Contemporaneous with the rapid decline of tobacco agriculture in the late 1600s was what can be called the maritime commercial revolution: the development of an economy based on shipbuilding, boat building, fishing, whaling and especially overseas trading.

The expansion of maritime trading and engaging in the carrying trade (the freighting of goods for other merchants) connected Bermudian merchants with ports around the Atlantic World: but the maritime trade especially connected Bermudians with ports throughout the Caribbean. Yet one unexpected group of beneficiaries were among the enslaved: men and women traders who secretly exploited these expanding connections with the Atlantic World, and especially the Caribbean, facilitated by the maritime commercial revolution. With increased involvement of black men - slave and free - as sailors, the reach of local trading was extended to wherever men and women merchants traded.

This article will focus on those trade links with the Caribbean, and the by-products that went beyond the simpler exchange of goods. At the core of this discussion is the relationship forged between black Bermudian merchant mariners - bond and free - and black merchants throughout the Caribbean.

It would be crude to fix a hard date on the expansion of black involvement in the maritime trading economy, but one likely candidate would be an event occurring in July 1719. This event was a meeting between Bermuda Governor Benjamin Bennett and his Council. The meeting concerned a number of white Bermudian sailors colluding with pirates. The oppressing fear was not only that these white sailors, acting as pilots, would lead pirates through the treacherous shoals of Bermuda to the Islands.But there was more persistent concern that the number of local whites available to defend the island was being depleted by overseas trading. Bennett was particularly worried about the salt rakers in Turks Island.

He declared at that meeting that pirates were taking these men and that it was "...very detrimental to the Inhabitants of these Islands". (Minutes of the Governor's Council, Bermuda Archives, 1706-21, p. 120) Desperation indeed, in the face of low white male population numbers (Bermuda's demography was for much of its history dominated by a strong female numerical majority) was probably what encouraged Bennett's plan to arm and muster slaves. One strongly suspects that the military implications of low white male numbers were the governor's more compelling motivation.

Thus, it was declared by an Order-in-Council that the number of white men employed in the local merchant marine be circumscribed. This would deprive these pirates, they convinced themselves, of potential pilots and at the same time expand the number of men available for the muster.

Thereafter, no vessel of 40 feet or more keel and belonging to and departing from the Islands was to have "...any more white Sailors than Twelve..."; and no vessel of 39 feet keel or less was to take out any more than nine `white' sailors. All captains of vessels of any dimension whatsoever could take out "...as many Negroes or other Slaves as he or they shall think proper". All sailors taken out by vessels were to be brought back to the Islands by the same vessels on which they left.

Hence began the expansion of the international reach of local `black's trading', as `Negroes', `Mulattos', and `Indians', bond or free, would begin to slowly expand their presence in the Bermudian merchant marine. Between 1708 and 1720, about 28 percent of the men constituting a sloop's crew were `black' according to 18th Century documents. This rose to 34 percent in 1720. (Bermuda Archives, Masters, Passengers, Sailors from Bermuda). Historian Elaine Forman Crane, in her essay "Socioeconomics of a Female Majority" published in Signs estimated that by 1773-4 40 percent of all black men in Bermuda were recorded as sailors.

Those who were employed as mariners within the `black' community were not all Bermuda-born and raised; and among the community of sailors were men with at least a foreign and plausibly Spanish Caribbean heritage. The list of passengers and crew departing from Bermuda noted two such sailors. One was an `Indian' named Dego [read: Diego who departed on the vessel Edward and Hanna on March 16, 1709. Another Dego was listed as a `Negro', and was departing for Antigua on January 30, 1709.

With both men, there is a suggestion of origin from a Spanish-speaking population and thus, by extension, a strong plausibility of Spanish-language proficiency. This was not a peculiar feature of these two sailors, but part of a foreign language capacity enjoyed by other enslaved Bermuda mariners.One useful incident concerned accusations levelled against the `Indian' sailor Tom. He was accused with Sarah Bassett of destroying the property of John Jennings and Stephen Paynter. Along with his destruction of property, what also served as grounds for his expulsion from Bermuda was that he had recently `taken up with French privateers, his majesties enemies' (Courts of the Justices of the Peace, Bodleian Library, Oxford University). This required a capacity to communicate with them. The diversity in the origins of Bermudian slaves plausibly led to a proficiency in Spanish, French or other languages among enslaved sailors.

Virtually every ship recorded in the passenger lists of ships clearing Bermuda in the early eighteenth century recorded slaves as sailors, and this put slave sailors, at all or many of the various Caribbean destinations including Curacao, St. Christophers, Sal Tortudas (in the Bahamas chain of islands), Jamaica, and Barbados. One ship en route to Jamaica in June 1720 had 16 `Negroes' and two `Indians' in its 42 crew members. Both the list of destinations, and the example of the exiled `Indian' mariner Tom, reveal parts of the maritime trade network of Bermudian bonds-people and their connections in the Western Atlantic trading system.

And enslaved sloop-merchants established for themselves commercial relationships with Caribbean populations, bond and free. Black Bermudian sailors traded with a welter of land-based traders ("higglers" as these land-based traders were often called in the archival record) and sailors like themselves. Goods traded by these merchants were secretly imported into Bermuda, beyond the reach of law enforcement.

Since the 1600s virtually all trading by slaves was circumscribed by law, with stiff penalties for violation. At best, goods could be confiscated, at worst the violator could be lashed. But (at times in collusion with white merchants and merchant sailors) enslaved men and women traders sold local and overseas products and increased secret surpluses.

In addition to trade, ideas were also passed along from these Caribbean connections. Cultural institutions which have been adopted today, and many which have died out long ago, rode along the sloops of merchant traders departing the Caribbean. So did, much to the chagrin of proprietors, tales of servile insurrections occurring in the Caribbean.

Enslaved Bermudian merchant Enslaved Bermudian merchant mariners related tales of these events to many interested Bermudian slaves. Perhaps it will be discovered that it was more than a coincidence that the great Makandal Revolt in the 1750s in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), in which poison and the blade were used to eliminate proprietors, occurred only a few short years before the Bermudian servile Conspiracy of 1761.

Nevertheless, with the insertion of local black trading activity into the expansive Caribbean system, new ways of accumulating surplus and engaging in cultural exchange developed. Such were the consequences, intended or otherwise, of the maritime commercial revolution.

@EDITRULE:

Dr. Clarence Maxwell is the Curator of the Department of Historical Research at the Bermuda Maritime Museum.