Carlos Enriques Clerque as crypto-Jewish confidence man in Francisco de Seyxas y Lovera\u27s Piratas y contrabandistas (1693)

Francisco de Seyxas y Lovera, in his book, Piratas y contrabandistas de ambas Indias, y estado presente de ellas, considers a category of pirates from the second half of the seventeenth century who differ from the men who populate most Hispanic writings on piracy from the Early Modern period. Carlos Enriques Clerque, the enigmatic mastermind of an English expedition to Chile in 1669 has appeared in numerous historiographical and literary texts, often in a manner at odds with the documentary evidence. The Hispanic view began to change in the second half of the nineteenth century when historians from Chile and Peru connected Carlos Enriques Clerque with the \u27Don Carlos\u27 of the Narborough journal. Working from the 1694 print edition, they came to see Enriques Clerque not as the captain of the expedition, but rather as its intellectual author and navigational guide. In the latter part of the twentieth century, scholars for the first time began to consider the archival evidence regarding Carlos Enriques Clerque in a systematic fashion. Seyxas employs the tale of Carlos Enriques Clerque to explore a larger sense of Hispanic unease during a period in which the economic and political crisis of the empire reached a point of maximum intensity