In his previous book, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (2010), Michael Jarvis established Bermuda's significance in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints, is, he writes, a “prequel” (5) to that book. Together the two works provide the definitive history of early modern Bermuda, but this is far more than a prologue. Here, Jarvis argues that seventeenth-century Bermuda “needs to join Jamestown and Plymouth within an English-American triangle of origin” since it “explodes our tidy familiar set of regional Chesapeake and New England contrasts” (2). Moreover, Bermuda should occupy a position of primacy in our thinking since it was “the first of England's experimental colonial laboratories to produce a successful staple, form a stable community, turn a profit, transplant civic institutions, and harness bound African knowledge and labor” (3). Despite this rhetoric of experiment, Jarvis demonstrates that Bermuda's influence was never solely theoretical or abstract. Bermudians were ubiquitous throughout the English Atlantic World where they “establish[ed] new colonial beachheads” as “self-organized autonomous vernacular settlers” (5). In short, Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints promises a new and distinct account of English colonial expansion—and it delivers one.
Jarvis does so through a narrative history that traces the story of Bermuda over eight chapters (with an introduction and conclusion) running from the dramatic wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609, which brought the first English settlers, to the dissolution of the Bermuda Company in 1684. These chapters provide a detailed account of life on the islands as well as the actions and internal politics of the Company in London while advancing arguments on two major themes—the process of ethnogenesis or the development of a distinctive Bermudian identity and the nature of Bermuda's connections within a wider English Atlantic World.
The emergence of a distinctive Bermudian identity began in the 1620s and was co-produced by “English, Indian, and African islanders . . . as they transformed forest into farms and farms into communities” (109). Jarvis anchors the origins of ethnogenesis in the practices and customs of everyday life on the islands, arguing that identity emerged from “Bermuda's unique environment, a blending of globally imported people, plants, customs, technologies and ideas, and a particular strain of Calvinist puritan Protestantism” (159). But, he argues, the processes begun by the 1620s only continued because of the relative freedom from Company oversight due to a series of tobacco crises in the 1620s and 1630s.
These crises were, in turn, also a driving force in the other crucial theme in Bermuda's seventeenth-century history—migration and connections that helped form the wider English Atlantic. Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, and Sir Nathaniel Rich mobilized Bermudians fleeing the collapse of the islands’ tobacco economy to populate colonial projects designed to offer a Protestant challenge to Catholic Spain's Atlantic empire. Other Bermudians, from former governors to former servants, joined settlements in Barbados and Virginia.
Over the second half of the seventeenth century, Jarvis charts the internal battles that emerged from fights between conflicting Protestant sects, witch trials, shifting demographic composition, revolts from enslaved people and Irish and Scottish indentured servants, and efforts from London to re-assert control over the colony. At the heart of all these conflicts lay questions about Bermudian identity. As in the 1620s and 1630s, migration often served as a solution to internal conflicts on the islands, creating even denser webs of connection between Bermuda and the wider English Atlantic. Ultimately, both the Bermuda Company and the colonial elite's vision of a “Christian Commonwealth” (a phrase Jarvis uses throughout the book) became increasingly untenable in the 1670s. The increasing “maritime turn” of Bermuda's economy played a substantial role in both collapses as patterns of trade led to irreconcilable friction with the Company, while older efforts to suppress sin were overwhelmed by “the flood of rum and money that merchant mariners, wreckers, and more than a few pirates brought home to Bermuda” (361).
Throughout, Jarvis emphasizes Bermuda's distinctiveness, but such an emphasis makes its influence within the wider English Atlantic uncertain. Jarvis carefully traces Bermudian migrants in Virginia, Barbados, Eleuthera/Bahamas, Providence Island, Trinidad, Tobago, and South Carolina, but the presence of a Bermudian model in these locations either did not stick or was never attempted. In some cases, such as South Carolina, this is because “worldly Barbadian settlers clashed with their pious ex-Bermudian governor” (335) and seized control of the colony. But in other cases, those who migrated from Bermuda seem to have been those who rejected Bermudian identity—“poor former servants and laborers . . . least committed to maintaining an ordered, Godly society and most likely to turn to theft or violence in times of crisis,” “ambitious but frustrated profit-oriented planters” (200), and Independents and other radical protestants committed to covenanted churches.
Historians should take Jarvis's challenge to existing patterns of early English colonialism seriously, but to do so will require new questions. To offer just a few: by re-examining other colonies, including those to which Jarvis draws the sharpest contrasts, can we find evidence for emulation of a Bermudian model or other points of similarity? How should we theorize the experience and attitudes of settlers who learned from but ultimately rejected the Bermudian model? How do we account for the behavior of Bermudian ex-governors who took on leadership roles around the Atlantic?
Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints is an incredibly rich book that, despite its length, is accessible and engaging throughout. Jarvis has an unparalleled command of Bermuda's historiography, archival and printed sources, and archaeological research (including his own) that lets him offer readers an account of Bermuda's seventeenth-century history that seems to cover every event or incident, no matter how small, without feeling overwhelming. Most importantly, it challenges historians of early modern English colonial expansion and the Atlantic World to rethink our models and paradigms.
