Cooper’s Island: Use your imagination

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This is my third article asking the reader to consider what a particular area of the Island looks like now, what it might have looked like a few decades ago and what it might have looked before man arrived in Bermuda.

This month’s focus is Cooper’s Island, St David’s. Cooper’s Island, as we know it today, is attached to the main island of St David’s, but when the Sea Venture was wrecked in 1609, it was truly an island of 77 acres the largest of a chain of islands forming the eastern boundary of Castle Harbour. Early records of the English settlers describe it as being “well covered in thriving young cedars”. There were also references to yellow wood trees, cahows, many fish, and sea turtles that laid their eggs on the beaches.

In the early 1600s, in times of famine, the Governor sent the sick and elderly to Cooper’s Island where they could easily obtain food. Pembroke Fort (later obliterated by the construction of buildings) was erected as part of the Island’s defenses against the Spanish.

Later in its history, Cooper’s Island was farmed; Easter lilies were farmed as late as 1941. William Zuill wrote in his book Bermuda Journey, a leisurely guidebook published in 1946, that “except for picnic parties and campers, Cooper’s has been deserted for a long time.”

In 1948, EA McCallan, in his book Life on Old St. David’s, described the island as “well wooded for the most part down to my day, contained fifteen to twenty acres of arable land, wells for watering stock, good catches for seaweed and no less than seven sandy beaches.”

It was in 1941 however that major change came to Cooper’s Island. A lease was signed allowing for the development and occupancy of a US Army base and consequently the Kindley Field airbase was developed. In 1944 it was completed and, in the process, Cooper’s Island was connected, using dredged fill, to St. David’s Island. By the end of the 1950s, the cedar blight altered the flora significantly and changed the look of all of Bermuda, including Cooper’s Island.

In the 1960s, the NASA tracking station was established and played a large role in space exploration. Fortunately, neither military nor NASA construction changed the contours of the land significantly so we need use only a little imagination to picture hillsides cloaked in the dominant upland hillside, pre-colonial flora of cedars and palmettos.

The US Naval Base, still known to many locals as Kindley Field, was closed in 1995; NASA closed its operations and returned Cooper’s Island to the Bermuda Government in 2001.

Today Cooper’s Island is a National Park to be enjoyed by all, where visitors can walk, swim, picnic, look for whales and migratory seabirds, AND watch the phases of woodland restoration take root. The next time you visit this impressive nature reserve, make a mental note (or better yet, take a photograph) of the young plantings of native and endemic flora. Go back in several years, or a decade or so, to see the change that will have occurred. And if you have a hard time believing that these barren hillsides will be cloaked in forest, take a minute to look southwest from Cooper’s Island to see Nonsuch Island where a similar restoration project was started in 1962. The hillsides of Nonsuch are now reforested with native and endemic flora, replicating the pre-colonial flora. That is what Cooper’s Island will look like, given time.

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n Lisa Greene is the author of two books on Bermuda’s flora.

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