ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been finished without the unflagging support of my sisters Mary Freedman and Helen Kritzler, and my Jamaican family Ainsley and Marjorie Henriques. I am indebted to the editorial advice of cousin Alan Wellikoff; lifelong friends Russell Karaviotis and Charles Shapiro for backing me with bucks; my ex-wife, Wendy Orange, for her continued encouragement; noted Sephardic author Jane Gerber for giving my research the necessary credibility and recommending my book to Doubleday; my agent, Mildred Marmur’s unstinting loyalty; my editors, Adam Bellow, Daniel Feder, and Melissa Danaczko, and publicists Chastity Lovely and Liz Hazelton at Doubleday. Other friends I want to thank are Jeffrey Phillipson for his unabated enthusiasm for my book; Allan Gordon, my role model for a Jewish pirate; and Vladimir Epelboym, my e-mail pen pal, who gave me many leads. Finally, when I look back over my life, I give thanks for the influence of Alan Freed, who fathered my rock ’n’ roll generation; foreign correspondent Bernard Diederich for showing me a life path; college newspaper editor Jules Older, who welcomed my adventure articles; Gabe Levenson, the dean of Jewish travel editors, for his unflagging support; and my Latin American history professor Larry Birns, raconteur extraordinaire.
All history books are written standing on the shoulders of other historians. In addition to those quoted, I would like to mention the writers whose works I found particularly valuable. For information on conversos in the New World: Seymour Liebman, Arnold Wiznitzer, Hugh Thomas, Irene Wright, Isaac Emmanuel, Zvi Loker, and Mordecai Arbell; for New World pioneers, the best reads are the books of Germán Arciniegas; the Jews in Dutch Brazil are documented by Arnold Wiznitzer and Anita Novinsky; for Spanish history, my favorite authors are Jane Gerber, J. H. Elliott, and Salvador de Madariaga; Samuel Tolkowsky writes most entertainingly on Jewish maritime heroes; the Sephardic Diaspora is documented in the voluminous works of Jonathan I. Israel and Daniel M. Swetschinski; pirates of the Caribbean are best covered by Dudley Pope, Alexander Winston, Anthony Gambrill, C. H. Haring, Stephen Talty, and buccaneer author John Esquemelin; the heyday of Port Royal by Robert F. Marx, Nuala Zahedieh, and David Buisseret; England in the seventeenth century is the specialty of Antonia Fraser; and the Jews of England are documented in the books and articles of Cecil Roth, William and Edgar Samuel, and Lucien Wolf. For Jamaica’s Jewish history, the best source is Jacob Andrade’s The Jews of Jamaica.