It is September 27 and, compared to some of our cousin islands in the Caribbean region, there but for the grace of Lee and Maria goes Bermuda. Complacent in our position in the fastness of the western North Atlantic, Bermudians do look on with dismay at the nuclear bomb-like path of destruction burst upon the West Indies and Florida by hurricanes Irma and Maria. On this date, a few days into autumn, Hurricane Maria churns by us to the north and her companion, Lee, is making up seriously to the east. Both will hopefully soon vanish into the oblivion of the eastern North Atlantic, but the earlier trajectory of Maria will never be forgotten in places like the island of Dominica, where apparently 90 per cent of the buildings were damaged or destroyed.

While one may leave a fuller speculation of the effects on Bermuda of a Category 5 hurricane, most will remember the results of Fabian with its damage and deaths. Others can hark back to the next most powerful hurricane, Arlene of 1963, and pictures exist of the devastation caused by the 1926 “Havana-Bermuda” hurricane. None of these were Category 5, nor did the pressure in any drop below 930 mbar (compared to Maria’s 909). However, in the 1926 blow, some 40 per cent of buildings in Bermuda were damaged but only two houses destroyed: compare that to the considerable knockouts on St Croix and Puerto Rico, to name but two of the affected Caribbean islands. The warship, HMS Valerian, and a merchant ship, SS Eastway, were also sunk near Bermuda in that hurricane.

Our cooler waters may have helped to save Bermuda over the centuries (its settlement in 1612 was also the result of such a storm, the “Sea Venture Hurricane of 1609”), but it is also our heritage of building in stone, not only for walls but for the roofs of our homes, whitewashed as they are to make them waterproof. The immensely heavy Bermuda-slate roofs may not be a match for a Category 5, but the fact is for more than 350 years our stone buildings have withstood the wrath of many a winter gale and summer hurricane. So, while you can thank your lucky stars, or whatever deity you wish, others would correctly bow to the great heritage that is our building tradition in stone and lime. As erroneously reported on in some of the international press of late, Bermuda is unlikely to suffer the sad fate of a Barbuda under a hurricane strike. As these articles have always insisted: heritage matters.

Important also is our tradition of catching and storing rainwater under most houses. That has meant that we always have water, even if the electricity fails in a hurricane, unlike other places where the inhabitants are tied to a central government supply.

As Irma crashed across the Florida Keys and up the west coast, the folks at Tampa were set to experience their biggest hit since the “Tampa Bay Hurricane of 1921”, a fate fortunately averted as the storm took out a lot of the Naples area instead. Busting across Florida on October 25 that year, the hurricane was headed for Bermuda, when it dissipated 400 miles to our southwest.

One of the vessels left high and dry by the storm at Tampa was the schooner Anna M. Hudson. The Bermuda connection is from three years before the hurricane, as discovered recently in a collection of First World War photographs of the Bermuda Dockyard by Martin Buckley of the BookMart and Jane Downing, registrar at the National Museum. Those images now form the James W. Anderson Collection at the National Museum, as donated by a relative, Kristina Magill.

One of the photographs is of the sailing ship, Anna M. Hudson, shot by Anderson in late March or early April 1918, when his ship, the USS Alert, was transiting from Bermuda to South Carolina and thence to the Pacific. Downing identified the vessel from the Anderson image and then found the only other known photograph of it, reproduced here by courtesy of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System.

A ship of the Denton-Shore Lumber Company of Tampa, the Anna M. Hudson was still sailing 15 years later, according to records in Atlanta, Georgia, having obviously been refloated and put back into service.

The same is not the fate of the hundreds of vessels sunk, flung onto land, or simply obliterated by Irma and Maria in their wakes, through the West Indies and Florida.