Philip Bell (colonial administrator)
Philip Bell (19 June 1590 – 3 March 1678) was Governor of Bermuda from 1626 to 1629, of the Providence Island colony from 1629 to 1636, and of Barbados from 1640 to 1650 during the English Civil War.
[1] During his terms of office in Providence and Barbados, the colonies moved from using indentured English workers to slaves imported from West Africa.
He complained of needing "to live in such a slavishe subjectione to such meane & base minded men as the citizen part of the Companye are & doe showe themselves.
In a letter to Sir Nathaniel Rich dated 28 April 1629, Bell protested about having been blamed for the unrest by the Somers Island Company in England without having been given the opportunity to defend himself.
[7] In 1628 two ships funded by the puritan Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, explored the western Caribbean and discovered the San Andrés and Santa Catalina islands.
The directors tried to encourage the planters to grow crops such as silk grass, cotton, sugar cane, pomegranates, figs or juniper berries.
[18] Labor on Providence island was originally undertaken by indentured servants from England, although Bell brought some black slaves from Bermuda.
The settlers were alarmed that the presence of these men would draw Spanish retaliation, and in 1632 they were near mutiny, led by their chaplain, Lewis Morgan.
[22] In March 1636 the Company dispatched Captain Robert Hunt on the Blessing to assume the governorship of what was now viewed as a base for privateering.
[23] He was appointed by James Hay, 2nd Earl of Carlisle, who owned the island, with the approved of Lord Warwick and the Committee of Trade and Plantations.
[24] The island had been settled in 1627 by a group of Englishmen hoping to develop tobacco plantations, but the leaf turned out to be poor quality.
Originally the labor force was provided by poor whites, but the planters found that Africans slaves worked harder, cost less and were better able to tolerate the climate.
He made the island's assembly a legal body, consisting of the leading residents, with the power to pass legislation.
The land grant act by his predecessor Henry Hawley was confirmed, as were existing property rights, and proprietary dues were abolished.
These people, with "erroneous opinions", were ordered to cease meeting in private and attempting to seduce others to their views, but to conform to public Anglican worship.
[26] Barbados remained neutral for most of the English Civil War, which broke out in 1642 after a long period of growing hostility between the king and parliament.
[25] Bell wrote in 1645 that, it pleased god so to unite all their minds and harts together, that every parish declared themselves resolutely for the maintenance of their peace and present government; and to admit of noe alterationes or new commissiones from either side ... for against the kinge we are resolved never to be, and without the freindeshipe of the perliament and free trade of London ships we are not able to subsist.
Bell called on James Drax to raise a force to keep the peace, but he was unable to gather enough men to present a credible challenge to the royalists, who were marching on Bridgetown.
