Witchcraft, which may be defined as the practice of magical arts with the aid of supernatural beings and for antisocial ends, has always been an accepted belief in some societies.
When crops failed, or the weather was abnormal, or epidemics were rampant because of dirt and ignorance, some alien or minority group was persecuted as having evil powers. But, strangely enough, it remained for the 16th and 17th centuries to indulge in those frightful and widespread witch panics which swept through Europe in a mass hysteria, leading to whole families – in some cases, whole villages wiped out in Bavaria, Spain, France, Germany. After the theological point of view had changed from regarding witchcraft as a delusion, to regarding it as a heresy, nine million people were burned alive in Europe.
The terrible Black Death of the 14th century, that killed off a quarter of Europe’s population, had completely demoralised people’s minds which were soon willing to accept the new point of view regarding witches: that they received their magical powers direct from Satan under the terms of a formal compact. Often the first victims were the old and weak. This led to the popular conception of a witch as an old hag. But in reality, schoolboys of eleven and twelve, and beautiful young girls in their teens were also put to death as witches (the word was used for either sex) since envy, malice or jealousy could lead to accusations.
Matthew Hopkins’ Discovery of Witches (1648) showing two witches calling out the names of their demons while Hopkins watches above.
Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / British Library
England and Scotland were free from the Inquisition, but under King James I an Act was passed in 1603 (six years before the Bermuda adventure began) by which all forms of witchcraft were punishable with death. James himself wrote copiously on the subject of “ordeal by water” (or “Swimming a witch”) as a test not a punishment. In this ordeal, the alleged witch was flung into water to see whether she would sink or float; if she remained afloat, it was supposed to prove that water rejected her because by her pact with Satan she had foresworn the water of her baptism. She was then yanked out and put to death. If she were innocent, the water would accept her, in which case she would be pulled out just before she sank for the last time.
In most countries, the easiest place to make this experiment would be from a river bank rather than on a coast. Bermuda has no rivers, but off the southern waterfront of St. George’s lies Ordnance Island close enough in-shore to leave a stream-like arm of deep water. Looking at it today, one can easily imagine the ordeal taking place between island and shore. And when one recollects that what is now Ordnance Island was then two isles, Ducking Stool Island where scolds were swiftly punished, and Gallows Island for grimmer penalties, it seems highly likely that the dreaded witchcraft ordeal or test by “swimming” took place here. (How difficult to sink in this warm buoyant water, supported with vast petticoats!) … By the same token of water rejecting them, James also expatiated on the supposed fact that witches were unable to weep, even when their bodies were being searched for flaws or abnormalities affirmed to be marks of the Evil One. Their homes too were to be scoured for “puppets” — those little wax figures made in the likeness of an enemy and stuck with pins to make him suffer.
Evidence of dreams and hallucinations were accepted as factual, and the victims themselves were pressed to implicate others as fellow witchcraft-practitioners. Bemused by the terrible accusations, the prisoners, often in a state of self-hypnosis, trance, delusion and hysteria, sometimes themselves began to believe they were possessed.
Although as early as 1622 it had become the duty of Church-wardens in Bermuda to present all Sorcerers, Enchanters, Charmers, Witches and the like, it was in fact nearly thirty years before the first Witchcraft Trial was held in these islands; as far as can be ascertained from the old records, the first of these was held in 1651, the last in 1696. During those years, there are details of the cases of twenty-two men and women tried for witchcraft in Bermuda of whom five were hanged in St. George’s. The date 1651 is an interesting one since the years 1645—1665 were those when the delusion was at its height in the British Isles; and 1651 was the very year that Scottish prisoners (from the battles that saw the defeat of Charles I) were sold into virtual slavery in Bermuda, bringing their superstitions with them.
In May of 1651 then, Jeanne Gardiner was accused of bewitching a woman who claimed to have been struck dumb and blind for the space of two hours. The searchers discovered a suspicious blue spot in Jeanne’s mouth, and though she claimed it had been there for years, it helped to seal her doom. Twice over she suffered the ordeal by water when she “did swyme like a corke and could not sinke.” At her trial, taunted with this, the poor creature replied that she could give no reason for it, all she knew was that she “did open her mouth and breathe but could not sinke.” Many spectators watched her being hanged the following Monday morning in St. George’s town.
The “sink or float” method of seeking out witches. Woodcut circa 1720
Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Wellcome Collection
After that, when a baby suffered convulsions, or someone’s turkeys died, or their hogs sickened, or their cattle languished, as likely as not information would be laid and prosecutions set afoot for “consenting with the Devil to bewitch”. Soon it must have seemed to choose one’s neighbours carefully, to exercise caution as to where one cast one’s eyes, and to keep a guard on one’s tongue. For in these pathetic testimonies, often signed with a cross by a total illiterate, nothing was too trifling to bring up in Court, and memories were dredged up of words spoken years ago, of bodily marks remembered since childhood, of past squabbles long past that once more flared into something ominous.
And when a man like John Midleton was convicted, and urged, before death, to name fellow witchcraft-practitioners among his acquaintances — what panic must have spread through the lanes and alley-ways of St. George’s as frightened speculation grew as to whom he could have named! But here, as in England and unlike the continent, no torture was used to extract confessions and death was by hanging rather than burning at the stake. The various women accused of witchcraft were made of sterner stuff than was John Midleton; they died protesting their innocence to the last even though puzzled by the explanation given as to why water had “rejected them”. He, having made the fatal mistake of becoming great friends with one of the Scotsmen who was servant to the Governor and who appears to have been a psychopath, quarrelled with this new-found friend on one of their hog-hunting expeditions, and thus took the first step in his path to the gallows. The wretched man, utterly convinced by his inability to sink when “swum” that he must have been indulging in witchcraft all along “though I knew it not” thanked God for showing him his sinfulness and appended a cross in lieu of signature at the foot of a long “confession” penned for him and read at the foot of the gallows before the huge hushed crowd. Some of the “sins” he remembered from his childhood and youth were of disobedience to parents, playing truant from school, telling lies, attending church more for fashion’s sake than devotion to God and other heinous crimes!
Unlike those who never owned their guilt, he could properly be urged to name other Bermuda witches with whom he had consorted — and named two. One he rather reluctantly called “a naughty woman” on the grounds that he had once seen her in a window of her house in a witch’s hat. Both women forfeited their lives despite their protestations of innocence.
Occasionally indeed the tables were turned as when, in 1658, Goodwife Crockford haled Michael Brother into Court for alluding to her as a witch. In this case, attack was far better then defence: Michael was forced to ask her pardon on his knees and his only excuse was that he had been indulging in the potent drink made from palmetto sap and known as bibby that had proved both comfort and downfall to some of the early settlers. In the 1690’s the trials petered out into non-convictions and then to no prosecutions. This, however, was the wave that broke on Salem in March of 1692 and raged in a witch-hunt against which defence was impossible since dreams and hallucinations were accepted as evidence — nineteen witches were hanged and another person pressed to death.
But that, in Rudyard Kipling’s unmatched phrase, is another story.
