This article is from our archives. It originally appeared in the May 1991 issue of The Bermudian.
Someone once said that “if the number of places of worship, their seating capacity, and the number of persons living in Bermuda, could be accepted as a standard where-with to measure the religious and moral position, then Bermuda should be an almost perfect Christian society.” For an island that has more churches per square mile than any other place in the world, Bermuda would seem to be a strong church-going community. But from the start, settlers were more preoccupied with colonising the Island – building houses for shelter, forts for protection, and farming for food and for earnings – and it was only through the infusion of religions others than the Church of England that the community focussed at all on spiritual matters.
The earliest scheme according to surveyor Richard Norwood’s original survey of 1617, was that there would be just two churches – one in the old capital of St. George’s, and the second in Pembroke Parish for those living in other parts of the Island. Nevertheless, the number of church building projects later grew to five and then to nine and with the steady spread of religion through the arrival of more and varied settlers, Bermuda saw a proliferation of churches, chapels, and gospel halls. Today, Bermuda has a more concentrated number of churches – approximately five per square mile than any other country.
Bermuda’s was not a religious settlement, and even 200 years after its discovery, one American visitor noted that “a regard for religion is not the characteristic of Bermudians, they seldom go to church, except to attend a funeral or get their children baptised, or to hear a stranger.” Unlike some of the earliest American colonies, which were populated by religious refugees, religion in Bermuda was more an extension of the Church of England than a rebellion against it.
English poet Andrew Marvell celebrated the arrival of Anglicanism, which was cast upon the Island’s shores with the crash of the Sea Venture in 1609, in his poem “The Bermudas” :
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The Gospel’s pearl upon our coast, And in these rocks for us did frame A temple where to sound his name.
Oh! let our voice his praise exalt’ Which then (perhaps) rebounding may
Echo beyond the Mexico Bay.
Anglicanism was the established religion from the time the first colonists settled in St. George’s. They were required at the time they arrived to pledge their allegiance to the Church of England. An oath was administered to settlers requiring them to remain good Christians and observe God’s holy name to maintain the Church of England against all the “Atheists, Papists, Anabaptists, Brownists and all other heretiques and sectaries whatsoever.” They were to remain loyal subjects of the King and so order their conduct as in a “well-governed commonwealth”.
They pledged themselves to obey their Governor, his officers, and the ministers, and if any enemy assailed the Island “not cowardly to yield up the same.” Bermuda was to a large extent affected by all religious quarrels raging in Britain through the seventeenth century.
When James I took the throne, he was unable to keep peace between factions as his predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I had done. Norwood made his feelings clear on the transition, writing in his diary in 1658: “When upon the death of Queen Elizabeth and the coming in of King James I, we heard by common rumour that he would be more severe against Puritans (as Pious Christians were then called) than against Papists, I was glad of it. … I had an evil conceit of them before I knew them, through the gross standards of the foul-mouthed multitude.”
James’ son King Charles I created real problems for the Church of England when he married a Roman Catholic and showed sympathy toward the Papists. After appointing an archbishop with similar sympathies, many of the clergy were either ejected from England or sought refuge across the Atlantic in New England. Many of them, free from interference from Britain, frequently interchanged between Massachusetts and Bermuda.
There was an growing desire for church building by the settlers as early as the 1620’s. When Captain Richard Moore returned to Britain in 1615, after serving three years as governor, the ‘Six Governors’ decided that five churches would be built – one each in St. George’s and Pembroke as was already planned, and one for Hamilton and Smith’s parishes, one for Paget and Warwick and the fifth for Southampton and Sandys parishes. The Pembroke church was also to serve Devonshire.
At the same time the Company in London voted that each minister would be paid forty pounds a year and that landowners would subscribe one-hundredth of their crops to build churches. Parishioners were strong in their objections to the five church plan, demanding a church be built in each of the nine parishes. Though the Assembly agreed to that in May, 1623, carpenters’ rates were high and building was slow, and none of the governors really seemed to mind about the delay. As Henry Wilkinson put it: “A lack of concern for the public weal seems to have been the uniquely uniform attitude of them all.”
Governor Moore, though more concerned with building up the defences in St. George’s, was responsible for the building of St. Peter’s Church, now resting on the oldest church site in the Western Hemisphere. According to one record, in 1612, Moore “framed a church of timber, it was blowne downe by a tempest so that he built another in a more closer place with Palmeta leaves.” Settlers used whatever materials they could find until stone became the primary building material a few years later. Early roofs consisted of palmetto thatch.
The new St. Peter’s was built in stone in 1619, rebuilt in 1713 and 1714, while additions were carried out in 1814 and 1832. Church dimensions were similar in each of the parish churches – the chancel measured approximately 80 feet long and 20 feet wide with the pulpit in the centre, the vestry, about twelve by twelve feet behind, and the porch in the front, usually on the south side. The oldest standing church is Holy Trinity, where the 58-foot-long main room with chancel, steeple, transepts, choir screen and windows form the nucleus of today’s church. But it is Old Devonshire which is probably the most interesting as it displays the workmanship of a shipwright rather than that of Bermuda’s early builders.
The St. George’s church, along with the parish churches of Smith’s, Devonshire, Pembroke, and Southampton, were completely destroyed by fierce hurricanes which battered the Island in 1712, and again in 1716.
Describing the first storm, Mr. Wilkinson said: “The wind raged for eight hours with great damage to practically every building, sacred or otherwise. Five ships were driven ashore in St. George’s Harbour and a woman was blown into the sea. St. Peter’s and Smith’s churches were reduced to such shambles that they had to be rebuilt. Then, as if calamity were not enough, many of the buildings which had, to some extent survived in 1712 were wrecked by another hurricane four years later. All the rebuilding was of stone with stone roofs. The older parish churches of the present day date from this time.”
Bermuda by this time was under the Crown – the Company folded in 1684. A strong puritan party had formed on the Island and there was a gradual drift from the Church of England to other religions, including Massachusetts congregationalism and to a far lesser extent Presbyterianism. The forty pound ministers’ wage had come to an end, and according to Mr. Wilkinson, the clergy lost all support except for their glebes and the voluntary contribution of their congregations. The community was enjoying a general awakening of sorts when Bermudians began to realise there was more to life than their rural regimen. As a result, even before the end of the century, the established church was losing its hold over the community, any support for other groups was dwindling, and the popularity of the Methodists, who had not long before arrived in Bermuda, was growing.
It was about this time, mid-1825, that the Church of England became linked with the newly constituted diocese of Nova Scotia, and in 1839, Bermuda was transferred under the diocese of Newfoundland. When forty years later Bermuda itself became a diocese, it continued to share the Bishop with Newfoundland.
The fervour of the times seemed to make the Anglicans nervous. When it became obvious that St. John’s, the Pembroke Parish church, could no longer meet the demand of so populated a parish, now holding the capital city of Hamilton, it was time to build a more dignified structure. A site was chosen on the third street behind Front Street, the top of the hill was razed and building began. But money soon ran out and the remainder of construction had to be paid for by voluntary subscriptions.
More than thirty years after it was started, Trinity Cathedral was completed in 1872 at a cost of 12,000 pounds.
Up until then, there was little room in the churches for black people. Though they were sometimes allowed to worship in the parish churches on Sundays – they were not allowed to work for themselves on the seventh day having worked for their masters the other six days – they had no religion of their own.
And “from the early days, the baptism of slaves people presented a thorny problem,” according to Mr. Wilkinson. There was a general opposition to baptising black folks – the American colonists believed it might imply freedom. And Bermudians were constantly warning that christening the enslaved would make them more stubborn.
Though the Lords of Trade pushed to get the enslaved into the church, the Assembly sent the following reply to England in 1698: “We having Long endeavoured the Conversion of our negroes and Slaves to Christianity; not hindering, but allowing them sufficient means of Bettering themselves, and of rendering the better and more Trusty for our own service and Interest. But, not withstanding, find them so Inclinable to the Principles of Infidelity, or influenced thereby, that our too constant experiences plainly evince us that such is their general Contrariety thereto, that the better they are Instructed in Religion the further they are from conversion thereto: and that they do the more pervert themselves, so far from any degree of Conformity to the Rules thereof, as to divert themselves therefrom to the greater Insolencies, Obstinacy and Incorrigibleness in ill manners and deportment.”
There was little if any effort before Emancipation in 1834 to enlarge the churches to accommodate the enslaved people, but they got a taste for something different in 1748, when British Methodist missionary George Whitefield stopped in Bermuda with his wife for a holiday. Mr. Whitefield had been travelling back and forth between England and the U.S. where he was summoned by John Wesley. But Mr. Whitefield was not welcome in many churches in England or in America, and during his stay in Bermuda, he preaches almost seventy times.
Though Mr. Whitefield was barred from preaching at the parish churches, Bermudians nevertheless managed to hear him speak. His farewell sermon in Warwick caused people to weep openly: “Oh, what a sweet and affected weeping was there to be seen everywhere! Few dry eyes in that plain open hearted group,” Mr. Whitefield later said.
It didn’t take long for Methodism – first the British version and later African Methodist Episcopalian from Pennsylvania – to take hold in Bermuda.
The first church enslaved people could call their own was a chapel built on moonlit nights and holidays only. The Island’s Chief Justice John Christie Esten in 1825 provided land in Warwick where he intended that a church would be built solely for the slaves. After two years of construction, the tiny chapel was com-pleted. It still stands today under the name of Cobbs Hill Methodist Church.
