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 anything like the cotton cemí found near Maniel.82 Separation from the ancestors was a less tangible part of the losses created by the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, but its marks would have been deep, even if invisible alongside physical scars on the bodies of the enslaved. If part of the violence of slavery was being ripped away from countless generations of ancestors, cords could provide some means to access those beings again, even when separated by hundreds and even thousands of miles in the apparent geography of the early modern map.
That collapsing of time and space could happen for vodun practitioners, who were already familiar with taking voduns with them after being uprooted from their natal lands in West Africa, long before being tangled in the transatlantic slave trade. But it could also occur for other peoples who did not have as strong a tradition of traveling shrines for ancestors. In Kongo, even though fixed shrines were the place for descendants to approach an ancestor, those were not the only locations that held power. Minkisi were smaller power objects associated with a specific problem and being who worked on that problem. They traveled more easily not only because they were often physically smaller, but also because they could be made from objects in one’s surroundings.83 Remaking the connections between all the generations who had crossed the threshold into the world of the dead and the currently living generations was not easy, but it was something enslaved individuals learned to do over and over as the demands and desires of their masters moved them throughout and around the Atlantic world.
At first glance, all it is possible to know about the first two enslaved people on Bermuda are the labels Europeans applied to them and something of the physical knowledge contained in their lungs, legs, arms, and hands that their new owners hoped to exploit. The pearl divers and the Africans and indigenous peoples of the Caribbean who joined them after 1616 certainly shaped early Bermudian society, as well as the very landscape and contours of the coast. But beyond their contributions to the colonial enterprise, they brought with them other-than-humans who populated their surroundings and made a particular place out of inchoate space. Attention to these less tangible layers of environment permits a deeper—even if necessarily conjectural—sense of the process of defining bodies and making place in an early modern Atlantic colony. Although obscured in the imperial historical record, the propitiations and maintenance of the beings who made themselves known to humans were reproductive practices that in their seemingly ephemeral performance brought whole worlds into existence. Enslaved Africans and indigenous Caribbean peoples worked to transform Bermuda into a place that could be like home, where they gained familiarity with the local other-than-humans who inhabited the world of the dead that was just a threshold away.84 Although their efforts were perhaps unmappable in precise terms, they still began the formation of Bermuda’s sacred geography, at once intensely local, rooted to that particular sea- and landscape, and ocean-spanning; grounded in their here-and-now, as well as connected to the ancestors, to the first creation.
2. “Joyne interchangeably in a laborious bodily service”
In June 1675, Awashunkes, the saunks or female leader of the Saconets, an Algonquian people who lived on the coast of what the English called Narragansett Bay, had an important decision to make.1 It was not one she could make alone, so she called for all those within her influence to gather for a nickómmo, a ritual dance and feast. Two decades earlier, the colonist, trader, and sometime religious exile Roger Williams had noted that Narragansetts (as did other peoples in the region the English knew as New England) held the nickómmo in times of crisis—“in sicknesse, or Drouth, or Warre, or Famine”—as well as “After Harvest, after hunting, when they enjoy a caulme of Peace, Health, Plenty, Prosperity.” This 1675 occasion was definitely the former, and was possibly a divination ritual.2 Opposing sides in the military conflagration that later came to be known as King Philip’s War (1675–76) sought Awashunkes’s allegiance. Emissaries had come