Читать книгу Faithful Bodies - Heather Miyano Kopelson - Страница 10

1. “One Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had”

In August 1616, the English ship Edwin returned to Bermuda after a voyage to the Caribbean. In addition to “plantans, suger canes, figges, pines, and the like,” it carried two individuals whose arrival marked an important event in Bermudian history and in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Disembarked on the twenty-one-square-mile island were “one Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had.” In having these first non-European inhabitants brought to Bermuda, Governor Daniel Tucker had acted on the Somers Islands Company directives to send a ship to the Bahamas to trade for “sundrye things . . . for the Plantacion, as Cattle Cassadoe Sugar Canes, negroes to dive for pearles, and what other plants are there to be had.” The English were hoping that Bermuda’s formidable reefs would yield riches in the form of pearls, and they took steps to secure skilled African and Indian experts from Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.¹

The arrival of the two pearl divers brought in the Edwin was significant in several respects. It began the multicontinental habitation of an Atlantic island: Bermuda was one of the few places Europeans settled that did not have an indigenous population. The instructions from the colony’s proprietary company to seek out an enslaved African and an Indian showed English eagerness to learn from Iberian colonization techniques, as the divers’ arrival was made possible by sixteenth-century English privateering raids on Spanish and Portuguese ships and colonies. The disembarkation of the two men marked the earliest introduction of enslaved labor to an English colony in the Americas, three years before the São João Bautista landed “20 and odd. negroes” in Virginia in August 1619.²

The presence of these two men in Bermuda was notable, but as is so often the case in the documentary record of the slave trade, the inked words preserved only their occupation and racial descriptors. They and the other Africans and indigenous peoples of the Caribbean who soon joined them had names, past experiences, and an outlook on the future, but the spare mention of “an Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had” or one early colonist’s notation of cargo including “a good store of neggars” made no allowance for anything more than their relation to the development of the colony.³ And contribute to that development they did: in addition to providing much of the labor that made English colonial society function, their knowledge made fundamental changes to the shoreline, the beds the English lay in, the roofs over their heads, and the very food they ingested.⁴

The early generations of enslaved and bonded Africans and Indians shaped more than the physical contours of early Bermuda, however. They continued to practice the skills that connected them to other-than-human persons whose power enabled them not only to comprehend their environment but also to affect it directly.⁵ In their initial approach to Bermudian shores, in fishing, processing manioc, thatching and weaving with parts of the palmetto tree, as well as making cords with cotton and palmetto fibers, they altered the spiritual landscape in ways that are perhaps less tangible to Western scholarly inquiry but no less significant to investigating these individuals’ influence on the tiny archipelago in which they found themselves. This approach does not reinforce the stereotype of non-European peoples as communing peacefully with nature at all times, but rather acknowledges that there was little theoretical divide between body and spirit and pinpoints some material practices through which Africans and Indians accessed the other-than-human persons who populated their early Bermuda. Indeed, all seventeenth-century peoples lived with an ever-present world of the unseen. Although each conceived of that world in different ways, it was one that left impressions on their senses and bodies and that was inextricably intertwined with human action and society.⁶

The bare approximations of numbers tell us that by 1620, when twenty-nine shipmates of the “20 and odd. Negroes” landed in Virginia were brought to Bermuda, between fifty and one hundred Africans and Indians had already joined the two pearl divers, who probably came from Margarita Island, off the coast of present-day Venezuela. These early arrivals included significant if unknown numbers of women as well as men, and—as was not the case in many other locations where Europeans created a larger population of slaves through increasing imports of people—births outnumbered deaths among enslaved Africans and Indians in Bermuda from the beginning. Indeed, natural reproduction was also the primary cause of growth in the English population; the island-born across all racial categories probably became a majority of the population as early as the mid-seventeenth century.⁷ Although initial generations of Africans and Indians were bound to thirty-year indenture terms that in the more healthful environment of Bermuda did not necessarily mean enslavement for life, the English decisively shifted toward institutionalizing racial hierarchy and practicing slavery as a heritable condition by the end of the 1630s.⁸ Slaveholding was widespread among Anglo-Bermudians, and the island’s close quarters meant that the small numbers of slaves in any one household did not result in isolation.⁹ Intimate island geography made runaway communities impossible while irregularly enforced proclamations and acts exiled free people of color, which meant that by the last third of the seventeenth century, darker skin color became legally synonymous with an enslaved status. By 1676, Governor John Heydon forbade any further importation of “Negroes, Indians, and Malattoes,” as he was concerned that there was not enough work for the bonded laborers already on the island. In 1687, the governor reported 1,737 “negroes” in Bermuda, a number that represented one-third of the total population.¹⁰

But the numbers alone cannot conjure the worlds from which the enslaved and the dislocated came, the worlds they brought with them, or their struggles to make their own place in the space they were forced to call their new home. Untangling these multiple layers of meaning requires imagining the archive in an expansive way and leads us to other kinds of sources and evidence: archaeological reports, ethnographic descriptions of religious practices, and origin stories, among others. It also necessitates leaving the bits of rock and soil that protruded from the Atlantic several hundred miles from the nearest landmass and reversing the involuntary journeys to their beginnings in Africa and the Caribbean. It is there in Central and West Africa and in the indigenous Caribbean that we will find the clues to piece together the tales of lives, homes, and communities lost and put back together again, only to be pulled apart once more by the calculations inscribed in the flesh of human property devoured by the slave trade.¹¹

Though all historical narratives, regardless of their subject of focus, contain an element of imagination, the speculative nature of this particular venture is more explicit than for many. In addition to the lack of Somers Islands Company records, many personal papers from the period, and anything akin to the rich social, cultural, and biographical detail recorded in the Inquisition trials held by the Roman Catholic Church, the vagaries of slave trade routes and island demography blur any attempt at a finely grained analysis of the spiritual lives of Africans and Indians that points to exact cultural transfers from elsewhere to Bermuda. Even without being able to recognize the outlines of many specific African or indigenous Caribbean practices, as scholars have been able to do for other parts of the Atlantic world, it is imperative to consider the few that are clearly visible and to suggest those that might have been.¹² Sketching out some aspects of the worldviews of the two pearl divers, of other Africans and Indians who soon arrived, as well as of their children, rearranges a European-dominated archive that frames their lives as unknowable and unintelligible and begins the important voyage toward understanding the layered stories that made up the strata of the island’s history. This reconfiguration permits a fuller recounting of the lives of the enslaved in early Bermuda beyond their appearance on a list of “sundrye things,” mere chattel in European maneuverings in the Atlantic world, and connects their productive and reproductive work to those around them and those they left behind.¹³ Their actions, performances, and memories carved, shaped, and named rock, soil, and sea into a many-peopled place rather than leaving Bermuda as a mere waystation or likely wrecking ground on the way to some more important destination elsewhere in the Atlantic.

“Divers small broken islands . . . in forme not much unlike a reaper’s sickle”

There is no way to know what the two unnamed pearl divers carried on the Edwin thought as they first saw Bermuda, if they overheard and understood the specifics of the crew’s concern about the treacherous course over shallow reefs that in some places extended more than ten miles from shore, or if they merely picked up on a generalized tension. But it is still essential to attempt to look over their shoulders.¹⁴ The captain may have permitted them to remain above deck because they were individuals with highly valued skills and were not in the company of a large enslaved group, so they might have gotten the initial glimpse of land along with the crew. That glimpse would not have come until quite late in the ship’s approach because the low-lying islands were notoriously difficult to sight from the water.¹⁵

The journey to Bermuda was probably only the latest in a series of dislocations for the two men. Whether the man labeled “Indian” in the English colony’s records was from a collection of peoples in the Greater Antilles whom scholars have named Taíno; from the Lesser Antilles and an Arawak speaker dubbed an “Island Carib”; one of the Guaquerí who were indigenous to Margarita’s companion island, Cubagua; from the mainland Caribbean coast; or perhaps even a Pancaruru from the sertões or the “inland wilderness frontiers” of Brazil, he came from a community devastated by the consequences of European arrival in the Americas more generally and Spanish demand for labor and material riches specifically.¹⁶ After establishing the fisheries on Margarita and Cubagua in 1516, the Spanish had turned to several peoples in sequence to do what Bartolomé de las Casas described as the “infernal and desperate” work of harvesting the pearl-bearing oysters, occasionally even bringing in experienced divers from Brazil.¹⁷ The African diver would also have survived disruptions multiple times, as dynastic wars and Portuguese campaigns of enslavement in West Central Africa uprooted people from their natal lands and created captives for the transatlantic slave trade.¹⁸ Spanish importation of enslaved Africans to the fisheries picked up in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and in 1558 the Crown ordered that the Africans replace all Indian divers. The mandated transition was never completed, and Indians continued to endure harsh treatment in the fisheries, as well as to dive on their own account. By the end of the sixteenth century, the vast majority of Africans being brought into the Spanish Americas had come from Angola. Most of them disembarked in Vera Cruz or Cartagena before being sold to traders and owners in Margarita and elsewhere. Those who came from coastal regions may have already been skilled in diving for oysters, whereas those from inland regions would have learned the hazardous work after being brought to the fisheries.¹⁹

Or the men may have been born in the place from which they were sold to the captain of the Edwin. Free and unfree individuals from Iberia, from other parts of the Caribbean, from mainland Central and South America, and from Africa all interacted in pearl-fishing settlements like the ones on Margarita Island, and there is some indication that Spanish officials did not perceive African divers to be of recent import from Africa.²⁰ If they had fled their enslavement in a fishery, either with or without the large canoe in which they worked, they might have been living away from European settlement along the coastline of Spanish colonies or on otherwise uninhabited small islands.²¹ Regardless of their birthplaces, they would have entered a world and a community forced to recover continually from the empty spaces caused by high mortality rates and the drive for profit in human flesh.

Figure 1.1. Map of Taínoan provinces and cacicazgos or political divisions on Hispaniola, with east at the top of the map. The eight cacicazgos were keyed to eight parts of the body, with the head (Caicimú) at the top. The caves that were the eyes of the “monstrous beast” are represented on the map by two dots. (Figure based on Peter O’B. Harris, “Nitaíno and Indians”; and Harris, communication with William F. Keegan; adapted with permission)

It is impossible to know the exact origin of the “Indian” who arrived in Bermuda in 1616, but whatever his particular ethnic grouping, his people had always—or at least as long as anyone could remember—been in the watery world of the Caribbean. Taínoans found their beginnings in the gourd that hung in the creator Yaya’s house and contained his son Yayael’s bones. When the gourd broke, it created the oceans and first fish.²² The pearl diver very probably welcomed the sudden sight of the trees on the low-lying island that barely broke the undulating surface of the ocean. If he were Island Carib or Kalina, perhaps he felt for the wood pendant around his neck that he wore to discourage the malignant force of a maboya. The pendant would have been carved to approximate the form in which the negative other-than-human person had appeared to him.²³ Although his people without question depended on the bounty of the salt water for sustenance, travel, and trade, he would still have marked that first glimpse of the spine of the island riding above the waves, perhaps comparing it to shorelines he knew.

For Taínoans, Hispaniola was their ancestral home, and it housed the sacred caves that were the place of origin for all people in the primordial time: Cacibajagua (Cave + jagua, a fruit whose black juice was used for ritual body paint) for Taínoans, and Amayaúna (the Cave without Importance) for everyone else. It was an island whose body was, in Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s sixteenth-century account of Taínoan beliefs, that of a “monstrous living beast of female sex” from whose caves people had emerged. More than the origin point of human society, this beast shaped political organization and relationships in the human present even as its back was the land that supported their dwellings. The island was split into eight cacicazgos, or domains, that corresponded to eight key body parts of the beast: two eyes, a mouth, two forelegs, two hind legs, and the genitals. The power of the cacicazgos was based on their corporeal location on the astronomically oriented beast. Its head was in the east, where the world begins with sunrise—the southeast part of Hispaniola was Caicimú, cimú meaning “front, forehead, first” in Taíno—which made the southern cacicazgos equivalent to the right hand and so senior to those in the north (figure 1.1).²⁴ Even though those political units had collapsed in the wake of Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century, that kind of body knowledge could have passed on from one generation to another, if only as spirit memories, tingling remembrances of limbs no longer present. It signaled the links between the living earth and human bodies, and between the beast body and political body.

Figure 1.2. Sir George Somers’s manuscript map of Bermuda, ca. 1609, with later place-names added. Some details of the coastline are inaccurate, but the map still conveys the fishhook layout of the islands. Bermuda Archives, Bermuda National Trust Collection.

Bermuda would never replace that most ancient of homes, but later the man may have caught sight of a hand-drawn map of the island chain, sketched in European fashion from an aerial perspective (see figure 1.2).²⁵ Nathaniel Butler, the third governor and the author of one of the earliest histories of the “small broken islands,” described their shape as echoing the curve of a reaper’s sickle, but the modern comparison to a fishhook is a more apt simile for a marine environment and one that would have made more sense to the pearl diver.²⁶ Perhaps in its connotation of an essential activity, the fishhook shape of the islands suggested that Bermuda, too, could be life-giving, offering the man hope that here, where once again he would have to begin anew, he would be able to make it into something familiar, something vaguely like home.

The man described simply as “African” in the account of the Edwin’s voyage was probably taken from Angola in West Central Africa, or if Caribbean-born, raised by adults taken from there.²⁷ Whether originally from an inland or coastal people, the man would have known to respect and fear the sea. This charged relationship to water would have come not only through his work as a pearl diver, but also from his people’s understanding of the world around them. There were many different peoples and religious practices in West Central Africa, but they shared a knowledge of water as cosmologically significant: not only was it one of the three primary domains, along with earth and sky, but it also separated the land of the living from the land of the dead. Before crossing a river, people would take up white clay from its bottom and smear it on their faces to repel any evil that might approach them in such a powerful place.²⁸ If he was one of the minority of the enslaved in Spanish America who was from the Bight of Benin in West Africa, he would have associated crossing water with a deity named Olokun and the passage from one world into the other through death or birth. The cross formed by one of the ship’s masts and the yard might have made him think about the original act, the division of the universe into the two worlds of the dead and the living.²⁹

Having spent at least some time in the Caribbean, the man would not have thought of a passage across water as a definitive journey to the land of the dead, as some Africans initially feared when they were loaded onto oceangoing ships. Even if originally from an inland people, he had been enslaved at least long enough to acquire diving skills and perhaps for his entire life, so he would have known that this latest saltwater passage meant the death of his most recent life and a birth into something new, something unknown. And he would have known, intimately, that though Europeans did not literally chew and swallow the flesh of the Africans they bought and sold, they did indeed consume their captives through the trade that exchanged enslaved bodies for money as well as a wide range of commodities.³⁰ With his familiarity with coastal waters and his ability to evade the marine dangers that plagued pearl divers, he could have been a healer whose powers to keep other divers safe had been made known by his spirit-guided discovery of a strikingly shaped shell. He could thus be looking forward to finding and collecting stones, plants, or shells to make powerful medicine for this new location. Or he may not have been skilled in ritual practices and have wondered who would help him cajole the appropriate water beings now.³¹ If he saw the shores of Bermuda before being disembarked, perhaps he wondered what his dwelling space on land was to be, and if he would be able to medicate it correctly with minkisi, power objects that conveyed access to a particular other-than-human person. Or he might have scanned what he could see of the coastline to get a first sense of the local forces that inhabited particular spaces, whom he was about to encounter and need to invoke for assistance.³²

Once established in Bermuda, the pearl divers quickly discovered that the reefs surrounding the islands did not host rich oyster beds. Labor was at a premium in the young colony, and, rather than allow them to stay idle, the governor probably reassigned the men to planting sugarcane and tobacco. This land-based work was perhaps dangerous in more predictable ways than pearl diving—rollers that pressed cane stalks, boiling coppers of cane juice, or sharp-edged weeds among tobacco plants were not as agile as marine predators—but required their own sets of demanding skills.³³ Some of the earliest people of color in Bermuda were familiar with the many tasks required for the successful planting, harvesting, and curing of tobacco, given that it had been cultivated for nearly a century not only in much of the Spanish Americas, but also in Angola and other parts of West Central Africa. A man named Francisco certainly was well versed in tobacco production, as the planter Robert Rich valued his “judgement in the cureing of tobackoe” highly enough to pay the extraordinarily large sum of one hundred pounds to obtain his service.³⁴ To the two divers, however, this work would have been unfamiliar.³⁵

Although the reefs were barren of pearls, the men did have some occasion to exercise their diving abilities when shipwrecks created other kinds of riches for them to retrieve. In 1621, the divers provided essential knowledge when Governor Nathaniel Butler directed them to recover cargo after the San Antonio ran aground on Bermuda’s treacherous reefs. Although some of the wreck lay above the water line, the most prized cargo of “Silver barrs and chest of Rialls” was not so easily located by people in the small boats that retrieved other goods, and Butler would have needed the divers’ assistance in searching for it.³⁶ Bermuda had not yet offered much occasion to practice diving skills, in contrast to the opportunities it afforded for tobacco cultivation and curing, so there had been little reason for others to learn from the divers. The men themselves, not only their knowledge, were necessary for a successful operation.

“Make their present repayre unto the Craule Point”

One of the most easily observable contributions of the other people of color who joined the pearl divers in Bermuda can still be seen in the indentations called “crawls” that punctuate its coastlines and remain in its place-names, but this physical imprint and inherited nomenclature carried parallel influences in the world of the unseen. Crawls were natural or human-made ponds set up to hold previously caught fish, which, by the eighteenth century, existed in locations a fair distance inland. Bermudians still refer to Crawl Point and Crawl Hill, among others. Indians and Africans introduced this technique of maintaining a readily available supply of fish without having to salt it on a daily basis. By 1623 in Bermuda the practice was established enough that salt pans to facilitate the preservation and stockpiling of fish “in this tyme of scarcitye,”³⁷ were built near the crawl for which “Craule Point” was named. The indigenous peoples of the Caribbean built corrals with varied materials, including branches and cane stalks. Some functioned more as weirs to trap fish as they swam in or as the tide went out, whereas others kept alive fish caught through other means, such as cast nets.³⁸ The word crawl itself has West African roots, via the sixteenth-century Dutch approximation kraal.³⁹

The presence and actions of Indians and Africans fishing from Bermuda populated the realms of the other-than-human as well as the tables of their English masters. Fishing went beyond feeding the physical body. In the Taínoan cultures, it had associations with the origins of the universe and was as much about maintaining the spiritual vitality of the community as it was about satisfying fleshly hunger.⁴⁰ Fishing was thus an occasion to interact with the forces of the water, of the weather, and in the fish themselves through rituals designed to coax those other-than-human persons and ancestors into providing abundance. Fish motifs figured prominently on stone collars worn by Taínoan caciques during ritual performances of their leadership such as areíto dances and feasts. Lucayans made effigy vessels in the shape of the poisonous porcupinefish, denoting their interest in the fish as more than just food to feed the physical body. One such vessel was recovered in a location where the main activity was to make ritually significant beads from a shell that displayed the highly sought-after quality of brilliance, or guanín, which indicated a concentration of power and energy. This thorny jewelbox shell, Chana sarda, retained its bright scarlet color for centuries, making it particularly valued.⁴¹ Small offshore islands, or cays, in the Bahamas were often located in the middle of productive fishing grounds. Nearly every cay in that archipelago contains an archaeological site with evidence of ritual activities. Other Taínoans besides Lucayans also saw places with a rich fish supply as containing spiritual power because of that abundance. Ile à Rat, a cay off western Hispaniola, has a similar mixture of a high concentration of fish bones and ritual objects, indicating the multiple ways its former inhabitants worked to ensure the health of all.⁴²

Figure 1.3. Manioc processing with a black woman (“Negresse”) performing most steps. This engraving is based on one that appeared in Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Francois (Paris, 1667), 2:419. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’America, vol. 1 (The Hague, 1724), plate before p. 127. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)

Fishing held an important place among coastal peoples in West Central and West Africa. In West Central Africa, ritual fishing expeditions were part of the accession of a new ruler, in part because of the association with water and the connotation of beginnings and rebirth. The first fish was sent to the leader’s wife, who prepared it with her own hands and then gave of her labor back to the community, to the fishermen, who ate the fish. Dancing and ritual chants marked this ceremonial meal and harnessed the power inherent in water, directing it in ways to benefit the community. Some Kongo initiation rites also included ritual fishing after the rebirth of the initiates into their new roles. The Italian mathematician Filippo Pigafetta reported the Portuguese explorer Duarte Lopes’s descriptions of proscriptions around types of fish, so that some “Fishes Royall” were reserved for leaders. In Guinea, fishermen honored their ancestors by decorating their canoes with spiritually powerful grains and colors of paint.⁴³ Even though Indian and African fishermen in Bermuda were no longer fishing entirely for themselves, perhaps they persisted in approaching the other-than-human persons associated with water and others essential to a good catch—more than ever, they were in need of an abundance of fish, since they were not able to control the disposition of the fruits of their labor. And in the place shaped like a fishhook, hundreds of miles from any other land, the resident forces seemed to have been appeased enough to continue to provide the creatures that filled the belly and connected to the beginning of time.

“Sundrye things . . . for the Plantacion, as Cattle Cassadoe Sugar Canes”

The same instructions that directed Governor Daniel Tucker to procure pearl divers also specified a search for “cassadoe,” or cassava, a tuber already recognized as essential to the success of European colonizing ventures in the Americas and tied to the growth of the transatlantic slave trade.⁴⁴ Also called bitter manioc, cassava contains high levels of a poisonous alkaloid that, when ingested, turns into cyanide. Leaching out the toxin was a time-consuming process, and it would have taken up a significant proportion of bonded laborers’—especially women’s—time. The tuber had to be peeled before grating or shredding it. The resulting pulp was pressed in some way, either in a tube basket or through a cloth, to remove as much of the poisonous juice as possible. The paste was then dried, further ground as necessary to break up the larger pieces, and toasted or baked over a fire. The juice was boiled to neutralize the poison and then used as the basis for pepper pot, a dish with chili peppers and other vegetables, as well as animal protein of meat or fish. Jean-Baptiste Labat’s account of his time in the French Caribbean in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century includes a detailed engraving of the stages of manioc processing; its caption specifically notes a black woman (“Negresse”) performing most of them (figure 1.3).⁴⁵

Figure 1.4. “Method of making bread.” The indigenous women shown were likely making bread from maize, but the steps for making cassava bread were very similar. Girolamo Benzoni, La historia del mondo nuovo (Venice, 1565), 56v. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)

Although Labat’s depiction is of a place under the control of a different European power and from a later time period, the gendered division of labor accords with earlier descriptions of task distribution related to manioc. The French Jesuit Jean Baptiste Du Tertre used an engraving with very similar figures set in the yard of a large plantation in his 1667 Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Francois. Among Taínoan peoples, both men and women cultivated and collected manioc tubers, but women were responsible for processing them.⁴⁶ Because of its placement in the text, a woodcut from Girolamo Benzoni’s 1565 History of the New World probably depicts women making bread from maize, but his accompanying text also details the steps for making bread from manioc, preparations that would have looked quite similar (figure 1.4).⁴⁷ The tuber was an import to Africa, but there, too, women were largely responsible for processing raw plant materials into edible food. Antonio Cavazzi’s impression of the division of agricultural labor in West Central Africa was that “all the work is left to the women, they alone hoe the ground.” The English traveler Richard Jobson opined that no women could be “under more servitude” than those he observed along the River Gambia, where the “very painefull” work of separating edible grain from the husk was “onely womens worke.”⁴⁸

The actions required to make manioc safe to eat would have carried divergent meanings for Indians and Africans. For Taínoans, the starchy substance was food from the gods. Their cultural hero Deminán had wrested the life-giving root from the primary god, Yaya, by theft, an action that was a key part of bringing culture to humans. One of the aspects of fertility held the title “Yucahuguamá,” or “Lord of the Yuca,” yuca being the Taínoan word for manioc.⁴⁹ Another indigenous people so identified themselves with this original food that they described themselves as Kalina or Karina, “manioc eaters.”⁵⁰ The tuber carried entirely different meanings of commodification in the context of Africa and the transatlantic slave trade, in which traders used it to victual soldiers and slave ships. Its flour, which was less susceptible to spoilage or infestation than were European grain flours, became a staple of human trafficking in the sixteenth century. For many Native peoples in Portuguese-controlled areas of Brazil in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, manioc became yet another example of the labor their masters extracted from them, rather than being a means of self-identification. Over the next century, slave traders switched to cultivating the crop in Angola, where they assigned the work to children and the elderly. Despite missionary Antonio Cavazzi’s review of the widespread manioc as “optimal sustenance,” enslaved Africans made to raise the crop were reminded daily that others strove to control their bodies, that the slave trade had made the very act of subsistence into a performance of cultural alienation rather than affirmation. Such work was yet another demand placed on top of already onerous labors.⁵¹

Figure 1.5. “How to make bread of casava rootes.” The directions list the labor-intensive steps while omitting any mention of the women whose responsibility it would have been to complete those tasks. Lewis Hughes, A Plaine and True Relatione of God’s Goodness towards the Summer Ilands (London, 1621), B2v. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)

By the early 1620s, manioc cultivation was so widespread and successful in Bermuda that not only was there some to spare for export, but one of the island’s ministers lauded the tuber as an example of the Christian deity’s goodness to the English. When the struggling Jamestown settlement in the Chesapeake sent to its sibling colony for food in 1622, Governor Butler offered “Cassada roote” along with other plants, fowl, and rabbits.⁵² Lewis Hughes’s 1621 A Plaine and True Relatione of God’s Goodness towards the Summer Ilands instructed English colonists that “The Casava roote is like to proove a great blessing of God unto you, because it makes as fine white bread as can be made of Wheat, and (as I am perswaded) wholsome; because the Indians that live of it, are tall and strong men.”⁵³ Rather than giving credit to Africans’ and Indians’ vital expertise, Hughes subsumed their knowledge and toil under a divine benificence. Hughes’s appropriation is all the more notable because his recipe for the “fine white bread” detailed all the tasks of preparing manioc for consumption (figure 1.5). Although Hughes did not mention who would have made the bread, it is likely that English masters would have assigned the arduous task to enslaved Indians and Africans whenever possible. His brisk list of the required steps obscures the labor contribution of people of color, particularly the vital work of women, as shown in figure 1.2 and figure 1.3, tasks and movements that would have defined the rhythms of their days. Indian bodies were present in Hughes’s construction only as object signs and pictures of “tall and strong” animal health, indications of the safety and efficacy of the root as “wholsome” food for the English.

Such slippage is typical of many European accounts that ascribed Indian and African knowledge to colonists’ own inventiveness, divine benevolence, or both. Richard Ligon often elided the knowledge and skill of enslaved Africans and Indians when he described plantation life on Barbados, writing as if European colonists had discovered the plants and techniques on their own. The unmarked European “we” accomplished the harvesting and propagation of the manioc tuber: “as we gather [the root], we cut sticks that grow nearest to it, . . . which we put into the ground, and they grow. And as we gather, we plant.” Ligon did, however, acknowledge Indian expertise in cooking “this Pone” and in teaching him how to use it to make a piecrust that would not crack.⁵⁴

Figure 1.6. Taínoan palm-thatched house. Note the “esta hecha” along the left-hand margin, indicating that this image was already “made” and incorporated into the published version. Gonzalez Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, “Montserrat Manuscript” of Historia general y natural de las Indias, vol. 1, fol. 4r. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)

Nathaniel Butler’s Historye of the Bermudaes extolled the “great aboundance” of introduced plants such as plantains, tobacco, manioc tubers, and watermelon, which “providence and paines have since the plantation offred divers other seedes and plants which the soyle hath greedily embrased and cherished.” The “paines” Butler described were Europeans’ effort in getting the seeds and plants to the island, where, in his account, the soil did the rest. But in addition to “providence,” the soil’s embrace of these new plants required knowledgeable human intervention. Butler obliquely noted that the only knowledge about the “name and vertue” of “divers . . . namelesse” plants came from people unwillingly brought to the island as slaves. To them, Butler’s nameless plants with unknown usages were known quantities, a relationship that Butler acknowledged. He wrote that “already certaine of [the plants], since the comeinge in of the newe guests, have gotten them appellations from their apparent effects.”⁵⁵ Butler knew of the contribution made by enslaved Indians and Africans, but his euphemistic reference to them as “newe guests” omitted any direct reference either to their familiarity with the subtropical plants or to the forced nature of their arrival.

The discursive erasure of the bodies and knowledge of non-Europeans made it easier for colonizers to maintain a mental map of a colonized landscape in which success resulted only from “God’s goodness” and their own superior skill and intelligence. Like “God’s goodness” in Lewis Hughes’s description of cassava in Bermuda, Butler’s circumlocutory use of “newe guests” to refer to enslaved Africans and Indians did more than obscure the knowledge transfer from Africans and Indians to the English. It removed from English view the coerced nature of the work performed by slaves in Bermuda, as well as framing their bodies as nothing more than empty vessels that—when filled with cassava bread—proved that the unfamiliar food was a solid foundation for the colonial enterprise. This elision inverted the structure of expertise and confirmed rather than challenged English belief in their own intellectual and cultural superiority, thus supporting the development of a racialized contempt.

One English colonist’s praise of an African man’s skill at curing tobacco, a rare acknowledgment of the desirability of Africans’ knowledge, underlines the gender and status components of these formulations rather than undermining their overall strength. When Robert Rich acknowledged Francisco’s “judgement in the cureing of tobackoe,” he did so because he was trying to convince his relatives that a great increase in the amount of merchantable tobacco would give them substantial returns on the £100 investment necessary to secure the man’s abilities. Indeed, his descriptions of Francisco’s skills seem to have been accurate, judging by the following seasons’ outputs.⁵⁶ But neither Rich nor other Anglo-Bermudians made mention of women’s skill and labor in turning a poisonous tuber into a staple food. Even as women’s work in processing cassava was a daily necessity in the early years of the colony as well as in the broader development and continuation of the transatlantic slave trade, that essential economic contribution escaped the notice of men like Robert Rich, accustomed as they were to being served by women who had also processed the food.⁵⁷ Labor like the processing of manioc has rarely entered the historical record in definitive, individualized form and yet would have irrevocably shaped the muscles, ligaments, and bones of the women who were not countless as bodies in the service of an imperial venture—for that purpose they were very specifically counted—but too often have remained uncounted as persons.

“A tree Called the Palmeto”

Indian and African knowledge transformed the intimate spaces of English life on Bermuda. Their knowledge about the complex manipulation of plant fibers to create sleeping surfaces, roofs, vessels, wall decorations, and clothing influenced the construction of houses, housewares, and sleeping arrangements. The forced immigrants were probably responsible for the most widely used roof construction in early Bermuda, a thatch made with leaves from the local palmetto. The English were familiar with thatching, but they tended to use rushes or marsh reeds. Palmetto thatching continued to be widespread even once that colony was well established. In 1688, Governor Robert Robinson reported that for 84 percent of households, the palmetto “leafe [was] the only thatch of their houses.”⁵⁸

Palm thatch was common throughout the Caribbean as well as in West Central and West Africa. Houses in the Taínoan Caribbean, whether the larger dwellings found on Hispaniola and Cuba or the smaller ones common in Borikén (Puerto Rico), were thatched with palm leaves. The sixteenth-century Spanish bureaucrat Gonzalez Fernández de Oviedo’s early accounts of Taínoan life included both rectangular and round palm-thatched houses (figure 1.6). Unlike many early and quite fantastic images of the Americas that circulated in Europe, these illustrations had some foundation in reality and were based on drawings done by Oviedo himself.⁵⁹ Pieter van den Broecke noted approvingly that in Loango, in Angola, people used palm leaves to “cover their houses, which works very nicely,” whereas Richard Jobson described walls “of Reede, platted and made up together, some sixe foote in height, circling and going round their Towne,” which he noted in his travels along the River Gambia.⁶⁰

Nor was the relatively rough work of thatch the only use for palm leaves that Africans and Indians instituted on Bermuda. The newly imported Bermudians taught their English masters to make mats and other cloth, baskets, cords, and hats. Lucayans valued the palm fibers for their shininess, and they made tightly woven baskets of intricate designs. Other Taínoans also wove baskets and mats. In Kongo, people used split-vine baskets for carrying and storing, as well as making baskets, mats, and rope from palm leaves.⁶¹ Their tutelage was so successful on Bermuda that in 1688 Governor Robert Robinson stated that the trees were of “soe greate & Extraordinary use & Service to the people that without them it is Generally opinioned they Could not have Subsisted,” since, in addition to using their leaves as roofing material, “they alseo Make Cables [and] Chaires with such like necessarys.”⁶²

Weaving with palm leaves was a highly developed art in West Central Africa, and European travelers and missionaries compared woven palm-leaf cloth to the finest European-made silks. Filippo Pigafetta praised the “marvelous arte” of “making . . . Sattens, Taffata, Damaskes, Sarcenettes and such like” from “the leaves of Palme trees” in the eastern provinces and areas adjoining Kongo. Indeed, the finest specimens were too “precious” for any but “the king, and such as it pleaseth him.” Cavazzi wrote that the beaten leaves of one type of palm resulted in such fine, soft fibers that the weave of the cloth thus produced brought him to “astonishment.”⁶³ Pigafetta noted that the process started with keeping the palms “under and lowe to the grounde, every yeare cutting them, and watering them.” Once the “tender” leaves were “cleansed & purged after their manner,” techniques that he did not further specify, “they drawe forth their threedes, which are all very fine and dainty, and all of one evennesse, saving that those which are longest, are best esteemed. For of those they weave their greatest peeces.”⁶⁴ European observers, including Cavazzi himself, were not always so laudatory about woven palm. Although Cavazzi had praised the fine nature of some palm cloth, he disdained it as an adequate covering for an infant undergoing Christian baptism. Mocking the social pretensions of couples who added a noble honorific to their infants’ names despite their lowly status, Cavazzi’s evidence for their “miserable” condition was that they could never even hope to own a handspan of land and that they had only a “simple and green leaf, instead of linen, to cover” their babies. His reference to a leaf may have been an exaggeration for effect, since a finely woven cloth would have been appropriate for an important ritual.⁶⁵

Figure 1.7. Palm fabric, 1670s, showing the construction of thinner strips joined together and the elaborate patterns woven into the cloth. Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, “Araldi Manuscript,” in “Un Cappuccino nell’Africa nera del seicento: I disegni dei Manoscritti Araldi del Padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo,” ed. Ezio Bassani, Quaderni Poro 4 (1987). (Courtesy of Michele Araldi)

African weaving techniques influenced the development of the distinctly Bermudian and quite profitable plat industry, which involved braiding palm leaves into thin strips that could then be sewn together to build hats, baskets, and other objects. The composite method of combining narrower widths to produce a wider finished piece of cloth or other object, as well as the absence of specialized equipment, was an outgrowth of a centuries-old industry in West and West Central Africa. West Central African weavers produced the complicated cloth remarked on by European observers on a simple apparatus made from easily procured materials. According to one Italian missionary to Kongo in the early eighteenth century, weavers did not have a “loom specifically made for the task, but they plant two pieces of wood in the ground, placing the fibers between them” and then used a stick instead of a shuttle to weave the woof or horizontal fibers of the fabric. When there were dedicated looms, as archaeologists have found across West Africa dating from as early as the thirteenth century, they produced a cloth of relatively narrow width.⁶⁶ Off the coast of West Africa in the Cape Verde Islands, weavers used such looms to make cloth from cotton and sometimes imported silk. To make wider pieces of fabric, weavers sewed together six strips that were each five to six inches wide and five to six feet long.⁶⁷ This technique, used on palm fibers instead of cotton thread, is visible in Cavazzi’s painting of a scene in Matamba. One man holds up woven palm fabric with differently patterned bands, apparently for the inspection of the seated man at the right-hand side of the painting whose headgear indicates that he is a Mbundu individual of high status (see figure 1.7). The elaborate cloth, imported from Kongo since the Mbundu inhabitants of Matamba did not make palm fabric worked in that fashion, was worn only by elites such as the seated nobleman. It is likely that the highly valued cloth formed part of the payment for a shipment of slaves taken from the interior and that the man holding the cloth was a pombeiro, or factor, of a slave trader on the coast.⁶⁸

The strips produced through plat making in Bermuda were only one-half to one inch wide, far narrower than the five- to six-inch width common in West and West Central Africa, but the process of making a finished object was the same. Initially, Indians and Africans who joined the two pearl divers would have been the ones who were familiar enough with the material to begin producing the strips. Taínoan and other indigenous Caribbean peoples do not seem to have used the composite technique, but they did use palm fibers to weave baskets as well as cloth, sometimes incorporating luminescent feathers of mainland birds acquired through trade. Since weaving was gendered differently among Africans and indigenous Caribbean peoples, it was probably indigenous Caribbean women and African men who first made plat. Women were the weavers in the Caribbean, both of open-weave items like hammocks and nets and of more tightly woven objects like baskets, mats, and clothing.⁶⁹ In many areas of West and West Central Africa, in contrast, weaving was men’s work, although women helped prepare the materials for weaving.⁷⁰

As the first enslaved practitioners taught the English the technique for making rope, hats, mats, and other items, producing plat became work for all women, one that required no special equipment, although some households did use wheels to take up the braided strips. Over the second half of the seventeenth century, plat manufacture became such a significant cottage industry that in 1691 the island’s government protected the local supply of the raw materials, forbidding any export of unworked palmetto tops or even brooms and cordage. After hats and bonnets made of plat became a highly desirable fashion accessory in England in the 1720s, the profits of the industry were five times greater than what the island’s maritime activity produced in that time and twice as lucrative as seventeenth-century tobacco exports from Bermuda. Though the activity of plaiting was widespread among all Bermudian women, those who could command the labor of others reaped the most profit. Several white Bermudian widows, such as Mary Gilbert and Elizabeth Tucker, were among the few dozen plat brokers who dominated the trade, drawing not only from the work of the women they enslaved but also from that of women in surrounding households.⁷¹

“Ropes for other Uses”

When Governor John Hope arrived in Bermuda and was asked to report on the state of the colony in 1722, he described its economic status as balanced on two trees, the cedar and the palmetto: “Of the Cedar they Build their Sloops & Fishing boats; & of the Palmetto leaves, they make a sort of ware call’d Platt; as likewise Cables for their Sloops, & Ropes for other Uses.”⁷² The most common material for ropes was palmetto fiber. The beginning of Hope’s term as governor coincided with the early stages of the plat boom, and even once the plat market bottomed out a decade later, the other half of his assessment remained accurate. Cedar trees furnished the materials for the Bermudian turn to a maritime economy fueled by buoyant, fast cedar sloops rather than the on-island production of either staple or food crops, a reorientation of the island’s economy that occurred after the Crown dissolved the proprietary Somers Islands Company and took over the colony in 1684. But the governor’s comments applied in more ways than he probably realized. The cordage that enslaved and poor Bermudians made from the palmetto was certainly useful for cables to use in fitting out the sloops that became a mainstay of the island’s economy.⁷³ The first generations of practitioners, however, may also have seen something beyond the creation of a merchantable product in the thousands of yards of cordage they produced. The product and the work to make it may also have held spiritual meaning, especially in the early years of the colony when the connections with Africa and the Caribbean were more direct and when English colonists were still learning how to work within their new environment. Those meanings, like the palmetto fibers that indigenous Caribbean Indians and Africans twisted into ropes, were intertwined in a blending of human and other-than-human interaction.

Ties, cords, and knots held spiritual meaning and function in many of the cultures that early slaves brought with them to Bermuda. They were a way to connect the world of the living to the world of the dead and of other-than-human persons, and to provide a conduit between those worlds. Ritual and physical functions sometimes overlapped, as they did in making the cord required for many fishing techniques: fishing was ritually significant in addition to its furnishing an important protein source.⁷⁴ Spinning and tying plant fibers into nets or weaving them into cloths and containers of various kinds were actions that provided for the outer container of the physical body while also having meaning for the inner essence of a person.⁷⁵

Cords and ropes could tie a boat to a landing and a burden in a basket, but they were also religiously significant in and of themselves: they closed packets of spiritually charged medicine, adorned ritual clothing, and bound the limbs of religious specialists and their associated power objects. Though few of the Africans brought to Bermuda in the first decades would have had West African links, those who did would have had strong associations, both negative and positive, with cords. In vodun, a slave was a “person in cords,” while a vodunon, or religious specialist, might counter such enslavement by a powerful object, or bocio, bound in cords. The object and concept were linked with death because of the practice of tying corpses before burial, as well as the belief that the dead used cords to bind and harm the living. Cords were also connected to the other direction of the passage between life and death, as pregnant women sometimes wore cords around their hips as a protection against miscarriage. A powerful image and object, a cord could also indicate durability, connection, and the vitality of human action.⁷⁶ West Central Africans also used cord imagery in religious rituals. Tying up a nkisi bound power to the object and prevented it from escaping, and Kongolese Christians extended this practice of kanga to the Christian pantheon and tied cords around their hands and feet on feast days to demonstrate their status as slaves to Christian spiritual forces.⁷⁷ Fine cotton cords dyed red or violet suspended the shells or stones in crescent shapes, or caracoli, that Kalina prized for their powerful reflective qualities and color. The brightness of the cord complemented that of the pendant, a quality that signified a concentration of energy.⁷⁸ Taínoans also used cordage in ritually significant objects. One form of chiefly regalia used cordage or sometimes wood to complete a stone collar. Even in all-stone collars, sculpted cords binding figures suggested the continuing importance of cords and binding in Taínoan religious practices. The bodies of the deceased, especially if the individuals had held high status while alive, were wrapped in hammocks before burial, another example of how cords connected the worlds of the living and of the dead.⁷⁹

Ligatures held an even more specific ritual function among Taínoan peoples, as religious specialists, behiques, bound their limbs with cotton cords to close up their bodies and make them better suited to be channels for communication with other-than-human persons. Although these details are not common in European textual descriptions, this type of binding can be seen on the arms and legs of a cemí, a ritually powerful anthropomorphic figure. In the case of a cemí found in a cave near Maniel in Hispaniola, its cotton and possibly palm-fiber body houses the skull of an ancestor. Cord binding served to tie shut the joints, which were access points into the behique’s body, and concentrate his spiritual power without interference from intrusive substances or beings.⁸⁰ Not only did the cords around the limbs denote the spiritual function of the object—perhaps mimicking the abilities of the once-living ancestor—they also accrued power to the new form of the ancestor’s person. The cotton and other plant fibers gave the ancestor a “new face,” reproducing the Taínoan belief that the apparent body is an outer shell and that persons are composed of parts that can be separated from one another and exchanged. The cordage of the cemí’s face thus sat at the threshold between the living and the dead—the spirits of the living, or goeíza, were concentrated in the physical structure of the face because of their ability to display emotion, while the spirits of the dead, opía, resided in the skull bones because the skeletal form could not express emotion. A new face for the ancestor-as-cemí facilitated that person’s participation in clan relationships.⁸¹

It is unlikely that the first Indian pearl diver brought to Bermuda or any of the captives imported after him would have been able to bring with them anything like the cotton cemí found near Maniel.⁸² Separation from the ancestors was a less tangible part of the losses created by the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, but its marks would have been deep, even if invisible alongside physical scars on the bodies of the enslaved. If part of the violence of slavery was being ripped away from countless generations of ancestors, cords could provide some means to access those beings again, even when separated by hundreds and even thousands of miles in the apparent geography of the early modern map.

That collapsing of time and space could happen for vodun practitioners, who were already familiar with taking voduns with them after being uprooted from their natal lands in West Africa, long before being tangled in the transatlantic slave trade. But it could also occur for other peoples who did not have as strong a tradition of traveling shrines for ancestors. In Kongo, even though fixed shrines were the place for descendants to approach an ancestor, those were not the only locations that held power. Minkisi were smaller power objects associated with a specific problem and being who worked on that problem. They traveled more easily not only because they were often physically smaller, but also because they could be made from objects in one’s surroundings.⁸³ Remaking the connections between all the generations who had crossed the threshold into the world of the dead and the currently living generations was not easy, but it was something enslaved individuals learned to do over and over as the demands and desires of their masters moved them throughout and around the Atlantic world.

At first glance, all it is possible to know about the first two enslaved people on Bermuda are the labels Europeans applied to them and something of the physical knowledge contained in their lungs, legs, arms, and hands that their new owners hoped to exploit. The pearl divers and the Africans and indigenous peoples of the Caribbean who joined them after 1616 certainly shaped early Bermudian society, as well as the very landscape and contours of the coast. But beyond their contributions to the colonial enterprise, they brought with them other-than-humans who populated their surroundings and made a particular place out of inchoate space. Attention to these less tangible layers of environment permits a deeper—even if necessarily conjectural—sense of the process of defining bodies and making place in an early modern Atlantic colony. Although obscured in the imperial historical record, the propitiations and maintenance of the beings who made themselves known to humans were reproductive practices that in their seemingly ephemeral performance brought whole worlds into existence. Enslaved Africans and indigenous Caribbean peoples worked to transform Bermuda into a place that could be like home, where they gained familiarity with the local other-than-humans who inhabited the world of the dead that was just a threshold away.⁸⁴ Although their efforts were perhaps unmappable in precise terms, they still began the formation of Bermuda’s sacred geography, at once intensely local, rooted to that particular sea- and landscape, and ocean-spanning; grounded in their here-and-now, as well as connected to the ancestors, to the first creation.