Bermuda Hundred was the first administrative division in the English colony of Virginia. It was founded by Sir Thomas Dale in 1613, six years after Jamestown. At the southwestern edge of the confluence of the Appomattox and James Rivers opposite City Point, annexed to Hopewell in 1923, Bermuda Hundred was a port town for many years. The terminology "Bermuda Hundred" also included a large area adjacent to the town. In the colonial era, "hundreds" were large developments of many acres, arising from the English term to define an area which would support 100 homesteads. The port at the town of Bermuda Hundred was intended to serve other "hundreds" in addition to Bermuda Hundred.
The area of the peninsula between the James and Appomattox Rivers on which Bermuda Hundred is located was part of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign of May 1864 during the American Civil War.
No longer a shipping port, Bermuda Hundred is now a small community in the southeastern portion of Chesterfield County.
Mattica
Prior to English contact, the site was an Appomattoc village shown as "Mattica" on a 1608 Robert Tyndall map. On May 26, 1607, Christopher Newport led a party of 24 English colonists to Mattica. They were welcomed with food and tobacco. He noted the village was surrounded by cornfields, which the Indians cultivated. A weroansqua (female chieftain), Oppussoquionuske, led the village. Their larger village nearby on the north bank of Wighwhippoc Creek, now called Swift Creek, was ruled by the weroance Coquonasum, brother of Oppussoquionuske. Anglo-Native relations deteriorated in 1609, culminating in the First Anglo-Powhatan War by 1610. In the summer of 1610 Opossunoquonuske invited fifteen settlers, who had been collecting water upriver from the settlement at Jamestown, to come to her town. Claiming that the women of the village would be afraid of their weapons, she persuaded the men to leave them in the boat; she then invited them to sit down for a meal, at which she had them ambushed. Her men killed all but one who managed to escape; the survivor, Thomas Dowse, managed to return to the boat and protect himself with the rudder. The men's manner of death is not recorded, nor is it noted if they were tortured. In retaliation, the colonists burned the town and killed several of its inhabitants. Opossunoquonuske herself was reported to have been mortally wounded and to have died that winter. John Smith, in his narrative of the colony, discusses the burning of the town but not the reason behind it, calling the motive only the "injurie done us by them of Apomatock".
Around Christmas 1611, in reprisal for an Appomattoc ambush on a group of colonists a year before, Sir Thomas Dale seized Oppussoquionuske's village and the surrounding cultivated land. He renamed it "New Bermudas".
Establishment The town of Bermuda Hundred was settled by English colonists in 1613 by Dale and was incorporated the following year. The town, described as a fishing village, was situated "on the peninsula at the confluence of the Appomattox and James Rivers, southeast of Richmond, and northeast of Petersburg." Thomas Dale annexed to his New Bermuda plantation "many miles of champion and wood land ground in several hundreds by the names of Nether Hundred, Shirley Hundred" and so on.Colonial Records of Virginia 0806305584 Committee of State Library, Virginia General Assembly, Virginia -2012- Page 38 "Sir Thomas Dale annexed to New Bermuda "many miles of champion and wood land ground in several hundreds, by the names of Nether Hundred, Shirley Hundred... the same is now located, opposite Bermuda Hundred, and well known as the residence 38 Colonial Records of Virginia."
Sir Thomas Dale, who served as Governor of Virginia for about three months in 1611, and from 1614 to 1616, hoped to replace the settlement of Jamestown in a more suitable location a few miles from the town of Bermuda Hundred at Henricus.
Governor Dale initially named the location across the Appomattox River from the town of Bermuda Hundred as "Bermuda Cittie" (sic). The latter was later renamed Charles City Point, and eventually just City Point, before it was annexed by the independent city of Hopewell in 1923. Some sources indicate that Dale called the entire region "New Bermuda" after the island.The Two Americas: Their Complete History 1881 "On the opposite side of the river he built a plantation on lands, from which he expelled the Indians, and called it New Bermuda."
Source of name
Bermuda Hundred was named for Bermuda, which became part of the Virginia Colony for a few years after the shipwreck of the ill-starred Sea Venture, the new flagship of the Virginia Company of London. With most of the leaders and supplies aboard the Sea Venture, it was leading the Third Supply mission from England to Jamestown in 1609 when the eight ships ran into a major storm. What was thought to be a hurricane separated them. The new caulking on the Sea Venture caused it to take on water. After the crew fought the storm and bailed water from the holds for three days, the Admiral of the fleet, Sir George Somers, drove the foundering ship onto a reef of the uninhabited archipelago known as Bermuda, saving the 150 passengers and crew (and one dog) aboard. Among these were the newly appointed Governor, future Governor Sir George Yeardley, Sir Thomas Gates, Vice-Admiral Christopher Newport, and future authors William Strachey and Samuel Jordan, as well as John Rolfe, who would later marry Pocahontas.
The fate of the Sea Venture was unknown until the following year. The rest of the fleet sailed on to Jamestown, delivering hundreds of additional colonists. They had little in the way of food, supplies, or leaders, all of which had been principally carried on the Sea Venture. Samuel Argall, the Captain of one of the other ships, delivered his passengers and what supplies he had, and hurried back to England to advise of the dire situation at Jamestown.
In the meantime, the lack of food and supplies and a general Indian blockade on the settlement's ability to hunt, forage, and claim farmland into the interior, combined with the arrival of additional colonists, weak leadership, and several other factors to cause death of over 80% of the 500 colonists at Jamestown in the subsequent year. This period between the fall of 1609 and the spring of 1610, became known as "starving time", and indelibly shaped the community into the remainder of the 17th century as it strove to become more self-sufficient, chose a mixed use of crop, and caused the survivors and subsequent colonists to seek interlocking strategic points along the coasts to control Chesapeake Bay.
Meanwhile, the survivors on Bermuda used salvaged parts of the shipwreck and native materials to build two new, smaller ships, the Deliverance and Patience. Most set sail for Jamestown ten months later, leaving several men to establish English possession of Bermuda. It would remain permanently settled, and Virginia's boundaries were extended in 1612 to include Bermuda. In 1615, Bermuda, also known as the Somers Isles (after Admiral Somers), was transferred to a new company formed by the same shareholders, the Somers Isles Company, which oversaw it until 1684, when the Crown revoked the company's charter. Bermuda and Virginia continued to maintain close links, although there was no possibility of Bermuda joining Virginia and the other mainland colonies in their 1776 rebellion, and Bermuda remains an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. Bermudians settled in North America in large numbers in the 17th and 18th centuries, and many places on the continent are named for the archipelago.
John Rolfe and tobacco
Among the colonists who survived the shipwreck of the Sea Venture at Bermuda and sailed to Virginia was John Rolfe. At Bermuda Hundred, he cultivated and exported several non-native strains of tobacco, providing the proprietary Colony with a crucial cash crop to export. Bermuda Hundred became a major shipping point for hogsheads of tobacco grown on plantations nearby.
Rolfe became wealthy and lived at Bermuda Hundred for a time. He is believed to have been living at a plantation at or near Bermuda Hundred at the time of the great Indian massacre of 1622 which along the murdering of much of the colony's population, destroyed Henricus and the Falling Creek Ironworks upstream on the James River. Although records indicate that he died in 1622, it is not known if he was a victim of the widespread coordinated attacks of the Powhatan Confederacy, which committed the murder of one third of the colonists in several days or if he died by other means.
Early colonial period With the subsequent victories in the Anglo-Powhatan Wars, and other Indian campaigns, the Bermuda Hundred was able to expand and develop. The area at first was a combined settlement of a few mid-sized plantations, several smaller-sized farms, and the small port town which shipped their produce and needs. For most of the remaining two-thirds of the century, this mixed-use economy marked the Bermuda Hundred, thereby helping the community to grow. In turn, slowly the population recovered from the Indian attacks, and although outbreaks of Indian diseases continued to occur, new colonists arrived to keep the colony and Bermuda Hundred growing.
However, starting in the second half of the 17th century and gaining momentum, a huge growth in demand first in sugar and then in tobacco occurred causing the countryside to slowly change crops despite earlier colonial policy. Additionally, the Indians were pushed back in several campaigns, allowing for the expansion in size of the plantation, and another growth of population which put additional pressures on land and small farms.
Slowly, over the remaining century and into the early 18th century, the farms turned to the valuable but land-depleting sugar and tobacco crops. As the soil depleted, requiring more and more land, large numbers of African slaves were brought into work the mortgaged land cheaply, thereby creating an economy of capital centralization. Consequently, most of the smaller surrounding Yeoman farms were absorbed into the plantations, their inhabitants falling into dependency to the planter class, turning to the town, or moving westward for cheaper land.
Later colonial period With this growth and evolving economy, the port and town also experienced expansion. Ironically, while originally serving both as a local tide-water port and an oceangoing port, as the cash crops pushed out the local consumption crops, thereby reducing the number of farms, and more slaves caused an increase in acreage and corresponding decrease in the number of plantations, the shippers required larger boats to carry the produce. Simultaneously, the growth in farmland starting increasing silt downriver into the port. Thus, as the port began silting up it was only maintained by dredging which required additional costs on the shippers already competing for capital to build larger boats.
Nonetheless, despite this increased competition, the port retained a good number of merchants devoted to the tidewater trade and import and export trade with the Great Britain and Ireland. Additionally, its shippers served in transporting and off-loading the continually growing numbers of settlers migrating from Europe (primarily as indentured servants) into the American colonies. Most of these migrants went on to settle further westward of the Tidewater, later into the Piedmont, and finally into the Great Wagon Road, and the Wilderness Road which led them further west. The combination of import and export trade, indenture transportation, slave importations, and the consequent requirements in parts and repair to maintain this small merchant fleet resulted in a flourishing mercantile community and an increase in the towns population.