Juan de Bermudez didn’t even think Bermuda was a suitable name for the islands he discovered in the middle of the Atlantic.
It was this Spanish explorer who happened upon our uninhabited paradise as he sailed from the Caribbean to Spain in the early 16th Century.
He never set foot on dry land on that first accidental visit but reported his finding to the Spanish when he got home. It turned out the Spanish didn’t think these little rocks in the ocean were worth the time and effort; they left them mainly untouched for the next hundred years.
Yet the name Bermuda stuck – meaning Juan de Bermudez boasts the longest running Bermuda legacy of all.
Born into a family of sailors in southern Spain in about 1450, de Bermudez was one of the first mariners to cross the Atlantic, shortly after Christopher Columbus’s historic voyage of discovery in 1492.
He helped form a European settlement on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Known for his sailing expertise, de Bermudez made numerous trips transporting goods – as well as slaves, according to some sources – from Spain to its new colonies over the next couple of decades.
On the way home from one of these voyages in 1505, de Bermudez’s ship, La Garza, was blown north by a storm towards an isolated archipelago that nobody knew about.
He approached the islands but was unable to land due to their dangerous ring of reefs. Further alarmed by screeching noises which he thought were spirits and demons, he beat a hasty retreat to Europe.
Those eerie sounds, we now know, were probably the shrill call of the Bermuda petrel, but in our early years de Bermudez’s story gave rise to the nickname ‘Isle of Devils’.
De Bermudez insisted the islands should be named ‘Garza’, after his boat, and that name is adorned on some maps from the early 16th Century.
Ultimately, however, the more exotic name Bermuda won out; perhaps they felt the ‘Garza Triangle’ didn’t have quite the same ring.
Historical details of De Bermudez’s life are inconsistent because he never kept a log. According to some documents, he returned to Bermuda in 1515 and left a dozen pigs for the benefit of anyone who might get stranded here in future. Other sources suggest he failed in that mission because those daunting reefs once again proved impossible to navigate.
Whether it was de Bermudez or someone else, though, pigs were indeed deposited here, and they played a key role in the early days of Bermuda’s first settlement.
In 1609, after Sir George Somers’s Sea Venture was shipwrecked a few hundred yards off the shore, the people on board became our earliest inhabitants.
The descendants of those hogs became a vital source of food for the new settlers, making such an impact that Bermuda’s first currency contained an image of a hogge and the coins were labelled ‘Hog Money’. The Hog Penny on Burnaby Street remains a lasting tribute to this day.
De Bermudez died in Cuba in about 1520.
SIDEBAR
Bermuda: What’s in a name?
A few of the things that Juan de Bermudez inadvertently gave his name to:
Bermuda
The world-renowned Bermuda Triangle
Our iconic Bermuda shorts
Bermuda grass
Our Bermuda sunset, our Bermuda beaches and our Bermuda culture
Have a Bermudaful day!
- Sources for this article include Huelva Buenas Noticias, The European Discovery of America, and archives of The Royal Gazette and Mid-Ocean News.
