Bermuda: “calm Clear Land”
November 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 7
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In 1815 Bermuda’s capital had been moved to Hamilton, where, by the 1880s, the beginnings of a tourist trade were stirring. Americans then as now formed the majority of the island’s visitors, carried from New York to Hamilton on new, faster passenger ships. For Mark Twain, a frequent visitor, this was “the right country for a jaded man to ‘loaf’ in.” Woodrow Wilson often sought peace in Bermuda too. “At last we are away from the crowd down here in this calm clear land,” he wrote, “where it seems possible to detach oneself from all kinds of distracting thoughts and think freely again.” Even the tormented playwright Eugene O’Neill found the place a solace. He first arrived in 1924 and stayed for several months at a time, toying with the idea of permanently settling there. “The climate is grand . . . [I]t has proved a profitable winter resort for me,” he reported to a friend. “I’ve gotten more work done than in the corresponding season up north in many years.”
As today’s visitor strolls through Bermuda’s four-hundred-year history, the senses are always engaged, the eye captured by a series of pictures. Houses painted in all the clean, ripe tints of fruit and flower are clustered on hillsides, their stepped roofs blazingly white against a cloud-struck or immaculately blue sky. In the wind the tall, spiky palm bends to the low, round-leafed sea grape. Never more than a mile away on this narrow-waisted island, the sea is nearly always visible, if only as a slice of deep aqua beyond the burst of pink oleander that climbs a stone wall.
The color, especially, seeps into the brain and stays there. On the ferry from the hamlet of Salt Kettle late one afternoon, I admired a particularly natty gentleman wearing a yellow blazer. In the slanting light his jacket took on a shade so purely lemon that it was almost edible. Those adventurers of 1609 came ashore in distress, scrabbled at an island, and made a life there within a year. A few stayed on, some returned, and others arrived in numbers. Something in that nourishing light must have drawn them all.
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Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
