Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson
their English masters to make mats and other cloth, baskets, cords, and hats. Lucayans valued the palm fibers for their shininess, and they made tightly woven baskets of intricate designs. Other Taínoans also wove baskets and mats. In Kongo, people used split-vine baskets for carrying and storing, as well as making baskets, mats, and rope from palm leaves.61 Their tutelage was so successful on Bermuda that in 1688 Governor Robert Robinson stated that the trees were of “soe greate & Extraordinary use & Service to the people that without them it is Generally opinioned they Could not have Subsisted,” since, in addition to using their leaves as roofing material, “they alseo Make Cables [and] Chaires with such like necessarys.”62
Weaving with palm leaves was a highly developed art in West Central Africa, and European travelers and missionaries compared woven palm-leaf cloth to the finest European-made silks. Filippo Pigafetta praised the “marvelous arte” of “making . . . Sattens, Taffata, Damaskes, Sarcenettes and such like” from “the leaves of Palme trees” in the eastern provinces and areas adjoining Kongo. Indeed, the finest specimens were too “precious” for any but “the king, and such as it pleaseth him.” Cavazzi wrote that the beaten leaves of one type of palm resulted in such fine, soft fibers that the weave of the cloth thus produced brought him to “astonishment.”63 Pigafetta noted that the process started with keeping the palms “under and lowe to the grounde, every yeare cutting them, and watering them.” Once the “tender” leaves were “cleansed & purged after their manner,” techniques that he did not further specify, “they drawe forth their threedes, which are all very fine and dainty, and all of one evennesse, saving that those which are longest, are best esteemed. For of those they weave their greatest peeces.”64 European observers, including Cavazzi himself, were not always so laudatory about woven palm. Although Cavazzi had praised the fine nature of some palm cloth, he disdained it as an adequate covering for an infant undergoing Christian baptism. Mocking the social pretensions of couples who added a noble honorific to their infants’ names despite their lowly status, Cavazzi’s evidence for their “miserable” condition was that they could never even hope to own a handspan of land and that they had only a “simple and green leaf, instead of linen, to cover” their babies. His reference to a leaf may have been an exaggeration for effect, since a finely woven cloth would have been appropriate for an important ritual.65
Figure 1.7. Palm fabric, 1670s, showing the construction of thinner strips joined together and the elaborate patterns woven into the cloth. Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, “Araldi Manuscript,” in “Un Cappuccino nell’Africa nera del seicento: I disegni dei Manoscritti Araldi del Padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo,” ed. Ezio Bassani, Quaderni Poro 4 (1987). (Courtesy of Michele Araldi)
African weaving techniques influenced the development of the distinctly Bermudian and quite profitable plat industry, which involved braiding palm leaves into thin strips that could then be sewn together to build hats, baskets, and other objects. The composite method of combining narrower widths to produce a wider finished piece of cloth or other object, as well as the absence of specialized equipment, was an outgrowth of a centuries-old industry in West and West Central Africa. West Central African weavers produced the complicated cloth remarked on by European observers on a simple apparatus made from easily procured materials. According to one Italian missionary to Kongo in the early eighteenth century, weavers did not have a “loom specifically made for the task, but they plant two pieces of wood in the ground, placing the fibers between them” and then used a stick instead of a shuttle to weave the woof or horizontal fibers of the fabric. When there were dedicated looms, as archaeologists have found across West Africa dating from as early as the thirteenth century, they produced a cloth of relatively narrow width.66 Off the coast of West Africa in the Cape Verde Islands, weavers used such looms to make cloth from cotton and sometimes imported silk. To make wider pieces of fabric, weavers sewed together six strips that were each five to six inches wide and five to six feet long.67 This technique, used on palm fibers instead of cotton thread, is visible in Cavazzi’s painting of a scene in Matamba. One man holds up woven palm fabric with differently patterned bands, apparently for the inspection of the seated man at the right-hand side of the painting whose headgear indicates that he is a Mbundu individual of high status (see figure 1.7). The elaborate cloth, imported from Kongo since the Mbundu inhabitants of Matamba did not make palm fabric worked in that fashion, was worn only by elites such as the seated nobleman. It is likely that the highly valued cloth formed part of the payment for a shipment of slaves taken from the interior and that the man holding the cloth was a pombeiro, or factor, of a slave trader on the coast.68
The strips produced through plat making in Bermuda were only one-half to one inch wide, far narrower than the five- to six-inch width common in West and West Central Africa, but the process of making a finished object was the same. Initially, Indians and Africans who joined the two pearl divers would have been the ones who were familiar enough with the material to begin producing the strips. Taínoan and other indigenous Caribbean peoples do not seem to have used the composite technique, but they did use palm fibers to weave baskets as well as cloth, sometimes incorporating luminescent feathers of mainland birds acquired through trade. Since weaving was gendered differently among Africans and indigenous Caribbean peoples, it was probably indigenous Caribbean women and African men who first made plat. Women were the weavers in the Caribbean, both of open-weave items like hammocks and nets and of more tightly woven objects like baskets, mats, and clothing.69 In many areas of West and West Central Africa, in contrast, weaving was men’s work, although women helped prepare the materials for weaving.70
As the first enslaved practitioners taught the English the technique for making rope, hats, mats, and other items, producing plat became work for all women, one that required no special equipment, although some households did use wheels to take up the braided strips. Over the second half of the seventeenth century, plat manufacture became such a significant cottage industry that in 1691 the island’s government protected the local supply of the raw materials, forbidding any export of unworked palmetto tops or even brooms and cordage. After hats and bonnets made of plat became a highly desirable fashion accessory in England in the 1720s, the profits of the industry were five times greater than what the island’s maritime activity produced in that time and twice as lucrative as seventeenth-century tobacco exports from Bermuda. Though the activity of plaiting was widespread among all Bermudian women, those who could command the labor of others reaped the most profit. Several white Bermudian widows, such as Mary Gilbert and Elizabeth Tucker, were among the few dozen plat brokers who dominated the trade, drawing not only from the work of the women they enslaved but also from that of women in surrounding households.71
“Ropes for other Uses”
When Governor John Hope arrived in Bermuda and was asked to report on the state of the colony in 1722, he described its economic status as balanced on two trees, the cedar and the palmetto: “Of the Cedar they Build their Sloops & Fishing boats; & of the Palmetto leaves, they make a sort of ware call’d Platt; as likewise Cables for their Sloops, & Ropes for other Uses.”72 The most common material for ropes was palmetto fiber. The beginning of Hope’s term as governor coincided with the early stages of the plat boom, and even once the plat market bottomed out a decade later, the other half of his assessment remained accurate. Cedar trees furnished the materials for the Bermudian turn to a maritime economy fueled by buoyant, fast cedar sloops rather than the on-island production of either staple or food crops, a reorientation of the island’s economy that occurred after the Crown dissolved the proprietary Somers Islands Company and took over the colony in 1684. But the governor’s comments applied in more ways than he probably realized. The cordage that enslaved and poor Bermudians made from the palmetto was certainly useful for cables to use in fitting out the sloops that became a mainstay of the island’s economy.73 The first generations of practitioners, however, may also have seen something beyond the creation of a merchantable product in the thousands of yards of cordage they produced. The product and the work to make it may also have held spiritual meaning, especially in the early years of the colony when the connections with Africa and the Caribbean were more direct and when English colonists were still learning how to work within