Maritime masters and seafaring slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 585-621

  Jarvis, Michael J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849343158     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491466     Document Type: Review

References (107)

1. Bryan Edwards, A History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 2 vols. (London, 1794), 1:470
2. Cyril Outerbridge Packwood, Chained on the Rock: Slavery in Bermuda (New York, 1975), 44-46
3. Virginia Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782 (Columbia, Mo., 1999), 276-77
4. African Americans served on ships on both sides of the revolutionary conflict but seldom in the proportions on the Regulator; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 34, 86-87, 153-54
5. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1961), 198-99
6. The decision of the Regulator's slaves cuts across recent historiography of the American Revolution, which emphasizes the efforts of African Americans to obtain freedom by joining British and loyalist forces or by military service on the American side; see esp. Silvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991)
7. Wesley Frank Craven, An Introduction to the History of Bermuda (Bermuda, 1990; orig. pub. 1938)
8. and Wilfred Brenton Kerr, Bermuda and the American Revolution, 1760-1783 (Princeton, 1936)
9. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1934-1938), 1:214-48
10. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1985), 42-43, 152-52
11. and D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1: Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (New Haven, 1986), 161-63, 224-30, place Bermuda in a larger imperial and colonial developmental setting but only superficially explore the colony's social structure
12. On Bermudian slavery, see Trudy Hubbard, "Slavery in Bermuda" (M.A. thesis, University of Leicester, 1973)
13. Packwood, Chained on the Rock
14. James E. Smith, Slavery in Bermuda (New York, 1976)
15. Bernhard, "Bermuda and Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative View," Journal of Social History, 19 (1985), 57-70
16. and Clarence Maxwell, "'From Revolution to Rebellion': Changing Approaches to Resistance by Persons of African Descent in Bermuda, 1700-1834" (Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1998)
17. Elaine Forman Crane, "The Socioeconomics of a Female Majority in Eighteenth-Century Bermuda," Signs, 15 (1990), 231-58, addresses slavery in her general investigation of the experiences of 18th-century Bermudian women. The Bermuda Archives houses abundant administrative, forensic, and legal records for the 17th and 18th centuries, but the dearth of family letters, business papers, and personal diaries makes it difficult to reconstruct the lived experiences of individual whites or blacks. That so many Bermudian slaves were mariners - a notoriously difficult profession to trace - compounds the problem
18. For other assertions of Bermuda's centrality, see Edward Randolph, "Account of Bermuda," Nov. 15, 1700, in Robert Noxon Toppan and Alfred Thomas Scrope Goodrick, eds., Edward Randolph: Including His Letters and Official Papers, 1676-1700, 7 vols. (New York, 1898-1909), 7:629-36
19. Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, 1986), 53-55
20. and Meinig, Atlantic America, 161-62
21. On Bermuda's prehistory and first decades of settlement, see David B. Quinn, "Bermuda in the Age of Exploration and Early Settlement," Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History, 1 (1989), 1-23
22. [Nathaniel Butler], The Historye of the Bermudaes or Summer Islands, ed. J. Henry Lefroy (London, 1882)
23. Lefroy, ed., Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands, 151-1685, 2 vols. (London, 1878-1879), 1:1-405
24. Vernon A. Ives, ed., The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda, 1615-1646 (Toronto, 1984)
25. Craven, Introduction to the History of Bermuda
26. Matthew Laird, "'In the Hollow Lotos Land': Discord, Order, and the Emergence of Stability in Early Bermuda, 1609-1623" (M. A. thesis, College of William and Mary, 1991)
27. and Jarvis, "In the Eye of All Trade: Maritime Revolution and the Transformation of Bermudian Society, 1612-1800" (Ph. D. diss, College of William and Mary, 1998), chaps. 1-2
28. On the Puritan character of Bermuda's early church, see A. C. Hollis Hallett, Chronicle of a Colonial Church: 1612-1826 Bermuda (Pembroke, Bermuda, 1993), 1-65
29. and Gregory Shipley, "Turbulent Times, Troubled Isles: The Rise and Development of Puritanism in Bermuda and the Bahamas, 1609-1684" (Th. D. thesis, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1989)
30. On colonial tobacco prices, see Russell R. Menard, "A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618-1660," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 84 (1976), 401-10
31. [Butler], Historye of the Bermudaes, ed. Lefroy, 84
32. Clarence Maxwell, "Race and Servitude: The Birth of a Social and Political Order in Bermuda, 1619-1669, " Bermuda J. Arch. & Maritime Hist., 11 (1999), 40-46
33. and Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders, 49-93
34. Ira Berlin does not explicitly address Bermuda, but his formulation of an Atlantic creole identity closely fits the characteristics of Bermuda's first blacks, in "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America," WMQ, 3d Ser., 53 (1996), 251-88
35. and Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 17-92
36. Bermuda Colonial Records (herafter BCR), vol. 56:314 (1676 ban)
37. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), 87-88, 327
38. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies, 5th ed., 5 vols. (London, 1819), 5:116-17
39. Bermuda became overcrowded by the late 1620s, sparking the emigration of Bermudian settlers to Virginia, Providence Island, and other English colonies throughout the 17th century; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993), 24-80
40. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 114-18
41. On the dissolution of the Somer Island Company, see Dunn, "The Downfall of the Bermuda Company: A Restoration Farce," WMQ, 3d Ser., 20 (1963), 48-512
42. On the diversifying consequences of shipbuilding, see Eyup Ozveren, "The Shipbuilding Commodity Chain, 1590-1790," in Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, Conn., 1994)
43. John J. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), 97-102, 318-21
44. and Simeon Crowther, "The Shipbuilding Industry and the Economic Development of the Delaware Valley, 1681-1776" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1970), 108-37
45. Randolph, "Account of Bermuda," 629-36
46. O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore, 1977), 49 (log cutting)
47. For a detailed overview of Bermuda's diversified maritime economy, see Jarvis, "In the Eye of All Trade," 407-87. Most of what has been written about colonial shipping focuses on New England
48. see Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), esp. 112-96
49. Daniel Scott Smith, "A Note on the Longevity of Colonial Ships," American Neptune, 34 (1974), 68-69
50. Crowther, "Shipbuilding Industry," 137-39
51. Joseph A. Goldenberg, Shipbuilding in Colonial America (Charlottesville, 1976), 15-17
52. James H. Levitt, For Want of Trade: Shipping and the New Jersey Ports, 1680-1783 (Newark, N. J., 1981), 88-95
53. Jarnes F. Shepherd and Gary H. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, 1972), 240-44
54. On teredo worm damage, see Arthur Pierce Middleton, Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of the Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (Baltimore, 1984), 43-46
55. Bolster, Black Jacks, explores the lives of black sailors and watermen along the coasts of Africa, the West Indies, and North America from a sociocultural perspective. He points out one of the great ironies of maritime labor: although white seamen were often deemed socially marginal, slave mariners were among the most privileged. Their mobility put them in touch with black communities throughout the Atlantic world, making them links between slave communities and conduits for information, traditions, and material culture. See Julius Scott, "The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communications in the Era of the Haitian Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986)
56. James Barker Farr, Black Odyssey: The Seafaring Traditions of Afro-Americans (New York, 1989)
57. and Martha S. Putney, Black Sailors: Afro-American Merchant Seamen and Whalemen Prior to the Civil War (New York, 1987)
58. Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (Chapel Hill, 1994), 144-203, documents how the Essex County, Mass., fishery also captured a rising generation of native-born men in the late 17th century to expand its maritime activities
59. Philip D. Morgan, "Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston," Perspectives in American History, N. S., 1 (1984), 187-232
60. See also Jean Hector De Crèvecoeur, "A Description of Bermuda," c. 1764, in Bermuda Hist. Q., 3 (1946), 202
61. Laurens shipped his starch (i.e., rice) to St. Kitts in Bermudian Joseph Outerbridge's sloop Ranger for 5s. 6d. (South Carolina currency) less per barrel than the 18s. that Capt. George Noarth had offered; Hamer and Rogers, eds., Papers of Henry Laurens, 3:243. Bermudian masters and shipowners further minimized their overhead by neglecting to pay Greenwich Hospital Money (6d. / month / crewman) - mandated by an act of Parliament - on their slave mariners; CO 37/18:64-65. On the low freight costs and international reputation of Dutch carriers, see Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), 48-50
62. and Richard W. Unger, Dutch Shipbuilding before 1800 (Assen, Neth., 1978)
63. David MacPherson, Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries, and Navigation, . . . from the Earliest Accounts to the Meeting of the Union Parliament in January 1801, 4 vols. (London, 1805), 3:504
64. On wartime wages and Royal navy impressment, see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987), 121-26, 304-06
65. Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200-1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, N. J., 1968), 123-48, 248
66. and N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (Glasgow, 1986), 126-29, 164-204
67. Bolster, Black Jacks, 28, 76-77, notes that in the colonial period, black sailors elsewhere usually received the same wages as whites and would thus profit from wartime increases
68. On patterns of slaveholding, see Crane, "Socioeconomics of a Female Majority in Eighteenth-Century Bermuda," 243-47
69. Jesse Lemisch, "Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America," WMQ, 3d Ser., 25 (1968), 371-407
70. Peter Linebaugh and Rediker, "The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of'Historical Sociology, 3 (1990), 225-52
71. and The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), 143-73
72. Vickers and Vince Walsh, "Young Men and the Sea: The Sociology of Seafaring in Eighteenth-Century Salem, Massachusetts," Social History, 24 (1999), 23, reveal considerable local ties in the manning of Salem's 18th-century merchant fleet: "About 60 per cent of the sailors who shipped out of Salem on local vessels had been born in Salem or Beverly and had grown up together within a relatively compact world. As children they had played together. . . . When young men decided to go to sea, therefore, they did so in the company of people they knew." Even' in the large British port of Bristol there were considerable social, religious, and familial ties linking mariners to their home ports
73. Gerald Lorentz, "Bristol Fashion: The Maritime Culture of Bristol, 1650-1700" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1997), 380-88
74. On the challenge to follow seamen onto the shore, see Vickers, "Beyond Jack Tar," WMQ, 3d Ser., 50 (1993), 418-24
75. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 77-115
76. Rodger, Wooden World, 41
77. Bolster, Black Jacks, 98-99, notes that in several cases white seamen (through threats of violence and legal action) obtained justice for their black shipmates
78. see also Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa, The African, Written by Himself (1789), ed. Vincent Carretta (London, 1995), 126-30
79. On the process of entering a ship through customs and the oaths sworn, see Thomas C. Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660-1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 265
80. On the difficult position of free blacks in Jamaica, see Edwards, History Civil and Commercial (1794), 2:16-21
81. South Carolina Gazette, Nov. 10-17, 1758 (Saunders). Seamen were proud of their shore-going rig, or best outfit; on sailor adornment, see Bolster, Black Jacks, 91-92, 138-39
82. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 182-86, discusses the widespread allowance of a peculium to slaves
83. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 358-59, notes that South Carolina and Virginia masters, like their Bermudian counterparts, "permitted slaves to produce and exchange goods because it served their own interests to do so."
84. Packwood, Chained on the Rock, 35, 38
85. On urban slavery and free blacks, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 67-70
86. and Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 8-37
87. Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey (Chapel Hill, 1999), 34-38, 69-73, 82-83, 102-03, 107-19
88. Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, 1998), 141-79
89. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 58-59, 70-71, 154-61, 178-80
90. and Morgan, "Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston," 187-232
91. On the interracial social mixing of seamen, see Scott, "Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors, and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth Century," in Paquette and Engerman, eds., The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville, Fla., 1997), 128-43
92. On Bermudian contempt for agriculture, see William F. Williams, An Historical and Statistical Account of Bermuda (London, 1848), 160-62
93. On the motivations and demographic profile of runaway creole slaves in Virginia and South Carolina, see Morgan, "Colonial South Carolina Runaways: Their Significance for Slave Culture," Slavery and Abolition, 7 (1985), 57-78
94. and Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 242-63
95. Murray G. Lawson, "The Routes of Boston's Trade, 1752-1765," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts: Transactions, 1947-1951, 38 [1959], 81-120)
96. David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore, 1985), 109-11
97. Scott, "Common Wind," 59-118
98. On slave crews in the Middle Passage, see Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, 1978), 58-59
99. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984), 199-212, 219-21, 242-47
100. Larry E. Hudson, Jr., To Have and To Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens, Ga., 1997)
101. Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects, 141-79
102. David Ryden, "Producing a Peculiar Commodity: Jamaican Sugar Production, Slave Life, and Planter Profits on the Eve of Abolition, 1750-1807" (Ph. D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1999), 133-44
103. Bolland, Formation of a Colonial Society, 29-31, 53-61. Like Bermuda's slave sailors, Belizian slave logcutters held agricultural work in contempt and reveled in their skills and autonomy. On the Biafran coast, slave-trading African families pawned relatives as collateral in return for European goods advanced on credit
104. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, "Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade," American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 333-55
105. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial (1794). 1:470; CO 37/40:135
106. K. G. Davies, ed, Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-1783, 21 vols. (Dublin, 1978), 19:320-21
107. Morgan, "Rethinking Early American Slavery," in Carla Pescana and Sharon Salinger, eds., Inequality in Early America (Hanover, N. H., 1999), 239-66