Free Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean by Edward Kritzler Page B

directed the magistrates of Antwerp, northern Europe’s trading capital, to grant Spanish conversos full settlement rights, and solved the problem of Jamaica by giving the island away.
    Although little is known about the Portugals Charles sent to Jamaica, apparently there was trouble right away, because at the same time Charles was recruiting his crusading army, he hurriedly dispatched an abbot to the island to keep an eye on religious matters. In March 1535, Father Amador de Samano arrived in Jamaica. He had gone ahead on the king’s orders before being accredited by the pope. Unable to produce papers from Rome, he was not recognized by Jamaica’s governor, who “used many disrespectful words unto him and other things worthy of censure and punishment.” When Charles was notified that his governor had acted “in disservice of God and in disrespect of our royal decrees,” he ordered him to “purge his offence before the Royal Audiencia *3 in Santo Domingo.” 24
    For Charles, Jamaica’s rejection of his abbot was a final straw. Years before, he had allocated money for a Jamaican church that was still being built and a hospital that never was. He received samples of gold ore, but not much more. His two haciendas and their livestock were valued at five thousand pesos, and though he also had two sugar mills, the only profit he made was selling produce to the starving settlers. Even then he had to loan them money to buy the goods, and if they didn’t pay, threaten to sell the produce to his other colonies.
    Jamaica was a losing proposition, and the governors he sent there were no better. Each accused his predecessor of diverting funds and selling off the king’s acreage “as their own private property.” It had been ten years since a plague of smallpox wiped out most of Jamaica’s Indians and the island’s more ambitious settlers left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The allure to leave in 1536 was even more compelling as word spread that the search for El Dorado was on, with three conquistadors climbing over mountains in a competitive race to find the haunt of “the Golden One,” the Indian king bathed in gold dust. Between the island’s Portuguese, whom he needed but didn’t trust, and the lazy Spaniards who remained, Charles was convinced that he wasn’t going to realize much of a profit from Jamaica. The island, he concluded, would be good only as a trading post, a way station for ships en route to and from the New World.
    The answer he settled on was to deed Jamaica to the Columbus kin. Since the summer of 1536, Charles had been negotiating with Diego Colón’s widow, María de Toledo, to settle a lawsuit she brought to recover Columbus’s rights of discovery on behalf of his grandson, her eight-year-old son, Luis Colón. In January 1537, she agreed to drop the suit in return for Jamaica. Charles did not question why Doña María wanted Jamaica; he was glad to get rid of it. But when he drafted the agreement to relinquish the troubled colony, she rejected it because it did not include power over the Church.
    After a month’s stalemate he reluctantly gave in. 25 This provision—subordinating the Jamaican church to the Columbus family—was unprecedented. For the next century, the family kept Jamaica, alone in the Spanish Empire, out of bounds to the Inquisition. Doña Maria’s decision was critical to the Portugals with whom she worked closely to develop the island’s trade. Like the court Jews who counseled Columbus on the issue of hereditary rights, Jamaica’s Portugals would have encouraged her to hold firm to this demand.
    Unfortunately, the absence of an Inquisition in Jamaica also means there is almost a complete absence of information about these Portugals who opted for New World adventure over Old World connections. While most conversos fled east or settled around the Mediterranean, these Portugals chose Jamaica, an island in a new sea. Rather than reside in restrictive exile communities