The other day, David Mendoza posted a page from the Bevis Marks Accounts Book for 5492 (1731/1732), showing the sums paid to ships’ captains to ferry refugee Marranos from Portugal and Spain to England. I have expanded this to cover the years 5488-5492 (roughly the third quarter of 1727 - 1732) and created an Excel spreadsheet that is fairly self-explanatory. Some background: The five year period concerned was the high point of new arrivals from Portugal, coinciding as it did with a particularly vicious resurgence of Inquisition activity. The refugees named in these documents were taking advantage of the Methuen Treaties signed between England and Portugal in 1703. These effectively exempted British ships from being searched by the Inquisition. In the beginnings the loophole was used by mostly wealthy Marrano families to escape, but by the period these documents covers, a trickle had turned into a flood, this time mostly of destitute families. The Mahamad was happy to pay for their passage. It meant a new stream of recruits to the congregation, who were moreover not forasteiros, poor Italians and Berbericos, but Portuguese escaping persecution, an important moral imperative for the Mahamad’s generosity. The Accounts show that in the years 5488-5492, the congregation paid for the passages of 290 individuals (give or take), with the highest number in 5488, at 128. By 1732, numbers were already beginning to tail off, with just 19 in that year. These are of course just those that the Mahamad paid the passages for; there will have been more who made their own way. The documents give the Captains’ names and sometime the ships’ names. Some captains appear more than once; Captain Benjamin Lyon, for example, looks to have been paid £103 for 52 passengers in five journeys. The most important data from our point of view are, of course, the names of the passengers. And here we have something extraordinary: Most of them are the refugees’ Catholic names. In the attached spreadsheet I have attempted to match as many of these as I could to the Hebrew names that appear in the Bevis Marks Records for circumcisions and ketubot. Some (most) of the identifications are speculative, which I have marked with a ‘?' After the Hebrew names. But it does give us a baseline for searching the Inquisition records for the Catholic names concerned, which may or may not help to confirm the Hebrew name identifications. One thing to note: The dates in the Accounts are not the dates of the voyage, I am pretty certain. They are when the captains were paid and/or the payment entered into the books. Judging by the corresponding circumcision and remarriage dates, they were paid in arrears, probably on account of some sort. I have also attached the Vindos de Portugal database that Kevin Martin drew attention to the other day, for cross referencing purposes.