Last week, you may have seen some nice objects which the Royal Navy appropriated from the capital of the USA at Washington, the District of Columbia, in the War of 1812. Four of the collection of booty — the full extent of which will never be known — now adorn our House of Assembly (parliament to overseas denizens) while the tall case clock is held privately. If you wish to admit your family holds other US goodies from the War, it would be a pleasure to see them!

The Treaty of Ghent brought that conflict to an end the day before Christmas 1814 and as it restored the status quo ante bellum, you might say it was a wash between the Brits and the Yanks. Other than looted objets d’art, etc., Bermuda perhaps did not much benefit from that war, but it was beginning to see the start of a building boom the like of which was unknown in our history. Those boon times were thanks to the Independence of the United States all that quarter of a millennium ago.

Maybe it had to do with planning permissions or the matter of removing local families from Ireland Island, for it was only in 1809, 26 years after the first American war, that construction started on the Royal Naval Dockyard on land once belonging to the Gilberts, Seymours, Harveys, Fowles, etc. At the same time in the far east of the archipelago, work started on six great forts, “large” in comparison to those of the previous two centuries that kept the Spanish at sea and not on siestas at Elbow Beach.

Military money and people poured into the island to its long-term benefit, including the use of the sites for tourism in present times. Some of the lands for those new or expanded fortifications may have had to be compulsorily purchased, but as what became St George’s Parish was originally the “Common Land” of the Bermuda Company, it may be that some of the properties had passed into government possession after the end of that corporation in 1684.

The Dockyard, with its immense fortifications (now the National Museum), is an obvious landmark in the west. In the east, Fort George eventually became “Harbour Radio”; its sibling, Fort William, became a powder keg, now being conserved by volunteers under the St. George’s Foundation and Stuart Smith. Fort St Catherine was undergoing its sixth iteration, while Fort Albert was arising nearby overlooking the coast.

Fort Cunningham on Paget was building up in dockyard limestone, while the “Citadel” of the Island, Fort Victoria, sat on a high hill overlooking all. The last was the finest fort in Bermuda but was much destroyed in the service of early airplane tourism in the 1960s, obliterating, as it were, the very thing the discerning visitor would want to see.

Never mind, back to the first two decades of Empress Victoria’s long reign in the 1840—50s: the Americans were more than a little aware of what we were up to in refortifying Bermuda for the next battle with them. To that end, the US Corps of Engineers (the CIA of yesteryear) sent several spies to the island to check out the new works.

Contrary to usual behaviour from visiting Americans, one of the espionage agents said he eschewed all the cocktail parties by claiming illness so he could stroll around and spy on the fortifications taking shape in the Bermuda countryside. His extraordinary sketch of the military sites has survived in the National Archives in Washington, DC. From its evidence the plans of the forts of the period were established when British records had been lost or never made.

There were three such agents sent to Bermuda, the first, Albert Fitz, had been “honoured with Instructions to proceed to certain of the British West India Islands, for the purpose of ascertaining the strength of the Naval and Military forces there; to examine the fortifications, take plans of them, ascertain the numbers of guns, describe the disposition of the inhabitants”. He recorded of the Bermudians: “They boast, however, that their isles have remained in obscurity, until their defences have become strong enough to defy the world.”

Captain Minor Knowlton was the next to appear on the island and was followed by Lieutenant Frederick Prime, who graduated from West Point in 1849. Three years later he was in Bermuda, and it is his wonderful drawings of our forts that are preserved. He records difficulties in that some of the forts were “visited but once and sometimes under such circumstances that nothing would be committed to paper for many hours after”.

Lieutenant Prime became obsessed with Bermuda and devised “Notes on an expedition against the Bermudas” when he was posted to Fort Alcatraz in California. He noted, in effect, if they took the Martello Tower at Ferry Reach, they would cut off St George’s and its forts from the rest of Bermuda. The subjugation of the rest of the island would follow, as the US Forces would control the Narrows Channel, the only large ship access to the Dockyard and the capital at Hamilton.

Fortunately, or not, depending on your loyalties, the Americans never followed Prime’s advice, and the island was not invaded in Victoria’s time. Some, however, might say that a “leveraged buyout” was effected on 1 September 1939, and in April 1941 the United States Forces descended upon the island, building Fort Bell and Kindley Field in St George’s Parish and the US Naval Operating Base in Southampton. Some might say “hostile takeover”: I could not possibly comment!

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