`Depictions of Dockyard' is the title of the Bermuda Maritime Museum's current exhibition at Commissioner's House, and the collection of original drawings and paintings provide fascinating insight into how the former Royal Naval Dockyard appeared and developed between 1809 and the 1860s, when it served as a vital British outpost.

The show includes paintings and drawings by artists Thomas Driver, Flag Captain Michael Seymour, and Lt. Gen. Gaspard Le Marchant Tupper, as well as pieces by other Royal Naval and anonymous artists.

The beautifully preserved watercolour images are borrowed from the extensive Fay & Geoffrey Elliott Collection, which is housed at the Bermuda Archives, while other pieces are selected from the Bermuda Maritime Museum's own collections.

The man responsible for collating the exhibition and providing the accompanying descriptive detail is guest curator Dr. William Cooke.

A retired physician and active Bermuda Maritime Museum volunteer, he spent many hours selecting the paintings and drawings as well as researching and writing the explanatory information, and he describes his archival journey as "an intriguing and exciting experience, allowing one to visualise the Dockyard during its development and heyday. Do not miss the thrill of discovery to be found during a careful analysis of these views".

Since photography was nearly non-existent during the period in review, Dr. Cooke turned to paintings and drawings of the day for the basis of the exhibition, but because military officers were also fine artists well trained in capturing critical perspectives of landscapes, he was confident they would be illuminating. That the artists were not infallible, however, soon came to light.

"I examined the paintings and drawings for what they told us, and if something didn't seem right I tried to explain how it was wrong," he says.

"There are a number of interesting things, some of which are not explained yet."

Among them is a painting by Capt. Seymour, one of two which he painted 20 days apart in 1846 and each of which he entitled `Samuel Triscott's House'. Dr. Cooke has now identified one painting as being `The Cottage' where the captain in charge lived, and the perspective of the other suggests it could have been located in the Spar Yard, but nothing is certain.

A panoramic painting attributed to Captain Rolfe circa 1839 features a signal mast adjacent to Casemates Barracks flying a flag of horizontal red, white and blue stripes. A similar panoramic view by Hurst in 1848 shows the same mast with the same colours on the flag, but in this case the stripes are vertical.

"That intrigued me," Dr. Cooke says. "I then found that the fleet was divided into three squadrons, each of which had a different coloured flag - the red, white and blue ensign, so it is my speculation that the three colours represented the three segments of the fleet."

Then there is Tupper's scene entitled `Dockyard from the South-East' which also puzzled the guest curator.

"It is a very mixed up scene according to the topography," he says. "In fact, it is two different views of the Dockyard blended together. The left hand side of the painting is Dockyard from the southwest, and the right hand side is Dockyard from the southeast. Tupper has a sailboat in the middle which obscures the junction of these two perspectives. The Victualling Yard is missing. It is an incomprehensible mistake. Maybe he finished it after he left Bermuda."

It is puzzles like this which contribute to Dr. Cooke's abiding interest in digging further and further into the Dockyard story.

"I have always been very interested in historical things, but did not have the time to get into them before I retired," he says. Yet even before he retired in 1995, the former physician approached the Maritime Museum's director, Dr. Edward Harris, about working as a volunteer, and his first task was helping to proof read Dr. Harris' book on Bermuda forts.

"That started me off, and I have since done research on subjects which Dr. Harris felt would be important to the museum. I had a number of projects, one of which was to collect data on all the Bermuda shipwrecks, which hopefully will become the subject of a book that marine archaeologist Clifford Smith is going to start working on," Dr. Cooke says.

"Then, in 2001 they said to me, `How about doing a project on the Dockyard, and attempting to utilise its pretty vast collection of often seriously deteriorated plans?' In the course of that, and in the absence of the late Dr. Jack Arnell, by default I became the informed person about Dockyard - which doesn't mean I know everything about it, but I gathered a fair amount of information and I have been writing about the different buildings and how they were developed. With that background I was invited to be the curator of this exhibition."

`Depictions of Dockyard' is located in the Fay & Geoffrey Elliott Room on the top floor of Commissioner's House and will continue until April. The Bermuda Maritime Museum at Dockyard is open from 9.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. Admission is $7.50 for adults, $5 for seniors and students. There are also family rates.