in West Central Africa uprooted people from their natal lands and created captives for the transatlantic slave trade.18 Spanish importation of enslaved Africans to the fisheries picked up in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and in 1558 the Crown ordered that the Africans replace all Indian divers. The mandated transition was never completed, and Indians continued to endure harsh treatment in the fisheries, as well as to dive on their own account. By the end of the sixteenth century, the vast majority of Africans being brought into the Spanish Americas had come from Angola. Most of them disembarked in Vera Cruz or Cartagena before being sold to traders and owners in Margarita and elsewhere. Those who came from coastal regions may have already been skilled in diving for oysters, whereas those from inland regions would have learned the hazardous work after being brought to the fisheries.19
Or the men may have been born in the place from which they were sold to the captain of the Edwin. Free and unfree individuals from Iberia, from other parts of the Caribbean, from mainland Central and South America, and from Africa all interacted in pearl-fishing settlements like the ones on Margarita Island, and there is some indication that Spanish officials did not perceive African divers to be of recent import from Africa.20 If they had fled their enslavement in a fishery, either with or without the large canoe in which they worked, they might have been living away from European settlement along the coastline of Spanish colonies or on otherwise uninhabited small islands.21 Regardless of their birthplaces, they would have entered a world and a community forced to recover continually from the empty spaces caused by high mortality rates and the drive for profit in human flesh.
Figure 1.1. Map of Taínoan provinces and cacicazgos or political divisions on Hispaniola, with east at the top of the map. The eight cacicazgos were keyed to eight parts of the body, with the head (Caicimú) at the top. The caves that were the eyes of the “monstrous beast” are represented on the map by two dots. (Figure based on Peter O’B. Harris, “Nitaíno and Indians”; and Harris, communication with William F. Keegan; adapted with permission)
It is impossible to know the exact origin of the “Indian” who arrived in Bermuda in 1616, but whatever his particular ethnic grouping, his people had always—or at least as long as anyone could remember—been in the watery world of the Caribbean. Taínoans found their beginnings in the gourd that hung in the creator Yaya’s house and contained his son Yayael’s bones. When the gourd broke, it created the oceans and first fish.22 The pearl diver very probably welcomed the sudden sight of the trees on the low-lying island that barely broke the undulating surface of the ocean. If he were Island Carib or Kalina, perhaps he felt for the wood pendant around his neck that he wore to discourage the malignant force of a maboya. The pendant would have been carved to approximate the form in which the negative other-than-human person had appeared to him.23 Although his people without question depended on the bounty of the salt water for sustenance, travel, and trade, he would still have marked that first glimpse of the spine of the island riding above the waves, perhaps comparing it to shorelines he knew.
For Taínoans, Hispaniola was their ancestral home, and it housed the sacred caves that were the place of origin for all people in the primordial time: Cacibajagua (Cave + jagua, a fruit whose black juice was used for ritual body paint) for Taínoans, and Amayaúna (the Cave without Importance) for everyone else. It was an island whose body was, in Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s sixteenth-century account of Taínoan beliefs, that of a “monstrous living beast of female sex” from whose caves people had emerged. More than the origin point of human society, this beast shaped political organization and relationships in the human present even as its back was the land that supported their dwellings. The island was split into eight cacicazgos, or domains, that corresponded to eight key body parts of the beast: two eyes, a mouth, two forelegs, two hind legs, and the genitals. The power of the cacicazgos was based on their corporeal location on the astronomically oriented beast. Its head was in the east, where the world begins with sunrise—the southeast part of Hispaniola was Caicimú, cimú meaning “front, forehead, first” in Taíno—which made the southern cacicazgos equivalent to the right hand and so senior to those in the north (figure 1.1).24 Even though those political units had collapsed in the wake of Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century, that kind of body knowledge could have passed on from one generation to another, if only as spirit memories, tingling remembrances of limbs no longer present. It signaled the links between the living earth and human bodies, and between the beast body and political body.
Figure 1.2. Sir George Somers’s manuscript map of Bermuda, ca. 1609, with later place-names added. Some details of the coastline are inaccurate, but the map still conveys the fishhook layout of the islands. Bermuda Archives, Bermuda National Trust Collection.
Bermuda would never replace that most ancient of homes, but later the man may have caught sight of a hand-drawn map of the island chain, sketched in European fashion from an aerial perspective (see figure 1.2).25 Nathaniel Butler, the third governor and the author of one of the earliest histories of the “small broken islands,” described their shape as echoing the curve of a reaper’s sickle, but the modern comparison to a fishhook is a more apt simile for a marine environment and one that would have made more sense to the pearl diver.26 Perhaps in its connotation of an essential activity, the fishhook shape of the islands suggested that Bermuda, too, could be life-giving, offering the man hope that here, where once again he would have to begin anew, he would be able to make it into something familiar, something vaguely like home.
The man described simply as “African” in the account of the Edwin’s voyage was probably taken from Angola in West Central Africa, or if Caribbean-born, raised by adults taken from there.27 Whether originally from an inland or coastal people, the man would have known to respect and fear the sea. This charged relationship to water would have come not only through his work as a pearl diver, but also from his people’s understanding of the world around them. There were many different peoples and religious practices in West Central Africa, but they shared a knowledge of water as cosmologically significant: not only was it one of the three primary domains, along with earth and sky, but it also separated the land of the living from the land of the dead. Before crossing a river, people would take up white clay from its bottom and smear it on their faces to repel any evil that might approach them in such a powerful place.28 If he was one of the minority of the enslaved in Spanish America who was from the Bight of Benin in West Africa, he would have associated crossing water with a deity named Olokun and the passage from one world into the other through death or birth. The cross formed by one of the ship’s masts and the yard might have made him think about the original act, the division of the universe into the two worlds of the dead and the living.29
Having spent at least some time in the Caribbean, the man would not have thought of a passage across water as a definitive journey to the land of the dead, as some Africans initially feared when they were loaded onto oceangoing ships. Even if originally from an inland people, he had been enslaved at least long enough to acquire diving skills and perhaps for his entire life, so he would have known that this latest saltwater passage meant the death of his most recent life and a birth into something new, something unknown. And he would have known, intimately, that though Europeans did not literally chew and swallow the flesh of the Africans they bought and sold, they did indeed consume their captives through the trade that exchanged enslaved bodies for money as well as a wide range of commodities.30 With his familiarity with coastal waters and his ability to evade the marine dangers that plagued pearl divers, he could have been a healer whose powers to keep other divers safe had been made known by his spirit-guided discovery of a strikingly shaped shell. He could thus be looking forward to finding and collecting stones, plants, or shells to make powerful medicine for this new location. Or he may not have been skilled in ritual practices and have wondered who would help him cajole the appropriate water beings now.31 If he saw the shores of Bermuda before being disembarked,
