Column: Talbot-Woolridge On Caribbean & More
[Opinion column written by Shomari Talbot-Woolridge]
Some of the oldest fortunes in this country were made in the Caribbean.
Not near it. Not alongside it. In it.
The land, the boats, the shopfronts, the family names that still carry weight on this island were built out of a relationship with a region we are now told we barely know.
Bermudians did not visit the Caribbean. We settled it.
In 1648 about seventy Bermudians sailed south to found a colony. Twenty eight of them were enslaved Africans. Their ship broke on a reef off Eleuthera. That expedition was the first concerted European effort to colonise the Bahamas.
In 1666 another group settled New Providence and built what became Nassau. Bermudians founded the Bahamas. The first settlement and the capital.
From the 1670s we ran the salt trade in the Turks Islands and held it for a century and a half. Our own Assembly claimed seven hundred and fifty of the eight hundred rakers there were Bermudian.
In 1710, when the Spanish and French took the islands, Bermuda did not petition London. Bermuda armed a sloop and cleared out the garrison. We fought a war over Caribbean salt.
The economies were one economy. The salt went north. The sugar came back.
Salt, sugar and slaves were never three industries. They were one machine, and this island turned it.
Here is the part that should stop you.
Every February, Bermudian owners put enslaved Bermudians on ships and sent them south for the season. Not for a voyage. For six months.
Wives left behind. Children left behind.
The Crown’s own regulations of 1767 speak of the great number of enslaved people sent annually to those islands while their masters remained comfortably in Bermuda.
The traffic ran the other way too.
Most of the people enslaved in Bermuda were not brought here from Africa. They were brought here from the Caribbean. Taken off one island and set down on another.
Whole families cut in half by the width of an ocean, and the cut was made by Bermudian hands, for Bermudian profit.
That is how tied together these islands are. Our people are in their ground. Their people are in ours.
Mary Prince was born enslaved in Devonshire in 1788. She was sold at about twelve for fifty seven pounds, sold again, and shipped to Grand Turk to rake salt for ten years.
She wrote of standing in salt water to her knees from four in the morning until nine at night, until her legs broke into boils that ate down to the bone.
She was taken to Antigua, then to England, and in 1831 she published her account of it.
They printed it under the title *The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself.*
A West Indian slave. That is what they called a woman born in Devonshire.
Our National Hero. Her story is the story of us. It always was.
Now the money.
When Britain abolished slavery it paid compensation. Twenty million pounds, roughly forty per cent of the national budget, borrowed.
Not one penny went to a freed person.
The claims are public record, sitting in an archive at University College London where anyone can read them.
Among them are two from St Vincent, settled in July 1836, naming merchants on St Vincent with other members of their family in Bermuda.
A hundred and seventy three human beings. Four thousand eight hundred and eighteen pounds.
That money did not leave. It landed here.
Capital placed in the right hands in 1836 does not sit still. It bought land. It bought boats. It became shops that became stores that became banks.
It paid for schooling, and for the schooling of the generation after that.
And it became names.
Names on buildings. Names over shopfronts. Names on companies that still trade in this country every day of the week. Names we say without hearing them.
Those names are not neutral. They are receipts.
So consider the arguments we are asked to take seriously now. That the Caribbean has nothing to offer us. That we are not like them. That the fit is wrong.
None of those objections were raised for three hundred years.
The relationship was never judged on whether it was close. It was judged on who was collecting.
What has changed is not the distance. What has changed is the distribution.
The proposal on the table is a connection that pays into food security, energy, policing and training. A connection whose benefit reaches a household in Pembroke rather than a ledger in Hamilton.
That is the version we are told to be frightened of.
It was fine when a few were able to profit from the salt, the sugar and the slaves of the Caribbean. It is only a problem now that the profit might belong to everybody.
We have been in the Caribbean since 1648. You cannot join what you never left.
You can only stop pretending.
Happy Emancipation Day!
Happy Mary Prince Day!
Happy Cup Match!
- Shomari Talbot-Woolridge is the PLP Candidate for Smith’s West, Progressive Minds; PLP Youthwing Chairman
Read More About
Category: All
If this is the voice of the future of the PLP, then the future is bleak indeed.
At the end of the day, regardless of historical and cultural ties, that does not automatically mean Bermuda needs to be in lockstep with the Caribbean on any given issue on that basis alone.
To suggest that historical links pacify the atrocious way the government is handling the CARICOM issue and the public’s concern around it is insulting to Bermudian collective intelligence.
You, sir, Mr. Talbot-Woolridge, are a part of the problem with this weak attempt at trying to distract from the real issues.