William Sayle
As an Independent in religion and politics, and an adherent of Oliver Cromwell, he was dissatisfied with life in Bermuda, and so founded the company of the Eleutheran Adventurers who became the first European settlers of the Bahamas between 1646 and 1648.
This was intended to ensure the balance of power remained with the company, rather than the settlers, but with no other group from which to appoint its members, the council quickly became dominated by men from the same prominent local families that filled the Assembly, and political power rested firmly with this emerging local elite and their descendants until the introduction of universal adult suffrage and party politics in the 1960s.
Although Bermuda quickly became a thriving colony, the growth of tobacco as a cash crop that was the basis of the economy under company administration became unprofitable from the 1620s as Virginia became stable and self-sufficient and England established newer and larger colonies, all of which emulated Bermuda's economy, flooding the English market with cheap tobacco.
The more successful settlers (whether they arrived as shareholders or tenants at their own expense or as indentured servants) increased their landholdings by purchasing shares from adventurers who were finding them ever less profitable.
They also grew food crops and raised livestock for their own consumption, and exported their excess production aboard their new ships for sale in other colonies.
He owned considerable property in the colony, with 165 shares totalling 220.5 acres in Southampton, Smith's, and Pembroke parishes, according to the 1662–1663 survey by Richard Norwood.
[2][3] As one of the colony's most prominent men, he served as a military officer in command of King's Castle,[4][5] and was at times a member of the council (that combined the roles now performed by the Senate and the Cabinet).
By this period, the Somers Isles Company had ceased sending new Governors from abroad, and appointed a succession of prominent residents to the position.
Sayle was appointed Governor in 1643, but as an Independent Puritan, aligned with the Parliamentary cause, the Commonwealth and then Oliver Cromwell's Protectorship, he was to be at odds with the majority of Bermuda's dominant elite.
This meant that, although most land was by then owned by residents like Sayle, their interests were thwarted in order to ensure maximum profits for the shareholders in England.
As the Crown and the Church of England attempted to assert their authorities, similar conflicts took place in other parts of the English realm leading up to the Civil War and the Interregnum, as well as in English-ruled Ireland (where native Irish Catholics and royalists would be suppressed after the 1649–1653 Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, and from where Presbyterian settlers from the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland, resenting the Crown's attempts in the 1630s to bring them under Episcopalian authority, had begun to re-emigrate to North America where they became known as Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish).
Royalists in Bermuda, with control of "the Army" (nine companies of militia infantry and the volunteer artillery that manned the coastal batteries), ousted Captain Thomas Turner, the Company-appointed Governor, in 1649 and elected John Trimingham as their leader.
[9] However, on 31 August 1649 The Journal does record that "An Act for Settling the Islands in the West Indies betwixt the Degrees of Twenty-four and Twenty-nine North Latitude was passed.
[13][14][15][16][17][18] The Articles that Sayle drew up in 1647 reflect the ambiguities of the English Civil War taking place at that time between Royalists and Parliamentarians.
In 1669, Sayle took over the command of a party of settlers to a new settlement in Carolina after Sir John Yeamans resigned, while undergoing repairs of his vessel in Bermuda.
