I.

safety. There they stayed till the tenth of May following1, SECTION finding the islands better than their repute; and finally, having built two ships, they set sail and reached Virginia 2.

As far as their own comfort was concerned, they had better have remained at the much maligned Bermudas. They found the Virginian colony nearly starved out, 'in much distress of victual, so that the overplus of their Sommer islands store relieved many and saved some lives 3.' The abandonment of the colony was only prevented by the arrival of fresh ships and a new governor from England; and, towards the end of June, Somers undertook to fetch food from the Bermudas, 'the most plentiful place that ever I came to for fish, hogs, and fowl.' He reached the islands Death of in safety, but reached them only to die.

His body was embalmed and carried to England by his companions, under the command of his nephew Captain Matthew Somers, and laid to rest at Whitchurch in his native county; but his heart is said to have been interred in Bermudian soil 5, where the town of St. George now stands, and that name with those of Somers islands and Somerset (Somers seat) have perpetuated his memory in the lonely land where he died.

1 During their stay a boy and girl were born, and were christened respectively, with some want of invention, Bermudas and Bermuda.

There are the fullest authorities for this celebrated voyage. Sir G. Somers' own report, and two fuller accounts by men who accompanied him, are given in the Memorials of the Bermudas.

3 From the Historye of the Bermudaes.

From Sir G. Somers' report to the Earl of Salisbury, referred to in the note above. It is dated Jamestown, the twentieth of June, whereas he is said to have sailed for the Bermudas on the nineteenth.

5 A few years later, in 1620, Governor Butler put the following inscription over the spot :

'In the year 1611

Noble Sir George Summers went hence to heaven.
Whose well-tried worth that held him still imploid
Gave him the knowledge of the world so wide;
Hence 'twas by Heaven's decree that to this place
He brought new guests and name to mutual grace;
At last his soul and body being to part,
He here bequeathed his entrails and his heart.'
As a matter of fact, however, he died in 1610 not 1611.

Sir G.

Somers.

SECTION

I.

Favourable

The return of Somers' companions drew public attention in England to the Bermudas. There was much to attract in the tale which they had to tell. The islands now recalled the adventures and death of a leading Englishman. While Virginia had been tried and found grievously wanting, the Bermudas, so long dreaded and shunned, had proved a spot from which the Virginian colonists might find relief.

Romance always exaggerates; and, the dark picture hitherto notices given of the islands having been proved to be untrue, no of the Bermudas. colours were thought too bright for future descriptions.

Marvell.

Henceforward the Bermudas are constantly spoken of as a kind of islands of the Blest. The author of the Historye of the Bermudaes,' who wrote probably soon after the first settlement of the islands, speaks of them as 'being in an equal elevation with that of the Holy Land, and in particular very near with the very city of Jerusalem, which is a clime of the sweetest and most pleasing temper of all others.'

A letter written in 1611-12 alludes to their being called 'Sommer islands as well in respect of the continual temperate air as in remembrance of Sir George Sommers that died there'. Their climate, beauties, and products became a favourite theme for English poets.

Andrew Marvell, writes of—

'This eternal spring Which here enamels everything".'

1 Quoted in the Memorials of the Bermudas, vol. i. p. 57. The false etymology no doubt helped to perpetuate the name. Writing in the middle of the seventeenth century, after the mistake had taken root, Fuller says, 'Possibly in process of time these Summer islands may be conceived so named because there winter doth never appear.' See the reference given in the note above, p. 8.

2 From the singularly beautiful little poem beginning—

'Where the remote Bermudas wide,

In ocean's bosom unespied.'

It was probably written about 1645.

Waller's1 description is equally glowing,

'So sweet the air, so moderate the clime,
None sickly lives, or dies before his time;

Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncurst,

To show how all things were created first.'

SECTION
I.

Waller.

While in our own century, Moore 2, whose poetry is inspired Moore.

by the genius of the place, has sung of

'These leafy isles upon the ocean thrown,
Like studs of emerald o'er a silver zone;'

comparing them to the 'pure isles'

'Which bards of old with kindly fancy placed
For happy spirits in th' Atlantic waste.'

Captain Somers returned to England in 1611. In March The 1612 the Virginia Company procured an extension of their Bermuda Company. charter so as to cover all islands within three hundred leagues of the Virginian shore and thereby to include the Bermudas. In the autumn of the same year the Company sold the islands to certain members of their own body, who in 1615 were

1 From the burlesque poem, 'The Battle of the Summer islands.' It was probably written before 1639. The tradition that Waller visited the Bermudas is shown to be groundless in App. 8 to vol. ii. of the Memorials of the Bermudas. Moore commemorates his supposed visit in the lines (Odes to Nea)—

'May spring to eternity hallow the shade,

Where Ariel has warbled and Waller has strayed.'

2 Moore was appointed Registrar of the Court of Admiralty in the Bermudas in the year 1803, but he only stayed a few months in the islands. He held the office, however, the duties being discharged by a deputy, till 1844.

Other writers besides poets have borne witness to the climate and soil of the Bermudas, notably Bishop Berkeley in discussing his scheme for the establishment of a college in the islands (see below, pp. 21, 2). On the other hand a different picture is given in A Short Discovery of the Coast and Continent of America, by William Castell, published in 1644 (see the Harleian Collection of Voyages). The writer says, 'Besides it is as much if not more than any other place infested with most tempestuous fearful winds called hurricanes. The soil and temperature is far inferior to any part of Virginia, and yet is it inhabited no less than with 1000 English.' Labat, too [1705], speaks of the Bermudas, to which he gives the second name of Vermude, as being stormy islands.

I.

SECTION incorporated by Royal Letters Patent as 'The Governor and Company of the City of London for the plantation of the Somer islands.' This Company owned the islands till the year 1684. The Letters Patent gave them full powers of government, with an absolute monopoly of the import and export trade of the islands, and among other provisions excluded from the settlement persons 'addicted to the superstition of the Church of Rome.'

First settlement of the

The first emigrants to the Bermudas, about fifty in number, were sent out in 1612, before the new Company had been Bermudas. formed. Richard Moore, a ship's carpenter, was the first

the islands.

Governor, and the instructions given to him specified various sources of wealth which might be derived from the colony, including tobacco, pearls, silk, timber, salt, sugar-canes, ambergris, and whale oil.

The new comers were received on arrival by three men who had remained behind from Somers' company, and who were mainly concerned with trying to conceal from the Governor a large quantity of ambergris which they had found.

Moore landed at Smith's island, but subsequently removed to St. George's, where he established his head-quarters. In his three years of government, he had, like the founders of other colonies, to confront mutiny and discontent on the part of his followers, he frightened away two Spanish ships with two of the only three gunshot in his stores, and he saw the infant settlement recruited by several hundred emigrants from England, who brought with them a blessing in the shape of potatoes, a curse in the shape of rats 1.

Norwood's One of the first settlers was Richard Norwood, a surveyor, division of whose name is very prominent in the early records of the Bermudas. He carried out the division of the islands according to the terms laid down in the Letters Patent.

1 Smith's History of Virginia ascribes the 'increase of silly rats' which devastated the islands and their subsequent disappearance to divine interposition. Compare the trouble caused by rats to the early settlers in Mauritius, vol. i. of this work, p. 146, note 1.

I.

These terms were that part, not exceeding one fourth, was SECTION to be left for common land to defray the public charges of the Company, while the rest was to be divided into eight tribes, each tribe containing fifty shares of twenty-five acres each, making four hundred shares in all1. The tribes were named after some of the leading members of the Company, Hamilton, Smith's, Devonshire, Pembroke, Paget, Warwick, Southampton, and Sandys, while St. George's with the small islands around it and part of the main island was set aside for the common land. The eight tribes and St. George's constitute the nine parishes, into which the Bermudas are still divided for ecclesiastical and political purposes at the present day.

tative in

Bermudas.

The division into tribes formed the basis for the repre- Represensentative institutions which were established in the Bermudas stitutions after the first few years of the settlement, subject to the in the authority of the Company at home. In addition to the Governor and his Council, mainly composed of officials, there were General Sessions held twice a year for judicial purposes, to which each tribe sent six representatives and the common land twelve; and a General Assembly, held once in every two years, which included the Governor and Council, and to which each tribe sent four representatives and the common land eight.

The Bermudas were the second British colony to receive some form of Representative Government. The first

1 The survey was carried out about 1618. There is a chart of the islands in the British Museum, showing the survey, and dated 1626. A reproduction is given in the Memorials of the Bermudas, vol. i. Norwood executed a second survey of the islands in 1662-3.

The division into tribes did not exhaust the whole of the islands. There was an overplus, the application of which gave rise to a suspicion of jobbery against the Governor and some members of the Company. It may be mentioned here that the Virginia Company, 'in consideration of the great defect of the quantity of land in the Summer islands, conceived to have been at the time of the sale thereof,' made over to the Bermuda Company certain land in Virginia. Hence the 'Bermuda hundred,' said to be still so named in Virginia. See the Memorials of the Bermudas, vol. i. p. 228, and note.