Somers Isles Company
When Deliverance and Patience set sail for Jamestown, they left several people behind, some to maintain Somers' claim to the islands for England, some dead.
Those aboard the two ships included Sir Thomas Gates, the military commander and future governor of Jamestown, William Strachey, whose account of the wrecking may later have inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, and John Rolfe, who would found Virginia's tobacco industry, and who left a wife and child buried in Bermuda.
The Virginia Company ran Bermuda until 1613, when the colony was transferred to Sir William Wade et cetera in exchange for £2,000, who then resigned it to the Crown in 1614.
The choice of this location followed the original settlement created by Sea Venture survivors, and was also determined by the two eastern harbours being the only ones then readily accessible to shipping.
An appointed council, composed primarily from the leading merchant families of the Colony, came to fill a role similar to both an upper house, and a cabinet, and often proved the true repository of power in Bermuda.
The immediate concern of the first governors was for the colony's protection from a feared Spanish or Dutch attack, and the building of fortifications, and the raising of militias, was sustained throughout the company's administration, and beyond.
[6] After the outbreak of the English Civil War (1642–1651), Bermuda remained sympathetic towards the Royalist cause, perhaps due to the fact that the shareholders of the Somers Isles Company consisted primarily of wealthy members of the upper-class.
Supporters of the Parliamentarians in Bermuda, which like their counterparts in England were similar to the Puritan and anti-Episcopalian demographic, were forced into exile by the Company administration, becoming the Eleutheran Adventurers who settled on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas.
This meant that they could not allow fields to lie fallow, and the soil, already high in alkaline and low in magnesium (used by plants to form chlorophyll), became depleted.
Bermudian farmers increasingly turned to growing food crops and rearing livestock, both to reduce their dependence on overpriced imports, and to sell to other colonies.
Bermudians began to turn away from agriculture quite early, building boats and developing the Bermuda sloop to pursue maritime trades.
The building of vessels was banned without its license, and the first laws to protect the Bermuda cedar, which were passed early in the seventeenth century, may have been intended more to restrict shipbuilding than to conserve the resource.
By the 1630s, the company had ceased sending Governors to Bermuda and began appointing a string of prominent Bermudians, such as William Sayle, to the role.
By the mid-17th century, with tobacco exports failing, many Adventurers in England eagerly cut their losses by selling their shares to the tenants who occupied.
With control of the military forces in Bermuda as well as the Assembly, the Royalists deposed the Company appointed Governor, Captain Thomas Turner, and elected John Trimigham in his stead.
The colony's Independents, who sided with Parliament, were forced into exile, settling the Bahamas under the Cromwell-loyalist William Sayle as the Eleutheran Adventurers.
With the Restoration, Bermudians found they had a powerful ally in the Crown, which had its own interest in wresting control of the English Empire from corporations like the Somers Isles Company.
Freed of the company's restraints, the local merchant class came to dominate and shape Bermuda's progress, as Bermudians abandoned agriculture en masse and turned to the sea.
