Owen Darrell has produced a second edition of Sir George Somers: Links Bermuda With Lyme Regis, the first edition having sold out. The booklet amounts to a brief history, with excellent annotations, of the man who "settled" Bermuda.

It is being sold to support the St. George's Foundation.

The booklet is authoritative; Mr. Darrell's work on Sir George has earned him a place in the English Dictionary of National Biography. He is also referred to in other reference works.

Mr. Darrell's book eschews a straight narrative approach in favour of a collage style, through which we come to know the man and something of his times.

Somers was born in 1554 in Lyme Regis, with which modern-day St. George's is twinned. His circumstances were relatively simple, as were his wife, Joan's, but Somers became a "considerable landowner" by financing sea-going activities in peace and wartime. To the backer went a share of the proceeds, including Spanish gold.

Somers' "buccaneering" spirit was to the fore when he served under veteran Sir Amyas Preston in Spain in 1595. Somers was said to have displayed much heroism. Two years later, he sailed under Sir Walter Raleigh to the Azores.

Knighted in 1603, Somers lived the life of the English country gentleman when not at sea. He accumulated more than 300 acres of land.

With the urge to discover the New World sweeping Europe, Somers set out from Plymouth in 1609, in command of a fleet of nine vessels that represented England's most ambitious effort to date.

The fleet sailed for Virginia. Half of the original crew of 500 aboard the vessels, commanded by Somers from the , made it to Virginia.

Somers funded the expedition, in part, as was traditional; backers shared the financial benefits to be derived from such activity.

Sir George died in 1610 and is buried at Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset.

Mr. Darrell is a Bermudian, and was the Island's Rhodes Scholar for 1940. He first researched Sir George in the Reading Room of The British Museum in 1959, although with no idea of what was to follow.

The genesis for Mr. Darrell's original publication in 1995 was the lack of material on Sir George. On a visit to St. George's, the author could find neither a postcard nor a picture of Somers, which moved Mr. Darrell to take up his pen.

His research has revealed that an ancestor, Sir Marmaduke Darrell (1559-1631), had also sailed with Sir Walter Raleigh, on a journey to Cadiz.

Sir George was knighted the day before Sir Marmaduke, both at Whitehall, and as fellow members of the Court and contemporaries, the two men would clearly have known each other.

Mr. Darrell's work on Sir George has therefore taken on a more personal dimension. It has also produced the discovery that Mr. Darrell is the 29th in a line of succession that traces back to Sir William Darrell, via John Darrell, who arrived in Bermuda in 1645.

Sir George thus has a worthy biographer, whose personal history rivals and is intertwined with that of his subject.

But don't take my word that the $5 that this book costs is well worth it. Ruth Thomas speaks of how it "conveniently encapsulates the essence of the man," in a work that "carries some valuable information which is ? not easily accessible," in the words of William Zuill.