“I once hear a sermon given by Dr. Patton who said “a man does to his destiny as straight as a shot from a gun”...Yet sometimes a warning voice if listened to may deliver one from the jaws of death.” Dr William Henry Watlington, ‘A Bermuda boy recalls his childhood’, 1958Without ships, there would be no Bermuda as we know it, for the Island would not have been settled until aeroplanes could transit the Atlantic Ocean.While the third Governor of Bermuda, Captain Nathaniel Butler (1619-1622), was of the opinion that ‘boats, next to fortifications’ were of first importance in Bermuda, the fact is that until 1937, when Pan American ‘flying boats’ connected the Island with the United States, boats and ships were the essential ingredient for life on this isolated 20-square-mile rock, being 650 miles from nowhere, not that Cape Hatteras should be so described, being the nearest dry land in all the quadrants of the compass of this American hemisphere.Regarding the hemisphere naming, I digress due to a discussion of the subject with a reader several weeks ago, as I generally refer to our geographical position as being in the ‘American Hemisphere’, as opposed to the ‘Western Hemisphere’.The western half of the Earth was determined in 1801, when the ‘Prime Meridan’ of 0-degrees was established at Greenwich in southern England. Thus the 180 degrees west of that north-south line around the globe includes the Americas, parts of Western Europe, but also a number of countries in western Africa, such as Morocco and Senegal, to name but a few.I prefer a prime meridian as used by mapmakers, such as Gerardus Mercator, who in 1595, had his at the present 25 degrees West, thus making the Americas the ‘Western Hemisphere’, separating, as it is geographically, the New World from the fogies in the old one.Unlike many other islands in this hemisphere of the Americas, Bermuda possessed several essential ingredients food for shipbuilding, if you will that obtained not in those places but were fundamental to any life on this archipelago until the heavenly date of 1937 (for those inclined to seasickness).The first for this bread-making was the flour of the Bermuda juniper, or cedar as we call it. Dr Michael Jarvis in his magnum opus, ‘In the Eye of All Trade’, (Bermuda being the ocular lens on the eastern Americas), gives a lengthy and invaluable discourse on shipbuilding and that timber, which ‘was as strong as American oak, but two-thirds the weight’.He also notes that because of low shrinkage, Bermuda cedar can be used when cut, or ‘green’, whereas oak and other words have to be cured for some periods. Cedar was also inured against the boring teredo worm (and land termites as well), and so Bermuda vessels had twice the life span of other ships, provided of course they did not end up on the rocks, or were vanquished by the ocean itself, as was the case of the subject of this column, the ill-fated Pearl of the prominent seafaring Hutchings family of this place.Built in 1855 as a ‘clipper barque’ (the adjective related to a ship of speed, as in the ‘Tea Clippers’ and racing ahead in time, the ‘Pan American Clipper’), the Pearl was considered to be the finest of all the Bermuda barques, such as Cedrine (‘of the cedar’) and Koh-I-Noor, and was also the fastest, making a trip to Britain with returning Dockyard convicts in December 1855 in a mere 15 days.During her short four years, Pearl made no fewer than 52 Atlantic voyages, but was built primarily for moving cargo. Thus entered another principal ingredient of shipping in this Island and that was its people, of all denominations, who designed, constructed and sailed those extraordinary vessels. The Pearl was alternately commanded by Capt Solomon Hutchings and Capt William Smith Hutchings, both Master Mariners, and was built on White’s Island by a team under one Nathaniel Yeates.On an unknown date after late October 1858, as related by Dr William Henry Watlington in the Bermuda Historical Quarterly, the Pearl sailed into oblivion, somewhere between the Azores and its intended destination: ‘The Barque “Pearl” of Bermuda was chartered to go to Madeira to bring some Portuguese labourers to Bermuda. Some young men, thinking it would be a nice voyage, went along and among them was young Mr [Capt] Hutchings. But early on the morning they were to leave he got a boat, pulled out to the ship, took his trunk off and brought it ashore, letting the “Pearl” sail without him. Of course he had to put up with a deal of chaffing from his friends but when months came and went and no news came of the “Pearl” (nor has there ever been) his friends began to believe him when he said “Something told me not to go”.’ As P.M. Wright wrote: ‘Her epitaph remains in the Register after over a century-those three, dismal, ominous words, “Not cancelled out”.’Leaving a large family, Capt William Smith Hutchings, from whom a prominent resident of Paget, Mrs Elfrida Chappell, is descended, was lost with the ship. It was his brother, Capt Solomon Hutchings who had the premonition not to go on the Madeira trip and lived on to be the great grandfather of Barbara Hutchings. Now Mrs Peter Cooper, she holds his memory dear and preserves memorabilia of the Pearl for posterity in her lovely home in Warwick Parish. Thus are some of the maritime pearls of our heritage saved for the future by the caring and thoughtful of our island home.A model of the Pearl by P.M. Wright was for many years on display at the Coral Beach Club, but has been given by other Hutchings descendants to the National Museum for ‘drydocking’ and future care. Through such three-dimensional objects, the memory of things precious to our 400 years of heritage are preserved against the ravages of Time and its tendency to pass many things human into oblivion.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480.