Bermuda’s Persistent Futures

Abstract

Abstract“Bermuda’s Persistent Futures” recovers Bermuda’s significance to the development of the settler colonial imaginations of early America. Following the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture that began its settlement, English settlers insisted that Bermuda’s apparent lack of any previous Indigenous population, Spanish failures to account for its potential, and its proximity to England, North America, and the West Indies all made the 20-square-mile archipelago an anomalous and exceptional plantation in an emerging colonial system. Writers and officials seized upon Bermuda’s perceived uniqueness to position it as an isolated, vacant laboratory perfectly suited for uncovering what they believed had been waiting to be discovered—an America that was natural to England. Bermuda, in this sense, inspired a corpus of colonial fantasies about the hemisphere’s futures under a permanent English presence that was previously unimaginable to colonial writers. This essay focuses on Richard Norwood’s The Description of the Sommer Ilands, Once Called the Bermudas (1622–23) and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur amèricain (1784) to reconstruct a Bermuda that persistently appeared to lead the way for the futures of American settlement.