Edward Kritzler: Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

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.

Chapter Three

THE KING’S ESSENTIAL HERETICS

W hen the bad news from Jamaica reached Spain, Charles V, the Lord of Half the World, was not surprised. It seemed that every time he put his crown on in 1534, there was trouble in his kingdom. Even his vaunted title, Holy Roman Emperor, didn’t carry the same weight as it had when his grandfather Maximilian wore the crown. So when he read that most of his Jamaican colonists were dead and the rest wanted out, Charles was not unduly grieved. He had seen it coming.

In the nineteen years that he had been ruling the New World, Jamaica had always been more of a problem than the “fairest isle” Columbus thought it to be. New Seville of Gold was now known simply as New Seville. The anticipated flow of the precious metal turned out to be a trickle, and most of the sixty thousand Indians who had greeted Columbus were dead. Aside from a small productive settlement of conversos on the south coast, the colony was going under. Why remain in Jamaica when neighboring Hispaniola and Cuba offered a regal style of life said to rival that of Spain? Why settle Jamaica when the nearby Main offered the promise of Aztec and Inca gold?

The communiqué was desperate: Conditions at New Seville had “turned out so badly that no citizen has prospered nor kept his health for a day.” To salvage the colony, his treasurer Pedro de Manzuelo proposed removing the settlement “to the south side of the island where the land is plentiful in bread and beef…with very good ports suitable for navigation to the provinces of Santa Marta, Cartagena, and the mainland…There is great disposition to settle there because no ship in this trade comes to the north coast but all load on the south.” 1

Manzuelo concluded his report with a seemingly odd request. To pioneer the south coast settlement, he recommended the king send an additional thirty Portuguese families to join with the twenty already there. Together they would be put to work on his sugar estate. Manzuelo’s request was couched in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. The king had made growing sugarcane in the Indies a priority and had been subsidizing planters in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Mexico with land grants, duty waivers, and loans. Years earlier, Jamaica’s sugar mill in New Seville had shown the island’s potential for growing the sweetener, and it made sense to recruit more workers to increase the island’s production. 2But why Portuguese? Portugal was then attracting settlers to its colonies with the promise of riches, so where would the king find Portuguese families in his realm willing to settle a poor Spanish island?

The fact is, he didn’t have to. Manzuelo’s directive was aimed at enlisting neither sugar workers nor Portuguese natives. In Crown correspondence, reference to Portuguese residing in Spanish lands pertained not to national origin, but rather was a code word for the worst heretics in his kingdom. With the stability of his empire at stake, Charles V took seriously his vows as Chief Knight of the Holy Inquisition to convert the heathen and burn the heretic. Yet when the communiqué specified “Portuguese,” Charles read between the lines: Jamaica for the Jews, or the colony goes under. 3

When Columbus returned from his voyage of discovery, a golden thread had wound its way into the fabric of every Spaniard’s imagination. In time it stretched from the New World across the Ocean Sea to a peninsula on the edge of the Old World, where it wove an exotic pattern of desire stirring a man’s dreams. Wherever men gathered, the talk was the same—tales of opulent cities with riches beyond belief and beautiful naked maidens aching to please.

Jamaica, thought to have neither, had become a dead end. Only Puerto Rico, where man-eating Indians discouraged settlement, was less popular. Why settle Jamaica when the bounty of the New World was thought to be yours for the taking, if a man be but brave and bold enough? And what Spaniard wasn’t? In their own generation, they had defeated the Moors, kicked out the Jews, enslaved the Indians, and conquered more territory than Rome had in five centuries. In forty-two years, their country had swelled from an alliance of Christians fighting over a few thousand square miles to a world empire governing millions. In the process, Spain had become the richest, most powerful nation on earth. Their king and Church told them they had the right, and they had proved they had the might.

Romance novels of chivalry, the pulp fiction of the day, “fired the imaginations of conquistadors to seek their own adventures in the New World. Their heads filled with fantastic notions…their courage spurred by noble examples of the great heroes of chivalry, they were prepared to undergo every kind of hardship and sacrifice as they penetrated through swamps and jungles into the new continent.” 4Fortune seekers from every province of Spain filled the taverns of Santo Domingo, the capital of the New World, plotting, conspiring, and gambling on destinies. Most, like Cortés, were soldiers of fortune, a class of Spaniard that had evolved during the Reconquista—the seven centuries of warfare against the Moors. In a grasp at nobility, they called themselves hidalgos, meaning sons of somebody, but the true somebodies, the grandees, would wait another fifty years before sending their sons to the New World. Provided you wore the cross of Jesus, your origin didn’t matter: an acrobat and a musician had looted Colombia for gold; a former scribe got the pearls of Venezuela; a soldier of fortune ruling New Spain, a nation bigger than Europe, was said to be richer than the king himself. And in the summer of 1534, word spread through Spain that a pig farmer turned conquistador had plundered an Indian nation of limitless gold.

While Charles was mulling the Jamaican communiqué in the royal palace, the pig farmer’s brother, Hernando Pizarro, was thrilling court attendees with the tale of how his illiterate brother Francisco, taking a cue from Cortés, had passed himself off as a god, kidnapped the Inca chief, and after accumulating a ransom of nineteen tons of gold and silver, had strangled and then burned the heretic. Even as Hernando spoke of this maleficent deed, a rumor spread in the court: A fleet of seventy ships from the New World had arrived at the Spanish port of Laredo with ten thousand Amazon women on board, hungry for Spanish men to father their children. Given the lure of Inca gold and the lust for Amazon women, Charles knew that would-be settlers would line up for Peru. 5But none would be interested in settling Jamaica, except the Jews. Along with an empire, Charles had inherited the Inquisition, and soon found the threat of being burned alive a handy means to control false conversos.