that derives from a completely different set of social relations than the “profitable” ones Norwood would later champion. Whereas the lack of unequal property had put the original castaways on an equal footing, Norwood helps the Bermuda Company stave off such historical irregularities (“chaos”) by surveying the almost-Eden and imposing private property relations upon it in the name of investors to render it “profitable.” Like Norwood, Strachey experiences only chaos (“devilish disquiets”) where the majority of the shipwrecked voyagers found “ease.” For him, the Bermudas turned out to be the “Devil’s Islands” they were reputed to be, then, though not in the way that earlier mariners had proposed. Satan, apparently, is a very malleable sign. In any case, the very freedom and plenty, equality and ease, that for the “common sort” had previously belonged only to fantasies of heaven or Cockaigne, Eden or New World natives, had actually become theirs, and they were not keen to give them up, which put them at odds with the colonial companies and their agents who were determined to return the radical commons to the realm of fairy tale once again. The stakes were nothing less than who would control labor, resources, and history at a moment in which they threatened vagrancy – masterlessness – from the point of view of elites.
What combination of fear of future reprisals, anxiety about the unknown if they were abandoned, appeals to duty or patriotism, the terroristic executions of subversives, religious indoctrination, or concern for loved ones still in England – all of which surface in Strachey’s narrative at some point as weighing heavily on the shipwrecked population – propelled the reluctant castaways on toward Virginia is unclear, but that almost all indeed did go on to suffer exactly the privation, authoritarian subjection, and constant labor that they had feared is clear. It is also clear that when Bermuda was officially colonized a year later, it was organized along martial lines (“a Regiment” in Norwood’s words), not as a radical commons. Norwood’s Bermuda writings, which emerge in this second moment – entirely suppressing the early Edenic period – imply that the compensation for giving up Eden and commonality was individualism, improvement, and “order.” In particular, Norwood explains the benefits of the official surveys he undertook in 1614–1615 (to map the island as a whole) and 1616–1617 (to allot specific plots to shareholders):
And then began this, which was before as it were an unsettled and confused Chaos … to receive a convenient disposition, forme, and order, and to become indeede a Plantation; for though the countrey was small, yet they could not have beene conveniently disposed and well setled without a true description and survey made of it; and againe every man being setled where he might constantly abide, they knew their businesse, and fitted their household accordingly. They built for themselves and there families not Tents or Cabins but more substantiall houses … So that in short time after … the Country began to asprire and neerely to approach unto that happiness and prosperitie wherein now it flourisheth.
(lxxvi–lxxvii)
The Edenic possibilities offered by Bermuda in the earliest years are manifestly lost or forgotten, degraded in Norwood’s account into a “chaos” that Norwood – as Locke would after – seeks to control with private property and possessive individualism rather than with an attempt to remake Eden or even a “brotherly” commonwealth as the earliest English settlement in Bermuda had been described in John Smith’s account (351). After the survey, Norwood claims that landowners “knew their business” and “built for themselves and thir families.” This suppression of the commons, repeated across numerous texts and instantiated in a variety of institutions, from land surveying to chancery court, ultimately has decisive effects for the emergence of not only private property and the nation but also “modern” subjectivity.
Benedict Anderson has emphasized that the emergence of a national imaginary depends on the sort of forgetting and remembering that Norwood enacts in his description of the founding of Bermuda. Communities are formed in particular ways by the memories that they share and the forms in which they are circulated. Norwood preserves and obliterates aspects of the settling of Bermuda such that enclosure triumphs over “common” use of resources. He engages in a related project in his spiritual autobiography, suggesting that the forgetting–remembering dynamic has a role to play in the emergence of “individuals” as well as nations, a supposition that is borne out by the ways in which his autobiography contrasts with that of his model, Augustine. While he draws heavily on the Confessions even to the point of “remembering” as part of his own life story numerous episodes from Augustine’s (stealing pears, resisting persistently strong sexual temptation, and suppressing a taste for stage plays, among numerous others) the two books are, in the end, more interesting in their differences than in their evident parallels. In his journal, Norwood “endeavoured to call to mind the whole course of [his] life past, and how the Lord had dealt with [him]” because he “perceived that some things began to grow out of memory, which [he] thought [he] should scarce ever have forgotten; and considering that as age came on, forgetfulness would increase upon [him], [he] determined to set them down in writing” (3). Writing is a prosthesis to his own mind, a reminder to himself of God’s mercy as much as to any possible future reader. Though his writings also seem to assume a reader who will become privy to aspects of himself that he emphasizes he has never fully described to anyone, they were not published until the mid-twentieth century. Augustine much more expressly assumes a reader (and the Confessions did circulate widely):
This then is the fruit of my confession … in that I confess not only before You … but also in the ears of the believing sons of men, companions of my joy and sharers of my mortality, my fellow citizens, fellow pilgrims: those who have gone before, and those who are to come after, and those who walk the way of life with me.
(Sheed, trans., 175; O’Donnell, ed., 120–121)11
Augustine (unlike Norwood) addresses God directly in this way on almost every page, but he also announces that God already knows him better than he knows himself, so that his writing can, ultimately, only be for human readers, for whom he repeatedly interprets even the most singular aspects of his life as illustrating a particular instance of a human universal. Augustine can thus begin the account of his life before he has any personal memories of it because he knows from watching other infants what all infants are like (Sheed, 6; O’Donnell, 5). Conversely, Norwood’s earliest recorded memory is intensely personalized: an account of falling into a pond and nearly drowning on his way to school on the first day he wore breeches. He makes no attempt to link this to “universal” tendencies or experience but instead emphasizes his personal folly and frailty. Augustine’s narrative is open and interconnecting, frequently deploying collective first-person pronouns, as when he explains his reasons for writing: “we are laying bare our love for you in confessing to you our wretchedness and your mercies toward us: that You may free us wholly as you have already freed us in part” (Sheed, 211; O’Donnell, 148). Norwood’s autobiography only very rarely uses the first-person plural or in any other way addresses or engages the reader directly.
Indeed, Norwood’s text seems to fear an excess in himself that may well not be assimilable to any universal, and presents himself as enclosed, privately walled off from fellow human beings. These differences do not mean that the slave society in which Augustine writes is superior, or that his subjective solution is to be preferred, but it does historicize the subjective enclosure that modernity takes for granted. Furthermore, both texts insert their narrative of conversion within a wider biographical frame, which makes it easier to situate their different emphases and choices as part of a long historical process. Responding to Augustine, Norwood ruminates continually on his “course of life” – which refers to both his career and his spiritual path. Because his father’s estate is “much decayed,” he cannot count on comfortable routes to his goals of travel and education. Often “destitute,” his choices are severely constrained. Aspiring to knowledge and longing for challenging and satisfying work, he is, instead, “alienated.” Of the “course” he follows before his first Bermuda voyage – from fishmonger’s apprentice, to mercenary on the continent, to vagrant and then, finally, seaman – he observes: “every step I went, as it was further from my native country so it led me and alienated my heart farther from God, from religion and from a desire to return” (22, emphasis added). He is so “alienated” in fact