Chapter Seven

EXODUS TO HERETIC ISLAND

In February 1654, Abraham Cohen bade a solemn farewell to friends and family at the Recife dockside. After a decadelong civil war, Dutch Brazil was no more; Jews had until April to quit the land or be turned over to the Inquisition. Cohen and the remaining hundred or so Jewish families would depart the following month aboard fourteen ships sent from Holland to carry them to Amsterdam. All hoped to meet again in another New World sanctuary, but for now their futures were unclear.

Two ships embarked that day—one to Curaçao, the Dutch island north of Brazil, the other to a faraway island in the northern climes purchased by a Dutch settler thirty years before for twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets and named New Amsterdam by its optimistic owner. Aboard the Curaçao-bound ship were Cohen’s twenty-four-year-old son Jacob, who would be attending the wedding of a namesake cousin,*7 and his brother Moses, who intended to return to his seafaring ways. Taking passage on the other ship, the Falcon, on the more ambitious voyage, were Cohen’s cousin Benjamin Bueno Mesquita and his two sons, as well as a lifelong friend, the widower Abraham Israel and his son, Isaac.

The Curaçao sailing was uneventful. Not so the Falcon’s. Intending to put in at the French island of Martinique to drop off passengers and take on provisions, the ship ran into a ferocious storm. For ten days, gale-force winds, howling out of the northeast, blew the Falcon far off course into the western Caribbean. By the time the storm let up, the refugees found themselves in enemy waters “driven against their will by adverse winds to the island of Jamaica.”1

Jamaica lay in the middle of the shipping lanes linking the New World with the Old. With its surrounding waters frequented by pirates lying in wait for Spain’s treasure-laden ships and cargo vessels, all foreign boats were suspect. In late April, the Falcon was spotted off Jamaica’s southeast coast, and an armed squadron was dispatched to bring it to port. Although its captain, Jan Craeck, explained that his passengers—a few dozen Jews and a small congregation of Calvinists—were refugees fleeing Brazil, Jamaica’s authorities refused to allow them to depart.

Despite the obvious truth of the captain’s statement, the local Spanish leaders had a vested interest in rejecting it. Years before, they had devised a nefarious scheme to overthrow the island’s owners, Columbus’s heirs, and gain legal right to their lands. As the island belonged to the progeny of the great explorer, no matter how large or prosperous a settler’s estate, it was not his. The discoverer’s family owned every inch, rendering the ranchers little more than legalized squatters. In order to obtain title to their estancias, they would first have to arrange for the Spanish Crown to reclaim the island. The arrival of an enemy ship with “suspect heretics” aboard enabled them to put into play their plan to oust the family.

The detained passengers had no way of knowing that they had become pawns in a century-long conflict that had been simmering since the island had been given away. While converted Jews, working with the Columbus family, operated the island as a profitable way station for ships of any nation, and as a transshipment port for cargo going to and from the New World, local hidalgos stewed over their legal status, and were determined to end it by any means. The Jews’ protected status was about to change, but not the way the local Spaniards envisioned.2

From Jamaica’s founding in 1511, its converted Jews had lived peacefully under the protective wing of the Columbus family. They called themselves “Portugals” and though their religiosity was suspect, no one could seriously question their bona fides while the family kept the island off-limits to the Inquisition. This prohibition ended in 1622, when an ecclesiastic coup transferred local authority over the Church to the archdiocese of Santo Domingo.3 With a foreign bishop allied with Jamaica’s hidalgos dictating policy, the Holy Inquisition was granted access to the island. Jamaica’s big ranchers thereupon appointed themselves familiars of the Inquisition, and patiently awaited an opportunity to charge that the island was riddled with heresy. Such an accusation would give the Crown the excuse it needed to void its treaty with the family and take back Jamaica.

King Philip IV had been alerted from the start of his reign that the Columbus family was secretly mining gold and, working with the Portugals, ran the island as a major smuggling port. The capture of a heretic ship thus furnished the hidalgos with the excuse to summon the Holy Inquisitor from Colombia to investigate the suspect heretics and likewise expose the Portugals as Judaizers. No longer would Jamaica be subject to a feudal lord, and the hidden gold mine would revert to the king.

After the union of the Iberian nations in 1580, Jamaica’s conversos had felt themselves secure. The Columbus family had not only kept the Inquisition from darkening Jamaica’s shores, but had also kept out all high church officials. In 1582, a visiting cleric declared he was the first abbot to ever visit the island. Given Jamaica’s patrimony, the island attracted few permanent settlers. In the final decades of the sixteenth century, with the island population at a low point, nearly half were Portugals, and two successive governors were themselves conversos.4

As the century drew to a close, so did the halcyon days of the covert Hebrews. In 1596, a lawsuit between two contending Columbus heirs put Jamaica’s ownership on hold. With neither claimant having the right to appoint a new governor, Spain’s king named his own man. Dire consequences followed. Within days of his arrival, the governor, Don Melgarejo de Córdoba, reported to the king that Jamaica was a rogue island, existing solely on “illicit trade”: “The island is like a keystone, a convenient stopping place for corsairs & traders who infest the coast to fit out their ships and get provisions from its abundant store.” He was equally shocked by the lack of religious fealty: “The temples are ill-treated. No mass is said in the principal church because it leaks all over and the walls are falling down.”5

The Portugals had no compunction about doing business with Spain’s enemies. Trading with the Dutch and English ships was profitable, and their wares were more affordable than the manufactured goods and textiles carried from Spain, whose ships only stopped in Jamaica to take on provisions on their way to the rich cities on the Spanish Main. One illegal trader was the pirate known as Motta the Portuguese, whose Jewish descendants are prominent today in Jamaica and Panama. The governor charged that Motta and his partner Abraham, “a Fleming,” regularly called on Jamaica from a base in Cuba where they “put up shops and [play] games of bowls, and people go there from the country to be cured.” Apparently Motta and the Portugals shared a Judaic interest in literature, as the governor accused the pirate of trafficking in “prohibited books which sowed a bad seed among the natives and Negroes.”6

Melgarejo, in his crackdown on illicit trade, initiated a sea patrol by a brigantine and two naval launches to discourage foreign ships. The Portugals, faced with a leader out to destroy their livelihood, turned on him. The governor complained to His Majesty:


Lampoons are insolently made on me, saying that I should let them live and not oppress them. They say that some night they will send 100 Englishmen to take me prisoner. All these enmities arise from my defending Your Majesty’s reputation and commands. I would punish these people but there is no strong jail, nor is there anybody of whom I could ask assistance except the delinquents themselves and their relatives, for they are all over the country…I am very much in danger that these people may take my life.7


To secure his person, he recruited four hundred soldiers from Puerto Rico and quartered fifty of them in his home. His action was endorsed by Jamaica’s Cabildo, a five-man governing body of wealthy planters. Although they also profited from what was known as the “silent trade,” they saw its suppression as an opportunity to discredit the Columbus family. Eventually the divergent interests of the Portugals, loyal to the Columbus family, and the Cabildo ranchers, who stood to gain title to their lands only if the Spanish king reclaimed Jamaica, made a clash between the two groups inevitable.

Melgarejo ruled for ten years and accomplished much: he repopulated the island, built up its defenses, and suppressed piracy and illegal trade while holding off accusations he was heavily engaged in it.8 But he came up empty in his search for Columbus’s gold mine. In his final communiqué to the king, he wrote that he was sure the mine was secreted in the Blue Mountains, but the two expeditions he sent out had not found it.9

In 1622, an ill-suited Columbus heir, Don Nuño Colón, was confirmed as the island’s ruler. However, before he was able to reassert his family’s control over Jamaica, two leaders of the Cabildo engineered an ecclesiastic coup that threatened to expose the Portugals as Jews. Operating with the connivance of the Crown, their leader, Francisco de Leiba, the self-styled “King of Jamaica,”10 together with his cousin, Sanchez Ysassi, plotted with Ysassi’s eldest son, a member of the Church hierarchy in Santo Domingo, to wrest control of the Jamaican church. The occasion was the 1622 Synod of Caribbean Churches.11 Philip III had died the previous year, and following the coronation of his son, Philip IV, the region’s prelates called on the new king to sponsor a church conference in Santo Domingo to reformulate policy on issues of Christian doctrine.

During the ensuing four-month synod, hundreds of decrees were passed, including one in the final session that—unlike the others—received no comment. Details are not known, but the upshot of this particular ruling was to transfer jurisdiction over the Jamaican church to the archbishop of Santo Domingo and his suffragan (assistant bishop), who happened to be Ysassi’s son. When the conference ended, the chief plotters, Leiba and Ysassi (whom Melgarejo had lauded as “the leading colonists who sustain, protect and defend the State”), were sworn in as officers of the Inquisition.12

With this, a new force entered Jamaican politics, one that opposed the Columbus family and its chief allies, the Portugals. Under the nose of Don Nuño Colón, an inept ruler who may not have even visited the island, members of the Cabildo began to use their power in support of secret moves by the Crown to reclaim Jamaica. Their maneuvers were given impetus by the king’s loss in September 1622 of his gold ship, the Nuestra Señora de Atocha. Returning from Havana, the galleon was battered by a hurricane off the Florida Keys and sank with forty-seven tons of gold and silver that Philip desperately needed to pay his creditors. Whatever value Jamaica had, he now wanted.13

The Portugals, sensing their days were numbered, looked first for aid from Holland. Dutch privateers were active in the Caribbean, and regularly stopped at Jamaica’s ports. But, like Moses Cohen Henriques, they were individual corsairs whose specialty was capturing ships, not countries. The one Dutch group that could pull off a full-scale invasion—the Dutch West India Company—was then preoccupied with mobilizing for their two-front invasion of Brazil and Peru the following year.

Although the Dutch were not interested in capturing Jamaica, England was. In 1597, Sir Anthony Shirley, a privateer whose marauding was in part financed by Queen Elizabeth, invaded Jamaica. For two weeks, he occupied the capital, La Vega, and plundered the countryside, and afterward wrote: “We have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place. It abounds with beef and cassava, & most pleasant fruits. It is a marvelous fertile island, & is a garden or store house for the Spanish Main.”14 English traders who frequented Jamaica’s ports shared Shirley’s enthusiasm. But however tempting the conquest, it would take the Portugals’ promise of acquiring Jamaica’s golden legend to lure the English to invade.


Early in the century, Englishmen had pioneered the New World’s northern climes, maintaining barely surviving colonies in Virginia and Bermuda and a dissident settlement of Pilgrims in a land they called New England. But these places had neither gold nor silver, and were far from the trade routes that carried the New World’s riches to the Spanish king. And so they looked south. As Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, “It is his Indian gold that indangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe.”15 Raleigh was another son of Devon, the home of John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake, the English heroes who had exposed the vulnerability of the Spanish Empire and the wealth that awaited a daring adventurer. But, unlike them, Sir Walter was not interested in smuggling or piracy. Having squandered his fortune colonizing Virginia, it was Indian gold he sought.

Chief among the golden legends was El Dorado, a mythical city in the Andes with riches surpassing those of Mexico and Peru. It was said to be by a large lake, backed by a hill of gold. Twice during Elizabeth’s reign, Raleigh set out to find the ephemeral kingdom. Like dozens of adventurers before him, all he found was jungle, swamps, pestilence, and hostile natives.

When James I became king in 1603, Raleigh was sent to the Tower of London on a trumped-up charge of treason, but due to his popularity, James waived his death sentence. For the next thirteen years, Raleigh languished in the Tower and dreamed of again attempting to find El Dorado. Two young royals who visited him often and shared his fantasy were James’s son Charles and George Villiers, the king’s favorite, who together managed to obtain their hero’s freedom so he could again seek the golden city.

When Raleigh’s expedition set sail, King James, in one of history’s great betrayals, confided in the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, what Raleigh was up to. In doing so, he hoped to mend fences with the ambassador, because relations had been strained since the Palache trial three years before. If Raleigh realized his dream, James would not have turned down his royal fifth, but just the same, he felt it prudent to distance himself from the deed by handing Gondomar “a precise inventory of Raleigh’s ships, armaments, ports of call, even a chart of his proposed route.”16 When Raleigh arrived at the headwaters of the Orinoco River on the north coast of South America, the Spaniards were waiting with loaded cannon and routed his expedition. Sir Walter limped back to England a broken man. Gondomar demanded an audience with James. Furious, he spat: “I will be brief. Raleigh and his captains are pirates and must be sent in chains to Spain to be hung in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor.”17 The king promised satisfaction. Five weeks later, he sent Raleigh to the chopping block.

Raleigh lost his head, but his quest for legendary riches in the New World was taken up by the young royals who had befriended him. Rather than El Dorado, they would embrace another gilded fantasy that had been bantered about in court circles from the time the Admiral of the Ocean Sea returned from his voyages of discovery. Extraordinary legends about the New World abounded, and there was ample reason to be a believer, as the land was filled with riches. By 1600, Spain had gained triple the amount of gold that had been in circulation before Columbus’s voyage, and Peru’s silver mountain was mined for a hundred years in increasing amounts, only to be surpassed by the discovery in Mexico of yet another mountain of silver.

So it was that the legend of the lost gold mine of Columbus was taken up by the king’s son and George Villiers. While perhaps not as seductive as Raleigh’s El Dorado, nor as wistful as Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, or as elusive as Coronado’s Seven Golden Cities, Columbus’s hidden mine, “not yet…opened by the King of Spain or any other,”18 had its own magnetic attraction. It was said to be somewhere in the mountainous island of Jamaica, where the great discoverer had been marooned for a year. Its allure was such that when Raleigh was preparing for his final voyage, Gondomar (until James told him otherwise) thought Jamaica was targeted, and notified Madrid to alert the island to fortify and prepare for invasion.


In the summer of 1623, George Villiers, with young Prince Charles in tow, was in Madrid on a fanciful marital mission that he and Gondomar had hatched to wed the prince to Spain’s infanta, seventeen-year-old Princess María. When it became apparent, through a succession of misdeeds, that the so-called Spanish Match would not materialize, a court spy, in contact with Jamaica’s Portugals, got word to Villiers: In return for a successful invasion of the island, they would reveal to their liberator the concealed site of the legendary mine.19

The Spanish spy’s offer appealed to Villiers, whose egotism knew no bounds. He had been presented to King James at a London theater ten years earlier, and had become lover and confidant to both the king and his son Charles, the reticent Prince of Wales. He had risen from royal cup bearer to become the Duke of Buckingham, and his swift rise bound him to no one but the king.

The “secret overture” was made at the Escorial Palace, where Villiers and Charles were encamped in adjoining suites during their mission to bring off the Spanish Match—a marriage that would avert a pending war with Spain and make Villiers the godfather of a united Europe. Unfortunately, when Charles attempted to woo the infanta in the royal garden—strictly off-limits to all but the royal family—the gentle, reverent girl ran off screaming that she’d “sooner enter a convent” than marry him.20

In the days that followed, the duke comforted Charles. They would return home, declare war on Spain, and pursue a treasure that had been spoken of since the time of discovery: the lost gold mine of Columbus. He had gotten the idea from a clandestine report he received from the Spanish king’s secretary, Don Hermyn, who saw in the apparent collapse of the match an opportunity to acquire a share of the mine for himself.

Hermyn’s secret memo to the duke presented a detailed account of his experience the year before, when he had been sent undercover to Jamaica by the king and his first minister, Count-Duke Olivares, to find out about the mine from the Portugals, the only people thought to be privy to its secret location. Once he had gained their confidence, he was taken to an isolated valley in Jamaica’s rugged interior: “where the earth is black, Rivulets discover the source of the Mine.” The gold, he observed, “is found neere the superficies of the Earth and slides down in the Rivers…The Vayne between the Rocks is but two inches wyde.” As proof he had been to the mine, Hermyn engraved his initials on a rock which he hid near the mine’s entrance.

Delighted with his find—he had been promised a tenth part of the proceeds—he returned to Spain and reported his discovery to Olivares. To acquire the mine, he proposed that the Crown expose Jamaica’s Portugals as heretic traitors to justify reclaiming the island. To his astonishment, instead of welcoming the news, Olivares had him imprisoned and he was released only after being sworn to silence by the minister, who warned that if he spoke of the mine to anyone it would mean his death.

Olivares rarely left Philip’s side. From the time his royal charge was thirteen, he supervised his learning. In 1621, when sixteen-year-old Philip became king, Olivares sought to mold him in the grand style of Charles V. There was one major impediment: Spain was in debt. In order to restore its fiscal health, he needed to befriend the very people Hermyn proposed they expose.

Count-Duke Olivares was a sincere converso, a devout Catholic who wore a piece of the True Cross around his neck, and kept other relics with which he regularly prayed. However, his faith did not interfere with his primary goal: to revitalize Spain’s economy by courting those he would later label, in defending himself from the Inquisition, “the most perfidious of all heretics—the Jews.”21

New World silver fueled the Empire. Needing bridge loans until the annual silver fleet arrived, Olivares contracted Genoese bankers, who, to his chagrin, regularly raised the interest rate. After one excessive spike, Olivares declared he would not let Spain be held ransom by their collusion, and turned to converso financiers in Lisbon who offered lower interest. Although their allegiance to Christianity was suspect—some had been living as secret Jews for a century or more—Olivares encouraged them to move to Spain, promising a general pardon and other inducements.

The Lisbon bankers were one part of Olivares’s plan to fund the empire; another was to attract those they dealt with: the merchants, traders, accountants, insurers, and commodity buyers, conversos all, who with their foreign agents dominated empire commerce. Olivares saw this exiled entrepreneurial class as unparalleled creators of wealth, and believed that their presence in Spain would generate new revenue. In the New World, they had helped implement the system that routed all registered trade through Spain, while at the same time setting up a parallel trade network that illegally funneled a large portion of New World wealth outside the empire. In Olivares’s day, this unregistered commerce, called the “silent trade,” siphoned off upward of 25 percent of the silver stream to pay for European goods and slaves brought illegally to the New World. In return, the converso entrepreneurs shipped goods from the New World directly to Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Leghorn, and other ports where Jewish merchants were welcome as long as they maintained a Christian facade. By encouraging these exiled conversos to move back, Olivares hoped to make Spain the home base for this heretofore illegal trade.

His master plan to co-opt the conversos included those in Jamaica. Beyond the island’s link in the “silent trade” network, its strategic location was integral to his defensive plan for the Caribbean. As Hermyn had written, “Jamaica lies in the belly of the New Spanish Sea and commands the Gulf of Mexico…all the fleets which come from the mainland must pass in sight of it.” To protect the shipping lanes, Olivares called for fourteen warships to be based principally in Jamaica to patrol the sea. It therefore did not bode well to implement his Caribbean defense and his courtship of conversos by adopting Hermyn’s plan to unmask those conversos living in Jamaica.22

Rejected and imprisoned by his former patrons, Hermyn turned to Villiers, who agreed to grant him “the same conditions promised him by the King.” But now, instead of exposing the Portugals, Hermyn proposed that Villiers ally with them to conquer the island for England. Jamaica’s covert Jews, long safely settled as Portuguese conversos, had told Hermyn they were now being threatened with exposure by the Inquisition and offered to assist an invading army. Success was assured because Portugals made up “most of the island’s 800 man defense force…[and] long for nothing so much as to be free from the Spanish yoke.” Their hatred of the Spanish “was so great that they could never be brought to discover their secrets to them,” but would reveal to their liberator the location of “the secret golden mine, which hath not yet been opened by the King of Spain, or by any other.”

Hermyn told Buckingham he would go to Jamaica to prepare the ground for the invasion, but when the Englishmen left, the turncoat’s ambitions were neutralized when Olivares had him poisoned.

After the Madrid fiasco, and the death of King James in 1625, the duke was involved in a succession of failed escapades that would terminate with his assassination. Over a four-year period (1625–28), he engineered England’s foreign policy so as to avenge personal slights and advance momentary interests. The duke thought he could achieve his foreign aims by attacking boldly. He could surprise the Madrid court and make off with the infanta, invade Cádiz, Spain’s home port, and seize the treasure fleet, relieve La Rochelle and free the Huguenots. His vision was heroic, but his campaigns were poorly equipped and ill planned. After every misadventure, his defeated men limped home.

Historians agree that at the time of his assassination in 1628, the duke was set to embark on another expedition to relieve the Protestants of La Rochelle. However, there is persuasive evidence this mission was a sham. This is revealed in an examination of a cache of state papers, compiled in 1668 by Charles II’s chief minister, Lord Clarendon, and kept at the Bodleian Library. This collection, never more than footnoted by historians, includes Clarendon’s transcription of Hermyn’s fourteen-page “Secret discovery…to the Duke of Buckingham,” a step-by-step plan for New World conquest using Jamaica as a base.

Additional evidence is found in Clarendon’s translation of a signed treaty by Villiers and Sweden’s King Gustav Adolphus, which reveals Villiers’s plan to capture Jamaica, possess the gold mine, and proclaim himself absolute monarch. The treaty, in the form of a contract, written in Latin and signed in Stockholm, is dated March 28, 1628, just two months before Buckingham’s murder. It concerns Gustav’s promised assistance in the conquest and his share in the proceeds of the “secret golden mine.”23 The Swede pledges to recognize the duke as “Absolute prince and Sovereign” of Jamaica, and send along “four thousand foote and six Men of War each of five hundred Tunne with Cannon and Munitions.” The flotilla’s expenses are to be paid for “out of the revenue of the Territory and Golden Mines.” Gustav pledges to defend the duke not only from Spanish attack, but interestingly, “from all Puritans from Barbados or other places.” In return, “The Duke of Buckingham makes good unto us a tenth part of the profits [payable] monthly.”

Twelve days prior to the duke’s murder, Gustav’s new warship, the Vasa, which would have taken part in the Jamaica invasion, was “heeled over by a stiff breeze just after launching.” With the ship’s gun ports left open to proudly display her sixty-four bronze cannons, the Vasa sank like a stone in Stockholm Harbor, drowning fifty of her crew.

Meanwhile, back in Jamaica, the Inquisition threat had cooled somewhat. In 1626, a new Columbus heir, known as the Admiral, was confirmed in his position, and appointed Francisco Terril, a strong governor who opposed the Cabildo. His “high handed ways” led to his recall, so in 1631, the Admiral appointed one he could trust: Juan Martínez de Arana, a descendant of Columbus’s Jewish mistress Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, mother of Fernando. Although the Cabildo’s power had diminished, the king’s earlier dominion over Jamaica during the first quarter of the seventeenth century had whetted his appetite to recover the island. In 1635, he instructed the Royal Audiencia of Santo Domingo to “report secretly what benefits the Admiral has in the island of Jamaica and if it is advisable for His Majesty to take it.” The report issued in 1638 recommended:


Your majesty [should] take the island [because Jamaica] is an outlet for all ships that reach there and defraud Your Majesty’s Royal Treasury…it is a large island with a great supply of provisions…it is sited so that all ships and fleets pass within its sight…If the enemy gets a footing there, none of our ships will escape from their hands and the fleets will run great risk.24


The report reflected the Cabildo’s view and had been prepared with their counsel. Relations between them and the loyal supporters of the Columbus family were further aggravated in 1640, when, after a sixty-year union, Portugal regained its independence. When the news reached Jamaica, it split the colony. The Spanish ranchers, loyal to Spain, turned against the Portugals loyal to the Columbus heir, who as fate would have it was a distant cousin of Portugal’s new king. As the Cabildo saw it, the protector of the Jews was now in the enemy camp. Through the ranchers’ intervention, troublesome Portugals began to be expelled from the island.

By 1643, the state of affairs had become so inflamed that the Portugals welcomed an English pirate as their liberator. Captain William Jackson, a privateer in the tradition of Sir Francis Drake, sacked Jamaica and went home convinced England could count on the Jews there to assist an invasion. His report to the Colonial Affairs Committee noted:


During our aboard in Town, divers Portugals who had been kept off by the Spanyards from coming into us, did Express great affection they had to the English & proposed to bring us where the Spanyards hid all their Plate & Treasure, which they affirmed to be greater than we could imagine, but we scorned to violate our former covenant…We understood what inward desire they had to change their old Masters and seemed greatly to rejoice when we told them we intended to shortly come and beat ye Spanyards from this Island, which fittingly corresponds with an old Tradition long rooted in them that they shall one day come under ye English.25


Jamaica’s Portugals were ready then and there to assist in the seizure of the island, a course affirmed by Jackson’s crew: “All our men allured desire to set up their station here and to that purpose moved our General to undertake ye settling thereof” (twenty-three of the crew deserted and remained in Jamaica). But Jackson wanted booty: “On the encouragement of Balthasar, a Portugal from Jamaica, we set sail for Rio de la Hacha [Colombia], a place very rich in Plate & Pearl. Balthasar persuaded our General to undertake this design which was very hopeful if ye success had proved as fortunate.” But good fortune was not theirs. Bad weather forced Jackson to return to Jamaica. Balthasar, not wanting the English to depart empty-handed, proposed they seize a ship in the harbor. “By the direction of Balthasar, we took a Spanish Frigate in the harbour next to where we had formerly rode at Anchor, being laden with Hides, Sugar & other provisions, & was bound with passengers for Cartagena.”26

Balthasar acted with the support of other Portugals. His help in the seizure of a Spanish ship was calculated to impress upon the English that their loyalty was not to Spain. This maneuver was not lost on the Cabildo, which, in all but name, governed the island. In the aftermath of Jackson’s raid, the colony nearly self-destructed. In October 1643, the governor “died a prisoner without guards in his own house.”27 Within hours, the Cabildo attempted a coup and again appealed to the king to retake the island. One account refers to a civil war.28 The charges are not detailed, but an early historian noted that as a consequence of Balthasar’s traitorous deed “internal divisions were soon to prove…disastrous. The Spanish settlers quarreled with those from Portugal and some of the latter were expelled from the colony.”

Among them was Balthasar, who went on to become a renowned pirate whose exploits and daring escapes were chronicled by the “Boswell of the Buccaneers,” the buccaneer author John Esquemelin. Figures on the number of Jews who were expelled range from thirteen families to “almost all the colonists of that nation.”29 A decade later, when the British conquered Jamaica and entered La Vega (where most Portugals resided), they observed more houses than occupants: “The deserted houses in the capital proved a want of tenants…The town was thinly populated compared with former years.”30

Captain Jackson submitted his report to the Colonial Affairs Committee, whose prominent members included Jamaica’s future conqueror, Oliver Cromwell. Historians claim Jamaica was not part of his plan to invade the Indies, as Jamaica is not mentioned. But considering what transpired during Jackson’s raid, and his lauding of Jamaica as a “Terrestrial Paradise…with the delight and plenty of all necessary conferred by nature,” it is hard to fathom why Cromwell would not have targeted Jamaica. Indeed, as the next chapter shows, the Spanish had no doubt Jamaica’s conquest was a prioritized aim of Cromwell’s “Grand Western Design” to secure a toe-hold in the fabulously rich New World.

Such was the situation in April 1654 when the “heretic ship” from Recife was brought to port in Jamaica. The Cabildo detained the Jewish and Calvinist refugees aboard the Falcon, and sent a messenger to Cartagena, the nearest Holy Office, requesting a hearing to determine what to do with the suspect heretics. Apparently their answer was to avoid trouble with Holland: to free the Calvinists and any Jews who had not been baptized, as the Inquisition’s jurisdiction was limited to relapsos—conversos who had openly returned to Judaism. In July, the Cabildo therefore released the Calvinists and twenty-three so-called born Jews (as many as seventeen were children). Those freed included Abraham and Isaac Israel, and Benjamin Mesquita’s two sons, Joseph and Abraham, but Benjamin himself was detained. How many other families were separated is not known, nor is the number of those still held.

The extended Ysassi family dominated the Cabildo, and held powerful positions in Puerto Rico and Cuba. But in their home base, Jamaica, the Columbus family stymied them. As familiars of the Inquisition, they hoped to use its power to stir up trouble—enough, they hoped, to warrant the Crown to intervene and appoint their leader, Francisco de Leiba, the equivalent of what he was already calling himself, “King of Jamaica.” The capture of a heretic ship furnished them with an excuse to summon the Holy Inquisitor from Colombia to investigate the suspect heretics and, once there, to likewise expose the island’s Portugals as Judaizers. No longer would they be subject to a feudal lord, and the Jamaica gold mine would revert to the king.

In detaining the Jews, the Cabildo overreached. Their action proved a lethal miscalculation, one that stirred a renewed effort on the part of Jamaica’s Portugals to overthrow Spanish rule. Fearful that any investigation of the refugees would spill over into an inquiry into their own lives, Jamaica’s Jews once more looked to entice a foreign liberator with the promise of gold. Since no vessel sailed direct from Jamaica to Holland, their message was carried first to New Amsterdam and then to Holland by Abraham Israel, who had convinced the Cabildo he was “born Jewish.”31

The Falcon, allowed to depart Jamaica, sailed to nearby Cape St. Anthony in Cuba, a well-known port frequented by ships to and from Mexico and the Spanish Main. The refugees’ stay there involved no risk, as they had been cleared in Jamaica and had the necessary papers attesting to this. After a few weeks, they obtained passage to New Amsterdam on a small French frigate, the St. Catherine.

On September 7, 1654, when the refugee ship dropped anchor in New Amsterdam harbor, they were met by an odd figure, floridly dressed like a peacock and walking about “with great state and pomp” on a wooden leg wrapped with silver bands. It was Peter Stuyvesant, the colony’s governor. Residents made a jest of his pretentious ways, calling him the “Grand Muscovy Duke,” but he moved among them with a show of force that made them understand he was a person to be obeyed.

Governor Stuyvesant welcomed the Calvinists, but not the Jews. He wanted them out. The seven-month voyage—from Recife, to Jamaica, to Cuba, to New Amsterdam—had left them destitute. They owed the ship’s captain, Jacques de la Motte, more than their belongings were worth. Stuyvesant wrote to the Company: “The Jews who arrived, nearly all like to remain, but fearing that owing to their present indigence they might become a charge in the coming winter, we required them in a friendly way to depart.”32

Stuyvesant went on to reveal his true feelings, which had nothing to do with their finances. Owing to their “customary usury and deceitful trading with Christians,” he wrote, “we pray that this deceitful race—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ—be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony.” His letter, dated September 22, 1654, corresponds with the sailing date of the first ship bound for Amsterdam since the St. Catherine arrived. Along with the letter, Israel was on board.

Nine months after Abraham Cohen saw his cousins off in Recife, he had heard nothing of them or the others on the Falcon. The feeling among his Amsterdam colleagues was that the ship was lost at sea. Alerted by the harbormaster that a ship from New Amsterdam was unloading, Cohen hurried to the wharf. Anxiety gave way to relief when Israel disembarked and assured him everyone was alive. But the rest of his news was not good: Cohen’s nephews, the Mesquita boys, had been freed, but their father, Benjamin, and others were still held in Jamaica, and those who had made it to New Amsterdam were broke, in debt, and threatened with expulsion.

The next morning, after religious services, the reunited friends conferred with the six officers of the synagogue, the Parnassim. Because their brethren in Jamaica were Dutch nationals, it was decided that their detainment was illegal. They thereupon submitted a petition to the government contending the incident was “an international outrage…[and that] the release of the Jewish prisoners should be requested of the King of Spain, and the Dutch consuls in Cadiz and San Sebastian should intervene in this affair.”33

The States General’s response was both immediate and forthright. On November 14, they wrote their consuls, “This business [is] considered by us as very serious,” and dictated an “urgent request” to the State Council of the king of Spain, “that Spanish authorities not allow the Inquisition or anybody else to molest [the Jews]…and permit them to return home…This request being in conformity with the treaty of peace existing between the King of Spain and the Dutch Government.”34 There is no record of the king’s response, but he evidently ordered Jamaica to free the detainees, as none were there six months later when English forces captured the island.

Following their successful protest of the Jamaica affair, Cohen and four members of the Parnassim, including Bento Osorio, the aforementioned leader of the Brotherhood, and Uriel da Costa’s brother Abraham, were confident that the Company in New Amsterdam would overrule Stuyvesant and authorize Jewish settlement. For years, the Company had encouraged others to settle there, even offering free transport, land grants, and tax exemptions. On the basis of the rights granted them in Brazil by the Patenta Onrossa, and the fact that all of them were major shareholders in the Company, they assumed that their people would likewise be welcome.

But although the States General acted quickly and forcibly to protest the detention of Jews in Jamaica, three months passed before the Company directors belatedly, and only reluctantly, rejected Stuyvesant’s request. On February 15, 1655, they wrote him: “We would have liked to fulfill your wishes that the new territories not be infected by the Jewish nation,” but citing pressure from Jewish shareholders and “the considerable loss sustained by this nation in Brazil,” a go-easy policy was recommended.35

In the coming year (1655–56), in light of the Company’s lukewarm endorsement, Stuyvesant, his sheriff, and the colony’s Calvinist leaders opposed the Jews at every turn. In a series of lawsuits, the sons of Abraham da Costa, Abraham Israel, and Abraham Cohen—Joseph, Isaac, and Jacob respectively—carried on their fathers’ fight. Ultimately the courts sided with them, winning basic rights for Jews in what in the future would be thought of as the land of the free.36

During their detention in Jamaica, Israel and Benjamin Mesquita learned of Columbus’s mine from the Portugals. Believing that the Cabildo’s real intent in sending for an Inquisitor was to have him expose their own covert Judaism, the Portugals confided in Israel that the island was ripe for takeover and offered to reveal the secret site of the mine as an incentive. Israel, therefore, not only carried news that Jamaica was holding Dutch Jews and that Stuyvesant wanted to expel them, he also told Cohen about the mine. This became evident eight years later, when the three of them—Israel, Mesquita, and Cohen—struck a partnership with the royal sons of Prince Charles I and George Villiers to fulfill their fathers’ quest for Columbus’s gold.

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