On some summer mornings in Dockyard, the naval base all but disappears.
From the flagpole by the ferry dock you mostly see steel: two or three mega-ships parked side by side, balconies stacked like high-rises above the limestone walls, passengers pouring down the gangways in bright T-shirts and lanyards. The old casemates and cranes are still there, but they’re just background to the floating apartment blocks tied up at King’s and Heritage Wharves.
Ships have been quietly rearranging Bermuda for a long time, long before anybody talked about “formal night” or “shore excursions”, small steamers and liners helped turn the island from garrison and onion patch into “somewhere you go in the winter.”
In the mid-1800s, getting here from New York meant days on a sailing packet, praying for decent wind. You could sit off the island watching breakers on the reefs, waiting for a pilot, with no idea when you’d actually get ashore.
Then, in 1868, the colonial government chartered a small steamer called Fah Kee to run regularly between Bermuda and New York. She’d started life as a US Civil War gunboat and now carried a few dozen first-class passengers along with mail and produce. People described her as “safe and convenient,” which was the polite way of saying: you might still be sick all the way across the Gulf Stream, but at least she left and arrived more or less when she said she would.
No one thought of Fah Kee as a cruise ship. She was a lifeline. But she made it possible to think of Bermuda as reachable on a timetable instead of “whenever the wind allows.” And she started a habit that would stick: Government paying a subsidy to keep the ships coming. By the 1870s, the House of Assembly was voting money each year to guarantee a New York service.
In 1874 the Quebec Steamship Company took over the run. By the 1880s they were advertising weekly winter departures: leave Manhattan on Thursday, arrive in Hamilton on Sunday. The ships still carried onions and Easter lilies north, but the brochures were selling something else—Bermuda as “a winter resort” where tired city people could get their lungs and nerves back.
The island began to answer that sales pitch. Hotels went up on the harbourfront, including the Hamilton Hotel and later the Princess. Golf courses spread inland. When Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, spent several weeks here in 1883 and praised Bermuda’s “eternal spring” in the international press, she gave that new resort image a royal endorsement and is often credited with helping to launch the tourism era. Glass-bottom boats and cave tours appeared. By the turn of the century, ships and hotels were growing into each other’s business.
After the First World War, the relationship got more serious. British shipping company Furness Withy took over the New York–Bermuda contract and created the Furness Bermuda Line. In the late 1920s it ordered two liners built specifically for this run: Monarch of Bermuda and Queen of Bermuda. In September 1932, at Barrow-in-Furness, Lady Cubitt christened the new Queen of Bermuda with a bottle of Empire wine before 28,000 tons of steel slid down the ways, watched by shipyard workers, Furness executives and a small Bermudian delegation. Three days from New York to Hamilton, air-conditioning, swimming pools, formal dining rooms, three funnels—these were not just ferries. They picked up nicknames like “the Honeymoon Ships” and “the Millionaires’ Ships,” which tells you plenty about who was paying the bar bill.
The Queen of Bermuda in particular dug herself into the island’s memory. With her three red-and-black striped funnels and reputation as one of the original “Millionaires’ Ships”, she quickly became a familiar and much-loved sight as she glided into Hamilton Harbour.
Stripped and armed during the Second World War, she spent the conflict as an armed merchant cruiser and later a troopship. When she returned to the New York–Bermuda service in 1949, fire tugs, a band and half of Hamilton Harbour turned out to meet her. For people who had endured blackouts, ration books and telegrams from overseas, seeing that silhouette off Two Rock felt like a signal that some version of normal might be back.
For schoolchildren and office staff, the Queen’s six-chime whistle became part of the weekly rhythm. You could hear it before you saw the ship. Boys in blazers and bank clerks on tea break would slip down to Number One Dock to watch her come alongside, check out the passengers and stand for a moment under that wall of steel and polished brass.
She wasn’t just something to stare at. By the 1950s and 60s, dozens of Bermudians were working aboard as bellboys, stewards, waiters, galley hands and junior officers. Families were fed and mortgages paid with wages and tips earned carrying suitcases, serving cocktails and working split shifts in the North Atlantic. A few bits of Bermuda real estate today were bought one gin and tonic at a time on that ship.
Alongside the Furness liners, the Canadian “Lady Boats” folded Bermuda into wider Caribbean and Atlantic routes. Together they fixed the picture we still reach for when we think “old Bermuda tourism”: couples in linen stepping down a gangway onto Front Street, spending a week or two at the Princess or Elbow Beach, then walking back up the same gangway to sail home.
And then the jets came.
By the late 1950s and 60s, commercial airliners had cut the trip from New York to a couple of hours. You could leave in the morning and be in a chaise longue by lunchtime. Visitor numbers climbed, but more and more people were arriving with boarding passes, not luggage tags from Furness.
For an all-first-class liner that only ever sailed to one island, the sums stopped working. In 1966, the Queen of Bermuda was retired and scrapped; the Furness Bermuda Line folded soon after. For Bermudians who had grown up timing their day by her whistle, it felt like losing a neighbour as well as a ship.
Around the same time, on the Clyde in Scotland, another “Queen” was taking shape.
Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth 2—QE2—was launched in 1967 and entered service in 1969. Built as a modern transatlantic liner, she could slide into cruise mode for warmer waters in the off-season. Over the next four decades she became one of the most recognisable ships afloat, and Bermuda showed up on her itineraries often enough that her visits began to feel like a regular event.
Her size set the rules. At close to a thousand feet and, after refits, over 70,000 gross tons, QE2 was never going to risk Two Rock or Town Cut. On Bermuda calls she usually came in from the west and anchored in the Great Sound. From shore she looked like a model in the wrong scale, this big white liner dropped into a bowl of small islands and headlands, with lifeboats shuttling passengers back and forth.
While QE2 was lying out there, the setting she looked at was changing.
The Royal Naval Dockyard, begun in 1809 as Britain’s main North Atlantic base, had been running down since the mid-20th century. Once the Navy pulled out, its stone buildings and vast open spaces sat largely empty. Ireland Island became a place of rumour and rust: abandoned barracks, chained-off workshops, a great fort with no clear job.
In 1982, Government created the West End Development Corporation (WEDCO) to make something of it again. Warehouses became shops and restaurants. The Keep became the National Museum of Bermuda. King’s Wharf was built as a dedicated cruise pier, later joined by Heritage Wharf, sized for the new mega-ships. By the 2010s, hundreds of thousands of cruise visitors a year were moving through the West End.
Hamilton and St George’s had to adjust. For most of the 20th century, ships at Hamilton were part of the city’s daily theatre: a liner bow-on at Front Street, engines humming, band playing on deck, clerks wandering down at lunch to see who’d arrived. Smaller and mid-sized ships still berth there, and many shop owners quietly prefer those days. But the big vessels can’t be risked through Two Rock anymore, and Town Cut in St George’s is even less forgiving. Most cruise passengers now meet Bermuda for the first time among kiosks and tour buses at Dockyard.
When two large ships cancel, taxi drivers, shops and tour operators feel it straight away. When two arrive together, parts of the island feel briefly overrun. Arguments about passenger caps, what mega-ships do to the “Bermuda brand”, and how much pressure reefs and roads can take now turn up everywhere from talk radio to the bar at the Mariners’ Club.
Some patterns, though, have barely budged. The ships have always brought work, and they’ve always started arguments.
In the Furness era, they were employers in their own right; half of Somerset seemed to have someone “on the Queen” at one time or another. As tourism switched towards jets and mega-ships, the jobs shifted onshore: taxi and minibus drivers at Dockyard running relays to Horseshoe Bay and back in such numbers that on cruise-ship days locals can barely use the beach, tour boat operators, dock workers, entertainers, hospitality staff in Dockyard bars and restaurants, vendors renting out bikes and paddleboards on cruise-ship days. The old questions keep coming back in slightly different clothes: should we pay to attract them, as we did with Fah Kee? How many passengers is too many? And what exactly are we trading away and what are we getting in return?
Look down the timeline and you can trace the line without needing a diagram. In the 1860s and 70s, little steamers nudged Bermuda into the North American imagination as “that winter place in the Atlantic.” In the interwar decades, Furness’s liners turned that connection into something grander and more social, while giving hundreds of Bermudians wages, sea-time and stories. After jets made flying in ordinary, ships like QE2 and the growing cruise fleets repositioned Bermuda as one stop—an important one—on longer itineraries.
There is even a quiet twist in the registry book. Cunard’s current “Queens”—Queen Mary 2, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth—now sail under the Bermudian flag, registered in Hamilton. The decision was mostly about practicalities, including the ability to hold legal weddings at sea under Bermudian law, but it suits an island whose economic story is so tangled up with ships called Queen.
Stand on the outer wall of the Keep on a busy cruise day and you can see most of this history in one slow turn of the head. To one side are the old naval works: dry docks, bastions and stone buildings that speak of sail, coal and empire. Straight ahead, mega-ships sit at King’s and Heritage Wharves, upper decks bristling with water-slides and big screens. In your mind’s eye you can still slot in the Queen of Bermuda easing down the harbour, or QE2 lying out in the Great Sound with her tenders buzzing like water beetles.
The horns echo off the walls. The pilot boat noses back through the Narrows. By late afternoon the gangways come up and the big ships begin to edge away from the pier. It’s the same basic story it has been for 150 years: people, and their money and their memories, arriving and leaving by ship—and Bermuda having to decide, each time, what kind of welcome and what kind of limits it wants to put at the water’s edge.
