If there was one year in which Bermuda could be said to have been ‘discovered’ as a desirable destination for tourists, it was probably 1883. Before that year, Americans had only vague notions of Bermuda as a mid-winter supplier of succulent onions to the green-grocers of New York and as a sometime menacing base for the British Navy, the ‘Gibraltar of the West.’ The year 1883, however, brought a clutch of visitors whose infatuation with the colony was transmitted back into the consciousness of North America, leaving the seductive impression that somewhere off the cast coast of America lay a “Juneland” where the world-weary could rejuvenate themselves.
Typical of the newcomers was a New York literary journalist, F.H. Taylor. Weighed down by work, Taylor decided he needed “a refuge from new books, telegrams, fresh American plays and all the rest of it.” On a “grey and dispiriting December afternoon,” he took a cab to New York City’s Pier 47. He boarded the S.S. Orinoco bound for Bermuda. The voyage was hellish, the Orinoco “dipping her iron nose saucily into the big green seas.” But two gyrating days later he was in Bermuda, “a delightful little aggregation, quite complete in itself, sans railroads and even politics, and nearly every other disturbing influence…” Bermuda, Taylor quickly concluded, was the perfect tonic for the “hard-worked, brain-racked citizens” of America.
The New York Times reached the same conclusion that very year. When the wife of Canada’s governor-general decided to cheat the frigid Ottawa winter by escaping to Bermuda, America’s greatest newspaper despatched a reporter to dog her steps. That the Marchioness of Lorne was also Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise made the assignment doubly enticing. When Louise proved elusive, the Times reporter turned his attention on the colony itself.
From Gibb’s Hill to Devil’s Hole, he wandered the Island. He tantalised his shivering New York readers with news that he had just picked bananas outside his hotel window. Bermudians, one of his columns concluded I, were “too modest. If they pushed their claims further, and more people in the States understand what a delightful country they have, they would have far more visitors.”
That same year, the Vermont novelist Julia Dorr voiced a somewhat different opinion after her sojourn. She informed the readers of Atlantic Monthly that Bermuda was “truly a paradise,” precious because distance had divorced it from America’s fever of progress and protected its uniqueness. “It can never be overrun by a noisy, promiscuous, tumultuous rabble. It must always have the subtle, indefinable charm of remoteness.”
American historian Paul Fussell has suggested that modern mass tourism is the culmination of a long process by which Western man first explored and then travelled. The explorers who fanned out from Renaissance Europe took risks by probing the unknown; the travellers who followed in the 18th and 19th Centuries deepened the knowledge of what was known but little sampled. Twentieth-Century tourists then crowded the “beaten path” in search of predictable enjoyment. Taylor, Dorr and the regal princess were thus travellers, adventurers who returned home bearing favourable impressions of a hitherto unfamiliar land. Others made the same pioneering journey. Since his first landfall in Bermuda in 1867, Mark Twain had, for instance, regularly conveyed the message back to America that Bermuda was a place “for pure recreation, the bread-and-butter element left out.” Collectively, these early ‘tourists’ helped to refashion the colony’s once harsh image—a foreboding image of jagged rocks, humidity and pestilence first given it by the Renaissance explorers-into an image of salubriousness and relaxation.
Until the 20th Century, few thought of tourism as an ‘industry’. Through much of the 19th Century, Bermuda had little reason even to contemplate the rewards of attracting visitors to its shores. Shipbuilding and seafaring paid handsomely early in the century, only to be eclipsed by the profits of market gardening in the late century. The onion was, as Twain noted, Bermuda’s “jewel, her gem of gems.”
Two waves of accidental tourists briefly invaded the onion patch. During the American Civil War, southern blockade runners frequented St.George’s, turning the sleepy port into a bustling entrepot for contraband cotton and military hardware. “These islands here are filled with Southerners,” the Northern consul reported back to Washington, “they seem to have plenty of money and have purchased largely from the merchants here.” Despite this largesse, The Royal Gazette complained the “constant presence of hundreds of rollicking blades” in St.George was “a real disgrace to any civilised community.” Bermuda’s first tourist boom ended abruptly with the Northern victory.
Health seekers followed. News that an island insulated from winter sat off America’s coast drew ‘consumptives’ to Bermuda after the Civil War. Tuberculosis sufferers came in the belief that Bermuda’s warm, clean air would restore their health. They soon discovered the air was also humid; only dry air cured diseased lungs. “Bermuda is not suitable,” the Bermuda Almanack advised in 1880, “for those in the last stages of hope for more life, but it is eminently adapted for those who are in need of rest and change.” Bermuda thus would not restore health, but it would preserve health. Thus, the image that drew Twain, Dorr and Princess Louise to the colony in the 1880s was that of “the isles of rest.” This image, powerfully appealing to North Americans frayed by the excesses of the Gilded Age, would be the mainstay of Bermuda tourism for the next century.
For their part, lulled by the rewards of market gardening, Bermudians were slow to take up the challenge of tourism. Early visitors complained the colony did not offer comfortable hotels, attractions and reliable steamer service from New York. Local capitalists resisted the long-term commitment of such investments; onions paid sooner and surer. The colony’s first resort hotel was therefore the product of municipal initiative. Hamilton’s redoubtable mayor Henry James Tucker cajoled his council into building the Hamilton Hotel, which it opened in the early 1860s and then leased to a series of American hoteliers.
By 1900, it boasted 400 rooms, telephones and hot and cold water. Private initiative soon took the hint. In 1884, a local syndicate opened the Princess, named for Louise, on the Hamilton waterfront. Tourists’ fascination with the sea soon produced resort hotels at Flatts, St. George and on Elba (now Elbow) Beach. By 1905, there were two golf courses. Local entrepreneurs developed tourist attractions: the gothic fish trap at Devil’s Hole, the Crystal Caves and glass-bottom boat excursions. The colonial government played its part, opening the Botanical Gardens in 1898 and prevailing on the garrison to serenade early tourists with regimental band music. Livery stables taxied tourists around in carriages and rented bicycles to the intrepid.
Government completed its role by promoting better steamer service. Here tourism and agriculture went hand in glove. Beginning in the 1870s, the Assembly voted an annual subsidy to induce regular steamship service from New York. A Canadian company won the contract and for almost a century, the steamer subsidy was to be a costly fixture of Bermuda government spending.
The weekly service at first left much to be desired. The small steamers had to fight their way diagonally across the choppy Gulf Stream. One queasy visitor reported in 1879 that “the wretched ship had no more centre of gravity than a cherub.” In the ‘crop-moving’ season, tourists had to contend with crates of vegetables smions on the decks, Maer. Yet, the link was made. Regular wack-stacked on the decks. Many complained their clothes stank of cr service meant regular tourists, arriving and departing on a weckly basis. And the ships got larger and more luxurious; in 1904 the colony welcomed The Bermudian, a 5,500-ton twin screw beauty specially designed for the run.
For all the late-century improvements in the “isles of rest,” the main impulse behind the emergence of Bermuda tourism came from North America as one 1902 visitor put it, the urge to escape “the hurly-burly of nerve-straining Gotham.” Indeed, Bermuda tourism’s emergence was more a result of push from North America than pull from Bermuda. “We are in a little world of our own,” one American rejoiced, “distinct from either Europe or America.” When Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, arrived at the Hamilton Hotel in 1907, he wrote to his wife that “I find a very strong feeling of strangeness on me here, but it is a soothing feeling.” Bermuda offered what America no longer could: rural tranquillity steeped in ‘Britishness’ and natural beauty. The affluence brought on by America’s industrialisation and urbanisation made escape to the “isles of rest” both possible and necessary. In their first amateurish attempts to advertise their Island’s tourism in the 1890s, Hamilton merchants adopted the slogan “very unique” to project Bermuda’s image across the Gulf Stream.
In the years just before the First World War, the colony experienced its first tourist boom. In 1908, Bermuda welcomed only 5,400 visitors, but a mere three years later, more than 27,000 came ashore. In 1911, the governor congratulated the Assembly that for the first time the annual number of tourists had exceeded the colony’s population. Bermuda, he declared, had entered a “new stage of development,” timely news given that Bermuda’s agricultural exports were being undercut in the American market by cheaper home-grown vegetables from the South. Bermudians quickly adjusted to the trend. Workers left the fields to take up jobs in the hotels and on the docks. The merchants of Front Street used their considerable political influence in the Assembly to establish the Trade Development Board in 1913 as an agency to nurture tourism. The board was given a plump budget and wide powers to steamer subsidies.
With remarkable rapidity, Bermudians adopted a collective attitude that tourism was Bermuda, that they must groom their Island to conform to the “isles of rest” aesthetic that gave it its distinctiveness. Acts were, for instance, passed to ban automobiles and gaudy commercial signs from Bermuda; the colony was not to become a Coney Island. The place was to be “Nature’s Fairyland,” the title given to the board’s first official guidebook in 1914. In this fairy-land, tourists were ‘visitors,’ to be treated with friendliness by everyone from carriage driver to hotel manager.
War broke the spell and taught Bermuda islanders their latest lesson in their vulnerability to fickle outside forces. In 1914, the steamers stopped coming and German submarines negated all attempts at advertising. Desperate to position the colony for a postWar return of tourism, the board scoured the horizon for a reliable steamship link to America. In 1919, a British company, Furness-Withy, took the contract, thereby forming what was to be the most durable partnership the colony was ever to enjoy in promoting its tourism. For almost a half-century, Furness-Bermuda ships bearing regal names like the Queen of Bermuda were to make a voyage to the colony a byword for luxurious travel.
The steamer contract allowed the colony to think in strategic terms about its tourism. Sleek, up-to-date liners would capture well-heeled North Americans and deliver them to a carefully manicured mid-Atlantic playground. Only quality visitors were to be courted; Bermuda’s postage stamp size and its delicately balanced society made mass tourism unappealing to Bermuda’s elite. Hordes of “trippers” —low-spending vulgarians looking for a good time— would debase the colony’s precious aesthetic and drive out the lucrative uppercrust visitors. Genteel honeymooners, yachtsmen, golfers, tennis players and hard-driven writers and businessmen in search of rest were to be the core of Bermuda tourism. In Bermuda, they would all find semi-tropical contentment in the midst of people who shared their values. And, while America endured Prohibition, they could also drink spirits.
The Twenties therefore saw the colony build an infrastructure to support carriage trade tourism. Resort hotels like the Castle Harbour and the Bermudiana appeared. The world’s best golf-course designers, like Charlie Macdonald, “the father of American golf,” were commissioned to fashion courses like the Mid-Ocean out of the Bermuda scrub. The tourist season was stretched to maximise the use of these facilities. Summer became high season.
“You can do everything or nothing at all…Luxuriously,” a Castle Harbour Hotel advertisement promised. Winter remained a time of longer, more restful relaxation. Tucker’s Town, with its magnificent views of Castle Harbour, was cleared of its small farming community and turned into an enclave for the wintering rich. Rockefellers, Roosevelts and Fricks bought lots and built their places in the sun.
The Rockefellers, for instance, commissioned Wallace Harrison, who had designed the Rockefeller Center in New York, to design an Island retreat-Round House—for them in Tucker’s Town.
The American invasion of Bermuda proceeded uninterrupted through the 1920s. By 1930 there were 43,000 visitors annually.
No other island resort had such kudos in American eyes.
“It is really my kind of paradise,” the writer Katherine Anne Porter wrote, “all brilliant colour and tropical sun and fruitfulness, and the British colonials there are the most reassuringly well-mannered and decent people.”
Canada’s prissy Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, loved the place and thought of it as Italy “without smells and dirt.” By 1926, tourism had clearly surpassed agriculture as the leading sector of the colonial economy, bringing in 80 percent of colonial revenue through passenger departure taxes, wharfage fees on liners and import duties on hotel supplies.
The control room overseeing this new-found prosperity was the Trade Development Board, which meticulously groomed the colony for its visitors. Advertising was directed to just the right media—a colour advertisement on the back cover of The New Yorker, for instance. Furness-Withy was encouraged to build new “built for pleasure” liners. Yacht races were sponsored. Litter was picked up. And, probably most importantly, the message that tourism was Bermuda was impressed upon every Bermudian mind.
Few other tourist destinations have ever achieved such a complete marriage of the social deportment of its citizens and the aesthetic expectations of its visitors. While the merchants, steamship agents, bankers and hoteliers on the board undeniably reaped the first and largest profits from the tourist trade, they were always shrewd enough to allow an appreciable trickle-down to all Bermudians.
Whenever there were inklings of unrest, the subtle message went out that, without its well-heeled American visitors, Bermuda would be relegated to the sun-baked poverty of its Caribbean sister colonies. By the same token, the board playing to the prejudices of the day sought to preserve the pristine appeal of the colony in wealthy American eyes by quietly discouraging Jewish and black tourists, whose presence it was felt might have ‘disturbed’ Bermuda’s idyllic social image in its loyal visitors’ minds.
The triumph of this pragmatism was amply revealed in the Depression. Having fashioned its tourism out of the richest cloth of American society, Bermuda was to protect its market while American society as a whole reeled under the impact of economic contraction. Throughout the ‘Dirty Thirties,’ tourism in Bermuda actually grew, peaking in 1937 at 82,800. After all, Bermuda offered not just an escape from winter, but also an escape from the grim reality of American capitalism gone awry. To make the point, the Trade Development Board despatched photos to the North American press of America’s best, brightest and richest weaving around the colony on bicycles and lounging at the Castle Harbour Hotel pool-“the smartest winter resort west of Biarritz.”
Bermuda was where Babe Ruth, Gertrude Lawrence, E.F. Hutton and Vincent Astor got away from it all. When cruise ships bearing ‘trippers’—less affluent, bargain-seeking tourists-arrived off the colony, Bermuda agonised over admitting them and in the end opted to regulate their visits.
Tourism thus saved Bermuda from the worst ravages of the Depression. It also allowed the colony to position itself at the cutting edge of tourism’s newest frontier: commercial aviation. Only the wealthiest could afford to fly in the 1930s and they were exactly the type of tourists Bermuda wanted. Just as it had befriended Furness-Withy and assured the colony the best liner service possible, the trade board now allied itself with two pioneers of commercial aviation-Pan American and Imperial Airways.
In June, 1937, the first flying boats touched down on the Great Sound. Bermuda was suddenly only five hours from New York. An aerodrome was established on Darrell’s Island, from where speedy launches carried passengers to their hotel docks. Pan Am’s dynamic president, Juan Trippe, was to become one of Bermuda’s most stalwart allies in tourism. He would later buy a home in Tucker’s Town, always ensuring that the colony received preferred service from his clippers. In 1959, for instance, a Pan Am Boeing 707 brought Bermuda into the era of jet tourism.
In 1939, war struck again. “I must say that it seems terribly sad,” Bermuda’s Colonial Secretary wrote to London at the outbreak of the Second World War, “that this lovely place should be ruined by that foul man Hitler.” The liners and clippers were quickly replaced by destroyers and bombers, as Bermuda rediscovered its role as the ‘Gibraltar of the West.’ Another American ‘invasion’ fol-lowed, as waves of U.S. servicemen came ashore. They brought with them the trappings of North American life: cars, trucks and a huge air base which they implanted in Castle Harbour using dredged coral. Bermudians fretted that the colony’s tourism would be spoiled forever by American speed and noise; with peace, the vulgar gobs would be replaced by vulgar tourists. The war, in fact, turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the “isles of rest.” The colony’s wartime heroics served to etch Bermuda into the North American mind. Life magazine published no fewer than four feature articles on “Bermuda in its battledress.” In each, the colony emerged as warm and quaintly different. This was exactly the same impression taken away by thousands of Allied servicemen, whose peacetime thoughts would soon turn to marriage and honeymoon-ing. And with peace, the American air base, Kindley Field, would allow them to return to Bermuda in faster, land-based commercial airliners.
For almost two decades after the war, Bermuda enjoyed an unchallenged position in resort tourism. Undamaged by war and riding on its pre-war prestige, the colony exercised a magnetic pull over North Americans seeking a respite from the post-war boom.
Europe lay in shambles, while only the intrepid ventured into the Caribbean, which lacked the requisite infrastructure of hotels and airline connections. Only the Bahamas exerted any appeal and its trade was in trippers from Florida. Bermuda got the quality tourists. Lots of them. The 100,000 mark in annual arrivals was passed in 1953; the 200,000 mark in 1963 and by the end of the 1970s just under 600,000 visitors more than 10 times the tiny colony’s population-were flocking to Bermuda annually, 85 percent of them from the American eastern seaboard. Bermuda, the American novelist Peter Benchley told readers of National Geographic in 1971, was “balmy, British, and beautiful.” Today, Bermudians wistfully look back on this magical appeal and the exponential growth it brought as the “glory years” of their tourism.
Bermuda tourism in these glory years through the 1980s ran like a finely-tuned automobile. Travel to the colony might be slow and elegant; Furness-Withy maintained its stately liners on the Bermuda run until 1966, after which, a growing fleet of luxurious cruise ships vied for entry to the colony. For the impatient, an expanding fan of airlines connected Bermuda to the heartland of its loyal visitors, from Atlanta to Halifax. Air travel allowed them to come when they wanted, stay for three days or three weeks and then leave when they wanted. Once in Bermuda, the visitor could choose to stay in a grand resort hotel, a cottage colony or a small guest house. Cottage colonies like Pink Beach Club and Cambridge Beaches, and small hotels like The Reefs, were perhay the most distinctive form of Bermuda accommodation-small, friendly and exclusive. In the late 1960s, the pressure of growth prompted the construction of two new grand hotels, the Southampton Princess and the Sonesta Beach. Other hotels were renovated.
All this change was guided by Bermudians’ canny instinct for balancing the demands of continuity and innovation, Cars had been made legal in the colony after the war. Rather than loose tourists in cars on the tranquil colony, the colony shrewdly limited its visitors to taxis, government-owned buses and rented mopeds. The visitors thus enjoyed new-found mobility on their vacations but Bermudians held the steering wheel. To ensure the right kind of visitor and to spread their impact through the whole year, the colony deftly developed products targetted to particular audiences.
College Weeks each spring attracted preppy American collegians, who frolicked by day on Elbow Beach and danced by night to the music of the Talbot Brothers. Winter visitors were treated to a Rendezvous season of arts and entertainment. Fort St. Catherine was renovated and opened to celebrate the colony’s heritage. An annual cycle of golf, bridge and sports tournaments punctuated the year. Every two years, sleek ocean yachts raced from Newport to the “onion patch.” The Tall Ships visited in 1976. Royal visits accentuated the colony’s distinctive ‘Britishness.’
Beyond this deft mixture of events, accommodation and travel arrangements, the central pulse of Bermuda tourism remained essentially the same. Bermuda thrived as a tourist destination because it was different. “You liked Bermuda the way it was. So that’s the way it is,” one poster promised. “Bermuda. Where you still find 19th-Century niceties,” another boasted. Americans came because they still found the place quaint, friendly and unblemished by the worst attributes of North American life-noise, hurry, pollution and the sense of being but a minion in an uncaring urban society. For one week a year, there was rejuvenating pleasure in finding a place where people habitually said “good morning” (and meant it), the beaches were clean and the bus didn’t start until you had found a seat. Newcomers found their discovery of Bermuda’s charms as sweet and disarming as did Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling almost a century before. For Beatle John Lennon, who summered in the colony in 1980, the place was a “paradise” where a songwriter jaded by the commercialised culture could rediscover his muse. Lennon named his last album, Double Fantasy, for a flower in the Botanical Gardens.
Tourism’s high water mark came in 1987 when an astonishing 631,314 tourists came to Bermuda. In economic terms-tourism’s contribution to Bermuda’s gross national product—the peak had probably come early in the 1980s. Since then, the industry has performed more fitfully. The lucrative mainstream of ‘regular,’ air-borne, hotel-staying visitors has fluctuated erratically, hitting a low of 375,231 visitors in 1992.
Cruise ship tourism has tended upward, but its impact is shallower, hardly touching the job-generating hotel sector, while providing a fillip for government coffers and Front Street retailing.
Bermuda visitors now plan their visits with shorter lead time; the habitual week-long annual holiday in Bermuda is increasingly a thing of the past. Bermuda’s visitors spend less. Demographic changes-the ageing baby boomers, two-career marriages-have combined with market shifts-the deregulation of North American airlines, the appetite for all-inclusive holiday packages—to make tourism a roller-coaster business.
Bermuda’s once seemingly invulnerable market advantage as an island in the sun is gone. The World Tourism Organisation in Madrid, the keeper of global tourism statistics, reports tourist arrivals around the globe have grown exponentially from a mere 25.3 million in 1950, when it began keeping records, to almost a half-billion arrivals a year in the mid-1990s. Bermuda has thus become a small wave in this surge of global tourism. Tourists have become comparison shoppers on a global scale. They face a feast of options that offer variety, value and novelty. Bermudians have not been oblivious to these shifts; the last decade has seen heated debate over how they can adjust the levers controlling their tourism’s fortunes-cruise ship policy, hotel expansion, labour costs—in order to enhance their competitiveness.
More often than not, they have discovered that theirs is a mature product, set in its ways and resistant to change. Some have prescribed shock treatment casinos, fast food, lively nightlife. Others respond that too much change would break Bermuda’s “very unique” spell over America and reduce it to a costly, mid-Atlantic version of Florida or southern California. Somewhere in between these two views lies the future.
If history teaches anything about Bermuda tourism, it is that Bermuda has succeeded when the gap between what it offers its visitors and what they wish to leave temporarily behind them is widest. Once, the choppy Gulf Stream did the trick. But, in an age of jet travel, homogenised consumerism and electronic culture, the challenge is more daunting.
A hundred years ago, Charles Dudley Warner put his finger on what it is about Bermuda that is worth preserving in the visitor’s mind, at any rate: “This protection from the noise and excitement of modern life is one of the great charms of the island,” he told readers of Harper’s Weekly. “There is scarcely any other place in the world so defended, and certainly the inhabitants of the United States can in no other two days’ journey get so completely out of the world and all its uneasiness.”
And so it is.
