Continyed from last week

ALTHOUGH Bermuda's law banned slaves from owning real or personal property, masters "wink'd at" widespread transgressions that served their own interests in building a more stable slave system through incentives. Like most sailors, black Bermudians took pride in their appearance and spent money on personal adornments.

Slave seaman Josiah Saunders, for instance, was described as "remarkably clean and neat in his dress" and wore a gold "ring-bob" in one of his ears. Because many slaves working in Bermuda were also paid wages, sailors would have found ready customers for their private ventures in the island's slave community and were thus conduits for the flow of material goods tailored to the tastes of black Bermudians. Although eighteenth-century Bermudian slaves commonly lived in white households rather than in separate quarters, they frequently gathered by themselves to celebrate marriages, funerals, and holidays.

By 1711, so many slaves wore fine clothing and fancy dresses to their own balls and gatherings that the Bermuda assembly passed an ineffectual sumptuary law that forbade masters from allowing their slaves to "wear any silk, lace, ribbon, rings, bracelets, buckles, . . . nor other ornaments." These "merry meetings and midnight festivals" reflected a synthesis of European fashion and African and Native American traditions perhaps best exemplified by the costume, dance, and music of gombay dancers. Despite the reforming efforts of the Bermudian Assembly, numerous clandestine public houses served rum and bibby (a liquor made from fermented palmetto sap) to black clientele, sites where slave sailors could cut loose after months at sea.Goods and specie flowing in Bermuda's internal slave economy testify to the success of Bermudian slave sailors in obtaining creature comforts for themselves and for the slave community as a whole, while their celebrations and rituals reveal their ability to create and maintain cultural traditions independently expressed from that of the white families with whom they lived.

Along with material consumption, family ties figured prominently in anchoring seafaring slaves to Bermudian ships and slavery in a variety of ways. Black Bermudians were reportedly "fond of domestic lives and form(ed) early connections," probably in their late teens or early twenties.

Although no extant records document formal slave marriages, Bermuda's distinct white and black female majority combined with the economic opportunities inherent in seafaring to make slave sailors highly sought-after marriage partners. It is likely that captains favored older slaves with wives and children when selecting their crew, playing on a slave's masculine role as provider to wed him to the voyage.

Stated or implicit threats to sell family members abroad may have been another tool to discourage desertion, effectively holding wives and children as hostages against their men's return.

Although for a later period, Bermuda's 1821 slave register reveals that the mean age of the 356 slave sailors listed was 31.1 years and that 55.9 percent of them were aged 30 or older. The presence of 51 Bermuda-born mulattoes in the register also raises the distinct possibility that some slaves were sailing with white fathers or half-brothers.

When hundreds of Bermudian slaves were reluctantly sold or sent to the American colonies during a period of commercial depression in the 1730s and 1740s, black Bermudian mariners became even more important to the island's slave community as links to loved ones overseas.

Their orally transmitted messages are forever lost to history, but a July 1741 letter penned by Joseph Hilton, a black Bermudian in New York, to a friend back home relating news of that city's slave conspiracy scare reveals that Bermudian sloops were also surreptitious postal carriers for literate slaves who used slave sailors as their messengers.

The black seaman, serving a vital role as importer of goods and as messenger for the island's slave community, might have additional bonds to those forged by his owner if community needs seemed to outweigh his own quest for freedom. White masters, black family members, the slave community as a whole, and the success of the Bermudian economy each depended in different ways on the steady service of Bermuda's seafaring slaves.

Enticed by rewards, entangled by responsibilities, and entrapped in a system that discriminated against free blacks, very few slave sailors deserted. After spending six years in Bermuda, Governor William Browne asserted in 1788 that "the number of (slave sailor) deserters for thirty years past does not exceed five a year on an average. That is the highest number any one supposes," although Browne cautioned that""few will admit there has been so many, considering the rambling trade of Bermuda and the frequent opportunities (slaves) have to deliver themselves up from bondage. This may seem incredible but I have no doubt of it."

Of the tens of thousands of runaway slave advertisements in North American newspapers between 1730 and 1790 compiled by Lathan Windley, only 28 advertisements mention Bermuda-born slaves.

The 24 men and five women identified included 18 sailors and three caulkers, most of whom were young men who may not have yet married and who arguably had weaker ties to the Bermudian slave community. Taking the Browne figure as high and the newspaper rate as low, a desertion rate of less than 1 percent emerges for the Bermuda merchant fleet, far lower than the seven percent average rate for the Royal navy in the 1750s or an estimated five percent average for British merchant shipping as a whole.

Even more surprising than the low number of deserters are the many instances of slaves who ran away returning to the island. At least seven of the masters seeking Bermuda-born runaway slaves in American newspapers thought they would be making for the island by ship.

When Negro Jack ran from Tybee Lighthouse in Georgia in 1758 (where he may have been employed as a pilot), his master thought he would "endeavor to get off to Bermuda."

Tom, an old man who ran away from his Charleston master in 1784, was thought to be heading for Bermuda, "where he has children belonging to Mr. Robinson."

In other instances, Bermudian slaves captured by Spanish and French privateers escaped and returned home unbidden. In February 1767, a Spanish guarda coasta set upon two Bermuda sloops gathering salt at the Tortugas. Benjamin Stiles, master of the Porgy, reported that when the Spaniards fired on him and forced him to strike his colors, "five of his negro sailors, in order to prevent falling into the hands of the said Spaniards jumped overboard to swim to the shore, by means whereof one of the said negroes was drowned, as this deponent hath since been informed by the other negroes who have since returned to these islands" voluntarily several months later.

Clearly, white Bermudian slaveowners succeeded in their goal of maintaining a stable labor force in the merchant fleet by minimising desertion, an achievement vital to the efficient operation of the island's entire economy.

Bermuda's low maritime desertion rate can also be explained by the insidious pervasiveness of slavery and racist laws and institutions all over colonial America. Among the most widely travelled denizens of the Atlantic world, black Bermudian seamen saw the face of slavery in cities, towns, plantations, and settlements throughout North America and the Caribbean. The lives of urban slave artisans, watermen, and coastal fishermen would have more closely resembled their own, but conversations in waterfront taverns with free blacks would no doubt have revealed the difficulties and ambiguities of their position. Fraternising with sailors from other vessels provided black seamen with a context to gauge their shipboard treatment. A trip beyond the docks to the cane fields of Jamaica or the rice belt of South Carolina would have revealed to black Bermudians an altogether harsher base of comparison for their servitude.

Although legal rights and restrictions, economic liberties, physical mobility, and work regimes varied from place to place, African and African-American slaves throughout the Americas were trapped in an exploitative system in which they were ubiquitously considered racially inferior, captive workers.

Concluded next week

Slave sailors could escape their Bermudian masters, but where might they run in a world where much was stacked against them? They could perhaps try to pass as free in the larger Atlantic world of black sailors, but they would have to be ever-vigilant against cheating captains, re-enslavement, and encountering white Bermudians who would recapture them in the ports they visited.

If Bermuda had an indigenous free black population, individual freedmen might have provided examples for building a life in freedom elsewhere, but the colony's periodic purges kept models for emulation to a minimum.

The stresses of deception in passing for free and beginning life anew in a foreign port would have been significant. The common ground shared by Bermuda-born highly acculturated slaves and the multitude of newly arrived African slaves of various ethnic origins who in the early 18th century composed a majority of the American and Caribbean slave population was small, while the degree to which they would compete with skilled, urban creole slaves and free blacks would have been great.

Add to this the fierce pride Bermuda's black mariners took in their profession and their absolute contempt for agricultural work and one can readily appreciate the considerable ethnic and cultural differences obscured by similarities of skin color and the shared status of slave.

A number of enslaved seamen, in search of greater gain and independence and up to the challenges of life as runaways, did flee their masters, including a few Bermudians. Josiah Saunders fled his Bermudian owner in St. Eustatius in late 1757, returned to Bermuda for much of the following summer, and then proceeded on to South Carolina or Georgia, where he apparently found fellow Bermudian runaway Sue, a slave of White Outerbridge and perhaps his wife or lover. Bermuda-born Joe Anderson, a "stout sailor negro," was legendary in Kingston, Jamaica, for jumping ship at Port Royal in 1779 and successfully evading capture for the next fourteen years while working the interisland trade.

But these individuals were exceptions to the general rule that few of Bermuda's slave sailors escaped. In Bermuda, they already possessed what many slaves in South Carolina and Virginia ran away to find: family members and friends from whom they had been separated. The stable family structure, geographic intimacy, and long history of Bermuda's slave community, exceptional in the British Atlantic, were compelling anchors mooring black Bermudians to their island home.

On many levels, Bermuda's slavery appears singular in the parameters of the institution in British America. The physical and conceptual worlds of Bermuda's black seamen were among the widest and most cosmopolitan known by any African or African-American slave. On their frequent forced visits to port cities and towns throughout mainland North America and the Caribbean, they collected information, conducted business, visited friends and family, and came to know slave communities throughout the Atlantic world. In Bermuda, owners allowed their slaves significant latitude in family formation, intra-island travel, recreation, trade, and property accumulation. American visitor Josiah Meigs went so far as to state that, compared with the institution elsewhere, "slavery here [in Bermuda] scarcely deserves the name."

When placed in the larger context of British American slavery, Bermudian slavery was unique only in its particular combination of facets of slave opportunity and autonomy. Viewed comparatively in an Atlantic spectrum of slave experiences, seemingly exceptional individual elements of the institution in Bermuda had widespread parallels in other colonies. As seafarers, Bermudians were among the thousands of blacks who plied the eighteenth-century trade routes of the Americas. Numerically, there were more blacks employed on the estimated 1,200 vessels of New England's 1760s merchant shipping fleet, in the intra-island trade of the Caribbean, and in the coastal, riverine, and intrabay fishing and transport boats of the Chesapeake and Lowcountry coast than could be found on Bermudian vessels. African and American-born slaves also numbered among the crews of many Royal navy vessels and slavers making the Middle Passage. Bermuda was exceptional in the high proportion of slaves in the crews of its fleet, but not in its use of slaves as sailors.

The living and working conditions of black Bermudian mariners fits squarely in a wider milieu of British American slave experiences. The autonomy and mobility of Bermudian slaves resembled that of urban black artisans in American seaports, who also hired themselves out, shared the wages they earned, and participated in local market exchanges. Bermudian slave sailors may have even envied the many urban slaves who rented their own lodgings and thus avoided the constant surveillance that came with living in a white household. West Indian and southern plantation slaves who were permitted garden plots and provision grounds likewise earned money selling surplus goods, which they spent on creature comforts and saved toward self-purchase.

Many white owners appreciated that functionally, small liberties of accumulation, trade, and mobility gave their praedial and skilled slaves "a stake in slavery" that discouraged escape, fostered some degree of "identification with the economic and moral concerns of the master," and ultimately benefited them by making their slaves more productive.

Like provisions from garden plots, stock- and poultry-raising, and hiring out extra time, the private ventures of Bermudian seamen produced revenue in a wider market economy, but there were also significant differences.

Whereas the former enterprises lengthened a slave's working day, since work for oneself came after the owner's work, venture profits required no additional labor since work for one's owner (operating the vessel) simultaneously benefited the slave. Black Bermudians profited from their access to multiple regional markets, whereas slaves elsewhere were confined to a single local outlet, but all concerned possessed money and the freedom to spend it.

The early, high degree of demographic and family stability of Bermuda's slave community was a crucial formative element, but by the mid-eighteenth century, creole-born majorities were emerging in most British colonies, even among the West Indian sugar islands. Slaveowners in many areas countenanced slave marriages with an eye toward a procreative expansion of their labor force, but the specific aim of using family members as anchors or hostages for geographically mobile slaves was also duplicated outside Bermuda. Slaveowners in eighteenth-century Belize encouraged enslaved logwood cutters to marry and form families to keep them from fleeing to nearby Spanish territory during the months they spent working in isolated, inland logging camps under token white supervision. It is likely that further research will reveal enslaved boatmen and seamen on the North American coast were similarly locally rooted by family formation.

When the seventy black Bermudians of the Regulator declined the Massachusetts Admiralty Court's offer of freedom, they chose to return to the island of their birth, their families, and a profitable seafaring way of life to which they were accustomed, as well as to their white masters and slavery.

They did not go home empty-handed, either. Sixty of them took passage on the American flag of truce ship Duxbury for New York. Off Cape Cod, they shouted "Huzzah for Bermuda!" and rose up with other prisoners on board to seize the vessel, putting their former experience as a trained and coordinated privateering crew to good and profitable use.

On reaching Bermuda, the Duxbury was condemned as their prize. Nine other Regulators traveled overland through war-ravaged countryside to reach New York, where they obtained passage home. The sole remaining, unaccounted-for slave reportedly died in captivity awaiting exchange.

Other Bermudian privateers were captured during the war and their slave crews condemned with the vessels, but they escaped from their new American masters and made their way back to Bermuda.

Contemporaries pointed to the Regulator case and other evidence to advance the benign nature of Bermudian slavery and the mild treatment of the island's slaves. In doing so, they failed to appreciate the harshness of maritime labour, the mortal dangers of the sea, and the omnipresent threat of violence from the enemy.

There was nothing benign or mild in fighting to reef a tops'l in a stiff, icy gale off Sandy Hook or trying to reach a rocky key through pounding surf after a reef has ripped the bottom out of one's sloop.

Perhaps with the exception of shipbuilding, the most vital work done by Bermudian slaves was performed off the island and was thus hidden from the eyes of historical observers.

In Bermuda, slavery mutated with the shift from field to sea to fit the island's emerging economic niche in a larger Atlantic world. Bermuda's black sailors may have traveled more and received better incentives than enslaved workers elsewhere, but they were still bound to a brutal, immoral, and exploitative system that ultimately benefited their owners far more than themselves.

Bermuda's well-traveled white slaveowners and black seamen were intimately familiar with the wide spectrum of slave experiences throughout the Caribbean and coastal North America. Whether measured by access to markets and money, life expectancy, levels of literacy, occupational skill, mobility and autonomy, or family and community formation and stability, Bermuda's small slave population taken as a whole compares favorably with the hundreds of thousands of Africans and African Americans who lived, labored, and died in the colonies of British America.

Although one must never forget that the majority of African and African-American slaves lived and worked in a rural, agricultural, plantation setting, the considerable latitude of conditions on slavery's margins reveals the persistent malleability of the institution. With so many tastes of freedom, perhaps Bermudian slavery was among the most frustrating and bittersweet experiences of all.

In adapting existing agricultural, racial, and labor relations to a new maritime working environment, Bermudians invented new systems of control to replace directly coercive or supervisory means formerly employed on land. Bermuda's extensive use of and growing dependence on seafaring slaves led to the creation of a looser strain of slavery that offered greater opportunities to the slaves themselves.

White Bermudians were keenly aware of their heavy reliance on black workers to operate their merchant fleet. In such a fluid labor environment, local identity, kinship ties to home, and material incentives woven into the course of the voyage imposed a psychological discipline that kept the vast majority of sailor slaves from deserting ship. Black sailors, aware of their vital services, gained material advantages through wages and the commercial concessions allowed them, had more freedom to negotiate the conditions under which they worked, and benefited from the mobility inherent in shipboard work. In the Atlantic slave system, they occupied a privileged labor niche that imparted opportunities denied to most African and creole slaves.

The decision of the Regulator crew to return to Bermuda emphasizes that material conditions and levels of autonomy for slaves varied widely in the Atlantic world, and that slaves appreciated these differences. That slaves given the opportunity of freedom might return to servitude underscores the values of a society that promoted residential and familial stability among its black inhabitants and the success of a system that bound master and slave together into a common enterprise.

In the 18th century, Bermuda depended on the sea for its economic survival. Its merchant fleet helped to carry the trade of Britain's expanding empire and was rewarded with the food, timber, and cash needed to sustain the island's inhabitants, shipbuilding industry, and economy. The success of the carrying trade rested firmly on the shoulders of Bermuda's white and black mariners, who shared the laborbut unequally reaped the benefitsof their work.

Michael Jarvis is an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester. T