A Pirate's Tale: The Mystery of the Spanish Roses

Historical Note: 

Though our particular Rose family tree is firmly connected to Dutch stock with a documented pedigree to 17th century Holland, family lore has often speculated about what came before. 

The traditional Roosa origin story,first penned around 1730 by Arien van Rijckhuijsen—claimed that the family's founding father was named Goerts who fled religious persecution from a town called Rosas in Catalonia, Spain. This was the time of Spanish Inquisition and it is documented that many Spaniards did indeed flee to the Netherlands. In an even more fascinating twist, there were also family stories that this Goerts was Jewish. 

Particularly in the 20th century, with the abundance of genealogical research tools, the Spanish Roses theory was debunked. There are too many documents involving Roosas to deny a long tenure in Holland. However, there is a question that deserves an answer: how did the Spanish Rose tradition begin? In particular, how did such a specific, detailed story take root? That a Spaniard named Goerts, facing persecution during the Inquisition, was forced to flee Rosa Catalonia with his family for the more friendly home: Herwignen Amsterdam? Even more mysterious is the two hundred year legend that even in their new home, the Roosa’s were “crypto Jews”--secret sephardic jews pretending to be Protestant to avoid anti-semitism which,even then, was always a threat. 

While it is unlikely we will ever be able to solve all these mysteries with evidence, there are creative possibilities that can inspire our imagination and even provide a plausible explanation for some of the distinctive patterns in our history. In this dramatized story we will consider the story of Goerts as a redemption story–a Dutch slaver, trafficking Jews from Catalonia for selfish gain who, in the classic tradition, was transformed by God into a man who propelled his family to a devout life of faith for generations to come. Like another slaver who lived two hundred years later, John Newton from England, perhaps Goerts could have been gripped in his heart, mind and strength by “Amazing Grace.” 

A Wretch Like Me

The Sea did not terrify Captain Goerts, but the religious fire consuming Spain in the spring of 1492 filled him with an insatiable, predatory hunger. A vain and foul man, Goerts commanded The Black Rose, less a ship and more like a floating instrument of terror.  His crew bound to him by equal measures of fear and awe. He was a master of the shallow-water raid. As a privateer (pirate) he had spent years plundering coastal towns of Spain and making himself and his crew wealthy. But his true genius lay in a smelling opportunity: the precise moment when another man's ruin could become his own fortune.

That opportunity arrived when King Ferdinand and Isabella’s placed their seals on the Alhambra Decree. With a single stroke Spain’s ancient Jewish population was given an impossible ultimatum: renounce their ancestral faith for Roman Catholic baptism, or flee the kingdom within four months under pain of death. 

As the smoke of the Inquisition rose over the Iberian peninsula, the desperation fractured into two worlds. Some Jews chose the dangerous path of the "Crypto-Jew"—pretending compliance while desperately preserving their traditions in secret. Others chose exile, seeking a precarious safety in more tolerant northern havens like the Netherlands.Watching this human upheaval from the quarterdeck of The Black Rose, Goerts did not see a tragedy; he saw a goldmine.

Anchored in the shadowed, rocky bays near Rosas, Catalonia, Goerts prepared to turn his pirate vessel into a “rescue ship.” He used his cunning to spread the word through the villages of safe passage to Amsterdam. Only after inquiries from the desperate Jews would the details emerge.

Goerts did not deal in promises, and he certainly did not deal in Spanish maravedis—the common copper and silver coins flooding the desperate, collapsing markets of Catalonia. He demanded the only currency that held its weight in the shadows: gold ducats.

t its height in the fourteenth century, the Jewish population of Catalonia thrived, fifty thousand strong. But for a hundred years leading up to the Alhambra Decree, the winds of anti-Semitism had been gathering into a gale. By the spring of 1492, when Captain Goerts brought De Zwarte Roos t--The Black Rose--o troll the Spanish coast for desperate cargo, barely eight thousand souls—perhaps twenty-five hundred families—remained.

Goerts was a predator who knew how to scent ruin. He cunningly whispered his illicit services in the shadowed corners of Catalan taverns and crowded marketplaces, offering a treacherous lifeline for an extortionate fee.

It was there, in the port of Roses, that a gentle Jewish man named Abraham heard the rumors and considered a self-imposed exile. It was not his own skin he sought to save. His eyes were fixed on his wife, Miriam, who was great with child, carrying their firstborn.

Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares

Though by no means a wealthy man, Abraham carried a small inheritance of gold coin and ancestral jewelry passed down through generations of fathers. He arranged to meet Goerts in a pitch-black alleyway to bargain for their lives.

The arithmetic of tragedy was brutal. Where an honest merchant might charge a single gold piece for safe passage north, Goerts set the price of survival at twelve gold ducats per soul. But the captain's cruelty did not stop there. Spotting Abraham’s desperation, the ever-opportunistic scoundrel demanded an additional half-fare for the unborn child resting in Miriam’s womb.

It cost everything they possessed, supplemented by frantic, whispered loans from terrified neighbors. A deal was struck; a midnight date was set. Space on the pirate vessel was a luxury they could not afford. Goerts issued a final, merciless command: Take nothing but the clothes on your backs.

Like all observant families, Abraham and Miriam had always kept a mezuzah—the small, handwritten parchment scroll containing the sacred commands of Deuteronomy—affixed to the doorpost of their home:

"And you shall teach them diligently unto your children... and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates."

To leave it behind to be defiled by the Inquisition was unthinkable. Knowing the rumors of ruthless Spanish port guards and Goerts's own ban on baggage, Miriam took a quiet, desperate gamble. She unnailed the tiny scroll and carefully sewed it into the heavy, pleated hem of her travel skirt. Shielded by her pregnancy, she knew no guard would dare touch her. She kept the secret entirely to herself, fearing Abraham would panic at the sheer folly of the risk.

Under any other sky, Abraham would have sooner thrown himself into the sea than trust a black-hearted privateer like Goerts. Putting his family's future into the hands of a pirate seemed the height of madness. But Abraham's true anchor was not the captain. He chose to lean not on his own understanding, but to trust the God of his fathers with all his heart, believing that even through the hands of a rogue, the Almighty would direct their steps.

This was no voyage of comfort. The Black Rose offered no staterooms, no bedding, and no sanitation. The refugees were relegated to the dark, suffocating belly of the ship, surrounded by the constant terrors of Atlantic privateers and heavily armed Spanish galleons hunting for fleeing exiles.

But the truest enemy was the sea itself.

After clearing the Strait of Gibraltar and fighting their way up the Portuguese coast, the ship turned north for the great open-water sprint from northern Spain to the western coast of France. They had entered the Bay of Biscay. For a thousand years, mariners spoke of Biscay in whispers—a notorious graveyard of ships where the ocean floor rises abruptly, forcing massive, chaotic waves to collide with fierce Atlantic winds and blinding, pelting rains.

Goerts had crossed the notorious bay many times over his lawless career. Like all men driven by vanity, he faced the waters not with a sailor's respectful caution, but with a loud, profane defiance, cursing the waves as if they were rivals he could intimidate.

Yet, as the voyage wore on, a strange friction developed on board. Abraham was a man of simple goodness and an industrious spirit. Rather than cowering in the dark hold, he spent his days on deck, offering a steady hand to the sailors, hauling ropes, and earning the hard-won respect of a superstitious crew. Even Goerts’s calcified heart began to soften under the light of the young Jew's quiet dignity.

The Reckoning

By the third night in Biscay, the defiance died. The tempest worsened by the hour until the sea was a wall of black water. Screaming winds ripped at the canvas, and pelting rain turned the deck into a slick, lethal trap. The superstitious crew, convinced they were cursed, began to panic.

Abraham did not panic. With a hopeful, steadying smile, he grabbed a wooden bucket and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the sailors, bailing out the freezing water rushing over the gunwales. Watching from the quarterdeck, Goerts could not tear his eyes away from him. All his life, Goerts had been fueled by a bitter hatred and exploitation of others. But looking at Abraham, the foundations of his pride began to crack. As his men screamed curses into the wind, Goerts found himself uttering a frantic, clumsy prayer to a God he had spent a lifetime mocking:

"Help me... deliver us, and I will change my ways."

Then, the true darkness fell. The ship lost its steering, entirely at the mercy of the monstrous waves. Goerts, for the first time in his memory, felt utterly helpless, stripped of his vanity and abandoned by his wits.

Clinging to the mainmast as the wind shrieked through the rigging, Goerts caught the sound of a human voice defying the storm. He looked down.

There, kneeling on the water-soaked, shifting timbers of the deck, was Abraham. His eyes were turned upward toward the black sky, and pressed tightly against his forehead was the small, damp parchment scroll his wife had smuggled aboard. Through the roaring of the sea, his voice rose in a strange, ancient cadence:

"Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad."

Goerts did not know the tongue. He had no way of knowing that he was witnessing the oldest, most sacred confession of the Hebrew Bible—the Shema: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."

Though the words were entirely foreign to the Dutch captain, the scene froze before his eyes. The raging tempest in his chest suddenly went silent, and he saw his own wretched, arrogant life with terrifying clarity, as if waking from a long nightmare.

Paralyzed by an awe he could not define, Goerts could do nothing but watch the kneeling Jew. In that flashing moment, beneath the roaring skies of Biscay, the privateer knew the truth: the storm had not broken his ship, but it had utterly broken him. His life, and the bloodline that followed him, would never be the same.

How Precious Did That Grace Appear the Hour I First Believed 

Though history is littered with “foxhole prayers” uttered in desperation but quickly forgotten, it was not so with Goerts. After surviving Biscay, Goerts would enter the English Channel, keeping the coast of France to his starboard (right) and England to his port (left). He would sail past Flanders and the Hook of Holland, finally entering the complex inland waterways leading into Amsterdam. He had made the passage many times. But this one was different. “He once was lost but now was found; t’was blind but now he saw.” 

The Mystery 

It wouldn’t be hard to imagine why an upstanding noble family in Herwijnen named Roosa would want to hide stories of a rotten apple on the family tree. But such a story as this would go along way in solving many of the vexing mysteries of Roosa origins. For example, how did they become so wealthy? Could it be that the treasury that sustained them for generations had an ill-gotten history? The pirated booty of a Dutch privateer? Even less mysterious would be the Spanish and Jewish legends of the early Roses. If Goerts was a pirate, pillaging off the coast of Spain, it would be a simple thing to talk about Spanish origins–purposely or ignorantly making it sound as if Goerts himself had emigrated from Catalonia to flee religious persecution? 

But what of the Jewish element that survived for so many generations? If Goerts did indeed rescue a Jewish exile from Spain during the Inquisition, bits and pieces of the real story could have eventually confused the story of Abraham with Goert himself. It is factually intriguing to study the Roosa naming patterns in documents and find so many Jewish names! Long before they sailed to the New World they favored these names. 

Abraham Reijersen Sterck Roosa (b. 1520)

Gijsbert (Dutch for Jacob) Goertzen  (b. 1546) 

Aldert Heymans Roosa (b. 1618) “Heymans” is derivation from the Hebrew word “Chaim”--Life

And over the next generations, Jewish biblical names would continue, not only in the men but also in the women.