[1672]. Carta de Isaac de Mesa para Francisco da Costa, homem de negócios.

Private letter from Isaac de Mesa to Francisco da Costa, business man.

The author clarifies which are the goods he sends on his behalf and on behalf of others. He also asks that the recipient deals with certain matters in favor of third parties, always taking into account the possibility of war as an obstacle.

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, the letter sent by Isaac de Mesa was accompanied by other papers, namely with which was exposed in PSCR1487. The author intended to send it to the recipient through David Luís Bondia, who, in his letter to him (PSCR1470), asked for it to be delivered to Francisco da Costa in Amsterdam. Everything would be, however, intercepted on board the Dutch vessel Het witte Zeepaard, which came from the port of Paramaribo, bound for an important and strategic port of the West Indies Company - Flushing, in North America - across the Caribbean. Of note is the mention of Luís Dias Guterres (incidentally, José Jessurun Coelho), whose presence in London was already confirmed in 1666, until 1704-1705, the date of his death. It was supposed that he had come from Recife and, at the date of this letter, he had businesses in the Barbados Islands. In addition to his privileged relationship with Carlos II of England, Luís Dias maintained several investments in the Dutch Company of the West Indies.