A Forgotten Colonial Past: Institutionalization of Slavery in Bermuda A New Addition to Colonial American History

This Article examines the institutionalization of slavery in Bermuda and the legal framework developed to support the enslavement of the Black person. The Article also analyzes Bermuda’s Colonial Records to chronicle the dehumanization process of the Black person, both woman and man. Bermuda’s colonial beginnings were often forgotten, aside from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play which was based on the very shipwreck of the Sea Venture in July 1609 that led to the foundingand exploitation of these once uninhabited islands, notwithstanding the likes of Ariel and Caliban. As the Introduction indicates, Bermuda began as a corporate venture in 1612 under the Virginia Charter with the return of settlers to the islands after survivors of the 1609 shipwreck journeyed on to Jamestown, Virginia, where they told the tale of an island off their very shores with great riches. This Article analyzes the early period of labor and slavery on the Island, and the eventual institutionalization of slavery. In Part II, the author sets the date of chattel slavery in Bermuda at 1623, just eleven years after the beginnings of the settlement and almost six decades prior to the institutionalization of slavery on the North American mainland. Indeed, Bermuda would charter the course for her mainland sister colonies with legislation, proclamations, judicial decisions, and other legal measures enslaving the Black population from as early as 1617. Part III looks at the legal rights denied to Black people and other people of color in the seventeenth century, including the rights to marry, raise their children, carry a weapon, ownership of goods and chattel, and other privileges accorded to the white English population. Quo fata ferunt.