Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  Following his death in 1531, Doña Marina cemented her place in colonial society by marrying off her daughters to two of Mexico’s prominent conquistadors. The youngest, Beatrice Estrada, married Vásquez de Coronado, who (with his wife’s money) set off to find the fabled Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola. Although the object of his search was never found, Coronado was the first to explore America’s southwest and discovered the Grand Canyon. Luisa, the oldest, became the wife of Jorge de Alvarado, a conqueror of Mexico and governor of Guatemala. The two other Estrada sisters likewise married nobility.*1

  What do these marriages portend? Since the Jewish ancestry of those noblemen’s wives’ mother was known (as was the fact that her Old Christian certification was a sham), it apparently did not overly concern them that their children would no longer be of pure blood.

  In the first four decades of the Age of Discovery, known conversos were involved in nearly every venture as explorers, pilots, and conquistadors, or behind the scenes as financiers, shipowners, and administrators. Those mentioned here are but a few of the known Sephardim who participated. How many others there were is unknown. Since all Spanish conversos were forbidden in the New World, it made no difference if one was a true convert, an atheist, or a covert Jew. All were there illegally and therefore subject to prosecution. Today, with the advent of genealogical Web sites, the Jewish roots of other early pioneers are being disclosed in postings by their descendants.27

  Hernando Cortés, like Columbus, had the support of many conversos. He had grown up across the street from the synagogue in Medellín, home to influential Jews. Some were friends of his family, and that may have been a reason he trusted and favored them. Their sad and sudden exodus in 1492, when he was seven years old, was a major event in his childhood. A leading historian of the conquest of Mexico, Hugh Thomas, puts the number of conversos who served with Cortés at more than a hundred.28

  As early as 1501, the Crown published an edict that “Moors, Jews, heretics, reconciliados [repentants—those who returned to the church], and New Christians are not to be allowed to go to the Indies.” Yet in 1508, the bishop of Cuba reported, “practically every ship [arriving in Havana] is filled with Hebrews and New Christians.”29 Such decrees banning them, followed by letters home complaining of their continued arrival, were a regular occurrence. Conversos with the aptitude and capital to develop colonial trade, comfortable in a Hispanic society, yet seeking to put distance between themselves and the homeland of the Inquisition, made their way to the New World.30 No licenses were required for the crew of a ship, and as many were owned by conversos, they signed on as sailors and jumped ship. Servants also didn’t need a license or exit visa, so that a Jew who obtained one by whatever means could take others along as household staff.31

  For most of the first century after the discovery, the fanaticism that characterized the Holy Office did not carry over to the New World. By and large, adventurers there—having left the Old World for whatever reason—could identify with the conversos’ desire to start anew. In the early New World, despite the edicts barring them, wherever one looks, a suspected Jewish adventurer was carving out a life, often on the run from the Inquisition. We will never know how many there were because even sincere converts hid their Jewish roots behind a mask of hyper-religious piety. As the next chapter demonstrates, as long as their skills were needed, the Crown not only turned a blind eye to their presence, but actively recruited them.

  Following a time line, then, we come to 1534, a year when disparate events came together in ways that broke with the past and shifted the century forward to new beginnings. In matters of faith, the Reformation was kick-started when a renegade monk published the Bible in German, and a lustful king became the Supreme Head of the Church of England. In the New World, an illiterate pig herder conquered the gold kingdom of Peru, and in Brazil, a group of exiled Jews from a little island off the Guinea coast introduced an agricultural industry that would prove more valuable than gold and silver. Meanwhile, warring infidels led by one who styled himself “the Magnificent” invaded Hungary. And the Most Catholic Defender of the True Faith, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, authorized the first documented Jewish settlement in the New World on the island of Jamaica.

  Chapter Three

  THE KING’S ESSENTIAL HERETICS

  When the bad news from Jamaica reached Spain, Charles V, the Lord of Half the World, was not surprised. It seemed that every time he put his crown on in 1534, there was trouble in his kingdom. Even his vaunted title, Holy Roman Emperor, didn’t carry the same weight as it had when his grandfather Maximilian wore the crown. So when he read that most of his Jamaican colonists were dead and the rest wanted out, Charles was not unduly grieved. He had seen it coming.

  In the nineteen years that he had been ruling the New World, Jamaica had always been more of a problem than the “fairest isle” Columbus thought it to be. New Seville of Gold was now known simply as New Seville. The anticipated flow of the precious metal turned out to be a trickle, and most of the sixty thousand Indians who had greeted Columbus were dead. Aside from a small productive settlement of conversos on the south coast, the colony was going under. Why remain in Jamaica when neighboring Hispaniola and Cuba offered a regal style of life said to rival that of Spain? Why settle Jamaica when the nearby Main offered the promise of Aztec and Inca gold?

  The communiqué was desperate: Conditions at New Seville had “turned out so badly that no citizen has prospered nor kept his health for a day.” To salvage the colony, his treasurer Pedro de Manzuelo proposed removing the settlement “to the south side of the island where the land is plentiful in bread and beef…with very good ports suitable for navigation to the provinces of Santa Marta, Cartagena, and the mainland…There is great disposition to settle there because no ship in this trade comes to the north coast but all load on the south.”1

  Manzuelo concluded his report with a seemingly odd request. To pioneer the south coast settlement, he recommended the king send an additional thirty Portuguese families to join with the twenty already there. Together they would be put to work on his sugar estate. Manzuelo’s request was couched in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. The king had made growing sugarcane in the Indies a priority and had been subsidizing planters in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Mexico with land grants, duty waivers, and loans. Years earlier, Jamaica’s sugar mill in New Seville had shown the island’s potential for growing the sweetener, and it made sense to recruit more workers to increase the island’s production.2 But why Portuguese? Portugal was then attracting settlers to its colonies with the promise of riches, so where would the king find Portuguese families in his realm willing to settle a poor Spanish island?

  The fact is, he didn’t have to. Manzuelo’s directive was aimed at enlisting neither sugar workers nor Portuguese natives. In Crown correspondence, reference to Portuguese residing in Spanish lands pertained not to national origin, but rather was a code word for the worst heretics in his kingdom. With the stability of his empire at stake, Charles V took seriously his vows as Chief Knight of the Holy Inquisition to convert the heathen and burn the heretic. Yet when the communiqué specified “Portuguese,” Charles read between the lines: Jamaica for the Jews, or the colony goes under.3

  When Columbus returned from his voyage of discovery, a golden thread had wound its way into the fabric of every Spaniard’s imagination. In time it stretched from the New World across the Ocean Sea to a peninsula on the edge of the Old World, where it wove an exotic pattern of desire stirring a man’s dreams. Wherever men gathered, the talk was the same—tales of opulent cities with riches beyond belief and beautiful naked maidens aching to please.

  Jamaica, thought to have neither, had become a dead end. Only Puerto Rico, where man-eating Indians discouraged settlement, was less popular. Why settle Jamaica when the bounty of the New World was thought to be yours for the taking, if a man be but brave and bold enough? And what Spaniard wasn’t? In their own generation, they had defeated the Moors, kicked ou
t the Jews, enslaved the Indians, and conquered more territory than Rome had in five centuries. In forty-two years, their country had swelled from an alliance of Christians fighting over a few thousand square miles to a world empire governing millions. In the process, Spain had become the richest, most powerful nation on earth. Their king and Church told them they had the right, and they had proved they had the might.

  Romance novels of chivalry, the pulp fiction of the day, “fired the imaginations of conquistadors to seek their own adventures in the New World. Their heads filled with fantastic notions…their courage spurred by noble examples of the great heroes of chivalry, they were prepared to undergo every kind of hardship and sacrifice as they penetrated through swamps and jungles into the new continent.”4 Fortune seekers from every province of Spain filled the taverns of Santo Domingo, the capital of the New World, plotting, conspiring, and gambling on destinies. Most, like Cortés, were soldiers of fortune, a class of Spaniard that had evolved during the Reconquista—the seven centuries of warfare against the Moors. In a grasp at nobility, they called themselves hidalgos, meaning sons of somebody, but the true somebodies, the grandees, would wait another fifty years before sending their sons to the New World. Provided you wore the cross of Jesus, your origin didn’t matter: an acrobat and a musician had looted Colombia for gold; a former scribe got the pearls of Venezuela; a soldier of fortune ruling New Spain, a nation bigger than Europe, was said to be richer than the king himself. And in the summer of 1534, word spread through Spain that a pig farmer turned conquistador had plundered an Indian nation of limitless gold.

  While Charles was mulling the Jamaican communiqué in the royal palace, the pig farmer’s brother, Hernando Pizarro, was thrilling court attendees with the tale of how his illiterate brother Francisco, taking a cue from Cortés, had passed himself off as a god, kidnapped the Inca chief, and after accumulating a ransom of nineteen tons of gold and silver, had strangled and then burned the heretic. Even as Hernando spoke of this maleficent deed, a rumor spread in the court: A fleet of seventy ships from the New World had arrived at the Spanish port of Laredo with ten thousand Amazon women on board, hungry for Spanish men to father their children. Given the lure of Inca gold and the lust for Amazon women, Charles knew that would-be settlers would line up for Peru.5 But none would be interested in settling Jamaica, except the Jews. Along with an empire, Charles had inherited the Inquisition, and soon found the threat of being burned alive a handy means to control false conversos.

  While tons of New World gold poured into Charles’s treasury each year, it leaked out just as fast, and in the summer of 1534 he would need every ounce to defend his borders.6 His empire was under attack. Jacob Fugger, the German banker who had loaned him a half million ducats to bribe the electors to name him Holy Roman Emperor, had died, and the Fuggers refused to advance him any more coin.7 It was one thing for a pig herder to capture a New World empire and gather its riches; it was quite another to ensure their safe transfer to the Crown to fund his extravagances, fill his nobles’ pockets, and pay for soldiers to fight his enemies.

  The New World was his golden goose. If Jews were best suited to care for the golden egg, then he would send them to the New World and get on with more pressing matters of state. France’s King Francis I and the Ottoman emperor, Suleiman the Magnificent, his two challengers for world dominance, were allied against him. Francis was backing border raids into Italy; Suleiman’s cavalry of 100,000 horsemen was camped on the eastern shore of the Danube rattling their sabers, while in the Mediterranean the sultan’s naval commander, Barbarossa, was on his way to attack Tunis, Charles’s last stronghold in North Africa.

  There was also the enemy within, walking around in a monk’s habit spreading heresy. That summer three German princes rejected the True Faith and declared for Martin Luther, who was turning all of northern Europe into heretics. Charles hated Luther and would have smiled to see him roasted by the Inquisition, but he needed the princes’ help to defend his empire from the hordes of Suleiman. So he swallowed his anger, abided their heresy, and received their support.

  The survival of Jamaica, in the midst of the Caribbean trading lanes, was essential to the security of the treasure ships that passed offshore, carrying the New World’s riches back to Spain. If it meant dealing with converted Jews to ensure their safety and prevent the strategic colony from becoming a pirate base, so be it. In 1522, three treasure-laden ships dispatched to him from Mexico by Cortés had been captured and diverted to France by an Italian pirate better known today for the bridge bearing his name as the discoverer of New York harbor—Verrazano. The Aztec plunder the Italian delivered to the royal court in Paris included a half ton of gold, 682 pounds of pearls, jewel boxes encrusted with topaz, mirrors of polished obsidian, an emerald as large as a man’s fist, three live jaguars—and of even greater value, the sea charts of the captured Spanish pilots.8

  When Charles demanded that Francis return the loot, the French king spoke for Europe’s other rulers when he mockingly told him: “The sun shines on me just the same as on you, and I would like to see the clause in Adam’s will that bars me from my share of the riches of the New World!” With these words, state-licensed piracy, known as privateering, commenced in the Caribbean and became the clarion call of sea rovers.9

  Given the threats to his empire, Charles was “quick to temper” when June 1534 passed and his treasure ships, due in May, hadn’t arrived. Finally, in early July, the galleons landed at Cádiz and off-loaded 21 million pesos’ worth of silver. When informed, Charles “danced a wild jig around with his son Philip and dwarf jester Perico.” When Perico said to the eight-year-old prince, “Your father is Lord of Half the World; soon you will be Lord of All,” it was said that Charles, who rarely let loose, “laff with no end.”10

  It was then that Charles, having received the communiqué that his Jamaica colony was foundering, agreed to send the “Portugals.” Although he may have suspected the converted Jews of heresy, Charles knew that he could count on them to conduct the necessary business of managing his empire.

  The conversos of 1492 were initially welcomed into a society desperate to fill those positions in which the Jews of Spain had specialized. As New Christians, they quickly became an elite bourgeoisie of merchants, physicians, tax collectors, mapmakers, financiers, and advisers to the crown. But the rapidity of their success stirred emotions that only the flames of the Inquisition would calm. In 1534, even as their baptized children filled important commercial positions in an expanding empire and in the councils of her church, the Limpieza de Sangre (Pure Blood) law introduced to Santo Domingo in 1525 decreed the New World off-limits to all but Old Christians able to trace their ancestry back four generations.11 Whether one was a recent converso or a New Christian from 1391, a drop of Jewish blood rendered one unfit to forward God’s glory in Spain’s empire. The law barred New Christians from a growing list of professions, and even parts of Spain. To discourage escape, conversos were not permitted to sell their land or exchange promissory notes or bills of exchange.

  Like his grandfather Ferdinand, Charles adhered to the principle that the end justifies the means. He therefore had no qualms about using conversos to salvage his Jamaican colony. Although he saw himself as a soldier for God, he did not let religious posturing stand in the way of self-interest. He financed wars in Europe by borrowing from anyone he could, sold futures in the gold ships to foreign bankers, pawned the Molucca islands to the king of Portugal, leased Venezuela and Chile to German bankers who hoped to discover El Dorado, and the following year (1535), courted Doña Gracia Méndez Nasi, a famous Jewess, for a sizeable loan from her Portuguese bank.

  In Charles’s lifetime, his subjects explored and settled a world three times as big as the one into which he had been born, and he needed help, even if it meant dealing with suspect heretics. They would help him maintain his empire in ways no one else could. Throughout his reign, Charles needed, but never trusted, them. He was used to dealing with nobles and clergy
, but the Jews were something else. The People of the Book had the arrogance of royalty and valued themselves not by physical prowess or even riches, but by knowledge, wisdom, and business acumen. They were his essential heretics, efficient pawns in his global chess game, to be moved about and sacrificed at will.

  Included in the Royal Fifth Pizarro brought the king was a small gold box belonging to Atahualpa, the Inca chieftain, for the cocoa leaves that he and his subjects chewed for energy. Charles kept it for his snuff and may have been toying with it as he took time out from conquering the New World to ponder the problems of administering it. The king was known for his silent reflections—he often stared into the air, his clear blue eyes focused on some unknown object, while his mouth lay open (due to the protruding lower jaw characteristic of the Hapsburg line)—and one imagines him turning to Francisco Cobos, his hovering counselor, and saying in his constrained and measured way of talking: “Send for Acosta [the court Jew]; we require new settlers bound for Jamaica.”

  Arriving at Port Esquivel in October, the new settlers were welcomed by the twenty “Portuguese” families already there. Today, these fifty Jewish families are credited with founding Villa de la Vega (Town by the Fertile Plain), Jamaica’s capital for more than three centuries. Now called Spanish Town, La Vega, founded in 1534, represents the earliest documented settlement of converted Jews in the New World.12

  Charles turned his attention next to the heathens at his door: Sultan Suleiman’s army, having overrun Persia and occupied Hungary, was on the move, and in the Mediterranean, Barbarossa’s armada of eighty-four ships had embarked from Constantinople to sweep Spanish power from the sea.13