THE grey dawn light on the morning of May 9, 1782, revealed to the masthead lookout of the Continental frigate Deane a strange sail on the horizon. Even at a distance, he guessed that the vessel with the raked-back masts to leeward was a Bermudian privateer. This late in the War of Independence, only fast runners, privateers, and warships cruised the waters off the Carolinas. She would bring welcome prize money to the Deane's crew, rounding out a highly successful cruise. Capture was almost certain, since she was caught on a lee shore with nowhere to run and her sixteen six-pound cannon were no match for the frigate's twenty-eight twelve-pounders. Trapped and out-gunned, Captain George Kidd struck his colours, and the Bermudian privateer Regulator fell prize to the United States navy.

The men of the Deane were no doubt amazed to find that 70 of the 75-man crew on the Regulator were black slaves. Kidd and his four officers were the only white men on board.

A further surprise occurred at the vice admiralty court trial of the Regulator when, breaking with precedent, the Massachusetts justices offered the slaves among the crew their freedom rather than condemn them, as forfeited chattel, to be sold at auction.

To a man, the black Bermudians declined the offer and asked instead to be sent to their island home as prisoners of war on the next flag-of-truce. Rather than embrace the freedom offered to them by this new republic, they chose to return to Bermuda and slavery.

Contemporary Bostonians and modern readers alike might puzzle over the seemingly incongruous choice of the Regulator's black sailors. To understand their decision requires a close look at their complex motives, embedded in the structure of Bermuda's maritime community, its male workforce, and centuries of historic development of slavery on the island.

Nearly six hundred miles to the east of the North Carolina coast, the island of Bermuda maintains a lone outpost in the midst of the wide North Atlantic. Neither American nor Caribbean, this ancient British colony has escaped the attention of most colonial historians, a neglect perhaps owing to its small size and anomalous location.

Far from marginal, Bermuda lay at the crossroads of the Atlantic world in the age of sail, when one contemporary claimed that nine out of ten vessels sailing between the Caribbean and Europe passed within fifty miles of the island.

It was the most central location in England's American empire, roughly equidistant from all the colonies in a broad thousand-mile arc from Newfoundland to Antigua.

The Gulf Stream to the west, the northeast trade winds to the south, and the Westerlies to the north enabled vessels to sail easily to and from Bermuda. Its location was a vital asset in an age when people, information, and trade traveled only as fast as wind and waves allowed.

One of Europe's few true discoveries in the New World, Bermuda was uninhabited until the Virginia-bound survivors of the shipwrecked Sea Venture reached its shores in 1609. During a nine-month sojourn, the English discovered that the island, long thought by the Spanish to be haunted and called "the Isle of Devils," was a healthy and fertile paradise with considerable potential as a colony.

Accounts of the "wracke and redemption" of the Sea Venture's company inspired William Shakespeare to pen The Tempest and the Virginia Company to dispatch six hundred settlers between 1612 and 1615 to fortify and colonise the island.

A separate joint-stock venture, the Somer Island Company, was chartered in 1615 to assume administration of the colony and sent over another thousand settlers over the next seven years.

By 1625, almost all of the island's twenty square miles were under cultivation and the infrastructure of a settled colony was largely in place: a ring of forts and an organized militia to guard the coast, nine parishes tended increasingly by Puritan ministers, an elected assembly to pass laws, private land ownership, and impressive tobacco exports at a time when the price of that commodity was still high.

While Virginia's settlers struggled to survive Indian massacres, famine, and astonishingly high mortality rates, Bermudians enjoyed good health, peace, and prosperity.

Bermuda owed much of its prosperity to the African black and Indian laborers whom the Somer Island Company imported from the West Indies, for they taught the English how successfully to cure tobacco for export. With the arrival of "one Indian and a Negroe" in the Edwin in August 1616, Bermuda gained the dubious distinction of being the first English colony to import African labor, fully three years before Africans arrived in Virginia.

Few of the estimated 100 or more black arrivals before 1623 were apparently African-born; most were taken by English privateers from Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, bore Spanish names, and taught planters to make their tobacco "in the Spanish manner."

More accurately termed "Atlantic creoles" than Africans, Bermuda's first blacks occupied an ambiguous legal status between slavery and limited servitude. They formed families and quickly established a demographically successful population. By the 1640s, however, they and their descendants were consigned to a perpetual and inheritable state of servitude.

Between 1625 and 1684, there was little white or black migration to the fully settled and densely populated colony.

Three generations of Bermudians came to maturity in virtual isolation from England and Africa as the population increased from 1,600 in 1625 to 8,000 in 1679, making it one of the two most densely populated colonies in English America.

Natural increase and a small trickle of around 300 blacks and Indians, mostly from the Caribbean, over the ensuing fifty years swelled the colony's enslaved population.

By the late 1660s, colonial officials complained that there were more slaves than could profitably be employed.

In 1676, Bermuda Governor Sir John Heydon banned the future importation of black and Indian slaves at a time when colonies elsewhere were clamoring for a greater supply. Heydon also exiled the island's tiny free black, mulatto, and Indian population by ordering them to leave the island within six months or be re-enslaved. This order, irregularly invoked into the 19th century, sought to conflate race with legal status by eliminating free nonwhites and succeeded in keeping Bermuda's free black population small until the eve of Abolition in 1834. Despite the deportation and the import ban, the island's black population continued to grow, reaching 1,737 in 1684 to compose a little under a quarter of Bermuda's inhabitants.

By the late 17th century, Bermuda's slave population was made up almost entirely of island-born creoles, the children and grandchildren of the 1616–1619 arrivals who were owned in small numbers and integrated into the majority of white households.

Like its population, Bermuda's economy also grew more diverse over the 17th century.

White and black Bermudians cultivated tobacco exclusively until the late 1620s, when a depression in price prompted islanders to diversify into raising livestock and growing provisions for export to other English colonies.

During the English Civil War and Commonwealth periods, the company's Puritan leadership was too distracted by events in England to curtail Bermuda's modest intercolonial trade, but after the Restoration it aggressively reasserted its authority over the colony in order to revive the exclusive cultivation of tobacco, which by then yielded little profit to Bermuda's planters but earned the company a steady revenue through duties.

To that end, the company demanded that Bermuda planters restore tobacco acreage to pre-1633 levels, confined the island's trade to vessels licensed by it, and banned shipbuilding in order to stop Bermudians from directly marketing their produce abroad.

The disgruntled colonists joined forces with Perient Trott, a London merchant and renegade company member, to launch a legal attack on the company's charter. In what turned out to be the opening salvo of Charles II's judicial battle to rein in England's American colonies, Bermudians ultimately succeeded in dissolving the company after a five-year quo warranto trial. In 1684, the government of Bermuda reverted to the crown.

The dissolution of the Somer Island Company was a watershed in the history of the colony. Free from company trade restrictions, Bermudians abandoned tobacco agriculture and took to the sea in pursuit of commerce.

Continued on Page 7Initially driven by the need to market island-grown produce in West Indian and North American colonies, Bermudian mariners quickly learned that carrying freight and speculative trading were far more profitable than producing trade goods.

Shipbuilding, vital for expanding and maintaining the island's merchant fleet, demanded timber and prompted Bermudians to reforest their tobacco fields and search abroad for iron, canvas, wood, and other necessary materials.

Once entrenched, shipbuilding and shipping resulted in a self-perpetuating, interdependent system in which shipping imports fed shipyards that, in turn, produced the vessels needed for the carrying trade. Bermuda's maritime economy wedded her people to sustained intercourse with a wider Atlantic world and dispelled the relative isolation characteristic of the island's company-period history.

The economic shift from field to sea was no less than a "maritime revolution" that fundamentally transformed the island's society and landscape.

From 1685 to 1700, Bermuda's annual tobacco exports fell from more than half a million pounds to fewer than ten thousand.

In the same period, the island's merchant fleet rose from a handful to more than seventy vessels.

Taking advantage of their island's advantageous location, Bermuda's first generation of mariners profited from connecting emerging regional economies in North America with the wealthy sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean.

Freighting cargoes for other colonial merchants and buying goods on speculation enabled Bermuda to prosper far more than the older tobacco economy had allowed, and the island's extensive tramp trade made Bermudians among the best-informed denizens of the North Atlantic.

Bermudians also found opportunity at the unsettled margins of empire, cutting logwood at the Bay of Honduras and raking salt in the Turks Islands, Tortola, and Saltortuga. Harvesting salt figured heavily in Bermuda's economic success, for in an age without refrigeration, salting was the chief means of preserving meat and fish.

The high seasonal demand for salt at autumn slaughter time in the southern colonies annually netted Bermudians considerable capital, which they invested and supplemented with freight and trade profits during the rest of the year.

Other maritime pursuitswrecking, whaling, and privateeringbrought a few lucky mariners overnight fortunes, but salt raking and the carrying trade were the mainstays of Bermuda's maritime economy in the century before the American Revolution.

Less than a generation after the fall of the Somer Island Company, Bermudians succeeded in departing radically from the predominantly commodities-based economies typical of England's other colonies and forged a new one based on manufacturing ships and rendering commercial services.

The maritime revolution transformed Bermuda into a cosmopolitan cultural crossroads, a product of the island's extensive integration into intercolonial and international exchange networks.

The Bermudian fleet that enabled this Atlantic-wide commercial expansion was chiefly composed of the internationally renowned Bermuda sloop, supplemented by a lesser number of brigantines and schooners. On the eve of the maritime transition in 1680, Bermuda owned only fourteen vessels.

Seven years later this number had grown to forty-two, and by 1700, the island's fleet included sixty sloops, six brigantines, and four ships. In 1716 , all ninety-two Bermuda-registered vessels were sloops, and by 1750 the size of the fleet had grown and diversified to 115 vessels: eighty-one sloops, fourteen schooners, eighteen brigantines, and two others.

The speed of the Bermuda sloop made it a highly sought-after carrier whose masters found ready customers in ports abroad, especially during wartime.

The flexibility of the rig allowed it to sail in wind conditions that kept square-riggers at anchor, and the shallow draft of the typical Bermudian hull could navigate over sandbars that stopped larger vessels and up rivers to reach markets deep in the North American interior.

The durable, native Bermuda cedar from which the sloops were built was highly resistant to rot and marine borers, giving Bermudian vessels a lifespan of twenty years and more even in the worm-infested waters of the Chesapeake and the Caribbean.

The Bermuda sloop, in short, was wonderfully adapted to overcoming many of the physical and geographic obstacles in America's intercolonial trade, a factor that played no small part in the island's success.

Growing fleets require greater numbers of mariners to man them. One consequence of the maritime revolution was that slave labour shifted from performing diverse agricultural tasks to skilled artisanal crafts.

A few male slaves had fished, hunted whales, and salvaged wrecks in local waters during the company period, and these early maritime slaves were among the first recruited by Bermudian masters embarking on intercolonial trade.

Other male slaves, particularly boys, learned seamanship when their owners eschewed planting and took to the sea.

A third group became sawyers, joiners, caulkers, blacksmiths, and shipwrights and formed the backbone of the colony's shipbuilding labor force.

As more and more slaves were integrated into the maritime economy, the shipping fleet swelled and the island prospered from its increased trade.

From a white perspective, the shift enabled white masters who went to sea to use their previously underemployed male slaves more productively.

Continued next week