LITMIR.BIZ

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into “Christian” and “Negro or other slaves” in a 1705 law but had less focus on an inherited Christianity than Virginia. Bermuda’s 1723 law did not use religious categories and confined its differentiation to racial labels. The redirected efforts to discipline the body of Christ altered its lineaments to exclude people of color, configuring space so as to give them little place in the community of sinners.

      A Note on Terminology and Editorial Process

      Choosing racial labels and terminology is a fraught process that has no perfect solution. When referring to Native peoples of southern New England, I use specific tribal/sachemship affiliations when possible, and Native and Indian interchangeably when discussing Native peoples as a group or English ideas about Native peoples. Tribe can be problematic because of its association with consigning Natives to a distant past, but it is also important for many Natives today in their ongoing efforts for governmental and public recognition as distinct political entities and so I use it advisedly. I use English for both colonists in New England and in England as many colonists maintained strong ties and traveled across the Atlantic with relative frequency.

      Michael Jarvis argues that the English colonists in Bermuda, linked by dense patterns of trade, family, and settlement and largely free of interference from the proprietary Somers Islands Company, came to depend on each other and by the 1630s experienced an “ethnogenesis of sorts” in which they thought of themselves as “wee Bermoodians” first and foremost. He suggests that the same may have been true even for the earliest African and Indian slaves imported in the 1610s, who gave their island-born children English names. White Bermudian seems appropriate to describe English-descended Bermudians, given that most often that group was marked by its lack of a racial identifier and the word white appeared at least occasionally in records by 1679.⁴³ Using black Bermudian in reference to African- and Indian-descended Bermudians is more problematic. The term contains within itself what James Sweet termed “the quiet violence of ethnogenesis,” the implicit fact that the creative forces marshalled by Africans in the Atlantic world were necessary in the first place because of the destructiveness of the transatlantic slave trade. Subsuming Indians—most of whom were of indigenous Caribbean origin for much of the seventeenth century although Natives from the North American mainland were also present—into the category of black Bermudian elides the direct and indirect ways that European diseases and invasions decimated many Indian peoples of the Americas. Indians reached their largest percentage of the enslaved population listed in probate inventories in the first decade of the eighteenth century, when they made up a fifth of all slaves listed.

      It is true that people identified as Indian and African in Bermuda were in broadly similar situations: the island had never had an indigenous population, so neither Indians nor Africans were in territory to which they had more than a few generations of connection. There was no sustained indication, beyond concerns over one particular shipment in the mid-1640s, that white Bermudians were unsure about enslaving Indians. But Bermuda was not completely isolated. The difference between Indian and African mattered as part of ongoing debates over the meaning of race as a way to classify humanity into hierarchical categories based on sets of characteristics marked by skin color.⁴⁴ I have chosen to use black and Indian when the Bermudian records use specific identifiers of “Negro” and “Indian,” but the somewhat ahistorical Bermudians of color when referring to Africans and Indians as a group in Bermuda specifically.

      For ease of reading quotations of primary sources, I have silently substituted th for the thorn (y), expanded abbreviations, and switched u and v, i and j to conform with modern usage. As a reminder that the words were recorded in a very different time, however, I have reproduced irregularities in spelling and syntax.

      Part 1. Defining

      1. “One Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had”

      In August 1616, the English ship Edwin returned to Bermuda after a voyage to the Caribbean. In addition to “plantans, suger canes, figges, pines, and the like,” it carried two individuals whose arrival marked an important event in Bermudian history and in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Disembarked on the twenty-one-square-mile island were “one Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had.” In having these first non-European inhabitants brought to Bermuda, Governor Daniel Tucker had acted on the Somers Islands Company directives to send a ship to the Bahamas to trade for “sundrye things . . . for the Plantacion, as Cattle Cassadoe Sugar Canes, negroes to dive for pearles, and what other plants are there to be had.” The English were hoping that Bermuda’s formidable reefs would yield riches in the form of pearls, and they took steps to secure skilled African and Indian experts from Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.¹

      The arrival of the two pearl divers brought in the Edwin was significant in several respects. It began the multicontinental habitation of an Atlantic island: Bermuda was one of the few places Europeans settled that did not have an indigenous population. The instructions from the colony’s proprietary company to seek out an enslaved African and an Indian showed English eagerness to learn from Iberian colonization techniques, as the divers’ arrival was made possible by sixteenth-century English privateering raids on Spanish and Portuguese ships and colonies. The disembarkation of the two men marked the earliest introduction of enslaved labor to an English colony in the Americas, three years before the São João Bautista landed “20 and odd. negroes” in Virginia in August 1619.²

      The presence of these two men in Bermuda was notable, but as is so often the case in the documentary record of the slave trade, the inked words preserved only their occupation and racial descriptors. They and the other Africans and indigenous peoples of the Caribbean who soon joined them had names, past experiences, and an outlook on the future, but the spare mention of “an Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had” or one early colonist’s notation of cargo including “a good store of neggars” made no allowance for anything more than their relation to the development of the colony.³ And contribute to that development they did: in addition to providing much of the labor that made English colonial society function, their knowledge made fundamental changes to the shoreline, the beds the English lay in, the roofs over their heads, and the very food they ingested.⁴

      The early generations of enslaved and bonded Africans and Indians shaped more than the physical contours of early Bermuda, however. They continued to practice the skills that connected them to other-than-human persons whose power enabled them not only to comprehend their environment but also to affect it directly.⁵ In their initial approach to Bermudian shores, in fishing, processing manioc, thatching and weaving with parts of the palmetto tree, as well as making cords with cotton and palmetto fibers, they altered the spiritual landscape in ways that are perhaps less tangible to Western scholarly inquiry but no less significant to investigating these individuals’ influence on the tiny archipelago in which they found themselves. This approach does not reinforce the stereotype of non-European peoples as communing peacefully with nature at all times, but rather acknowledges that there was little theoretical divide between body and spirit and pinpoints some material practices through which Africans and Indians accessed the other-than-human persons who populated their early Bermuda. Indeed, all seventeenth-century peoples lived with an ever-present world of the unseen. Although each conceived of that world in different ways, it was one that left impressions on their senses and bodies and that was inextricably intertwined with human action and society.⁶

      The bare approximations of numbers tell us that by 1620, when twenty-nine shipmates of the “20 and odd. Negroes” landed in Virginia were brought to Bermuda, between fifty and one hundred Africans and Indians had already joined the two pearl divers, who probably came from Margarita Island, off the coast of present-day Venezuela. These early arrivals included significant if unknown numbers of women as well as men, and—as was not the case in many other locations where Europeans created a larger population of slaves through increasing imports of people—births outnumbered deaths among enslaved Africans and Indians in Bermuda from the beginning. Indeed, natural reproduction was also the primary cause of growth in the English population; the island-born across all racial categories probably became a majority of the population as early as the mid-seventeenth century.⁷

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