Faithful Bodies - Heather Miyano Kopelson Early American Places

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to thirty-year indenture terms that in the more healthful environment of Bermuda did not necessarily mean enslavement for life, the English decisively shifted toward institutionalizing racial hierarchy and practicing slavery as a heritable condition by the end of the 1630s.8 Slaveholding was widespread among Anglo-Bermudians, and the island’s close quarters meant that the small numbers of slaves in any one household did not result in isolation.9 Intimate island geography made runaway communities impossible while irregularly enforced proclamations and acts exiled free people of color, which meant that by the last third of the seventeenth century, darker skin color became legally synonymous with an enslaved status. By 1676, Governor John Heydon forbade any further importation of “Negroes, Indians, and Malattoes,” as he was concerned that there was not enough work for the bonded laborers already on the island. In 1687, the governor reported 1,737 “negroes” in Bermuda, a number that represented one-third of the total population.10

      But the numbers alone cannot conjure the worlds from which the enslaved and the dislocated came, the worlds they brought with them, or their struggles to make their own place in the space they were forced to call their new home. Untangling these multiple layers of meaning requires imagining the archive in an expansive way and leads us to other kinds of sources and evidence: archaeological reports, ethnographic descriptions of religious practices, and origin stories, among others. It also necessitates leaving the bits of rock and soil that protruded from the Atlantic several hundred miles from the nearest landmass and reversing the involuntary journeys to their beginnings in Africa and the Caribbean. It is there in Central and West Africa and in the indigenous Caribbean that we will find the clues to piece together the tales of lives, homes, and communities lost and put back together again, only to be pulled apart once more by the calculations inscribed in the flesh of human property devoured by the slave trade.11

      Though all historical narratives, regardless of their subject of focus, contain an element of imagination, the speculative nature of this particular venture is more explicit than for many. In addition to the lack of Somers Islands Company records, many personal papers from the period, and anything akin to the rich social, cultural, and biographical detail recorded in the Inquisition trials held by the Roman Catholic Church, the vagaries of slave trade routes and island demography blur any attempt at a finely grained analysis of the spiritual lives of Africans and Indians that points to exact cultural transfers from elsewhere to Bermuda. Even without being able to recognize the outlines of many specific African or indigenous Caribbean practices, as scholars have been able to do for other parts of the Atlantic world, it is imperative to consider the few that are clearly visible and to suggest those that might have been.12 Sketching out some aspects of the worldviews of the two pearl divers, of other Africans and Indians who soon arrived, as well as of their children, rearranges a European-dominated archive that frames their lives as unknowable and unintelligible and begins the important voyage toward understanding the layered stories that made up the strata of the island’s history. This reconfiguration permits a fuller recounting of the lives of the enslaved in early Bermuda beyond their appearance on a list of “sundrye things,” mere chattel in European maneuverings in the Atlantic world, and connects their productive and reproductive work to those around them and those they left behind.13 Their actions, performances, and memories carved, shaped, and named rock, soil, and sea into a many-peopled place rather than leaving Bermuda as a mere waystation or likely wrecking ground on the way to some more important destination elsewhere in the Atlantic.

      “Divers small broken islands . . . in forme not much unlike a reaper’s sickle”

      There is no way to know what the two unnamed pearl divers carried on the Edwin thought as they first saw Bermuda, if they overheard and understood the specifics of the crew’s concern about the treacherous course over shallow reefs that in some places extended more than ten miles from shore, or if they merely picked up on a generalized tension. But it is still essential to attempt to look over their shoulders.14 The captain may have permitted them to remain above deck because they were individuals with highly valued skills and were not in the company of a large enslaved group, so they might have gotten the initial glimpse of land along with the crew. That glimpse would not have come until quite late in the ship’s approach because the low-lying islands were notoriously difficult to sight from the water.15

      The journey to Bermuda was probably only the latest in a series of dislocations for the two men. Whether the man labeled “Indian” in the English colony’s records was from a collection of peoples in the Greater Antilles whom scholars have named Taíno; from the Lesser Antilles and an Arawak speaker dubbed an “Island Carib”; one of the Guaquerí who were indigenous to Margarita’s companion island, Cubagua; from the mainland Caribbean coast; or perhaps even a Pancaruru from the sertões or the “inland wilderness frontiers” of Brazil, he came from a community devastated by the consequences of European arrival in the Americas more generally and Spanish demand for labor and material riches specifically.16 After establishing the fisheries on Margarita and Cubagua in 1516, the Spanish had turned to several peoples in sequence to do what Bartolomé de las Casas described as the “infernal and desperate” work of harvesting the pearl-bearing oysters, occasionally even bringing in experienced divers from Brazil.17 The African diver would also have survived disruptions multiple times, as dynastic wars and Portuguese campaigns of enslavement in West Central Africa uprooted people from their natal lands and created captives for the transatlantic slave trade.18 Spanish importation of enslaved Africans to the fisheries picked up in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and in 1558 the Crown ordered that the Africans replace all Indian divers. The mandated transition was never completed, and Indians continued to endure harsh treatment in the fisheries, as well as to dive on their own account. By the end of the sixteenth century, the vast majority of Africans being brought into the Spanish Americas had come from Angola. Most of them disembarked in Vera Cruz or Cartagena before being sold to traders and owners in Margarita and elsewhere. Those who came from coastal regions may have already been skilled in diving for oysters, whereas those from inland regions would have learned the hazardous work after being brought to the fisheries.19

      Or the men may have been born in the place from which they were sold to the captain of the Edwin. Free and unfree individuals from Iberia, from other parts of the Caribbean, from mainland Central and South America, and from Africa all interacted in pearl-fishing settlements like the ones on Margarita Island, and there is some indication that Spanish officials did not perceive African divers to be of recent import from Africa.20 If they had fled their enslavement in a fishery, either with or without the large canoe in which they worked, they might have been living away from European settlement along the coastline of Spanish colonies or on otherwise uninhabited small islands.21 Regardless of their birthplaces, they would have entered a world and a community forced to recover continually from the empty spaces caused by high mortality rates and the drive for profit in human flesh.

      Figure 1.1. Map of Taínoan provinces and cacicazgos or political divisions on Hispaniola, with east at the top of the map. The eight cacicazgos were keyed to eight parts of the body, with the head (Caicimú) at the top. The caves that were the eyes of the “monstrous beast” are represented on the map by two dots. (Figure based on Peter O’B. Harris, “Nitaíno and Indians”; and Harris, communication with William F. Keegan; adapted with permission)

      It is impossible to know the exact origin of the “Indian” who arrived in Bermuda in 1616, but whatever his particular ethnic grouping, his people had always—or at least as long as anyone could remember—been in the watery world of the Caribbean. Taínoans found their beginnings in the gourd that hung in the creator Yaya’s house and contained his son Yayael’s bones. When the gourd broke, it created the oceans and first fish.22 The pearl diver very probably welcomed the sudden sight of the trees on the low-lying island that barely broke the undulating surface of the ocean. If he were Island Carib or Kalina, perhaps he felt for the wood pendant around his neck that he wore to discourage the malignant force of a maboya. The pendant would have been carved to approximate the form in which the negative other-than-human person had appeared to him.23 Although his people without question depended

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