Bermuda: The Shipwreck Colony

A rock in the North Atlantic

Bermuda is not in the Caribbean, though it is often filed there. It is a cluster of small islands on an old volcano in the North Atlantic, about 1,000 kilometres off North Carolina, ringed by the northernmost coral reefs in the world. It covers only 54 square kilometres and holds around 64,000 people. It has no indigenous history: no one lived there before Europeans, who for a century avoided it as the "Isle of Devils" — a reef-fringed trap for sailing ships. Bermuda was settled by one of those wrecks.

A short history

1. c. 1505

   Sighted

   The Spaniard Juan de Bermúdez names the uninhabited islands.

2. 1609

   The Sea Venture

   An English ship bound for Virginia is wrecked on the reefs; the survivors settle.

3. 1612

   St George's

   The Virginia Company sends colonists; Bermuda's parliament first meets in 1620.

4. 17th–18th c.

   A maritime society

   Bermudians live by shipbuilding, salt, whaling and Atlantic trade.

5. 1809

   The Dockyard

   Britain begins building a great fortified naval base at the western end.

6. 1834

   Emancipation

   Slavery is abolished outright, without an apprenticeship period.

7. late 19th c. onward

   Tourism

   Bermuda becomes an exclusive resort for wealthy Americans.

8. 1963–1968

   The vote

   Universal adult suffrage arrives; race and politics realign.

9. 1995

   Referendum

   Bermudians vote against independence.

The wreck that founded a colony

In 1609 the Sea Venture, flagship of a supply fleet sailing to the struggling English colony at Jamestown, was caught in a hurricane and deliberately driven onto Bermuda's reefs by its admiral, Sir George Somers, to save the roughly 150 people aboard. They lived on the island for ten months, built two new vessels from Bermuda cedar and the wreckage, and sailed on to Virginia — arriving just in time to stop the settlers there from abandoning Jamestown. Accounts of the storm and the enchanted island are generally thought to have shaped Shakespeare's The Tempest.

England claimed the islands, and in 1612 the Virginia Company sent 60 settlers to found St George's. A dedicated company ran the colony until 1684, when it passed to the Crown, making Bermuda the oldest of England's overseas territories. Its House of Assembly, first meeting in 1620, is among the oldest parliaments in the world.

A nation of sailors

Bermuda had too little land for plantations, and its early tobacco crop failed, so the islanders turned to the sea. They built fast sloops from rot-resistant cedar, controlled the salt ponds of the distant Turks Islands for a century and a half, hunted whales, and traded and privateered across the whole Atlantic world. Bermudian society was made of shipwrights, pilots and mariners rather than field hands. Slavery existed from the beginning — enslaved Africans, and enslaved Native Americans shipped over in the 17th century, worked as sailors, whalers, and craftsmen — and by the 18th century enslaved people were about half the population. Emancipation came in 1834, without the "apprenticeship" imposed on the plantation colonies.

The Gibraltar of the West

The American Revolution changed Bermuda's strategic value. Cut off from American food, Bermudians in 1775 stole the Crown's gunpowder and shipped it to George Washington's army in exchange for trade. After the war, having lost its ports on the mainland, Britain decided it needed a naval base in the western Atlantic, and from 1809 it built one at Bermuda's western tip — a vast fortified dockyard, "the Gibraltar of the West", constructed largely by British convicts held in prison hulks and by enslaved and free Black labourers.

From Bermuda the Royal Navy blockaded the American coast in the War of 1812 — the force that burned Washington in 1814 sailed from here — and during the American Civil War the island grew rich as a transfer point for Confederate blockade-runners.

Onions, lilies, and tourists

In the 19th century Bermuda recruited Portuguese farm labour from the Azores and Madeira, and for a time exported onions and Easter lilies to New York. Then it found its lasting business: tourism. From the late 1800s, and on a large scale after the First World War, Bermuda marketed itself as a genteel, exclusive resort for wealthy Americans — banning billboards, keeping out private cars until 1946, and capping the speed limit — a two-day boat ride from New York.

The Second World War brought American air and naval bases, leased for 99 years. After the war the dockyard closed, in 1951, and the US bases followed in 1995. Bermuda replaced them with international business — above all insurance and reinsurance, in which it became one of the largest centres in the world — helped by having no income tax.

Race, politics, and independence

For most of its history Bermuda was run by a small white merchant class through a property-based vote. Universal adult suffrage came only in 1963, and full equality of the vote in 1968. Racial tension broke into rioting in 1968 and again in 1977, the latter after the hanging of two Black men convicted of assassinating the Governor in 1973 — the last executions on the island. The mainly Black Progressive Labour Party, founded in 1963, finally won government in 1998. A 1995 referendum rejected independence by a wide margin, and Bermuda remains a British Overseas Territory.

Troupes perform through the streets on Boxing Day and New Year's Day, the costumes and drum rhythms passed down within families and neighbourhoods.

What Bermuda keeps

Bermuda began with a shipwreck and has spent four centuries turning its isolation into an asset: first as a base for sailors trading across the Atlantic, then as a fortress guarding it, then as a discreet resort, and now as a place to register insurance risk. It has one of the highest incomes per head in the world, an old parliament, and an unresolved gap between the descendants of the merchant class and the descendants of the people they enslaved.