Bermuda Sloop - Slavery and The Bermuda Sloop

Slavery and The Bermuda Sloop

The commercial success of the Bermuda sloop must be credited in part to the contribution of Bermuda's free and enslaved Blacks. For most of the 18th Century, Bermuda's agricultural economy was reliant on indentured servants, most of whom were White. After 1684, Bermuda turned wholesale to a maritime economy, and slaves, Black, Amerindian, and Irish (the various minorities merged into a single demographic group, nominally Black), played an increasing role in this. Black Bermudians became highly skilled shipwrights, blacksmiths and joiners. Due to the number of White Bermudian men who were away at sea at any one time (and possibly due as much to fear of the number of Black Bermudian men left behind) it was mandated that Blacks must make up a percentage of the crew of every Bermudian vessel.

By the American War of Independence, the use of many able slaves as sailors added considerably to the power of the Bermudian merchant fleet, and these included the crews of Bermudian privateers. When the Americans captured the Bermudian privateer Regulator, they discovered that virtually all of her crew were black slaves. Authorities in Boston offered these men their freedom, but all 70 elected to be treated as prisoners of war. Sent to New York on the sloop Duxbury, they seized the vessel and sailed it back to Bermuda.

There was also an irony in the use of Bermuda sloops, built largely with slave labour, to counter the Atlantic slave trade, to which end the Royal Navy frequently applied them.

Many of the shipwrights who helped to develop shipbuilding in the American south, especially on the Virginia shore of the Chesapeake (Bermuda, also known as Virgineola, had once been part of Virginia, and had maintained close connections ever since), were Bermudian slaves, and the design and success of the area's schooners owes something to them, also.