The Freest Country

In a letter to his friend, the Cambridge don Charles Mason, the Reverend William Smith, a Church of England minister on the island of Nevis, described a recreational outing which took place ‘in the Month of July, 1719’, at which time ‘Mr Moses Pinheiro a Jew and myself, went to angle in Black Rock Pond’, a body of water ‘situate[d] a quarter of a mile or better Northwards from Charles Town our Metropolis or Capital, and about thirty yards distant from the Sea’.1 Smith lived in Nevis from 1719 to 1724, serving as rector of the parish of St. John’s Fig Tree, outside Charlestown, before returning to England to take up the well-endowed living of St. Mary’s, Bedford.2 As the island’s principal clergyman, he possessed considerable social capital, and his letters are lled with references to the elite men and women which whom he socialised. That he chose to befriend a Jew, and to give this relationship a prominent mention in correspondence with a friend in the metropole, implies that it was possible for Jews to form bonds of acceptance and friendship with Gentiles, even churchmen. But that Smith felt it necessary to identify Pinheiro exclusively in terms of his religion suggests that their friendship was complicated by the latter’s status as a member of a religious minority within colonial British America

Ancient history · Geography · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History