To General Moses, order dated 10th July 1811, to make a full report upon the measures it may be necessary to take to secure the permanent military possession of the Bermuda Islands. I shall in the first place describe the present state of the works, and then offer such observations, and propose such new works, alterations or additions, as appear to me to be best calculated to answer the proposed end.

— Capt. Thomas Cunningham, 1811.

> FEW weeks ago, a story appeared in this column on the mini-forts of the western districts, which incurred the wrath of the inhabitants of the lower, or eastern, parishes. Perhaps they thought they were being “disrespected”, like those in the western parishes did when their historic forts were left out of the roster for Bermuda’s UNESCO World Heritage Site.

So this column represents an equal opportunity for those in the East to read about some of their mini-forts that were built by Bermudians in the two centuries before the construction of the Dockyard ushered in the period of mega-forts.

It is the job of the historian to lay the facts before people and it is a good sign of the times that some are demanding such evidence of their associations with the past.

Too much of the historical dialogue that takes place in this island unfortunately stems from myth and assumptions, for, as one might paraphrase, never let the facts interfere with a hot political cause or story.

Archaeologists sometimes have a closer connection with the facts of the past, when digging up forts, houses and other monuments. Dealing with such “hard” facts, a wall cannot be mistaken for a spade, or a ploughshare for a pottery bowl.

Historians deal more often with “soft” facts, with hieroglyphs written down in the past, for contemporary and sometimes future consumptionBK>Sifting through written records to obtain the truth, that is to say the facts of past events, is a more difficult and uncertain profession for the armchair historian, than excavating such buried facts out of the ground is for an archaeologist out in the field. As some colleagues say, not entirely in jest: “Only archaeology can reveal the truth.”

For archaeologists working with periods after writing was invented, an advantage is to be had in comparing the documentary record with the archaeological one.

Fortunately as regards the little coastal batteries at Bermuda, there are several reports that detail their condition, which have survived from the late 18th and early 19th century.

Captain Thomas Cunningham RE was the author of one such report sent to the Master General of Fortifications at London in 1811. An officer of the Corps of Royal Engineers, Cunningham was responsible, among other works, for the design of the fort that bears his name on Paget Island on the eastern perimeter of St. George’s Harbour.

It is the only British fort at Bermuda to carry the name of its builder, whereas a number of the earlier Bermudian structures were called after local persons.

Cunningham began his survey with the forts defending the two principal harbours at Bermuda, namely, St. George’s and Castle. At the Ferry, the mini-fort at Burnt Point was anything but in a “state of preparedness”, a situation made obvious by “guns entirely corroded by the spray of the sea”.

At Bailey’s Bay Battery, named after a time when the Bermudians tried to rename all the parishes for geographical localities, in place of the surnames of some of the original shareholders of the Bermuda Company, such as Sir Edwin Sandys, Cunningham found two four-pounder cannon mounted on cedar carriagIt was a semi-circular work, with a magazine to the rear. The lowest stone courses of these features were found in excavations some years ago and the present owners of the property generously reconstructed the rampart of the fort and positioned two replica guns within it, fronting the sea, as in days of old. Moving westward, Cunningham examined Harris’s Bay Fort, not named, I hasten to add, after my ancestors, who were at that time Whitecrosses, but he appears to have missed Sears Fort near St. Mark’s Church. It is likely that it was then overgrown, as St. Jean de Chantal Kennedy and I found it to be in the late 1960s. It is a half-moon battery named after a parish family, as in William Sears Zuill, the eminent Bermuda historian and former Director of the Bermuda National Trust.

A little further on, he looked at Hungry Bay Battery, as we did as children while swimming and playing. That fort was also a half-moon, but its magazine yet survives, rising out of the Mexican pepper jungle that daily invades and destroys our landscape.

Durham and Katherine Stephens of Hungry Bay kindly showed me a painting of the battery, which is one of the very few that exist of any of the mini-forts of Bermuda.

At Elbow Bay, three works defended that major landing place in the westernmost of the eastern parishes. East Elbow Bay Battery was also called Crow Lane Battery, after the attempt to convert Paget to “Crow Lane” Parish.

In the middle of the beach at the imaginative Centre Bay Battery were two French 36-pounders on traversing platforms, “made in the country of cedar of the most grotesque appearance, and I should judge totally unmanageable.”

The last on this strand of pink sand was West Elbow Bay Battery, with two 12-pounders on “good cedar carriages”. Archaeologists excavated and recorded this fort in 1989 and it was then partly restored through the generosity of the Wardman Fay. A carronade<$> found at the site was remounted on a new carriage, though not of cedar. A guardrail at the cliff in front of the Battery is composed of a group of limestone War Department boundary stones in hard Bermuda limestone, presumably collected from the property and the edge of the South Road some decades ago.For almost two centuries, the mini-forts protected the south coast of Bermuda against Spanish, French and, latterly, American invasions. What is surprising is that a number of these very small fortifications have survived.

What is pleasing to the archaeologists has been the willingness of private persons to preserve these hard facts of Bermuda’s military past and to enhance them through generous works of restoration.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments cae sent to drharris<$>U>logic.bm or by telephone to 799-5480.