The recorded history of Bermuda dates back to 1503, when it was written about by the Spanish explorer Juan de Bermúdez, whose surname was used as the island's namesake. Having never been settled by indigenous Caribbeans, Bermuda remained uninhabited until , a merchant ship of the Virginia Company on the Third Supply mission to the English colony of Virginia, wrecked on a reef near the island on 3 August 1609. The crew and passengers of Sea Venture settled on Bermuda for nine months, resulting in the island becoming a permanent part of the English colonial empire. Bermuda's first capital, St. George's, was established in 1612.
The Virginia Company administered Bermuda as an extension of the colony of Virginia until 1614 and the company's corporate spin-off, the Somers Isles Company, took over in 1615 and managed the island until 1684 when the company's charter was revoked and Bermuda became a Crown colony. Bermuda remained under Crown rule but developed and maintained a degree of autonomy from officials in London. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949 Bermuda became the oldest remaining British colony, and has been the most populous remaining dependent territory of Britain since the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Bermuda became a British Overseas Territory in 2002 as a result of the British Overseas Territories Act 2002.
Initial discovery and early colony
The earliest depiction of the island is the inclusion of "La Bermuda" in the map of Pedro Martyr's 1511 Legatio Babylonica. The earliest description of the island was Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés' account of his 1515 visit with Juan de Bermúdez aboard La Garza. Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas in 1527 affirms the island was named after the captain who discovered it. Henry Harrisse documents earlier voyages by Juan Bermúdez in 1498, 1502, and 1503, though John Henry Lefroy noted Bermúdez left no account of visiting the island. Samuel Eliot Morison lists a 1505 discovery by Juan Bermúdez, citing the investigation into the Archivo de Indias by Roberto Barreiro-Meiro. Compounding the confusion is the record of a Francisco Bermudez accompanying Christopher Columbus on his first voyage, a Diego Bermudez accompanying Columbus on his fourth voyage, and Juan's brother Diego Bermudez accompanying Ponce de León in a 1513 voyage. Thus, the only clearly documented account is of Juan Bermudez visiting the island in 1515, with the implication he had discovered the island on an earlier voyage. The island was definitely on the homeward course for returning Spaniards, as they followed the Gulf Stream north followed by the Westerlies just north of Bermuda. The Spanish avoided the uninhabited island's reefs and hurricanes, calling it Demoniorum Insulam. Yet, Spanish Rock bears the date of 1543, but little further details. A Frenchman called Russell was wrecked there in 1570, followed by the Englishman Henry May in 1593, but both managed to escape. Spanish Capt. Diego Ramirez was stranded on the rocks of Bermuda after a storm in 1603, when he discovered the "devils reported to be about Bermuda" were actually the outcry of the Bermuda petrel. He did note the former presence of men, including remnants of a wreck.
In late August 1585, an English ship Tiger commanded by Richard Grenville on his return from the Roanoke Colony, fought and captured a larger Spanish ship Santa Maria de San Vicente off the shores of Bermuda.
The 1609 shipwreck of Sea Venture
On 2 June 1609, Sir George Somers had set sail aboard , the new flagship of the Virginia Company, leading a fleet of nine vessels, loaded with several hundred settlers, food and supplies for the new English colony of Jamestown, in Virginia. Somers had previous experience sailing with both Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. The fleet was caught in a storm on 24 July, and Sea Venture was separated and began to founder. When the reefs to the East of Bermuda were spotted, the ship was deliberately driven on them to prevent its sinking, thereby saving all aboard, 150 sailors and settlers, and one dog. William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, in which the character Ariel refers to the "still-vex'd Bermoothes" (I.ii.229), is thought to have been inspired by William Strachey's and Silvester Jourdain's accounts of the shipwreck.
The survivors spent nine months on Bermuda. With ship's supplies mostly gone except for some domestic pigs, the castaways subsisted on rainwater, palm tree pulp, cedar berries, fish, birds (such as Bermuda petrel), and by hunting for the plentiful wild hogs from past Bermuda shipwrecks.
The master's mate and 7 other sailors were lost at sea when Sea Ventures longboat was rigged with a mast and sent in search of Jamestown to rescue the lot. The sailors were not seen again. The remainder of castaways built two new ships: Deliverance at and 80 tons, and Patience at and 30 tons, mostly from Bermuda cedar. When the two new vessels were completed, most of the survivors set sail on May 10th, completing their journey to Jamestown on June 8, 1610. Christopher Carter and Edward Waters remained, the latter being accused of murder, while four others had died, including John Rolfe's infant daughter. Later in Jamestown, Rolfe's wife died (and he would eventually marry a native, Pocahontas). The castaways arrived only to find the colony's population almost annihilated by the Starving Time, which had left only sixty survivors. According to Sir William Monson, the "swine brought from Bermuda" saved Virginia until the timely arrival of Lord De La Warre.
Somers returned to Bermuda on Patience in June and found Carter and Waters alive. Somers soon died, however, and while his heart was buried at Saint Georges, his nephew, Captain Matthew Somers, returned his embalmed body to England for burial at Dorset.
1612 official settlement
Two years later, in 1612, the Virginia Company's Royal Charter was officially extended to include the island, and a party of sixty settlers was sent on Plough, under the command of Sir Richard Moore, the island's first governor. Joining the two men left behind by Deliverance and Patience (who had taken up residence on Smith's Island) and Edward Chard, they founded and commenced construction of the town of St. George, designated as Bermuda's first capital, the oldest continually inhabited English town in the New World.
Bermuda struggled throughout the following seven decades to develop a viable economy. The Virginia Company, finding the colony unprofitable, briefly handed its administration to the Crown in 1614. The following year, 1615, King James I granted a charter to a new company, the Somers Isles Company, formed by the same shareholders, which ran the colony until it was dissolved in 1684. (The Virginia Company itself was dissolved after its charter was revoked in 1624). Representative government was introduced to Bermuda in 1620, when its House of Assembly held its first session, and it became a self-governing colony.
Somers Isles Company (1615–1684)
In 1615, the colony was passed to a new company, the Somers Isles Company, named after the admiral who saved his passengers from the Sea Venture. Many Virginian place names refer to the archipelago, such as Bermuda City, and Bermuda Hundred. The first British colonial currency was struck in Bermuda.
Bermuda was divided by Richard Norwood into eight equally sized administrative areas west of St. George's called "tribes" (today known as "parishes"). These "tribes" were areas of land partitioned off to the principal "Adventurers" (investors) of the company, from east to west – Bedford, Smiths, Cavendish, Paget, Mansell, Warwick, and Sandys.
The company sent 600 settlers in nine ships between 1612 and 1615. Governor Moore dug a well in St. George, then built fortifications including Paget and Smith's batteries at the entrance of the harbour, King's and Charles' at the entrance to Castle Harbour, Pembroke Fort on Cooper's Island, and Gates' Fort, St. Katherine's Fort and Warwick Castle to defend St. George. In 1614, the first English-grown tobacco was exported, the same tobacco variety John Rolfe started to grow in Virginia. The exporting of ambergris was especially lucrative. Slavery in Bermuda In August 1616, plantain, sugarcane, fig, and pineapple plants were imported along with the first Indian and Negro, the first English colony to use enslaved Africans. By 1619, Bermuda had between fifty and a hundred black enslaved persons. These were a mixture of native Africans who were trafficked to the Americas via the African slave trade and Native Americans who were enslaved from the Thirteen Colonies. The first African slaves arrived in Bermuda in 1617, not from Africa but from the West Indies. Bermuda Governor Tucker sent a ship to the West Indies to find black slaves to dive for pearls in Bermuda. More black slaves were later trafficked to the island in large numbers, originating from America and the Caribbean.
As the black population grew, so did the fear of insurrection among the white settlers. In 1623, a law to restrain the insolence of the Negroes was passed in Bermuda. It forbade blacks to buy or sell, barter or exchange tobacco or any other produce for goods without the consent of their master. Unrest amongst the slaves predictably erupted several times over the next decades. Major rebellions occurred in 1656, 1661, 1673, 1682, 1730 and 1761. In 1761 a conspiracy was discovered that involved the majority of the blacks on the island. Six slaves were executed and all black celebrations were prohibited.
Agricultural diversification Though Bermuda exported more tobacco than Virginia until 1625, Bermuda diversified its agriculture to include corn, potatoes, fruit trees, poultry and livestock. This was especially true when prices collapsed in 1630, and tobacco took its toll on soil fertility, though the company continued to use tobacco as a medium of exchange and resist a diversified economy. Tobacco exports peaked in 1684, the last year of company control.
English immigration essentially ceased by the 1620s when all available land was occupied. Because of its limited land area, Bermuda relied on emigration, especially to the developing English colonies in the Bahamas, the Carolinas, New York and the Caribbean. Between 1620 and 1640, 1200 emigrated, while the population reached 4000 in 1648. Between 1679 and 1690, 2000 emigrated, while the population reached 6248 in 1691.
The archipelago's limited land area and resources led to the creation of what may be the earliest conservation laws of the New World. In 1616 and 1620, acts were passed banning the hunting of certain birds and young tortoises.Meggs, Martin. "Developing a Small Island GIS: the Bermuda Experience". Bermuda Department of Planning.
English Civil War in the Bermuda In 1649, the English Civil War was in its seventh year and King Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall, London. In Bermuda, related tensions resulted in civil war on the island; it was ended by militias. The majority of colonists developed a strong sense of devotion to the Crown. Dissenters, such as Puritans and Independents, were pushed to settle the Bahamas under William Sayle.Forbes, Keith: "About Bermuda Online" , The Royal Gazette Ltd. Retrieved 22 September 2007. However, the Earl of Dorset, a royalist, was replaced by the Earl of Warwick, a Puritan, as governor of the Somers Island Company. Sayle and most of the emigrants were allowed to return to Bermuda in 1656.
Bermuda and Virginia, as well as Antigua and Barbados were, however, the subjects of the September 1650 Prohibitory Act of the Rump Parliament, and the Atlantic fleet was instructed to bring these opposing colonies into obedience. At the same time, John Danvers, governor of the Somers Island Company, and the other adventurers were forced to take the oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth. Then in the 1651 Navigation Act, trade was restricted to English ships.