For a century until 1973 there were no burials in the churchyard. It was full. Then on 10 March that year Sir Richard Sharples, the Governor of Bermuda, and his aide Captain Hugh Sayers, were assassinated in the grounds of Government House. Because of the Governor’s affection for the slow town of St George’s and its peaceful church he and Captain Sayers were buried among the first settlers of the old colony.
St George’s is carved with old corners, squares and tree-roofed courtyards, most of them so unattended that you can hear your footsteps on the stones. The place names are evocative – Barber’s Alley, Old Maid’s Lane, Blockade Alley and Featherbed Alley. In Barber’s Alley lived Joseph Hayne Rainey, a freed slave from South Carolina who, with his wife, reached Bermuda on a blockade runner. He set up as a barber in St George’s, educated himself by reading between customers and eventually returned to America to become the first black man to be a member of the House of Representatives.
The old houses of St George’s could tell a good many stories. At the top of King Street is the State House, built in 1620, the oldest building in Bermuda. Its annual rent is still one peppercorn. The rectory, a welcoming little place with a cat asleep on the windowsill and the sunshine streaming down the chimney, was built by a penitent pirate. In King’s Square, just across from the pillory, the stocks and the cheerful local inn, is a house built in 1700 by Governor Day who used the communion plate at dinner and who died in prison. Years later, during the American Civil War, it was used by Major Norman Walker, the Confederate agent, who stage-managed Bermuda’s not-altogether-neutral part in that conflict.
The blockade of the Confederacy ports of the Northern navy resulted in St George’s becoming a transhipment harbour where cargoes were unloaded from heavy vessels onto lighter craft which would scurry across the stretch of water to the South undetected by the Union guns. The little town had never known such activity or prosperity. Ships crammed the harbour, money rattled, gracious living arrived as it so often does with the misadventures of others. Today Major Walker’s house is a museum with flags, misty photographs of posed generals and captains and other relics of those heady times.
More than a century earlier, during the American Revolution against the British, St George’s was the setting of another drama. A raiding party from three American ships slid ashore on the night of 14 August 1775. From the armoury they calmly rolled barrels of His Majesty’s gunpowder down to their whaleboats for transportation to the war against the British. They were disturbed by only one man, an ally as it happened, a captured French officer on parole. Not recognizing his uniform the raiders killed and buried him. His body was not found for more than a hundred years. It was discovered when the foundations of a new church for the town were being dug on the ground behind St Peter’s. The front of this church was raised but it was never completed and its stands hollowly today, a huge and chance memorial for a French prisoner who disappeared without trace one summer night.
Bermuda is formed like a lobster’s claw (a similar shape to Nantucket) with St George’s at the blunt end and the homely-named parishes, Pembroke, Devonshire, Warwick, Southampton, Smiths and Paget, extending to the extreme of the hook at Ireland Island, with the village of Somerset located just below it. Castle harbour is in the northeast, lapping alongside the civil airport, and the promontory of St David’s where the people are acknowledged by everyone (including themselves) to be ‘different’. They have their own ways and their own lives, cut off from the rest of the islands. The texture of their skin is different for they are a mixture of Negro slave, Irish immigrant and American Indian. To the other people they are known as Mohawks. During World War II they were assembled and told that three-quarters of their land was to be taken over as a United States Air Base (one of those leased in 1940 in trade for fifty old warships). Silently they went away and removed their belongings to the remaining quarter of land. The air base was still there – and so were the Mohawks. Harrington Harbour, a marvellously enclosed anchorage, touches Front Street in Hamilton, the island capital, whose shops and houses line it in vivid and varied colours like laundry hanging on a line. The curled claw itself hooks around the Great Sound gathering in its shelter a whole bevy of small and pretty islets.
Hamilton looks almost too good to be true; a confection of pastel buildings like a film set which might be dismantled and carried elsewhere by tomorrow. At the town’s junction is a little dais, like a miniature bandstand and it is here that the policeman, uniformed like a London ‘bobby’, conducts the sedate traffic wearing a serious expression and white gloves, much to the satisfaction of American visitors who feel that they must be at least halfway to Europe. There are some good inns, one called the Forty Thieves, the nickname given to the original landowners and another the Hog Penny from the first coins issued there, depicting a hog, the most widespread land inhabitant before man.
There are shaded wooden walkways at the front of the shops and outside Trimmingham’s Department Store comfortable canvas chairs and settees placed with consideration for the warm and weary shoppers. At one time Bermuda’s railway chuffed right along the middle of the street on its journey from one end of the island to the other. That was in the days before the introduction of cars to the island in 1946. Bermuda entered the motor age late and with trepidation. A speed limit of twenty miles per hour was voted when the first vehicles appeared and it remains so to this day. Many visitors, particularly the young, take to small unaccustomed motor bicycles. On my first morning, as I walked along Front Street, a youthful American dived into the harbour without getting off his scooter. He was pulled out by a Bermudan who then hurried off. He was, he explained later to the newspaper, already late for work.
A few yards uphill from the traffic policeman’s stand is a delightful white building, flat at its front, balconied and tree-shaded behind. It is the Perot Post Office, restored to its original quaintness, still in business with its polished lamps and grilles, its high writing desks and lofty stools. Venerable candlesticks are placed on the desks and above there are loyal pictures of Queen Victoria and postmaster Sir Rowland Hill. Customers come and go, the staff perch behind the solid wooden counter that was in use in 1849 when William B. Perot, the Hamilton postmaster, produced his own stamps and appended his signature – stamps which are now highly prized and priced.
From the Hamilton waterfront the many isles of the Great Sound merge and mingle. Some, hardly humps in the sea, are simply named Alpha Island, Beta Island, Delta Island, which sounds better than ABC; others have names and stories like Murderer’s Island.
This island is also called Burt’s Island and Skeeter’s Island, a few acres of scrub and rock with some windy trees at its centre and a gaunt crucifix raised above its landing place. The Cross represents a late attempt to consecrate the place after Skeeter, a murderer whose case touched even the corridors of law in far London, was interred here along with a sorry company.
Richard Cox, the young man who took me across to Murderer’s Island in his dory, had never been there before, although he had lived all his life in Bermuda and his family have been settled in the island since the arrival of the ship Golden Rule from Brixham in 1620.
Skeeter was a man living at Somerset at the end of the nineteenth century. The previous day I had gone there and found his fishpond, still carved out by the shore at the spot where his now-vanished cottage stood. The story is that his wife, after going to a wedding party, disappeared, and Skeeter gathered his neighbours to search for her. But they did not find her and it was even supposed that she might have left the island for America.
Weeks later, the missing woman’s brother was sitting on a rock when he saw something odd off the shore. He took a boat out and there saw his sister’s body beneath the waves. She was tied to a large boulder. Skeeter was arrested, convicted and executed. The most amazing thing, however, was that Skeeter’s body was taken to Murderer’s Island and buried – and the stone which he had tied to his hapless wife was used as the headstone above his grave.
Skeeter’s grave with its gruesome and apposite reminder has been long lost among the rubble and rocks of Murderer’s Island, but there are remnants of history on many of the other midget islands in the Great Sound. During the Boer War a contingent of prisoners was taken to Bermuda (deemed to be a place from where they were unlikely to run back to South Africa) and was distributed among the smaller isles where they made the best of the monotony by whittling wood carvings which were advertised for sale in the local newspaper and some of which can be seen today.
Darrell’s Island, just across an elbow of water from Murderer’s Island, became the prison of more than a thousand Boers who also whittled and whiled away their time. Apart from their carving activities, they laid out a tennis court and a croquet lawn. In 1902 when the war ended some of the Boers refused to be repatriated and had to be forcibly removed.
Thirty years later Darrell’s Island had another role. The ladylike flying boats of Imperial Airways and Pan American Airways began flights from London and New York to Bermuda. They came down in the cosseted waters of the sound and taxied to Darrell’s Island where they disembarked their passengers who were taken the final mile to Hamilton by boat. The great aircraft were housed in hangars, the foundations of which still jut from the land near the water’s edge, the last remnants of an elegant age.
The now sadly-gone flying boat had a notable part in linking many islands of the world. Pan American pioneered the trans-Pacific route to China, using Honolulu, Midway, Wake and the Philippines as ‘stepping stones’. Midway and Wake were arid atolls until the arrival of the Americans who had to swim ashore from freighters carrying the first materials that went into the building of the important air bases.
Richard Cox, who took me across to Murderer’s Island, had been at college in the United States and was filling in time working in Douglas Fetigan’s boatyard in Pitts Bay, Hamilton. Richard and his father Harry spend much of their time diving along the fruitful reefs of Bermuda, rummaging through the debris of the many ships that came to grief there. Their home is a treasure chest in itself; bottles, bells, binnacles recovered from the cellars of the sea stand around like ornaments might in another home. Their pride is a brass musketoon, a gun like a polished telescope, and Richard’s mother has built two fine fireplaces from bricks that came from the kiln centuries ago and were doubtless destined for some settler’s house in the New World.
Richard tapped the ship’s bell which hangs outside their door. ‘Our family records show that we lost three ships on journeys from England and they lie somewhere around these coasts,’ he smiled. ‘Wouldn’t it be strange to be down there one day and realize that we were looking through cargo that was loaded by our ancestors, or that the bones lying there could be my great-great-great-great-grandfather?’
*
Across the anchorage from Hamilton the land elevates a little, not much, in the parishes of Warwick, Paget and Southampton. It is the white roofs that fill the scene, like squares of paper. With few exceptions Bermuda roofs are white, constructed to catch every speck of rainwater and to carry it to the householder’s personal barrel or tank. Shortage of water has been one of the island’s problems; it is hoarded and never wasted.
Over there Gibbs Hill lighthouse, built by the Royal Engineers in the 1840s, bleeps through the night. I climbed its 185 steps and went out onto the lantern-gallery into a gale that would have been at home in Cornwall. It chopped the sea and shredded through the palms. Up there it was necessary to press back against the lighthouse wall, like a child pressing against the leg of a parent. Even so it was worth it for from that elevation you can see the whole scope of Bermuda’s Great Sound, its fragments, coves, settlements and seas spread out conveniently beneath your nose.
Within the lantern-house I found Maurice Nearon, the keeper, in his seventies and then still clambering up the stairs several times a day. He has that cheerful calmness that is the demeanour of lighthousemen everywhere from Scandinavia to the Southern Ocean. ‘My grandfather came here from Wales,’ he said squatting in a well-used chair and tuning a radio. ‘He met my grandmother who was a Bermudan lady. And here I am.’ He listened intently to the radio. Was it the weather forcast, I asked.
‘No, no,’ he replied. ‘I’m not worried about the weather up here. That’s for others to think about.’ He detected something on the radio. ‘Ah . . . that’s it,’ he smiled, settling back.
The sound of melodious, hymn-singing voices came over the air. ‘My own church,’ said Maurice nodding towards the set. ‘St Paul’s, Hamilton.’ It was said with pride as if the broadcast was coming from the other side of the world. He began to mumble the tune and so I left him, clanking down the curling stairs, leaving a happy man humming the Lord’s praises 130-odd feet in the air.
The road from the lighthouse out towards Ireland Island, at the end of the lobster’s claw, is enclosed with extravagantly flowering shrubs intersected by what have been known from the times of the first maps as tribe roads. These cut across the short width of the islands from shore to shore – always just wide enough to roll a barrel, which shows that the early settlers had their priorities in order.
The land narrows quickly as you enter Sandys Parish, a crossing accomplished on an odd little wooden structure, which is the smallest drawbridge in the world. The drawbridge is, in effect, a hinged groove about twelve inches wide which opens up to allow the masts of small vessels to go through. The bridge even has traffic lights at each end.
Bermuda’s great naval base was at Ireland Island, now disused, its rusty guns pointless but still directed out to sea from their stone and concrete bastions. On the extreme cape is one of the most singular buildings I have ever encountered: the Commissioner’s House, a former elegance, with cast-iron balconies and balustrades, now fallen to ruin (but happily being restored). It creaks and echoes as you walk through it like the house in Gone With the Wind. When it was almost finished in the early part of the nineteenth century, there was an outcry in Britain over its cost of £42,511, after an estimate of £12,400. ‘The extraordinary, and to all appearances improvident expenditure on this house must stop all proceedings concerning it until the subject has received all and every explanation of which it is capable,’ bellowed a memorandum from the far-off Navy Board in London. In 1832 it was considered to be too big for any one family and was relegated to the role of ‘billets’ which it fulfilled until 1951 when the British Navy sailed away for the last time.
Nearby within the hefty walls of the former dockyard a Maritime Museum has been established, arrayed with boats and interesting oddments. Outside is a superb ship’s figurehead of Neptune which was lowered into place by helicopter. The most intriguing exhibit here is still the subject of a great mystery in the Bermuda islands. The museum houses Tucker’s treasure, a collection of gold bars and jewelled ornaments brought to the surface from a wreck in 1955 by Teddy Tucker, a local diver. It was purchased by the Bermuda Government and sent to the Maritime Museum in time for the museum’s opening by the Queen in 1975. As the fabulous treasure was being laid out on exhibition it was found that the centrepiece of the display, a rich cross in which were mounted seven emeralds, had vanished. It had been replaced by a plastic substitute. The real cross – called Tucker’s Cross – has never been found.
The most eyecatching exhibit there, however, is the gate attendant Douglas Little who wears a nautical cap and jersey. He has a beard sad enough to impress the Ancient Mariner and, to boot, a wooden stump. Every inch the part; he confesses, however, that his lost leg was the result of neither shark nor storm. ‘Lost it when I was a boy in Nova Scotia,’ he said. ‘Wheel of a cart ran over it.’
BERMUDA situated between latitudes 32°15′–32°23′N and longitudes 64°38′–64°53′W; area 22.5 sq. m (58 sq. km); population approx. 61,000; associated British colony
Sanibel and Captiva
A Hurricane is Coming
I have been here before
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know t
he grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
I never saw better storms, skies and sunsets than those you get on the Gulf of Mexico. The August morning would begin untouched blue, the sea sage to bottle green, a breeze nudging from the south. Shell-seekers would be out early peering into the shingle and then, oddly, looking up to see if a storm might be lining the horizon, knowing that if one came up then the turbulence of the sea would throw up more of their particular small treasures.
Quite often they were not disappointed. By mid-afternoon it would become deep and sultry and there would be rumbles from a distance as though someone big was grumbling about the heat. Then the clouds would sail in, the ocean would frown, and there would be thunder, lightning and violent and impenetrable rain.
But it would all be gone in an hour; gone towards Louisiana or Texas or Mexico itself. The rattling on the roof would be reduced to taps and then stop altogether; the trees would calm, the sky would move over like stage scenery, and the late sun would flood the gulf. Sometimes events overtook each other. One evening there was a vivid sunset, forked lightning and a rainbow, all in the sky at the same time. Then the moon appeared.
Captiva is one of the narrow Florida Barrier Islands, joined to its longer neighbour Sanibel by a bridge; and Sanibel is joined to the mainland by a low causeway. North Captiva, a separate island, can only be reached by boat or by seaplane (some residents are wealthy enough to have their own seaplane) and beyond that are Useppa Island, which is very select indeed, and Cabbage Key, upon which is a wooden pub with 30,000 dollars pinned to the walls.
During my wanderings around the islands of the world, I have usually been alone but this time I had a family with me, Diana my wife, my son Matthew and his pretty girlfriend Sophie, and seven-year-old identical twins, Charlie and Joe, the children of my daughter Lois. We stayed for a month in a large and airy wooden house divided from the beach only by a line of trees. It was often quite solitary. We were like castaways.
My World of Islands Page 6