Continued from last week

by MICHAEL JARVIS

THE economic edge Bermuda's fleet of cedar schooners enjoyed because of the slaves who crewed them was particularly advantageous in times of war. Then the wages demanded by merchant seamen skyrocketed to reflect the increased risks they ran and the labor shortages caused by Royal navy impressment.

In contrast, Bermuda's merchant marine benefited from a stable wage structure because slave sailors could not strike for higher pay.

In 1770, Governor Bruere noted that "in time of war (Bermudians) are wealthy, their vessels, which sail remarkably fast, getting a preference everywhere for freight. . . . (When) other owners must give exorbitant wages to their seamen, the Bermudian owner, if he commands the vessel himself as many of them do, and is proprietor of four negro sailors," paid competitive wages only to his white mate.

During wartime, Bermudians kept their fleet fully employed in the intercolonial carrying trade, enhancing their profits by charging freight rates higher than peacetime levels but still lower than those of their competitors while maintaining static operating expenses.

Although there were inevitable captures, the veteran crews of most of Bermuda's weatherly sloops usually outsailed their enemies. Slave labour was thus an essential element in enabling Bermuda's merchant fleet to prosper and compete with her larger and materially richer colonial neighbors for more than a century.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Bermuda's maritime economy depended heavily on the slaves who built and manned the island's fleet.

How do we explain the creation and perpetuation of such a labour system in an Atlantic world where maritime labor was in short supply, desertion was relatively easy, and ready wages were offered with few questions asked by captains often short of hands?

How did white and black Bermudians daily work together on the island's many sloops and how did such sustained interaction shape definitions of race, identity, and masculinity among Bermudian sailors on land and at sea?

To what degree did enslaved sailors benefit from their own labor aboard the sloops on which they sailed? In short, what was the life of a Bermudian slave sailor like?

Unlike most Atlantic world seamen, Bermuda's slave sailors generally knew well the men with whom they sailed.

Social relationships already established on land were transferred intact aboard ship and heavily influenced crew interaction while underway.

Bermuda's slave population was self-reproducing as early as the 1630s, and with virtually no influx of African newcomers, a tight-knit community of island-born slaves extensively related by kinship ties emerged by 1700.

The overwhelming majority of Bermuda's slaves did not know Africa firsthand and had never endured a Middle Passage.

Instead, they were highly attuned to European ways, having grown up in households in a colony where the racial breakdown was more or less even.

Widespread but small-scale slave ownership and the large sizes of both black and white families produced a racially integrated colonial society in which constant daily interracial interaction was the norm.

Black and white Bermudian boys grew up in the same households, fished and swam together throughout childhood, and in some instances even attended the same grammar schools.

Although sustained proximity between white and black Bermudians by no means promoted notions of equality and most likely reinforced a hierarchy of race within Bermudian society, the pasts and personalities of all seafaring individuals were generally known in the small island community.

When Bermudians went to sea for the first time in their early to mid-teens, the proximity of shipboard life and collective nature of maritime labor reinforced a preexisting high degree of personal familiarity among Bermudian crews.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the manning of Bermuda's sloops was mostly a community or family affair.

The colony's fleet ranged in size from seventy to 120 sailing vessels that were small by transoceanic standards and required many small crews of four to 12 men each. White and black Bermudians who dwelled in the same households on land often went to sea together.

The 1708¿1709 ship list gives many examples of crews related by blood and common residence. The four-man crew of the sloop Anne, for instance, was composed of master Christopher Lusher, his son (a boy), his slave James, and Thomas Watson. The sloop Samuel's crew included master Daniel Gibbs, his three sons (John, Nathaniel, and Joseph), and Davy, the slave of one of the vessel's owners. A father and two sets of brothers manned the sloop Woolidge: master William Sr., William Jr., Richard, and Jeremiah Leacraft and Stephen and Hugh Painter. Thomas Burch's Barbados-bound Advice carried Captain Josiah Forster and his slave Robin, Nathaniel Merritt and his slave Ben, and sailor Joseph Ward. Southampton widow Mary Keele sent her son John and her slave Tony aboard the sloop Joseph and Benjamin, bound for the Turks Islands.

One would be hard-pressed to find a Bermudian sloop crew that did not share kinship, household, or neighborhood connections in the eighteenth century, since even before they took to sea, captains and crew were often closely acquainted in the densely populated colony. Bermuda's locally anchored, community-based white and black seafarers contrast starkly with the stereotypes of anonymous, rootless, and often oppressed and violent seamen described by Marcus Rediker and other maritime and labor historians.

Recent studies that connect seamen with the landed communities from which they originated reveal close-knit seafaring communities like that of Bermuda, challenging us to see a plurality of regional maritime cultures and interlinking maritime labor markets within a larger Atlantic world. The Hobbesian world of oppressed Jack Tars serving in ocean-going factories existed alongside locally based, family-run coasting vessels operated along the lines of family farms, with a wide array of labor arrangements in between.25 22

Sailors' work varied greatly according to weather and season, for the wind and sea dictated whether the voyage would be easy, demanding, or in some cases fatal. The crews of the typical Bermuda sloop of 40 registered tons were small (four to seven men), so tasks such as raising anchor, setting and striking sail, and standing watch were collective and therefore racially integrated.

The small size of the sloops - about fifty feet long on deck, eighteen feet wide, and with a hold roughly eight feet in depth - meant that by necessity Bermudian crews slept and ate together.

Shared living quarters and work performed day in and day out while at sea doubtless influenced the relationship between free and unfree Bermudians and produced, for better or worse, greater degrees of personal familiarity and understanding. Unlike most overseers on plantations, white Bermudian slaveowners engaged in the same tasks as their slaves, enabling them to identify and discipline legitimate slackers through personal familiarity with the work but also giving them reasonable expectations of their slaves' capabilities. W. Jeffrey Bolster points out that experience and ability often at least temporarily undercut racial hierarchy, creating situations where veteran black sailors instructed and commanded novice white "boys" in shipboard tasks. Black and white sailors also shared a collective fate, for they jointly endured the tedium of long passages and fought against storms, shipwreck, or pirate attacks together.

Continued next week