This is the eighth 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.

The English language was brought to Bermuda by the passengers and crew of the Sea Venture, although two of that complement spoke Powhatan and probably other Eastern Algonquian dialects of the region once generally called Virginia — by the English.

In modern days, we Bermudians lucked out on the language stakes because English is largely the dialect of the internet, so we don’t have to learn Chinese or Russian, etc, to search or troll, podcast and broadcast, on the worldwide web.

English is a wonderful, very diverse tongue and nowhere is this as true as in the category of collective nouns. A group of the very intelligent bird of black feathers is a “murder of crows” and few words can gainsay a “murmuration” of starlings.

In the old days in the wild west of the Americas and the Caribbean, a “brace” of pistols was your security blanket, in the absence of the British Bobby, the FBI, CIA, and now the TSA. Thus were two such guns in the possession of Major Edward Fanshawe as he journeyed in this western hemisphere in 1824 (Caribbean and Brazil), 1826 (Bermuda) and 1828 (Canada and the United States).

In those times of worked-from-the-front, “muzzleloading” guns (fired by the spark of a flint stone), it paid to have a brace of two weapons primed to fire, as loading took too long.

We earlier related how the Royal Engineers officer, Fanshawe, was sent on three missions to Bermuda and other lands in the Americas to assess the state of military readiness of friend and foe, so that Britain could retain its position as top dog in the kennel of international politics.

We also noted that a descendant of Fanshawe, Harry Rycroft, gave a lovely album of paintings by Edward’s granddaughter, Alice, to the National Museum of Bermuda, to join one already here in the possession of the Bermuda National Trust.

The images in those volumes from the first few years of the 1870s were incorporated into a book on the artistic endeavours of the military family, recently launched at Valence House, a Fanshawe-related museum in London.

To the surprise of some members of the family, a brace of pistols in a handsome box appeared very recently on the auction block and the authors of The Fanshawe Legacy won the bid for the guns in England. While one thought they might be needed back home in Somerset in these turbulent times (a number of unsolved murders on the Bermuda books), the pistols will be donated to the Valence House Museum in due course.

In case the Bermuda authorities want to come calling, I hasten to add that the brace is being embraced only in Britain, where no license is needed to hold such antique museum pieces.

The pistols were made in the 1780s for Edward’s father, the “Commissioner” of the Plymouth Dockyard, Captain Robert Fanshawe, a couple of decades before the birth of his son, later Lieutenant General Fanshawe. Appropriately, the box carries a copper plate inscribed with the family crest, or cipher, and the name Edward Fanshawe, RE. They were likely given to Edward by his father upon his majority or commissioning into the Corps of Royal Engineers of the British Army, “Purveyors of Technology to the Empire” — including Bermuda.

After the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, a deal sealed in 1783 by the Treaty of Paris, that technology and vast sums of money poured into Bermuda to build and equip the dockyard in the west and five great forts in the eastern St George’s Parish. Instead of being exchanged to the coming “Americans”, Bermuda became the premier British base in the eastern waters of the North Atlantic and the seas of the Caribbean.

It cannot be gainsaid how much Bermuda profited from the creation of the United States 250 years ago, a financial tsunami not afforded to British islands in the Caribbean, but an ocean of wealth that militarily continued into 1995, when the American, British and Canadian Forces left Bermuda at the end of the Cold War.

Luckily, we only shivered slightly as the so-called “international business” of corporate cash was building here, as the military funding withered on a dying vine. Bermuda had the cash to carry and the jobs to fill and thus it was that many came to the island from the British West Indies, without leave if possessing a British passport, especially during the renewed spending brought on by the extension of the Royal Naval Dockyard in the first decade of the 1900s.

Meanwhile, a century earlier, Major Fanshawe, his brace of pistols no doubt tucked into his belt, ventured as far south as Salvador in Brazil and up the Hudson and St Lawrence rivers, inspecting military sites. Perhaps he never had to use them, but that is the essence of military — some might now say civil — preparedness: exhibit force so you don’t have to use it!

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