This is the second in a series of occasional articles on the shared histories of Bermuda and the United States, which celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence this year. The articles, by Heritage Matters author Edward Cecil Harris, will run throughout the year.

Over half a millennium ago from the viewpoint of European knowledge, Christopher Columbus, heading for Hong Kong as it were, inadvertently discovered the western continents in 1492, later named America in honour of someone else. History and remembrance are fickle friends, indeed! Chris was later followed by such worthies as Cortes and Pizarro, who successively conquered the Aztec Empire in Mexico in 1521 and the Incas of Peru in 1533.

The English, ever at odds with the Spaniards of the Peninsula (Portugal being its oldest ally from those parts), were dismayed at these conquests which resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from central and southern America to Cadiz in the form of gold and especially silver. For over a century, English pirates and privateers preyed upon the silver Flota ships, bound for the Spanish Exchequer out of Havana and the Caribbean, while some peninsula vessels ended up on the rocks at Bermuda.

By the Treaty of Tordesillas in June 1494, less than two years after Columbus alighted in the Bahamas, the denizens of Iberia divided the New World into Spanish and Portuguese arenas, the latter forming Brazil and the former much of the rest of south and central America, with a little of the North, the lower half of which has become synonymous with the United States and the upper with moose and tar sands. Not much was therefore left in the New World for English aspirations for colonies, but eastern North America, lonely Bermuda, and later the islands of the Caribbean (ignored by the Spanish) beckoned to the venture capitalists of Old Blighty.

Thus, Bermuda became the third settlement by the English in the Americas and now the only surviving one of the three, as the other two were incorporated into the United States after 1776, the first having failed utterly and its brave souls “disappeared”. Other settlements would follow, such as Plymouth in the north and Barbados in the far south, but for today, the interest is on the first two before Bermuda.

In 1584, the “Virgin” Queen Elizabeth granted her buddy Sir Walter Raleigh a Royal Charter to take and rule any “remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince or inhabited by Christian People”. The next year, a colony was set up on Roanoke Island near Cape Hatteras, some 660 miles due west of Bermuda, but it flopped in 1586: fifteen men left to “hold the fort” vanished. In July 1587, another settlement was attempted in those “Outer Banks” of the present North Carolina, but its governor, the artist John White, was soon sent home for more supplies.

The Spanish Armada attack on Britain in 1588 delayed his return until 1590, when he discovered that the hundred-odd settlers, including his daughter and firstborn English-in-America grandaughter, “Virginia” Dare, were nowhere to be found. That “Lost Colony” became one of the enduring mysteries of early America, but modern archaeological research, including DNA studies, indicates that the colonists may have simply been incorporated into the indigeneous communities.

White returned to England and never went to America again, but in his short time in “Virginia” (named for the “Virgin” Queen) he painted scenes and portraits of Native Americans that are an unparalleled record of those people, preserved in the British Museum in London. He also recorded the natural world of the Virginia coastal areas, including species like land crabs, once found in abundance in Bermuda as recently as the 1960s.

A couple of decades after the Roanoke debacle, the English under the 1606 “Virginia Company” gave settlement in eastern North America another attempt. In 1607, they went north of the Outer Banks and into the Chesapeake region to establish “Jamestown”, a fortified village on the banks of the James River, the James being the King in England. We will speak more on Jamestown, but for now, it was failing when the passengers and crew of the “Lost Ship” of the Third Supply Fleet miraculously appeared on the James, out of the gloom of the Bermuda Triangle, with fried cahow, pork belly, turtles and whatnot from their 1609-10 enforced holiday on the Isle of Devils.

Two years later, the English settled Bermuda and under the 1615 “Bermuda Company” became what was considered a possible outpost to supply Jamestown. So we became the third overseas settlement of the English (outside of Ireland) as the Age of Exploration was drawing to a close.

As international business is very much the Bermuda world today, it should be remembered that the Bermuda Company was one of the first of a revolution in enterprise structures, the “joint-stock company”, as was the Virginia Company and the great East India Company of 1600. Such “share” entities gave investors the abilities to consolidate capital, share risk and profit, with liability limited to the value of their stock.

You might say that the success of Jamestown (and the USA) and Bermuda was predicated upon that new “business model”, which indeed very much supports the wellbeing of the Island today.

• Dr Edward Harris is the founding executive director emeritus of the National Museum of Bermuda