Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2001 by Robert L. Paquette

In several of the book's six detailed chapters, Bernhard examines slave resistance. No major slave revolt ever broke out in Bermuda. Whites did preempt five alleged slave plots, in 1656, 1661, 1673, 1682, and 1761. But no whites were killed. No wave of bloody repression followed discovery. The five plots resulted in the execution of a total of only ten slaves. Rarely did Bermudian whites resort to torture and mutilation in the process of executing any slave. Bermudian masters, according to Bernhard, even seem to have grown disinclined to lash their merely recalcitrant slaves. In the 1760s officials created the post of "jumper" for those masters who wanted someone else to do the whipping.

For Bernhard, the opportunities for Bermudian slaves in the maritime economy mitigated the inherent brutality in slavery. Governor Alured Popple reported to his superiors in 1739 that Bermuda's celebrated cedar sloops were carrying crews that were one-quarter black. Bernhard claims that by the 1770s, "black sailors made up the entire crews of most stoops (p. 247)." Whatever the true proportions, increasingly large numbers of Bermudian slaves seized opportunity, made transatlantic contacts, and forged a strong sense of self-worth on the high seas. Bernhard admits that her portrayal of Bermudian slavery is far from rosy. Slave marriages had no protection in law. Blacks sat in the rear of those churches in which they worshiped together with whites. Some ministers refused to baptize slaves. Manumitted slaves and other free persons were at times targeted for expulsion from the islands. Slaves were hanged, if not broken on the wheel. Black sailors crewed Bermudian vessels headed by white masters and mates. "Four sc ore and 19 years" is, de facto, permanent bondage.

Bernhard's impressively researched book clearly establishes Bermudian slavery as a complex and fascinating departure from the plantation type. But, in the absence of black voices, how did Bermuda's slaves view their intimacy with whites? "Close bonds" to one can mean stifling supervision to another; slaveholder "laxity" can entail detachment without understanding. Bermudian slaves, like slaves in the antebellum South, had a rich and contradictory experience. The maritime economy may have given Bermudian slaves "a large measure of autonomy and a sense of identity (p. 275)." But identity with whom and autonomy toward what ends? Bernhard's assertion that in "Bermuda's small households the bonds of womanhood, of female companionship ... undoubtedly transcended race (p. 275)" seems more like a sop to academic fashion than a conclusion warranted by the evidence in her book. Given the leadership of privileged slaves in at least several of the insurrectionary plots that supposedly aimed at the destruction of whites, familiarity with masters must have bred racial contempt in many slaves in spite of (because of ?) the benignity of Bermudian slavery. In 1796 a Massachusetts newspaper reported the complaint of a white Bermudian that blacks were given a "shameful scope" on the islands. That scope, he continued, led blacks to assemble for entertainment that excluded whites. Another assessment of Bermudian slavery comes from the singular voice of Mary Prince, whose famous narrative, published in 1831, picks up the story where Bernhard's history ends. Prince grew up on a small farm in Bermuda in the late eighteenth century. She worked as a literate domestic slave in close contact with several masters and mistresses from whom she suffered whippings, beatings, and sexual abuse. Like many other Bermudian slaves, Prince was shipped out of Bermuda to spend years of grueling bondage raking salt under a scorching sun on the Turks Islands. After running away from one of her Bermudian masters, Prince was returned to bondage by her own fa ther. "Oh I was loth, loth to go back; but as there was no remedy, I was obliged to submit."