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Maarten Janssen, 2014-

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1672. Carta de Isaac de Avelar para o tio Jorge Espinosa.

Author(s) Isaac de Avelar      
Addressee(s) Jorge Espinosa      
In English

Letter from Isaac de Avelar to his uncle Jorge Espinosa.

The author reiterates a request made in an earlier letter because he fears itoc has been lost.

Given the suspicion that the Sephardic communities were trafficking goods and information to the detriment of the English Crown, several ships coming from or going to the Netherlands on their behalf were intercepted. In fact, the provisions in the Cromwell Navigation Acts prohibited the commercial contacts of the English colonies with the Netherlands, Spain, France and their overseas possessions. The proceedings that were initiated, under the guard at the Supreme Court of Admiralty, arose in the context of four moments of great tension between those two powers: the 2nd Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667); the 3rd Anglo-Dutch War (1672-1674); the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763); and, finally, the 4th Anglo-Dutch War (1781-1784). The documentation found on board and preserved in the archive - private correspondence and cargo records - was taken as documentary evidence of the practice of cargo smuggling at sea. The letters described here are also demonstrative of the quality of the relationships within Sephardic families (Jews and converted), with the existence of strategically distributed social networks: on the one side, the settlers positioned below the Equator, more precisely in one area of the West Indies’ Seven Provinces (in the Caribbean), as part of the Dutch overseas territories; on the other, family and business partners, located in the main ports in the North Atlantic, important centers of financial and commercial activities. Incidentally, in some of these letters we may observe the occurrence of loanwords of English and Dutch origin belonging to the lexical-semantic field of trade relations. Examples of this are “ousove” and “azoes”, for the English “hoshead” or the Dutch “okshoofd”, an ancient measure of volume. In the present case, we have a set of letters that were transported on board the Dutch vessels Het witte Zeepaard, Bijenkorf, Fort Zeeland and Gekroonde Prins. They were coming from the port of Paramaribo and bound for an important and strategic port of the Company of the West Indies - Flushing, in North America - through the Caribbean.

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Page [1]r

[1]
sor tio e Irõ spinosa

No navio BieCorf msre Jacob suteslingh escrevi

[2]
a Vm largo, e o propio o fiz neste navio o cavalo
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marinho q parte em sua compa no ql lle man
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dei a Vm a copia da q escrevi em do sutelingh que
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ds leve paz; agora p estar em duvida se da 2a
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via se emcaminhou a bom recado fazo esta pa tornar
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de novo a suplicar a Vm o q nela pedia q he
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q a vista desta sem falta fizese acresentar sr
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os f 200 q nas passadas pedi me fizese no
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navio Ardenburgh msre Jan andrese f 100: mais
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f 300 q são f 300: sem falta p o preso q puder al
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cansalo pq nele tenho embarcado mto mais de
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se Valor, e embarcarei algo mais; os Conhesimto
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do ql mandarei en seo navio q parte sem falta
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dentro de 15 / d, todos estamos de saude a ds grasas
[16]
salvante ma pria com alguã febre de hum
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mau parto q teve ds lle de saude e guarde
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meo david e a Vm os as de seo desejo amen
[19]
serenam a 4: 7ro 1672 Sobo de Vm
[20]
Avilar

a meo Irõ dira Vm como

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neste lle mandei o segdo
[22]
conhesimto do ocf q lle
[23]
remeti em sutelingh
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e q nele e neste lle escrevi largo

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