Isn't it odd that the closest and oldest friend of the United States should be an Atlantic archipelago, a British Overseas Territory, a geographical entity which is one of the most isolated in the world? But it is the closest friend in many ways, particularly from the viewpoints of history and economics, culture and heritage.

The archipelago is Bermuda, the second oldest successful British settlement in North America, whose history closely parallels both Virginia and New England, and which rejoices like the United States in a heritage of English law and custom. Although we are over 600 miles off the Eastern Seaboard, our economy has almost always been tied to the continent, whether colonial or independent, which has always been our most important trading partner.

The Sea Venture

It was in 1607 that the London-based Virginia Company sent its first settlers to the North American mainland. They clung on to an island in the James River, grandiloquently called Jamestown, erratically supplied by an occasional vessel from England. In 1609 the Virginia Company decided on a major effort to help the tiny settlement, and on June 2 a large fleet of nine vessels led by a large ship called the Sea Venture sailed from Plymouth. The fleet was some ten days off the capes of Chesapeake Bay when it was hit by a storm, probably an early hurricane. The fleet separated, and the Sea Venture suddenly sprang several leaks as oakum spewed out from between her planks. As the ship rode the tremendous waves the passengers and crew fought the leak, pumping and bailing the ship, until on July 28, just as they were giving up, the Admiral of the Fleet, Sir George Somers, saw land just where it was needed, green trees waving in the wind as they defied the hurricane. The ship steered towards a beach, hit a reef, bounced over, plunged between two reefs and was held upright – another great mercy so that the whole ships company were saved.

That was 400 years ago, and this year Bermudians are celebrating the shipwreck which brought permanent habitation to our island.

Aboard the Sea Venture were not only Sir George Somers, appointed Admiral of Virginia, but also Sir Thomas Gates, incoming Governor, and Captain Christopher Newport, who had steered the first fleet into Chesapeake Bay and led them up the James to the future Jamestown. Now, lodged in Bermuda, their services were denied the new colony, where, to make matters worse, the strongest leader, Captain John Smith, was invalided back to England after a gunpowder explosion. Without good leaders, with winter coming on, surrounded by native Americans not happy about this European invasion, it was questionable whether the settlers would survive.

Meanwhile in Bermuda the sailors and passengers found plenty of food – fish, birds, hogs and native berries – and responded (though some grumbled) to their leaders' call to construct two vessels to carry them to Virginia. No snow or ice chills Bermuda's weather, and work on the two pinnaces was completed by May 1610, when the ships' company embarked (leaving behind two sailors) and reached Chesapeake Bay after an easy ten-day voyage. At last, the shipwrecked men and women thought, we will be saved – we will return to civilisation.

But it was not like that – in fact they arrived just in time. Out of 500 who were at Jamestown in the autumn of 1609 only 60 remained alive – the rest had died of starvation, illness, and native American attacks. Some had eaten the flesh of the dead. Fortunately the Bermuda pinnaces carried surplus ship's stores, and these sustained the starving English while their leaders conferred and decided to give up Jamestown and set sail for England. Two weeks after the arrival of the Bermuda vessels they set out again down the James – but before they reached Chesapeake Bay English vessels were seen coming up – a new relief fleet with a new Governor, and plentiful supplies.

Thus, in these infant days of English settlement in the Americas, Bermuda and the future United States were drawn close. Sir George Somers agreed to take his pinnace, the Patience, back to Bermuda to bring more supplies, but died after he arrived and his nephew decided to take the little vessel back to England. He left three men behind. The Virginia Company decided to colonise Bermuda and sent out the Plough, and then agreed to sell the island to a sister company, the Bermuda Company.

The colonisation business

Both colonies prospered, and in 1619 a vital gift was bestowed on Virginia – the right to have a representative institution. Thus the Virginia House of Burgesses was born. The Bermuda Company followed suit, and in 1620 Bermuda was blessed with its House of Assembly, which still exists and meets and is our lawgiver. It is the oldest continuous legislature in the Americas, and although it is owned by Britain the London-appointed Governor cannot veto acts dealing with domestic matters. Nor does Bermuda pay any tribute to the United Kingdom.

The year 1620 also saw the arrival in New England of the Pilgrims and a ten years later of the Massachusetts Bay Company puritans. Bermuda rapidly developed cordial relations with their new neighbours, and sent ten tons of Braziletto wood (used for dying) as a gift to the new Harvard College. The Eleuthera donation of £120, named after the Bahama island which Bermudians had tried to settle, was the third largest early donation to Harvard after John Harvard's bequest of his library and £400 from the Massachusetts legislature.

Bermuda and Virginia became rivals in growing tobacco for export to Britain, but Bermuda's small fields quickly lost their fertility, and Bermuda turned to the sea. The Virginia Company had been disbanded long since, but it was not until 1684 that the Bermuda Company lost its fiefdom when royal lawyers brought a writ of quo warranto against it. A similar method was used against the Massachusetts Bay Company as King James II's government tried to bring the puritan colonies under control of the crown.

Bermudians now developed an economic base of shipbuilding, obtaining salt in the Turks Islands, and developing a carrying trade. The salt, vital for preserving food, was sold up and down the Eastern Seaboard and to the Newfoundland fisheries. The ships were partly manned by free men and in part by slaves. Slaves were brought to Bermuda early on to work on the land and (unsuccessfully) to dive for pearls, but rapidly became shipwrights, sailors, masons and carpenters – mainly artisans rather then plantation workers. The climate was healthy, and soon laws were passed prohibiting the importation of slaves.

The Revolution

During Britain's 18th Century Wars Bermudians joined with their North American brethren in fighting the French and Spanish, with privateers acting as an auxiliary navy in launching out against enemy commerce. Bermudians had had their own quarrels with their British governors and their bosses in London, but the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775 came as shock.

Suddenly the Continental Congress came into its own when shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, and laws prohibiting the export of food supplies to colonies remaining under the crown were enforced. A tiny colony of 10,000 people over 600 miles away from the Continent, could scarcely defy the might of Britain and the Royal Navy. At the same time Bermudians had a vital commodity to sell – salt – and a Bermuda delegation sought a waiver from Philadelphia, the seat of Government. They were turned down, but it was suggested that if they could forward the gunpowder stored in the Bermuda magazine a different view might be taken.

On the night of August 14/15, the gunpowder was stolen from the magazine, trundled down to waiting boats, and rowed out to two American vessels which lay offshore. Later the embargo was lifted and Bermudian trade resumed, but was now faced by the Royal Navy and by royal privateers manned by Tory Americans, both anxious for prizes.

The importance of the gunpowder to the American cause is illustrated by a brilliant letter from General George Washington to the Bermudians. It encapsulates the colonial cause and therefore I quote it at length. Written from his headquarters outside Boston, Washington wrote:

"In the great conflict which agitates this continent, I cannot but doubt but the asserters of freedom and the right of the constitution are possessed of your most favourable regards and wishes for success. As descendants of free men, and heirs with us of the same glorious inheritance, we flatter ourselves that, though divided by our situation, we are firmly united in sentiment. The cause of virtue and liberty is confined to no continent or climate. It comprehends, within its capacious limits, the wise and good, no matter how dispersed and separated in time and distance.

"You need not be informed that the violence and rapacity of a tyrannic ministry have forced the citizens of the America, your brother colonists, into arms. We equally detest and lament the prevalence of those counsels which have led to the effusion of so much human blood and left us with no alternative but a civil war or a base submission. . . .

"The virtue, spirit and union of the provinces leave them nothing to fear, but the want of ammunition. The application of our enemies to foreign states, and their vigilance upon our coasts, are the only efforts they have made upon us with success. Under these circumstances, and with these sentiments, we have turned our eyes to you, Gentlemen, for relief . . . ."

In fact the letter arrived in Bermuda after the gunpowder was stolen, and therefore was never delivered.

'A pistol pointed at the heart of America'

As a result of the gunpowder theft, a garrison was sent to Bermuda and the island slowly evolved as a major British base in the middle of the Atlantic — symbolically expressed as "The Gibraltar of the West" and more crudely as "a pistol pointed at the heart of America". Bermuda's shipping business gradually fell apart until in the 1840s a new trade came to bolster the islands fortunes.

There was one bright note in this period: the freeing of slaves. Emancipation was ordered by London throughout the Empire in 1833, to take place in 1834, when Bermudian slave owners willingly let their slaves go and were compensated with British gold – there was, however, no compensation for the slaves now trying to fend for themselves. Freedom came on August 1, 1834, and today Emancipation Day is celebrated along with Somers Day in a two-day summer holiday during which a major cricket match is played.

In February the following year an important legal decision resulted in the freeing of 72 American slaves. They were aboard the brig Enterprise, which put in to Bermuda for provisions and water. People ashore heard about the slaves, and a writ of habeas corpus was obtained, and acted upon immediately. At 9 p.m. each slave was given the opportunity to be free, and all except a woman and her five children took the offer to remain in Bermuda. A subscription was taken up to help the former slaves who, it turned out, had been stolen from a plantation in Virginia in the first place.

The new business was agriculture, and pretty soon Bermuda reverted to its earliest days and shipped spring vegetables to northern markets. Of course the markets were not in need as the Jamestown settlers had been, but the availability of spring vegetables before northern farmers could harvest them brought handsome sales which bolstered the island's economy.

The Civil War

The farm sales were as nothing to the remarkable boom brought about by the American Civil War. In 1861 President Abraham Lincoln ordered a blockade of all Southern ports and daring men aboard small, fast steamers were quick to start running the blockade, taking advantage of cheap cotton in Southern ports which would sell dearly in Europe, and European armaments which would bring in many times their value if landed in ports such as Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston. The men were paid handsomely for taking the risk of being caught, and the Town of St. George's quickly became a scene of debauchery as if gold had just been discovered.

In 1864 yellow fever broke out in Bermuda, which temporarily stopped blockade running, and led to a bizarre plot to spread it to northern cities. Confederate Dr. Luke Blackburn collected the clothes and bed linen of the sick and dead and stored them in trunks which were to be sent to New York. The plot was discovered and Dr. Blackburn's assistant was arrested, the doctor having left Bermuda in the interim.

He was followed to Halifax by Mr. Joseph Hayne Rainey, a free black South Carolinian who had escaped from Charleston when free black men were drafted to work on the fortifications. Why Rainey, who had become a moderately successful barber, took the same steamer as Blackburn is a mystery, but Rainey himself was soon to shine in another field. Returning to South Carolina after the war, he became involved in politics, and in 1879 was elected to the House of Representatives – the first African-American to be sworn in, preceded in the Congress the year before by Hiram Revels, who was the first African-American Senator.

Rainey, who made some fine speeches and at one point presided over the House as chairman of the Indian Affairs committee, lost his seat when the US Army was withdrawn from South Carolina and was no longer available to enforce civil rights laws.

Bermuda honoured Rainey by naming the lane where his barber shop had been "Barber's Alley" and the building where he had his business contains memorial items relating to his stay in Bermuda.

Prohibition and tourism

Although Bermuda remained a major British base the "pistol pointed at the heart of America" seemed to have little relevance as a tourist trade steadily developed, propelled by the visit of a British Princess for the winter of 1883. Bermuda's mild winter climate and its accessibility to New York by steamer brought increasing numbers of visitors and by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was an established and important part of the economy, particularly as the vegetable trade was hit by increasing US Customs tariffs and competition from the Southern states.

When the United States entered the war in 1917 an island was leased as a base for small submarine chasers to stop for rest and refreshment on their way to the Mediterranean – a harbinger of things to come. The tourist trade resumed in 1918, assisted by prohibition, for Bermuda remained "wet" which pleased many people escaping from the "dry" United States.

A few vessels even returned to blockade-running days, anchoring off New York to sell cases of spirits to anyone daring to put to sea in a motorboat. Prohibition rapidly became unpopular, and was ended during President Franklin Roosevelt's administration – but, fortunately for Bermuda, people still liked the island and, despite the recession, came in increasing numbers for the peace that island life can offer.

Defence partners

This pleasant neighbourly arrangement was abruptly stopped when Hitler invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war on Germany. Tourism dropped away and Bermuda's economy crashed, only to revive in 1941 when the defeat of France led to the British offering land on Bermuda for a US base – thus opening a whole new era. This was part of the overall Anglo-US "Destroyers for Bases" deal, but Bermuda was slightly different as a long lease on the land was given rather than being exchanged for armaments. Locals were surprised and shocked when it turn out the requirements for an airfield and a naval base took one-eighth of our land area, but construction soon brought boom times to Bermuda as Americans prepared for Britain's defeat by Nazi Germany. Fortunately these forecasts were wrong, but the bases proved their worth in fighting U-Boats and later providing a mid-Atlantic landing strip for hospital planes and transports winging back and forth across the ocean.

Bermudians settled in with the US service people as they had with British soldiers and sailors. When peace came civilian aircraft were allowed to use the airfield, in accordance with the terms of the wartime agreement, and soon tourists returned to Bermuda and built the tourist trade to a height never seen before. Meanwhile concern about the build-up of the Russian Navy caused concern in the Pentagon, and Bermuda became an underwater listening post for Russian missile submarines. The hope was that they could be pinpointed and destroyed if a war should break out.

The bases were given up and the forces withdrawn at the end of the Cold War, but visitors continued to pour in, a flood which slowly slackened at the end of the 1980s.

Business partners

By then Bermuda was becoming a centre for international trade with reduced taxes and simpler regulations making it easier for international companies based here to operate throughout the world. This service has become our economic mainstay today, and with the development of locally based reinsurance companies Bermuda businesses have been able to back up damage claims on primary US insurers, notably in the last few years of intense hurricanes.

Bermuda and the United States have been closely linked throughout our histories. Primarily Christian countries, we share a common language and culture, and a common heritage of democracy and respect for law. As Bermuda celebrates its 400th year of human habitation we look forward to more centuries of friendship.