Accounts noted that the island had become “the base for the greatest flow of silver and gold [and] more bullion is yearly imported from thence than from all other of the King’s dominions laid together.”60

  Morgan had heard nothing from the Crown since he returned under guard to London in the spring of 1672, “to answer for his offences against the King, his crown and dignity.”61 Apparently Charles thought it was sufficient to recall him and let it go at that. A year would pass before the king summoned him. Unfortunately there is only a salacious hint of his time in London. If only Pepys had kept up his diary, we might have an unexpurgated account of Morgan’s carousing there while London’s dilettantes and ladies thrilled to host a live swashbuckler. While Morgan gallivanted around London, Modyford languished in the Tower, satisfying the Spanish ambassador that he was confined to “a cold, damp, stone room.”62 When he was finally released, it was thought his day had passed. But Morgan had not forgotten his arbiter.

  Anxious letters from Lynch informed the king that Cuba’s governor had licensed privateers to capture British ships, and Jamaica’s outlawed buccaneers, having deserted to Tortuga, were now sailing forth with French commissions. Lynch declared that he had used his own money to store up the island’s defense, and had come to appreciate Modyford’s policy of keeping the buccaneers on a short leash. Without the threat of them as guard dogs, the Spanish had no interest in keeping the peace with the despised Protestants who had stolen their island. Lynch was blunt in his assessment: “I fear all may be lost if we have not a frigate or two to defend the island.”63

  In response to his governor’s warning, Charles sent for Morgan to advise him how best to defend the island. Impressed by the pirate’s counsel, the king decided to recall Lynch and return Morgan to Jamaica as deputy governor. Cocksure as ever, Morgan agreed, providing he was first made a knight and that his friend Modyford join him as chief justice. Charles consented. When Lynch learned of this turnabout, he was shocked, and predicted trouble: “Spaniards are much alarmed at the noise of the Admiral’s favor at Court and return to the Indies. [His] appointment will fuel the Spanish fire.” As for himself, he was happy to relinquish his post and was looking forward to returning to England: “None can come to the Government with such joy as I shall quit it.”64

  On March 6, 1675, Sir Henry Morgan arrived at Port Royal, and the following day took a carriage to Spanish Town to meet with Lynch and the planters and merchants who made up the Council. To a man, they wanted peace and feared the return of the notorious buccaneer. Their main interest lay in the slave trade—not just to buy for themselves, but also to sell to Spanish colonies. The last thing they wanted was a return to the days when Morgan’s buccaneers made any chance of that impossible. Why should any Jamaican settler toil in the fields when he could join the buccaneers and reap the immediate reward of the “sweet trade”? As for the Spaniard, why should he chance inviting an English merchant into port who might turn pirate, as many unsuccessful trading ventures did? Simply put, pirace and trade were incompatible.

  The Council members needn’t have worried. Morgan, having discarded his old garb for the finery commensurate with his new status, and sporting medals and sashes befitting a knight, told the assembly that his orders were to continue to suppress piracy. This policy was seconded by Jamaica’s new governor, Lord Vaughn, who arrived the following week. Vaughn, described by one who knew him as among “the lewdest fellows of the age,”65 was also a poet and a patron of the arts. Preferring to rule over an enslaved island, rather than a wanton, undisciplined na
tion of licentious pirates, he sided with the planters.

  They, meanwhile, were awaiting the arrival from Suriname of fellow English planters who were expert in sugar production. In 1674, when New Amsterdam was permanently deeded to England in exchange for Suriname, the English planters who had been living there had begun looking to move elsewhere, and in April 1675, three transport ships left England to carry their hundred or so families to Jamaica. Historians credit the Suriname planters with introducing the expertise that converted the island into a vast sugar plantation and the richest source of income in the British Empire. To accomplish this transformation, cheap labor was needed, and on May 11, the Council of Jamaica, composed mostly of planters, petitioned the Royal African Company, “demanding more slaves.” The year before, the Company had sent “2,320 negroes to Jamaica,” and in response to the request agreed to send “four more ships with 1660 slaves.”66

  Meanwhile, early in 1675, Abraham Cohen received news that convinced him it was safe to return. Modyford, his ally, was back in Jamaica. King Charles, he also learned, had authorized Suriname’s Jews to settle in Jamaica. Since the king had rejected the Port Royal merchants’ suit to exclude the Jews from trade, Beeston and others would have to pull in their claws and tend to their own affairs, and Cohen could lose himself among the new arrivals. However, when Cohen clandestinely returned to reclaim his properties, trouble arose—though not from the hostile merchants, but from his brother, who took him to court.

  The reader will recall that in 1671, when Abraham returned to Amsterdam, he had asked Moses to look after his land. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. Although Moses was not one of the sixteen naturalized Jews in Jamaica, his presence there was not disputed and he and Sir Henry Morgan, as ex-freebooters, were longtime comrades. Ostensibly the case was brought over a claim of back pay for superintending Cohen’s property. Settling the dispute in May 1675, Abraham acknowledged that he was “justly and duly indebted unto my brother Moses Cohen Henriques…for two years and seven months salary that he hath been employed by me.”67 In lieu of a hundred pounds sterling, Cohen agreed to give his brother forty cows and horses.

  Although the suit was a minor matter, Modyford as chief justice presided and signed off on the settlement. Since both litigants were in their late sixties and wealthy, more than back pay was at issue. It appears that Moses had caught the gold fever and wanted a piece for himself. In any event, Abraham was dispirited: It was one thing to circumvent a royal ordinance, fake his own demise, and twice journey to a forbidden island while avoiding Beeston and his allies. It was quite another to find his own brother trying to horn in on a deal that he had been working on since he first learned of the mine twenty years earlier. A few months after signing off on the judgment, Cohen gave up the quest. He sold off the land, and that’s the last we hear about the “gold finding Jews” and their search for Columbus’s mine.68

  In 1677, King Charles replaced Governor Vaughn with the Earl of Carlisle, a man more favorable to Morgan, who stayed on as deputy governor. Modyford, after two years as chief justice, retired to his estates. Jamaica’s seesaw policy of alternately reining in and releasing the buccaneers continued until Modyford’s death in September 1679. Afterward, Carlisle returned to England, and for the next two years Morgan was acting governor. Finally in a position to revive Port Royal as a pirate capital, he instead turned prosecutor. He had become a major landowner and, in his newfound allegiance to the status quo, no longer tolerated piracy. Retiring privateers, he announced, would be pardoned and given land to cultivate. Any caught violating his new directive might end his days rotting from a noose at Gallows Point.

  One old privateer seeking an official pardon “upon the oath never to indulge in such practices again” was Moses Cohen Henriques. Well into his seventies, he likely hadn’t been at sea for years, but apparently wanted to be pardoned for his earlier roving. So it was that Morgan, on November 18, 1681, acting on “the humble petition of Moses Cohen,” signed the document granting him naturalization, that quasi-citizenship that was the best that a Jew could then aspire to. At the same time, Moses, like his brother Abraham, now foreswore his Spanish name. The document reads in part:

  [I, Sir Henry Morgan] do graciously give and grant Moses Cohen his heirs and successors from this day forward in the island of Jamaica to be fully and completely naturalized and do hereby confirm to him and his heirs forever all the rights, privileges and immunities granted in this said act as fully and completely as our natural born subjects do have or enjoy or as if said Moses Cohen had been born in any of our dominions. Witnessed, Sir Henry Morgan, Knight Commander in Chief of the Island of Jamaica.69

  As for the alleged gold mine, Morgan knew of it, but had no knowledge of its location. Still, when the Duke of Albemarle obtained from the king the sole right to search for Spanish gold in the Caribbean, Morgan lured him to Jamaica with tales of sunken treasure and the lost gold mine. Although Albemarle brought along “Miners to search for Mines,” and the two men were successful in salvaging sunken treasure, the legendary mine was never found. After Albemarle’s death, a near contemporary noted that the duke’s prospectors “under the Pretence of search for Mines, instead went to Planters houses, & Got Drunk.”70

  The Great Earthquake of 1692 brought a climactic end to the pirate port, when the sea swallowed two-thirds of Port Royal. Beeston, who owned the waterfront land across the harbor that became Kingston, did not let his animosity toward Jews prevent him from taking their money. After the earthquake, he sold sixteen of the first lots to Jewish investors.71

  From an infamous pirate capital, Jamaica, by 1698, had become a sugar island worked by forty thousand slaves, and after 1713, “the centre for slave distribution in the Caribbean and North America.” It was then that England’s Royal African Company was awarded the asiento—the monopoly right Spain granted to conduct the slave trade with Spanish America. A few Jamaican Jews did participate in the trade, but most dealt in dry goods. This fact was noted in a London petition in 1735 that protested the ongoing effort of rival merchants to exclude Jews. Their defenders (ninety-two Jewish and non-Jewish merchants) wrote: “The Jews [in London] are almost the only persons that send any dry, fine goods to Jamaica, at their own risk, and on their own account…for the supply of the inhabitants of the island, and for making proper sortments of goods for the Spaniards.”72

  As Jewish involvement with piracy petered out in the Caribbean, the rovers and their Sephardic sponsors disbanded, only to reunite in the following century when a budding new nation would enlist them in its fight for liberty. In the American Revolution, a dozen prominent Jews sided with the rebels as privateers. Celebrated as founders of early Jewish congregations, these men owned and operated more than a few of the pirate ships that captured or destroyed over six hundred British ships and took cargoes and prizes with an estimated value of $18 million in today’s dollars.73

  Finally, no discussion of Jewish piracy should leave out the Jewish heritage of the famous pirate known to Americans as a hero of the battle of New Orleans. In a handwritten note, stuck in his family Bible, Jean Lafitte wrote: “I owe all my ingenuity to the great intuition of my Jewish-Spanish grandmother, who was a witness at the time of the Inquisition.” Elaborating on his ancestry, Lafitte wrote in his journal:

  My mother died before I can remember and my maternal grandmother, who lived with us, became a mother to me…My grandmother was of Spanish-Israelite…My mother’s father had been an alchemist with a good practice and patronage in Spain. He was a freethinking Jew with neither Catholic faith nor traditional adherence to the Jewish synagogue. But this did not prevent him from dying of starvation in prison for refusing to divulge the technical details which the Inquisition demanded from all Jews. Grandmother told me repeatedly of the trials and tribulations her ancestors had endured at the time of the Spanish Inquisition…Grandmother’s teachings…inspired in me a hatred of the Spanish crown and all the persecutions for which it was responsible—not only against Jews.
74

  Here our story ends. It is the history of Iberian Jews, disguised as Christians, who pioneered the New World as explorers, conquistadors, cowboys, and pirates, transformed sugar cultivation into an agro-industry that they introduced to the Caribbean, and created the first trade network spanning the seven seas. Figures are imprecise, but it is estimated that conversos numbered around ten thousand in the midseventeenth century, or 5 percent of the 200,000 settlers in the New World, and up to 15 percent in the islands. As they were an underground community, we only know about those targeted by the Inquisition or otherwise exposed. With a heritage of denying their Judaism, most of their descendants eventually abandoned their religion. Of the thousands or more Spanish and Portuguese names listed in the Jamaican telephone book, the island’s declared Jews today number less than two hundred.

  The Cohen Henriques brothers and their comrades came of age in Holland, a tolerant oasis in a hostile world. They had heard about the horrors of the Inquisition from their elders, who fled Iberia to settle in Amsterdam. Emulating their mentor, the pirate rabbi Samuel Palache, they were inspired to combat their people’s enemies. In their twenties, using force and diplomacy, they gained a temporary homeland in Brazil, and in their maturity, when the Dutch colony was overrun, they parlayed their trade connections and skills in the production and marketing of sugar and other commodities to ensure their welcome in the islands of the Caribbean. Their economic power in turn enabled them successfully to lobby the Dutch West India Company in support of their children in New Amsterdam, and to secure the intervention of the States General to free their other comrades held in Jamaica. Finally, in Port Royal, as merchants and shipowners they used the buccaneers to wage a successful surrogate war on the lands of the Inquisition that effectively ended Spain’s hegemony in the New World, and in the process they reaped the rewards, both legal and financial.