Michael Jarvis, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), 585-622.
Arnold Sio, “Marginality and Free Colored Identity in Caribbean Slave Society,” in Slavery and Abolition (Sept. 1987).
Historians have paid great attention to the slave history in the 17th and 18th Atlantic world, but rarely have historians notice the changing relationships between masters and slaves, as well as the changing status of the African slaves. In this essay, focusing on Michael Jarvis’s Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783 and Arnold Sio’s Marginality and Free Colored Identity in Caribbean Slave Society, I will mainly discuss their historical approaches and their contributions in helping us to renew our understanding of slave history in Bermuda and Caribbean.
Historians usually assume slaves were in opposition to their masters due to their enslavement. While in fact, the relationships between them were not always the same. In Arnold A. Sio’s paper, he thinks the bipolar structure of Caribbean slave society simplifies the relationships between the slaves and their maters. According to him, their relationships could gradually alter through the genetic intermixture of the masters and the slaves, which produced an intermediate racial group and they were neither slaves nor masters. Unlike them, they were legally free, which “promoted questions regarding the boundaries of the respective groups, criteria of identification, and status allocation. In a society in which slavery was associated with race, a free coloured person was ‘a third party in a system built for two.’”[1] Then he points out, the people of free coloured “were marginal to Caribbean slave society: neither black nor white, neither African nor European, and neither slave nor free.”[2] In his opinion, it is very necessary for historians to treat them as free coloured people, because the categories of slave and master could not explain their complicated relationships. Moreover, in order to understand their identity, as well as their history and culture, according to Sio, historians should interpret them from the perspective of marginality. Following this approach, he examines three problematic or neglected issues that relate to the question of the identity of the free people of colour: culture and social organization, unity and group consciousness, and the style and goals of their political identity.
Like Sio, Michael J. Jarvis also thinks the oppositional relationships between slaves and their masters had limitations. In Jarvis’s paper, he turns his attention to the Bermuda maritime community and examines the role of seafaring slaves in participating maritime business. In the 16th and 17thth century, Somer Island Company imported African black and Indian laborers to the island, who taught the white English to cure tobacco for export. However, in the late 17th century, there was a “maritime revolution,” which caused the economic shift of Bermuda community from field to sea and greatly transformed the island’s society and landscape. Jarvis points out, “from 1685 to 1700, Bermuda’s annual tobacco exports fell from more than half a million pounds to fewer than ten thousand.”[3] Accompanying with this big change, the Bermudians made many fleets and actively took part in the Atlantic-wide commercial expansion. According to him, “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.”[4] Bermuda was a small island in the Atlantic Ocean and it lacked of white labor force, which caused the gradual integration of slaves into the maritime labor force, although it was risky for slave masters to use slaves as sailors, because they could run away in foreign ports.
For Bermuda’s white maritime masters, their aim was to create a captive labor force that would work for substandard rates. However, when African slaves became seafaring slaves and their legal status was admitted by the official, their destinies would be much more different. Until 1725, the Board of Trade admitted Bermudian slaves to be British subjects. With the official recognition of Bermudian slaves as British sailors, masters increased their use of slaves aboard ship with confidence. By the 1740s, blacks accounted for at least one quarter of the sailors on virtually every sloop. “On the eve of the American Revolution, slave sailors formed the backbone of Bermuda’s merchant fleet. At least 45 percent of Bermuda’s sailors were slaves, representing 38 percent or more of the adult male slave population.”[5] Historians usually assume “African and African-American slaves throughout the Americas were trapped in an exploitative system in which they were ubiquitously considered racially inferior, captive workers.”[6] Through examining the “maritime revolution” in Bermuda and its impact on the slaves, Jarvis tells us that the status of the slaves in Bermuda was changeable and the binary relationships of slaves and masters is insufficient for historians to interpret African slave history in Bermuda.
Focusing on Bermuda maritime community and Caribbean slave society, both Sio and Jarvis greatly challenge our understanding of slave history. Although they both work on slave history, their perspectives are totally new, which greatly help us to understand slave history in a new way. In Sio’s paper, he pays more attention to the free coloured people who purchased their freedom and became legally free slave in Caribbean. Compared with Sio, Jarvis turns his attention to the seafaring slave and maritime masters in Bermuda maritime community and tells us that the status of African slaves in Bermuda was not always the same. Instead, as the “maritime revolution” happened in Bermuda, African slaves became seafaring slaves and finally they became British citizens in Bermuda. Although they have done their case studies in different areas, they greatly questioned the usefulness of slave as a category, as well as the binary relationships between slaves and masters. Moreover, they tell us that traditional classifications of slave is too limited, which are still in need of further reflection for historians.
[1] Arnold A. Sio, “Marginality and Free Colored Identity in Caribbean Slave Society,” in Slavery and Abolition (Sept. 1987), 668.
[2] Sio, Ibid., 669
[3] Michael Jarvis, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), 592.
[4] Jarvis, Ibid., 593.
[5] Jarvis, Ibid., 599.
[6] Jarvis, Ibid., 615.
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