11125+
web files in a constantly updated compendium on Bermuda's business, culture,
cuisine, customs, districts, economy, education, food, geography, government,
history, internet access, laws, parishes, politics, religions, traditions,
wildlife etc. For tourists, business visitors, employers, employees, newcomers,
researchers, retirees, scholars. Funded by and linked to The
Royal Gazette, Bermuda's only daily newspaper.
By Keith Archibald Forbes (see About Us) exclusively for Bermuda Online
To refer by e-mail to this file use "bermuda-online.org/rnd" as your Subject
This is Part 1. Also see Part 2. His other files on Bermuda relating to military matters and civil aviation include Airlines serving Bermuda - American Bases in Bermuda from 1941 to 1995 - Bermuda Aviation History Pioneers Civilian and Military - Bermuda International Airport.
On the African Diaspora Heritage Trail because part of it was built by slaves as well as convicts shipped from Britain.
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Its initial stages were in 1795. Later - after 1814 - it was largely credited to Arthur Wesley - later Wellesley - the 1st Duke of Wellington (once a colonel in the 33rd Foot in 1795). Especially after the War of 1812-14, the Royal Naval Dockyard in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was considered too vulnerable to attack from America. Bermuda, beyond the operating range of the United States Navy, isolated but in the strategic mid Atlantic, was ideal for a surprise Royal Navy attack. |
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The British Government needed to retaliate in the event of any invasion of Bermuda or Canada by Americans or their allies. The credit goes to Rear Admiral Sir George Murray of the Royal Navy. He commanded its North American Squadron. He appointed two young Royal Navy lieutenants to the task of charting Bermuda's waters so the Royal Navy could use them. One was Thomas Hurd. The other was Andrew Evans. (Both later became captains). Murray arranged with the Admiralty in London for his flagship the 74 gun triple decked ship HMS Resolution to call at Bermuda in 1795, with sloops HMS Cleopatra and HMS Thesly. |
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They tested the theory advanced by Hurd that a series of natural channels through the reefs of Bermuda could be navigated with caution. On board the flagship as a pilot was black Bermudian slave Jeremy Darrell. Murray was pleased with Darrell and requested his freedom. Governor Crauford agreed. This was why Ireland Island in Sandys Parish, the former separate, narrow serrated island that pushes out into the Atlantic at the extreme north west of Bermuda, started to become, from 1809 when it was acquired by the British Admiralty, a Royal Navy base of one-time huge significance. |
They were the first Bermuda based commanders of this Station.
(Included Halifax).
Held temporarily by Admirals commanding Fourth Cruiser Squadron
Station ended, but HMS Malabar continued. It shut down officially in stages from 1953.
Admiralty House, in Pembroke Parish, where the Admirals lived and had their offices
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the base was built, The Royal Navy
invested heavily in a Bermuda-based program of building small,
fast vessels out of Bermuda cedar. Such vessels had been used in
Bermuda since 1609.
In rapid succession in 1803, the British Admiralty issued draught no. 3275, issued by the Navy Office in July for building two sloops of war in Bermuda; draught no. 3276, for building the two sloops Bermuda and Indian (the brother of famous British writer Jane Austen, later an Admiral, commanded the latter from her commissioning in Bermuda); draught No. 3278, as an addition to No. 3276, for fitting out the Bermuda and Indian; draught No. 4540, for work on the navy schooners Dispatch and Advice; and draught no. 4541, for supplementing the building of the Dispatch and Advice. |
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Bermuda-built sloops - similar to the one shown above - had unique advantages. Their construction from Bermuda cedar ensured they were durable and resistant to shipworm. Cedar was plentiful then and unlike oak, from which many of the larger ships were made in the United Kingdom, did not require seasoning.
One such Bermuda-built schooner established her own special claim to fame in 1805. She was the small warship HMS Pickle of the Royal Navy. Earlier, she had been the civilian vessel Sting. She played a unique role in the Battle of Trafalgar in which the Royal Navy, with 448 dead and 1,241 wounded, soundly defeated the French. Their navy had 4,408 dead, 1,545 wounded and lost 23 of their 33 ships in the battle. HMS Pickle was the fastest and one of the hardiest ships in the Royal Navy. Thus it was chosen to cover the 1,000 mile journey from Cape Trafalgar to England with exclusive news of the battle. It was a 9-day journey, during which the ship ran into a gale. On arrival at Falmouth, the officer with the dispatch raced to Whitehall in London by horse and carriage. He arrived at 3 am. Prime Minister William Pitt, the King and Royal Family and newspapers, were awoken to hear the news of the victory and the death of Admiral Lord Nelson.
In 1808, three years after she achieved her claim to fame at the Battle of Trafalgar, the Bermuda-built cedar schooner HMS Pickle struck a shoal when entering the Spanish port of Cadiz and was lost.
The Royal Navy started moving in from 1809 when the Ireland Island was acquired. It has a separate history from the rest of Bermuda. It is named after an individual, not a country. Because there was a fear of leprosy, all on the island had to leave their jungle of cedar and swine and wooden houses thatched with palmetto. Until it became a major Royal Navy base there were no roads and only a few inhabitants. Then it was completely separate from Main and Somerset Islands. (It became connected to other islands via several bridges first built in the late 1800s). When work began here in 1809, main weapons were light.
By 1814, construction was well under
way to switch the location of the Royal Navy base from Castle Harbour to Ireland
Island. In July, after another declaration of war between Britain and the USA, a Royal Navy
fleet with Royal Marines and soldiers assembled in Bermuda and sailed to attack and burn
principal buildings, including the White House, in Washington DC in revenge for the
American torching of Yorktown, now Toronto.
Afterwards, off Baltimore as a detainee aboard a British warship, the American lawyer Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star Spangled Banner" - with its melody from a raucous British drinking song.
Colonel (later Brigadier General) James Robertson Arnold, one of the two sons of Benedict Arnold and his Loyalist wife Margaret Peggy Shippen of Philadelphia and - like his mother, American born - went to Canada with his family and was educated at King's College School. He avenged his father's humiliation in America by joining the British Army. From Halifax, he was the first Royal Engineer to fortify, in 1816, the new Bermuda Dockyard against the USA. In 1818, he did the same thing at the Citadel in Halifax.
From 1814, the Dockyard defended the British military machine in Bermuda against any possible attack by the United States and others. Hawkish individuals wanted the USA to seize Bermuda as war reparations or in retaliation for how Bermudians supported the Confederacy and the ships from Britain that preyed on Union shipping.
For big guns to defend dockyards adequately, smooth bore cannon, developed in the 1500's, had to be more effective. One temporary British answer was the development of the carronade in about 1779. The Royal Navy brought them to Bermuda as effective weapons.
1824
marked the arrival in Bermuda on February 4 of the first ship of the white convicts labor
force, on the Antelope, 300 of them with guards. From 1824 to 1863,
the British Government shipped thousands of British convicts from London prisons or
English prison hulks to Bermuda to build the Dockyard. The hulks were once ships
of the line that had fought at Trafalgar and elsewhere. Masts were taken off and
extra decking and roofs were erected to make places on incarceration.
British convicts who were exiled in chain gangs to Bermuda at that time included debtors, unemployed mill hands goaded into riots in Britain by starvation, Irish nationalists, Welsh debtors, Scotsmen defiantly and violently protesting the Clearances from the northern Highlands of Sutherland and Caithness in particular, defaulting bankers, sheep steelers, poachers and petty thieves.
They all wore the Broad Arrow - used to identify property of the government and probably best known on convicts' uniforms. It has its origins from when Henry Sidney, Earl of Romney, Master of Ordnance to William and Mary, was asked to mark all government property to reduce theft. He chose to use his family emblem which is a broad arrow, or Pheon, and this is still in use today by the UK government 300 years later.
The decision to send them to Bermuda had an interesting origin.
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After the War of 1812 to 1814, there were continuing disputes between the British and Americans over the boundaries between Canada and the United States. The military authorities saw this as future trouble. They were informed that work on building the dockyard was proceeding far too slowly. Providing the convict labor force was a cheap and effective way to overcome the problem, get the base built cheaply and isolate the trouble-makers. Bermuda was selected as a convict station in preference to Sierra Leone in Africa or Canada. Without the Dockyard, Bermuda would have had none, all would have been sent to Australia instead. As it was, it received 8 for every 1 sent to Bermuda. Transported to hard labor in the colony for six to eight years in the same way British convicts had been once been condemned in Virginia and elsewhere in the USA until the American Revolution in 1776, the prisoners lived on rotting Royal Navy prison hulks - including some from the Battle of Trafalgar 20 or more years earlier - and worked from sunrise to sunset to build the naval bastion and fortress. |
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Most were still wearing chains of bondage as convicts when Bermuda's blacks were freed from all vestiges of slavery in the 1840s. Only when the sentences of the convicts was served if they still lived - because 20% died in Bermuda or on the way there - were they allowed to remain as free colonists. The British convict cemetery is behind Albert Row on Ireland Island South, via a left turn onto one way Cochrane Road (named after Admiral Cochrane). About 2,000 of the 9,000 convicts died here from yellow fever or other diseases and were buried there, but the graves of many are no longer visible. Note the Redman headstone in the grave yard at Boaz Island which reads "Killed One Day, Died the Next." Nearby, past a tall stone chimney, is a weathered limestone formation known as Pulpit Rock, from the convicts who were denied freedom of worship. Because of the social stigma in Bermuda attached to the convicts, 98% of those who survived elected to go back home to England or Wales or Scotland or Ireland, or emigrate to Canada or USA after they had served their sentences. |
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Possessions of the convicts from the 19th century found much later were of value only to the convicts who made them illegally. The Colonial Times of 1826 reported the situation then prevailing as follows: "At the termination of the assizes or sessions, the keepers of the various gaols throughout the kingdom are required to transmit to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, a list of prisoners who have received sentence of transportation, and an order is then forwarded, directing to which of the hulks they are to be conveyed. On their arrival, they are immediately stripped and washed, clothed in coarse grey jackets and breeches, and two irons placed on one of the legs, to which degradation everyone must submit, let his previous rank have been what it may. They are sent out in gangs of a certain number to work on shore, guarded by soldiers. A strict account is kept of the labour performed by each gang, there being a scale by which it is calculated, and out of each shilling earned for the Government by the prisoner, he is entitled to a penny, which is carried to his credit; but of this he receives only one third part weekly, the remainder being left to accumulate until the expiration of the term which he is doomed to serve. |
"Thus it sometimes happens that a man who has been six or seven years on board
the hulks, on his discharge is put in possession of ten or twelve pound, and is
also supplied with an addition sum of money to defray his travelling expenses
home. The strictest discipline is
maintained, and extreme cleanliness enforced in the vessels. The diet daily
allowed is a pound and a quarter of bread; a quart of thick gruel, morning and
evening; on four days of a week, a piece of meat weighing 14 ounces before it is
cooked; and on the other three days in lieu of meat, a quarter of a pound of
cheese, also an allowance of small beer; and on certain occasions, when work
peculiarly fatiguing and laborious is required, a portion of strong beer is
served out; no where [except in the Colonies] does a good behavior meet its
reward more than at the hulks. A chronicle is kept of the conduct of each, and
the Captain and Chaplain have the privilege of recommending annually a certain
number as fit objects for a mitigation of punishment, so that it frequently
occurs that a man sentenced to seven years transportation, serves only three
years and a half or four years; there are also other inducements to orderly
conduct, such as having the irons lightened and being promoted to little
appointments which relieve from severe labour. Besides those who are retained to
serve out their term of transportation in England, thousands are every year sent
to these colonies, upon an average about six transports arrive annually in Van
Diemen's Land; and about twelve in New South Wales. Amongst others who are
actually transported to the Colonies, such are invariably selected as are known
to be old offenders, and those who appear to be incorrigible. One ship, the
Bellerophon, at Sheerness, is appropriated exclusively to a reception of boys,
not exceeding 16 years of age, most of whom are not expatriated, but are taught
various trades, such as shoemaking, tailors work, bookbinding and etc. The
morals of these youthful delinquents, some of whom are not more than ten years
old, are very carefully attended to; it is, however, a lamentable fact, that not
withstanding the severe lessons taught by the discipline of the hulks, very many
instances occur of prisoners who have been discharged, again returning to habits
of dishonesty, and, again incurring the penalty of transportation, eventually
banished to these Colonies. The Penitentiary, at Millbank, was erected in order
to serve some measure as a substitute for the hulks or exportation, but it is
sufficiently notorious that this gigantic establishment which has cost the
Mother County near a million of money, has hitherto most lamentably disappointed
the expectation of its projectors, both in a moral and political point of view.
About two years back, when much sickness prevailed in the penitentiary, an Act
of Parliament was passed, to enable His Majesty to remove the prisoners from
thence to the Hulks, and a certain number were draughted to each ship. These are
said to have exhibited little symptoms of reformation, but, on the contrary,
were generally found to be the most refactory. We have drawn this statement ,and
we place it before the Public to convince them of the difference between the
usage of American prisoners, and those subjected to a penal bond in the Colonies
we inhabit; and we are the more eager to do so at the present period, from the
influx of prisoners from England and the penal settlements, otherwise we should
not have been induced to have entered thus fully into this subject." Source
- CT Sept 1 1826.
Few in Bermuda or the United Kingdom will admit they are descended from convicts, unlike in Australia where it has become a source of pride that many there are descended from men sent there as convicts for offences that today are so minor no-one is imprisoned at all. But it is known that some - not many - of the wives and children were voluntarily transported to Bermuda so as not to completely break the family ties.
In addition to building the Dockyard, they also constructed parts of Pembroke Parish, for example, the caves and secret hideout at Admiralty House.
Trial records for convicts tried in England can be found primarily, not in Bermuda but at the London Public Record Office (PRO) in Kew or at the County Record Office responsible for the place where the trial occurred. Generally in the UK, for British convicts sent to Bermuda, Assizes Court records are held at the PRO while Quarter Sessions records are held in local County Record Offices.
For more information in Bermuda on the convicts, see the books:
One of the books that circulated at the time in Bermuda was the 1834 publication "An historical view of the progress of the physical and mathematical sciences." The author was Baden Powell, the father of Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. Handwritten in the margins of the book, on two different pages, is "The Ireland Island Library Association" and the "Bermuda Convict Establishment". The author's brother-in-law, Sir Henry Augustus Smyth, was an army officer who served in Bermuda between 1847 and 1851. He was in the Royal Artillery which then helped to guard the Dockyard as well as other places. He may well have brought this book with him, but possibly donated it to the library there when he left.
1848 woodcut showing prison hulks moored off Ireland Island, Bermuda
In 1829, the 118-ton Bermuda-built cedar privateer, completed in 1825, also with the name Pickle in honor of the vessel of 1803, took part in a severe Royal Navy action of the northeast coast of Cuba that resulted in the capture of a Spanish slave-trading ship, the Boladora and the release of 330 slaves aboard.
By the 1830s the Dockyard and forts elsewhere in Bermuda were fully armed. The Old Cooperage building was built by the Royal Navy in 1831 for navy storage (now the Bermuda Arts Center, the creative workshop of local artisans and artists, open 7 days a week).
One of the buildings usually
completely overlooked by visitors is Lefroy House, named in the 1960s (after the
Royal Navy left in the 1950s) after the famous
Bermuda Governor and historian in later life. See "Friends of Lefroy
House." Ireland Island, Sandys. Phone 234-0525. Fax 234-2152. Adult day
care center for seniors. Registered charity 393. But its significance here is
that it was built by the Royal Navy in its Dockyard days and was its shore-based
hospital. (It served heroically during World War 2). It is before you get to the
Dockyard proper.
From the mid 1800s on, the exploding shell and use of rifling inside a gun barrel improved range and accuracy. Rifled muzzle loading and rifled breech loading guns were also much easier, safer and quicker to load and fire. The Royal Navy brought them to Bermuda in quantity to fight off an enemy.
Commissioner's House in Bermuda was restored in 2000 after long years of neglect. The Bermuda Government contributed US$ 500,000 in a new partnership with the Maritime Museum. It has now been reopened as a second museum.
It is identical in name to properties at other Royal Navy bases. It is so-called because it was the home and office of the Royal Naval Dockyard Commissioner. It has the distinction of being the oldest cast iron building in British military history (it is exceeded in age only by a few buildings in the USA where cast iron buildings were pioneered).
It was an iron and steel framework shipped from the United Kingdom. It caused a monumental scandal because of its huge cost to British taxpayers. It became HMS Malabar VI and remained so until paid off. In front of and below it - see picture above - is the replica of the original bowsprit of a one famous Royal Navy vessel (with the author next to it).
The
Great Eastern Storehouse, huge - pictured - with 3 foot walls and 100 foot towers, was built
in 1856.
The clock on the south tower was cast in England in 1857 by John Moore and Sons.
What seems to be a single hand clock on the eastern side of the north tower is a rare "tide clock."
In Royal Navy days, the hand was set daily to indicate the time of high tide. Grassy areas lead to deep water berths. Today, it is a shopping mall - the Clocktower Mall.
By 1857, the Keep at the Dockyard surrounded on three sides by sea water - had 68 guns, mostly of 24 and 32 pounds in ammunition size and range. In those days of Imperial sea power, one gun in the latter weight could fire a 32 pound ball for a distance of 1,000 yards. From these, shells were carried to the guns on special systems.
The grim building of Casemates (below - described by name in Somerset Parish - was once solid rock. It is one of the most important - and second-oldest of the Dockyard buildings. It was built from convict labor in the 1830s as a barracks for Royal Marines.
Casemate Barracks - as it was then called - was so named after an English military facility and was a barracks for the men of the Royal Marine Light Infantry, then responsible for the defence of the Dockyard. The "casemate" refers to the fact that its roof, vaulted in brick and concrete some eight feet thick, was built to make it bomb-proof against the incoming cannon balls and mortar shot of the day. At one time (1848), Casemates was the barracks of the 42nd Highlanders (Black Watch). They were then guarding the convicts building the Dockyard.
Its yard is a flat, white wasteland created by the blasting away of its hard limestone, to give slaves (until 1834), free men and jailbirds from England (until 1863) the raw material from which they laboriously shaped each and every rock that made up the fortifications. The walls are several feet thick and made of specially-treated local limestone needed no plastering to make them waterproof.
It had two floors with accommodation for 120 officers and men, along with canteens, messes and offices. There was a veranda - needing restoration - on three sides of the building on the ground floor. The well that forms the roof has unparalleled views of the Dockyard to the northeast and the building, given its construction, was capable of being used as a fort. On either side of the Barracks was an ordnance yard, still with gunpowder storage buildings, or magazines.
When the Royal Navy left, it became the main Bermuda corrections center (prison) for convicted criminals until 1995. There was even an execution or two here in the 1970's.
It was such a damp, forbidding, gloomy place that the Bermuda Government built a brand new prison nearby, to make it more humane. The old building is still there, not used at this time.
In recent years, but without success to date, there have been proposals to create a hotel from the prison. It has also been suggested that the Bermuda Archives be relocated here.
How used initially and subsequently.
Ruby, ex 64,1811-1821, depot ship
Romulus, ex 36, 1813-1816, hospital ship
Romney, ex 50, 1820-1837, hospital ship
Royal Oak, ex 74, 1825-1850, receiving ship
Resolute, ex brig, 1826-1852 diving bell
Despatch, ex transport, 1826-1846 receiving ship/slop ship
Dotterel, ex brig 1827-1848, receiving ship
Terror, floating battery, 1857-1901, base ship
Virginia, barque, 1862-1866, coal hulk
Irresistible, battleship 1868-1894, depot ship.
Scorpion, turret ship, 1869-1901 guard ship.
Minstrel, gunboat, 1874-1902 coal hulk
Forward, gunboat, 1892-1904 coal hulk
Shah, frigate, 1895-1919, receiving ship/coal hulk
Hotspur, turret ship, 1897-1903, guard ship
Malabar, troopship 1897-1918, base ship and from 1901 in place of Terror.
Rupert, turret ship, 1904-1907, guard ship
Captain Sir Michael Seymour painted this scene from Commissioner's House in May, 1847.
He commanded HMS Vindictive on the North America and West Indies Station from 1845 to 1848. Note the prison hulks on the left side. The Victualling Yard had not yet been built.
English engraving of Royal Navy ships at anchor off Dockyard, 1962
The earliest dock proposal was made in 1823 but in 1827 the Clerk of the Works argued that the local rock was too heterogeneous and porous for an efficient coffer dam. But a slip was started to careen the hulls of ships and is still there. The idea of a floating dock was discarded for a generation. It was stated that the new slip had to be capable of accommodating two 46-gun frigates. Correspondence was renewed in 1852 on the relative merits of a dry-dock, a slip and a floating dock. At that time, it was specified that the largest vessel to be considered would have the bean of the Terrible and the length of the Simoom, or the size of an 80-gun ship as these were the largest that could come through the Narrows in the channel widened for ships.
In 1854, a 600-foot slip was proposed at a cost of 35,000 pounds sterling but considered too costly. Three years later there was a plan for a dry-dock and yet another slip in 1862. Then it was decided Bermuda should have a floating dock. It was built by English floating dock engineers Campbell & Johnstone at Blackwall on the River Thames and completed on June 23, 1869.
Floating Dock arrives in Bermuda 1869
She was towed out by the HMS Agincourt and HMS Northumberland as far as Porto Santo, Madeira, where HMS Warrior (Britain's first iron-hulled battleship, built in Blackwall on the River Thames in 1860 as a counter to the naval ambitions of Emperor Napoleon III of France, the fastest, largest, strongest and best-armed warship in the world but by 1869 she was obsolete) and HMS Black Prince took over. With HMS Terrible and a small gunboat fast astern, the voyage took 35 days. The ships and the floating dock arrived off Ireland Island on July 28. The floating dock lay in Grassy Bay until the following April when it was brought to the North Basin and moored against the Great Wharf.
As a functioning Dockyard, this facility had ammunition depots, deep water berths, barracks, chapels, soldiers and sailors to guard it. The soldiers were based at the fort here, the largest in Bermuda (now the Bermuda Maritime Museum).
The
Keep was freshly equipped in the 1870's until 1905. Concrete emplacements for 10 inch
rifled muzzle loading guns were built on five of the bastions. One could fire a 400 pound
exploding shell for a distance of 4,800 yards. Two new magazines for ammunition were also
built. In the 1880s, the Royal Navy
brought modern breech loading guns with steel barrels to Bermuda, in accordance with the
rearmament at British dockyards in Britain, Canada and Malta.
What is now the Queen's Exhibition Hall was a magazine built in the late 1800s for 4,860 kegs of gunpowder. The Shifting House once handled ordnance for naval vessels.
Not until after 1900 did the USA and Britain become allies, which is why so many land based forts were built in Bermuda in the 19th century. They and their powerful, long range, hill-top coastline cannons discouraged an enemy from seizing Bermuda. All the forts in the Western Parishes were designed to help protect the Dockyard. It was Britain's Atlantic naval base headquarters from Canada's Great Lakes to the Caribbean and remote islands of the South Atlantic. It was the Citadel of the Western Atlantic and Gibraltar of the West.
In the early 1900's, three 4.7 inch quick firing modern breech loading guns - mostly to guard against torpedo boats -and four new six inch breech loading guns were mounted on the bastions. Each was supplied by an underground magazine. Under this further improved system, a six inch gun could fire a 100 pound exploding shell for 12,000 yards.
Also in the 1870s, Cockburn's Cut - named after a former Admiral - was excavated. It is between Ireland Island north and south. The year of construction of the bridge was 1896.
From 1880 to 1885, Dr. Edward Lewton Penny was the Dockyard parson, schoolmaster and librarian. A scholar, he described himself in Latin as "unhappily submerged and badly treated in the Bermuda Islands. " In this sketch by him he notes in Greek that the man who borrows a volume and does not return it is committing a sin. He hoped for the best but expected the worst.
| American military quit Bermuda in 1995 | Bermuda Forts built by the British Army | British Army in Bermuda |
Last Updated: May
10, 2008
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