How can the small, isolated island of Bermuda help us to understand
the early expansion of English America?
First discovered by Europeans in 1505, the island of Bermuda had no
indigenous population and no permanent European presence until the early
seventeenth century. Settled five years after Virginia and eight years
before Plymouth, Bermuda is a foundational site of English colonization.
Its history reveals strikingly different paths of potential colonial
development as a place where slave-owning puritan tobacco planters
raised large families, engaged overseas markets, built ships, created a
Christian commonwealth, hanged witches, wrestled to define racial
difference, and welcomed godly pirates raiding Spanish America.
In Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints, Michael J. Jarvis presents readers
with a new narrative social and cultural history of Bermuda. Adopting a
holistic, multidisciplinary approach that draws upon thirty years of
research and archaeological fieldwork, Jarvis recounts Bermuda's
turbulent, dynamic past from the Sea Venture's dramatic 1609 shipwreck
through the 1684 dissolution of the Bermuda Company. He argues that the
island was the first of England's colonies to produce a successful
staple, form a stable community, turn a profit, transplant civic
institutions, and harness bound African knowledge and labor. Bermuda was
a tabula rasa that fired the imaginations of English thinkers aspiring
to create an American utopia. It was also England's first puritan
colony, founded as a covenanted Christian commonwealth in 1612 by
self-consciously religious settlers who committed themselves to building
a moral society.
By the 1670s, Bermuda had become England's most densely populated
possession and was poised to become an intercolonial maritime hub after
freeing itself from its antiquated parent company. The first scholarly
monograph in eighty years on this important, neglected colony's first
century, Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints is a worthy prequel to In the
Eye of All Trade, Jarvis's masterful first book. Revealing the dynamic
interplay of race, gender, slavery, and environment at the dawn of
English America, Jarvis's work challenges us to rethink how Europeans
and Africans became distinctly American within the crucible of
colonization.
