Overlooking Hamilton Harbour, Fort Hamilton is a landmark most Bermudians feel they already know well. We’ve walked its ramparts, enjoyed the view across the harbour, and taken visiting friends or family to explore the moat below. Yet for all that familiarity, few of us realise just how much history lies hidden beneath the surface.
Beneath the lawns and walkways of this nineteenth-century fortress lies a more complex—and far less romantic—story. It is a history of military ambition, technological experimentation and strategic paranoia. It is also a story of land dispossession, emancipated labour and, unexpectedly, the private lives of soldiers and labourers who used (and occasionally vandalised) the fort’s facilities. Few people know this history better than archaeologist Florence Laino.
Laino, a professional archaeologist with an MSc as well as a degree in archaeology and a decade of fieldwork across Europe, is currently leading the archaeological investigations at Fort Hamilton—the first sustained archaeological excavation in the site’s modern history. Her résumé reads like a highlight reel of military archaeology: Excavations at Hampton Court Palace; a multi-period burial ground on the High Speed 2 rail project; and six seasons on the Napoleonic battlefield of Waterloo in Belgium. Yet nothing, she says, compares to what she is uncovering in Bermuda. “This site is a microcosm of four centuries of shifting military strategy,” she explains. “But it’s also a window into the social history that existed around those strategies. The archaeology gives voice to people who didn’t leave written records.”
Laino’s work at Fort Hamilton is part of a multi-year improvement project led by the City of Hamilton in partnership with the Bermuda National Trust. Phase One, which includes complex underground infrastructure, invasive-species removal and sensitive restoration, has created a rare opportunity—open ground in an historic fortress. For an archaeologist, that’s a gift. And Laino is making sure the site tells its story before anything new is built.
A Fort Built on Fear
To understand why Fort Hamilton was built, one must return to the 1870s when Bermuda was still a node in Britain’s global military network. The American Civil War had just ended, and British authorities worried that the newly unified, newly confident United States of America might retaliate against Bermuda, which had assisted Confederate blockade runners. “Four new forts were commissioned to protect Dockyard from a potential enemy invasion,” Laino says. “Fort Hamilton, Prospect Camp and Fort Langton together formed the ‘Prospect Position.’ Today, Fort Hamilton is the only one preserved for the public.”
Fort Hamilton was no small undertaking. It was carved into a hillside, surrounded by a 20-foot dry moat and engineered with underground tunnels, monumental earthworks and the latest Victorian-era military innovations. Among them were disappearing gun carriages—part cannon, part catapult—and a horizontal-retracting drawbridge known as the “Guthrie Rolling Bridge,” an eccentric invention that slid sideways on tracks like a Victorian railroad turntable. Yet for all its expense and ingenuity, the fort was obsolete almost immediately after completion. Advancements in long-range artillery rendered it unnecessary.
But while the military history is well documented, the human history—the families whose land was requisitioned, the teams of Black Bermudian masons whose skilled labour shaped its walls, and the men housed here after its decommissioning—is almost entirely missing from the archives. “Written records capture strategy,” says Laino. “Archaeology captures lives.”
When Construction Meets Conservation
The City of Hamilton’s improvement plan for Fort Hamilton includes major upgrades: a new 36,000-gallon water tank below ground; a new accessibility ramp to allow barrier-free entry into the fort; and updated utilities to support future lighting, kitchen facilities and ADA-compliant washrooms. Invasive vegetation has also been carefully removed, revealing historic stonework hidden for decades. Fort Hamilton is a designated Historic Protection Area so, by law, archaeological work must happen first. Before any construction begins, Laino assesses each location. She studies old maps and architectural plans to predict what may lie buried, and then excavates the exact spots where the city plans to build, such as the ramp, the water tank area and new service trenches at the entrance.
Where Laino finds significant remains, she records and excavates them before construction proceeds. Where nothing survives, the builders continue uninterrupted. Once the main excavation is done, Laino remains on-site to monitor digging and document anything unexpected. “We can build for the future and protect heritage at the same time,” she says.
An Outhouse Becomes a Time Capsule
The most surprising discovery emerged from what no one expected to be a highlight—the remains of a nineteenth-century outhouse. Maps from 1883 indicated that the structure had existed, but nothing prepared Laino for what she found beneath three feet of soil: a floor slab, and then a second, older floor beneath it. That second floor revealed a meticulously constructed slate urinal, with three stalls, still bearing quarry marks—including the word BERMUDA painted in red, likely applied in a quarry in Wales before being shipped to Bermuda.
And then came the catchpit. Beneath the urinal lay a six-foot-deep pit filled with the discarded detritus of daily life: clay tobacco pipes (some from Ireland), buttons, bottle fragments and even what appears to be the clay boot of a toy soldier. Mixed among them were enormous quantities of fish bones and scales. “Imagine a soldier,” says Laino, smiling. “He’s bored. He relieves himself, smokes his pipe, and scratches graffiti into the slate. He leaves his mark.” One slate slab bears a faint but unmistakable inscription: 86th. The 86th (Royal County Down) Regiment of Foot was stationed in Bermuda in the 1880s. For a brief moment, through scratched graffiti and smoking pipes, the archaeological record breathes. “Archaeology that can connect to named regiments, to specific groups of people—that’s rare,” says Laino. “In those moments, history becomes intimate.”
Forgotten Residents: The Fort’s Portuguese Labourers
Not all discoveries were strictly archaeological. Some are archival, and they reveal a little-known chapter of twentieth-century Bermuda. After the Corporation of Hamilton purchased the fort in 1926, plans to repurpose the ditch as a town reservoir never fully materialised. Instead, the fort became temporary housing for Portuguese labourers employed by the Corporation. “This is an undocumented part of the fort’s history,” Laino explains. “We have references from the 1930s and 40s, but very little detail.” She hopes that Bermudians may be able to fill those gaps. “If anyone has family memories, photographs or stories from that period, we would love to hear from them,” she says. “History belongs to the community.”
Challenges Above and Below Ground
While Fort Hamilton is a Victorian-era site—typically a period well documented in military archives—Laino was surprised by how few records remain. With help from the Bermuda Archives, she tracked down architectural plans stored in London, which proved invaluable for guiding excavation. But when it came to understanding daily life at the fort, personal accounts and photographs were scarce. “I expected more written records about what happened here,” she says. “Either the War Department discarded them when the fort was decommissioned, or perhaps not much was ever documented.” She now hopes Bermudians may hold the missing pieces in family albums or inherited stories—from the people displaced when the land was taken, to soldiers stationed there, to later uses of the fort by the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps and even Portuguese labourers. On top of the archival challenges, Laino navigated a personal one: She completed much of the excavation while pregnant. “We wrapped up digging around the 35-week mark,” she laughs, grateful for the help of the fort’s gardening team.
From Excavation to Exhibition
After excavation, each artifact follows a precise chain of custody: washing, bagging, cataloguing and distribution to specialists—pottery to a pottery expert, metal to a conservator, faunal remains to a zoologist. Once analysis is complete, every object will return to Bermuda. “All artefacts will be archived with the National Museum of Bermuda,” Laino says. “Some will eventually go on public display as part of a permanent exhibition at Fort Hamilton.” In other words, these discoveries belong to Bermudians. The fort, once an instrument of defence, is becoming an instrument of education.
Revealing the Invisible
Archaeology is already reshaping what we know about Fort Hamilton. Excavation revealed the original entrance road buried beneath layers of fill, showing that the fort once sat at a much lower ground level. Nearby, the massive stone foundations of the Guthrie Rolling Bridge—an unusual Victorian engineering invention—were uncovered, and paint analysis confirmed that the bridge was originally black, not red. In other areas, quarry pits beneath the surface show how workers shaved away sections of hillside to construct the fort. “Archaeology makes the invisible visible,” says Laino. “We uncover both structure and story.” The work is revealing that Bermuda’s forts are not static relics of the past—they are archives of engineering ambition, colonial expansion and the everyday lives of the people who built, occupied and adapted them.
Every time Laino opens a trench, she invites a dialogue between past and future. Her work proves that heritage preservation need not resist development; it can guide it intelligently. “We can build new things and preserve Bermudian heritage at the same time,” she says. When the Fort Hamilton Improvement Project is complete, visitors will see new amenities, thoughtfully designed pathways, curated exhibits and interpretive signage. But beneath their feet, the stories remain—preserved because, for a brief moment in Hamilton’s modern history, someone stopped to listen.
