Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

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      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 Although initial generations of Africans and Indians were bound 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 СКАЧАТЬ