February 2024 update: I located Juan Cohen's death certificate, saying "Señor Juan Bautista Cohen (John Cohen), de ochenta y tres años de edad, casado, natural de Bristol, [...] Reino Unido de la Gran Bretaña" (John Cohen, 83 years of age, native of Bristol, UK) died on July 16, 1869 in El Carmen de Bolívar, Colombia.
June 2024 update: I found wills proving Juan Cohen was born "Jacob Cohen," and his birth family lived in Bristol and London, England. See my latest findings on my Cohen y Herrera Leiva family history page.
Juan Cohen distracts me at night. I'm searching Google and Google Books for clues about my 4th-great-grandfather, a man born c.1785? in Great Britain to a Jewish family, who possibly became a sailor and definitely became a merchant and slave owner, and who died c.1865 as the paterfamilias of a Catholic family in Colombia and the Dominican Republic. Juan's story is appropriately full of globalization, dramatic shifts in culture and geography, adventure, and even infectious disease.
For a man who lived over 200 years ago, Juan Cohen has a considerable paper trail but an incomplete story. There are mutiple sources on the latter half of Juan Cohen's life, when he was a merchant living on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and we have genetic evidence about his background, yet his parentage and the first half of his life remain mysteries.
A few sources mention a sailor named John Cohen who traveled through the Caribbean in the early 1800s. Could this "Sailor John" be the same man as my ancestor, "Trader Juan"? I lack any definitive answers, but for now here is a summary of the evidence I have collected:
1) DNA and Names
I am lucky to be in contact with D. Cohen, a direct-male descendant of Juan Cohen, who tested his Y-chromosome's DNA and confirmed that Juan Cohen's patrilineal ancestors had the Cohen Modal Haplotype. That means that Juan Cohen's direct-male line belonged to the Kohanim, the Jewish priestly caste. Perhaps Juan or his father performed the Kohen's priestly blessing in a synagogue.
No evidence indicates whether Juan Cohen was born Jewish and converted or was Christian from birth. D. Cohen's genetic tests results suggest he has an Ashkenazi Jewish ancestor born between 1750 and 1800. While that could be Juan himself, D. Cohen interprets this as Juan being the son of an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a gentile mother.
The genealogist Rocío Sánchez, who runs the Colombian history blog "Camino Arriba," gave me another potential clue embedded in a distant Cohen relative's family narrative. Juan Cohen is described as a "Syrian" rabbi named Isaac Cohen, who first settled in London, England and then came to Colombia. Juan Cohen had a documented grandson named Isaac Cohen (the great-grandfather of D. Cohen), who was born years after Juan's death. Was Isaac named after the dead grandfather Juan in the Jewish tradition, or was Isaac a family name?
2) The Life (Or Lives) of Sailor John Cohen
Clearly Juan Cohen took a ship to get from his homeland of Great Britain to Colombia. Naval records from this era mention one or more sailors named John Cohen.
First there is John Cohen, the veteran of the Napoleonic Wars.
The "UK Naval Officer and Rating Service Records" database on Ancestry.com has an entry dating from 1847 about John Cohen, who was born in c.1785 and at age 21 joined the crew of the HMS Blanche on March 31, 1806, five months after Admiral Nelson defeated the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar. His rank of "ordinary seaman" means he had at least one prior year's experience at sea.
John served on the Blanche until March 24, 1807, then joined the crew of the HMS Alfred the following day. On May 1, 1807 he was promoted to the rank of "carpinter's crew," a kind of specialist seaman. The HMS Alfred took part later that year in the Battle of Copenhagen, during which British ships bombarded the Danish capital for three days straight.
John's time aboard the HMS Alfred ended on May 24, 1809, and the following day he joined the crew of the HMS San Domingo. This third ship took part in the Walcheren Campaign of 1809, a failed British naval assault on the Netherlands. The service of this first John Cohen came to an end on September 4, 1810.
The Napoleonic Wars veteran's service came to an end at around the same time of the birth of Juan Cohen's first child, Henrique Cohen (aka Henry Cohen), in Great Britain. Henry's mother is listed on an 1852 baptismal record as "Eliza Macfarlane." The genealogist Rocío Sánchez believes that Henrique Cohen is the same as Henry Cohen, a 16-year-old British boy who sailed from Cartagena to New York aboard the brig Abigail in February 1826.
 |
| The sinking of the HMS Peacock (1813) |
Next, courtesy of the website 1812privateers.org, is John Coen, veteran of the War of 1812. This British sailor was aboard the HMS Peacock when it was sunk by the USS Hornet, on February 24, 1813 near the mouth of the Demerara River in what is now Guyana. This POW was detained in New York City until June 1813, when he was brought to Bermuda. While John Coen remained in U.S. custody, another Cohen attempted piracy on the high seas.
 |
| I stand at Cartagena's walls, under the flag of Cartagena (2015) |
The historian Edgardo Pérez Morales provides the next clue in his book No Limits To Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions. Pérez Morales quotes the Jamaican newspaper "Postscript to the Royal Gazette," which reported in mid-April 1813 on a ship of privateers called the Kingston Packet, led by two men named Philips and Cohen. The Kingston Packet flew the flag of Cartagena, which was now independent and fighting a losing battle against Spanish forces. The newspaper described the Kingston Packet's crew as a "band of desperados," consisting of "Americans, Frenchmen and Spaniards" (pp.38, 68).
The newspaper mentioned Philips again in mid-July 1813, noting he had won "two prizes" but considered quitting privateering to pick up his "old trade of turtling." Pérez Morales says that last detail might be "more mocking than accurate."
The first source I've found linking John Cohen and Cartagena is an article dating from December 1815, originally published in the Kingston Chronicle, another Jamaican newspaper, and then reprinted in British papers. General Pablo Morillo, who led the Spanish reconquest of Colombia, counted John Cohen among his prisoners:
"From the Kingston Chronicle, of December 30: — "A letter from Santa Martha to a Gentleman of this city, dated the 23d inst. states, that a Gentleman on his route to the head quarters of General Morillo's army, fell in with Messrs. John Macpherson, John Cohen, John Welsh, and Leonard Hebden (British subjects, and lately resident at Carthagena), stripped of every farthing they possessed in the world, and not even common rations allowed them by General Morillo. They had been ill of fever and ague for near two months, notwithstanding which, they were driven about, tied arm in arm, from town to town, without shoes or hates, existing merely upon the charity of the inhabitants. All their hopes were in the arrival of a British man of war to claim them as British subjects, and to carry them off. The property of Messrs. Macpherson and Hebden, General Morillo had in his own private possession.""
I am not sure yet how John Cohen escaped Spanish captivity, but it's no surprise that the next time Cohen appears he is on the side of the independistas. In May 1820, a budding scientist named Joaquín Acosta boarded the schooner (goleta in Spanish) of Captain J. Cohen, and they traveled from the Gulf of Urabá, near the current Colombian-Panamanian border, to the coast of San Blas in modern-day Panama.
The daughter of Joaquín Acosta, the writer and feminist Soledad Acosta de Samper, wrote how her father witnessed Cohen and his crew trading with the Indians of the coast of San Blas, and then conducting diplomacy that first night with the local cacique, Cuipana. Cohen honored the cacique Cuipana for his military actions against the Spanish with gifts from the local governor. The cacique received the flag of Gran Colombia and the title of "commanding governor-general of all the free people of the Coast of San Blas." Cohen then brought out a "demijohn of rum" and spurred on the festivities, and the Indians and Colombians ended the night by firing shots into the air from the ship's deck.
Joaquín Acosta took his leave of Captain J. Cohen the following day. Soledad Acosta quotes her father's letter saying he was "housed like a prince" aboard Cohen's ship, but she then snottily adds that it must have been a "miserable merchant schooner."
 |
| The Isla Ebusitana (1856), one of the world's oldest surviving schooners. |
When the independistas conducted a naval siege of Cartagena in 1821 and retook the city from the Spanish, among the ship commanders was a "Captain Cohen, Sephardic Jew of Curacao," as recorded in Vida del almirante José Padilla, 1778-1828 by historian Enrique Otero D'Costa. Cohen sailed a corsair brigantine named "El Centinela" (The Sentinel).
The main moment of the siege took place on the "Noche de San Juan," or the night of June 24, 1821, when Admiral José Prudencio Padilla captured 11 Spanish war ships. It's interesting that Juan Cohen is referred to as "Juan Bautista Cohen" in some family baptismal records. Did Juan adopt that name to remember his military action on the feast day of St. John the Baptist?
There is one more mention of "Sailor John" in another text by historian Edgardo Pérez Morales, Itineraries of Freedom: Revolutionary Travels and Slave Emancipation in Colombia and the Greater Caribbean 1789-1830. One page 238, he lists "the schooner Padilla, commanded by J. Coen" among ships that sailed into Cartagena in 1823 "after their respective privateering cruises." It's interesting that the schooner was named after the hero of the naval siege of Cartagena.
The newly independent nation of Gran Colombia (or after it split apart in 1830, Nueva Granada) soon dealt with a "British invasion" in the field of finance. That is where the story of "Trader Juan" begins.
3) The Life of Trader Juan Cohen
In January and September of 1823, a Mr. Cohen attended two London meetings of "holders of Colombian bonds." The previous year, the government of Gran Colombia took out a loan of £2 million, sparking a major British investing boom in Latin America that came crashing down by the end of the decade.
I cannot prove whether or not this Mr. Cohen at the shareholders' meeting is the same Cohen who led privateering voyages and fought in naval battles. If it is the same man, it is strange to read in the September 1823 article his objections about mundane procedural matters:
"Mr. Cohen said that it was quite irregular to address a Meeting where no Chair had been called."
"Mr. Cohen and several other Gentlemen protested against so strange and so irregular a mode of proceeding."
"Mr. Cohen said that he could not help thinking that the tendency of the Resolutions which had been read, prepared as they had been a day or two before the accounting day, were calculated only to throw difficulties and inconvenience in the way of the bondholders."
My ancestor Juan Cohen, the merchant, makes his first verified appearance in a pair of letters from 1825, in which he serves as an agent in Cartagena for Gualterio Chitty, aka Commodore Walter Dawes Chitty, former aide-de-camp of Simón Bolívar. Around this time Juan had a relationship with Manuela Arévalo, a woman who according to family legend came from Madrid, Spain but could have related to the descendants of Antonio de Arévalo, the architect who designed Cartagena's walls. Juan and Manuela had one son, Juan Agustín Cohen (c.1827-1878), and then Manuela died of yellow fever just a few months after the birth of her son.
As Juan Cohen suffered personal tragedy, his professional standing rose. He was appointed to the "Tribunal del Consulado" of Cartagena in 1828, and on October 9 of that year he co-signed a letter to Simón Bolívar expressing gratitude at his surviving an assassination attempt on September 25. The letter curses the conspirators against Bolívar:
"These traitors do not belong to Colombia; nor have they been able to belong to the heroic and magnanimous people who have received independence and freedom from the hand of Your Excellency; and whom Your Excellency has saved many times, and saves today from dissolution and anarchy."
My other family history blog gives a more detailed explanation of Juan Cohen's business and bureaucratic career and his descendants. In the 1830s Juan served as the administrator of the hacienda of the English merchant Henry Grice in Arjona, Colombia. There, Juan had a relationship with Pastora Herrera and they had one son, Juan José Cohen.
By the 1840s, Juan Cohen lived in Barranquilla, where he served on the district council and was the inspector of bogas (commercial rowboats). He married Bartola Villalobos, and they had at least five children: Vicente, Mercedes, Jorge, Leandro, and Mauricio Cohen Villalobos.
Notarial records from Cartagena show that Juan Cohen bought and sold enslaved people during this time. What I have found is probably a small sample of Juan Cohen's total dealings in slavery. In 1831, Juan sold an enslaved man named Juan José to Ramón Benedetti. In 1835, Juan bought an enslaved man named Mariano from Roberto M. Key, a landowner in Quibdó, Colombia. In 1847, Juan Agustín Cohen represented his father in the sale of an enslaved man named Simón Carrasco. Slavery finally ended in Colombia in 1851, and I am not sure if Juan Cohen continued "renting out" the labor of former slaves.
 |
| 1835 record of Juan Cohen purchasing Mariano, an enslaved man from Quibdo, Colombia. |
Towards the end of his life, Juan Cohen worked for the British firm Powles, Gower & Co., which traded tobacco grown in El Carmen de Bolívar, Colombia. When the firm went bankrupt following the Panic of 1857, Juan served as the receiver tallying the defunct firm's assets. A number of Juan Cohen's descendants still live around El Carmen de Bolívar.
Juan Cohen's last days are covered in a family history written by his granddaughter, Cándida Amelia Cohen de Marchena (aka "Tía Memé"), who was born in 1873 and wrote her narrative in 1967. Tía Memé Cohen said her father, Juan Agustín Cohen, settled in the Dominican Republic during its last days of Spanish rule and helped defeat the Spanish during the War of Dominican Restoration (1863-1865). Juan Agustín wanted to resettle his aged father from Colombia, but a few months after the war ended in March 1865 he learned in a letter that his father had died in a house fire. Another family story, collected by the genealogist Rocío Sánchez, says Juan Cohen died by falling off a horse.
The 70 or 80 years of Juan Cohen's life spanned from the end of the era of absolute monarchs, powdered wigs, and sailing ships to a world of steam locomotives and steamships, photography and telegraphs, and the first use of steel. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which boomed at the start of Juan Cohen's lifetime, ended through the efforts of multiple abolition and emancipation movements and wars. The major changes in Juan's life reflected the world's epochal transitions.
Update: I finished this blog entry on Tuesday morning. I'm happy to report that Allie's COVID-19 test came back negative. I'm less happy to see that the president wants to curtail quarantine measures in April in order to drive up the stock market and U.S. employment numbers. I hope to update this blog with more information about Juan Cohen, and I hope I can emerge from this quarantine into a healthier world.
March 2021 Update: I added Mauricio Cohen Villalobos, a fifth child of Juan Cohen and Bartola Villalobos, and corrected Gualterio Whilty (as Colombia's national archives identifies him) to Gualterio Chitty / Commodore Walter Chitty.
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
It´s a thrilling story and nice to read. My mom is a great-granddaughter of Juan José Cohen Herrera. We have lived for years in Cartagena and building some steps into our genealogy. Nice to know all these stories. I got here through your ruedaandfingerhut blog.
ReplyDeleteI hope all in your family are healthy in these days.
Thank you! Pablo Cohen
ReplyDeleteYou're quite welcome, Pablo! If you want to join the search for Juan Cohen, please email me at ruedafingerhut@gmail.com. Thank you for reading!
Delete