The dock heralded the opening of a new era, and most appropriately the old hulk Tenedos, the sole survivor of the dark age, was lowered into her watery grave. The d, <$>Bermuda, forthwith added immensely to the colony’s importance to commercial shipping as well as the navy’s needs, and in even greater proportion it substantiated the reasons for the island’s defence. In fact, in naval eyes, the dock was more important than the colony.

&#2; Dr. H.C. Wilkinson<$>

.5>A<$>T the end of the first decade of the 19th century, all the families on Ireland Island were removed from lands they had occupied for nigh on 200 years by the British military and the Bermuda Government.While the ground was possessed in the national interest in order to build the greatest Royal Navy dockyard in the Americas, several dozen families had to relocate to other parts of Bermuda and were never to return to their ancestral lands.

Their lands eventually fell in 1951 and 1995 to the Bermuda Government, which until late years neglected much of the built-heritage given over at those dates by the British military.

Beginning 1974 with the establishment of the Maritime Museum and in 1982 with the creation of the West End Development Corporation, the deterioration of the historic Dockyard was reversed and the area is now the most visited in Bermuda. What is missing now was missing then for the first 50 years of the Dockyard, namely, a dock; that is to say, a dry-dock.

A dockyard is so named because it is an industrial “yard” with workshops, artisans and a “dock” for repairing ships. In the absence of a dry-dock, ships had to be careened to have their hulls, or bottoms, repaired and cleaned.

In the early decades of the Bermuda Dockyard, careening capstans were located near the present ferry stop, with pits next to them to accept the yards of the ship. By careening, a ship was hauled over on one side, so that the opposite side was exposed for cleaning out.

A dry-dock is a basin in the land that could be flooded and a vessel floated in. A gate or caisson was placed behind the ship and the water pumped out, leaving the vessel in a “dry” dock, in which all the hull was exposed to the air for maintenance.

Such a repair basin was called a “graving dock” and for many years, a space was reserved in the Bermuda Dockyard for such a structure.

The local rock was an inappropriate material for a graving dock and so a London firm invented a iron “floating dry-dock” in the 1860s, at the period when iron ships, and later on, forts, were at the forefront of the Industrial Revoion. That first dock, Bermuda, was the largest piece of ironmongery ever made and it could accommodate any ship then afloat, with the single extion of the Great Eastern. It was specifically designed to give the Bermuda naval base a dry-dock at long last.Over 100 years, the Bermuda yard had five floating docks: HM Floating Dock Bermuda (1869-1908); Admiralty Floating Dock 1 (1902-1946); AFD 28 (1941-1946); AFD 5 (1946-1951) and AFD 48 (1946-1972). Two were small, while the other three were all the largest in the world at their launch.

Construction on thloating dock Bermuda began in 1866 and a model of the vessel was presented at the Paris Exhibition the following year. After launching in September 1868, Bermuda was towed across the Atlantic via the Azores 33 days. The<$> lead ship from the Azores was HMS Warrior, appropriately the world’s first iron-hulled warship towing the firiron dry-dock. Bermuda was sold for scrap and “towed out of Camber by the Stm. Tug Gladen, Stm. Tug Powerful<$> behind on Monday the 9th March 1908 at 2.30 p.m. — to Spanish Point to complete breaking up”. Her bones and two caissons reside in that bay to this very day.AFD 1 was the replacement for HMFD Bermuda. Upon arrival in 1902, the dock was moored at Boss’ Cove, awaiting the completion of the new South Basin of the Dockyard. Shortly thereafter, she succfully raised HMS Dominion<$>, which at 17,500 tons was several thousand tons over the capacity of the dock.

After lifting 100 ships in 1945 alone, AFD 1 was sold to Regusci y Voulminot Ingenieros at Montevideo, Uruguay, one of the largest and most important harbours in South America. The dock left Bermuda in December 1946, after half a century of sterling duty. AFD 5 arrived in Bermuda in 1946, but had to be moored in Port Royal Bay, for berthing arrangements in the South Basin were not yet completed, including two 80-foot booms, “the largest welding job ever done in Bermuda”. The dock had twice the lifting capacity of AFD 1, which it replaced. On August 25, 1948, it was towed from Port Royal by the tugI>Justice and Eminent to the wharf in the South Basin, there to work for a m three years. In <$>1951, AFD 5 was taken to Falmouth, England, where it served until 1966, when it was bound for the United States, but broke in half and sank 800 miles into the Atlantic. Its last job was to dock a floating dock acquired from Germany after the war.AFD 28 was the first of two small docks that replaced HMFD Bermuda in the North Basin. This was a wooden construction and had been sent from the United States for the duration of the Second World War. Arriving in late December 1941, it left the island in the summer of 1946, but sank on the passage home.

AFD 48 replaced AFD 28 at the North Basin wharf in late 1946 and was there employed for the next 26 years. It was sunk to the west of Dockyard in August 1972, ending its life, did the first dock, Bermuda, as a shipwreck.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum.mments can sent to drharris@logic.bm or by telephone to 799-5480.