[1672]. Bilhete 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 asks the recipient to send him certain goods that are needed.

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 written note addressed to Francisco da Costa occupies the back of what he calls "Memory of what Mr. Francisco da Costa will do me the favor to send with the first vessel that will come for this Colony, giving us God peace". This and other papers, in particular the letter PSCR1485, were 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.