In Bermuda An Idyll of the Summer Islands of 1884, Julia Dorr described Bermuda’s geographical shape as follows: “The islands lie northeastward to southwestward, in the form of a fish hook ….. twenty-five miles from end to end, and fifteen miles in a straight line.” Whether she was the first to describe it as a fishhook is arguable but she certainly wasn’t the last. Many other writers about Bermuda have borrowed her metaphor, including James Ziral in The Insiders’ Guide to Bermuda (1998) who referred to Bermuda as “this fishhook-shaped coral archipelago.”
Certainly, the image is fitting. On a map, even on the simple one Sir George Somers sketched in 1609, Bermuda does really look like a fishhook and its rich marine history includes much fishing, thanks to picturesque characters such as Geary Pitcher of St. David’s who alone supplied the Bermuda military with rock fish and grouper he caught off St. David’s during World War II.
True, the 1941 landfilling creating the American Base and airfield obliterated Long Bird Island while dramatically changing Ferry Reach and St. David’s southern coastline, but the silhouette of the whole archipelago resembling the fishhook still looks unchanged.
However, if plans drawn up as early as 1943 to create a much larger Bermuda by dredging and landfilling had been acted upon, Bermuda would certainly have a different shape on our late 20th and 21st century maps. What plans? You might well ask since they are rarely if not ever mentioned today. At various times between 1943 and 1964 the prospect of substantially expanding Bermuda was seriously mooted by Bermuda’s Chamber of Commerce and by Bermuda’s House of Assembly. The plan was first exposed to the public on the front page of the Royal Gazette of March 20, 1943:
“A bold scheme for the extension of Bermuda’s acreage was outlined last night at a meeting of the Bermuda Chamber of Commerce when the President, Mr. M.[Morris] A. Gibbons, mooted a plan to increase the land area of the Islands by approximately 60 per cent.
Briefly outlining the scheme, Mr. Gibbons said that it was well known to Bermuda that at low tide a person could walk out from the Somerset end of the Islands across the shoals some considerable distance to the North and West of the Dockyard. “Using equipment already in Bermuda, it seems quite possible to build up on these shoals, thereby creating a large strip of land beginning at Tudor Hill and swinging in a wide arc from the mainland to a point beyond the tip of the Dockyard.”
A large island could similarly be constructed; as wide as the thickest part of present-day Bermuda, lying to the North and extending to the North-east of St. George’s.“
Gibbons went on to explain that the plan was conceived by a Mr. Frank Gosling. Who was he? Born in 1911 and given the full name, William Francis Goodwin Gosling, he was the second child of Francis Gosling and Alice Trimingham. His elder sister was Alice Emily Gosling, who was known as Elsie and who became the head librarian of the Bermuda National Library, while his younger brother was Bernard Trimingham Gosling. All three were born in Paget. Frank would never leave the family house, “Underwood”. According to his obituary in the Royal Gazette, he was educated at Saltus Grammar School, and also by a private tutor. In his youth, he was one of the best tennis players on the island and he was a “keen fan of sports of all types” although apparently an unspecified illness prevented him from participating in many.
There is no record of him marrying or having children. Quite what he did for a living, if anything, is unclear. He did not, for example, work for the Gosling’s liquor business. But judging from his ideas for Bermuda’s future, he was undoubtedly some kind of eccentric visionary who thought about Bermuda’s problems and about how to solve them. Some of his ideas were downright terrifying. Having already suggested dry icing hurricanes to deflect them, in 1950 he wrote to the Research and Development Board in Washington suggesting hydrogen bombs could be experimentally exploded in the Arctic and Antarctic areas in order to ascertain what effects they would have on the world’s weather. “Many benefits may result – far outweighing any unfavourable results,” he wrote. “The bombs would certainly melt a great deal of ice.” He argued that agriculture would spread farther north and south, that mining minerals in those areas might become possible and that people “would be able to live in greater comfort farther north and south than hitherto.” “Hydrogen bombs,” he argued bizarrely, “can thus be used for the betterment of mankind instead of for its annihilation.”
But Gosling’s main passion was creating more land for Bermuda which he said was an essential solution to Bermuda’s growing population (an issue that certainly seriously concerned the Government at the time) and it was this project he had in mind when he founded his company, Gosling Atlantic Enterprises, and hired Dr. Guillaume Piette, professor of engineering and partner in a Montreal engineering firm, to research its viability. During working visits to Bermuda, Piette would stay at the Mid-Ocean Club in Tuckers Town. Right from the start, the project had support. Morris Gibbons argued that “Though this might seem like a dream, when Mr. Frank Gosling had drawn a fairly accurate plan of the American East End Bases in 1939 everyone who saw it treated the proposal as an utter impossibility. Look at it today. In two years there has been made the finest airport in the world.” Gibbons also agreed with Gosling that Bermuda’s population then standing at 2,000 persons an acre was a major incentive for adopting the plan.
(According to the Gazette, Gosling was “credited with having first come up with the idea of building Kindley Airfield partly on fill sucked from the bottom, and his idea was passed on to the U.S. Government.” Whether this was true or not is unclear.)
By December 1958, Gosling, as reported in the Gazette, applied to the Colonial Office in London to purchase roughly 60 square miles of submarine land to the west, north-west and north of Bermuda and to request a marine surveyor to survey the scheme. At this point, he wanted to build new islands, possibly seven, in the archipelago. He explained, “Using three or four dredgers, at least 12 square miles could be built within two years.” The suction-type dredger, said the Gazette, “would crush the coral heads and add them, with sand, to the heads on which the land was being built.”
To the modern mind, his scheme sounds chilling, environmentally disastrous. But we have to remember each era has its own pressing concerns and its own gaps in knowledge. A glimpse at E. A. McCallan’s Bermuda Home Vegetable Garden manual of 1943 illustrates this. As a former director of Agriculture, he advocated using many control poisons unthinkable today. They included arsenic, mercuric chloride and DDT, the last of which was a popular pest control everywhere. Steps taken to control the lizards is another example. In 1957, authorities imported the great kiskadee to Bermuda to control them, not realizing this decision would adversely affect the bluebird and white-eyed vireo population and would greatly exacerbate the spread of invasive plants. Still, as we shall see, environmental awareness countering the destruction of the reef did eventually come into play.
By 1958, Gosling also had plans on one of his islands for a new city, which would cut down on congestion and traffic. It would be located “about one-and-a quarter miles west of Daniel’s Head. A wide boulevard is envisioned running along a harbour on the southern side of “New Bermuda,” with docks located slightly east of the city proper. Wide lawns would flank drives running along the outside of the wedge-shaped city and avenues with roundabouts would bisect blocks of buildings enclosing a triangular public garden. On the north or sea-side of this proposed city a high wall would be erected for protection.”
However, in November 1961, Gosling was faced with a different problem. As so often happens in Bermuda, another person jumped on his bandwagon: William Blackburn Smith, who together with his daughter Madeline Scott, had founded the Perfume Factory in Bailey’s Bay in about 1929. In 1941, despite wanting to create another Tucker’s Town for Long Bird Island, he was forced to sell his property there to the War Office for the construction of the American Base. Already familiar with the idea of land reclamation and agreeing that Bermuda’s population was hugely problematic, he also came up with a plan, one which differed from Gosling’s, however. Instead of building islands, he wanted to add on to the shoreline by creating land on the reefs to the west of Southampton and Somerset. Whereas Gosling’s plan would be entirely a private enterprise, Smith felt that private companies should not be responsible for dredging the land. It would be far cheaper and more advantageous for Bermuda, he argued, if the project were run and financed by Government.
Undeterred by this new competition, Gosling developed his plan further, explaining that five islands could be constructed, forming an area of approximately three square miles, at a cost of £10 million but with no cost to the Government. The first island would be linked to the mainland by a causeway. Two other islands would be located off the west of Daniel’s Head. Work on the remaining two islands was to be postponed.
By August 1, 1962, House of Assembly appointed a “select committee” headed by Lt.-Col. J. C. Astwood, M.C.P to look not only into Gosling’s scheme but also two others: Smith’s and one other seeking to create additional harbour space and land by connecting islands north of Spanish Point. Crucially, at least from a modern point of view, the committee had also received a request by the then curator of the Aquarium, Louis S. Mowbray, for the preservation of reef areas off Bermuda from desecration.
When the committee convened in February 1963. Gosling must have been devastated to hear they turned down his proposal, not because they were against land reclamation in general but because they agreed “it must be done by the Government so that when finished, the land belonged to the Government.” It’s interesting to note that while Louis S Mowbray’s proposal for reef conservation received little publicity, the committee certainly paid attention to it, agreeing there should be created a zoned reef area. It’s likely he had been voicing environmental concerns behind the scenes. One member of the committee, Dr. W. H. C. Masters, paid particular attention to Mowbray’s proposal, wanting to know what effect land reclamation would have on the fish population around Bermuda, noting that “when Kindley was constructed an entire grouper ground on the South Shore well away from the dredging had disappeared.” Frank Gosling did not give up. He submitted a new petition. In June 1963 the Legislative Council agreed to form a new committee with the House of Assembly to consider it. But before it could decide, Gosling died at home of an illness which had taken him to New York for treatment. Sadly for him, he never saw his vision come true. Louis S. Mowbray’s vision, on the other hand, did come to pass. His quiet but forceful persuasion resulted in the Coral Reef Preserves Act of 1966.
Today, we are thankful. With our slowly declining population, and our climate issues, attention to environmental issues is so much more important than adding to land.
