Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean by Edward Kritzler Read Free Book Online

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