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.