Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink

.¿ Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner

Bermuda is like the Ancient Mariner's cursed ship, becalmed in a wide, wide ocean: Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship, Upon a painted ocean.

Before the island was settled, shipwrecked mariners would have appreciated Coleridge's verse that there was water everywhere around Bermuda, but not a drop to drink, as it was salty. Having no rivers, there was no obvious water on tap and the mariners would have had to make do with catching some rainwater, or possibly drinking the uppermost layers of some of the ponds in the central parishes.

While it is now known that the island has some groundwater, it would have been difficult for shipwrecked mariners to exploit it, as it is not a uniform or obvious phenomenon. Water has always been an endemic Bermuda problem.

With the arrival of the Plough in July 1612, the settlement of Bermuda began in earnest. Presumably the first thirsty Bermudians set about with barrels to collect rainwater from their thatched roofs. It would be some decades before stone houses with stone roofs and rainwater leaders to masonry tanks would become the local answer to having a drop to drink when necessary.

However, as early as 1616, Governor Daniel Tucker was excavating wells on his lands in western Southampton, one of which may still exist on the Port Royal Golf Course. One of the biggest government wells for modern water truckers is on the same land.

Tucker, perhaps like many of the early settlers, understood the geological circumstances of water and the limestone platform that is Bermuda, perched on the top of an oceanic volcano. Rainwater floats on salt water within the soft limestone rock and so it is possible, with a well, to bucket, or pump the fresh water off the top. If the well is pumped too quickly using modern machines, the fresh water can be replaced by rising salt water, which permeates the Bermuda rock at sea level.

Most Bermuda stone was formed above sea level, in the air as it were, and the sands of which it is composed were consolidated through the action of rainwater. As people here know well, rain does not descend in a uniform way and it can be raining in Warwick and dry as a bone in Somerset. The erosion of the island over many thousands of years has also created differences in the strata throughout the island. Thus wells for fresh water cannot be obtained in many parts of Bermuda.

At Ireland Island, where the greatest British dockyard in the Americas was begun in 1809, the rock contains little of the soft Bermuda stone, but is mostly the very hard strata, known as the Walsingham Formation, after similar material in the area around the Crystal Caves. That type of rock is often cracked and fissured and rainwater soon runs out through the crevices to mix irreversibly with the salt water of the sea.

The Royal Navy personnel and Royal Engineers were well aware of the presence of underground water in some areas of Bermuda. Devonshire has some of the formations most conducive to the production of ground water and so near the present incinerator on the north shore of that parish, they dug some wells to supply that very necessary commodity to the ships of the Fleet. A house called Seven Wells in that vicinity indicates the number of the wells, one of which is preserved on that property.

At the Dockyard, the Navy had to rely on the Bermuda tradition of storage tanks fed by rainwater from the roofs of the warehouses and other buildings. Unlike most sites in Bermuda, the Dockyard was excavated to a flat ground within six feet of high tide level; therefore tanks could not be placed in the ground without major reinforcement against the pressure of seawater. Having tanks above ground allowed ships to be provisioned by gravity, as their water tanks were at a lower level than those in the Dockyard.

Perhaps to make up for the absence of fresh water wells, the Royal Navy turned to salt water for another basic necessity, the flushing of toilets in the dockyard. As they did not use cesspits, but piped effluent overboard, like the City of Hamilton and the Town of St. George's yet do, the use of salt water, rather than fresh, for flushing might be seen as more environmentally friendly, than using precious fresh water.

To supply salt water for flushing, machines were needed, namely a pump powered by a steam engine and a boiler to produce steam. A building, now historic, with a magnificent chimney was erected near Glass Bottle Beach to the southwest of Cockburn's Cut on the north shore of Ireland Island. In front of the building, properly known as the Flushing Engine House, a sump was cut down below sea level to provide a reservoir of saltwater for pumping; this feature has been buried or destroyed.

The steam pump was housed on the ground floor, with the boiler room above. The tall chimney was erected to carry the smoke away from the adjacent naval housing. From the building, salt water for the toilets was pumped throughout Ireland Island in cast iron or ceramic pipes. To some extent, a similar flushing system is still in use.

The Flushing Engine House was made from the hard Dockyard stone and despite years of neglect has withstood all hurricanes, except the last, which damaged some of the western gable.

The Bermuda National Trust has long been concerned about the fate of this historic building, which is being renovated. While it is commendable that this building has been saved by renovation, there are aspects of such projects that suggest that there should be protocols for work on historic buildings. After all, we would not like people to say that we are flushing away heritage for modern conveniences.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments can be sent to drharrislogic.bm or by telephone to 799-5480.