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Ninety Forts Span 350 Years
By Dr. Edward Harris
 In the summer of 1612, five years after the establishment of Jamestown, Va., which led to the creation of the United States, a small ship arrived in Bermuda with its first settlers, volunteers from England. Richard Moore, governor of the second English colony in the Americas, was charged by the Virginia Co. — later known as the Bermuda Co. — to fortify the new colony against a Spanish attack. Before the end of 1612, several forts were erected, the first of over 90 forts that spanned almost 350 years of Bermuda's four centuries of settlement.
Most of Bermuda's forts were unique for the first decades of English colonisation in this hemisphere, for they were built of stone, unlike their counterparts of timber, such as James Fort in Virginia. Consequently, several of the first Bermuda forts have survived, whereas those on the continent soon rotted away, leaving only buried archaeological traces. In Bermuda's entire history, only one timber fort was built, but that structure burnt to the ground one fine day in late October of 1620. The new governor, Capt. Nathaniel Butler, had visited the fort and received a salute from its guns. In the haste of the gunner to go to the governor's ship in Castle Harbour, he forgot to put out the match, and all watched in horror as the fort went up in smoke.
The first forts were placed along the northeast coast, where the extensive barrier of reefs to the north and west did not protect the land. Later in the 1600s, small redoubts were built along the south shore, where a number of beaches and breaks through the nearby reefs could allow an enemy to land. All of the early forts were quite small, but adequate, and they were designed by the local citizenry. Into the later part of the next century, life on the defences of Bermuda was a quiet affair, a peaceful interlude from strife elsewhere.
Change came dramatically at the end of the American Revolution in 1783, when Britain lost its harbours on the East Coast. Halfway between British possessions in the Canadian maritimes to the north and the West Indies to the south, Bermuda became the pivot in English military strategy in the western North Atlantic. The Royal Engineers arrived here in 1788 to begin the refortification of the islands and, with the other branches of the British Army and the Royal Navy, remained in some force until 1957, with a final departure in 1995.
Massive forts were built on the northeast coast, as that was the most vulnerable shore. To the west, a great naval dockyard arose, surrounded on three sides by the largest fortifications in Bermuda. As artillery changed in the 1860s, some of the forts were remodelled and new ones built, a process that had to be repeated at the end of the 1800s, as modern breech-loading guns were invented.
From 1783, the forts in Bermuda were intended to protect the islands against a hostile takeover from the United States, and they performed their job admirably, even if a shot was never fired in anger. In April 1941, a friendly invasion of Americans took place, as the U.S. Army assumed wartime responsibility for the coastal defence of Bermuda. The American forces brought their own artillery with them and thus represented the final phase of new artillery work in Bermuda.
A decade after World War II, the British garrison left Bermuda for the last time. However, military activity continued for the next four decades through the U.S. naval air station, with P-3 Orion aircraft seeking and tracking Russian submarines patrolling off the East Coast and to Cuba.
In the spring of 1995, the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy left Bermuda, probably for all time, and the forts and other structures left behind now serve to defend the islands' tourist economy as major heritage assets.
Read more about Bermuda's tours and attractions in Sightseeing, or get a quick listing of activities to help you Experience Bermuda.
Relax, enjoy, save and see Bermuda by bus. A blue or pink pole indicates bus stops. If the pole is topped with blue, the bus travels from Hamilton; if the pole is topped pink, the route is toward Hamilton.
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