Berkeley's overall contribution to Bermuda is reflected in the very fabric of our society. The Berkeley stamp is everywhere. Her fine citizens abound at home and abroad. Hence, it is indeed fitting that we herald the achievements of our eleven founding fathers...men of determination; men of dedication and noble ideals; men who resolved to establish a school which would be, in their words: "for the betterment of all the people".

¿ web site of The Berkeley Institute, December 2007

Berkeley's pamphlet, which he published, and in which he explained his plan, is the most extraordinary production of the kind every soberly given to the world by a sane man".

¿ The New York Times, June 21, 1876

Bermuda has become a Mecca for consultants bent on the sale of plans and concepts for our apparent betterment, approbation and of course, high cost. "Axepert" hatchet men and women constantly descend upon the place selling all sorts of potions and schemes for what ails us or will make us richer.

Many such magicians need not even sell themselves, but are imported by government and the private sector in order to produce reports, which are then shelved or ignored. In other words, while the payments reach into the thousands, the results usually come to naught on the balance sheet. Such is the longevity of the need to bring in the foreign intelligentsia, due to a perhaps innate inferiority complex or the refusal to use the brains and resources that are Bermuda-grown, that it may be said to be part of our heritage.

One of the early and most extraordinary plans for the island was A proposal for the better supply of churches in our foreign Plantations, and for converting of the savage Americans to Christianity, by a College to be erected in the Summer Islands, otherwise called the Isles of Bermuda.

This was an idea that was to be launched on the perhaps unsuspecting island by Dr. George Berkeley, the Dean of Derry, and later, Bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland. Born in 1684 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, Dr. Berkeley became one of the great philosophers of his age, dying at Oxford in 1753, where he had lived a while "highly respected by the learned members of that great University, till the hand of Providence unexpectedly deprived them of the pleasure and advantage derived from his residence amongst them".

The good Bishop Berkeley's main philosophical tenet was Esse est percipi, that is to state: "To be is to be perceived." Do not, however, perceive that I intend to march you into a philosophical swamp by attempting to explain in a few, or many, words what that means.

Suffice to say, for our heritage purpose, he was considered an absolute philosopher with regard to money, titles and power; and for three years past has been struck with a notion of founding a University at Bermuda, by a charter from the crown. He hath seduced several of the hopefullest young clergymen and others here, many of them well provided for, and all of them in the fairest way of preferment: but in England his conquests are greater, and I doubt will spread very far this winter. He shewed me a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your Excellency will see his whole scheme of a life academico-philosophical of a college founded for Indian scholars and missionaries.

Aside from setting up "St. Paul's College" on the island, Berkeley had a design drawn up for a whole new town, to be called the "City of Bermuda", for which "metropolis" an illustration survives. It is unclear where in Bermuda he would have found the flat ground for this urban centre, but its main street would have been a prospect "leading to the College situate in a peninsula a quarter of a mile from the Town".

Possibly harking back to Roman times, the City of Bermuda would have open porticoes, parks and groves, and "publick" baths for Men and "Baths for Women", with no such qualification of openness. There would a theatre and academies for music, painting, sculpture and architecture.

To bring all to earth, one side of the city would contain "The Walk of Death or Burying Place". To sustain the body, to complement all these emollients of the soul (including a requisite Church and Steeple), would be the Fish, Herb and Flesh Markets. The good doctor intended to build this on "the virgin earth of these rock-encircled islands".

All that came to naught and after a period in Rhode Island, Dr. Berkeley donated his farm called "Whitehall" to Yale University to fund three scholarships, which carried his name, and returned to Ireland.

Back in Bermuda, there was no college and little secondary education, but later Berkeley's idea was revived. In 1853, William Dowding opened St. Paul's School for "white boys and youths of African descent", but this attempt at a college failed through prejudice against the education of the latter.

As a result, the Berkeley Educational Society was formed in 1879 by 11 "coloured men of importance", according to author Dr. Kenneth Ellsworth Robinson, who noted that these men were "proponents of racially integrated schooling . . . and they contemplated a school or schools which would . . . look to the better education of all the people, as distinct from that of coloured people only".

Thus it was that The Berkeley Institute was opened on September 6, 1897 on the ground floor of the Samaritan's Lodge on Court Street, with its teacher from Jamaica, George Augustus DaCosta. A few years later, it moved to an entirely new school in West Pembroke that was partly built through the benefaction of Samuel Saltus to the defunct Devonshire College of the 1830s, the other half of that gift creating Saltus Grammar School.

The Berkeley Institute is today a fine campus, recently built but retaining the name of the Irish cleric, as does the town in California with its great university. The Dean chose Bermuda for his great scheme, for here "the students may be safe from the contagion of vice and luxury". The Lord only knows what Bishop Berkeley would make of these universally contagious Internet times and the luxury in which many here now wallow.

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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.