Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean Read Online Free Page B

most of the older seamen, who after six months in Santa Gloria wanted out. Columbus declared he would not leave, but rather than battle the mutineers, agreed to let them go.
    Crying, “I am for Castile—follow me,” the rebel leader seized the dozen canoes Columbus had bartered from the Indians. Forcing the natives to row, the rebels made three attempts to overcome the fierce currents of the 108-mile-wide channel to Hispaniola. On their final try, they gave up, though only after throwing eighteen Indian paddlers overboard, and chopping off the hands of those who clung to the side. Five months later, after a two-week march across the island, marked by rape and pillage, they were encamped in an Indian village a half mile from Santa Gloria, intending to seize the admiral’s ships.
    Columbus had just finished his troubled letter to the queen when the two men he had sent to parlay with the rebels returned. They had taken an offer of pardon and a promise that they would soon be rescued. But Poras rebuffed them.
    When his emissaries reported that Poras’s men were preparing for battle, Columbus withdrew to his cabin in despair. But Bartholomew, his fierce younger brother, convinced him to take the fight to the enemy. He armed the fifty young loyalists and set forth to attack the rebel camp. When the mutineers saw Columbus’s teenage army approach they laughed. There was no way mere youths, “brought up in a softer mode of life,” could defeat such “hardy sailors, rendered robust and vigorous by the roving life.” 15 But the rebels’ confidence was premature: In a superhuman effort, Bartholomew slew the six mutineers sent to attack him, and had the point of his sword at Poras’s breast when the rest surrendered. The Poras brothers were put in irons aboard ship, and the forty-eight rebels were disarmed and kept on shore. With peace restored, a reunited, mistrustful crew nervously awaited their promised rescue.
    Even if Ovando did send a ship, Columbus had little faith his gold medallions would be safe in Hispaniola, whose previous governor, he wrote the queen, “robbed me and my brother of our dearly purchased gold.” 16 He expected no less from Ovando. During the tense five weeks before two rescue ships arrived (one sent by Méndez, the other by Ovando), he rarely left his cabin. Never again did he set foot on Jamaica.
    What happened to the gold of Veragua? The Crown had instructed Columbus that if treasure was found, “you must draw up an account of all this in the presence of Our Notary…so that We may know everything that the said Islands and Mainland may contain.” 17 Yet the sixty-three medallions from Panama are not mentioned in the notary’s account, nor are they listed in the inventory of the ship that brought him home to Spain. 18 Unsure his gold would survive Ovando’s rescue, Columbus would not have left the gold in Hispaniola. 19 Columbus also had reason to fear a renewed mutiny on the way back to Spain. It is therefore unlikely that he kept the gold with him.
    That leaves Jamaica. Since he never left the ship, and trusted no one but his son and brother and a core group of loyalists, he presumably asked members of this latter group to transfer his gold to safety.
    There were two good reasons he could count on these youths, whose unstinting loyalty he vowed to reward. 20 First, they had a fiscal interest in the voyage, as their fathers helped finance it. Second, their families, being wealthy conversos, were targeted by the Inquisition. It is reasonable, therefore, to postulate that to keep their sons safe, Columbus’s backers persuaded him to take them along.
    While the Jewish youngsters may have looked to Columbus as their Moses (as he himself did), Jamaica was no Promised Land. Still, for teenagers forced to lead underground lives in Spain, a year’s idyll on a tropical island was nearly as good. When not swimming around their rotting ships, or diving off a yardarm, they wrestled on the beach and