Such storms are of especial geological interest for they effect more changes in the shore cliffs and beaches in a few hours than would occur in many years of ordinary weather.

A.E. Verrill, about 1905

It all happened because of a teacup in a storm, or rather the ship, Sea Venture, in a hurricane. Since then there has been many a storm in the teacup that is Bermuda, though with our inflated sense of self, the more apt metaphor might be "hurricanes in a great cauldron" used for trying whale blubber.

That is to say that the settlement of Bermuda by humans was the result of a hurricano, that unique feature of the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the "Great Bay" of North America. Sir George Somers, and all of the future big wheels of the first English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in what became the United States, were in a little vessel, one of a fleet of nine, in the mid-Atlantic, when a hurricane struck on July 24, 1609.

For four days, the Sea Venture ran before the great storm, which battered its timbers without let-up. The seams began to give way and the bilge pumps were manned round the clock. When all appeared lost, the hurricane abated and Somers, the bigwigs, crew and the 150 emigrants found themselves in calm and brilliant waters off the beautiful east end of Bermuda.

No doubt attempting to beach the craft, the Sea Venture became wedged in a reef several hundred yards from St. Catherine's Beach, or "Gates Bay", as one of the eminences apparently proclaimed in his own name and honour, as he stepped onto the pink stands on July 28, 1609.

The rest of the story should be familiar to you, or will be by the end of 2009, which is the quadricentennial, or 400th anniversary, of the settlement of the island.

The shipwreck company soon split into two parties, with one group concentrating on building the Deliverance at Building's Bay, St. George's Island, while Sir George took a gang over to the "Main", possibly somewhere like Tucker's Town Bay or another place on the western perimeter of Castle Harbour, to construct the Patience, perhaps named because of the perseverance that he needed during an enforced holiday of ten months at Bermuda.

To cut out a couple of years, a shipload of settlers arrived in late July 1612 and soon set about making the first English town in the Americas, to be called St. George's, now part of Bermuda's World Heritage Site. Over the years, the first settlers and future Bermudians would experience many a hurricano, such as that which was the genesis of our island home, but none perhaps matched the great blow of 1899.

Among her contributions to Bermuda heritage, the late Mrs. Terry Tucker compiled Beware the Hurricane!, as a story of the more significant storms to affect the island over the last 400 years. In that book, she quotes the great American naturalist A.E. Verrill of Yale University, who did so much for the natural history of Bermuda in the early 1900s, as stating that the 1899 hurricane was one of the most violent such storms on record.

The island was already in a state of shock from hurricane-force winds that hammered the place on September 4, 1899 for 12 hours, when a real hurricane struck eight days later, on September 12 and 13, In the manner reminiscent of the 2003 Hurricane Fabian, the Causeway connecting the Main, Long Bird and St. George's Island was "completely demolished by a tidal wave that swept the whole south coast during that night of terror".

Fabian was the most powerful hurricane since Arlene in 1963 to hit Bermuda directly and it caused the first deaths here from such a storm since that of 1926, which sank HMS Valerian off the South Shore, among other casualties.

Considerable damage was caused at the military depots, with the central Prospect Camp looking "something like Alexandria after the bombardment".

Out to the west, the Dockyard sustained many injuries, one of which was repeated in Hurricane Fabian a century later. The great Long Arm of the breakwater that protected the Dockyard was significantly damaged on its seaward, or southerly, face. The massive stones of the original work were tossed about, like so many pebbles, but the Arm fortunately was not breached.

A plan of the damage to the Long Arm survives in the archives of the Bermuda Maritime Museum, as do three photographs, presumably taken a few days later. All show the destruction "caused by the Gale on the 4th and the Hurricane of the 12th and 13th September 1899".

The photographs, which may be some of the earliest that record hurricane damage at Bermuda, capture the two areas of damage to the Long Arm, one to the southwest and a large portion to the northeast. These were the same areas that were affected in Fabian, which may indicate inherent weaknesses in the Long Arm, or the nature and direction of the strongest hurricane seas in Grassy Bay.

The Fabian damage was sympathetically repaired by Correia Construction, which created rubber-faced formwork to imitate original stonework of the Dockyard.

A decade after its completion, the Long Arm had been severely damaged in the largest hurricane of the 1800s, prior to that of 1899. On September 17, 1839 that very strong storm struck the island, a few months after the new Governor, Sir William Reid, had arrived. Perhaps Providence intended that he should see theory in practice, for the year before Reid had published a seminal work, The Law of Storms, based upon his study of the aftermath of the Barbados hurricane of 1831, which killed no fewer than 1,477 persons in that island. For that first scientific study of hurricanes, Reid was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge ¿ to give that oldest learned society still in existence its full name.

History does not record how that man of science dealt with his Bermuda informants, if he received responses such as that given by the "wily" Mr. Zuill, Somerset Magistrate, after the great blow of 1899. When asked to give an estimate of the damage in those parts, he replied: "Billy Pitman made coffee this morning and couldn't drink it; the salt water had got into his tank!"

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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.