or factor, of a slave trader on the coast.68
The strips produced through plat making in Bermuda were only one-half to one inch wide, far narrower than the five- to six-inch width common in West and West Central Africa, but the process of making a finished object was the same. Initially, Indians and Africans who joined the two pearl divers would have been the ones who were familiar enough with the material to begin producing the strips. Taínoan and other indigenous Caribbean peoples do not seem to have used the composite technique, but they did use palm fibers to weave baskets as well as cloth, sometimes incorporating luminescent feathers of mainland birds acquired through trade. Since weaving was gendered differently among Africans and indigenous Caribbean peoples, it was probably indigenous Caribbean women and African men who first made plat. Women were the weavers in the Caribbean, both of open-weave items like hammocks and nets and of more tightly woven objects like baskets, mats, and clothing.69 In many areas of West and West Central Africa, in contrast, weaving was men’s work, although women helped prepare the materials for weaving.70
As the first enslaved practitioners taught the English the technique for making rope, hats, mats, and other items, producing plat became work for all women, one that required no special equipment, although some households did use wheels to take up the braided strips. Over the second half of the seventeenth century, plat manufacture became such a significant cottage industry that in 1691 the island’s government protected the local supply of the raw materials, forbidding any export of unworked palmetto tops or even brooms and cordage. After hats and bonnets made of plat became a highly desirable fashion accessory in England in the 1720s, the profits of the industry were five times greater than what the island’s maritime activity produced in that time and twice as lucrative as seventeenth-century tobacco exports from Bermuda. Though the activity of plaiting was widespread among all Bermudian women, those who could command the labor of others reaped the most profit. Several white Bermudian widows, such as Mary Gilbert and Elizabeth Tucker, were among the few dozen plat brokers who dominated the trade, drawing not only from the work of the women they enslaved but also from that of women in surrounding households.71
“Ropes for other Uses”
When Governor John Hope arrived in Bermuda and was asked to report on the state of the colony in 1722, he described its economic status as balanced on two trees, the cedar and the palmetto: “Of the Cedar they Build their Sloops & Fishing boats; & of the Palmetto leaves, they make a sort of ware call’d Platt; as likewise Cables for their Sloops, & Ropes for other Uses.”72 The most common material for ropes was palmetto fiber. The beginning of Hope’s term as governor coincided with the early stages of the plat boom, and even once the plat market bottomed out a decade later, the other half of his assessment remained accurate. Cedar trees furnished the materials for the Bermudian turn to a maritime economy fueled by buoyant, fast cedar sloops rather than the on-island production of either staple or food crops, a reorientation of the island’s economy that occurred after the Crown dissolved the proprietary Somers Islands Company and took over the colony in 1684. But the governor’s comments applied in more ways than he probably realized. The cordage that enslaved and poor Bermudians made from the palmetto was certainly useful for cables to use in fitting out the sloops that became a mainstay of the island’s economy.73 The first generations of practitioners, however, may also have seen something beyond the creation of a merchantable product in the thousands of yards of cordage they produced. The product and the work to make it may also have held spiritual meaning, especially in the early years of the colony when the connections with Africa and the Caribbean were more direct and when English colonists were still learning how to work within their new environment. Those meanings, like the palmetto fibers that indigenous Caribbean Indians and Africans twisted into ropes, were intertwined in a blending of human and other-than-human interaction.
Ties, cords, and knots held spiritual meaning and function in many of the cultures that early slaves brought with them to Bermuda. They were a way to connect the world of the living to the world of the dead and of other-than-human persons, and to provide a conduit between those worlds. Ritual and physical functions sometimes overlapped, as they did in making the cord required for many fishing techniques: fishing was ritually significant in addition to its furnishing an important protein source.74 Spinning and tying plant fibers into nets or weaving them into cloths and containers of various kinds were actions that provided for the outer container of the physical body while also having meaning for the inner essence of a person.75
Cords and ropes could tie a boat to a landing and a burden in a basket, but they were also religiously significant in and of themselves: they closed packets of spiritually charged medicine, adorned ritual clothing, and bound the limbs of religious specialists and their associated power objects. Though few of the Africans brought to Bermuda in the first decades would have had West African links, those who did would have had strong associations, both negative and positive, with cords. In vodun, a slave was a “person in cords,” while a vodunon, or religious specialist, might counter such enslavement by a powerful object, or bocio, bound in cords. The object and concept were linked with death because of the practice of tying corpses before burial, as well as the belief that the dead used cords to bind and harm the living. Cords were also connected to the other direction of the passage between life and death, as pregnant women sometimes wore cords around their hips as a protection against miscarriage. A powerful image and object, a cord could also indicate durability, connection, and the vitality of human action.76 West Central Africans also used cord imagery in religious rituals. Tying up a nkisi bound power to the object and prevented it from escaping, and Kongolese Christians extended this practice of kanga to the Christian pantheon and tied cords around their hands and feet on feast days to demonstrate their status as slaves to Christian spiritual forces.77 Fine cotton cords dyed red or violet suspended the shells or stones in crescent shapes, or caracoli, that Kalina prized for their powerful reflective qualities and color. The brightness of the cord complemented that of the pendant, a quality that signified a concentration of energy.78 Taínoans also used cordage in ritually significant objects. One form of chiefly regalia used cordage or sometimes wood to complete a stone collar. Even in all-stone collars, sculpted cords binding figures suggested the continuing importance of cords and binding in Taínoan religious practices. The bodies of the deceased, especially if the individuals had held high status while alive, were wrapped in hammocks before burial, another example of how cords connected the worlds of the living and of the dead.79
Ligatures held an even more specific ritual function among Taínoan peoples, as religious specialists, behiques, bound their limbs with cotton cords to close up their bodies and make them better suited to be channels for communication with other-than-human persons. Although these details are not common in European textual descriptions, this type of binding can be seen on the arms and legs of a cemí, a ritually powerful anthropomorphic figure. In the case of a cemí found in a cave near Maniel in Hispaniola, its cotton and possibly palm-fiber body houses the skull of an ancestor. Cord binding served to tie shut the joints, which were access points into the behique’s body, and concentrate his spiritual power without interference from intrusive substances or beings.80 Not only did the cords around the limbs denote the spiritual function of the object—perhaps mimicking the abilities of the once-living ancestor—they also accrued power to the new form of the ancestor’s person. The cotton and other plant fibers gave the ancestor a “new face,” reproducing the Taínoan belief that the apparent body is an outer shell and that persons are composed of parts that can be separated from one another and exchanged. The cordage of the cemí’s face thus sat at the threshold between the living and the dead—the spirits of the living, or goeíza, were concentrated in the physical structure of the face because of their ability to display emotion, while the spirits of the dead, opía, resided in the skull bones because the skeletal form could not express emotion. A new face for the ancestor-as-cemí facilitated that person’s participation in clan relationships.81
It is unlikely that the first Indian pearl diver brought to Bermuda or any of the captives imported after him would have been able to bring with them
