This is the first in a series of occasional articles on the shared histories of Bermuda and the United States, which celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence this year. The articles, by Heritage Matters author Edward Cecil Harris, will run throughout the year.

In this 250th anniversary of the founding of our great friend to the West, named the “United States of America”, after that minor Tea Party in Boston Harbour, we think it appropriate to start with our history, as we are 164 years older than the Yankees!

Harking back to European awareness of the American continents and Bermuda, it is possible that St Brendan might have alighted here in his little round coracle but found the place wanting.

Certainly, it is proven that the Vikings from Scandinavia — those snowbound lands of northeast Europe — found their way as far south as the Canadian Maritimes, but appear not to have reached our sun-soaked shores, until imported as farm labourers (unsuccessfully) in the mid-1800s.

Rather, Bermuda hove into European consciousness at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when a Spanish pilot, Juan de Bermúdez, and his ship, La Garça, found the island (without ending up on the rocks) on the way home from the Caribbean in late 1505. Using “word of mouth”, the internet of their times, news spread about the “remotest known” place on Earth at that time, Bermuda having lived in blissful silence, except for the noisy cahows, for several million years.

The first selfie of Bermuda would be published on a map in the book, Legatio Babylonica, authored by Peter Martyr d’Anghiera in 1511 (see the map), so Europeans had a portrait of the place to go with rumours that it was the “Isle of Devils”. That may be true today, but back then the island was uninhabited by any homo sapiens, making it one of the last places that humans settled after we disembarked from the African continent all those thousands of years ago. Bermuda was settled in 1612 and so we are in this year 2026, 414 years old, compared to the 250 achieved by the United States.

While the island began to appear on globes and in small-scale maps of the Atlantic and the Americas in the 1500s, it was not until 1603 that a large-scale selfie appeared in the glorious map of Captain Diego Ramirez. That internet bastion of truth, “AI Overview” has it that his ship was wrecked here (not true) and that he “famously explored the island, documenting its natural resources” (hahaha emoji)! What happened was: Ramirez remarkably piloted his ship through the reefs to effect repairs in the bay we now call Spanish Point and afterwards managed to get out of Dodge without wrecking the vessel.

During his sojourn in paradise, he and his crew, which included “Venturilla”, possibly the first person from Africa to visit the island, would have dined first-class on cahows and the local pigs (Swinius Bermudiensis), the first endemic and the second invasive.

The swine came from Spanish vessels, wrecked or passing by, and likely created Bermuda’s first ecological disaster by gobbling up all the eggs of the ground-nesting cahow on the main islands of the archipelago!

Captain Diego’s map is a bit sketchy, but it is all we have until Sir George Somers produced one in 1610, which he took to “Virginia” in May that year to the struggling English colony at Jamestown, and until Richard Norwood produced detailed ones around 1620.

Of course, we must admit that the Brits up the James River were not the Imperials they were to become, and so it may be said that the cahow and swine brought from Bermuda to the starving colonists at Jamestown in May of 1610 saved for the world what would become the United States in 1776.

• Dr Edward Harris is the founding executive director emeritus of the National Museum of Bermuda