Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  31. I first came across Israel’s name in Captain Fonseca’s 1634 testimony before the Inquisition in Madrid. The spy listed Israel as “adjutant” (administrative officer) of the Recife-bound supply ships that allegedly were to stop off in Portugal, storm the Inquisition prison, and free the prisoners. Israel’s name also appears in the testimony of Abraham Bueno Henriques, a young Dutch Jew taken prisoner in the fighting in Brazil and sent to Lisbon for trial. W. Samuel, “Sir William Davidson, Royalist (1616–1689) and the Jews,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 14 (July 1936), 49–50: In his confession to the Inquisitors, he noted that Abraham Israel was married to his niece. Since Israel’s full name “de Pisa” identifies him with Italy, and since the Bueno Henriques family also had links with that country, Samuel suggests that despite the commonality of the name Abraham Israel (one likely assumed by conversos upon their reversion to Judaism), the young prisoner was referring to his near kinsman Abraham Israel de Pisa. This relationship Samuel reinforces in the testimony of Sir William Davidson, who in urging the endenization [naturalization, or some rights of citizenship] of Daniel Bueno Henriques, a Barbados Jew, notes that Daniel Bueno Henriques is “a neir kinsman of the Portingall Merchand who goes for Jamaica for the discovery of the Myne ye know of.” However, the “neir kinsman” might just as likely have been Abraham Cohen, who was also an Henriques. My deduction is that all three were related. As Daniel M. Swetschinski has documented in his article “Kinship and Commerce: The Foundations of Portuguese Jewish Life in 17th Century Holland,” Studia Rosenthaliana 15, no. 1 (1981), 65, the partners in most business dealings were “almost inevitably related.”

  32. Morris U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654–1875 (New York: Citadel Press, 1950), 1–2.

  33. Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Exodus from Brazil,” 319–20: That some were left behind in Jamaica is documented in a “Letter of Protest of the States-General of the Netherlands to the King of Spain,” dated November 14, 1654.

  34. Ibid., 320.

  35. Schappes, Documentary History of the Jews, 5.

  36. When the ship bearing the Company’s letter arrived in New Amsterdam granting the Jewish “boat people” admission, among its passengers were the sons of Cohen and Israel, Jacob and Isaac. Each was around thirty years old. Looking beyond the borders of New Amsterdam, the two friends applied for a license to trade for furs with the Indians, and Israel journeyed down to South River to barter for skins with the Delaware Indians. He returned with pelts, but their license was rejected, and only approved after Calvinists added their signatures. Hints of their characters are apparent in the court records: Cohen was charged with smuggling eleven carts of tobacco, and Israel with “punching [another Jew] in the face.” After securing rights for their people, the two wound up joining their fathers in Jamaica in the search for Columbus’s lost gold mine.

  Chapter Eight: Cromwell’s Secret Agents

  1. James Williamson, A Short History of British Expansion: The Old Colonial Empire (London: Macmillan, 1965), 249: The 1,500 ships were “double that of the English mercantile marine.”

  2. Albert M. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, 1492–1951 (London: Methuen, 1951), 11: Daniel Cohen Henriques, aka Duarte Henriques Alvares from the Canaries, married a Jewess, Leila Henriques, in Amsterdam, and after their marriage they settled in England. “This was the first appearance in England of the well-known Sephardim family of Henriques.”

  3. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: The Lord Protector (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1974), 521.

  4. Ibid. Fraser wrote that the preparations were so secret that “one Scottish soldier involved wrote, ‘if he suspected his shirt knew of the plans, he would be compelled to burn it.’”

  5. Ibid., 522.

  6. Irene A. Wright, “The English Conquest of Jamaica,” The Camden Miscellany 13, (1924), 11, quotes the Spanish captain Julian de Castilla’s report on the invasion: “Among the prisoners taken was an English youth who begged for his life in Spanish. He stated he was General Robert’s interpreter…He said his Protector…had received into London the greater part of the Hebrews of Flanders and sold them one of the best quarters in the city, with a church for synagogue. He understood that these Jews had urged the dispatch of this fleet and advanced a great loan for its fitting out. It is not difficult to believe this, since the example of Brazil exhibits similar treasons and iniquities committed by this blind people out of the aversion they have for us.”

  7. Most information on Carvajal is from Lucien Wolf, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 2 (1894), 14–46; and Lucien Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 2 (1893–94), 55–88.

  8. Fraser, Cromwell, 524.

  9. S. A. G. Taylor, The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica and Jamaican Historical Society, 1969), 10.

  10. Ibid., 16, 19.

  11. Taylor, The Western Design, 34, 36.

  12. Ibid., 36: Taylor quotes Henry Whistler, “Journal of the West Indian Expedition (1654–1655),” reprinted in Journal of the Institute of Jamaica 2 (Kingston, 1899).

  13. Wright, “The Spanish Naratives of Santo Domingo, The Notarial Account,” The Camden Miscellany 13 (1924), 59: There is also the admission of a fourth prisoner: “he said their intention was to go to Jamaica.”

  14. H. P. Jacobs, “Jamaica Historical Review,” Jamaica Historical Society 1, no. 1 (June 1945), 109–10.

  15. Wright, “‘The English Conquest of Jamaica’ by Julian Castilla (1656),” The Camden Miscellany 13 (1924), 522.

  16. John Elijah Blunt, The Jews of England (London: Saunders and Benning, 1830), 70–71: “The Rabbi’s extreme supporters embarrassed Cromwell when it was reported in the daily press that they had looked up his birth records to see if the Lord Protector was of the line of David and might himself be the Messiah!” When word of their investigation reached London, “Cromwell was suspected of being privy to their designs, and was exposed to raillery. At a meeting of the council the Jews were summoned…warmly upbraided and ordered to depart the country.”

  17. Evidence that Carvajal and Acosta were Jews comes from their Jewish descendants resident in the Caribbean.

  18. Taylor, The Western Design, 61.

  19. C. A. Firth, ed., A Narrative by General Venables of His Expedition to the Island of Jamaica: with an Appendix of Papers Relating to the Expedition, Royal Historical Society (London, 1900). Venables’s report to Cromwell. Richard Hill, Jamaica’s foremost nineteenth-century historian, writes in Lights and Shadows of Jamaican History: Eight Chapters in the History of Jamaica (1508–1680) illustrating the settlement of the Jews on the island (1868), 35: “The family influence of Diego Columbus had rendered it very considerably Portuguese. Several Jewish families already here are progenitors of families still living and commenced the nucleus of Jewish influence so remarkable and so paramount in Jamaica at this day.”

  20. Taylor, The Western Design, 63: When Duarte de Acosta, who was held by the English as a hostage, sent his slave with a message to his brother Gaspar, the slave was garroted as a spy. Acosta, “incensed” at the murder of his slave, went over to the English. Venables noted: “A good deal of information was obtained from Acosta.”

  21. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56: De Caceres’s origins: born 1615 or 1623 in Amsterdam, died 1704 in England. He was the son of Moses de Casseres, one of the twelve founders of Neveh Shalom, and lived in Barbados from 1647 to 1654 and in Hamburg before he came to London. Maurice Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews in the Sephardic Century,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 24 (1970–73), 47: his family was from Caceres, in Spain, near the Portuguese border, where many Jews lived before the expulsion, on the same latitude as Toledo and Lisbon.

  22. Lucien Wolf, “American Elements in the Resettleme
nt,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 3 (1896–98), 97–98, Appendix VII.

  23. Thomas Carlyle, ed., Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, A Library of Universal Literature (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1800), Part 2, 428.

  24. W. S. Samuel, “A List of Jews Endenzation and Naturalization 1609–1799,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 2 (1968–69), 113.

  25. Lucien Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” Essays in Jewish History (1934), 103: “sends first authentic warning of treaty…the text of which he conveys ‘is kept very close’ but he obtained a copy for 20 [pounds].” Source—Birch: Thurloe Papers, v. 645. March 56, Blake sailed from England to blockade Cádiz. When the galleons arrived, he captured six of the eight ships and two million pieces of eight, and the following year burned or sank the Spanish fleet in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This ended all hope of sending an expedition to the West Indies in the fall to retake Jamaica.

  26. Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” 112.

  27. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56.

  28. Interesting Tracts Relating to the Island of Jamaica which throw great light on the history of that island from its conquest down through the year 1702 (St. Jago de la Vega, 1702), 1–2: “A Proclamation of the Protector, Relating To Jamaica: we therefore,…[decree] that every planter or adventurer to that island shall be…free from paying any excise or custom for any…goods or necessaries which he or they shall transport to the island of Jamaica…for a space of ten years.”

  29. Anita Libman Lebeson, Pilgrim People (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 48–49; Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 174–75.

  30. Fraser, Cromwell, 566.

  31. Ibid., 561; Bernard Martin, A History of Judaism, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 163.

  32. Lucien Wolf, Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (London: Macmillan, 1901), 78–79: Text of Menasseh’s address to Cromwell. Along with fulfilling the Messianic requisite, Menasseh noted: “Profit is the most powerful motive all the world prefers before all things,” and stressed the wealth their return would create. There is no record of what they discussed when they met, but it is easy to imagine a lively volley of opinions on Scripture, prophecy, and trade. Menasseh, in addressing him, assumed “a most submissive and obsequious posture imaginable,” but was quick to remind the Protector of the fate of leaders who treated Jews harshly: “No monarch has ever brought suffering to Jews without eventually being heavily punished by God.”

  33. D’Blossiers Tovey, Anglia Judaica: A History of the Jews in England (1738); retold by Elizabeth Pearl (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 143–44.

  34. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 64. London Jews petition Cromwell: “to shelter himself from those tyrannical proceedings and enjoy those benefits and kindness which this commonwealth afforded to afflicted strangers as yr Highness hath bin pleased to show yourself on behalf of the Jews.”

  35. Ibid., 65.

  36. Ibid., 66.

  37. Gilbert Burnet, Osmund Airy, ed., A History of My Own Time, vol. 1 (London: Company of Booksellers, 1725), 76.

  38. Carlyle, ed., Oliver Cromwell’s Letters, vol. 22, 427–30.

  39. Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq. Secretary, First to the Council of State to the Two Protectors Oliver and Richard Cromwell (London, 1742), vol. 4, 543–44: Sabada’s journal entry dated February 1, 1656.

  40. State Papers of Thurloe #4, 602.

  41. Wolf, “Crypto-Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56.

  42. Wolf, “American Elements in the Resettlement,” 96–97, Appendix VII, Invasion of Chile letter: Simon de Caceres’s scheme for the conquest of Chile. Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, vol. 3, 131; Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” 108–9.

  43. Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (London: Clarendon Press, 1964), 56.

  44. Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews,” 47. Samuel Tolkowsky, They Took to the Sea (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), 245: In April 1661, the king of Denmark endorsed the Caceres brothers’ request to Charles II to live and trade in Barbados and Suriname.

  45. Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 1540–1740, Brill Series in Jewish Studies (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2002), 298–99, quoting Simon De Vries, Historie van Barbaryen: From 1626, when the port city of Salé, Morocco, just north of Rabat, formed “a self-governing pirate republic,” the leaders and financial backers of the corsairs were “a small resident community of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam [who] divided between them the captured booty taken from Christians.” The States General, in a dispatch to Morocco’s sultan, identified two familiar names, Moses Cohen Henriques and Aaron Querido, as “prominent” traders who supplied arms and munitions to Salé. Other familiar figures were the sons of the Palache brothers, members of the Bueno Mesquita family, and Moses’s cousin, Benjamin Cohen Henriques, described in 1634 as Salé’s “pre-eminent resident Dutch Jewish merchant.” Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 73.

  46. Richard Hill, Lights and Shadows of Jamaica History (Kingston, Jamaica: Ford & Gall, 1859), 37: “The Jewish families laid the foundation of the trade and traffic of Jamaica as soon as mercantile business became organized with the Freebooters. With the Jewish settlers, properly opens the connexion of the colony with the Buccaneers.”

  Chapter Nine: The Golden Dream of Charles II

  1. Benjamin Keen, ed. and trans., The Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), li: As Columbus wrote in his Book of Prophecies: “O, most excellent gold! Who has gold gets what he wants, imposes his will on the world, and helps souls to paradise.”

  2. Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 40–43.

  3. Samuel Oppenheim, “An Early Jewish Colony in Western Guiana and Its Relation to the Jews of Suriname, Cayenne and Tobago,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 16 (1907), 108–9.

  4. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 44: In 1659, David Cohen Nassi, who contracted with the Company to found a Jewish colony in Cayenne, bought “52 negro slaves from Abraham Cohen do Brazil who had paid the Company 2995.50 florins cash for them and he would reimburse Cohen within three years.” Zvi Loker, Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, Institute for Research on the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage, 1991), 59–60: In August 1659, Abraham Cohen and A. Luis, merchants in Amsterdam, ship “goods and passengers” to Cayenne with the agreement of the West India Company; in November 1659, Abraham Cohen and A. Luis, acting under Power of Attorney of the New Cayenne Company, send the ship Abrahmas Offerhande “laden with wares” to Cayenne. March, 3 1660: “Abraham Cohen chartered the Hamburch to ship cargo and several Jews to Curacao and Cayene” May 1660: “A. Cohen to ship to A. Luis part of his property from the island ‘Ayami’ on the river in the wasteland of the Wild Coast.”

  5. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 107.

  6. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 43.

  7. Brian Masters, The Mistresses of Charles II (London: Blond and Briggs, 1979), 45.

  8. Jean Plaidy, The Wandering Prince (New York: Fawcett, 1971), 164–65.

  9. Quoted in Antonia Fraser, Royal Charles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 139, 173.

  10. See http://www.contemplator.com/england/phoenix.htm.

  11. Fraser, Royal Charles, 139.

  12. Masters, The Mistresses of Charles II, 45.

  13. Ibid., 47.

  14. A. G. Course, A Seventeenth-Century Mariner (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1965), 24–26.

  15. Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (London:
Clarendon Press, 1964), 167.

  16. Lucien Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 5 (1896–98), 13.

  17. Lucien Wolf, “Status of the Jews in England After the Resettlement,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 4 (1899–1901), 181–82.

  18. Ibid., 182.

  19. Edgar R. Samuel, “David Gabay’s 1660 Letter from London,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 25 (1973–75), 38–42.

  20. Antonia Fraser, Royal Charles, 195: Fraser quotes an entry in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles II, no. 140, November 30, 1660.

  21. Roth, History of the Jews in England, 160–61.

  22. Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,” 15: María Fernandez de Carvajal, née Rodrigues, was maternal aunt of Antonio Rodrigues Lindo (brother of Lorenzo), who was arrested in Lisbon for Judaizing when he was twenty-three in 1660. Of María, a tough gal—“when the community was threatened in 1660, she called a meeting of her co-religionists at her house in Leadenhall St, that petitioned Charles II for ‘his Majesty’s protection to continue and reside in his dominions.’”

  23. Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,” 15–16: While Charles hadn’t yet formally sanctioned their presence, he had reason to. While most Jews sided with the Protector, others in Amsterdam and London, led by the da Costa family, were sympathetic to his cause. Reportedly, they advanced Charles one million guiders (about $600,000). Thus, while Cromwell had his Jewish intelligencers, other Jews supported the exiled king.

  24. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661–1668 (National Archives, Kew, Surrey, England), 7/24/1661 #139: In April 1661, Charles approved their petition to live and trade in Barbados and Suriname, endorsed by the king of Denmark.

  25. Within two years after his restoration, the number of London Jews holding bank accounts increased from thirty-five to ninety-two.

  26. Albert M. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, 1492–1951 (London: Methuen, 1951), 19.