Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
them. The cutoff in trade proved a great hardship for the islanders, who, having cho-
sen seafaring over farming, depended heavily on America for their food. Many of
them, now deprived of profitable trade routes, turned to privateering, piracy, and
“wrecking” (salvaging goods from wrecked or foundered ships).
Britain's loss of its important American colonial ports led to a naval buildup in
Bermuda. Ships and troops sailed from Bermuda in 1814 to burn Washington, D.C.,
and the White House during the War of 1812.
Bermuda got a new lease on economic life during the American Civil War. The
island was sympathetic to the Confederacy. With the approval of the British govern-
ment, Bermuda ran the blockade that the Union had placed on exports, especially of
cotton, by the Southern states. St. George's Harbour was a principal Atlantic base for
the lucrative business of smuggling manufactured goods into Confederate ports and
bringing out cargoes of cotton and turpentine.
When the Confederacy fell, so did Bermuda's economy. Seeing no immediate
source of income from trading with the Eastern states, the islanders turned their
attention to agriculture and found that the colony's fertile soil and salubrious climate
produced excellent vegetables. Portuguese immigrants arrived to farm the land, and
soon celery, potatoes, tomatoes, and especially onions were being shipped to the New
York market. So brisk was the onion trade that the City of Hamilton became known
as “Onion Town.”
During Prohibition, Bermudians again profited from the situation in the United
States—they engaged in the lucrative business of rum running (smuggling alcohol to
the U.S.). The distance from the island to the East Coast was too great for quick
crossings in small booze-laden boats, which worked well from The Bahamas and
Cuba. Nevertheless, Bermuda accounted for a good part of the alcoholic beverages
transported illegally to the United States before the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
A Hotbed of Espionage
Bermuda played a key role in World War II counterespionage for the Allies. The story
of the “secret war” with Nazi Germany is told dramatically in William Stevenson's
A
Man Called Intrepid.
Beneath the Hamilton Princess Hotel, a carefully trained staff worked to decode
radio signals to and from German submarines and other vessels operating in the
Atlantic, close to the United States and the islands offshore. Unknown to the Ger-
mans, the British, early in the war, had broken the Nazi code using a captured Ger-
man coding machine called “Enigma.” The British also intercepted and examined
mail between Europe and the United States.
Bermuda served as a refueling stop for airplanes flying between the two continents.
While pilots were being entertained at the Yacht Club, the mail would be taken off
the carriers and examined by experts. An innocent-looking series of letters from Lis-
bon, for example, contained messages written in invisible ink. The letters were part
of a vast German spy network. The British became skilled at opening sealed enve-
lopes, examining their written contents, and carefully resealing them.
The surreptitious letter-readers were called “trappers.” Many of them were young
women without any previous experience in counterespionage work, yet a number of
them performed very well. As Stevenson wrote, it was soon discovered that “by some
quirk in the law of averages, the girls who shone in this work had well-turned ankles.”
A medical officer involved with the project reported it as “fairly certain that a girl with
unshapely legs would make a bad trapper.” So, amazingly, the word went out that
women seeking recruitment as trappers would have to display their gams.
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