Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

Chapter Ten

BUCCANEER ISLAND

In the decade after the English takeover, more people were dying than arriving in Jamaica. Cromwell’s liberal policy to give “Encouragement to such as shall transplant themselves to Jamaica” promised English citizenship to every child born there, and an allotment of twenty acres to every male over twelve years (ten acres to each female).¹ But his stated resolve “to people and plant that Island” had few takers, as word seeped out that Jamaica was a land of famine and disease with enemies all about bent on reconquest. Cromwell’s plan to send a thousand Irish boys and girls was stillborn; another to transport from Scotland, “all known idlers, robbers and vagabonds, male and female,” was abandoned when he was warned “this would set the whole country ablaze.”² Cromwell’s appeal to fellow Puritans in New England also came up empty when their delegate returned from Jamaica “horrified at the mortality among the soldiers.”³

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. Contrary 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.”

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

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

Despite Lynch’s advocacy, the census was ordered. Only sixteen Jews were able to show “patents of naturalization,” and were deemed legal traders.⁵⁴ How many others there were without papers is not known. The community’s insecurity was heightened the following month (November 1671) when Beeston had the temerity to seize a ship owned by a Jew from New Amsterdam (now temporarily in English hands and called New York) on the grounds that Jews were foreigners and had no right to trade. Cohen, having secured his valley land and fearing exposure, hastened back to Amsterdam, leaving his brother Moses, protected by Morgan, to oversee his properties.

Cohen wasn’t in Amsterdam long before his wife, Rebekah Palache, reported that he had died, and as his widow collected debts due him. But this was a subterfuge. He had faked his death to cover his forbidden trips to Jamaica. Leaving Amsterdam, he moved to Salé, the pirate republic in North Africa where he had many associates and where both he and his wife’s family were well established.⁵⁵

Port Royal’s Jews, adhering to the basic survival principle their people had acquired in the Diaspora, had a foot in both camps: They outfitted the buccaneers, advised them of potential targets, and received priority to purchase spoils. But if piracy was outlawed, there was the lucrative Spanish trade. It made no difference that the trade was still illegal. Everyone wanted a piece of it, including Jamaica’s new governor. In March 1672, Lynch wrote Arlington that the presence of the buccaneers had forestalled a Spanish attack, and he was no longer interested in pursuing legal trade with those he termed “the most ungrateful, senseless people in the world.”⁵⁶

Lynch was not as naive as he let on. When he first sent his emissaries, he had instructed them that if the Spanish rejected his offer of peaceful trade, they should try to establish ties with the local merchants, whose names Lynch had obtained from his intelligencers who specialized in the “silent trade.” As long as such trade was illegal, the Sephardim of Port Royal were the preferred agents of foreigners of whatever religion. For a 10–15 percent commission, they would “adjust the cargoes, strengthen the crews, provide commercial information and accompany the vessels to Spanish markets.”⁵⁷

The English merchants’ animosity toward those they labeled “descendants of the Crucifiers of our Lord” didn’t let up. In June 1672, Lynch received a petition from seventy-two Christian merchants stating that they were threatened “by the infinite number of Jews who daily resort to this island and trade amongst us, contrary to all law and policy.” Ironically, the merchants, like those in Recife, accused the Jews of engaging in what is today normal business practice:

The great Mischief we suffer by them is that their trading is a perfect monopoly, for they are a kind of joint stock company, and not only buy the choicest and best goods, but frequently buy up whole cargoes, and undersell petitioners, which they can better bear by their penurious way of living…His Honor must have [seen] in Europe how Jews do engross the whole trade where they are…Although their trading seems to give credit and reputation to the island, yet England receives no benefit for all their merchandizes come from Holland, where they will certainly transport themselves again with all their gains and his Majesty’s island will be drained and subjects will suffer.⁵⁸

In urging Charles to reject the petition, Lynch renewed his case in the Jews’ favor. The king, in continual need of hard currency, approved a liberal policy toward them. Their buying power and experience as importers and exporters of precious metals, together with their commercial ties with Spanish America (which had the silver), and Holland (the leading bullion market) made their presence in Jamaica vital to England’s capital flow, and the colony’s continued prosperity. Lynch’s views were adopted, and the King-in-Council recommended steps to encourage even more Jews to settle the island. In December 1672, Charles wrote Lynch, declaring Beeston’s seizure of a ship the year before on the grounds that its owner “being a Jew was to be accounted a foreigner” was “undue and illegal,” and that “said owner, Rabba Couty, ought to enjoy the benefit of a free citizen…and his ketch and the value of her lading be restored.”⁵⁹

Prejudice could not stand up to economics. The Jews’ contribution to Jamaica and England’s prosperity determined the Crown’s position in their favor. In two decades (1656–76), in large part due to the role of these proven entrepreneurs in the “underhand trade” and their dealings with the buccaneers, Jamaica funneled to England an estimated four million pounds of silver. England’s Committee of Accounts noted that the island had become “the base for the greatest flow of silver and gold [and] more bullion is yearly imported from thence than from all other of the King’s dominions laid together.”⁶⁰

Morgan had heard nothing from the Crown since he returned under guard to London in the spring of 1672, “to answer for his offences against the King, his crown and dignity.”⁶¹ Apparently Charles thought it was sufficient to recall him and let it go at that. A year would pass before the king summoned him. Unfortunately there is only a salacious hint of his time in London. If only Pepys had kept up his diary, we might have an unexpurgated account of Morgan’s carousing there while London’s dilettantes and ladies thrilled to host a live swashbuckler. While Morgan gallivanted around London, Modyford languished in the Tower, satisfying the Spanish ambassador that he was confined to “a cold, damp, stone room.”⁶² When he was finally released, it was thought his day had passed. But Morgan had not forgotten his arbiter.

Anxious letters from Lynch informed the king that Cuba’s governor had licensed privateers to capture British ships, and Jamaica’s outlawed buccaneers, having deserted to Tortuga, were now sailing forth with French commissions. Lynch declared that he had used his own money to store up the island’s defense, and had come to appreciate Modyford’s policy of keeping the buccaneers on a short leash. Without the threat of them as guard dogs, the Spanish had no interest in keeping the peace with the despised Protestants who had stolen their island. Lynch was blunt in his assessment: “I fear all may be lost if we have not a frigate or two to defend the island.”⁶³

In response to his governor’s warning, Charles sent for Morgan to advise him how best to defend the island. Impressed by the pirate’s counsel, the king decided to recall Lynch and return Morgan to Jamaica as deputy governor. Cocksure as ever, Morgan agreed, providing he was first made a knight and that his friend Modyford join him as chief justice. Charles consented. When Lynch learned of this turnabout, he was shocked, and predicted trouble: “Spaniards are much alarmed at the noise of the Admiral’s favor at Court and return to the Indies. [His] appointment will fuel the Spanish fire.” As for himself, he was happy to relinquish his post and was looking forward to returning to England: “None can come to the Government with such joy as I shall quit it.”⁶⁴

On March 6, 1675, Sir Henry Morgan arrived at Port Royal, and the following day took a carriage to Spanish Town to meet with Lynch and the planters and merchants who made up the Council. To a man, they wanted peace and feared the return of the notorious buccaneer. Their main interest lay in the slave trade—not just to buy for themselves, but also to sell to Spanish colonies. The last thing they wanted was a return to the days when Morgan’s buccaneers made any chance of that impossible. Why should any Jamaican settler toil in the fields when he could join the buccaneers and reap the immediate reward of the “sweet trade”? As for the Spaniard, why should he chance inviting an English merchant into port who might turn pirate, as many unsuccessful trading ventures did? Simply put, pirace and trade were incompatible.

The Council members needn’t have worried. Morgan, having discarded his old garb for the finery commensurate with his new status, and sporting medals and sashes befitting a knight, told the assembly that his orders were to continue to suppress piracy. This policy was seconded by Jamaica’s new governor, Lord Vaughn, who arrived the following week. Vaughn, described by one who knew him as among “the lewdest fellows of the age,”⁶⁵ was also a poet and a patron of the arts. Preferring to rule over an enslaved island, rather than a wanton, undisciplined nation of licentious pirates, he sided with the planters.

They, meanwhile, were awaiting the arrival from Suriname of fellow English planters who were expert in sugar production. In 1674, when New Amsterdam was permanently deeded to England in exchange for Suriname, the English planters who had been living there had begun looking to move elsewhere, and in April 1675, three transport ships left England to carry their hundred or so families to Jamaica. Historians credit the Suriname planters with introducing the expertise that converted the island into a vast sugar plantation and the richest source of income in the British Empire. To accomplish this transformation, cheap labor was needed, and on May 11, the Council of Jamaica, composed mostly of planters, petitioned the Royal African Company, “demanding more slaves.” The year before, the Company had sent “2,320 negroes to Jamaica,” and in response to the request agreed to send “four more ships with 1660 slaves.”⁶⁶

Meanwhile, early in 1675, Abraham Cohen received news that convinced him it was safe to return. Modyford, his ally, was back in Jamaica. King Charles, he also learned, had authorized Suriname’s Jews to settle in Jamaica. Since the king had rejected the Port Royal merchants’ suit to exclude the Jews from trade, Beeston and others would have to pull in their claws and tend to their own affairs, and Cohen could lose himself among the new arrivals. However, when Cohen clandestinely returned to reclaim his properties, trouble arose—though not from the hostile merchants, but from his brother, who took him to court.

The reader will recall that in 1671, when Abraham returned to Amsterdam, he had asked Moses to look after his land. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. Although Moses was not one of the sixteen naturalized Jews in Jamaica, his presence there was not disputed and he and Sir Henry Morgan, as ex-freebooters, were longtime comrades. Ostensibly the case was brought over a claim of back pay for superintending Cohen’s property. Settling the dispute in May 1675, Abraham acknowledged that he was “justly and duly indebted unto my brother Moses Cohen Henriques…for two years and seven months salary that he hath been employed by me.”⁶⁷ In lieu of a hundred pounds sterling, Cohen agreed to give his brother forty cows and horses.

Although the suit was a minor matter, Modyford as chief justice presided and signed off on the settlement. Since both litigants were in their late sixties and wealthy, more than back pay was at issue. It appears that Moses had caught the gold fever and wanted a piece for himself. In any event, Abraham was dispirited: It was one thing to circumvent a royal ordinance, fake his own demise, and twice journey to a forbidden island while avoiding Beeston and his allies. It was quite another to find his own brother trying to horn in on a deal that he had been working on since he first learned of the mine twenty years earlier. A few months after signing off on the judgment, Cohen gave up the quest. He sold off the land, and that’s the last we hear about the “gold finding Jews” and their search for Columbus’s mine.⁶⁸

In 1677, King Charles replaced Governor Vaughn with the Earl of Carlisle, a man more favorable to Morgan, who stayed on as deputy governor. Modyford, after two years as chief justice, retired to his estates. Jamaica’s seesaw policy of alternately reining in and releasing the buccaneers continued until Modyford’s death in September 1679. Afterward, Carlisle returned to England, and for the next two years Morgan was acting governor. Finally in a position to revive Port Royal as a pirate capital, he instead turned prosecutor. He had become a major landowner and, in his newfound allegiance to the status quo, no longer tolerated piracy. Retiring privateers, he announced, would be pardoned and given land to cultivate. Any caught violating his new directive might end his days rotting from a noose at Gallows Point.

One old privateer seeking an official pardon “upon the oath never to indulge in such practices again” was Moses Cohen Henriques. Well into his seventies, he likely hadn’t been at sea for years, but apparently wanted to be pardoned for his earlier roving. So it was that Morgan, on November 18, 1681, acting on “the humble petition of Moses Cohen,” signed the document granting him naturalization, that quasi-citizenship that was the best that a Jew could then aspire to. At the same time, Moses, like his brother Abraham, now foreswore his Spanish name. The document reads in part:

[I, Sir Henry Morgan] do graciously give and grant Moses Cohen his heirs and successors from this day forward in the island of Jamaica to be fully and completely naturalized and do hereby confirm to him and his heirs forever all the rights, privileges and immunities granted in this said act as fully and completely as our natural born subjects do have or enjoy or as if said Moses Cohen had been born in any of our dominions. Witnessed, Sir Henry Morgan, Knight Commander in Chief of the Island of Jamaica.⁶⁹

As for the alleged gold mine, Morgan knew of it, but had no knowledge of its location. Still, when the Duke of Albemarle obtained from the king the sole right to search for Spanish gold in the Caribbean, Morgan lured him to Jamaica with tales of sunken treasure and the lost gold mine. Although Albemarle brought along “Miners to search for Mines,” and the two men were successful in salvaging sunken treasure, the legendary mine was never found. After Albemarle’s death, a near contemporary noted that the duke’s prospectors “under the Pretence of search for Mines, instead went to Planters houses, & Got Drunk.”⁷⁰

The Great Earthquake of 1692 brought a climactic end to the pirate port, when the sea swallowed two-thirds of Port Royal. Beeston, who owned the waterfront land across the harbor that became Kingston, did not let his animosity toward Jews prevent him from taking their money. After the earthquake, he sold sixteen of the first lots to Jewish investors.⁷¹

From an infamous pirate capital, Jamaica, by 1698, had become a sugar island worked by forty thousand slaves, and after 1713, “the centre for slave distribution in the Caribbean and North America.” It was then that England’s Royal African Company was awarded the asiento—the monopoly right Spain granted to conduct the slave trade with Spanish America. A few Jamaican Jews did participate in the trade, but most dealt in dry goods. This fact was noted in a London petition in 1735 that protested the ongoing effort of rival merchants to exclude Jews. Their defenders (ninety-two Jewish and non-Jewish merchants) wrote: “The Jews [in London] are almost the only persons that send any dry, fine goods to Jamaica, at their own risk, and on their own account…for the supply of the inhabitants of the island, and for making proper sortments of goods for the Spaniards.”⁷²

As Jewish involvement with piracy petered out in the Caribbean, the rovers and their Sephardic sponsors disbanded, only to reunite in the following century when a budding new nation would enlist them in its fight for liberty. In the American Revolution, a dozen prominent Jews sided with the rebels as privateers. Celebrated as founders of early Jewish congregations, these men owned and operated more than a few of the pirate ships that captured or destroyed over six hundred British ships and took cargoes and prizes with an estimated value of $18 million in today’s dollars.⁷³

Finally, no discussion of Jewish piracy should leave out the Jewish heritage of the famous pirate known to Americans as a hero of the battle of New Orleans. In a handwritten note, stuck in his family Bible, Jean Lafitte wrote: “I owe all my ingenuity to the great intuition of my Jewish-Spanish grandmother, who was a witness at the time of the Inquisition.” Elaborating on his ancestry, Lafitte wrote in his journal:

My mother died before I can remember and my maternal grandmother, who lived with us, became a mother to me…My grandmother was of Spanish-Israelite…My mother’s father had been an alchemist with a good practice and patronage in Spain. He was a freethinking Jew with neither Catholic faith nor traditional adherence to the Jewish synagogue. But this did not prevent him from dying of starvation in prison for refusing to divulge the technical details which the Inquisition demanded from all Jews. Grandmother told me repeatedly of the trials and tribulations her ancestors had endured at the time of the Spanish Inquisition…Grandmother’s teachings…inspired in me a hatred of the Spanish crown and all the persecutions for which it was responsible—not only against Jews.⁷⁴

Here our story ends. It is the history of Iberian Jews, disguised as Christians, who pioneered the New World as explorers, conquistadors, cowboys, and pirates, transformed sugar cultivation into an agro-industry that they introduced to the Caribbean, and created the first trade network spanning the seven seas. Figures are imprecise, but it is estimated that conversos numbered around ten thousand in the midseventeenth century, or 5 percent of the 200,000 settlers in the New World, and up to 15 percent in the islands. As they were an underground community, we only know about those targeted by the Inquisition or otherwise exposed. With a heritage of denying their Judaism, most of their descendants eventually abandoned their religion. Of the thousands or more Spanish and Portuguese names listed in the Jamaican telephone book, the island’s declared Jews today number less than two hundred.

The Cohen Henriques brothers and their comrades came of age in Holland, a tolerant oasis in a hostile world. They had heard about the horrors of the Inquisition from their elders, who fled Iberia to settle in Amsterdam. Emulating their mentor, the pirate rabbi Samuel Palache, they were inspired to combat their people’s enemies. In their twenties, using force and diplomacy, they gained a temporary homeland in Brazil, and in their maturity, when the Dutch colony was overrun, they parlayed their trade connections and skills in the production and marketing of sugar and other commodities to ensure their welcome in the islands of the Caribbean. Their economic power in turn enabled them successfully to lobby the Dutch West India Company in support of their children in New Amsterdam, and to secure the intervention of the States General to free their other comrades held in Jamaica. Finally, in Port Royal, as merchants and shipowners they used the buccaneers to wage a successful surrogate war on the lands of the Inquisition that effectively ended Spain’s hegemony in the New World, and in the process they reaped the rewards, both legal and financial.

The Sephardic Diaspora of 1492 was nothing new in the history of a people who for more than two millennia had been wandering the known world. Since the expulsion of the twelve tribes in 722 B.C., the exiled Jews had been forced to develop particular talents that would be welcomed in foreign lands. The Iberian expulsion, far from destroying them, assured their survival. Concurrent with the Age of Discovery, they settled the newly discovered lands, and as world trade grew in importance, so did theirs. Trading with their brethren around the globe, they developed the markets and acquired the secret intelligence national leaders craved as they competed for lucrative trade routes. Menasseh ben Israel, in his appeal to Cromwell, quoted Amos 9:9: “I will sift the house of Israel among all the nations as corn is sifted in a sieve,” and cemented his argument with an economic promise: Welcome us and we will make you rich. Today, centuries later, it is this promise of entrepreneurial wealth that still protects the People of the Book in an indifferent and often hostile world.

The search for the “lost gold mine” of Columbus was a last hurrah of the Jewish merchant adventurers, an adventure that failed. Not so the cause to which the Cohen brothers and their peers had devoted most of their lives. In 1675, the very year the brothers were battling each other in court, Jewish houses of worship were opened in Amsterdam and London, and the following year in Curaçao, Barbados, and Jamaica. It was thanks largely to their efforts spanning most of the seventeenth century that the barriers to Jewish residency and commercial rights were surmounted and Jews were finally free to be Jews in both the Old World and the New.