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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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The hogs that fed English settlers
and appeared on Bermuda's coins bore little resemblance to the pigs
that wandered around seventeenth-century English barnyards, let
alone those that can be found on a modern farm. The animal depicted
on the money has relatively long legs, a ridge of fur along the
spine, and tusks that suggest a ferocious manner. It is clearly
a feral hog, displaying morphological changes that resulted from
generations of free ranging and indiscriminate breeding. Wild swine
were also leaner than their domesticated counterparts—"so leane,"
one early visitor to Bermuda complained, that "wee could not eat
them." This disparaging opinion was hardly shared by hundreds of
other colonists who eagerly converted the pigs into "flitches of
Bacon" which they judged "very good."
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English colonists may have been pleased,
but not particularly surprised, to discover that hogs thrived on
the tiny island. Settlers who reached the mainland never doubted
that livestock of all sorts would adapt to an American environment
that, with its natural meadows and woodlands, seemed ideal for the
beasts. Colonists likewise anticipated little trouble raising livestock
in the New World much as they had in England. But it turned out
that animals transferred more easily than animal husbandry. Confronted
with a shortage of labor relative to the supply of land and to the
amount of work that needed to be done in establishing new settlements,
colonists from New England to the Chesapeake could not supervise
their livestock anywhere nearly as thoroughly as English farmers
did. Every available hand was required to clear fields, grow food,
and build houses, roads, fences, and other necessities. As a result,
livestock were left on their own for all or at least a good part
of the year. Inevitably, this lackadaisical husbandry permitted
some creatures to escape human control altogether and become wild.
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So far as the colonists were concerned,
however, livestock that went wild did not cease to be English. Neither
did they cease to be considered property—a category into which
English settlers reflexively placed all livestock species. Yet identifying
specific owners for feral livestock, a necessary task if the animals
were indeed property, became a vexed issue, especially in places
where the animals proliferated. This turned out to be the case in
the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, where abundant
food and a warm climate generated a substantial population of wild
hogs and cattle. Colonists could not bring themselves to regard
feral livestock as free for the taking, like deer or other indigenous
animals, because this amounted to a denial of their status as property.
Lacking a clear alternative, colonists decided that the beasts belonged
to the Crown, much as unclaimed strays in England did.
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Bermuda's colonists appropriated
the island's hogs in similar fashion. The Somer Islands Company
claimed ownership of the animals, along with everything else on
the island, even though the hogs were originally Spanish. But whoever
decided to use the hog as an emblem on Bermuda's coins engaged in
a subtler form of appropriation. The unknown official chose an animal
that had already taken possession of the island before the English
ever reached there, as if to prepare it for the human colonists
to come. It did not seem to matter that the newly minted symbol
of Bermuda was not in fact native to the island. Rather than reproduce
the image of some exotic plant or animal, the Company preferred
a creature that was familiar to the people who would lay claim to
the land and its resources. Hogs, unlike fish or turtles, made Bermuda
seem more like England.
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One wonders, however, if the deliberate
portrayal of a wild hog expressed an underlying anxiety about
the effects of colonization. If moving to a strange environment
had produced physical and behavioral changes in pigs, might a similar
transformation affect human colonists? During the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, European intellectuals drew upon classical
humoral theory to argue that environment indeed influenced human
physiology. Some thinkers went so far as to warn explicitly about
the potential dangers to colonizers of distant lands. Thus no matter
whether they moved to frigid New England, temperate Bermuda, or
tropical Barbados, settlers worried that exposure to new places
and new climates would so alter their bodies that they would no
longer be recognizably English. Those who ended up in places with
moderate climates, including Bermuda, tried to reassure themselves
that the difference from England was not all that great. Perhaps,
like the wild hog, colonists would eventually display physiological
changes but if so, they would be too superficial to undermine the
settlers' fundamental Englishness.
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Bermuda's colonists did not have
long to ponder the meaning of the odd image imprinted on their coins.
Within five years of its first appearance, "hogge money" ceased
to be used on the island. By the early 1620s, tobacco provided colonists
with a means of profit, and tobacco or credit for tobacco served
in lieu of currency. Yet the symbolic power of a European animal
stamped on a Bermudian coin far outlasted the actual population
of wild swine. A hog still appears on the reverse of the modern
Bermuda cent.
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Notes
1. Bermuda was variously
known as Somer (or Summer) Island, Somer Islands, or Somers Islands.
2. For a complete
account of the founding of Bermuda and the origins of these coins,
see Louis Jordan, "Somer Islands 'Hogge Money' of 1616: The Historical
Context," The Colonial Newsletter (August 2003): 2465–93.
3. Alfred W. Crosby,
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
173–76. The quotations are from John Smith, The Generall
Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles ...
(1624), in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631),
3 vols., ed., Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1986), 2: 346, 353. Smith never visited Bermuda,
but relied on others' accounts.
4. The material in
this and the following paragraph is derived from Virginia DeJohn
Anderson, "
Animals into the Wilderness: The Development of Livestock Husbandry
in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
," William and Mary Quarterly 59 (2002): 377–408;
and Creatures of Empire: People and Animals in Early America
(New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
5. On environmentalist
thinking in this period, see Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter:
Technology, The Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier,
1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "
Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience
," William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 213–40; John
Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American
Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1990).
6. Jordan, "Somer
Islands 'Hogge Money'," 2490.
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