A Governor of Bermuda makes an abrupt departure from the Island, under a cloud of scandal and controversy, setting tongues wagging both on the Island itself and in London. Sir Richard Posnett in 1983?

No, Captain Nathaniel Butler in 1622. And there is more much more of rather greater substance, besides.

Unlike in the old detective stories, the Butler probably did not do what he was accused of by his detractors.

Governors of Bermuda have quite often had a difficult time of things, and Nathaniel Butler was no exception.

Those were precarious, swashbuckling, pioneering days, beset by natural catastrophes as well as by religious controversies, political feuding and the threat of foreign attack.

Butler seems in fact to have been a highly conscientious public servant.

Happily, he ended up having the last say (albeit posthumously), when yet another former Governor, General Sir J.H. Lefroy, transcribed Butler's previously-unpublished manuscript account of Bermuda's early history, and had it published in 1882 by the prestigious Hakluyt Society.

Fast-forward a century and a quarter, and the Bermuda Maritime Museum Press publishes a modernised edition of Butler's history, complete with helpful biographical and other notes, giving us a more readable version of that half-forgotten book; now handsomely brought forward as the first of its exciting new Monograph Series of Bermuda history books.

(Cyril Packwood's 'Chained on the Rock' will be next, and one can only hope that the Maritime Museum will keep up the good work thus begun.)

Nathaniel Butler governed the vulnerable young colony of Bermuda from 1619 to 1622, but his book deals also (and often very humorously) with the administrations of his predecessors in office, thus providing us with an important near-contemporaneous account of the early history of Bermuda as a settled colony.

By contrast, the precise history of Captain Butler's History of the Bermudas is somewhat murky.

Although it is now generally accepted that it was he who wrote it, the book was originally attributed to the much-better-known Captain John Smith (famous for his 1624 General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, which drew heavily on Butler's account of Bermuda's formative years).

Ironically, it may well have been the publication of Smith's history, in 1624, that scuppered Butler's own publishing plans.

In any event, Butler's authorship of the obscure manuscript only became clear a decade or so after the book had been published in 1882, as a result of a handwriting comparison between the original manuscript in the British Museum and another (signed) Butler manuscript also held there.

General Lefroy (who edited the 1882 publication) was an able and highly energetic hunter-gatherer and publisher of Bermuda's early historic records, to whom generations of historians of Bermuda (and of Bermuda's place in the wider epic of English colonisation in the Americas) have long been indebted.

But Lefroy was by no means infallible. In addition to mis-attributing the Butler manuscript to John Smith, he also propagated the fallacious notion that Bermuda had been noted on Sebastian Cabot's famous 1544 world map as Ya de demonios or Isle of Devils, when in fact the Island's appellation on Cabot's map had been the standard La Bermuda of the period.

As for Nathaniel Butler, his final years are regrettably shrouded in mystery. That being so, it is perhaps all the more important that an impressive and worthy man who eventually dropped out of the history books should at least get his belated due in the form of proper credit for his very important contribution to the history and historiography of Bermuda.

In 1622, having put a number of noses out of joint, both in Bermuda and in London, Butler hastily departed the Island before the expiry of his term of office, and before his successor arrived to take office.

He went first to Virginia, and later to London, where in 1623 he made himself even more unpopular in certain influential quarters by writing an exposé entitled 'The Unmasked Face' of our Colony in Virginia as it was in the Winter of the year 1622, which he submitted to the Privy Council.

Butler's shocking report contradicted the self-serving propaganda that the Virginia Company had been putting out about the state of its American colony.

Virginia (said Butler) was not so much a colony as a slaughterhouse.

Butler's account of Virginia proved to be a major influence in the eventual revocation of the Virginia Company's royal charter in 1624, and the imposition of Crown rule there.

(See James Horn, A Land As God Made It. Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York: Basic Books, 2005) at pages 276-7.)

Butler's history of Bermuda was rather tame in comparison, albeit perhaps only because the island had been much luckier in its fortunes, and not as badly mismanaged as Virginia had been.

Mrs. Hallett has done a good job of work in bringing Butler's History more prominently to light (and to life) for the modern reader.

Hers was a challenging task, for which she was admirably equipped by dint of her previous scholarly transcriptions and redactions of original Bermuda source-materials.

Whilst she had the great benefit of having Lefroy's 1882 printing of the book conveniently to hand (as well as the more up-to-date technological advances that allowed her to pore over a digital copy of Butler's manuscript at home in Bermuda, rather than in a public library in London), it fell to her nonetheless to steer a judicious path through the intricacies of Butler's vibrant but complex and archaic language, with a view to allowing the modern reader an easier time than Lefroy had when he puzzled-out the original handwriting of the ancient manuscript.

It is inevitable, in such a task, that the editor will not entirely please everyone with every modern paraphrase of the Jacobean vernacular, but Hallett has done an admirable job.

Future generations of historians, hopefully honouring her painstaking toils just as we do Lefroy's, will, on the whole, find their own path considerably smoothed (and their understanding considerably enriched) by her mastery of her text.

Happily, she has quite often preserved Butler's original ripe phraseology, placing it in quotation marks to distinguish such original portions from her own paraphrased or glossed portions of the text.

With its Shakespearean colour and verve, it would have been a shame had Butler's original wording been left discarded in its entirety on the cutting-room floor.

Original expressions deemed worthy of preservation but in need of comment have in many cases been helpfully clarified in footnotes.

Occasionally she gives up too easily, however; as when (at page 62, footnote 24) she is stymied by Butler's phrase "Having made a Scoggins dole of her [a supply-ship's] supply?"

But a Scoggin (or Scogan) refers to a not-unduly-obscure 16th century jest-book, attributed to one John Scogan, who was the court fool or jester to King Edward IV: see, for example, The Chambers Dictionary (London: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd., 10th Edition, 2006, at page 1369); whilst "dole" clearly refers to the giving-out or apportioning of something.

Hence it seems tolerably clear that the phrase simply mocks the man in question (a rather loathsome Acting Governor named John Mansfield) for distributing the newly-arrived food and (alcoholic) drink to himself and his cronies, rather than to the needy (as any less-ethically-challenged leader like Butler himself would surely have done).

There is perhaps also a play upon the sense of 'doleful', in that such greedy antics are ultimately sad to contemplate, however amusingly re-told.

At page 71, footnote 43, the allusion which puzzles Hallett is perhaps not quite as obscure as she suggests.

Whilst the allusion to the French King Louis XI's badly-dressed messenger to England's King Edward IV certainly no longer resonates with us, it may well have been a much more familiar image to Butler's contemporaries, particularly at a time when history plays had become so popular (Shakespeare, Marlowe, et al).

Peter Quennell and Hamish Johnson, in their 'Who's Who in Shakespeare' (London: Routledge, 2006, at page 125) state of King Louis (Lewis) that he himself "wore the meanest clothes and avoided all ceremony and ostentation".

In the context of the Acting Governor's low and treasonous antics in the face of the arrival of the newly-appointed governor Daniel Tucker, the allusion, however obscure, certainly seems apt enough.

Matters of dress were far more important in Butler's day than in ours, and people of the higher sort were also much quicker to take serious offence at perceived slights (e.g. being greeted by a conspicuously badly-dressed messenger).

But it is perhaps conceivable that Butler was also making some elaborate, coded allusion of his own in this regard. In Shakespeare's King Henry VI, Part III (Act III, Scene III) the Earl of Warwick is sent as "England's messenger" to King Louis XI, but ends up returning to England as Louis's messenger, to threaten King Edward with being overthrown by English force of arms.

For his part, Butler is known to have been a follower of the latter-day Earl of Warwick. I have not had the leisure to pursue this train of thought, but I mention it in case it may possibly be relevant.

A few errors do unfortunately crop up in the book. At page 68, footnote 34, Hallett suggests Spanish Point as the locale for a find of treasure "at the Flemish wreck".

But the name 'Flemish Wreck' denoted a place in the vicinity of Ely's Harbour, clearly shown as such on the early maps (including on one of the two Sir George Somers maps of 1609/10).

Also, at page 99, footnote 60, Hallett seems unaware that although governors of Bermuda used the title of Governor when on the ground in Bermuda, they were technically only Deputy Governors within the corporate governance structure of the Bermuda Company; with the titular Governor (i.e. the chairman of the board) being a grandee residing in London.

Hence the reference which puzzles Hallett is simply to governor Daniel Tucker, and not to some mystery personage as supposed.

A bolder editorial voice would occasionally have added to the book: for example, Hallett allows what is surely an obvious slip of the pen by Butler to go unchallenged (his statement at page 29 about countless reefs extending out by about nine miles to the northeast [sic], when he surely meant the northwest).

But in general Hallett is to be congratulated on weaving so painstaking and pleasantly elucidatory a course through the rank thickets of Butler's language and the political complexities of the day, to give us a work that is comparatively easily readable for a work of its period, and certainly worth the trouble (although much of the story will be familiar to those who have read the relevant sections of Smith's General History).

One wishes that Hallett had been able to provide a more comprehensive biography of Butler. It is frustrating (although hardly her fault) that we do not even know when Butler died, or how he was circumstanced at the time of his demise.

She mentions that Butler made himself unpopular with the Virginia Company of London with his 1623 report, and that he was later to be found serving in various foreign parts (France, Spain, and what is now part of Nicaragua) intermittently up to 1641; and also that he may have been committed to prison in 1649 by the Cromwellian regime "for dispersing treasonable and scandalous books".

She does not mention that he was an ally of the Earl of Warwick in the latter's disputes with Sir Edwin Sandys (both of those notables being active in both the Bermuda and Virginia companies).

Further discussion and details of such matters would have been welcome, and would surely not have taxed either the patience of the general reader or the generosity of the sponsors of the book (Richard & Susan Butterfield, whose civic-minded largesse is warmly to be congratulated, here as also in other instances).

The production-quality of the book is high. The pages are thick and pleasing to the touch; the typeface easy on the eye; and the titles and layout handsomely done, in a mixture of black-letter and red-letter type that is aptly redolent of the 17th century

As in John Smith's more famous history, the use of marginal dates is a helpful touch for those wishing to be reminded at a glance what portion of the chronology is being recounted at any particular juncture.

The famous Bermuda map from Smith's General History is also helpfully reproduced as the book's main illustration (a colour image of the Sir George Somers map from c.1609/10, on the jacket, also being very apt).

However, the explanatory caption appended to the Smith map is seriously erroneous, in so far as it attributes the Smith map in its entirety to Butler, with only a tentative credit being given to Richard Norwood for the mapping of the Island thus delineated, and with poor John Smith getting short shrift.

It is very probably the case that the numerous drawings (of the forts, bridges, and other public constructions of the fledgeling colony) which surround the actual map were indeed based on drawings made by Butler.

Smith himself never visited the island although one suspects that the finished drawings themselves improved upon reality (probably in Smith's own polishing of them) in regard to the imposing array of field-artillery apparently disposed about the island.

But there is no reason whatever to deny due credit either to Richard Norwood or indeed to John Smith the latter almost certainly being responsible for the layout and general style of the published map.

Smith was an accomplished cartographer, and whilst he very properly credited the surveyor Richard Norwood with the actual well-surveyed outlines of our delicate little archipelago, it is quite clear that it was Smith who artfully combined Norwood's delineation of Bermuda with the (Butler) drawings of the forts and other images of local life, to create the highly satisfying and very informative pictorial map that Smith published in his 1624 book, and which is crisply reproduced in this new version of Butler's book.

Indeed, Smith quite clearly says so on the map itself: "The description of ye land by Mr. Norwood.

All contracted (i.e. reduced in size) into this order (i.e. referring to the design and layout of the published map) by Captaine John Smith."

Few human enterprises of any significance are error-free, and the publishing of history books is far from being an exception to the rule. In general, a fine job has been done by all concerned in the production of this book, of which the Bermuda Maritime Museum Press should be justly proud.

Jonathan Land Evans, BA (Hons), MA, LL. B (Hons) is a Bermudian lawyer and an historian of Bermuda maps and artworks. His detailed history of Bermuda in old maps is forthcoming from the Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, and he is currently engaged in penning a three-volume history of the depiction of Bermuda in fine art.