Chapter Two

ADVENTURING IN THE NEW WORLD

At the dawn of the Age of Discovery, when Spain’s monarchs banished the Jews to purify their nation, followers of the Law of Moses sailed with the explorers and marched with the conquistadors. With the discovery and settlement of the New World, they took solace in the hope of finding a safe haven, or at least putting distance between themselves and the Inquisition. Unlike other pioneers, they had no home to return to, and as seen in the preceding chapter, they were among the first foreigners to permanently settle the New World. Going about as bona fide Christians, most carried their secret to the grave. The adventures of some who did not paint an extraordinary tableau of their time. These include a turban-wearing pilot who sailed with three of the early explorers; the first capitalist to own and market New World flora; a suspect Jew who discovered California; a conquistador who was the first Jew burned in the New World; and other Judaizers, men and women, who joined in the conquest of Mexico.


GASPAR, THE JEWISH PILOT

Outlawed in the civilized world and vulnerable in the Diaspora, Jews became skilled in ways to find and explore new lands. They were the era’s foremost mapmakers, and also perfected the nautical instruments and astronomical tables the early explorers sailed with. When Jewish expertise was needed, prejudice took a backseat to expediency, and Jewish pilots, adept at reading maps and using navigational instruments, were recruited to interpret those tables. Had they not, many an explorer would have been lost in the vast oceans, and three of the most famous—Vasco da Gama, Pedro Cabral, and Amerigo Vespucci—used the same enigmatic Jew to show them the way.1

The story begins in 1494, when the pope, believing (as all did) that Columbus had found the western sea route to Asia, divided the world between the two contending Iberian nations by drawing a line through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. His ruling, agreed to in the Treaty of Tordesillas, assigned all lands 370 leagues (about 1,175 miles) west of the Cape Verde islands to Spain, and all lands east to Portugal.2 Three years later, when Columbus was preparing his third voyage across the Western Sea, King Manuel of Portugal commissioned Vasco da Gama to seek the eastern route around Africa. In the event the two explorers should meet, King Ferdinand gave Columbus a letter of greeting for his rival.



Da Gama, a learned nobleman, who credited his “Hebrew tutor” for teaching him navigation, mathematics, and astronomy, left Lisbon in July 1497 in command of four ships and 170 men. Two years later (in September 1499), he returned with two ships, fifty men, and a few spices to show for his effort. If not for his fortuitous encounter with the Jewish pilot, he might not have returned at all. But thanks to him, Portugal beat Spain in the race for India’s riches, and monopolized the lucrative spice trade.

Approaching the subcontinent, da Gama had stopped at a small island off the coast of Calicut to careen and clean his ships when a small boat approached. In its bow stood a tall, bearded white man, richly dressed in Eastern attire. Calling to them in Spanish, the stranger asked to speak to the captain. Welcomed aboard the flagship, he introduced himself as Moncaide, the harbormaster of Calicut, and explained that his lord, Rajah Samorin, having heard of the “military valor and nautical knowledge of the Portuguese,” had sent him to welcome the foreigners.3

Da Gama, whose voyage thus far had been marred by attacks along the East African coast, suspected a trap and ordered his men to seize Moncaide’s attendants, who immediately confessed their leader’s duplicity. Far from being the harbormaster, they said, Moncaide commanded the ruler’s navy, and if he perceived the visitors as a threat was to signal four warships, lying in wait, to attack. Da Gama held Moncaide and ordered him to confess or “be boiled in fat and whipped until he died.”4 Admitting his deceit, he agreed to pilot da Gama’s ships to port and present him to Samorin. Although Moncaide now claimed to be a New Christian forced to become a Moor, da Gama, writing in his journal, described him as a “renegade Jew” and noted that though his hair and beard were gray, he looked to be about forty.

Samorin was ready to trade with the strangers, but was put off when da Gama offered cheap trinkets in exchange for priceless jewels. Insulted, Samorin sent them away. The two would meet again, but the initial impression persisted and their enmity escalated to hostage-taking on both sides. Eventually da Gama was allowed to depart with a small quantity of spices and jewels bartered from local merchants. Moncaide, meanwhile, having aroused his enemies at court by aiding the foreigners, gladly accepted da Gama’s invitation to return with him to Portugal.

Back in Lisbon, Moncaide dropped all pretense. He now claimed to be Alonso Pérez, a Spanish Jew from Castille, and said he wished to be baptized and serve his new host country. With da Gama acting as his godfather, Moncaide took the explorer’s name, and was christened Gaspar da Gama. Although he was made a cavalier by King Manuel, who regularly conversed with him about lands he had visited, the king always referred to his new court favorite as “Gaspar, the Jewish pilot.”

Manuel, not knowing that Columbus was sailing in circles in a far-off sea, thought Portugal was still in a race with Spain for the riches of Asia and asked the worn-out explorer to go again. But da Gama, newly married and not inclined to set off on such an arduous trip, recommended in his stead Pedro Cabral, a young nobleman and member of the court. Cabral had never been to sea, but he had a commanding presence and was trusted by the king. Given his inexperience, however, the king ordered Cabral to take the Jewish pilot and “follow his counsels in all and every matter.” The king also ordered his talented converso physician, Mestre João, expert at calibrating Zacuto’s improved astrolabe, to go with the fleet and chart the expedition.5

In March 1500, Cabral set off with thirteen ships, loaded this time with better trade goods than those da Gama had tried to palm off. As the fleet sailed past the Cape Verde Islands and approached the Gulf of Guinea, where the continent narrows abruptly to the east, Gaspar had Cabral stay west of the gulf to avoid getting stuck in its becalmed waters. But when it was time for the fleet to sail east to round the horn of Africa, the winds and currents in the South Atlantic drove them further to the west until one morning a lookout shouted Terra! Cabral had reached the eastern shore of South America.

Two years before, Columbus, sailing south of Trinidad, had sighted the continent’s northern coast, but did not land. Observing the four mouths of the Orinoco River that emptied into the Gulf of Paria, the admiral, with one foot planted firmly in the Bible and the other in Renaissance science, declared them the four rivers flowing out of the Garden of Eden.6

Cabral sailed north along the coast to a protected harbor he named Porto Segua (Safe Port). Suppressing his belief that he was trespassing on lands reserved for Spain, he stuck a wooden cross in the earth and carved on it the arms of Portugal. As it was Sunday, he celebrated Mass and handed out little tin crosses to the natives.7 The following day Mestre João aligned the sun with his astrolabe to determine their latitude. His measurement of 17 degrees south was off by only a half degree. In his report to the king (unpublished for five centuries), the physician included drawings of the Southern Cross and adjacent constellations. Brazil had been discovered.

João shared his observations with Gaspar. Expert in nautical matters, the two conversos judged it a new continent. Cabral was not so sure: “We remained in ignorance,” he wrote, “whether it was an island or a mainland, though we are inclined to the latter opinion.” In a rush to get back on course, after five days he headed for southern Africa. His intention was to sail in the wake of da Gama, circumvent the continent, and proceed up the coast until he caught the trade winds to India. A simple plan, but owing to heavy storms and the poor skills of his captains, six ships were lost rounding Africa, and Cabral arrived in India with half his original fleet.

This time around, the Hindu Rajah Samorin, pleased by the foreigners’ more generous offerings, greeted the Portuguese warmly. For a while all went well—too well, according to competing Muslim merchants. Cabral was given a warehouse to store his trade goods and nearby quarters for his men. But the Muslim merchants gathered a mob to attack the crew’s quarters and loot the warehouse, killing many sailors and forcing the rest to retreat to their ships.

When informed of the action, Samorin did nothing. Gaspar, who had commanded Samorin’s navy, advised swift retribution. Heeding his pilot’s counsel, Cabral


ordered ten Moorish ships in the port to be taken and all the people in the said ships to be killed. Thus we slew 500 and captured 20 or 30 hiding in the holds of the ships…One ship had three elephants which we killed and ate; we unloaded and burned the ships; and the following day we bombarded the city, so that we slew an endless number of people and did much damage.8


As evident from the notary’s account, the temperament of the explorer was little different from that of a conquistador. If peaceful means did not bring the desired result, terror was the alternative. Cabral, having journeyed thousands of miles for spices, silks, and jewels, was not to be put off by recalcitrant rulers or angry locals—and when his men were hungry, elephant meat would do. After Calicut’s devastation, Gaspar recommended they head south to Cochin, whose ruler hated Samorin. With the renegade Jew smoothing the way, the rival rajah and Cabral concluded a trade treaty that laid the foundation of Portuguese rule in India. On a palm leaf, inscribed with an iron pen, Cochin’s ruler wrote King Manuel: “My country is rich in cinnamon, cloves, ginger and pepper. That which I ask of you in exchange is gold, silver, corals and scarlet cloth.”9 Cabral departed with the holds of his ships loaded with pepper, cinnamon, fine cottons, silks, and perfumes.10

Homeward bound, Cabral stopped off at Cape Verde to take on provisions. A chance encounter there with a Portuguese fleet on another voyage of discovery resulted in Gaspar’s meeting an Italian explorer whose name would become synonymous with the continent to which Gaspar directed him.

When the crews met and conversed, Gaspar shared his knowledge of the southern continent with the fleet’s adviser, Amerigo Vespucci, who had previously explored the continent’s northern coast for Spain two years before when he sailed with Alonso de Ojeda, one of Columbus’s captains. When Amerigo reported his find to Ferdinand, he expected the king to sponsor a return voyage. But although he was a trusted friend of Columbus, Vespucci was a foreigner, and preference was given to the proposals of Spanish explorers. Shunted aside, Amerigo turned his back on Spain. Having noted that his landfall on the continent might have fallen on Portugal’s side of the pope’s dividing line, he approached the Portuguese court. King Manuel, intrigued with the idea of a new land and having not yet received news of Cabral’s discovery, authorized an expedition to investigate further and sent the Italian along as adviser.

So it was that Amerigo and Gaspar happened to meet in Cape Verde, and as a result the Italian’s name would one day be attached to Columbus’s discoveries. According to Vespucci’s biographer, the Jewish pilot possessed “a storehouse of geographical knowledge and [was] an incomparable source of information for Amerigo who could discuss hundreds of things with him in Italian.” Amerigo soon took command of the fleet, and reaching the continent explored nearly a thousand miles of coastline as far south as Río de la Plata.

On his return to Lisbon, he confirmed the continent’s massive size and asserted that much of its coastal land was indeed “over the line.” Although sailing for Portugal, the loyal Italian wrote his Florentine patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, that he had not reached Asia but had discovered a “New World.” He also praised Gaspar as “the best informed man among Cabral’s followers…a trustworthy man who speaks many languages and knows many towns and provinces from Portugal to the Indian Ocean, from Cairo to the island of Sumatra.”11 The popularity of his account of these discoveries led a young German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller to label the southern continent “the land of Amerigo,” and by 1528 Columbus’s Indies were known as the Americas.12



Gaspar’s own story ends back in India. In 1502, he and his godfather, Vasco da Gama, sailed once more to the subcontinent. On this occasion, he reunited with his wife, who, having escaped from Calicut after the attack, was living in Cochin. Gaspar tried to persuade her to convert so that she could return with him to Portugal, but being a devout Jewess and learned in the Law, she adamantly refused.

After Samorin’s demise, Gaspar settled in Calicut in 1505 in service to the Portuguese viceroy. (In 1511, Goa was conquered and became the capital of Portugal’s Indian empire.) He often visited his wife, but she never forgave him for turning Christian. Such were the life and adventures of the Jewish pilot who, as Vasco da Gama wrote, “shed his faith with the ease of a reptile.”13


CAPITALIST PIONEER

A small, fertile island off the northeast coast of South America that Amerigo Vespucci called “a natural wonder” bears the name of Fernando de Noronha, a sixteenth-century converso who headed the first capitalist venture in the New World.

King Manuel, excited by Vespucci’s report of coastal forests of brazilwood, which was the source of a valuable red dye in demand throughout Europe, drew up a royal contract with the wealthy shipowning merchant Fernando de Noronha. With the likelihood of also finding valuable spices and other marketable commodities, Noronha recruited other prominent conversos to join his consortium in partnership with the king. Beyond a good business opportunity, however, their interest in the far-off land was to find a refuge to live free from persecution.

In 1503, they set forth on five ships and put in at the offshore island to regroup before proceeding to the mainland. Amerigo, who sailed with them as far as the island, wrote glowingly that its bountiful streams and woodlands attracted all sorts of birds, “so tame they allow themselves to be taken up by hand.” Although beguiled, he left to seek out a southern passage to India, which was not found until Magellan rounded the continent in 1519. The conversos he left behind had better luck. Cutting and loading logs of dyewood along the forested coast, they found ready buyers when they returned to Lisbon. Investing their profits, they established logging camps along six hundred miles of coastal land now known by the name of its valuable tree, Brazil.

By 1505, the dyewood business was netting the partners fifty thousand ducats a year. Next to gold, brazilwood was then the most valuable product to come out of the New World. A grateful king gave de Noronha a ten-year monopoly and ceded him the uninhabited island, and gave it his name.

Was de Noronha a secret Jew? He changed the name of his ship the São Cristóvão (St. Christopher) to A Judia (The Jewess), and a harbor he discovered and named Cananea lies 32 degrees south of the equator, just as Israel’s ancient city of that name lies 32 degrees north. Whatever his personal beliefs, it appears Fernando de Noronha did not forsake his heritage.14


CALIFORNIA DREAMER

In 1520, João Rodrigues Cabrilho, “a Portuguese,” led thirty men armed with crossbows from Jamaica to Mexico, where they joined Cortés in the conquest.15 Afterward, Cabrilho set forth to find the legendary Seven Golden Cities. No luck: they never existed. But after this fruitless search, he sailed into San Diego Bay in 1542 and discovered California. Over the next five months, he and his two Portuguese pilots explored the North Pacific coast in hopes of finding a shortcut to Europe via the Northwest Passage, an elusive waterway believed to traverse North America from the Pacific to the Atlantic to Europe. Wounded in a skirmish with the Indians, he died near what is now Santa Barbara.

Like that of other conversos who obscured their past, Cabrilho’s ancestry is not known. His written reports and navigation skills show him to be an educated man, apparently from a good family. It is probable that João Cabrilho had Jewish ancestry.16 Recent scholarship argues he was not Portuguese but Spanish-born, from Cuéllar, a city known for its many Jews, who crossed the border to Portugal at the time of the expulsion.

Forcibly converted in 1497 by the threat of having their children enslaved, the newly baptized Jews referred to themselves in Hebrew as anusim (forced ones).17 Although they made up about 10 percent of Portugal’s 1.5 million people, conversos constituted nearly three-quarters of the mercantile community owing to the Portuguese upper class’s disdain for commerce.18 The king, considering his nation’s small population and large, talented converso community, viewed his New Christians as indispensable to the success of his expanding empire. Portugal’s conversos, who were otherwise forbidden to leave the country, were duly licensed to settle in the Indies.

Prior to the union of Spain and Portugal in 1580, few Portuguese nationals looked to serve the Spanish Empire. Portugal was an independent nation with its own New World empire. Why serve Spain when Portugal’s vast empire offered unbridled opportunity? Since Spain forbade their conversos to migrate, a self-proclaimed Portuguese national operating in the Spanish realm was likely to be a converso, and in this early period of forced conversion his loyalty to Judaism would probably have been strong. This is particularly true of those originally from Spain who initially chose exile rather than conversion. This supports the theory that Cabrilho, the discoverer of California, whose name appears throughout the state on roads, schools, and even drugstores, was a converted Jew who deliberately hid his origin.

There are, however, notable exceptions that serve as cautionary reminders not to jump to conclusions about the Jewish identity of all the Portuguese serving Spain’s empire. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, whose ships sailed around the world for Spain in 1519, was a bona fide pure-blooded Catholic. But even he had a Jewish partner who brokered his contract with the king. Juan de Aranda was a well-known converso, and while the contract he negotiated for Magellan called for the king to receive one twentieth of the profits of his voyage, Aranda himself was to receive an eighth share.19


HERETIC CONQUISTADOR

Hernando Alonso had it made. Six short years after serving with Cortés as a carpenter’s assistant, “hammering nails into the brigantines used in the recapture of Mexico,” he had become the richest farmer in the new Spanish colony. While most soldiers of his rank received nothing more from the conquest than “the cost of a new crossbow,” Alonso was awarded a large tract of land north of Mexico City. Turning it into a pig and cattle farm, Alonso became the biggest supplier of meat to the colony.

In September 1528, it was reported that Alonso, now thirty-six and getting as portly as his beef, in emulation of his commander, “swaggered about in a belt of refined gold he had exacted from the natives.” He had good reason: In March, his contract had been renewed by Cortés himself and he had taken a new wife, the “very beautiful” Isabel de Aguilar.

This information on Hernando Alonso comes from the trial records of the Spanish Inquisition.20 On October 17, 1528, Alonso became the first person in the New World to be burned alive at the stake. Alonso was a secret Jew, as was his deceased first wife Beatriz, the sister of Diego Ordaz, one of Cortés’s five captains. His undoing came when a Dominican friar charged that, years before in Santo Domingo, he had secretly observed Alonso and Beatriz, following their son’s baptismal ceremony, “washing the boy’s head with wine to cleanse him of the Holy Water.” When threatened with torture on the rack, Alonso confessed that after the wine ran down the child’s body and “dripped from his organ,” he caught it in a cup and drank it “in mockery of the sacrament of baptism.”

Beatriz, having accompanied her husband when he marched with Cortés’s army, died from fever during the conquest of Mexico. The trial recorded testimony of a witness who overheard Alonso telling his new wife not to go to church: “Señora, in your present condition [menstrual period] thou wouldst profane the Church.” To which Isabel, his New Christian wife, replied, “These are old ceremonies of the Jews which are not observed now that we have adopted the evangelical grace.”

Cortés had no part in the arrest of Alonso. After approving Alonso’s contract, he left for Spain to answer trumped-up charges of misrule. In his absence, a rival faction in the colony conspired with the powers of the Inquisition and introduced the Holy Terror to the New World. The holier-than-thou Inquisitors, who considered Aztecs savages for sacrificing prisoners to their gods atop their Great Pyramid, chose the plaza fronting the site, where a lofty edifice of the True Church had replaced the pyramid, to consign the heretic to the flames.

In a time of carefully arranged marriages, Hernando Alonso would not have married his first wife without the blessing of her brother, Diego Ordaz, one of the outstanding figures of the conquest. Alonso’s brother-in-law was the first man to climb the volcano Popocatépetl and look upon the Valley of Mexico as an advance scout of the invasion. Mesmerized by what seemed to be a floating city, he compared it to a vision out of the chivalric tale Amadis of Gaul, a sword and sorcery book of the time.

Before joining up with Cortés, Alonso and Diego were in Cuba, but on far different rungs of society. Alonso was a blacksmith in town, while Diego and his sisters lived in the governor’s mansion, where he served as majordomo. Despite this all-important class difference, Beatriz married the blacksmith. Apparently decisive was the one thing they did share: a common ancestry. Cortés’s captain wound up gathering pearls off the Venezuela coast, only to be poisoned by rivals in 1532.21 Although much is written about him, nowhere is it mentioned that he was a converso, much less a secret Jew. Like most conversos, Diego passed himself off as an Old Christian, and went to his grave with his masquerade intact.


Señoritas were a rarity throughout the New World. With fewer than one Spanish woman for every ten men, to marry one was considered a feather in the cap for the mostly poor, aspiring hidalgos. After Mexico’s conquest, some ladies felt the same about them. Most were servant girls who journeyed to New Spain to find themselves a newly rich husband. Exceptions were the four daughters of the royal treasurer Alonso Estrada, the natural son, or so he claimed, of King Ferdinand. Few women were as desirable as the Estrada sisters, who could choose from among many suitors, and it is therefore not surprising that they all married well. What is surprising is that their mother was from a well-known Jewish family and that their husbands would have known of their wives’ blemished ancestry. That their progeny would also be stigmatized seems not to have mattered. Despite the aggressiveness of the Holy Fathers, and repeated decrees against conversos, they were able to keep their wives’ and children’s Jewish heritage secret. The same held true of Beatriz and Diego Ordaz’s surviving sister. Only now is their story being told.


FRANCISCA ORDAZ

As Beatriz, the wife of the heretic Jewish conquistador, lay dying during the siege of Mexico, her sister, Francisca, was by her side. The two were among only six Spanish women known to have accompanied the conquistadors during the fighting in Mexico. After the final victory, Francisca was observed enjoying a wild night of celebration. According to an eyewitness, Francisca and three other “adventurous women went gaily to dance with men still in their quilted armor.” It may well have been that night that she danced with her future husband, the son of Ponce de León, one of the legendary figures of the New World.22

After Alonso’s undoing, Diego Ordaz was not about to fix Francisca up with another Judaizer. Instead he found Juan González Ponce de León, a valiant suitor of noble, unblemished credentials. His father, the conqueror and governor of Puerto Rico and discoverer of Florida, is forever known for his quixotic search for the fountain of youth. His son was distinguished in his own right. Serving as a soldier under Ordaz’s command, Juan was the first man to reach the top of the main temple of Tenochtitlán and, despite being badly wounded, led a vanguard force that captured Montezuma. When Cortés asked him why, considering his injury, he had not withdrawn, but instead led the fight up the steps to Montezuma’s quarters, Juan answered: “Señor, this is not the time for men to be in bed.”23

Juan was aware of Francisca’s lineage even before Alonso’s trial had exposed her sister as a Judaizer. For years he and Alonso were friends, and up until Alonso’s flaming death the two men were partners.24 They shared a royal land grant, an encomienda, in Actopan in the modern state of Hidalgo, about sixty miles north of Mexico City, where Alonso had his farm.25


ALONSO ESTRADA’S WIFE AND DAUGHTERS

In 1522, King Charles V appointed his alleged uncle Alonso Estrada as Mexico’s royal treasurer, perhaps the most important position in the rich territory. In Cortés’s absence, Estrada served as acting governor and for a year (1529) was governor. It was a common belief that he was the bastard son of King Ferdinand, the result of a liaison with Doña Luisa de Estrada, the daughter of Don Fernan, Duke of Aragon, when both were teenagers.

Raised in Ferdinand’s court, Alonso inherited the title Duke of Aragon and sided with Charles V when he was contending for the throne. While some speculate that Alonso himself had Jewish ancestors, his wife certainly did. It was widely known that Marina Gutiérrez Flores de la Caballeria was from an old Jewish family whose wealth has been compared to the Rothschilds’. Although both sides of her family had converted to Catholicism, for three generations they were condemned as Judaizers by the Inquisition. Some who were already dead before sentencing had their bodies exhumed and burned. Doña Marina, having secured a forged affidavit attesting to her pure blood, followed her husband to Mexico.26

Following his death in 1531, Doña Marina cemented her place in colonial society by marrying off her daughters to two of Mexico’s prominent conquistadors. The youngest, Beatrice Estrada, married Vásquez de Coronado, who (with his wife’s money) set off to find the fabled Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola. Although the object of his search was never found, Coronado was the first to explore America’s southwest and discovered the Grand Canyon. Luisa, the oldest, became the wife of Jorge de Alvarado, a conqueror of Mexico and governor of Guatemala. The two other Estrada sisters likewise married nobility.*1

What do these marriages portend? Since the Jewish ancestry of those noblemen’s wives’ mother was known (as was the fact that her Old Christian certification was a sham), it apparently did not overly concern them that their children would no longer be of pure blood.


In the first four decades of the Age of Discovery, known conversos were involved in nearly every venture as explorers, pilots, and conquistadors, or behind the scenes as financiers, shipowners, and administrators. Those mentioned here are but a few of the known Sephardim who participated. How many others there were is unknown. Since all Spanish conversos were forbidden in the New World, it made no difference if one was a true convert, an atheist, or a covert Jew. All were there illegally and therefore subject to prosecution. Today, with the advent of genealogical Web sites, the Jewish roots of other early pioneers are being disclosed in postings by their descendants.27

Hernando Cortés, like Columbus, had the support of many conversos. He had grown up across the street from the synagogue in Medellín, home to influential Jews. Some were friends of his family, and that may have been a reason he trusted and favored them. Their sad and sudden exodus in 1492, when he was seven years old, was a major event in his childhood. A leading historian of the conquest of Mexico, Hugh Thomas, puts the number of conversos who served with Cortés at more than a hundred.28

As early as 1501, the Crown published an edict that “Moors, Jews, heretics, reconciliados [repentants—those who returned to the church], and New Christians are not to be allowed to go to the Indies.” Yet in 1508, the bishop of Cuba reported, “practically every ship [arriving in Havana] is filled with Hebrews and New Christians.”29 Such decrees banning them, followed by letters home complaining of their continued arrival, were a regular occurrence. Conversos with the aptitude and capital to develop colonial trade, comfortable in a Hispanic society, yet seeking to put distance between themselves and the homeland of the Inquisition, made their way to the New World.30 No licenses were required for the crew of a ship, and as many were owned by conversos, they signed on as sailors and jumped ship. Servants also didn’t need a license or exit visa, so that a Jew who obtained one by whatever means could take others along as household staff.31

For most of the first century after the discovery, the fanaticism that characterized the Holy Office did not carry over to the New World. By and large, adventurers there—having left the Old World for whatever reason—could identify with the conversos’ desire to start anew. In the early New World, despite the edicts barring them, wherever one looks, a suspected Jewish adventurer was carving out a life, often on the run from the Inquisition. We will never know how many there were because even sincere converts hid their Jewish roots behind a mask of hyper-religious piety. As the next chapter demonstrates, as long as their skills were needed, the Crown not only turned a blind eye to their presence, but actively recruited them.

Following a time line, then, we come to 1534, a year when disparate events came together in ways that broke with the past and shifted the century forward to new beginnings. In matters of faith, the Reformation was kick-started when a renegade monk published the Bible in German, and a lustful king became the Supreme Head of the Church of England. In the New World, an illiterate pig herder conquered the gold kingdom of Peru, and in Brazil, a group of exiled Jews from a little island off the Guinea coast introduced an agricultural industry that would prove more valuable than gold and silver. Meanwhile, warring infidels led by one who styled himself “the Magnificent” invaded Hungary. And the Most Catholic Defender of the True Faith, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, authorized the first documented Jewish settlement in the New World on the island of Jamaica.

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