'That enthusiasm and initiative can achieve wonders is well known, but it is always a pleasure to come across good examples. This book is about one of the world's greatest collections of iron guns, but it all started in the 1980s when Dr Edward Harris, the Director of the Maritime Museum in Bermuda, was enjoying a holiday in Barbados. He happened to notice a number of old cannons just lying about, and recognized that they might be of considerable historical interest. He felt strongly that something should be done about them, and with little persuasion, he managed to enthuse the author of this book to such an extent that he eventually managed to collect the guns, clean them up and put them on display in the National Armoury in St Ann's Fort.'

Foreword by HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh to "Great Guns of Barbados"

One would be quite remiss in not starting this article without a word of thanks to Major Michael Hartland, BSS, MSM, of The National Amoury in Barbados, the former subtitled as the "site of the finest collection of English 17th Century Guns (Cannon) known to exist anywhere". As you may infer from the opening quotation by the Duke of Edinburgh, we in Bermuda had something of a hand in bringing historic artillery to the attention of people in Barbados, with the stupendous outcome that they now have a National Armoury. We do record our thanks to Major Hartland for being so kind as to remember the minor contribution of Bermuda in this matter.

Islands, being isolated, trap people, plants, animals and artifacts, and have done so from time immemorial. The animals and plants, if left alone for millennia, will possibly evolve and become endemic to the place, like the miniature elephants of Malta, the famous Dodo of Mauritius, or the Bermuda cahow. When St. David's was isolated from the Main, citizens there saw themselves as a world apart from the rest of Bermuda. So, tongue in cheek, did some of their fellow Bermudians on the other islands.

People get trapped as well, one of the most famous, and in the end tragic, being the original Tasmanians, who became island-locked when the seas rose over the land bridge of the Bass Strait, a terrestrial way that allowed those folk to get to Tasmania from mainland of the island continent of Australia. Major Hartland was trapped by Barbados, if not physically then certainly by the heartstrings, for no one could do what he has done with a neglected area of international heritage were he not in love with the place. Having graduated from Sandhurst, he travelled the world with the British Army, fetching up at Barbados in 1980.

Of the 188 guns that the Major has inventoried at Barbados, 130 form the National Collection and the remainder rest in private hands. It is to be hoped that Hartland's new book, "Great Guns of Barbados" will encourage the private owners to place the international artillery heritage in their hands into the trust of The National Armoury for safe custodianship for all time. Many of the early guns are very rare indeed and include an example from the Commonwealth (1649-1652), when Oliver Cromwell was the leader in England.

Bermuda has a similar number of historic guns, but ours are mostly 19th Century, although the recent discovery of a gun of Charles I at Dockyard gives Barbados a little competition for the earlier years. Like Barbados, however, we lack a full-blown military museum, which should be placed in St. George's, which was the epicentre of the defence of the island from settlement in 1612, through the American Revolutionary War and throughout the 19th Century, culminating in the Cold War presence of the United States Naval Air Station at Kindley Field.

The grandbaby of all the weapons at Barbados is the HARP Gun, a unique piece of artillery history, presently in need of preservation near the airport. As Major Hartland wrote: "Although the High Altitude Research Project (HARP) was and is largely unknown, it is historically, scientifically and militarily unique." The gun was the early 1960s brainchild of the Canadian Gerald Bull, considered by many to be the greatest ballistics expert of the 20th Century. Later employed by Saddam Hussein to make a "Super Gun" for sending messages to Israel or others of Saddam's enemies, Bull paid for his expertise and brilliance with his life, being assassinated in 1990 in Belgium, allegedly by Mossad.

It was Bull;s idea that it would be cheaper to fire satellites into space, rather than sending them up by rockets, if only a gun could be made to do the job. The financial plug was pulled on his HARP project which had been established at Barbados in the early 1960s: people from SOFAR Bermuda took part in some of the experimental firings.

The HARP Gun set new high altitude records for firing into space to a height of 180 kilometres, as yet an unsurpassed achievement. It proved that artillery could sustain accurate fire for up to 250 miles and succeed in delivering heavy payloads into space for a fraction of the cost of normal rockets. The HARP Gun thus gives Barbados a range of unique historical weapons from 1600 to 1965 and Hartland included that modern piece among his book, "Great Guns of Barbados", in 2009.

As the outstanding Major Hartland noted: "Finally, I hope with this publication to put our great guns on the World Map. It is accepted now that Heritage Tourism plays an important part in the promotion of our Tourist Industry as a whole. Barbados is lucky to have such a rich military history and we should promote it to the full".

Some might be of the opinion that Heritage Tourism is central to the tourism industries of many places, including Bermuda. However, the divide between those who so believe and those in the industry who should so believe still looks as wide as the intellectual gap between the cannon of the earliest days of Barbados and Bermuda and the HARP Gun.

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. The opinions in this column are his own. Comments may be made to drharris@logic.bm or 704-5480.