Bermuda

• 1. Introduction

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  Bermuda sits alone in the North Atlantic, the nearest land more than a thousand kilometres away on the coast of North Carolina. It is a British Overseas Territory of 181 islands with a total land area of just 54 square kilometres, yet it has hosted Cold War summits between British prime ministers and American presidents, sheltered Confederate blockade runners, and produced a daring Boer prisoner of war who later ran the largest espionage ring ever uncovered on American soil. How did such a small collection of islands become so consequential? The answer lies in geography, accident, and centuries of relentless adaptation. Bermuda's House of Assembly dates from 1620, making it one of the oldest legislatures on earth. An independence referendum held in 1995 returned a decisive majority against leaving British rule. And at the 2020 Summer Olympics, a Bermudian named Flora Duffy made the archipelago the smallest overseas territory ever to win an Olympic gold medal. The story of how this remote reef-ringed place became all of those things at once begins with a storm, a shipwreck, and the sound of raucous birds in the night.

• 2. The Isle of Devils

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  Juan de Bermudez, a Spanish explorer, discovered the archipelago in the early 1500s, and the islands were named after him. A historian named Pedro Martir de Angleria mentioned them in Legatio Babylonica, published in 1511, and Spanish charts of that year already included them. Neither Spain nor Portugal attempted to settle the place. Instead, their ships used the islands as a replenishment stop for fresh meat and water, then moved on. Legends accumulated quickly. Sailors reported spirits, devils, and terrifying sounds in the night. Those noises are now thought to have come from the calls of raucous birds, most likely the Bermuda petrel or cahow, and from loud nocturnal noises made by introduced wild hogs. The frequent storms and the surrounding reefs gave the archipelago a name it would carry for decades: the Isle of Devils. Portuguese mariners who were shipwrecked there in 1543 left behind an inscription on what was long called Spanish Rock, a reminder of how many vessels were drawn to the islands against their will. The reef that wrecked so many ships would, in 1609, become the accidental engine of permanent English settlement.

• 3. Shipwreck and Settlement

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  In 1609 a flotilla of seven English ships left port carrying several hundred settlers, food, and supplies bound for the struggling colony at Jamestown, Virginia. A storm broke up the fleet. The flagship, the Sea Venture, drove deliberately onto Bermuda's reef to prevent her from sinking. Every passenger and crew member survived. When the rescued settlers heard from the sailors about conditions back in Jamestown, they became reluctant to leave. Several attempts at rebellion followed, with some colonists arguing they had a right to stay and form their own government. The settlement that resulted was initially a prison labour camp, and the survivors built two ships, the Deliverance and the Patience, before finally departing. Formal English settlement of the archipelago, officially named Virgineola, began in 1612 with the arrival of the ship the Plough. New London was founded that year, later renamed St George's Town, and designated as the colony's first capital. It remains the oldest continuously inhabited English town in the New World. By 1616 and 1620, conservation was already on the agenda: acts were passed banning the hunting of certain birds and young sea turtles, with one law against killing young tortoises possibly ranking as the earliest conservation legislation in the New World.

• 4. Slavery and Resistance

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  The first two slaves arrived in Bermuda in 1616, not from Africa but from the West Indies. Bermuda's governor at the time had sent the ship Edwin to the West Indies to find slaves who could dive for pearls. One of those first two enslaved people was Black, the other was Native American. There proved to be no pearls to dive for. More enslaved people were later trafficked to the islands in large numbers from America and the Caribbean, and as the Black population grew, white settlers' fear of insurrection intensified. A 1623 law forbade Black residents from buying, selling, or bartering without their master's consent. Major rebellions erupted in 1656, 1661, 1673, 1682-1730, and again in 1761. The 1761 conspiracy was the most sweeping: it involved the majority of Black people on the island, six enslaved people were executed, and all Black celebrations were prohibited. Hundreds of Native Americans were also shipped to Bermuda, among them Algonquian peoples including Pequots, Wampanoags, Podunks, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts, exiled from the New England colonies in the aftermath of the Pequot War and King Philip's War. Some are believed to have been brought from as far away as Mexico. The legacy is visible today: some residents of St David's still trace their ancestry to Native Americans, while others are unaware they carry such ancestry.

• 5. Between Empires

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  When the Continental Congress in September 1774 resolved to ban trade with Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies after the 10th of September 1775, Bermuda faced famine. Without political channels to London, a group led by the Tucker family met in May 1775 with eight other parishioners and resolved to negotiate an exemption. Henry Tucker found a clause in the trade ban that allowed the exchange of American goods for military supplies, a clause confirmed by Benjamin Franklin when Tucker met with the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety. On the night of the 14th of August 1775, while Governor George James Bruere slept, 100 barrels of gunpowder were removed from the Bermudian magazine and loaded onto three American boats. The Continental Congress exempted Bermuda from the trade ban two weeks later, on the 2nd of October. That exemption came at a cost to Bermuda's reputation, earning it a name for disloyalty. Britain responded by passing the Prohibitory Act and dispatching HMS Scorpion to watch the island. Famine struck in 1779, brought on by the combined efforts of the Royal Navy, the British garrison, and loyalist privateers. George Bruere died in 1780, and his son George Jr., an active loyalist, took over the governorship, ending most of the smuggling. In 1784 Bermuda's first newspaper, the Bermuda Gazette, began publishing; its editor, Joseph Stockdale, had been given a financial incentive to relocate his family to the islands and also ran Bermuda's first local postal service.

• 6. Fortress and Flashpoint

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  After the American Revolution, the Royal Navy began improving Bermuda's harbours. In 1811 construction started on the large Royal Naval Dockyard on Ireland Island, intended as the principal naval base guarding western Atlantic shipping lanes. During the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, British attacks on Washington D.C. and the Chesapeake were planned and launched from Bermuda, where the Royal Navy's North American Station headquarters had recently moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia. James Arnold, son of Benedict Arnold, fortified the dockyard against possible American attack in 1816. During the Anglo-Boer War from 1899 to 1902, some 5,000 Boer prisoners of war were held on five of Bermuda's islands, sorted by their loyalty. Those who refused to pledge allegiance to the British Crown, known as Bittereinders, were interned on Darrell's Island under close guard. The most famous escapee, Captain Fritz Joubert Duquesne, was serving a life sentence for conspiracy and espionage. On the night of the 25th of June 1902, he slipped out of his tent, worked over a barbed-wire fence, swam a mile and a half past patrol boats and bright spotlights through storm-swept water, navigating by the distant Gibbs Hill Lighthouse until he reached the main island. He eventually settled in the United States and became a spy for Germany in both World Wars. In 1942, Colonel Duquesne was arrested by the FBI for leading the Duquesne Spy Ring, which remains to this day the largest espionage case uncovered in the history of the United States.

• 7. Tourism, Wartime Censorship, and Modern Bermuda

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  In the early twentieth century Bermuda attracted American, Canadian, and British tourists arriving by sea. The US Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 dealt a fatal blow to Bermuda's agricultural export trade with America, which accelerated the pivot to tourism. A rail line was built in the 1920s, opened in 1931 as the Bermuda Railway, and then abandoned in 1948; its route is now the Bermuda Railway Trail. The first aeroplane to reach the islands landed there in 1930, a Stinson Detroiter seaplane from New York City, after several earlier failed attempts. During World War II the Hamilton Princess Hotel became a censorship centre where 1,200 censors working for British Imperial Censorship intercepted and analysed all mail, radio, and telegraphic traffic bound for Europe, the United States, and the Far East. Working closely with the FBI, these censors identified and helped arrest a number of Axis spies, including the Joe K ring. Universal adult suffrage was adopted as part of Bermuda's Constitution in 1967; previously, voting had required a certain level of property ownership. On the 10th of March 1973, Governor Richard Sharples was assassinated by local Black Power militants during a period of civil unrest. American military presence on the island, which had begun in earnest during World War II, lasted until 1995 when the bases were closed as part of the wave of closures that followed the end of the Cold War. By the end of the 1970s, international business had already supplanted tourism as the dominant sector of Bermuda's economy, a transition that shaped the archipelago's character into the twenty-first century. When Flora Duffy won the women's triathlon gold medal at the 2020 Summer Olympics, the first Portuguese immigrants who had sailed from Madeira aboard the Golden Rule on the 4th of November 1849 had long since woven themselves into a population where Portuguese ancestry today accounts for roughly a quarter of all residents.