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169 n the spring of 1616 the Somers Islands Company ordered Bermuda’s governor, Daniel Tucker, to send to the West Indies for “negroes to dive for pearls.”1 Tucker (a former Virginia colonist and survivor of the Starving Time) gave the order, and the captain of the Edwin filled it as best he could: he brought back, as Nathaniel Butler noted, “one Indian and a Negro (the first thes Ilands ever had).”2 But he was mistaken: the first African to set foot on Bermuda was a crew member of a Spanish ship captained by Diego Ramirez that was wrecked there in 1603. As Ramirez wrote in his journal, the ship’s rudder was broken, and he sent a man ashore for wood to repair it: “Let Venturilla go ashore with an axe and cut a piece of cedar, for it must be made before we sleep.” This man was a negro, and he carried a lantern. The moment he landed and went into the bush, he began to yell, so that I shouted, “The devil’s carrying off the negro! Everybody ashore!” [The loud, catlike cries of Bermuda’s cahow birds had long contributed to the island’s reputation as the Isle of Devils.] The men jumped into the boat. At the negro’s outcries and signals he made with the light and his hands, the clamour of the birds and of the men augmented. The birds, meanwhile, attracted by the light, dashed against him, so that he could not keep clear of them, even with a club. Neither could the men of the relief party.3 Who was Venturilla? All that Ramirez noted about him was that he was “a negro.” Where was he from? Was he sent ashore at night on a dangerous mission because he was skillful and trustworthy—or because no one else could be forced to go ashore? But when Venturilla called for help, his comrades rushed to his aid, risking unknown danger themselves to save him. Nothing is known about Venturilla, but he is probably the first of 7 The Confluence of Three Cultures I A Tale of two colonies 170 his race to have set foot on Bermuda, which today has sixty-eight thousand people, about two-thirds of whom are of African ancestry. When Nathaniel Butler wrote his history of Bermuda, he had no way to know about Venturilla, and he was also unaware that two Indians, Namontack and Matchumps, had been among the 1609 Bermuda castaways. More Africans would soon arrive, and so would more Indians. Bermuda’s multicultural history had begun. So had Virginia’s. In both Bermuda and Virginia, slavery was an unintended consequence , or, as one scholar called it, an “unthinking decision.”4 Its results would last for four hundred years. Spain and Portugal had been buying and selling Africans as slaves since the 1500s, but Bermuda was the first English colony in North America to import Africans as laborers. Virginia was the second. Spain’s New World colonies in the Caribbean and on the mainland had been using Indians and Africans as slave laborers for more than a hundred years, since a 1503 Spanish decree allowed enslavement of the native Carib Indians.5 Spanish traders soon began buying Africans as slaves and by 1600 had shipped as many as 150,000 of them to the plantations and mines of Spanish America.6 By the early 1600s both Spanish and Portuguese traders were buying Africans by the thousands from native African dealers, with handsome profits for both sellers and buyers. Enslaved men, women, and children were packed into the holds of slave ships for the dreaded “Middle Passage,” as the hellish voyage from Africa to America came to be called. The slave trade was on. In the early 1600s slavery had not yet come to England’s colonies, but tobacco as a money crop had. Virginians knew next to nothing about growing the leaf they saw the Indians smoking, but around 1611 John Rolfe (who was said to be an “ardent smoker”) had begun experimenting with tobacco seeds from the West Indies, and by 1613 he was producing a milder tobacco that pleased the Virginians’ tastes. (Among the thousands of artifacts excavated at the Jamestown fort site are numerous small clay pipes.)7 Better yet, Virginia tobacco sold well in England. Virginia might yet turn a profit for its investors. Smoking soon became the rage in London, though King James hated it. He wrote a pamphlet...

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