This is the ninth 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.

Today is Saturday, the “Fourth of July”, and in the United States of America, from Maine in the Far East to Guam in the west (some 6,000 miles from California), many a cracker will be lit, ceremonial guns fired and parties explode: all in honour of the 250th anniversary of the independence of 13 colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America from British Rule in the personage of Mad King George.

The US of A became a “constitutional republic”, as opposed to an absolute monarchy, and entered the world stage (where it would eventually dominate militarily) with this opening salvo, which yet resonates down the ages, even though written by men barely out of their teens.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence was followed by the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights which set the stage for perhaps the most free society for ordinary people that has existed to date.

Many decry the United States in present times and some seek to destroy it, while availing themselves of its generosity and general freedoms. As someone who is part American, as many Bermudians are, I hope that our great neighbour, indeed, serious benefactor, to the west will live to see many more quarter-millennium anniversaries.

Without the US, it is not difficult to imagine what most of the western world would look like, given the rise of fanatical ideologies, civil and religious, of the last century and a quarter. Choose your friends wisely.

Bermuda was fortunate, or otherwise, not to be the 14th colony to join with the Tea Party mob in Boston and the revolution they initiated in 1773, but we may claim to have been there at the start, if not the actual beginning of the embryonic United States.

The timeline is thus for world consciousness: the year 1492, the America continents become fully known; 1505, Bermuda discovered; 1607, Jamestown established in “Virginia”; 1609, the Sea Venture “lands” at Bermuda. In May 1610, the remnants of the complement of that ship saved Jamestown with their arrival from Holiday Inn Bermuda in the Patience and Deliverance, with well-stocked cahow and pork larders, lumps of limestone and other island cruise souvenirs.

Virginia and Bermuda have thus been in a partnership for 416 summers, and the island has much benefited from this alliance. The mid-century advent of the US bases was one of those benefits, not least of which, dear readers, it brought my Tea Party mother to the St. George’s Hotel, to work for the American Forces building Fort Bell and Kindley Field, the latter launching us in the stratosphere of airline tourism after the war, there being few competitors with large airfields.

If you wish to read of the pre-settlement years of that relationship, the 2024 book by Peter Barrett, Virginia and Bermuda: Colonial Siblings, is recommended. In modern language and illustration, the author brings together various historical accounts of the marooning (by Mother Nature) of the folk from the Sea Venture, 1609-10, with happenings across the pond at Jamestown, with excellent timelines and appendices.

For this Independence Day, we will jump to the firm settlement of Bermuda in 1612, when the Plough arrived on another Saturday, July 11, with some 50 settlers.

That advent marked one of the last places on Earth to be settled by people after the “Primary Global Migration” out of the continent of Africa some 70,000 years ago. Thus, one might say that the indigenous people of Bermuda for the first decade (1609-1619) were English; others from West Africa would follow in 1619.

Bermuda was uninhabited and the settlers had no internal forces to counter, but to seaward were the Spanish in particular, and later the French, and yes later still, the “Americans”!

Against the first, the energetic Governor Moore (1612—15) erected eight forts, while Governor Butler (1619—22) erected two more, one on the site of the only timber fort ever built here (it burnt to the ground as the just-arrived Butler and friends were having cocktails on the good ship Warwick in Castle Harbour).

Spread on a defensive arc from Charles Island to St Catherine’s Point, the forts (the first English forts built overseas in stone) are now part of Bermuda’s Unesco World Heritage Site.

They helped the Bermuda Company (1615—1684) remain independent, only for the island to be taken over by the British Government when that early modern corporation was dissolved.

So, independence means different things to different folk, but to our neighbours, now allies, in America: congratulations on your 250th anniversary.

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