Even his single success was short-lived. Responding to his offer, the governor of Nevis arrived with a party of 1,500 men, women, and children, and settled on the eastern end of Jamaica. Being farmers, the newcomers immediately set to work clearing and planting many acres. Soon they had a bountiful crop, but others had to harvest it: In the three months the crops took to mature, a thousand of them had died.4 Reluctantly, Cromwell continued to send more soldiers and food supplies (termed “survival stores”).5 But this was no answer.
In 1657, he instructed Jamaica’s commander, Colonel Edward D’Oyley, to extend a formal invitation to the buccaneers of Tortuga to call Jamaica home.6 As they began to dispose of their wares, the “fair beginning of a town sprung up around the fort” that de Caceres had recommended to guard the harbor entrance. Occupying the tip of a long and narrow peninsula, the port town could only grow up, not out. Freshwater had to be brought in by boat, which was the only way to reach the town. However, the port’s offshore depth was such that the biggest ships could unload at its wharfs, and hundreds more could anchor in the Caribbean’s largest harbor, sheltered by the seven-mile-long peninsula.
At first, each buccaneer crew was a force unto itself, electing (and disposing) captains at will to cruise the sea for merchant ships and stray galleons. This changed in 1659, when Jamaica’s naval commander, Commodore Christopher Mings, called them all together. Only a strong leader could unite men so fiercely individualistic, and Mings, who rose through the ranks from cabin boy, was a tough old sea dog who fit the bill. Rather than run down ships at sea, he proposed that they unite under his command and attack Spanish towns. On their first venture, Mings and his men plundered three towns on the Main, and returned with a haul valued at 1.5 million pieces of eight. The sight dazzled the people. After a few days of raucous celebration, so much silver changed hands that one wrote, “Not a man in the island reaped not a benefit of that action.”7
The higher-born English officers were offended at the wild frolicking and scoffed at Mings for having allowed his buccaneers to keep so much of the spoils. They called him “a proud speaking, vain fool and a knave in cheating the State and robbing the merchants.”8 This was sour grapes. There was no arguing with success. News of Mings’s exploit brought other buccaneers, merchants, tavern owners, prostitutes, and assorted and sordid pleasure-seekers to the port, so that in a few years the Point, as it was known, grew from “a barren sandy spit, to the largest, most opulent town in the English Americas.”9 Mings’s triumph paved the way for the golden age of piracy under the command of one of his young captains, known to history as the Buccaneer Admiral, Sir Henry Morgan.
In August 1660, news of Charles’s restoration reached Jamaica. It was no longer a secret that he had promised to return Jamaica to Spain when he regained his throne. With the island’s future in doubt, merchants in England and Jamaica waited nervously to see what their king would do. They need not have worried: Charles was quick to renounce his promise, saying he had made it solely to secure Philip’s assistance to regain his crown, and as no help had been forthcoming, Jamaica would remain English.
This assurance, together with the defeat of Ysassi’s guerrillas and the success of Jamaica’s growing port, gilded by plunder and protected by buccaneers, put the island on a more secure footing. In the previous five years, Jamaica had been a burial ground for fully three-quarters of the nearly twelve thousand men, women, children, and slaves who had come to the island.10 But now every ship arrived with new colonists, mostly from England. With the guerrillas no longer a threat, settlements spread inland. More acreage was planted and food was plentiful. Spanish silver, gained through plunder and contraband trade, poured into Jamaica. Now solvent, the colony began a regular trade with Boston, shipping hardwoods and cattle hides for fresh food and salt fish. Fort Cromwell was renamed Fort Charles, and the Point christened Port Royal.
Fed by plunder, nourished by merchants, and spiced with sensuous pleasures, Port Royal attracted English and French buccaneers, as well as men of no nation, or at least none they acknowledged. Here they found what they needed most: a ready market for Spanish loot, facilities to repair and equip their ships, and the ribald pleasures they sought between voyages. By the end of 1660, there were always “at least a dozen armed ships in the area.”11 Owing to their fearsome presence, Charles felt comfortable enough that Christmas to recall the fleet to England, and the following year disbanded most of the army.
Iberian Jews, welcomed by Cromwell and Charles II, now arrived in Jamaica from all over the New World and abroad. Here they could throw off their converso cloaks and live free and prosper. Together with brethren from Holland and England, the Jewish community included shipowners from Mexico and Brazil, traders from Peru and Colombia, and ship captains and pilots from Nevis and Barbados. Joining with Jamaica’s Portugals, their combined knowledge of New World trade (both legal and illegal) was unsurpassed.
An island census in August 1662 put Jamaica’s population at 6,000 (including 552 slaves), and found that Port Royal was home to thirty “stout vessels” manned by three thousand buccaneers.12 At the time, Mings was abroad with 1,500 of them, plundering Santiago, Cuba’s second largest port, and sacking Campeche in Mexico. In December, he returned to a hero’s welcome, and shortly after was recalled to England to be knighted by Charles and made admiral.13
When news of Mings’s exploit reached Spain, Philip was furious. He wrote Charles demanding satisfaction. Hadn’t he and Charles agreed to a truce only months before? Campeche was near Vera Cruz, where the flota was loaded with silver and other treasures. Fearing Vera Cruz could be next, Philip hurriedly dispatched an armada to escort the flota home.
Charles assured Philip that Mings’s raids had been without his knowledge and that he would put a stop to it. He wrote Jamaica’s governor: “Understanding with what jealousy and offence the Spaniards look upon our island and how disposed they are to make some attempt upon it…the king signifies his displeasures of all such undertakings and commands that no such be pursued for the future.”14 His condemnation not withstanding, the king’s draft of his letter conveyed his truer feelings. While he called for a cessation of such attacks, he first wrote: “His Majesty has heard of the success of the undertaking which he cannot choose but please himself in the vigor and resolution wherein it was performed.” His subsequent letters to Jamaica’s governor indicated that, if given the right excuse, his orders to desist could be ignored.15
Versions of this episode were repeated again and again in the decades that followed. In a century that began with the Thirty Years’ War, peace was a rarity. When Europe’s rival powers agreed to a truce, more often than not it was so that the two signatories could jointly attack a third. At times the buccaneers would be reined in, and licenses to attack other nations’ ships revoked. But these licenses, known as letters of marque, would soon be reissued on some pretext. Spain was the preferred target, but sudden shifts in alliances meant that, at times, the ships of Portugal, Holland, and France were also fair game. In 1665, the French and Dutch were at war with England. The Dutch bombarded Barbados, and the next year the French routed the English at St. Kitts and threatened Jamaica.
Publicly Charles castigated the sea rovers; privately he turned a blind eye. Governors were dispatched to Jamaica “with strict orders to keep the peace,” but quickly learned to holler wolf: “The Spanish are coming!” An alleged need to preempt a foreign invasion was the usual excuse for unleashing the buccaneers. Besides, it was argued, if Jamaica denied them the freedom of Port Royal, they would resort to other havens, and perhaps even target English ships.
In March 1663, “the gold finding Jews” entered a town that had grown to near three hundred buildings. When they left the next year, another hundred had been built, all crammed together at the end of the otherwise barren peninsula. A visitor described Port Royal’s crooked streets and narrow lanes, lined with shops, taverns, and warehouses topped with balconied homes, as having the look of “an English shire town
perched on the end of a tropical spit.”16 At the time of the conquest, the site was “nothing but loose Sand [with] neither Grass, Stone, fresh water, Trees, nor anything else,” and only used by the Spaniards to careen ships to clean their hulls.17 A decade later, the land spit had morphed into the treasure house of the Indies, so dubbed for its plunder-filled warehouses along the wharves, packed high with cases of sugar, cocoa, dyewoods, precious stones, plate, bullion, and other commodities. With buccaneer ships unloading their spoils, while others waited in the harbor to disgorge their ill-gotten gains and rowboats plied passengers and goods to and fro between ship and shore, the waterfront was a noisy, nonstop scene of bustling human activity.18
The pirates captured the riches, but it was the merchants, both Sephardim and rival English, who profited most, buying the booty “dogge cheape” on the dock, and selling it dear abroad. Wrote one visitor: “The merchants live here to the height of splendor, in full ease and plenty, being sumptuously arrayed…not wanting anything to delight and please their curious appetites.” Their elegant homes were spectacular, furnished with plunder—silver plate, crystal chandeliers, and other accoutrements that had once graced a noble’s casa or a bishop’s dining table. Not to be outdone, by 1663, twenty-two pirate captains had equally grand residences, and shod their horses with silver horseshoes, loosely nailed and carelessly dropped to show their disdain for hoarded wealth.
It is not known how Cohen and his partners spent their time in Jamaica. Inside of a year they were gone. Gone too, at least from the historical record, are the two Portugals who welcomed the English, Duarte Acosta and Francisco Carvajal. Sephardic names appear on the island’s early land deeds, bills of lading, wills, lawsuits, immigration records, hostile petitions, and so on. Port Royal had a Jew Street and a synagogue. The port’s leading Jewish merchants are named (15 from a list of 125 merchants), as are their enemies, the rival merchants who petitioned to expel “the crucifiers of our Lord…who eat us and our children out of all trade.”19
Most ships sailed to England in accord with the Navigation Act; others snuck in and out to avoid registration. In Jamaica’s public registry, the amount of cargo consigned to Jewish merchants is relatively small. As in Spanish Jamaica, the Sephardim dominated the so-called silent trade. It is in this undocumented trade with converso merchants in Spain’s colonies that Jamaica’s Sephardim specialized, supplying them with European goods at bargain prices.20 Unregistered merchandise bound for Vera Cruz, Havana, Nombre de Dios, Cartagena, and Santa Marta left Port Royal and the surrounding mangroves on unmarked sloops in the dead of night. Archival records contain the names of ninety-six Jews who lived in Port Royal during this era. That there were more is certain, but their names are absent from the public record. With trade restricted to English citizens and Jews who had been naturalized, undocumented Jewish traders kept their participation secret.
How many illegal aliens were there, and how big was the silent trade? The Port Royal historians David Buisseret and Nuala Zahedieh do not even hazard a guess. Their detailed analysis of the port’s public record simply notes that the trade’s covert nature makes it difficult to quantify. However, an indication of the enormity of contraband trade throughout the New World may be gauged by the fact that while no Spanish galleons arrived for two years after Charles regained his throne, when the ships finally came loaded with goods in 1662, there were few buyers. Their wares, the colonialists said, were far too expensive, and the galleons “returned [to Spain] with most of their cargo unsold.”21
In the 1660s, Port Royal was the busiest port in the New World, and the most expensive. Employment was plentiful, with wages three times higher than in England. Only in the heart of London were rents so dear.22 The town’s permanent residents (numbering four hundred in 1664) were artisans, merchants, tavern owners, and ladies of the night who catered to the port’s transient visitors. Once the booty was shared out, the buccaneers made for the bars and bordellos—one for every ten residents. Each place offered its own brand of vice, and none were said to lack customers. In the cool of the evening, the unexpurgated fun began. The taverns threw open their doors and pipe-smoking, petticoat-clad courtesans strolled the lanes.
Next to the merchants, it was the owners of the pleasure domes who profited most from the free-spending wild men. It was said no true buccaneer would go to sea again until he had spent every last piece of eight “in all manner of debauchery.” He gambled it away, drank it up, and spent it on the ladies. “Pieces of eight were thrown around and no man bothered to count his change.”23 For a vivid picture of “wenching on a grand scale,” it is worth quoting a passage from the Dutch surgeon (and suspect converso) John Esquemelin, who served with Morgan. He wrote that as soon as a pirate received his share, all he desired was “strumpets and wine”:
Such of these pirates are found who will spend 3000 pieces of eight in one night, not leaving themselves peradventure a good shirt to wear on their backs in the morning…I saw one give a common strumpet 500 pieces of eight only that he might see her naked. My own master [Morgan] would buy on like occasions, a whole pipe of wine, and, placing it in the street, would force everyone to drink with him; threatening also to pistol them, in case they would not. At other times, he would throw these liquors about the streets, and wet the clothes of such as walked by, without regarding whether he spoiled their apparel or not, were they men or women.24
Such frantic moments ashore only partially reflect the complexity of men who began life in the Old World and ran away to the New. The stereotypical pirate with a kerchief round his head and a cutlass at the waist, singing “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” doesn’t begin to describe these untamed men who in Hispaniola had slept with their animals, “with no more estate than a knife, and a gun, the sky their coverlet.”25 The fellow behind the eye patch and the gold earring was a natural anarchist who followed his own way on an uncharted journey that eventually brought him to Port Royal. In Tortuga, he had found a refuge. In Jamaica, he found a home.
To maintain a semblance of order, Port Royal had two prisons, a cage, a ducking stool, and stocks. One jail was for sailors “and other unruly elements.” The other was for women, “to allay the furie of those hott Amazons.” A nightly roundup hustled into a cage those too drunk to make it to a bed. When not whoring, the buccaneers shot at targets and gambled at cards, dice, billiards, shuffleboard, cockfights, and on a beastly match that pitted a bull and a bear. It was a rum-soaked scene—tawdry, noisy, and violent. The taverns and brothels “sucked them in, sucked them dry, and then tossed them out to seek further gold.”26 A newly arrived cleric, shocked to his core, left on the ship he came in on, and afterward wrote: “This town is the Sodom of the New World, the majority of its population being pirates, cut-throats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world.”27 Another visitor concurred: “’tis almost impossible to civilize [the town]. Vile strumpets and prostitutes are a walking plague against which neither the cage, whip nor ducking stool prevails.”28
The setting cries out for a good novelist. It is an interesting challenge, as characters previously introduced now show up in Port Royal: Moses Cohen Henriques, whose citizenship paper was signed by Henry Morgan, lived here with his wife, Esther; Campoe Sabada, the invasion pilot, was likewise awarded citizenship; and Abraham Lucena, one of the half dozen Jews who with Jacob Cohen and Isaac Israel fought Stuyvesant, eventually owned land at the port.
Then there is the interesting figure of Batholomew (aka Balthasar) the Portuguese, whose misadventures are part of buccaneer folklore. Expelled from Jamaica after having assisted the English invaders in 1642, he turned full-time pirate and was in and out of the port on roving excursions. His tale is told by his contemporary John Esquemelin.29 Smarter and more persistent than most in his profession, the Jewish pirate didn’t know when to quit. In 1666, his ship heavily out-gunned and outmanned, he captured a “great vessel” off Cuba’s south coast with a rich cargo of cacao beans and seventy thousand pieces of eight. C
ontrary winds prevented his safe return to Port Royal and he was intercepted by three Spanish men-of-war, which took him to a nearby port, Campeche. Bartholomew having previously escaped imprisonment there (for “infinite murders and robberies”), his captors decided to keep him aboard ship “fearing lest he escape out of their hands on shore.”
Knowing he was to be hanged the following day, Bartholomew, unable to swim, fashioned a pair of crude water wings from two empty wine jars, killed his guard, and slipped overboard. Hiding in a mangrove swamp, he concealed himself from the search parties for three days in the hollow of a tree. Using nails salvaged from a board washed ashore, he built a raft of twigs and branches and floated downriver to a secluded harbor frequented by buccaneers. There he met up with a Jamaican pirate crew “who were great comrades of his own.” Relating his “adversities and misfortunes,” he promised them a share of the wealth if they gave him a small ship and twenty men to retake the great ship that had been his two weeks before. Entering the port undetected, he and his men were able to persuade those aboard that they were traders coming from the mainland. By the time the Spaniards realized their mistake, it was too late.
Bartholomew was again master of the ship where he had previously been held prisoner awaiting execution. Although the silver had been removed, the trade goods were still in the hold, and weighing anchor, he set sail for Jamaica “with extremity of joy.” But south of Cuba, “fortune suddenly turned her back upon him once more, never to show him her countenance again.” A “horrible storm” dashed the ship against the rocks, leaving him and his crew with only a canoe to return to Port Royal. Esquemelin concludes his monograph, noting that although Bartholomew survived to “seek his fortune anew…from that time on [it] proved always adverse to him.”
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