His lifetime idea and work was force, speed and trajectory. He was one of the only people in the world that had an idea of the mathematics behind high velocity physics ¿ aerodynamically designed projectiles fired from barrel lengths, at tremendous speed and force, boosted with rockets, packed with electronics and Boom! Orbit! Satellites! Space Gun!

¿ Angela Cole, The Century's Ballistician

Barbados, the most windward of the West Indian islands and home of my great-great grandfather Cole, is somewhat in advance of Bermuda in artillery heritage matters. It has a "National Ordnance Collection", while Bermuda's outstanding assemblage of historic artillery has as yet no such honourable appellation.

Mind you, we do not have the other of only two known guns, of which Barbados has one, that carry the coat-of-arms, or "royal cipher" of the Great Protector, Oliver Cromwell.

The Barbados collection has been assembled by Major Michael Hartland of that place and is said to be the "largest cluster of 17th-century English cannon in the world".

The group of historic pieces is to be found at the historic Garrison Savannah, outside of Bridgetown the capital, an area which also houses the famed Barbados Museum and, of very late times, the wonderfully restored George Washington House. The claim of the last to name and fame is because George slept there, but he never graced our shores or beds, even though we gave him some stolen gunpowder for his war against the British, back in the troubles of 1776-83.

While Barbados has some of the earliest guns in the modern Commonwealth, it also has one of the most recent, and arguably most historic of recent, pieces of artillery in the world. That great gun, built in the early 1960s, lies a-rotting near the airport and is known as the HARP, or Barbados, Gun, the invention of a ballistics genius, the late, but not lamented by some of the enemies of the late Saddam Hussein, Dr. Gerald Vincent Bull, once of McGill University in Canada.

"Ballistic" Bull, as we might have nicknamed him in the tradition of speech here, was fascinated with long-range weaponry, an obsession which led to his murder in March 1990 by agents unknown, Israel and Iran being among the suspected.

Dr. Bull, the youngest person ever to obtain a PhD (1951) from the University of Toronto, was named the "ballistician of the century" by the prestigious Jane's Journal of Armaments and Defence, was seemingly vilified by the US intelligence community for several decades prior to his death.

However, such was his military value that he was apparently offered American citizenship in 1975 through an Act of Congress, the second-only person, other than Winston Churchill, to be so honoured, according to a journalist friend of his from Barbados.

The HARP was Dr. Bull's largest working gun and its predecessor may be said to be the Paris Gun, created by the German Army in the First World War and later studied by Bull. That "supergun" was mounted on a railway and could fire a projectile up to 130 kilometres, reaching a height of 40 km in its three-minute trajectory, pounding Paris from the woods of Crepy for six months in 1918. Unfortunately, no example of the Paris, or Kaiser Wilhelm, Gun has survived.

The HARP Project, standing for High Altitude Research Project, was a project of the US Department of Defence and the Canada Department of National Defence. Part of the project was to test the viability of sending objects into space using the inexpensive method of gunfire, rather than costly rockets. In the late 1950s, the US was testing new types of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and needed information on problems of the re-entry vehicles.

Key to the use of the HARP gun was the enclosure of the vehicle, or "bullet", within a sabot, an ancient technique of putting a projectile of a smaller calibre within a casing, so that it could be fired to greater effect in a larger calibre, or oversized, gun. Bull's Barbados gun was made from old US Navy 16-inch guns, extended to twice their original length, so that the final weapon was some 40 metres long.

When the HARP Gun was fired, it could be heard throughout Barbados and some claimed their houses were damaged in the bargain. Dr. Bull, while breaking all records by firing the "martlets" sabots up to 300,000 feet into space, was unable to achieve his goal of reaching altitudes suitable for orbit and the plug was pulled on the project in 1967.

In his last years, Bull was engaged on developing a supergun for Saddam Hussein, the object probably being to lob missiles into Israel, and presumably, Iran or Hussein's other neighbourhood enemies.

Bermuda's connection with the HARP Project came through a Cold War facility, the SOFAR Station at St. David's. The Sound Fixing and Ranging relates to a layer of ocean water through which sound waves can travel for thousands of miles before dissipating, an important facet of submarine warfare. Around Bermuda, that "deep sound channel" is usually to be found at about 1,000 metres. The Bermuda SOFAR was actually the Columbia University Geophysical Field Station from 1949 through the early 1970s and it was here that various implements were made and tested for the detection of sound waves underwater. Scientists like Bermudian Frank Watlington and American Gordon Hamilton were central to the successes of that research station.

The re-entry and sea-landing of vehicles fired from the HARP Gun presented new SOFAR issues and so the RV Sir Horace Lamb (named for a St. David's Islander) was dispatched south to monitor the "surface impact splash signals of the supersonic HARP shells", in a oceanic area 1,000 miles east of Barbados.

The Maritime Museum will shortly publish Gordon Hamilton's article of reflections on the HARP and other unusual projects of the SOFAR Station, including the pinpointing of the sinking of the submarine, the USS Scorpion, traced through the analysis of underwater sound waves in 1968.

So it is that great and thunderous sound waves, which often dissipate at short distances in the air, can run silent, deep and long, but detectible, beneath the ocean surface. Bermuda played an important role in the Cold War in determining how such sound waves could be recorded and interpreted, through the SOFAR Station at St. David's. Sounds from the HARP Gun were no doubt music to the ears at SOFAR.

* * *

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.