Narratives From the Sephardic Atlantic by Ronnie Perelis

Author:Ronnie Perelis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

Under Cover of Night: Escape from Lisbon

I began feeling affection for the people of the Nation, and I began to take on their struggles as my own.

Cardoso’s involvement in the failed attempt to help a group of New Christians escape from Portugal forms an essential part of his narrative of sacrifice and heroism on behalf of fellow Jews in the Vida. This episode also leads to his second arrest and imprisonment by the Lisbon Inquisition. The proceedings of his second trial before the Lisbon Holy Office provide details about this case, which supplement and problematize the narrative Cardoso crafts in his Vida.62 The trial records also deepen our appreciation of Cardoso’s relationship with the Dias Milão family and the ways he seems to insert himself into the fabric of the family despite their different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Before analyzing Cardoso’s treatment of this episode in his Vida, I will focus on the trial record in order to better understand this social dynamic and to foreground his autobiographical narrative of the same event.

In the beginning of the trial record, we find the testimony of two witnesses who saw a group of “reconciled” heretics boarding a skiff on the Tagus River in front of the Madre de Deus church. The witnesses claim that they recognized one of the passengers as the daughter of Enrique Dias Milão, who was burnt at the last auto-da-fé. Antonio Dalmeida, head of the Lisbon customs house, and his friend Bernardo Gomes saw the suspicious get-away from the steps of the church and called to have the passengers apprehended before they could reach the ship that would take them to the “lands of heresy.”63 These passengers were Cardoso and Isabel Henriques Milão and her “Indian” maid, Victoria Dias,64 whom he was accompanying to Antwerpt in an elaborate plan of escape that involved their boarding a small skiff and rowing downstream to an English ship waiting near the Belem neighborhood and ready to depart from the mouth of the harbor.65 At his trial, Cardoso admitted to contracting the captain and his boat to take these New Christians out of Lisbon,66 while also arguing that he and the other passengers were innocent—that they were not guilty of moving to lands of heresy because Antwerp was a Catholic city. He tells the Inquisitors that he had no ill intent because he did not think that he or the other passengers needed to receive explicit permission “from this table” to leave Lisbon once their penance was finished. He assures the Inquisitors that since his sentencing, he has been a good Catholic and asks them to verify this with the priests and officials who periodically visited him after his release.

In his testimony, Cardoso puts the brunt of the responsibility for the escape on his own shoulders. After many rounds of questioning, the only member of the Dias Milão family whom Cardoso identifies as being involved in the escape is Guiomar Gomes, the mother of Ana Enriquez Milão and of Fernao Lopes Milão. Lopes Milão is not directly implicated in the case, but he is close to Cardoso.

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