ABSTRACT
In mid-1688, a small boat left the Dutch entrepôt of Curaçao, a small island in the southern Caribbean, carrying a Sephardic Jewish woman, four women of African descent, two Spanish men and a Guayquirí Indian. It was headed for Coro, a town located just 40 miles away on the northern coast of mainland Spanish America. But the vessel did not complete the typically short, easy voyage over calm waters. Instead, it was caught in a storm and dashed to bits along the mainland shore. Only the Guayquirí, Miguel Francisco, survived to tell the tale of this eclectic group of shipmates. He testified that he had met the Sephardic woman in Curaçao, where she had begged him to help her leave the island undetected, and that she carried papers written by a Franciscan priest in Curaçao introducing her to religious and secular authorities in Coro, where she intended to convert to Catholicism. As the storm tore apart the vessel, one of the Spaniards clumsily complied with her desperate pleas to baptize her before she perished, bestowing on her the Spanish Christian name of Josepha María (the only identification we have for her). Her four black female companions remain nameless.2
