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Bermuda

Name: Bermuda
Address: BM

Bermuda was called the Isle of Devils before anyone lived there. Spanish charts carried the name by 1544 — Sebastian Cabot's world map labels the archipelago ysla de demonios — and sailors gave it a wide berth for a century, not because of anything they had seen ashore but because the reef sat exactly where the treasure fleets turned east for the Azores.

Where is Bermuda?

Location: Bermuda
Type: Island
Coordinates: 32.32, -64.74
Last updated: 2026-10-01

LOCATION

Why is Bermuda said to be haunted?

In July 1609 the Sea Venture, flagship of a relief convoy bound for Jamestown, was driven onto those reefs by a hurricane. Every one of the roughly 150 people aboard got ashore, spent nine months there, built two small ships out of Bermuda cedar and sailed on. Two of them wrote it down, and their accounts are the reason we know what the islands sounded like at night: a burrow-nesting seabird that fed only in darkness and made, in William Strachey's words, a strange hollow and harsh howling. The colonists ate it to apparent extinction within a generation. It was found again, alive, in 1951.

Bermuda, Bermuda — Image: Version 1: Made by Caleb Moore from the Open Clip Art website and uploaded by Nightstallion Version 2: Made by Nameneko from version 1 of File:Flag of Bermuda.svg and version 2 of File:Coat of arms of · Public domain

What is the history of Bermuda?

Bermuda was called the Isle of Devils before anyone lived there. That is the striking thing about it: the fear came first, and it was fear of an empty place. The islands appear on Sebastian Cabot's world map of 1544 as ysla de demonios, a label John Henry Lefroy noted with some care in 1877 while assembling the colony's earliest documents. In 1515 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo came within a gunshot of them in eight yards of water; he meant to put hogs ashore, but a contrary wind kept him off. In Richard Eden's English of 1577 he gives the group as twelve leagues long by six wide, "lying in the three and thirtieth degree", and describes sea birds and giltheads hunting flying fish. The fuller early description is Antonio de Herrera's, printed in 1601: "It is a small island and not very high, having a ridge in the middle, and a vast quantity of land and sea birds. It is in 33°, and always covered with clouds." Herrera also derives the name Bermuda from the captain, Juan Bermúdez, and La Garza from his ship, and Lefroy shows that a map in Peter Martyr's Legatio Babylonica of 1511 already marks "La bermuda", four years before Oviedo's voyage. Neither Oviedo nor Herrera mentions devils. What Lefroy points out is that the evil reputation is itself evidence the place was well known: the galleons bound for Spain ran the Florida channel, followed the Gulf Stream as far as latitude 33° and then steered east for the Azores, and Bermuda lay on that course. Then, on 2 June 1609 — a Friday, as William Strachey remembered it, and the calendar agrees — a fleet of "seven good Ships, and two Pinnaces" left Plymouth Sound for Jamestown, carrying the relief the Virginia colony was starving for. The flagship Sea Venture held Sir Thomas Gates, the incoming governor, Admiral Sir George Somers, and about 150 people. The convoy held together until 23 July, when a hurricane took it apart. What follows in Strachey's letter is one of the great pieces of English prose about being at sea and expecting to die. Jourdain, on the same deck, is plainer and in some ways worse: the water rose above the ballast until the men "stood vp to the middles" bailing with buckets and kettles and "continually pumped for three dayes and three nights together, without any intermission; and yet the water seemed rather to encrease, then to diminish". Somers sat on the poop through all of it — "three dayes and three nights together, without meales meat, and little or no sleepe" — steering to keep her upright, and it was Somers who sighted land. On 28 July 1609 they were driven onto the eastern reefs. Silvester Jourdain, who was aboard, gives the date flatly: "Vpon the eight and twentieth day of July 1609 (after the extremity of the storme was something qualified) we fell vpon the shore at the Barmudas." The ship wedged between rocks and did not break up at once. Every soul aboard got ashore. It is, so far as the record goes, the luckiest wreck in the Atlantic. What they found contradicted everything they had been told. Jourdain wrote that the islands had been "neuer inhabited by any Christian or Heathen people, but euer esteemed, and reputed, a most prodigious and inchanted place, affoording nothing but gusts, stormes, and foule weather; which made euery Nauigator and Mariner to auoide them, as Scylla and Charibdis; or as they would shun the Diuell himselfe" — and then found it "the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land" he had ever set foot on. Strachey put the same reversal more formally: he hoped "to deliver the world from a foule and generall errour", the belief that the islands "can be no habitation for Men, but rather given over to Devils and wicked Spirits". They stayed nine months and a few days. They ate wild hogs left by earlier wrecks — Somers himself took thirty-two at one time and brought them in by boat — along with turtles, palmetto tops and, in winter, a burrowing seabird they could pick up by hand. Two children were born and baptised on the island, a boy named Bermudas and a girl named Bermuda. There was also a marriage, and there were two mutinies. On 13 March a gentleman named Henry Paine, caught stealing tools and then abusing the captain of the watch, was condemned to hang; he asked, as a gentleman, to be shot instead, and Strachey records the sentence carried out "towards the euening he had his desire, the Sunne and his life setting together." Out of Bermuda cedar and the salvaged ironwork of the Sea Venture they built two small ships, Deliverance and Patience, sailed on 10 May 1610 and reached Jamestown on 23 May to find the colony in its Starving Time. Strachey dated his long letter home 15 July 1610. Somers turned back to Bermuda for food and died there on 9 November 1610. The monument later raised over the spot carries an epitaph that puts his death in 1611 and ends: "He here bequeathed his entrailes and his heart." Lefroy, printing it, added a correction that says a great deal about how records go wrong: the year is false, and "the exigencies of rhyme have much to answer for".

Timeline: the documented record of Bermuda

1515 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo comes within a gunshot of the islands in eight yards of water, meaning to put hogs ashore, and a contrary wind keeps him off. He gives the group as twelve leagues by six, in 33°, and mentions no devils. The description of 'a small island and not very high [...] always covered with clouds', and the naming after Juan Bermúdez and his ship La Garza, are Antonio de Herrera's, printed in 1601.
1544 Sebastian Cabot's world map labels the islands ysla de demonios. It is the earliest dated attestation of the "Isle of Devils" name that Lefroy could point to, and it precedes any recorded landing.
2 June 1609 A fleet of "seven good Ships, and two Pinnaces" sails from Plymouth for Jamestown. Strachey remembers the day as a Friday, which the calendar confirms. The flagship Sea Venture carries Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers and about 150 people.
28 July 1609 After four days of hurricane and continuous pumping, the Sea Venture is driven onto the eastern reefs and wedges between rocks without breaking up. Everyone aboard reaches shore. Jourdain, who was there, gives the date in his own words.
13 March 1610 Henry Paine, a gentleman among the castaways, is condemned for striking the captain of the watch and stealing tools. He asks to be shot rather than hanged and, in Strachey's phrase, "towards the euening he had his desire, the Sunne and his life setting together."
10 May 1610 After nine months ashore the castaways sail in Deliverance and Patience, built from Bermuda cedar and the salvaged ironwork of the wreck. They reach Jamestown on 23 May and find the colony starving.
15 July 1610 Strachey dates his long letter to an unnamed "Excellent Lady". It circulates in manuscript and is not printed until Samuel Purchas includes it in Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1625.
9 November 1610 Sir George Somers dies in Bermuda, having returned for supplies. His monument's epitaph — "He here bequeathed his entrailes and his heart" — dates the death to 1611; Lefroy corrects it, blaming "the exigencies of rhyme".
1 November 1611 The Revels Account records a play called The Tempest performed before the King at Whitehall on Hallowmas night. No contemporary source links it to Bermuda.
1616 At Governor Daniel Tucker's second assize a proclamation is passed "against the spoile of Cahowes, but it came too late, for they were most destroyed before". The bird is written off, and stays written off for some three centuries.
1808 Edmond Malone publishes An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakspeare's Tempest were derived, the first argument that the Bermuda wreck lies behind the play — made about two centuries after the fact.
1877 John Henry Lefroy prints the colony's founding documents and records his doubts about the Shakespeare link: the play "does not contain a single plain allusion, and very few phrases, which, taken apart from their context, have a local colour".
1951 Robert Cushman Murphy and Louis S. Mowbray, curator of the Bermuda Government Aquarium, find eighteen surviving nesting pairs of cahow on rocky islets in Castle Harbour. With them is a fifteen-year-old Bermudian, David B. Wingate. They publish the find in The Auk that July.
1966 David Wingate becomes Bermuda's first conservation officer and begins the restoration of Nonsuch Island, clearing it of introduced species so that the cahow has somewhere to breed that is not a bare rock.
March 2012 The Bermuda Department of Conservation Services announces that the cahow population has passed 101 nesting pairs "for the first time since the 1600s", up from eighteen at the 1951 rediscovery.

Is there a rational explanation for Bermuda?

Two famous claims hang on this story, and the documents change the shape of both. The first is that the cries of a bird gave Bermuda its devils. The bird is real and so is the noise. Strachey describes a web-footed fowl the size of a plover which "all the Summer wee saw not, and in the darkest nights of November and December (for in the night they onely feed) they would come forth, but not flye farre from home, and hovering in the ayre, and over the Sea, made a strange hollow and harsh howling". It nested in burrows "like Conyes in a Warren"; his men learned to catch it by standing on the rocks at night "hollowing, laughing, and making the strangest out-cry that possibly they could", whereupon the birds flew in and settled on their arms and heads, "answering the noyse themselves". For its blindness by day "and for their cry and whooting, wee called the Sea Owle". The margin of the printed text glosses the local name directly: "They call it of the cry which it maketh a Cohow." A later Bermuda relation printed by Purchas repeats it: "The Cohow is so termed of his voice; a night Bird all day hid in the Rockes." So the etymology of cahow from the bird's call is documented in the seventeenth century and is not in dispute. The causal step is in print by 1610. A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, published by the Council of Virginia in 1610 and reprinted by Lefroy as "the earliest and rarest of all printed notices of the Somers Isles", explains the islands' reputation in one sentence: "These Islands of the Bermudos have euer beene accounted as an inchaunted pile of rockes, and a desert inhabitation for Diuils; but all the Fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the Diuels that haunted the woods, were but heards of swine." In that version the birds account for the fairies and the wild hogs for the devils. Strachey puts the name down to the weather and the reefs: "such tempests, thunders, and other fearefull objects are seene and heard about them, that they be called commonly, The Devils Ilands". Neither explanation reaches back to the name itself. The label ysla de demonios is already on Sebastian Cabot's world map of 1544, sixty-five years before the Sea Venture, and Oviedo, who came within a gunshot of the islands in 1515, wrote about sea mews and cormorants hunting flying fish and nothing about devils. The bird reading is as old as the English settlement, and the name is older than the English accounts of the cahow's cry. The second claim is that this wreck produced The Tempest. Strachey's letter is dated 15 July 1610 and circulated in manuscript long before Purchas printed it in 1625; the Revels Account records a play called The Tempest performed before the King at Whitehall on Hallowmas night, 1 November 1611. The connection, however, was not drawn by anyone at the time. It was argued by Edmond Malone in 1808, in a pamphlet whose title says what it was for: An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakspeare's Tempest were derived; and its true Date ascertained. That is roughly two centuries after the events. Lefroy, no debunker by temperament, was already uneasy in 1877: the question "can scarcely be passed over", he wrote, but "that the play does not contain a single plain allusion, and very few phrases, which, taken apart from their context, have a local colour, is very apparent". He also noted that the play keeps "the still vexed Bermoothes" apart from Prospero's island: Ariel was once called up "at midnight to fetch dew / From the still-vex'd Bermoothes", and in the same speech the rest of the fleet is "upon the Mediterranean flote, / Bound sadly home for Naples". A third correction concerns the bird itself. The cahow was hunted to apparent extinction within a generation of settlement — John Smith's history records that at Governor Daniel Tucker's second assize a proclamation was passed "against the spoile of Cahowes, but it came too late, for they were most destroyed before" — and the bird was written off for some three hundred years. Its rediscovery in 1951 is usually told as David Wingate's story. Wingate, who did devote his life to the bird and became Bermuda's first conservation officer in 1966, was fifteen at the time and was there; the find was published as Murphy, R. C. and L. S. Mowbray, "New light on the Cahow, Pterodroma cahow", in The Auk for July 1951. Robert Cushman Murphy was an American ornithologist; Louis S. Mowbray was curator of the Bermuda Government Aquarium. They found eighteen surviving nesting pairs on rocky islets in Castle Harbour. Bermuda's own Department of Conservation Services, announcing in March 2012 that the population had passed 101 nesting pairs "for the first time since the 1600s", dated the recovery from that 1951 count of eighteen. That is the ghost story with a solution attached, and the solution is better than the ghost.

Can you visit Bermuda?

The finds from the Sea Venture are at the National Museum of Bermuda, 1 The Keep, Sandys MA 01, telephone +1 (441) 234-1333. Its underwater-archaeology page states that "All of the records and artifacts from the excavation are held at the Museum" and that the ship's story is told through objects shown in Shipwreck Island: Sunken Clues to Bermuda's Past. The museum's exhibits page places that exhibition in the Queen's Exhibition Hall and describes it as more than 1,500 artifacts from Bermuda's earliest wrecks, cannon, olive jars and silver coins among them. The visitor page, read on 24 September 2026, gives the hours as 9:00 to 17:00 in summer, 9:30 to 17:00 at weekends and on holidays and 10:00 to 17:00 in winter, with last admission at 16:00 and closure on 25 December; admission is $20 for adults and $18 for over-65s. Under "Admission" that page lists resident students under 16 as free, while under "Family Amenities" it says "Children under 16 are FREE". Commissioner's House has a lift in the ground-floor hallway, reached through the Defence Exhibit, and vehicle access up the hill for disabled visitors has to be arranged beforehand with the museum office. According to the museum, Edmund Downing found the wreck in 1958; the museum recovered more material between 1978 and 1981 under Allan "Smokey" Wingood, and in 1982 the Sea Venture Trust completed the excavation under the British archaeologist Jon Adams. Bermuda's Historic Wrecks Act 2001 applies to vessels abandoned for at least 50 years and has the Custodian of Historic Wrecks classify each as open or restricted, marked underwater with green or red markers. Interfering with a wreck or historic artefact without a licence carries a fine of $25,000 or a year in prison, and wilfully diving on a restricted wreck a fine of $5,000. The government's list of wrecks open to recreational divers, last updated on 14 July 2026, held 24 names when it was read on 24 September 2026, and the Sea Venture was not among them. St George's, the town that grew out of the settlement, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 as the Historic Town of St George and Related Fortifications, Bermuda under criterion (iv), which describes it as "the oldest English town in the New World". Somers Garden lies where Duke of York Street meets Duke of Kent Street. The Bermuda National Trust's 2025 teacher guide to St George's says that Somers' heart was reputedly buried there after his death in November 1610 and that Governor Nathaniel Butler had a tomb built over it in April 1620; the grave itself, the guide adds, "has now vanished beneath the pavement of Duke of York Street". The park was designated Somers Garden in 1911. The same guide places the Trust's museum in the Globe Hotel at 32 Duke of York Street, a building of 1699, and gives 236-6483 as the number to call for its current opening hours. The cahow nests on Nonsuch Island, which the Department of Environment and Natural Resources lists as "closed to public access", adding that "Anyone landing on the island without permission will be subject to prosecution". The department's own tours are prioritised for school and educational groups, and none run in January, February, July or August. Tours for the general public are run by the Bermuda Zoological Society aboard the research vessel Endurance, with dates available from [email protected] or +1 (441) 505 0042. Boats may not tie up at the island's docks, though they may anchor offshore to snorkel over the wreck and reefs on its north side. The Nonsuch Island website carries a live CahowCam for the 2025-2026 nesting season.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-11 · How we verify our content