Every Wednesday, the Lost Cultures: Living Legacies podcastAlisha Prakash, Travel + Leisure’s Associate Editorial Director, hosts the show. She explores cultures from around the world, and shares ways you can discover more during your travels.
It is easy to overlook Bermuda On a map. Its largest isle is only 21 square miles in size, and lies about 600 miles from the coast of the mainland. It’s harder to ignore its place in history. Over the past four centuries, this small archipelago served as a landing place, a launchpad and a crossroads of cultures. How does that history manifest itself in the present? How did a once-uninhabited island become the home of a culture shaped through shipwrecks and slavery, migration, resistance, and more? What does it mean to call yourself a Bermudian?
Bermuda: the Crossroads of the Atlantic
This week, on the episode of Lost Cultures: Living LegaciesDr. Edward Harris is the former director of Bermuda’s National Museum. Dr. Harris explains that humans did not reach the island until the 1500s as it was far too remote to be reached by earlier navigators. Bermuda was a vital stopover on ships traveling between Europe, Caribbean and Americas.
Dr. Harris explains that Bermuda was one of a few islands which was only settled 500 odd years before. “It is estimated that it took people 500 years to settle Bermuda, and other places, 100,000 years after the human race left Africa. The geography of Bermuda has played a major role in the development and evolution of its culture.
Bermuda’s culture is much more than a stopover for maritime traffic.
Four years after British settlement, in 1616, slaves from Africa were brought to Bermuda. Their knowledge and labor would shape Bermuda’s development in ways that are rarely acknowledged.
In the first four-year period, the island was using a large amount of resources, says Dr. Kristy Warren, senior lecturer of the University of Lincoln, England, who specializes in the history of slavery and colonialism, and the legacy they left behind on Bermuda. “They realized, ‘We actually can’t do this by ourselves.'”
The story of Bermuda’s people is also the story of how knowledge—agricultural, architectural, spiritual—was carried and preserved across an ocean. The Gombeys continue to carry on this legacy.
Gary Phillips explains that “the history of Gombeys really is the history of Black people coming from Africa into this section of the Diaspora,” a former tourism director for the island. Phillips explains that the masked and costumed dancers represent one of Bermuda’s most iconic cultural practices, with roots in African Caribbean and British influences. Gombeys were once criminalized but are now celebrated and a source for pride. Phillips adds, “From the time of suppression until this period almost of celebration, Gombeys can be seen almost everywhere.”
This is just a small taste. To trace the long arc of Bermuda’s identity—from pigs dropped onshore by passing ships to the critical role of onions—listen to this week’s episode of The Lost Cultures of Living LegaciesTo unravel it all. You can get it now at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Player FMWherever you listen to your podcasts.
