This is your heart that you hold in your hands, be careful with it, don’t lose it, and don’t forget that I loved you the same way even though you weren’t born to me.

When Faith was five months old, Maria kissed Juni and Adrie good-bye. She wept to leave them, for they had offered her only kindness; all the same her fate awaited her, and she packed her satchel, sewed the diamonds into the hem of her dress where they would be safe from thievery, then went to the docks to search for a ship that would take her to Massachusetts. Before she left, she’d made a pot of Courage Tea, for she would require courage to find her way across the sea. Adrie had fashioned a small traveling basket made from reeds for Cadin, which he hopped into when Maria whistled.

None of the American ships would take her on, for a baby was not welcome on board, and its cries and ailments were said to bring nothing but bad luck. Fortunately there was another possibility. The Jews here had founded the first synagogue in this part of the world, and the first cemetery was founded in 1659, called Beth Haim, “House of Life,” where the tombs were made of coral. Their settlement, the Plantation of Hope, had flourished; still many of their people had taken to the sea, carrying Torah scrolls from synagogues that had been burned to the ground in Spain and Portugal.

Many were merchants and translators and traders, but some of those who were sailors were actually pirates whose targets were Spanish ships; they felt it was their duty to take revenge on the country that had tortured and murdered their people. The Portugals were after gold and goods, but they also were known for transporting books, including outlawed literature that was said to incite slaves. There had been those who boarded their ships to steal their bounty, only to find wooden crates of books, worthless to some, a treasure to others.

There had been Jewish pirates reported by Josephus in the first century, and Jews had often lived at sea, especially when there was no country that would allow them entrance. Sinan, who sailed with the famous Barbarossa, had done his best to smash the Spanish fleet. Yaacov Kuriel had led the fleet, until he was imprisoned during the Inquisition. Many of these men had gold studs in their ears, often to mark a life that had been lost. They often hid their true identities, though there were some who recognized the gold chains they wore with charms imprinted with the Hebrew letter Hey. They made sausage from chicken, so if they were challenged and asked to eat pork to prove they were not of the tribe of Israel, they had their own false meat. These men journeyed to the ends of the earth, with many going as far as the Barbary Coast, where they often threw in with Moorish pirates in North Africa, who lived on a diet of blood rice, made with the blood of the lamprey eel, a creature older than the shark, a living fossil.