One day it was too hot for golf, so we sat on the rocks high above the sea. After the beauty of the scene had held us quiet for a time, he looked down into those magical blue and jade-green depths and said: "I have been in nearly all the known waters of the globe, and these are the most beautiful I have ever seen".

¿ Mrs. Peck, quoting Admiral (Jackie) Fisher.

I am told Bermuda is much changed. I can't believe it is wholly different, for Bermudians still live in Bermuda. I loved them, and their beautiful, dignified but simple old houses were their rightful background.

¿ Mary Ellen Hulbert, The Story of Mrs. Peck, 1933.

He was returning to the place where, as he wrote, "the days have that perfect sweetness and variety of loveliness that only Bermuda knows and are an emotional experience".

.¿ Mrs. Peck, quoting President Woodrow Wilson.

As an archaeologist writing about the past, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to connect people to places and things of history buried in the ground. The same strictures apply to more recent histories, where records have been lost or were not put on paper.

No one knows, for example, who the Bermudians were who first sailed in a boat with the now world famous "Bermuda Rig", or indeed which of our forebears invented that sailing system, a technological achievement of the highest order. History, however, would not be history, or archaeology archaeology, were it not for missing records in the archives, or later destructive disturbances of monuments of the past buried beneath our feet.

History is nothing more than moth holes in the fabric of world society and it is the task of the historian to attempt to recreate and to bring understanding to events and peoples of the past, which are at present unknown or unclear. For all those who often say "what a pity that was not saved", there is an army of historians who think otherwise, else they would be out of a job, if all was preserved.

So there is a certain excitement in recreating the past, in weaving a story, in filling in the moth holes, hopefully with a warp and weft of the cloth of truth, especially when one can connect things with people by name.

Some weeks ago, while on an historic building reconnaissance in Devonshire, I was looking at an old library of worn-out books, items that were a few weeks out from the incinerator. One of the volumes of these tomes of little interest that caught my eye for a brief moment was The Story of Mrs. Peck. My attention was diverted, but after an hour, I raced back to the bookshelf, thinking the while that this might be the elusive Mrs. Peck of "Shoreby" and Mark Twain acquaintance, about whom I wrote some time ago, and so it proved.

Here was a whole book written by the lady herself, an autobiography of one who some would like to term the "Monica Lewinsky of the Woodrow Wilson era", for it appears that Mrs. Peck may have been more than a walking companion to the upcoming President of the United States during his visits to Bermuda before the First World War.

Mrs. Peck, or Mary Ellen Hulbert, as she preferred to be called after her divorce from Mr. Peck, her second husband, was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1862, to a family of some means.

"At the ungodly hour of eight in the morning, October 31, 1883", she was married to Thomas Hulbert at Duluth, Minnesota, where a train was held up for the pair until 9 a.m. so that they could depart for their honeymoon. In September 1888, their only child, a boy, was born, but this object of joy was overridden by the death of "my Tom", in October 1889, following injuries a couple of years prior on one of his mining expeditions in Canada.

Several years later, Mary Ellen married T. D. Peck, but the untimely passing of her first husband, combined with other family deaths and health problems, had brought on a melancholy that only began to alleviated by her first visit to Bermuda, but "it was with reluctance that I first embarked for those Blessed Isles" in 1895.

The family stayed at "Inwood" in Paget, the home of Mrs. Eugenious Trimingham Jones, but Mr. Peck soon returned to business in the United States and "in six weeks I was well". Thereafter, Mrs. Peck wintered as a socialite at Bermuda most years for the six winter months. That the island became her home is reflected in the fact that all the illustrations in her autobiography were of Bermuda.

Mr. Peck soon turned into a bushel of trouble and divorce followed, but that legal disentanglement did not interrupt the annual visits of Mary Ellen to Bermuda, which included her Bermuda mongrel "Paget Montmorenci Vere de Vere to give his full name-the offspring of a mésalliance and bought for five shillings at a corner grocery".

In 1897, Mrs. Peck met Admiral Sir John (Jackie) Fisher, then C-in-C of the North America and West Indies Station. For the next two years, a considerable friendship, its depth of intimacy as yet unknown, ensued between the two. "My very best friends are Americans. I was the Admiral in North America and saw American beauties in Bermuda". After one contretemps with Mrs. Peck, Fisher declared: "Madam, you are the only woman in the world I have waited for. I wouldn't wait for the Queen herself."

A decade or so later, Mrs. Peck was renting "Shoreby" near Newstead on the Harbour Road, when she meet Woodrow Wilson and a close friendship ensued, for which she was hounded for details by the Press in the months before the presidential election of 1912. Other worthies at "Shoreby" included Mark Twain and his oilman friend, H.H. Rogers.

In her later years, Mary Ellen Hulbert fell on hard times, but found the strength to write her autobiography, partly to dispel the "whispering campaign" against her name and that of President Wilson. It is with a certain regret that the author must dissolve one by one that long line of glamorous Cleopatra-Helen of Troy-Mrs.Pecks ¿ the intriguing, plotting, treacherous Mrs. Pecks, so thrillingly interesting and always amusing but sometimes annoying to those who knew the one who lived under that name for nearly twenty years.

Her story of Mrs. Peck, while unable to dispel the rumours and whispering about her life and loves, even in these days, allows us to connect a real person with people and places of Bermuda a century ago, a country of which she quoted: "All her ways are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace."

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments can be sent to drharrislogic.bm or by telephone to 799-5480.