In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680-1783

In the Eye of All Trade

In the Eye of All Trade

Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783

Michael J. Jarvis

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. On November 15, 1996, the Institute adopted the present name in honor of a bequest from Malvern H. Omohundro, Jr.

© 2010 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jarvis, Michael (Michael J.)

In the eye of all trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the

maritime Atlantic world, 1680–1783 / Michael Jarvis.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3321-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Bermuda Islands —History, Naval—18th century.

2. Bermuda Islands —Social conditions —18th century.

3. Bermuda Islands —Commerce —History—18th century.

4. Bermuda Islands —Economic conditions —18th century.

5. Sailors —Bermuda Islands —History—18th century.

6. Slaves —Bermuda Islands —History—18th century.

7. Seafaring life —Bermuda Islands —History—18th century.

8. Shipping—Bermuda Islands —History—18th century.

9. United States —History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Influence.

10. United States —History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Economic

apects —Bermuda Islands. I. Omohundro Institute of Early

American History & Culture. II. Title.

F1637.J37 2010

972.99—dc22 2009039433

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

For my Parents, and for Anna, Charlotte, and Katie

Contents

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations and Short Titles

Currency, Weights, Measures, and Quotations

Introduction

IN THE EYE OF ALL TRADE

Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783

Chapter 1

COLONIZING PARADISE

The Somers Islands Company and Colony

Chapter 2

BERMUDA’S TURN TO THE SEA, 1685–1715

Chapter 3

BERMUDA’S MARITIME ECONOMY 1

Circumatlantic Shipping and Smuggling, 1715–1775

Chapter 4

BERMUDA’S MARITIME ECONOMY 2

Working the Atlantic Commons, 1690–1775

Chapter 5

A SEAFARING PEOPLE

Bermuda’s Maritime Society

Chapter 6

MARITIME MIGRATION, TRADE, AND ATLANTIC FAMILIES

Chapter 7

NAVIGATING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Epilogue

FROM SEAPORT TO SENTRY POST

The Decline of Maritime Bermuda, 1783–1820

Conclusion

FATE, CONTINGENCY, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARITIME AMERICA

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Maps

MAP 1   The Atlantic Arc of British America, ca. 1750 3

MAP 2   Prevailing Winds and Curr

ents of the Northern Atlantic Ocean 4

MAP 3   Bermuda’s Islands and Reefs 14

MAP 4   Sir George Somers’s Manuscript Map of Bermuda 15

MAP 5   Eastern Bermuda, ca. 1626 18

MAP 6   The Island of Bermudos 21

MAP 7   Paget, Pembroke, and Devonshire Tribes 25

MAP 8   Inset from A Chart of the Antilles 163

MAP 9   St. Eustatius on the Eve of the American Revolution 164

MAP 10 Bermuda’s West End 175

MAP 11 Atlantic Commons, Sites of Significant Bermudian Activity 186

MAP 12 Hispaniola and the Turks and Caicos Islands, ca. 1780 192–193

MAP 13 Grand Turk Island and Salt Cay 195

MAP 14 The Windward Passage 200–201

MAP 15 Detail from Thomas Jefferys’s Windward Passage, Showing the Caicos Bank and Islands 217

MAP 16 Campeche, Yucatán, and the Mosquito Coast, with the Cayman Islands and Jamaica to the East 221

MAP 17 Detail from Part of the Coast of Georgia with the Savannah River 238

MAP 18 Significant Sites of Bermudian Emigration, 1630–1770 319

MAP 19 The Carolinas, Florida, and the Bahamas Islands, 1755 328–329

MAP 20 Manuscript Map of St. George’s, Bermuda, ca. 1780 410

Plates

PLATE 1   Bermuda’s Forts, Capital Town, and Public Works 34

PLATE 2   The Old Rectory, St. George’s 92

PLATE 3   Bridge House, St. George’s 92

PLATE 4   The South Prospect of the Town of St. Georges in the Island of Bermuda 96

PLATE 5   Detail from Nicholas Scull’s Plan of the Improved Part of [Philadelphia] 124

PLATE 6   A Bermuda Sloop Coming to Anchor, Viewed from the Port Side 128

PLATE 7   Bermuda Sloop Leaving Castle Harbour 128

PLATE 8   Typical Newspaper Advertisements Posted by Bermudian Captains 140

PLATE 9   A View of the Island of St. Eustatius 166

PLATE 10 Artificial Salt Pans at Salt Cay, Turks Islands 209

PLATE 11 The Bermuda Privateer Sloop Devonshire Approaching a British Warship 243

PLATE 12 Recruiting Advertisement for the Bermuda-Built Privateer Trembleur 244

PLATE 13 Photograph of the Smith’s Island Whale House Tryworks 248

PLATE 14 Portrait of Anne Tucker of Southampton, with Her Children 282

PLATE 15 Hamilton, Bermudas 285

PLATE 16 The Flatts Village, Bermudas 288

PLATE 17 Advertisement for Mrs. Randle’s Coffeehouse at Mullard [Mullet] Bay 295

PLATE 18 Portrait of Sarah Riddell 306

PLATE 19 St. George’s, Bermuda 311

PLATE 20 Portrait of William Stone 361

PLATE 21 The Mallory Todd House in Smithfield, Virginia 367

PLATE 22 Portrait of Colonel Henry Tucker of Southampton 388

PLATE 23 Portrait of Governor George James Bruere 390

PLATE 24 Revolutionary War Newspaper Advertisements 413

PLATE 25 View of St. George, Bermuda 455

PLATE 26 The Royal Navy Dockyard, Ireland Island 456

Tables

TABLE 1 Bermuda and Virginia / Chesapeake Tobacco Exports, 1614–1625 and Select Other Years 28

TABLE 2 Population Trends in Bermuda, 1679–1721 101

TABLE 3 Shipping Traffic in Select British Atlantic Seaports and Colonies, 1714–1725 114

TABLE 4 Vessels Clearing Leading (>50 Annual) North American Ports, 1772 123

TABLE 5 Bermuda’s Merchant Fleet, 1700–1774 131

TABLE 6 Bermuda Port Traffic for Select Years, 1716–1772 132

TABLE 7 Bermudian Estates Owning Slaves, 1690–1774 268

TABLE 8 Domestic Activities Reflected in Bermuda Probate Inventories, 1690–1774 287

TABLE 9 Select Genteel Items Listed in Bermuda Inventories, 1690–1774 308

Abbreviations and Short Titles

ADM Admiralty Records, NA AO Audit Office Series, NA APC, Col. Ser. Great Britain Privy Council, Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, 6 vols., ed. W. L. Grant, James Munro, and Almeric W. Fitzroy (London, 1908–1912) BA Bermuda Archives, Hamilton, Bermuda BCAP Bermuda Court of Assize Proceedings, BA BCL Bermuda Colonial Legislature BCR Bermuda Colonial Records (1615–1713), 9 vols., BA BCV Bermuda Composite Volumes (formerly Bermuda Book of Bills, Bonds, Deeds, Protests, Grants, Warrants, Etc. [1693–1781]), 14 vols., BA Bermuda Wills Bermuda Book of Wills (1629–1835), 15 vols., BA BHQ Bermuda Historical Quarterly BHS Bermuda Historical Society BJAMH Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History BL British Library, London BLO Bodleian Library, Oxford BNT Bermuda National Trust BT Board of Trade CO Colonial Office, NA CSP, Col. Ser. Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and the West Indies, 44 vols. (London, 1860–1978) CTP Council of Trade and Plantations CUST HM Customs and Excise, NA DNB Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols., ed. Leslie Stephen, Sidney Lee, et al. (Oxford, 1885–1901) HCA High Court of Admiralty, NA Journal of Bermuda Assembly Ancient Journals of the House of Assembly of Bermuda, from 1691 to 1785, 3 vols. (Hamilton, Bermuda, 1890) LTP Lords of Trade and Plantations NA National Archives, Kew Gardens, London NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. NEHGR New England Historical and Genealogical Register NOSL Naval Office Shipping Lists NWIC Nieuw West-Indische Compagnie (Dutch New West India Company) Papers, Nationaal Archief, The Hague ODNBO The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online PC Registers of the Privy Council, NA PROB Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Great Britain, NA SCHGM South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine SCHM South Carolina Historical Magazine SIC Somers Islands Company TCP Tucker Coleman Papers, Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia VAC Bermuda Vice-Admiralty Court VACP Vice-Admiralty Court Proceedings, BA VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography WMQ William and Mary Quarterly

Currency, Weights, Measures, and Quotations

To make Bermuda’s maritime activities broadly comparable with those of other Atlantic places, I have converted whenever possible business transactions from local colonial and international currencies into pounds sterling using John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1978), unless noted otherwise. For standardizing the weights and measures of various commodities shipped in Atlantic vessels, I have used the ratios in John J. McCusker, The Tonnage of Ships Engaged in British Colonial Trade during the Eighteenth Century, Research in Economic History 6 (1981): 91–94, supplemented with information from Lester A. Ross, Archaeological Metrology: English, French, American, and Canadian Systems of Weights and Measures for North American Historical Archaeology (Ottawa, 1983).

I have retained original spelling when quoting material from historical sources, but I have modernized the orthography. I have also modernized punctuation and capitalization in quotations and expanded common contractions.

In the Eye of All Trade

Introduction

In The Eye of All Trade

Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783

What did early America look like from the deck of a ship, and how might this perspective change the ways we understand it? This book positions itself at the intersection of maritime history, Atlantic history, and colonial American history to consider an Atlantic world that was in motion and evolving in the century before the American Revolution. It focuses on British American mariners and the vital role they played in connecting Atlantic regions. It invites readers to see the Atlantic world through the eyes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bermudian seafarers and explore the maritime world they inhabited. With such a gaze, we can appreciate better how prominently the Atlantic Ocean figured in Americans’ lives.

Atlantic history should rest on a maritime foundation. Early modern Americans were well acquainted with sailing vessels. For immigrants and slaves, crossing the Atlantic in ships was often a life-changing experience. American colonists frequently traveled in boats and coastal vessels to avoid slow, tedious, or dangerous overland journeys through wilderness. Even in settled areas, travel by road involved teeth-jarring journeys along dusty or muddy routes and delays precipitated by broken carriages, lamed horses, swollen rivers, and inclement weather. Sailing vessels carried the commodities that settlers produced, transporting them from the seaport entrepôts where exports were gathered to overseas markets. They also brought in the many tools, textiles, ceramics, and other manufactured items that Americans could not make for themselves. Maritime commerce shaped the pace and direction of colonies’ development, promoting staple specialization in the Sugar Islands of the West Indies, diversification in the middle colonies, and shipping, shipbuilding, and naval stores industries in New England, North Carolina, and Bermuda. Ships linked frontier backwoodsmen and yeoman farmers with colonial and British merchants, African slaves, Caribbean planters, and a host of English manufacturers. News, letters, books, and information were part of the cargoes that ships carried, serving as agents of a broader panatlantic process of cultural integration that was transforming societies on both sides of the Atlantic. The eighteenth-century ship combined the modern-day services of Greyhound, Roadway, Amtrak, and Verizon and was the principal — and often the sole — vehicle on early America’s information highway.

A mariner’s view of early America supplements our terrestrial framing of British American geography with an alternative Atlantic-centered one. We have been conditioned by countless textbook maps to see colonial America, early America, or British America as the stretch of North American coast from Florida to present-day Maine or Nova Scotia, depending on the map’s cropping. The thirteen colonies appear as a line of settlements running in a southeast-to-northeast direction. These maps privilege western lands and deemphasize water. Besides wrongly reducing British America to only the thirteen colonies, these maps distort the Atlantic world by excluding or relegating to the fringes Newfoundland and the Caribbean and marginalizing the Atlantic Ocean itself. If Bermuda and the Bahamas appear on these maps, they are usually not labeled — a fitting visual reflection of their neglect in most historical narratives. Most textbooks similarly neglect the Caribbean, only supplying brief coverage surrounding Columbus’s voyages, early Spanish conquests, and perhaps the rise of sugar plantations, and segregate it visually from North America by displaying it on separate maps. Even as new Atlantic histories emphasize early America’s considerable interregional connections, cartographic representations persist in separating its parts and in emphasizing land over the bridging ocean.¹

If we discard Europeans’ predilection for placing north at the top of maps and approach British America from a mariner’s point of view, a more authentic geography encompassing the full scope of British America emerges. Jamaica and the quasi settlements of Belize and the Mosquito Coast in the Caribbean and Hudson Bay excepted, nearly all of British America was arrayed along a continuous curving arc of islands and coastline stretching from Newfoundland to Tobago (map 1). Bermuda lay at the center of this vast British American crescent, roughly equidistant from all points on its rim. Almost every major seaport lay within a thousand miles of the island. But distances on maps can be misleading: in the age of sail, ocean currents and prevailing winds modified strictly linear distances. In both local situations and when undertaking long-haul voyages, winds and waves stretched or shrank mariners’ transit times. The thousand-mile voyage from Barbados to Jamaica, for instance, usually took a week or less, but to make the same trip in the reverse direction was virtually impossible: the steady trade winds that aided westward passages became powerful headwinds against which few vessels could sail. In fact, the most practical course from Jamaica to Barbados for eighteenth-century ships routed them past Bermuda and took a month or more. The blank blue expanses of most Atlantic maps obscure a more complex nautical geography, where a straight line is not always the shortest sailing distance between two points.²

MAP 1 The Atlantic Arc of British America, ca. 1750. Drawn by Elizabeth Eaton

Prevailing western North Atlantic current and weather patterns further intensified Bermuda’s geographical centrality within British America (map 2). The warm Gulf Stream waters that flow past the island supported the world’s northernmost coral reef and carried vessels sailing from the Caribbean to Europe within a few score miles of Bermuda. North of Bermuda, westerly winds propelled ships from the middle and northern colonies eastward to Europe. South of Bermuda, strong and steady northeast trade winds sped vessels bound for the Caribbean or North America’s southern coast to their destinations. Vessels from New England and midatlantic colonies bound for the eastern Caribbean harnessed both of these wind systems, sailing east past Bermuda before turning

MAP 2 Prevailing Winds and Currents of the Northern Atlantic Ocean. Drawn by Elizabeth Eaton

south to reach the Leeward and Windward islands. Although wind systems and the track of the Gulf Stream shifted seasonally, Bermuda remained at the cusp of the North Atlantic’s major current and weather systems. From this natural navigational crossroads, Bermudian vessels quickly and easily sailed to and from ports in British America throughout the year. By the 1680s, Bermuda increasingly lay in the eye of all trade athwart several major shipping lanes. One Bermudian governor estimated that nine out of ten vessels making Caribbean-European and North American–Caribbean voyages passeth unavoidably by his island.³

Bermuda’s colonization also played a crucial role in English Atlantic expansion. Founded within five years of Jamestown’s settlement, Bermuda remains Great Britain’s oldest and smallest colony. The island was fully settled before much of English America was even conceived. Overcrowding quickly led Bermudians to depart for other American destinations. The expansion of English America and the spread of Bermudians were linked: migrating islanders were frequently the founding settlers in other colonial ventures.

Early maritime forays in the 1650s culminated in a decisive shift to seafaring in the 1690s, transforming Bermuda into perhaps the most intensively maritime colony within the British Empire. Hitching their fortunes to the sea, eighteenth-century Bermudians scoured the western Atlantic for opportunities and built up an expansive commercial network. As carriers and traders sailing in their famously fast sloops, Bermudians often disregarded imperial borders and restrictive trade laws. They regularly traded with Danish and Dutch Caribbean islands and exploited barren islands and deserted coasts on the fringes of empires. Making full use of slave labor to build and man their sloops, Bermudians also pioneered a maritime slavery that materially differed from the plantation slave system. Finally, this book’s consideration of Bermudian maritime activities offers a counterpoint to New England–based American maritime studies that highlights both the distinct character of New England’s maritime enterprises and the considerable range of maritime pursuits in which other Anglo-Americans engaged.

This book also takes an organic approach to investigating Atlantic history, defined here as the study of how three races and scores of cultures living on the four continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean became increasingly interconnected in the centuries after 1492. The recent emergence of an Atlantic perspective that seeks a systemic understanding of early American, European, and western African history within a broader geographic framework has reinvigorated scholarship, generated new insights, and challenged older nation-based and nationalistic historical narratives. David Armitage notes the often overlapping transatlantic, circumatlantic, and cisatlantic facets of recent Atlantic studies, stressing transnational networks and cross-cultural sharing, the circulation of peoples, ideas, diseases, and commodities within geographic systems, and the impact of global and Atlantic forces, events, and exchanges in particular communities. The most ambitious Atlantic histories map connections within the whole Atlantic world or within imperially, nationally, or ethnically inflected Atlantic worlds. In considering early America from a mariner’s perspective, this book seeks to recover the particular Atlantic world that Bermudians inhabited in the long eighteenth century (1689–1815). Gazing landward from a Bermuda sloop illuminates only portions of the Atlantic world, taking in only those places where Bermudian mariners went. Accordingly, the chapters that follow omit many places and activities relevant to other Atlantic histories — frontier fur trading with native Americans, mining silver in Spanish America, and fishing for cod in the North Atlantic, to name three — but introduces others that are rarely considered. Bermuda’s eighteenth-century Atlantic world was geographically lopsided; it had only tenuous transatlantic links with Africa and Europe but dense connections with its American neighbors. I use the terms maritime America and the maritime Atlantic world geographically to refer to islands and coastal regions where maritime exchanges were most intensive and sustained, and I use the term America expansively to refer to both Caribbean and continental locations rather than as shorthand for North America’s thirteen colonies. (I eschew the term colonial America because of its geographic and temporal ambiguities: Bermuda, after all, is still a British colony and its colonial history thus extends to the present.) My approach draws on all three of Armitage’s conceptual formulations but particularly stresses Bermuda’s circumatlantic connections and cisatlantic aspects of how Bermudian seafaring shaped island life.⁴

Finally, this book is a maritime social history. Most maritime histories focus on navies or on large transatlantic ships and living conditions and labor relations on board them, but America looked different from the deck of a coasting sloop. Exploring Bermudians’ Atlantic world sheds light on how small American intercolonial traders conducted business: often they did so improvisationally, leaving few historical traces. Bermudians were exceptional in their heavy dependence on the sea, but their business strategies and sailing routes were the same as those of many other Anglo-American mariners. By examining the seafaring and shoreside components of mariners’ lives, this book places seafarers within the larger maritime communities to which they belonged. This approach helps to shed light on the experiences of the hundreds of enslaved black Bermudian sailors who spent much of their working lives afloat, shuttling among American colonies. Throughout, this book is thick on description in its efforts to illuminate the experiences of a host of traditionally inarticulate historical subjects—sailors, slaves, women, woodcutters, squatters—because we have no letters, diaries, or other direct sources from them. Understanding their Atlantic world depends significantly on reading their behavior and actions in lieu of their words. It is not, strictly speaking, a conventional history of Bermuda since I privilege maritime connections and activities over island events and developments and leave out much that would be important to a local history. And although slavery is central to Bermuda’s history and development, I have resisted topically segregating it in order to integrate its maritime manifestations through all the chapters.⁵

CHARTING THE COURSE

This book proceeds chronologically and topically through the Atlantic worlds of Bermudians, charting the rise and fall of their maritime economy. The first two chapters chronicle how Englishmen transformed a small, uninhabited cluster of islands into a successful colony and how that colony became an intensely maritime place, home to a seafaring people. After an accidental shipwreck identified Bermuda as a viable site for settlement, the Virginia and Bermuda companies quickly colonized the island and established an agrarian economy based on tobacco cultivation. As the population grew and emigrants discovered opportunities overseas, the Somers Islands Company and its colonists fought over the island’s place within the emerging English Atlantic world. Freed in 1684 from company restraints, Bermudians rushed to embrace seafaring as an economic base and a way of life. Chapter 2 chronicles how this turbulent maritime transition unfolded and the changes it wrought on the colony’s landscape and society. By 1700, the new maritime economy had radically expanded most Bermudians’ world well beyond the island’s rocky shores.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore Bermudians’ diverse maritime activities and chart the geographical contours of their Atlantic world. Chapter 3 profiles Bermudian shipbuilding and the intercolonial carrying trade that became the mainstay of the new maritime economy. Built and operated largely as family enterprises, Bermuda sloops called at virtually every British American seaport (and many foreign ports as well) and specialized in linking North American and Caribbean markets. Because Bermuda conducted little trade with Great Britain, much of its commerce escaped customs-house documentation. This is especially true for Bermudians’ smuggling with the Dutch Caribbean islands and for their various extractive enterprises. Bermudian captains also turned their fast vessels to privateering during the eighteenth century’s colonial wars. Together, these chapters shed light on a considerable volume of petty trading in small craft, poorly recorded economic activities occurring on the watery frontiers of empires, and illicit commerce carefully concealed from an imperial gaze.

Chapter 5 takes stock of how seafaring shaped Bermudian society. Answering Daniel Vickers’s call to recover the shoreside context of seamen’s lives, it explores how Bermudian families and households accommodated a demanding maritime economy. The sea’s impact on the island’s population and social structure was pronounced. Extended maritime absenteeism and high male mortality rates produced a sharp sex imbalance and fostered substantial female autonomy within the colony. Women’s and children’s domestic work complemented men’s more visible seafaring and sustained maritime families in vital ways. Access to multiple Atlantic markets enabled even poor island households to acquire genteel goods and enjoy relatively high standards of living. But seafaring also exacted a heavy price in lives, leaving many island women widowed or with dim marriage prospects. This chapter contrasts the popular image of sailors as rootless, alienated, and disruptive men with the reality of Bermuda’s family- and career-oriented seafarers.⁶

Chapter 6 addresses how Bermudian families strategically migrated to other colonies to extend kin-based commercial and communication networks and how Bermudian emigrants helped to develop the seaports and regions where they settled for their own ends. Through case studies of Bermudians in the Bahamas, the Chesapeake, and the Carolinas and Georgia, this chapter reveals how Atlantic families spread out across oceanic distances and how white and black members of emigrating Bermudian households reestablished aspects of island life in their new American homes. It presents another view of dynamic colonial entrepreneurs at work and highlights the self-organized character of much Atlantic business.

The last chapter considers Bermudian mariners’ struggle to remain competitive as American shipping lanes became increasingly crowded in the 1760s and shows how the American Revolution shattered the intercolonial networks that Bermudians had built up over a century. Bermudians faced a desperate choice between famine and treason as their connections with North America and the Caribbean broke down. Dependent on the thirteen colonies for food and shipbuilding material, Bermudians supplied salt, sloops, gunpowder, and munitions to their rebellious neighbors. Torn between their extensive ties to both North America and the Caribbean and profoundly vulnerable to invasion, Bermudians struggled to steer a neutral course throughout the war, trading as much as they dared with the United States while proclaiming continued loyalty to Great Britain. Through the profound disruptions it caused, the American Revolution threw into sharp relief the considerable intercolonial integration that had occurred in preceding decades. Considering the Revolution from the decks of merchant vessels and loyalist privateers also sheds light on important but overlooked international maritime aspects of the war. A short epilogue chronicles how Bermuda’s flexible maritime economy unraveled in the wake of U.S. independence as deep structural changes took place within the maritime Atlantic world. After 1783, Bermuda became strategically too important to Great Britain to be left to mere Bermudians, and the island was accordingly garrisoned and fortified. Bermuda was refashioned as the Gibraltar of the West, a naval outpost well positioned for strikes against the United States. By 1820, Bermuda’s maritime moment had passed.

Motion was the defining characteristic of the Atlantic world. Connections and linkages across space are central to all Atlantic histories. Whether the focus is people, plants, ideas, diseases, religious doctrines, texts, technologies, or commodities, crossing water remains the assumed or explicit common denominator in most Atlantic studies. Seafarers set the Atlantic world system into motion and kept it moving at an ever-accelerating pace in the centuries after 1492. They were responsible for the main transatlantic flows and the numerous smaller streams swirling between continents and American regions. While acknowledging the importance, even the primacy, of oceanic connections, Atlantic historians too often leave unexplored the complexity, mechanics, and varieties of maritime linkages or fail to appreciate their historical development. In profiling how Bermudian mariners worked the reefs, forests, salt pans, sea-lanes, and international markets of maritime America to support themselves and their families, this book also argues that individuals, as much as corporations, nation-states, and imperial bureaucracies, expanded and integrated the various parts of the Atlantic world into a greater whole.

1

Colonizing Paradise

The Somers Islands Company and Colony

Bermuda came to occupy a central place within the early modern Atlantic world, but when Portuguese mariner Juan Bermudez discovered his namesake island around 1505, much of that world was inchoate, existing more in the dreams and ambitions of European colonial promoters than in any tangible form. The same was true a century later when a group of English castaways became Bermuda’s first settlers. As new European settlements sprang up on Caribbean islands and along the North American coast and the number of sailing vessels plying Atlantic waters multiplied, an Atlantic system of colonies and markets coalesced. Bermudians, along with other Anglo-American colonists, populated the periphery of a London-centered empire, but over time islanders also developed an alternate perspective, one that placed them at the center of England’s emerging Atlantic system.

Bermuda’s early history highlights the tensions between metropolitan sponsors and colonial foot soldiers over who should profit the most from new American colonies. In Bermuda’s case, the contest pitted islanders struggling to capitalize on their Atlantic centrality against English investors intent on perpetuating the tobacco-based economy that settlers pioneered in the 1610s. For three generations, the London-based Somers Islands Company and tobacco shaped island life and local colonial development. The company largely determined who came to Bermuda, how the colony was settled, and the contacts that Bermudians had with their English colonial neighbors. Tobacco played a starring role in Bermuda’s initial success and long-term struggles. Tobacco drew hundreds to Bermuda and early rewarded planters’ efforts, but then it challenged them to remake their lives after it became virtually worthless in the late 1620s. This chapter profiles the Puritan planters who first settled Bermuda and examines how, in their struggles with economic downturns, local overcrowding, and the Somers Islands Company’s monopoly claims, they planted the seeds of the island’s later maritime expansion.

SHIPWRECK

Bermuda’s settlement began with a particular view from a specific ship at a pivotal historical moment. In late July 1609, after fighting a four-day losing battle against a hurricane, the Sea Venture was on the verge of sinking. Exhausted passengers and crew had given up on pumping out the seawater that was inexorably filling her hull and some of the sailors had broken into the spirits locker in order to get blissfully drunk before they drowned. As dawn broke on the morning of July 28, a lookout spied a thin strip of land on the horizon — a miraculous vision, given the vastness of the Atlantic. Admiral Sir George Somers and Captain Christopher Newport at once recognized it as uninhabited Bermuda. The island chain had another more sinister name, the Isle of Devils, that superstitious mariners had bestowed upon it, but with their ship foundering, Somers and Newport had little choice but to land. They ran the lumbering hulk through Bermuda’s reefs and onto some rocks within a mile of shore. As the castaways stepped ashore without the loss of a single life, they set into motion a chain of events that led to Bermuda’s English colonization and its eventual development as one of the most sea-centered settlements in the British Atlantic world.

During the century before the Sea Venture survivors arrived, dozens of homeward-bound European ships had wrecked on Bermuda’s reefs as a consequence of the devil’s bargain that early modern seafarers struck with the island. In an age when oceanic navigation was more art than science, homeward-bound Iberian mariners learned to sail east along the thirty-second degree north latitude until they sighted the island and then take a northeasterly course to Spain. But in using Bermuda to firmly fix their positions in the vast Atlantic, captains risked their lives and their ships. Subject to sudden, intense storms and fluctuating ocean currents, the waters around Bermuda were particularly dangerous and soon earned a sinister international reputation. Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Ralegh both noted the hellish sea for thunder, lightning and stormes surrounding Bermuda. Samuel Champlain encountered very tempestuous weather and waves as high as mountains there as well. Another English captain wrote in 1599 that it was a generall actioma [axiom] of all seafaringe men . . . both of our English and the Spanish, French and Portingall, that hell is noe hell in comparison to sailing past Bermuda.¹ Modern research on global weather patterns has revealed that, during the so-called Little Ice Age (circa 1350–1800), the ocean surrounding Bermuda was one to two degrees centigrade cooler than it is now. Cooler waters would have produced stronger but more erratic Gulf Stream flow and northeasterly winds and more frequent and intense mid-ocean storms. Bermuda, in short, deserved its notoriety among sixteenth-century seafarers.²

How did these men explain this particular patch of volatile sea? In an age notable for its intense spiritual beliefs, European mariners concluded that the devil or his minions were in the water or close at hand. From there it was not difficult to conclude that the uninhabited low-lying, reef-strewn cluster of islands at the center of this stormy region was an inchanted den of Furies and Devils (map 3). By the time Somers and Newport landed there, Bermuda was reputed a most prodigious and enchanted place, and was avoided as [an Atlantic] Scylla and Charybdis. Mariners shunned it as they would shun the Devil himself.³

As flagship of a nine-vessel supply fleet, the Sea Venture was bound to Virginia, England’s only overseas colony in 1609. After two years of exploration and experimentation, the Virginia Company had radically stepped up its commitment to the struggling Jamestown venture. The Third Supply, as the fleet was known, was carrying supplies, livestock, and some 600 new settlers. Sir Thomas Gates, Virginia’s new governor, took passage on the Sea Venture, along with 150 other settlers. Sir George Somers, a famous but aging Elizabethan sea dog, served as admiral of the fleet, while veteran captain Christopher Newport (another sea dog) commanded the Sea Venture. They were only days away from reaching their destination when the hurricane struck the fleet and scattered its vessels. Passenger William Strachey, an experienced traveler, judged that all that I had ever suffered gathered together might not hold comparison with this storm. The odds of fetching up near tiny Bermuda after being driven six hundred miles off the American coast were incredible, but God was with the would-be Virginians — or at least that’s what they thought. Thus began a ten-month occupation during which Bermuda was transformed from the Isle of Devils into the Summer Islands, from a place to avoid into a paradise that invited settlement.⁴

Gates and his castaways immediately began remaking Bermuda by christening their landfall St. George’s Island to honor England’s patron saint. Exploration demystified the island (map 4). During the months the sojourners spent building two vessels to complete their journey to Virginia, Gates and Somers mapped the island’s twenty square miles and cataloged Bermuda’s considerable

MAP 3 Bermuda’s Islands and Reefs. Extending up to ten miles from the low-lying islands, Bermuda’s offshore reefs claimed scores of unsuspecting sailing vessels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. J. W. Norie, Heather’s Improved Chart of the Bermudas, Drawn from the Best Surveys, 1814. Courtesy of the Bermuda Maritime Museum

MAP 4 Sir George Somers’s Manuscript Map of Bermuda, ca. 1609, with Later Place-Names Added. The Sea Venture sank to the east of the area labeled Somers Creake (right-hand side of map). Courtesy of the Bermuda National Trust

natural resources: bays teeming with fish, lobsters, and turtles, forests of mangroves, palms, and cedar trees, herds of feral Spanish hogs that had multiplied after surviving some earlier shipwreck, and docile cahow birds (one man could catch as many as three hundred of these fearless, tasty birds an hour). Indeed, Bermuda was so appealing that Gates had to face down three mutiny attempts by sailors and passengers who wished to stay there. Tensions ran particularly high as the replacement vessels neared completion, and in the end two sailors remained behind when the Sea Venture’s company finally departed in May 1610. They set out laden with supplies of salt pork, turtle, and cahows — and the epiphany that an island previously considered the most dangerous, infortunate and most forlorne place in the world was in truth the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land . . . as ever man set foote upon.⁵

When Gates reached Jamestown two weeks later, he found it in shambles. Although seven of the original nine vessels in the Third Supply had survived the hurricane and reached Virginia, most of their passengers were now dead. War with the Powhatan Indians, famine, and disease had reduced Jamestown’s population to sixty sickly survivors. During the same winter that Sea Venture survivors feasted on wild hogs and fish in Bermuda, Virginia’s settlers starved and resorted to murder and cannibalism. With James Fort’s walls and houses falling down, fresh graves in abundance, and hostile Indians lurking only a musket’s shot away, Jamestown must have proved a shocking disappointment. During their Atlantic odyssey, the Sea Venture castaways had seen both heaven and hell. The contrast between the lush, safe splendor of Bermuda and the wasted, war-torn wilds of Virginia could not have been sharper.⁶

The timely arrival of the well-manned Fourth Supply Fleet and a new governor saved Virginia from collapse and decisively shifted efforts there to a genocidal war aimed at wiping out Powhatan and his people. Back in England, the no less timely arrival of Sir Thomas Gates, seemingly back from the dead and with revelations of Bermuda’s true nature, proved equally vital to the Virginia Company’s survival. The company rushed several accounts into press that detailed Gates’s Bermuda interlude and stressed God’s role in rescuing him from a watery grave and saving Jamestown from starvation. Minister Lewis Hughes explained that the Sea Venture story demonstrated how God favored England over her Catholic rivals: The King of kings hath kept these Ilands from the King of Spaine and all other kings in the world till now that it hath pleased [Him] to bestow them upon England. In their lavish praise of Bermuda’s natural riches, the accounts also promoted colonization of the island. The Virginia Company kept popular interest in Bermuda alive by naming a new Virginia settlement upriver from Jamestown Bermuda City and another Bermuda Hundred in 1611. By emphasizing the providential elements in the Sea Venture story and vigorously associating Virginia with Bermuda, the Virginia Company successfully distracted public attention from the tragic fate of the Third Supply’s other emigrants and even managed to attract new investors. One wonders what would have happened to Virginia had the Sea Venture sunk with all hands.⁷

VISION

Two years later, a small group of Virginia Company investors embarked on colonizing Bermuda after the company secured a new royal charter to include the island within its domain. The new enterprise had two distinct advantages over the Virginia venture: investors and colonists knew exactly what they were getting into in colonizing Bermuda and would not have to contend with an indigenous population. Virginia’s first settlers had to simultaneously explore and exploit a largely unknown region and were saddled with unreasonable investor expectations arising from rosy promotional tracts. Bermuda’s founders, in contrast, had a map of the entire island chain and its reefs and channels, as well as a clear understanding of what they would find and could do there. Gates and Somers’s earlier exploration and agricultural experimentation also revealed the variety of European and American plants that could be grown in Bermuda’s semitropical climate. The men that remained behind cleared and planted fields of corn, beans, melons, and tobacco, effectively building up a stock of seeds, provisions, and valuable cultivation knowledge that benefited later arrivals. The absence of Indians allowed settlers to immediately begin clearing and farming the land. Somers’s map showed that, as a colony, Bermuda would be far easier to defend than Virginia against rival European assaults. Its reefs offered formidable natural bulwarks, and forts built near Bermuda’s two deepwater channels would render the colony virtually invulnerable to naval attack. Securing Bermuda, in short, would not be nearly as costly or distracting as securing Virginia.⁸

The Virginia Company expected Bermuda not only to prosper quickly and return investments in its own right but also to complement Virginia and through its aydefull vicinitie fix some of the logistical problems that had emerged there. Supplying the Chesapeake from Bermuda rather than England would be quicker and cheaper and would free beleaguered Virginians from their precarious dependence on Indians for food. The island’s semitropical climate would support various plants that had failed to flourish in the Chesapeake. Cultivating sugar, wine, olives, oranges, and other lucrative staples in Bermuda would enrich the Virginia Company and at the same time free England from having to purchase them from Catholic Iberia. A settled Bermuda would safeguard Virginia against famine, end the colonists’ reliance on Indians for food, serve as a laboratory for developing new staples, and potentially provide a base for launching new American ventures and attacks on Iberian shipping.⁹

SETTLEMENT

In Bermuda, the Virginia Company achieved the rapid colonial success that had eluded it in Virginia. Between 1612 and 1615 the company dispatched six hundred settlers in nine ships. The company had no trouble recruiting colonists, since the glowing printed accounts of Bermuda in circulation produced swarmes of people desir[ing] to be transported there. The first emigrants included diverse gentlemen and men of fashion as well as all sorts of artisans with their wives and two ministers. Governor Richard Moore, a professional carpenter, spent his three-year term building up an enduring infrastructure in and around St. George’s Island that included forts, houses, commercial buildings, roads, a watchtower, and a church. He also laid the foundation for a self-sufficient agricultural economy through his experiments with potatoes, corn, wheat, sugarcane, and Spanish tobacco. Moore’s forts were finished in time to repulse Spanish ships on a scouting mission in December 1613. The following month Moore sent home the first English-grown tobacco exported from America — 170 pounds of pudding [rolled or braided] tobacco — at a time when John Rolfe was just beginning his tobacco experimentation in Virginia. (Rolfe was probably working with the same Spanish-Bermuda tobacco that Moore grew: during his stay in Bermuda as a Sea Venture castaway he could easily have collected seeds from the Varinas variety growing wild there.) When an enormous, barrel-sized lump of ambergris (a waxy sperm whale secretion used to fix perfume scents) washed ashore, the financially ailing Virginia Company gained a momentous windfall. Worth as much as £12,000, the lucky find underwrote the cost of peopling and supplying Bermuda and provided a vital infusion of capital needed to fund the company’s Indian war in Virginia. When Governor Moore returned to England in 1615, he left a secure and settled town and a population that exceeded that of Virginia. Confined to St. George’s under Moore, the colony’s six hundred residents were poised and impatient to spread westward to the rest of Bermuda (map 5).¹⁰

MAP 5 Eastern Bermuda, ca. 1626. During the Virginia Company’s administration (1612–1615), Governor Richard Moore confined settlement to St. George’s Island. Most settlers lived in the Town of St. George’s, Bermuda’s first capital. Moore also built a chain of island forts to command the colony’s two deep-water anchorages, Southampton Harbor and Town Harbor. Detail, A Mapp of the Sommer Ilands, Once Called the Bermudas, by John Speed, 1626. Courtesy of the Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, Bermuda Maritime Museum

Not all of the Virginia Company’s lofty (and sometimes unrealistic) expectations of Bermuda had been met, however. Silkworms refused to take to the island’s native mulberry trees and indigenous spiders’ silk did not provide a viable substitute. Sugarcane and English wheat failed to prosper. Offshore oyster beds did not yield plentiful pearls. The sperm whales that seasonally migrated past Bermuda eluded capture. Settlers also struggled with problems of their own making. The colony experienced its own modest food crisis in 1614 because a defense-obsessed Moore had set more colonists to work building forts than planting grain, and rats accidentally introduced from a passing privateer decimated colonists’ fields. Bermuda’s natural bounty cushioned human losses, however: Moore sent most settlers to the main island to live off the land, enabling them to weather the famine. A mysterious, debilitating illness called the Feagues also afflicted the hungry settlers, but its effects were not deadly and proved short-lived. Although Bermuda had yielded a great dividend in the ambergris find, the colonists had not yet fixed on a staple to produce a steady revenue stream for company investors by 1615. Still, measured in human terms, the vast majority of the men and women that the company had sent to Bermuda were alive, acclimatized, and committed to their colonial project. The same could hardly be said for Virginia.¹¹

THE SOMERS ISLANDS COMPANY

Anticipating the greater complexities of settling the rest of the island in the wake of Moore’s auspicious start, the Virginia Company sold its interest in Bermuda to a new joint-stock venture, the Somers Islands Company, which received its royal charter in June 1615. The new, distinctively English name both effaced the island’s original Iberian connection and commemorated Sir George Somers, who had died on Bermuda after returning there to fetch food for starving Virginians. (The phonetic rendering Summer Islands also didn’t hurt, since it conjured up a warm and pleasant locale.) The charter granted the company secure title to the island, freedom from all taxes for the first seven years, state aid in case of foreign aggression, a monopoly over trade, and near-absolute authority in governing life in the colony. The company’s 117 founding investors included some of the most influential political and commercial men of their day — expansionists with global aspirations and experience who brought considerable business acumen in overseas commerce and colonization to the venture. Five noblemen, eighteen knights, fourteen gentlemen, twenty-one members of parliament, and many prominent merchants, lawyers, and London professional guild members invested in Bermuda. All but ten were Virginia Company shareholders. More than two-thirds were East India Company members, and a third funded various searches for a northwest passage. Typical Somers Islands Company members held shares in three or more joint-stock companies, underscoring their strong interest in global commercial and colonial ventures.¹²

The Somers Islands Company’s leaders exemplified the multifronted global expansion going on in England in the 1610s. Most knew each other intimately, since they moved in the same elite royal court, parliamentary, and commercial circles or were interrelated by blood or marriage. Sir Thomas Smith, the Somers Islands Company’s first governor, was a pioneering businessman and expansionist: he was governor of the East India Company, Virginia Company treasurer, leading Muscovy, Northwest, and Greenland Company member, and arguably England’s most experienced colonial entrepreneur. A former lord mayor of London, Smith had substantial links with the city’s many guilds and extensive contacts among England’s expanding merchant marine forged through his many shipping ventures to Asia, the Baltic, and Virginia. William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and England’s lord chancellor, combined his Virginia and East India interests with explorations of New England and, later, the Caribbean. Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, brought to the new company an intense hatred of Spain born on the battlefield and an interest in finding a northwest passage. Sir Edwin Sandys, parliamentarian activist and vocal political advocate of colonial expansion, was an early leader of the Virginia Company. Although he focused primarily on Virginia, he brought extensive political, personal, and commercial contacts to bear in developing Bermuda as well. William Cavendish, Lucy, Duchess of Bedford, and Lord William Paget were among the other wealthy nobles who invested time and capital in developing Bermuda. Sir Robert Rich, who became second Earl of Warwick in 1619, was primarily interested in Bermuda for its location: he had inherited a fleet of privateers from his father and saw the island as an ideal base for raiding Spanish America. Sir Robert brought his kinsman Sir Nathaniel Rich, several important Essex and London gentry families, and later his brother Sir Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, into the Bermuda venture. The Rich family ultimately became the most committed to Bermuda’s development, but all of Bermuda’s early noble and merchant investors left their stamp on the island: when the island was laid out into eight tribes,¹³ or parishes, their names became indelibly imprinted on Bermuda’s geography (map 6).¹⁴

Spanning the Tudor and Stuart periods, the gentry and merchants who developed Bermuda were in the vanguard of a generation who led England to embrace an import-driven economy and build an overseas empire. All were drawn to Bermuda for personal gain: Bermuda’s ambergris windfall and promising

MAP 6 The Island of Bermudos: Divided into Its Tribes, with the Castles, Forts, Etc., by Herman Moll, 1736. Apart from St. George’s, Bermuda’s tribes, or parishes, were named after leading Somers Islands Company investors. Detail, courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection

start seemed to guarantee future earnings. But public duty, a desire to enhance England’s international prestige, the drive to spread Protestantism globally, and other noncommercial motives blended with material interests. Along with the Virginia Company, the Somers Islands Company emerged as an important site for organizing political opposition, especially during the period between 1614 and 1621 when James I refused to convene Parliament. The company also attracted a coterie of Puritan-leaning gentry in the decade before New England became the main focus of Dissenters’ colonization efforts. Both temporarily silenced Parliamentarians and frustrated Puritan reformers hated Catholic Spain and were alienated from James I’s pro-Iberian court. Cultivating Bermuda promised simultaneously to drive a thorn in Spain’s side, reward investors with profits from tropical commodities that England currently had to import from her rivals, and even perhaps become an exemplary utopian Protestant commonwealth. None of these expectations was ever fully realized, but they nevertheless shaped Bermuda’s development in important ways during the next sixty years.¹⁵

Over the next two years, the Somers Islands Company sent out a new governor (Daniel Tucker, a former Jamestown settler) and surveyed the entire colony. Tucker’s term proved a mixed success: he made himself unpopular among settlers by instituting the same martial law and compulsory work regimes he had known in Virginia, and he angered the company when he used public labor and timber to build himself a fine mansion. To his credit, however, he instituted a rudimentary court system and presided over a great breakthrough in tobacco production. The island survey was also profoundly transformative. It divided the land west of St. George’s into four hundred private shares of twenty-five acres each, which shifted the mode of development from a common corporate venture to a public-private partnership in which investors became individually responsible for cultivating land given to them as dividends in proportion to their company shares. In effect, the survey created private property in Bermuda and substantially shifted the task of developing the colony from the company collectively to its individual members. Investors-cum-landlords had to assume a much more active role in recruiting settlers to populate their land if they wanted a return on their investment. Land privatization brought a sizeable influx of new settlers to Bermuda in the decade after the survey. As he surveyed Bermuda, Richard Norwood noted that settlers began to clear and farm shares as quickly as he laid them out and that a few overly eager planters had even preceded his arrival. Norwood’s work rendered an unsetled and confused chaos . . . [into] a convenient disposition, forme and order to become indeed a plantation.¹⁶ The successes that followed Bermuda’s survey inspired the Virginia Company to adopt a similar strategy.¹⁷

THE TIGHT LITTLE ISLAND

In 1805 a Royal Navy captain stationed in Bermuda concluded a recruitment advertisement he placed in the Bermuda Gazette with the phrase God Save the King, and Success to the Tight Little Island! Although his precise intended meaning is bit unclear (tight was also slang for drunk), the phrase nicely captures the essence of early seventeenth-century Bermuda.¹⁸ In the decade after 1615, the key elements and characteristics of the colony emerged. It began to manifest a dense settlement pattern in which compact family farms predominated, and its inhabitants formed a close-knit community bound by religion, kinship connections, and local attachments. Bermudians adopted an agricultural focus that became increasingly diversified over time. It became a multiracial society in which slavery developed along different lines as well as a politically stunted colony that early unified against English regulations. As the colony evolved, Bermudians outgrew their small island and pressed to expand outward. Tight captures the multilayered bonds that linked Bermudians and hints at the intense pressure present in what became the most crowded colony in English America.

The rush to populate shares after Richard Norwood’s survey brought eleven hundred settlers to Bermuda within five years, more than doubling the population. Although these emigrants included a smattering of Bridewell and gaol transportees, indentured servants, and maids for wives (single women sent over to wed bachelors already settled there), most emigrants came as families and took up shares as long-term tenants of the company investors who had recruited them. Most of the tenants who emigrated were formally bound for four or five years to the landlords they served and worked on sharecropping terms, paying their landlords half the tobacco they grew as rent. The small size of the Bermuda share also promoted rapid settlement, since to equip and send over a couple of settlers to clear and farm one’s land only required a modest investment of £10–£20. Leading gentry and merchant members further eased the task of populating and supplying Bermudian shares when they chartered a subsidiary magazine shipping company in 1616 to regularly shuttle people and cargoes between London and the island. By 1622, more than 80 percent of the island’s private land had been substantially cleared and cultivated. Significantly, more than 90 percent of Bermuda’s occupied shares had at least one woman or child living on them, and women and children outnumbered men on about half these shares. Modest-sized family farms overwhelmingly dominated as the colony’s basic unit, and colonists worked Bermuda’s land chiefly by using household labor.¹⁹

COMMUNITY

Richard Norwood noted an important mental shift among the first Bermudians as his survey transformed the colony. Whereas pre-1615 emigrants had noe heart to build or plant on company land, settlers now built for themselves and families not tents or cabbins, but more substantial houses and planted not onlie such things as would yeeld them their fruits in a yeare, or half a year, but all such too as would afford them profitt after certain years. The second wave of emigrants, in short, embraced an open-ended future in Bermuda and invested their time and labor in long-term projects. Settlers bonded with their neighbors as readily as they bonded with the island, a trend that Norwood’s survey also subtly encouraged. By dividing shares into long, thin strips (which gave each landlord water access and an equal cross section of island soils and topography), Norwood enabled tenants to live relatively close to each other as they situated their houses along paths and the coast (map 7). Although none would rival St. George’s as the colony’s principal seaport and only substantial town, small hamlets of tenant farmers grew up at Tucker’s Town, Flatts Village, Brackish Pond, Spanish Point, Crow Lane, and various coastal bays within a generation.²⁰

Community ties among Bermudian families multiplied as island churches proliferated and local governors instituted various common civic enterprises. Upon arrival, Bermuda’s first settlers had entered into a religious and civil covenant that was similar to but predated Plymouth’s more famous Mayflower Compact by eight years. The Virginia and Somers Islands companies sent over four ministers and established four churches before 1622, but Bermudians found the number of churches insufficient and by 1630 had, of their own initiative, built one in each of the island’s nine parishes. Puritan company leaders readily supplied ministers to these churches throughout the 1620s and 1630s, using the island as a refuge for radical ministers whom the Church of England had dismissed for their Nonconformist views and liturgical innovations. Disputes among ministers and between ministers, governors, and congregants occurred, and many Bermudians chafed under the intense proselytizing to which some especially zealous ministers subjected adults and children alike, but the weekly mandatory gathering of all settlers in the island’s churches regularly and publicly reinforced a sense of community within a Christian commonwealth.²¹

MAP 7 Paget, Pembroke, and Devonshire Tribes, as surveyed by Richard Norwood in 1616/17. Note how Norwood’s long, thin share boundaries enabled tenants to situate their houses near each other at bays, ponds, and other natural features. Detail from A Mapp of the Sommer Ilands, Once Called the Bermudas, by John Speed, 1626. Courtesy of the Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, Bermuda Maritime Museum

As Bermudians gained greater experience in local governance under Governor Nathaniel Butler (1619–1621), civic participation especially brought island men together. Butler formed up and drilled militias in each parish and enlisted all settlers to fund and build stronger stone fortifications for their common defense. The assembly he inaugurated in 1620 was remarkably representative. Its thirty-six elected members were chosen by the widest franchise possible: since Bermudians did not own the shares they worked, property ownership was not required for either voting or office-holding. Although subject to company veto, the laws that the new legislature drafted empowered Bermudians to address local social, political, economic, and environmental problems as they arose. Self-taxation (which the company encouraged) funded the construction of roads, bridges, schools, ferries, forts, and other public buildings where they were needed, enabling the colonial government to quickly meet community needs. The expansion of Bermuda’s court system under Butler drew Bermudians together twice a year to serve on juries, settle disputes, punish criminals, and take stock of the social, moral, and physical state of the colony as a whole (as reflected in the presentations of the grand inquest jury). Coinciding with the tobacco harvest, the annual visit of the company’s magazine ship compressed island commerce into a short but intense period (November to January) that brought most planters to St. George’s to load their crop and purchase tools, cloth, and other goods that the magazine offered for sale. As they served in militia companies, fort construction crews, and juries and gathered together to elect assemblymen, settle differences, do business, and socialize, Bermudians found themselves in constant contact with each other. Interaction was most sustained at the neighborhood and parish level, but the island was small enough to regularly bring all residents together. On many levels, the colony was one community.²²

TOBACCO AND SLAVERY

Bermudians were also increasingly unified in their pursuit of a common crop — tobacco — especially after early problems with cultivation and curing were solved. Pre-1615 settlers grew a great deal of tobacco, but the secret of properly curing that tobacco eluded them. In 1615, one C. T., the author of An Advice How to Plant Tobacco in England, disparaged Bermudian efforts to imitate the "blacke role Tabacco, brought from Orenoque [and] Trinidads," but the fact that Englishmen annually purchased £200,000 worth of tobacco at 5 to 10 shillings a pound in London’s seven thousand taverns, inns, alehouses, and tobacco houses kept Bermudians experimenting. (C. T., incidentally, does not discuss Virginia tobacco, speaking of it only as a potential future product.) Neither an English expert nor the botanical treatises that the company sent out to Bermuda produced success, however.²³

Somers Islands Company leaders experienced in privateering and carrying out raids against Spanish America pursued the search for a cure through different and potentially dangerous means: by bringing Africans and Indians already versed in Spanish tobacco cultivation from Spanish America to Bermuda to teach the island’s struggling planters their methods.²⁴ Skilled enslaved experts lived within a few weeks’ sail of Bermuda, but to acquire them the company would have to engage in illicit trade with New Spain or an unsanctioned peacetime raid. Despite these dangers, one of the company’s first acts was to dispatch the Edwin to the Savadge Islands to truck there for livestock, tropical plants, and negroes to dive for pearls.²⁵ Where exactly the Edwin went is a mystery, but in August 1616 her captain landed plantains, sugarcane, figs, pineapples, and other West Indy plants in Bermuda, along with one Indian and a Negro (the first thes Ilands ever had). That these men later proved to have diving experience suggests they may have come from Margarita Island off the Venezuela coast, where the Spanish had a pearl-fishing base. Over the next five years, both English privateers sailing under dubious Dutch commissions and outright pirates landed dozens more Hispanic Africans and twenty-nine Angolan Africans in Bermuda. By the time the first Africans reached Virginia in the summer of 1619, Bermuda had at least fifty, and perhaps as many as one hundred, black residents, accounting for between 5 and 10 percent of the colony’s population.²⁶

Most or all of the black newcomers were probably familiar with tobacco, since it had been cultivated on the Angolan coast and throughout much of Spanish America since the 1530s. Soon after one privateer landed a good store of neggars . . . brought from the West Indies, planter Robert Rich confidently predicted to his brother in London that "I doubt not but you will have from us good store