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Indentured Servants

Shortly after Bermuda was settled in 1612, the first indentured servants were brought
to Bermuda. Indentured servants were people who agreed to work for a set number
of years (usually seven but varying from three to twelve) in exchange for paid
passage to the island. They could not be sold or leased. Most indentured servants
in Bermuda were poor white people who came from the British Isles and were
enticed by the possibility of a better life. These servants were used as a cheap source
of labour. On the expiry of their contracts, they were released from service and,
in accordance with the normal practice at the time, were provided with tools and
two suits of clothing by their former masters.

During these early years, black people living in Bermuda were not slaves but indentured
servants. The first record of black indentured servitude we know of was under the
leadership of Governor Daniel Tucker. He brought a Native American and a black
man to Bermuda to work as pearl divers in 1616. Others followed, and there is evi-
dence from letters of the time that there may have been a sizeable black population
by 1621. These men were highly skilled and essential to the development of the
island’s early economy. Most came from the West Indies or were seized from Portuguese
or Spanish ships (hence the fact that many had Spanish names). They worked as
divers, or as planters and cultivators of tobacco and sugar cane, and their expert
knowledge proved invaluable to the development of agriculture in Bermuda, as Flatts Village with Bridge, 1835 (detail)
they were able to pass on their skills to other indentured servants. By Thomas Driver
Watercolour on paper
However, life was not easy for indentured servants. In 1639, a Spaniard, Joan de
Rivera y Saabedra, who was forced to stay on the island after the ship on which
he was travelling ran aground off Bermuda, recorded these comments about the
labour force:

“Labour in the fields and in the farm houses is performed by boys, who are either orphans
or who have been abandoned, and most of them, expecting betterment, have been
brought to the island in ships that call here. They serve for ten years at a very miserable
wage, which is paid in tobacco at the end of this term. They are clothed on the same
mean scale, and thus live poorly and practically in a state of slavery. On completion of
their time, however, they are freed; no force or violence is employed, a point to which
much attention is given. There are also a few Blacks; some of them have landed from
vessels wrecked here; others have been left here by the Dutch who captured them.”
In 1644, Captain William Jackson was reported to have arrived with a human cargo of
several Indians and blacks and to have sold them as indentured servants. In addition, we
know that a number of Pequot and other Indians were brought here.
Over the next few years the need for cheap labour in Bermuda increased dramatically.
During the 17th century there was a vast expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It
became far more profitable to own slaves than to use indentured servants, black or
white. As such, Sir Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, brought in the first slaves to work on
his plantations in Bermuda and Virginia. Over the next few years more and more slaves
were brought on sailing ships, primarily from the Caribbean.

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