Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  Critics cite the earlier presence in Port Royal of Abraham Cohen’s relative Joseph Bueno Henriques, and his purported knowledge of a secret Spanish copper mine, as evidence that Cohen’s purported search was “a fraudulent scheme…to gain entry into the economic life and trade of Jamaica.”30 In 1661, Joseph petitioned “Your Majesty to obtain permission to go to Jamaica…[to] discover a copper mine…the Spaniards…found to be productive.” He claimed that when he was living in Jamaica in 1658, an escaped Spanish prisoner “informed me of [its] whereabouts.” He had the gall to offer Charles a niggardly 10 percent of the proceeds, and the king rejected his proposal.31 However, Charles later granted him naturalization and in 1672 he is listed in a Port Royal census as one of sixteen Jewish merchants so certified.

  The tale seems to validate the skeptics’ view. But a reading of the royal contract clearly dispels the notion that Cohen and his partners really came “for the sake of trade.” It states in no uncertain terms that the Jews will be awarded the right to export “all hollow pepper [pimento], only in the event of the discovery…finding and working of the mine” [emphasis my own].32 Therefore, if their search was indeed bogus, and there was no mine, there would be no trade benefits.

  The never-before-accessed documents found in the archival vault also supported the view that the search for the gold mine was real and that Cohen, if he did not actually find the site, at least believed he knew where it was. They show that Cohen, despite his lifetime banishment, returned to Jamaica sometime in 1670, and in January 1671 secured 420 acres in an isolated river valley at the headwaters of the Oracabessa River (an area today confirmed as a gold-bearing region by Jamaica’s Ministry of Mining). Cohen’s actions—leaving behind his new family in Amsterdam and journeying to a far-off island from which he had been banished in order to buy land in a hidden valley—only seems plausible if he believed it contained the site of Columbus’s mine.

  As for Beeston’s view that the mission was a fraud, this too demands another look, not just because of Cohen’s return, but also because Beeston’s later actions show he was no friend of the Jews. Along with policing the waterfront, he was a rival merchant, and more than once tried to expel Jews: In November 1671, the harbormaster seized a Jewish-owned ship on the pretext that Jews were foreigners and had no right to trade.33 The court overruled him, but when he became governor in 1700, he tried to drive Jews from the island. His means this time was to tax them in what they formally protested was “an extraordinary Manner hoping thereby to oblige [us] to quit the island.”34

  Beeston’s unrelenting hostility was again evident in 1702, when Jews, citing unfair treatment, petitioned for voting rights. Beeston, with the Council of Jamaica concurring, declared their grievance “false and scandalous,” and suggested they should be “imprisoned for their presumption.” They weren’t, but they were ordered to pay a tribute of two thousand pounds. When the Jews appealed the fine, the Crown sided with them, but not in regards to suffrage.35

  The archival documents highlight what was going on in Jamaica when Cohen was expelled in 1664, up until his final appearance in 1675. Twice during that decade, he was in and out of the island, first to buy the valley land, later to develop it. What the documents do not reveal is what allowed him to return to buy land in 1670, and what made him suddenly leave the following year. Nor do they explain why in 1674 he felt it was safe to come back, ostensibly to work the mine, only to leave again in haste.

  In June 1664, two months after the “gold finding Jews” left Jamaica, the island’s new governor, Thomas Modyford, arrived from Barbados. Unlike Beeston, Modyford favored Jewish settlement. Weeks before, when he was still governor of Barbados, he testified “on the value of the Jewish Traders in the progress of settling the Colony…the Jews are our chief supplyers in Barbadoes, and would sell very cheap, and give one not seldom two years to pay, by which credit the poorer sort of planter did wonderfully improve their condition.”36 Modyford, at the time he assumed the Jamaica post, may not have been aware of the king’s decree that banished Cohen and his partners, but he undoubtedly knew of it when he approved Cohen’s land deed in 1671, and otherwise supported his presence.

  Modyford ruled Jamaica during the heyday of piracy. From 1666 to 1670, the buccaneers and their leader Henry Morgan invaded the fabled cities of the Main and held its citizens for ransom. Using the same Inquisition tortures (and at times the same apparatus), they forced the Spaniards to surrender their wealth. In five years of nonstop plundering, Morgan, with Modyford as his patron and defender, and backed by Port Royal’s Jewish merchants, “attacked and plundered 18 cities, four towns 35 villages and unnumbered ships.”37

  Morgan was born on a farm in Wales in 1635 to a prosperous family. An adventurous youth, he journeyed to Bristol, then the major port for the slave trade, and soon found himself caught up in it—literally. “Shanghaied” is a later term for what was referred to as being “Barbadoed”—kidnapped and transported to a foreign land to be sold as an indentured servant. So it was that the nineteen-year-old farm boy hanging around the docks was captured and put aboard a ship bound for Barbados. Sold to the owner of a tobacco plantation, he did not have to labor long. Cromwell’s fleet arrived shortly thereafter, and with the promise of freedom he joined Venables’s army and wound up in Jamaica. Nothing more is known of him until 1662, when he signed on with Mings. By then he had fought the “cow-killers” in Hispaniola and Ysassi’s guerrillas in Jamaica, gaining combat experience that served him well in the coming years, and from Mings he learned important lessons that made him a brilliant strategist. That he was also courageous, dauntless, and cruel were no less vital attributes.

  Modyford and Morgan were a perfect pair to shape the colony. Though in many ways opposites, they complemented each other. A descendant of Morgan later contrasted the two: “[Modyford] was cunning, mannered, elegantly dressed and extremely popular; his sexual tendencies leant toward homosexuality.”38 Morgan, on the other hand, was lustful, boisterous, and prideful. Rum was his elixir, and he usually could be found with his mates in the taverns of Port Royal, where in his cups, he loved to spin yarns. Both men were charming, ambitious, duplicitous, and Machiavellian.

  For all his licentiousness and volcanic temper, Morgan was a great leader, and when required, a disciplined and brilliant tactician. Morgan did whatever it took to conquer a place and wring the last piece of eight from a prisoner. If he and his men had scruples, they kept them hidden: They slaughtered soldiers and priests, raped women and nuns, tortured adults and children, and blew up churches. Modyford, for his part, ran interference, calling Morgan’s actions necessary for Jamaica’s defense.

  When Modyford arrived in June 1664 with strict orders to recall the buccaneers, Morgan was away, having left the previous November on a two-year expedition, during which he raided three towns in Central America. When he finally returned towing eight Spanish ships, all laden with riches, he persuaded Modyford that his action was necessary to forestall a Spanish attack. The governor did not need much convincing. Shortly before Morgan’s return, he received the unsettling news that the Jamaica-bound ship his eldest son was on had been attacked by Spaniards. Reportedly the young man had been taken alive but was either first tortured before being murdered, or sent as a slave somewhere in the South Seas.39 After conferring with Morgan, Modyford wrote General George Monck his reason for unleashing the buccaneers:

  I cannot but presume to say we should in any measure be restrained while [the Spanish] are at liberty to act as they please upon us, from which we shall never be secure until the King of Spain acknowledges this island to be his Majesty’s, and includes it in the capitulations.40

  Again in 1666, Modyford defended the buccaneers:

  The Spaniards look on us as intruders and trespassers wheresoever they find us in the Indies and use us accordingly; and were it in their power…would turn us out of all our Plantations…It must be force alone that can cut in sunder [their] unneighbourly maxim to deny all access of strangers.41<
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  Modyford was a cunning politician. His dispatches mention neither booty nor personal revenge. Rather, he harps on the theme that Jamaica was in constant peril from a Spanish invasion and that only Morgan’s attacks were a deterrent. Receiving and investing 10 percent of all the booty brought to port eventually made Modyford one of the richest men in the English Empire. Governing by proclamation, he ruled as an independent potentate, answering only to a king thousands of miles away, whose directives took months to arrive. Major military and judicial posts were given to family members, and he alone decided how to spend the island’s revenue.

  King Charles’s excuse to King Philip that Morgan was acting contrary to his orders was scant satisfaction for Morgan’s devastating raids, particularly when Charles had no problem pocketing his share of the plunder. At the beginning of 1670, the Spaniards took matters into their own hands. Privateers were fitted out by the governor of Portobelo to attack English merchant ships, and Philip dispatched six war ships to the Caribbean. Morgan said there were twelve, and complained that the armada had been sent “to take all the English they can light on…and with a frigate or two lying off the Point [of Port Royal] take all our ships and so ruin the place by obstructing our commerce.”42

  Morgan was restrained by a cautious Modyford, but then an incident occurred that he could not ignore. A Spanish privateer raided and torched a few farms along Jamaica’s unprotected west coast, and in an act of unbridled arrogance nailed a contemptuous message to a tree. The audacious pirate wrote that only lack of time prevented him from sailing “to the mouth of Port Royal to proclaim by word: I, Captain Manuel Rivera Pardal come to seek Admiral Morgan…and crave he come seek me that he might see the valor of the Spaniards.”43 His insulting challenge enraged the buccaneers and all of Port Royal. Merchants, tradesmen, tavern keepers, and even the petticoat-clad ladies were loud in anger. In truth, however, they must have smiled at the pirate’s boast that would serve as a casus belli to turn loose the buccaneers and renew the flow of Spanish silver. In July 1670, Modyford addressed an angry Council. Citing evidence of Spanish aggression and Pardal’s challenge, he demanded, and they at once agreed:

  For the security of this Island and the Merchant Ships…that Admiral Morgan gather all ships of War belonging to this harbor…and put to Sea to Attain, Seize and Destroy all the enemies vessels that shall come within his reach…and that he shall have power to Land in the enemies Country…to perform all manner of exploits which may tend to the preservation and quiet of this island…and all the goods gotten to be divided according to their usual rules.44

  Although the Council did not specify where Morgan was to attack, it was no secret that his destination was Panama. A year before, Morgan had threatened the governor of Panama that he would be back within a year. Next to Cartagena, Panama City, founded in 1517, was the largest city in the Indies. Separated from the buccaneers by a twenty-five-mile-wide isthmus of almost impassable mountains, rivers, and jungle, its citizens believed they were secure. However, the city’s very security made it vulnerable to men fired by the promise of plunder. Its merchants, intent only on amassing gold, lived in lazy luxury in palaces of scented wood, intricately carved and of Moorish design, furnished with luxuries from Europe. As Morgan described it: “The famous, antient City of Panama is the greatest Mart for Silver & Gold in the World, for it receives the Goods that comes from old Spain in the King’s great Fleet, and delivers to the Fleet all the Silver and Gold that comes from the Mines of Peru and Potosi.”45

  Modyford, aware that the repercussions of such an attack, however successful, would fall on his shoulders, sought to gain the support of those closest to the king. Hoping to secure England’s blessing, he wrote his ally Lord Ashley, one of Charles’s confidants, that he was “a petty governor without money” and had no desire to declare war on “the richest and powerfulest prince of Europe.” But since Spain had declared war on him, he had no choice. Anticipating an order to desist, he pointedly added, “Yet I far more dread the censure of my friends and countrymen on this occasion than the sword of the enemy.”46

  He was prescient in this regard, as Charles was then in Madrid negotiating peace. Barely a week after Modyford approved Morgan’s plan, the two sovereigns signed a “Treaty for Composing Differences Restraining the Depredations and Establishing Peace in America.” In return for England outlawing piracy, Spain agreed to recognize her possessions in the New World. However, by the time Modyford received news of the treaty, Morgan had already sailed. He sent a boat after him with orders to return to port, but as he wrote the king, “the vessel returned with my letters, having missed him at his old rendezvous.”47

  It was during this period that Abraham Cohen clandestinely returned from Amsterdam to secure a particular piece of land in Jamaica’s interior. On December 2, 1670, when Morgan was disclosing to his compatriots his plan “to take Panama…for the good of Jamaica,”48 Cohen and his surveyor were trekking in an unexplored river valley on Jamaica’s north coast. On January 11, when Morgan and a thousand men were hacking across the isthmus, Cohen’s surveyor, wielding rod and chain, set the boundaries of a 420-acre property at the headwaters of the Oracabessa River. On February 7, while Morgan and his men were ravishing the Golden City, Modyford signed the deed approving Cohen’s ownership of the land.

  Although Modyford did not know it at the time, his action was technically illegal, not just because of the banishment decree, which was still in effect, but for the fact that Modyford himself was no longer governor. The previous month, when Charles learned that Morgan had not been recalled, he blamed Modyford and revoked his commission: “Whereas Sir Thos. Modyford, late Governor of Jamaica, hath contrary to the King’s express commands, made many depredations and hostilities against the subjects of his Majesty’s good brother the Catholic King.”49

  When the news of the burning of Panama reached Spain, the English ambassador reported: “The Queen spent hours on her knees, imploring God’s vengeance; all Spain is in mourning.”50 Anticipating Spain’s reaction, Charles appointed as deputy governor Thomas Lynch, a wealthy Jamaican planter living in London, and sent him to Jamaica to arrest Modyford and return him to England under guard. He did so, but with discernment. A few days after he arrived, Lynch invited the governor to dine aboard his ship. Only then did he tell Modyford of his orders to imprison and send him to England. So as not to make an enemy of the popular governor, he added, it was simply a political move forced on the king because of Panama, and assured him “his life and fortune were in no danger.”51

  Lynch had first gone out to Jamaica with Cromwell’s army, and later served as Modyford’s chief justice until the governor dismissed him. Though the two started out as friends, they fell out over the matter of the buccaneers. Lynch, a sugar planter and owner of “the best and richest settlement” in Jamaica, was the agent for the Royal African Company, England’s slave-trading consortium. As such, he favored peace with Spain, as it would open her colonies to the lucrative slave trade. His return in the summer of 1671 plunged the island into factional strife. He and the planters were opposed by those favoring the buccaneers. Many small farmers had given up their plots to join the buccaneers and it had become evident that farming and freebooting were incompatible. As long as piracy was sanctioned, legal trade was off the table.

  Lynch had hoped that in return for collaring the buccaneers, Spain’s colonies would welcome his trade ships. In his initial address to the Council of Jamaica, he told the assembly that peaceful trade would be “infinitely more advantageous, safe and honorable” than privateering. In line with this, he ordered ship captains to go to the major Spanish ports under a flag of truce to propose open trade, but despite his peaceful and profitable offer, they returned with the news that the Spaniards would not buy “so much as an emerald.”

  Compounding this rejection, late that summer an order arrived from the king to arrest Morgan, explaining that Spain was threatening war unless this was done. Lynch, his trade overture rebuffed, was in
a quandary. He wrote Lord Arlington, the king’s adviser, that “to obey the order and [see] the Spaniards satisfied [he would] send [Morgan] home.” But he cautioned that Jamaica’s only defense force was the buccaneers, and to send away the one man who could lead them would leave Jamaica unprotected at a time when he had learned that Spain was marshaling forces to invade. “Certain merchants in Jamaica,” he wrote, had shown him “letters from Holland and Spain [that] the Church and Grandees of Spain were gathering an army of 5,000 men and a fleet of 36 ships to recapture Jamaica.”52

  Lynch did not identify these merchants, but like Cromwell, who relied on members of London’s Portuguese community for intelligence, Lynch likewise received reports from the Jewish traders in Port Royal, who were in regular contact with agents in Holland and Spain and engaged in what Lynch called “a little underhand trade” with the enemy. In October 1671, Lynch defended them when English merchants sought his intercession at the unfettered “Trading of the Jews.” Alarmed at the “alien presence in Port Royal [of ] a multitude of Jews,” they demanded an exact census be taken, followed by “the expulsion of any Hebrews” who were there illegally. Lynch, in forwarding their petition to the king, justified their presence:

  To keep up the credit if not enrich the island, His Majesty cannot have more profitable subjects than the Jews. They have great stocks and correspondence; His Majesty cannot find any subjects but Jews who will so adventure their goods or persons to get a trade. Their parsimony enables them to sell the cheapest; they are not numerous enough to supplant us; nor is it in their interest to betray us. Hopes we will do as much as will keep up the credit if not enrich the island by keeping peace and obliging them.53