Patiently preserving Bermuda

[Photos: Bermuda Department of Tourism] Visitors walk to the gate to Spittal Pond. At about 60 acres, it is tiny Bermuda’s most important wildlife refuge.

By HERB HILLER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 4, 2001

Its unique environment and history are as important as tourism to the island nation.

Imagine volcanic specks in a warm sea on which discoverers create a flowering paradise, a resilient democracy and a pollution-free economy. Bermuda comes across like this, a place of such beauty and competence that its natural and human history seems unblemished.

For more than 100 years, visitors have come (and come back) for Bermuda's pink sand beaches, its landscapes, golf, sailing and British colonial heritage.

Houses and commercial buildings are distinctive, in bright pastels beneath white roofs -- stepped in order to direct rainwater runoff into cisterns.

Public order and civility create their own impressions: graffiti-free public places, uniform street signs, even the greetings Bermudians offer fellow passengers, yet strangers, on boarding the immaculate buses.

Equally impressive is how Bermudians patiently work at keeping their island this way. Accidents seem to begin everything.

First is the island's location: Bermuda occupies the same northern latitude as Tibet, yet its foliage calls to mind Florida's, thanks to the warm Gulf Stream that bathes Bermuda.

The second "accident" occurred in 1609, when English colonists bound for Virginia wrecked on these isles. They had first been discovered by Juan de Bermudez in 1511, but they were left unsettled for another century. There were no indigenous peoples before English settlement.

One consequence: From Avonville to Windyfields, place names are indubitably English.

But those early English did import slaves -- first Irish, then North American Indians, then Africans, by way of the West Indies. On an island just 22 miles long and at most 2 miles wide, plantations were few, and slaves and owners occupied close quarters. Miscegenation flourished.

Those settlers also completely altered the natural landscape. They twice set fire to the entire chain of islands, big and tiny, to rid themselves of rats that had come ashore from ships. The fires wiped out the indigenous cedars and palmettos. In their place, settlers replanted with today's non-native specimens.

The result of these accidents is Bermuda's signature style, a spot of England lushly contoured and gardened in a blue-green shimmering sea.

Making it stable

By the 1970s the most racist practices evolved from the slave era were overcome; today, blacks hold numerous positions of authority, from prime minister down. While there are crime and drug usage, race-based disturbances and labor strife have given way to social adjustments. There are seldom scary headlines in the overseas media, so the small country still draws tourists and, more recently, corporate locations for the insurance and re-insurance industry.

Government works to maintain the image of a tidy, and pretty, island paradise. To hold down pollution and crowding on the handful of narrow roads, each household is limited to a single vehicle -- the chief reason why many islanders ride the reliable buses, commuter ferries and mopeds or scooters.

Verdmont, a stone house built about 1910, is one of the properties maintained by the volunteer organization Bermuda National Trust.

Nor may visitors rent cars on Bermuda -- there are none. If they want to head off on their own schedule but avoid the costly minivan taxis, tourists can rent scooters.

But it is the nongovernmental Bermuda National Trust that largely reinforces the shared heritage that binds Bermudians.

The trust works to conserve Bermuda's environment and cultural heritage. As trust executive director Amanda Outerbridge says, "Heritage figures below food and drink, but it provides Bermudians with a sense of continuity and belonging. I never hear anybody say it's a bad thing that we do."

The trust owns more than 50 properties. These include burial grounds and farmhouses and, more notably, structures such as Verdmont, a stone house built at Harrington Sound about 1710 and unchanged since 1802, and open space such as Spittal Pond, just east of Verdmont and, at about 60 acres, the country's most important wildlife refuge.

The trust is a nonprofit charity, one of about 400 in this country of 65,000 people, but its most prestigious. About 3,500 residents, more than 5 percent of the population, are dues-paying members. The trust employs 20 and operates with a budget equal to $1.3-million U.S.

The government provides 10 percent of that sum. The rest comes largely from corporate sponsors such as the Bank of Bermuda, General Atlantic Group and Transworld Oil.

The trust conducts teacher workshops on the island's heritage and arranges tours for schoolchildren to historic sites.

And the organization also influences tourism.

Trust programs aimed at locals often attract tourists. For instance, one program features a historical interpreter who performs as a young woman from the mid-1800s, relating those times to visitors at Verdmont, and singing and chatting about her diary entries with visitors to Tucker House, in the centuries-old capital of St. George.

The Bermuda National Trust Museum, opposite St. Peters Church in St. George, features a highly regarded exhibit on the island's involvement in the United States's Civil War. England favored the South, so Bermuda, among other things, provided a haven for blockade runners.

Largely because of trust advocacy, the "Historic Town of St. George and Related Fortifications" was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000, underlining the efforts at preserving island history.

To maintain that heritage, the trust monitors proposed changes that might affect the look of the island.

Even though Ms. Outerbridge called it "almost anti-Bermudian" to object to ideas that could benefit tourism, the trust succeeded, after "a big battle," in winning a reduction in the physical scope of the Underwater Institute, which is alongside Hamilton Harbor.

The trust also objected to elements of a condominium-hotel development that represented government's cornerstone for turning around a long decline in tourism. The complaint was that the buildings might affect underground caves that rank among Bermuda's most sacrosanct natural features.

"Tourism and protection of our environment are definitely not mutually exclusive," said Ms. Outerbridge, who also serves as deputy chair of the country's advisory tourism board. Yet, she added, sometimes "People flinch about my talking about impacts on environment and heritage.

"But the trust is not a knee-jerk, latter-day Luddite organization. It's known we go about our business in an organized, methodical manner."

The condo-hotel development was ultimately approved by the government but with its footprint slightly reduced. The rationale for subordinating heritage concerns to commercial interests was provided by member of Parliament DeLaey Robinson:

"Half the economy is driven by tourism (which) is labor-intensive, and most of the labor in the industry are our (political) supporters. We could not sit by and watch tourism go downhill" by voting against the new development.

Reinventing the past

Equally ambitious but headed in a different direction from the work of the trust is noted ornithologist David Wingate, whose project on tiny Nonsuch Island is re-creating Bermuda's native environment.

Nonsuch Island is one of the dots in the Castle Harbour Islands Nature Preserve. The area is remote enough that there is no bridge from the big island to these little ones.

As a teenager, Wingate had helped naturalists search small islands for existence of the cahow (ka-HOW), a large seabird believed extinct for more than three centuries until bodies of unknown birds were found. He was with this group of researchers when the first living cahows were found, on a small island. According to one report, it took 10 more years' searching to establish that there were just 18 nesting pairs alive.

The government recognized the importance of saving the species and declared the larger Nonsuch Island to be a sanctuary for the cahow; the survivors were moved there. Wingate came to Nonsuch in 1958 to head the recovery effort.

But he soon conceived of creating a "living museum," a microcosm of precolonial Bermuda as it had naturally emerged, rather than a refuge for one managed species.

As in other places, the advances of development in Bermuda had meant the destruction of some of the ecology.

The building of Bermuda's airport in the 1940s allowed the migration of insect pests against which native fauna had no defenses. The once-dominant cedar forest, a low, gnarly growth that was hurricane resistant and that had grown back after its early destruction by settlers' fires, was again wiped out. Government again reforested the mainland with exotics.

But on Nonsuch, Wingate in 10 years replaced invasive trees and plants with about 10,000 native and endemic trees, starting with a few cedars that carried a genetic trait conducive to their survival. In the 10 arboreal generations since, Nonsuch cedars are almost totally resistant. The islet more resembles coastal Georgia than subtropical Florida.

The value of his work is obvious after several recent tropical storms. In two hours in 1987, the first hurricane since the demise of the main island's cedar forest destroyed an estimated 35 percent of Bermuda's biomass. But the renewed cedar forest on Nonsuch largely survived that blow -- as, now more fully developed, it easily survived two brushes with hurricanes this year.

Wingate, made a Member of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in 1975, wants to bring blight-resistant cedars back to the main island. However, germinating cedars won't grow beneath an established forest canopy, and rats quickly devour saplings. (On Nonsuch, he eliminated rats with a chemical that stops their blood from clotting.)

Still the researcher, Wingate says: "We don't yet have all the answers. We need to study the project for another hundred years."

- Freelance writer Herb Hiller first visited Bermuda as a member of the Coast Guard in 1957; his most recent return trip was in September.

If you go

GETTING THERE: There are no direct flights from Florida to Bermuda, but Delta connects through Atlanta and US Airways through Philadelphia.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact the Bermuda Department of Tourism toll-free at 1-800-237-6832; the Web site is bermudatourism.com.

For information about tours, contact the Bermuda National Trust; (441) 236-6483, fax (441) 236-0617, Monday-Friday; the Web site is www.bnt.bm.

Also, contact the Bermuda Biological Station for Research Inc., (441) 297-1880, fax (441) 297-8143, e-mail to webmaster@bbsr.edu; the Web site is www.bbsr.edu.

A good general guidebook is the lushly illustrated Insight Guide Bermuda, published by Insight Guides, a division of Langenscheidt Publishing Group. The second edition is $22.95.

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