The Darrell House or Hermit’s Court on Aunt Peggy’s Lane no longer presents either a vernacular or Georgian appearance, but was once as impressive as Stewart Hall on its immediate east, and more so considering it was the first house owned by a Black Bermudian, pilot James ‘Jemmy’ Darrell. Built on land occupied by Daniel Ubanks in the early 1700s, it is not known when the house was built or whether Darrell built it or purchased it from someone else, but it was in his possession in 1795, the year that he piloted Rear Admiral George Murray’s ship-ofthe-line HMS Resolution from the open sea to Murray’s Anchorage, unlocking Bermuda’s potential as a major naval base.

On Murray’s advice, the Bermuda Government purchased Darrell for £150 and set him free to serve in one of three newly created King’s Pilot posts. Over the next two decades, Darrell piloted scores of Royal Navy warships through Bermuda’s treacherous channels into St George’s and, later, Dockyard. Although he was constantly ‘on call’ and could not refuse a job piloting naval vessels, Darrell was paid well and prospered. When the Bermuda Assembly passed a racist law in 1806 prohibiting Black Bermudians in the future from purchasing property as Darrell had and denying them the right to pass property to their heirs, Darrell and a fellow pilot protested directly to the Royal Navy and Colonial Office in London.

The law had lapsed by the time Darrell died in 1815 at the ageof 66, and in his 1812 will (the earliest known penned by a Black Bermudian) he left life use of his house to his wife Eusebia and then divided it between his son Thomas Cooper Darrell, also a pilot, and daughter Johannah. The property was worth £300 when Eusebia died in 1824 and then was divided into northern and southern halves by Thomas and Johannah, who both mortgaged their portions for a time as they struggled financially. By the 1850s, the house was in decline and its value dropped to £180. In 1860 the house and land was formally divided by partition, with Thomas Cooper Darrell’s widow Nancy and their children occupying the northern half and Johannah Darrell living in the southern portion. In 1861 Johannah put her half house in trust for Mary Laura Allen, the wife of Hamilton Parish school teacher John Gilbert Allen and after her death in 1864 at the age of 80, the Allens opened a store on the lower floor.

James Darrell’s house fell victim to the St George’s Improvement Commission’s town-wide road widening campaign. The commission paid Joannah Darrell’s trustee £100 for the Allens’ shop and residence (below its assessment value) and then demolished it. The northern half of the house survived and in the 1920s was home to Thomas E Carroll Darrell, James’s great-grandson, a reclusive diver and cedar carver locally called ‘the hermit’. In 1992 much of what remains of James Darrell’s house was gutted in a comprehensive renovation, leaving little of the famous pilot’s original home intact. Only the fine old chimney on the northern gable end hints at the size and scale of James Darrell’s 1790s house.