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Gallery
Virginia DeJohn Anderson on Somer Islands' 'Hogge Money'
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IN 1616, the recently chartered Somer Islands Company faced a problem.
The new enterprise, an offshoot of the Virginia Company that had
founded Jamestown nine years earlier, was trying to establish an
English colony on the island of Bermuda.
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Many of Bermuda's first settlers worked as company employees and
were supposed to be paid with shares of the company's profits. Until
the colonists managed to cultivate a lucrative staple crop, however,
profits were not immediately forthcoming. Unwilling to wait indefinitely
for their remuneration, workers demanded that company leaders find
a way to pay them. Too little English currency circulated in Bermuda
to solve the problem, but Governor Daniel Tucker found an answer
in the colony's charter. One of the clauses in that document granted
the company the right to issue coins that could circulate only on
the island for local commerce.
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Sometime after mid-1616, the Company
began to supply its colony with small coins made of copper thinly
covered with tin. More like tokens than coins, they came in the
four denominations of twopence, threepence, sixpence, and shilling,
and could be used to buy goods at the company storehouse. An image
of a ship—an evocative symbol for colonists who had all made
the perilous voyage to Bermuda—appeared on one side. Stamped
on the other side was a symbol equally meaningful to these early
settlers: a picture of a hog. Thus these coins became known to their
users as "hogge money."
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Why a hog? Although the animals were
not native to the Americas or their outlying islands, hogs meant
the difference between life and death for the first English people
to arrive on Bermuda in 1609. By that point, swine had had the run
of the island for nearly a century. Spanish sailors had stocked
Bermuda with pigs back in 1515, expecting them to proliferate and
supply fresh meat for subsequent transatlantic voyagers. The English
happened upon this isolated larder by chance. In the summer of 1609,
the Sea Venture, part of a relief fleet bringing provisions
to starving Virginia colonists, was blown off course by a hurricane
and ended up snagged in the treacherous shoals off Bermuda. When
the 150 men, women, and children on board made it to shore, they
were relieved to discover an abundance of hogs, creatures they had
known in England, as well as strange fish and exotic plants they
might also use for food. Admiral George Somers organized hunting
parties that rounded up dozens of hogs at a time to feed passengers
and crew while they constructed two new boats to carry them to Virginia.
Somers eventually returned once more to Bermuda to collect pigs
for Jamestown's settlers, but he succumbed to illness on the island
before he could complete his mission.
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