How can the small isolated island of Bermuda help us to understand the early expansion of English AmericaFirst discovered by Europeans in 1505 the island of Bermuda had no indigenous population and no permanent European presence until the early seventeenth century. Settled five years after Virginia and eight years before Plymouth Bermuda is a foundational site of English colonization. Its history reveals strikingly different paths of potential colonial development as a place where slaveowning puritan tobacco planters raised large families engaged overseas markets built ships created a Christian commonwealth hanged witches wrestled to define racial difference and welcomed godly pirates raiding Spanish America. In Isle of Devils Isle of Saints Michael J. Jarvis presents readers with a new narrative social and cultural history of Bermuda. Adopting a holistic multidisciplinary approach that draws upon thirty years of research and archaeological fieldwork Jarvis recounts Bermudas turbulent dynamic past from the Sea Ventures dramatic 1609 shipwreck through the 1684 dissolution of the Bermuda Company. He argues that the island was the first of Englands colonies to produce a successful staple form a stable community turn a profit transplant civic institutions and harness bound African knowledge and labor. Bermuda was a tabula rasa that fired the imaginations of English thinkers aspiring to create an American utopia. It was also Englands first puritan colony founded as a covenanted Christian commonwealth in 1612 by selfconsciously religious settlers who committed themselves to building a moral society. By the 1670s Bermuda had become Englands most densely populated possession and was poised to become an intercolonial maritime hub after freeing itself from its antiquated parent company. The first scholarly monograph in eighty years on this important neglected colonys first century Isle of Devils Isle of Saints is a worthy prequel to In the Eye of All Trade Jarviss masterful f