Bermuda's history: self-rule since 1620 inside the Crown

How a shipwreck began the English colony

An island named La Bermuda appears on the map in Pedro Martyr's Legatio Babylonica, published in Spain in 1511. The first description comes from Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who visited in 1515 aboard La Garza with Juan de Bermúdez, and according to Britannica Oviedo credited Bermúdez with the discovery, possibly as early as 1503. The islands had no Indigenous population. Spanish and Portuguese ships stopped for fresh meat and water and sailed on. The reefs, the storms and the night cries of the Bermuda petrel gave the archipelago the name Isle of Devils, and neither Spain nor Portugal tried to settle it.

The English arrived by accident. Sea Venture, flagship of the Virginia Company's third relief fleet for Jamestown, sailed from Plymouth in June 1609 under Sir George Somers. A storm on 24 July scattered the fleet, and the caulking was forced from between her planks until she leaked faster than the crew could bail. With 9 feet of water in the hold, Somers drove her onto the reef east of the islands, where she wedged in a gap in the coral, and everyone aboard reached the beach at Gates' Bay. Britannica counts about 150 people; the Wikipedia account of the ship gives 140 men, 10 women and one dog.

The castaways stayed about nine months. They lived on fish, birds, cedar berries and the wild hogs left by earlier wrecks, and built two pinnaces, Deliverance and Patience, mostly from Bermuda cedar. Most of them sailed for Virginia on 10 May 1610 and found about 60 colonists still alive at Jamestown. Accounts of the wreck by William Strachey and Silvester Jourdain are thought to lie behind Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which Ariel speaks of the still-vex'd Bermoothes.

Permanent settlement followed in 1612, when the Virginia Company's third charter was extended to the islands and the ship Plough landed sixty settlers under Richard Moore, the first governor. They joined the men left behind from the wreck and began the town of St George. UNESCO dates its permanent settlement to August 1612.

Who ran Bermuda before the Crown took over

The Virginia Company found the colony unprofitable and passed it briefly to the Crown in 1614. In 1615 King James I chartered the same shareholders as the Somers Isles Company, which governed until 1684. The surveyor Richard Norwood divided the land west of St George's into tribes, each allotted to one of the company's principal investors and named after him; Paget, Warwick and Sandys survive as parish names. The House of Assembly held its first session in 1620. Acts of 1616 and 1620 banned the hunting of certain birds and young tortoises, one of them titled An Act Agaynst The Killing Of Ouer Young Tortoyses.

The company wanted rent from tobacco. The first English-grown leaf was exported in 1614, and Bermuda shipped more tobacco than Virginia until 1625, but prices collapsed in 1630 and the crop exhausted the thin soil. Land ran out early, so Bermuda exported people: about 1,200 emigrated between 1620 and 1640, and the population still reached about 4,000 in 1648 and 6,248 in 1691. Bermudians went on to settle in the Bahamas, in Jamaica from 1655 and in Carolina from 1670.

The English Civil War reached the islands in 1649. Royalists deposed the company's governor, Thomas Turner, elected John Trimingham in his place and exiled Independents to the Bahamas under William Sayle. Parliament named Bermuda in its Act of 30 October 1650 prohibiting trade with the rebel colonies, and the fleet sent under Sir George Ayscue in 1651 could not get past the reef and the shore batteries; it blockaded the islands for several months until the colonists negotiated a peace.

The company's last quarrel was with its own settlers. It suppressed shipbuilding to keep Bermudians on the land, and the islanders demanded its revocation until the charter was withdrawn in 1684 and Bermuda became a Crown colony.

Why slavery in Bermuda moved to sea

Slavery arrived with the company. The Wikipedia accounts date the first two enslaved arrivals to 1616 or 1617, one Black and one Native American, brought from the West Indies on the orders of Governor Tucker to dive for pearls that turned out not to exist. Britannica puts it at about 1617. Numbers grew through purchase and through the captives of privateers, and after the Pequot War and King Philip's War, Pequots and Wampanoags exiled from New England were sold on the islands. Some families in St David's trace their ancestry to them.

The law tightened as the enslaved population grew. An act of 1623 forbade Black people to buy, sell or barter tobacco or any other produce without their master's consent. Revolts or conspiracies are recorded in 1656, 1661, 1673, 1682, 1730 and 1761. After the conspiracy of 1761 six enslaved people were executed and all Black celebrations were prohibited.

What set Bermuda apart was the work. Tobacco was grown mostly by tenant families and indentured servants, and the Wikipedia history of the colony holds that slavery was not essential to its farming. That changed when the economy turned to the sea in the 1690s. Enslaved men became sailors, carpenters, coopers, masons and shipwrights, and owners hired them out, the worker keeping a third of the wage. By 1721 they numbered 3,517 in a population of 8,366.

Bermudian law required part of every crew to be Black. When the privateer Regulator was captured during the American War of Independence, almost all of its crew were enslaved men. Offered their freedom in Boston, all seventy chose to be held as prisoners of war; sent to New York on the sloop Duxbury, they seized it and sailed it back to Bermuda.

Mary Prince, a Bermudian who raked salt in the Turks Islands, published The History of Mary Prince in 1831, a slave narrative that fed the abolition campaign in Britain. Britannica records slavery outlawed across the British Empire in 1833. The National Museum of Bermuda dates emancipation to 1 August 1834, the day Friendly Societies later marked with picnics and then with cricket.

What Bermudians built from cedar and salt

With the company gone, islanders replanted farmland with native cedar and took to shipbuilding, wrecking, whaling, piloting and trade. The fleet grew from fourteen vessels in 1679 to sixty sloops, six brigantines and four ships in 1700. Governor Isaac Richier wrote in 1691 that the cedar was as strong as American oak at two thirds of its weight, and a 30-ton sloop could be built in three to four months. The Bermuda sloop, fore-and-aft rigged with its masts raked aft, was adopted by the Royal Navy; HMS Pickle carried the news of Trafalgar to England.

Salt came from the Turks Islands, which Bermudians had raked since the 1630s. Eighteen Bermudian vessels worked the salt pans in 1708 and 65 in 1716, and by 1740 about 200 loaded salt every year. In 1772, 750 of the 800 rakers on the Turks were Bermudian. The Bahamas taxed the trade, seized Bermudian sloops and in the end won political control of the islands in 1819.

Privateering ran through the same families. At least fifteen Bermudian privateers operated in the 1740s. In the American war the islands traded both ways: on 14 August 1775 about 100 barrels of gunpowder were taken from the Bermudian magazine while Governor George James Bruere slept, loaded onto American boats, and on 2 October the Continental Congress exempted Bermuda from its trade ban. Loyalist privateers based on the islands later captured 114 prizes between 1777 and 1781. In the War of 1812, Bermudian privateers took 298 ships.

The cedar did not last. Shipbuilding had deforested the islands by the start of the 19th century, and iron hulls and steam ended the rest of the trade.

How the Royal Navy made Bermuda a fortress

American independence cost Britain every continental naval base between the Maritimes and Florida, and Bermuda lay between Nova Scotia and the Caribbean. The Royal Navy spent twelve years charting the reefs to find a deepwater channel, and that channel also opened Hamilton Harbour: Hamilton, founded in 1790, replaced St George as the capital in 1815. Work on the Royal Naval Dockyard on Ireland Island began in 1811, and in the War of 1812 the attacks on Washington and the Chesapeake were planned and launched from Bermuda.

The forts multiplied. UNESCO's account of the St George's fortifications traces continuous rebuilding from the 17th to the 20th century: the first forts on Paget, Governor's, Charles and Castle Islands, a redesign in the 1780s and 1790s, Forts George, Victoria, St Catherine, Albert and Cunningham when the dockyard was begun, and further strengthening after rifled artillery appeared in the 1850s. During the American Civil War, Confederate blockade runners worked from the islands, and between 1899 and 1902 about 5,000 Boer prisoners of war were held on five of its islands.

The Second World War brought a second military power. In 1941 Britain granted the United States 99-year leases for bases on 5.8 km² of land, much of it reclaimed from the sea, and the Hamilton Princess Hotel became a censorship centre where about 1,200 staff read transatlantic mail and radio traffic for Axis agents. The British garrison, which dated to 1797, left in 1957 and the dockyard closed in the 1950s. A Canadian base closed in 1993, and on 1 September 1995 the United States closed both of its bases, with the small Royal Navy station closing in the same year. The US returned the base lands in 2002.

How tourism and finance replaced the garrison

Tourism began in Victorian times with wealthy North Americans escaping winter. Farming for export ended with the US Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which closed the vegetable trade and pushed the islands further towards visitors. Rum left for the United States during Prohibition. The first aeroplane landed in 1930, scheduled flying boats reached Darrell's Island from New York and Baltimore in 1937, and a railway opened in 1931 and was abandoned in 1948. Regular land-plane services to Kindley Field began in 1948, and tourism peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. By the end of the 1970s international business had overtaken it.

Who could vote before the constitution

Voting depended on owning property. When the House of Assembly debated a Cup Match holiday in November 1946, according to the National Museum of Bermuda, only 7% of the population could vote and most members were white men. Schools were desegregated in 1965. The Progressive Labour Party, organised in 1963, claimed to represent non-white citizens. Universal adult suffrage was adopted as part of the constitution in 1967, and the constitution of 1968 gave strong powers to the elected leader of the majority party. The multiracial United Bermuda Party won the first election under it and governed until 1998.

The first riots came in 1968, and the Wooding Commission reported on their causes.

Why Bermuda burned after the executions

On 10 March 1973 Governor Sir Richard Sharples and his aide-de-camp were assassinated by local Black Power militants. Erskine Burrows was convicted of the killing, and he and Larry Tacklyn were sentenced to death. Britain had abolished the death penalty in the 1960s, and according to the former police commissioner Jonathan Smith, some members of the UK Parliament predicted riots if the hangings went ahead. Burrows was hanged on 2 December 1977, and three days of rioting followed.

Smith, researching the period from the Pitt and Wooding reports and from UK government papers, put the number of rioters at up to 500 and argued that many causes named after 1968 had not been remedied by 1977: poor results in schools, economic inequality, neglect of Black men in particular, and housing. The Royal Commission into the 1977 disturbances, chaired by Lord Pitt of Hampstead, examined the causes. Britannica records that the unrest led to official efforts to end de facto racial discrimination and to open talks on independence. A general strike followed in 1981.

Why Bermuda voted to stay British

The independence question was put directly in 1995. On 25 March the House of Assembly passed the Independence Referendum Bill by 20 votes to 18. Independence needed a majority of those voting and the support of at least 40% of all eligible voters. The Progressive Labour Party, which favoured independence, voted against the bill and called for a boycott, arguing that a general election should decide. The governing United Bermuda Party was split, with Premier John Swan in favour. Hurricane Felix delayed the vote by a day, to 16 August 1995. On a turnout of 59%, 74% voted against, and Swan resigned.

The British Overseas Territories Act 2002 gave Bermudians full British citizenship, which Britannica notes would not pass automatically to citizens of an independent Bermuda. A commission on the procedure for independence was set up in 2004 and reported in 2005. The United Nations has listed Bermuda as a non-self-governing territory since 1946, and its General Assembly adopts a resolution on the territory every year.