which appeared in last weekend's Telegraph Magazine, The Royal Gazette has secured the right to reprint the article in full in today's newspaper.

LAST AUTUMN, a small boat landed on Nonsuch, one of the coral islands which together form the British dependency of Bermuda. It contained the new Governor, Lord Waddington, and his house-guest, Prince Michael of Kent. The object of their journey was a black and white bird called the cahow. One might almost describe it as an expedition of two protected species in search of a third.

There survive today an estimated 53 pairs of cahows, coincidentally the same number as exists of governors and ex-governors to British dependent territories. The cahow is a nocturnal petrel with a longish beak and webbed feet. It has a loud cry which to early ears sounded like "tell 'em, tell 'em''. Believing they were hearing the screams of shipwrecked spirits, sailors steered the widest possible berth. They christened the treacherous coral reef Insula Daemonorum, or Islands of Devils.

Then came the first settlers -- all shipwrecked sailors -- who discovered the truth about the cahow. Not only were the birds good to eat, they were easy to catch. You walked towards them, laughing, whereupon they settled with piercing shrieks on your arms and head. In this way four thousand cahows could be clubbed to death in a single evening. Which is why, round about 1630, and more or less the same time as the dodo, the cahow appeared to have become extinct.

The man who guided Governor Waddington and his royal visitor through the tangled palmettos was David Wingate, a naturalist who has introduced most British Governors to Nonsuch in the past 30 years. To each he recalls a particular evening in 1951 when he was present at the discovery of a deep crevice, and, outside it, telltale signs of excrement. What was to happen next changed his life. "We saw footprints and smelled a musky smell and at the end of the nest was a bird.'' The bird was noosed and gentled drawn out. "By gad,'' exclaimed Wingate's companion, "the cahow!'' To Wingate, "it was like being in on the rediscovery of the dodo''. Bermuda is our oldest colony, one of 14 dependent territories to have a British governor. "A lot of people think we went out with the dodo, or should have done,'' says Mark Herdman, a former Governor of the Caymans, who briefed Lord Waddington before his departure last August. "But it's a serious job.'' Herdman is credited with devising the collective noun for the human species: he calls it a `plume' of governors. He also designed their tie. Made in Woking, from polyester, this shows a feathered hat against a background of maroon or blue. "I had to order five dozen of the things -- and blow me down, I sold the lot.'' Lord Waddington is a rare bird, not least because he happens to be a political appointee rather than a career diplomat. The only other is his former Cabinet colleague, Chris Patten. But Bermuda is not Hong Kong, not yet. Six hundred and thirty miles off the North Carolina coast, it is one of the remotest spots on earth. For a small place -- 22 miles long, one mile wide -- Bermuda has shipwrecked many careers. These are the fates of some previous governors: The first of them inspired The Tempest. He was Sir Thomas Gates, Governor-designate of Virginia, cast ashore in a hurricane. Shakespeare borrowed details of Gates's arrival for his last play, about a man -- Prospero -- ousted from his throne and banished to a lonely island with only one inhabitant, Caliban.

Until this century, most Governors of Bermuda were military men. I cannot imagine General Sir James Willcocks differed dramatically from his predecessors. In 1917 Willcocks wanted to be fighting in France. Instead there was nothing for him to do but write his memoirs. One night as he sat at his desk a gale drove a four-funnelled American destroyer on to the beach. He grabbed his torch and went outside to find himself the one challenged.

"Who are you?'' hailed a voice through the howling wind.

"I'm the Governor.'' "Here, stop that. What are you Governor of?'' "Governor of Bermuda,'' shouted Willcocks. He explained, "I could not catch all they said, but gathered they took me for an escaped lunatic.'' This was not an uncommon reaction towards recent holders of the post. `I wasn't the first to be offered the job,' one former Governor of Bermuda told me. "I was the third. I know of at least five people who superseded me who turned it down. Nobody wanted it.'' Sir Peter Ramsbotham (1977-80) accepted only after he had been ousted by Peter Jay as ambassador in Washington. He learned to love the place but "it really was the other end of the telescope''.

What explained their reluctance? In part, there was the perception that our oldest colony could well be our dullest. (Mark Twain, a regular visitor, described Bermuda as "the right country for a `jaded' man to loaf in''.) There was also the fate of Sir Richard Sharples, as brutally murdered as any petrel.

Sharples' history is of particular relevance to the Waddington story. Like Waddington, he had been a Conservative politician. Like Waddington he had been a minister in the Home Office, where, according to his widow, "he was very, very hard on drug pushers, and had made forceful speeches in the House''.

Baroness Sharples believes her husband's stance on drugs explains the events of March 10, 1973, the memory of which continues to traumatise Bermuda.

That night, as she describes it, they had hosted a dinner party. "I suffered from a bad back and went to bed immediately after. The next thing I knew I was being woken from a dopey sleep to be told Richard had been shot.'' It seems what had happened was this: after the guests departed and shortly before midnight, the Governor, his ADC and Horsa, his Great Dane, walked into the Garden. They were standing on the steps over looking the North Shore when two men leapt up. Captain Sayers was killed instantly, his hands in his pockets, his gun still wedged in his cummerbund. Horsa, wounded at the bottom of the steps, ran up and died at the top. The Governor, hit once, was crawling away when he was shot again. Baroness Sharples says, `I would have been shot too.' It is a coincidence we happen to be talking on the anniversary of the day, 15 years ago, when two black Bermudians were hanged for the murder. "How did you feel on that day?'' I asked.

She says, "It tidied everything up.'' After Sir Richard's murder, the Governor's residence was dubbed "the most dangerous address in the world''. Those dispatched there tended to be plucked from either the diplomatic or the military fold. Then last April, on the Saturday following the general election, the Prime Minister sent for David Waddington.

Lord Waddington QC is an elusive creature. "He's a Selwyn Lloyd figure,'' says a fellow peer. "A politician who's very shy and a lawyer who's rather average. He's never quite what you expect him to be. You'd think because of his reactionary views he'd be awful, but he's actually quite nice.'' The original Waddingtons were Normans who fought at Hastings. "He's a good Norman,'' observes his wife Gillian, who also comes from Lancashire where Waddington's grandfather owned cotton mills. In his Lancashire roost he is known as a raconteur of rare talent; also as a respecter of between-the-wars, mercantile values. Outside Lancashire he is better known for his carefully concealed sensitivity. when I asked my uncle, who was at school with him at Sedburgh, what he remembered of the former Chief Whip, Home Secretary and Leader of the House of Lords, he replied: "Absolutely nothing.'' Contemporaries at Oxford recall with difficulty "a dullish little man on a bicycle with a taste for Gilbert and Sullivan''.

But Waddington's political views are anything but dull. If he is remembered by the man in the street, it is for the wish he pronounced to flog students who had pelted him with eggs, and for his robust appreciation of the death penalty. Tories accorded him a standing ovation when he reminded them that they knew exactly where he stood on hanging.

So what, one might ask, made Waddington a candidate suitable for Bermuda? Could it have been his trenchant views which swayed John Major into offering him the governorship of a territory where death by hanging not only remains the law, but is enthusiastically practised? Was it the pleasure in dressing-up that associates itself with lovers of Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum? Or was it the quality that allowed Waddington to be completely forgotten? "Most people are told to move on and that's the end of the story,'' he says.

"But to be told to move on and go to Bermuda...I was a very fortunate man, to put it bluntly.'' "Did you accept at once?'' "I didn't accept at once,'' he says. "I wanted to consult my wife.'' How did Lady Waddington take the news? She avoids a direct answer and says, "My husband rang and I turned round and when I said, "David's been offered Bermuda,'' my daughter and her baby both burst into tears.'' Never having lived abroad this was not, as Lady Waddington herself explains it, "first on my list of things to do''. Her reaction brought to mind the words of the Duchess of Windsor upon learning her husband had been created Governor of the Bahamas. "It's not an appointment -- more of a disappointment.'' `OUR OLDEST COLONY COULD WELL BE OUR DULLEST' WHEN, last summer, Lord and Lady Waddington arrived in Bermuda, they were welcomed by a straw-hatted figure who every morning, between 5.30 and 10 "come rain, blow or shine'', stands on a roundabout outside the capital, Hamilton, and greets those driving in to work with raised thumbs and shouts of "Hello, darling, I love you''.

In Britain, Johnny Barnes would be regarded by commuters with a degree of alarm. In Bermuda, an island of friendly, open people, they all wave back.

"I'm just trying to make people happy, the good Lord and I,'' explains Barnes, a former bus driver. "What's the sense of living if you can't make people happy? What can we take with us? Not a thing. Not even the breath we breathe.'' He leans forward, thumbs up, towards a man on his moped. Kissing both hands, Barnes tells the Chairman of the Bank of Bermuda, "Don't forget, we love you now. Have a beautiful day.'' It was with these very words that Johnny Barnes last August hailed the figure in a horse-drawn landau, seated thee in a plumed hat. `Did you wave back?' I ask the Governor.

"Of course, I did.'' Lord Waddington stands before a great, grey, turreted house, his back to the sea. The water through the palms is unnaturally blue: low nutrient levels encourage virtually no plankton. The palms have been planted by famous visitors. "I'm writing a guide to the garden,'' he says. His expression, which might have been mournful, is ebullient. "That's Mrs. Thatcher'', and he points at a thatch palm, Thrinax parviflora. "That's Mr Bush.'' (A sentry palm.) "And this is John Major.'' (A bedraggled Bermuda palmetto.) There are trees planted by Churchill and Eisenhower, even Haile Selassie, who continues to be regarded by members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as divine. "I was told not to be alarmed if I saw a Rasta,' says Lord Waddington, standing before the trunk of a 30-year-old princess palm. "A lot of these Johnnies come up and worship it.'' These are the trees and shrubs through which Lord Waddington jogs before breakfast, chased at heel by Basil, a brown Norfolk terrier. Of late, Lord Waddington and his wife have been taking golf lessons and there is a plan to buy a dinghy. But, really, they have had no time for themselves: "We've been busy from the word go.'' There is admiration in his voice when he adds, "You know, there are an awful lot of things we can learn from these people.'' There is no doubt that something extraordinary has happened to Lord Waddington of Read in the few months he has been in Bermuda. After his luncheon speech to the Hamilton Rotary Club, I watch a black cameraman punch him playfully in the stomach. "You've got a great sense of humour, sir.'' A woman enthuses, "What a wonderful cosy man''.

Elsewhere he is described as `a people person' and as `an open-air man'.

Detractors might explain this by suggesting he was required to do nothing in particular and is doing it very well. They would be wrong. "For the first time I can remember,'' says a hyper-critical Bermudian lady, "we have the right man in the right job at the right time''.

So what is the post which has brought him here? A story goes that when informed Lord Waddington was in a hurry to take up his job, the then incumbent, General Sir Desmond Langley, whose monocle was famous for splashing into the soup, asked: "What job would that be?'' According to Sir Richard Posnett, Governor from 1981-83, the position required you to be "a bit of a dolly''. Posnett remembers, `London didn't want me to be invaded or to make a noise or to cost them money, while Bermuda wanted me to be a puppet in uniform -- to show off to American tourists. There were a few committees, but it didn't amount to a row of beans, and you had to attend endless functions.

Eighty percent of the time was drudgery and boredom. Peter Ramsbotham warned me I must have some hobby to keep myself interested. I brought my golf handicap down. He used to go off and look at birds.'' Two reasons underline the phenomenon of why it is Waddington might have come into his own. The first concerns the size of the place. Bermuda contains the same population -- about 60,000 -- as his old Ribble Valley constituency. Like Ribble Valley, it is a merchant community, built on virtues such as thrift and a Victorian sense of respect for law and order. It is a society he can understand.

The second reason is this: Unlike some of his predecessors, Lord Waddington perceives there is a job to do.

Before analysing what that might be, it is necessary to focus closer on his territory. One misconception which sends Bermudians into a lather is that Bermuda lies in the Bahamas. It does not. It is situated entirely on its own, both geographically and spiritually. No banana island in the Caribbean, Bermuda is a highly-evolved society. It has one of the best-educated populations in the world: 90 percent of school-leavers go to university. It also has one of the richest: A barman's earnings can amount to $80,000 a year, on which he pays no tax. Its parliamentary system is the oldest among British Commonwealth countries, dating from 1620. The speed limit, rigidly enforced, is 20 m.p.h. There is little discernable corruption or violence despite the wealth: Five firearm offences in the past year. It is also very beautiful. As close as you'll get to Paradise without actually dying, they tell you. Or, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "You can go to Heaven if you like, I'm staying in Bermuda.'' To understand this paradise one must bear in mind one thing: The families who still run the place are descended from privateers. Some of their ancestors came ashore from the same shipwreck as Governor Gates and their names can be seen over the shops on Front Street in Hamilton. There are the families known colloquially as the Forty Thieves or the Front Street Gang and their first fortune was founded on the vomit of sick whales: ambergris. This greasy grey substance was coughed up from the stomach lining and discovered lying on the beach. Despite its provenance, ambergris was a prized ingredient in the creation of perfume. When reading about the island's subsequent history, it is impossible not to conceive of Bermuda as one vast lump of the stuff, and Britain as the whale.

That Bermuda is so prosperous is owning to the Forty Thieves' sophisticated exploitation of its links with the mother country. `We have our cake and eat it,' is a phrase you hear often. It describes an a la carte approach to the British way of life. What Front Street Bermudians want from Witchall is what they get, namely a policy of benign neglect. They reckon it is far better to have an absent-minded nanny overseas than an interfering American nearby. Says one, `Americans have a habit of interfering, which is inclined to end up with dead bodies on the beach.' This tends not to happen with a British Governor nominally in charge.

Since virtually nothing is manufactured in Bermuda -- even those shorts are made elsewhere -- the island's prosperity depends in equal measure on tourism and off-shore business. Both are designed specifically to attract the outside world, and both fly the British flag of convenience to do so.

Take, for example, tourism. The majority of the half-million tourists who visit each year are rich Americans in search of the little piece of Britain they want Britain to be. In Bermuda they find Perthshire paperwrights, lambswool jerseys, bobbies without guns -- even a town crier. They can bask in the enforced absence of neon, gambling, whores and rain, while revelling in the tradition of afternoon tea -- which might be partaken in tidy gardens reminiscent of a Miss Marple village, circa 1935.

But take a look behind the genteel facades and you find something different: a ruthless business mentality which trades on the stability offered by the British legal system. What attracts 7,000 offshore companies to Bermuda -- apart from combining the AGM with a round of golf -- is the idea of the British Court of Appeal as a guarantee of respectability. This might explain why Bermuda's reinsurance market ($14 billion) has grown to be double that of Lloyd's ($7 billion); also the way in which Bermuda has deftly positioned itself to catch the fall-out from Hong Kong. Jardine Matheson has already moved operations here. The man who engineered its move expects other companies to follow.

Sir David Gibbons is chairman of the Bank of Butterfield and, like many on Front Street, a keen diver. His office is decorated with the brass nails and shell-cases of shipwrecks which litter the reefs. A former Premier and Minister of Finance, he remains the most powerful man on the island, its Prospero.

Over a Dark `n' Stormy -- Bermuda's national drink, consisting of rum and ginger-beer -- with some of the locals, this is what I hear. "The Front Street Gang run Bermuda -- and Gibbons runs them.'' If what Gibbons says tends to go, it is worth listening to what he has to say. It can be placed in the shell of a nut. "To give up our special position,'' he tells me, "would be madness''. By which he means he wants things nicely as they are. He wants the status quo to be preserved as well as put on display. He wants a uniformed Lord Waddington in a plumed hat to continue sitting on what is by any standard an immensely lucrative egg. Gibbons summarises the Governor's function from the Bermuda angle, and one suddenly perceives a triangle into which quite a lot of power has disappeared. "The Governor can advise you,'' he says. "He can hook you up to people in Ottawa, Washington and London. And he's important for photo opportunities. The Americans love it.'' It is fortunate Lord Waddington should be a devotee of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The play-acting demanded of his position is considerable. If anybody embodies the special identity Bermudians like to peddle before tourists and boardrooms, it is not the Premier but the Governor. They don't want him to do anything, but they do want him to be someone.

As a former Home Secretary, Lord Waddington is judged to possess more impressive credentials than some of his predecessors. Their marks have remained in their nicknames. "Lord Vinyl'', whose party piece was to play Mack the Knife on drums; "Idle John'' who played with his train set in a room above the kitchen and whose diminutive stature meant his sword grazed the ground on parade.

Lord Waddington's salary is paid for by the Bermudians ( 67,647 a year plus slightly less in expenses). Responsible for the police, internal and external security and for foreign affairs, he is also paid to stand on ceremony. Of all his duties, the most important are those which, 12 times a year, require him to dress up in uniform.

IN SAVILE ROW, Colin Macnaughton has been making governors' uniforms since 1928. The ban on ivory has meant sword-handles are today fashioned from Bakelite, but otherwise little has changed. The cocked hats -- costing 400 -- are constructed around the same blocks used at the time of Waterloo, while governors' plumes are still made from swans' feathers.

Eschewed by Chris Patten, the complete uniform, including boots, spurs, sash, gloves and gold embroidery, costs 7,000. "It does something to a man,'' says Macnaughton. "It smartens him up -- and Patten there with the sleeves of his jacket two inches too long. I think it's appalling.'' There is another thing. "Quite a lot of my customers have been assassinated over the years.'' How many Governors' uniforms has he made in his life? "God knows,'' says Mcnaughton. "But we had a good year last year.'' This included the outfit ordered for Lord Waddington.

In the Bermuda residence, in a room smelling faintly of damp, I watch the Governor's butler fit him into the quilted coatee. Michael, an ex-guardsman, says of the coatee: "It's a throwback to early Victorian, Napoleonic War style.' Of his duties as butler, he says: "It's nor like Hudson in Upstairs Downstairs. It's more like Igor the vegetarian vampire in Count Duckula.'' "Gillian, hat,'' says Lord Waddington of Read. Lady Waddington hands it over.

She watches him lower the red and white cockade on to his thinning head and says: "If there had been any question of my husband refusing this uniform, there would have been an outcry.'' Firmly she looks at me, but I know what she is thinking. She is thinking of Sir Richard Posnett.

The case of Richard Posnett penetrates to the heart of Bermuda's questions of identity and of the island's relationship with its Governors. At first glance the episode is cut and dried, but the illuminating lesson to be drawn from the following story is: don't muck around with the Front Street Gang, don't try to govern, and to dress up. In 1983, two years into his tour of duty, Posnett was compelled to resign after the Bermuda Government accused him of fiddling his expenses. Scratch deeper and the cast becomes a little more complex. "He wanted to be invested in a business suit!'' splutters Sir David Gibbons, who at the time was Minister of Finance, and someone not given easily to emotion.

As Posnett himself -- who has always denied the allegations -- explains, "They wanted me to arrive in uniform. I said, `Look, this is really going too far'.'' But Posnett's wish to dispense with the fowl-feather hat was symbolic of a crime far greater than whether or not he had cashed in an airline ticket or spent government money on his private entertaining. "He was not corrupt,'' believes Ottiwell Simmons, president of the powerful Bermuda Industrial Union.

"I've never seen such an impartial or fair person. His forced resignation was a political issue.'' He believes Posnett's principal crime was to behave as if he were a Governor paid to do just that govern.

Posnett had been lured from retirement in Godalming after service in Uganda and four years as Governor of Belize. He had arrived in Bermuda at a time when Britain was anxious to divest itself of dependent territories. He came on a wave of decolonisation. This was the last outcome desired by the Front Street oligarchy, and, for most of the population, it remains so. As Gibbons explains: "A substantial number of clients have made it clear they would leave if we went independent.'' He cites the terrible experience of these clients in Caribbean islands such as Jamaica. At the time of severing links with Britain the Jamaican dollar was worth $1.20. "Now it's worth three cents.'' Many on Front Street believe half the offshore companies would leave if Bermuda followed suit. They fear, too, the collapse of the tourist industry. Gibbons repeats, "There are no advantages whatever in going independent.'' But in Posnett's opinion this was not the sentiment of many in the majority black population. Nor was it the opinion of Gibbons's black successor as Premier, Sir John Swan. `INDEPENDENCE IS A DIRTIER WORD THAN POSNETT' Posnett recalls: "I took Swan to Belize for the independence celebrations and he was quite taken with the idea.'' "What happened when he got home?'' I ask.

"He was roundly sat on by his colleagues.'' Shortly afterwards Richard Posnett left the island. To this day, whiffs of a witch-hunt surround his departure.

"Would Posnett have been sent back if he had not encouraged independence?'' I ask one ex-Governor who knows the players involved. He replies: "I don't think so.'' What he means is, the expenses row was most convenient.

When I met Posnett in Godalming, he had returned from Sotheby's with his old uniform. "They weren't interested,'' he said. "Now I don't know what to do with the thing.'' He had inherited it from Peter Ramsbotham. "I think I'll try a theatrical costumier. It would do for an admiral in HMS Pinafore.'' INDEPENDENCE is a dirtier word than Posnett in certain parts of Bermuda.

("Posnett wouldn't have been allowed in here,'' snorts a man in the billiard room of the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, until the Fifties a room described as the real seat of government.) Lord Waddington's position on the matter is as clear as the surrounding sea. "I'm not in the business of frustrating any wish for independence nor am I in the business of saying `Shape up, it's time you left the fold'.'' Independence may not make financial or even political sense, but for many, especially among the black community, it makes psychical sense. As long as Lord Waddington wears that uniform, they say, there will always be a problem of self-respect, an identification with slavery, an inability to hold up heads on the international stage. They will forever be "the still-vexed Bermoothes''.

When I ask a black taxi driver what he thinks of the Queen's representative, he says: "He's paid mega-bucks to cut ribbons.'' "It's ridiculous,'' says Ottiwell Simmons, the union leader. "He comes out here at our expense and we have no say in his appointment. It's most insulting to me. They're finding places for their unemployed -- and it's a lot of money we pay to have someone keep quiet.'' Most problems in this paradise derive from frustrations over identity. Bermuda is a British dependent territory. Therefore it cannot be surprising that Bermudians suffer from what psychologists call a "dependency complex''. Or as a psychologist might also say: When there is no problem, man becomes the problem.

The term you hear discussed everywhere is "status''. If corruption does exist, it is located in the judgemental arbitrariness attending the acquisition of Bermudian identity. This is not normally granted unless your father was Bermudian. But it might help, say, if you are a former British policeman or attorney-general.

The policy is absurd and immoral and resulted in the spectacle last year of 300 Portuguese being obliged to leave because their work permits had not been renewed (with about 600 unemployed, Bermuda believes it is in the fist of a recession). Many had been here longer than the Governor's gardener, Manoel "Noriega'' Souza, who has been planting the trees of famous visitors since 1968. Four times Manuel has applied for status: each time he has been denied.

So, too, has Edmund Feria, 24, who was not only born here but drafted into the Bermudian Regiment. So too, extraordinarily, has Andrea Sullivan, Miss Bermuda 1991, who even represented her island in the Miss Universe Competition. Except that, three months after relinquishing her title, she discovered it wasn't her land at all. She had lived in Bermuda since she was eight, but status was refused since both parents were English. Now studying law in England she says: "I can't go home to live. I can't go home to work. I feel incredibly cheated.'' Even before her protected status was removed, when she was still living there, Miss Bermuda sought refuge in analysis. Her counsellor was Sarah White, who deals with the island's very wealthy and also its poorest. Talking to Sarah in her office on Front Street, opposite a sign saying "Take my advice: I'm not using it'', I realise that Bermudian identity might be as prized as ambergris once was but it can be exceedingly corrosive to those who hear it.

Great Britain gives a sense of identity, she says, "but it's an identity they're trying to shed''. More and more the vacancy is occupied by an unthinking materialism. "I know a lot of frightened people who are rich beyond what most people could comprehend. They're lonely and desperately sad because they don't dare to be real. They don't dare to own up and say `I'm having a lousy day'.'' The problem of being cooped up on a small island result in a syndrome known as "rock fever''. This, says a Front Streeter who cures himself by diving twice a week for buried treasure and by travelling abroad, is "a strange mental posture that makes you believe yourself to be at the centre of the world, that this is the world''.

Sarah White lists the symptoms of rock fever in escalating degrees of hopelessness: envy, promiscuity, lack of secrecy ("everybody knows who is sleeping wit whom''), a stressful need to keep-up-with-the-Gibbonses, overwork ("everyone has three jobs and wears seven hats''), eating and spending disorders, alcoholism ("it is socially expected you will drink a lot''), child-abuse ("seventy percent of the women I deal with have a background of abuse'') and drugs.

The latter causes Sarah most concern. "Drug addiction'', she says, "has become an epidemic''. If there is a large snake to be found in the paradise grass, this is it.

"O YE PEOPLE of Bermuda ...'' recites Lord Waddington. "Marijuana in its natural state is not a drug. It is a herb, a food, a natural medicine and a tea.'' This advertisement in the morning's Royal Gazette calls for its legalisation, urging readers to write in support to the High Priest, PO Box 220. It also calls for the release of all prisoners charged with possession and demands that compensation be paid to them.

Glumly, Lord Waddington puts down the newspaper. "I take the view,'' he says, "that there is a very strong link between the use of cannabis and schizophrenia.'' This view is shared by his wife. "Everyone believes there is a link, but for some reason or other it remains difficult to prove -- like the Guildford Four.'' After four months engaged in charity work she has found her cause. "I shall have to take the Rastas on.'' Listening to them both, I make no mistake.

What we have here are two brave people. The last governor to express these sentiments was murdered a few yards away.

Whether Sharples was in fact about to break up a drugs ring operating from Jamaica or whether he was murdered by members of the Black Beret Cadre under the inspiration of Malcolm X remains obscure. Quite a lot of black Bermudians do not believe the two men hanged were responsible. Quite a lot of whites do not believe all those responsible were caught. Whatever the truth, the hangings raised a tempest comparable to the crime.

They took place in Casemates Prison, early on December 2, 1977. "The problem of getting a gallows really foxed me,'' says Sir Peter Ramsbotham, practically whose first task as Governor was to implement the recommendation of the Prerogative of Mercy Commission, which had recommended no mercy. Nor could he find an executioner.

Afterwards, the riots lasted three days. On Front Street, sheets of blue flame lit the shops from a liquor warehouse where exploding bottles hampered the firemen. Other buildings damaged by fire included the Piggly Wiggly Plaza and the Perfume Factory. The Forty Thieves nightclub did not open. "It seems like we need a riot every few years to get things done in this country,'' explained one of those rioting.

CAPITAL punishment remains the law in Bermuda. The last vote for its retention was split down the middle exactly, the Speaker casting his vote to uphold the constitution. The Governor has the power of reprieve, but is not encouraged to use it. "I think if you execute a man every 30 years, it's a deterrent,'' says Gibbons, the Iron Duke of Front Street.

Lady Waddington has an inkling that if there is going to be trouble at t' mill, it will be over this issue, not drugs. She says, "The inmates of Casemates will no doubt provide an opportunity for the press to say the hanging-flogging Home Secretary is hanging someone in real life.'' The opportunity may soon come. Next month in Bermuda's Supreme Court there begins the trial of 24-year old Leroy Burgess, accused of the murder and rape of a German tourist at the Maritime Museum Dockyard. If he is found guilty as charged, the only penalty is death.

I ask the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Bermuda, "Have you changed your views on capital punishment?'' I am interested to know because last February, in Britain, the Court of Appeal acquitted Stefan Kiszko, a man condemned in 1976 at Leeds Crown Court to life imprisonment. Like Leroy Burgess, Kiszko had been accused of a sex killing. But the Court of Appeal ruled that had crucial forensic evidence available to the prosecution at the time of the trial been revealed to the defence, he would never have been convicted. Counsel for the defence those 16 years ago was David Waddington QC.

Alone in his study, the Lord High Executioner refused to be drawn on the subject. "One doesn't look forward to exercising these responsibilities, but so long as capital punishment happens still to be the law of the land, my personal views don't matter a hoot.'' Again I try. If Kiszko had been convicted in Bermuda, an innocent man would have hanged. Again, he refuses to comment. The conversation peters out and we talk of safer things such as dinghies and success. He says, "One has had some painful times but generally it's been a wonderful life. I'm not a disappointed man.'' I tell him I have spent the morning on Nonsuch, looking for cahows. "Oh, yes?'' "Would you say the cahow is the symbol of Bermuda?'' "I suppose so.'' The door opens and Lady Waddington enters.

"Dark 'n' Stormy, darling?'' she says.

Lord Waddington stands up, terrier at heel. "Come on, Basil.'' z, Nicholas Shakespeare/The Telegraph plc .

PASSING THE TORCH -- Sir Peter Ramsbotham, second left, shows his soon-to-be disgraced successor Sir Richard Posnett Government House in 1981.

PEOPLE PERSON -- Lord Waddington.