This is the latest 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.

While we are heading into Emancipation Day marking the August 1, 1834, late news of the solving of a cold case of treason takes precedence today and refers to an earlier decade centred on 1780.

That of course was the central year in the late, great unpleasantness that began with the wasting of good tea leaves in the cold waters of Boston harbour (if only we could have read them for future awareness!).

It was in the middle of December 1773 that the “Sons of Liberty”, identifying as “Native Americans”, dumped over 300 chests of good China overboard, adding to a perhaps already polluted bay, one now of infamy to the British Realm. A decade later, the American Revolutionary War was over with the signing in 1783 of the Treaty of Paris and the rest, they say, is culinary history — all over some bags to be heavily taxed by the Tea Act of 1773.

After that scandalous act, Bermudians began to take note and most naturally to consider their position, indeed existence, in the face of the coming “existential threat” from “America”.

That is “any danger that poses a fundamental, terminal risk to the continued existence or viability of a subject”, or, the very survival of the Bermuda population, already (and still) almost entirely dependent on the United States for its daily bread, pun most hungrily intended!

Perhaps without leave of the British authorities in the form of the Bermuda governor, local emissaries were dispatched to collude with the rebels to find a way for the island to be relieved of the US sanctions against shipping to British territories.

And — I don’t want to say in usual Bermudian fashion — find a way we did, by the treasonous act of relieving the British governor Bruere of some 125 small kegs of gunpowder, stolen from his magazine shown on the map here illustrated on a plot to the east of St George’s.

Michael Marsh and others have written well of that theft and that the powder was used against some of our own kind in Boston and Charleston in the ongoing conflict on the eastern flank of the continent.

The perps were never brought to justice, but the beef, perfume, and other necessaries were allowed to continue to flow into Bermuda homes and larders. (By the way, we were similarly saved by the Yankees in the Second World War, and we perhaps had a “happy war” while many others suffered worldwide.)

Today, however, we are here to report on the solving of another treasonable act, namely the proposed invasion of Bermuda (as the 14th colony of rebels?) in the early 1780s. Using genealogical DNA to trace family members down, and some good old-fashioned journalism and academic library research, coupled with vivid imagination, we have solved the cold case of the treasonous Bermudian families in the Town of St George in 1780.

At the instigation of one Captain B Joell of this place and Colonel Timothy Pickering, US Adjutant General of the Board of War, plans were drawn up for the invasion and capture of St George’s, then the capital, and Bermuda itself.

That was to be accomplished by the US Army and Navy, but of course a simple blockage of shipping into the island and deletion of the internet would have brought Bermuda to its knees within weeks (or days — on its belly — regarding the TikTok vehicle).

Here is what our treasonous son of the soil Joell wrote in July 1780 to Pickering and you can be the judge and jury of his guilt or innocence.

“I trouble you once more to mention a circumstance I did not til now think proper to make public, and which I intended to communicate only to you. In the attempt on Ber[muda] I have likewise a design of seizing between two and three thousand pounds in specie, which the governor always keeps by him. Money arising from the Custom of the Island for which he gives the Collector Bills, on England from the Admiralty, and from his own revenues. With this he pays the Garrison, and furnishes the Barracks, Commissary, and other departments.”

Aside from stealing the governor’s bank balance, Pickering sent a map of St George’s with all the dwellings of the sympathetic “Friends of America” homes, marked with a cross.

In solving this cold case, we have noted 34 such properties, in other words, more than half the town were buddies with the tea party terrorists. Thanks to our forensic work, we can now “doxx” some of the family names: Tucker, Esten, White, Richardson, Smith, Gibb, Cox, Forbes, Fisher, Lewis and last but perhaps first, alphabet-wise, the Atwoods. Associated treasonous governmental role players discovered were the treasurer, secretary, comptroller and a judge or two, all listed on the back of the Joell map.

So, the question now is: with whom will the people of Bermuda stand if the Americans come a calling to include Bermuda with Greenland in a new hemispheric security encirclement, the Western Atlantic Security Treaty Executive?

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