Faraclas, Nicholas G.

English

Portal de Revistas Académicas Universidad de Puerto Rico

276
Caribbean Studies Vol. 41, No. 2 (July - December 2013)
niCholas g. faraClas
Virginia Bernhard. 2011. a tale of two colonies: What really 
Happened in Virginia and bermuda? Columbia and London: 
University of Missouri Press. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8262-
1951-0.0
Nicholas G. Faraclas 
English Department, College of Humanities 
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras 
nickfaraclas@yahoo.com
For anyone interested in the social, economic, ideological, and political factors that gave rise to racialized plantation slavery in 
the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas on the one hand, and to the 
emergence of the United States of America as well as many of the other 
nations of the western hemisphere on the other, Virginia Bernhard’s 
detailed and revealing historical study titled, A Tale of Two Colonies: 
What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? is essential reading. This 
insightful and reader-friendly account of the initial English attempts to 
colonize Virginia and Bermuda between the 1580s and the 1620s pro-
vides us with a careful and brutally honest reconstruction of the naked 
plunder, unbridled greed, festering corruption, unabashed hypocrisy, 
and systematic disrespect for human life and welfare which not only 
characterized the founding of the first two permanent English colonies 
in the Americas, but which in countless ways have also come to define 
much of the rest of the historical trajectories of the current and former 
English colonies in the region, especially that of the USA.
Bernhard is not by any means the first historian to have demon-
strated that the bulk of existing archival, archaeological, and other evi-
dence roundly contradicts almost every aspect of the grand narratives 
of valor, enlightened humanity, and moral rectitude that have been 
promoted by too many other historians who have studied the founding 
of colonial societies in the Caribbean and the United States. What makes 
this volume special, however, is the systematic, straightforward and non-
polemical manner in which it configures this evidence. In a disarmingly 
convincing way, Bernhard effectively unmasks the anti-working class 
biases and alarming lack of accountability to the facts that typify the army 
of historians who have lent their legitimizing voices to the construction 
of the dominant discourses concerning the ‘glorious’ establishment of 
European Empires, of the ‘enlightened’ development of Virginia and the 
other Thirteen Colonies which eventually became the USA, and of the 
‘heroic’ conquest of the American Frontier, all of which have saturated 
history textbooks and the popular media worldwide.
It is too often overlooked that during the century that followed 
Reseñas de libRos • book Reviews • Comptes Rendus 277
Vol. 41, No. 2 (July - December 2013) Caribbean Studies
Columbus’ first arrival in the Americas, the entire English colonial 
enterprise worldwide was a pitiful parody of the prevailing narrative 
of Anglo-Saxon political and moral superiority projected in the history 
books. Before the establishment of Virginia and Bermuda in the early 
1600s, numerous attempts had been made by the English to found colo-
nies in North and South America as well as in the Caribbean, but each 
and every one failed miserably, so that their activities were limited to 
the parasitic and pitiless pilfering of Spanish settlements and shipping 
in precious metals and slaves. 
Although these points could have been made more explicitly and 
effectively by Bernhard in this volume, her meticulously collected evi-
dence on the life histories of the leaders of the various expeditions to 
Virginia and Bermuda and of the first administrators of these colonies 
reveals that virtually all had spent the previous decades mobilized against 
the Spanish as pirates (‘privateers’) on the high seas and/or as merce-
naries in the Netherlands. Bernhard also mentions in passing the disas-
trously abortive attempt by the English to establish a colony in Roanoke 
just south of Jamestown in 1587, and demonstrates beyond the shadow 
of a doubt that at several junctures between 1607 and 1623, Virginia 
came extremely close to sharing the fate of Roanoke and so many of the 
other English fiascos, had it not been for what she in her final analysis 
can only characterize as an amazing series of providential lucky breaks. 
What Bernhard does not challenge in this instance, however, is the 
prevailing mythology concerning the ‘mysterious disappearance’ of the 
Roanoke settlers by 1590. Linebaugh & Rediker (2000) and other his-
torians have convincingly demonstrated that the colonists in Roanoke 
actually ran off to live in abundance and freedom with the local indig-
enous people, rather than face the scarcity and forced labor imposed 
upon them by the English colonial authorities. Bernard’s unfortunate 
silence on Roanoke is repeated to some extent in her accounts of what 
happened in Bermuda and especially Virginia, where those European 
and African descended people who did manage to survive, more often 
than not did so by going renegade and adopting an indigenous American 
subsistence lifestyle (58-59). 
Bernhard’s reluctance to confront certain particularly sensitive 
issues in the fabrication of American mythology, however, is more than 
compensated for by her careful reconstruction of the facts on the ground, 
which graphically illustrate the mind- boggling greed, self-righteousness, 
mean-spiritedness, pettiness, and ineptitude that formed the basis for the 
transition to a racialized capitalist agro-industrial plantation economy in 
the Atlantic, which was ushered in by the Calvinists of the Netherlands 
and England over the course of the 17th century. That this transition 
involved levels of violence, exploitation, deception and delusion that 
278
Caribbean Studies Vol. 41, No. 2 (July - December 2013)
niCholas g. faraClas
were without precedent in human history is amply confirmed by the cata-
log of human-made disasters that constitute the founding of Virginia and 
what was to become the United States of America. Bernhard carefully 
documents the seemingly endless and gruesome cycles of decimation of 
the settler population through starvation resulting from the deliberate 
negligence of the colony’s leaders, the imposition of pitiless regimes of 
military law and hard labor by the propertied few on the working major-
ity, the flight of settlers who went renegade to live in the abundance 
of subsistence with the indigenous peoples, attacks from these same 
indigenous peoples after being recklessly insulted and provoked by the 
colonial authorities, the torturing and execution of the many colonists 
who dared to resist and organize against the elites, and disease. 
Despite the copious archival evidence for cannibalism among the 
early Virginia colonists that she cites in the text, Bernhard remains 
cautiously agnostic concerning this phenomenon (110-111). In fact, 
archaeological evidence uncovered since the publication of her book 
has incontrovertibly demonstrated that the marks found on the bones 
of deceased Jamestown settlers during the ‘Starving Time’ from 1609 to 
1610 and beyond could only have been made by the butchering knives of 
hungry colonists. This reluctance on her part to confront the dominant 
narratives that systematically demonize any indigenous peoples of the 
Americas who have dared to challenge colonization as ‘Caribs’, ‘Caliban’ 
and ‘Cannibal’ and which simultaneously justify that same colonization 
in the name of European ‘civilization’ does much to render Bernhard’s 
portrayal of both indigenous and European descended peoples in Vir-
ginia far more limited and shallow than it need be. 
Bernhard concludes this book with a discussion of the beginnings 
of the enslavement of Africans in Bermuda and Virginia before 1620, 
showing how the leaders and the captains in charge of both colonies 
were deeply involved in the pirating and trading of slaves, with the active 
support and encouragement of their Calvinist counterparts in the Neth-
erlands. Once again, the facts that Bernhard so carefully gathers and 
presents cry out for an analysis that she cannot or will not provide. As 
Linebaugh & Rediker point out, the eventual exclusive reliance of Vir-
ginia and other English colonies on plantation labor by enslaved people 
of African descent was, in the final analysis, due to what she so success-
fully illustrates, but so vexingly fails to interpret in this volume: 1) the 
failure of the colonial ruling classes to effectively enclose and harness 
European labor and Indigenous land and 2) the successful cohabitation 
of peoples of European, Indigenous, and African descent in renegade 
subsistence societies which were effectively outside of the control of the 
colonial authorities. 
The solution to this conundrum was the racialization of society 
Reseñas de libRos • book Reviews • Comptes Rendus 279
Vol. 41, No. 2 (July - December 2013) Caribbean Studies
in such a way that non-propertied European descended peoples were 
mobilized in both the imposition of forced labor on African descended 
peoples and in the invasion of Indigenous land. Working class people 
of European descent were eventually exempted from hard plantation 
labor, which was to become the lot of African descended slaves instead. 
The colonial elites then issued these European descended people with 
firearms and small holder titles to as yet unconquered Indigenous land. 
With this, the much celebrated phenomenon of the ‘American Frontier’ 
emerged, with poor Europeans using their guns to systematically mas-
sacre Indigenous people and invade their lands, as well as to mercilessly 
hunt down runaway slaves and return them to their plantation masters. 
Thus, the enclosure of African plantation labor and Indigenous land 
was assured, as well as the suppression of ‘inter-racial’ cohabitation of 
renegades and runaways in subsistence societies. 
Once poorer European descended people had seized their small 
plots of frontier land from the Indigenous peoples and had done the 
arduous work of clearing it and cultivating it, they were soon so far in 
debt to the colonial elites and their banks that they were forced to sell 
their plots to the rich for a pittance, and then were dispatched to the 
next frontier with more firearms and more bogus land titles to start 
all over again. This is how ‘the West was won’ in a continuing cycle 
of genocide against Indigenous peoples, invasion and cultivation of 
Indigenous land, bounty hunting to enforce the enslavement of African 
descended peoples, and boom-and-bust consolidation of small holdings 
into the estates of the European descended oligarchs. The evidence that 
Bernhard so skillfully uncovers and presents graphically portrays how 
Virginia played a key role in the emergence of this paradigm of racial-
ized domination and plunder that eventually became the dominant one 
throughout the Americas. Unfortunately, she leaves it to other historians 
such as Linebaugh & Rediker to convert her inventory of facts into a 
cohesive analysis.
References
Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra. Boston: 
Beacon Press.


Virginia Bernhard. 2011. A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda?

https://revistas.upr.edu/index.php/csj/article/view/134/132

Virginia Bernhard. 2011. A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda?

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Portal de Revistas Académicas Universidad de Puerto Rico