June 15, 2003
New York Times
Celebration: Bermuda
By ANTHONY WELLER


Ever since childhood, my idea of islands was tropical, so I'd always been
skeptical of Bermuda, only a two-hour flight from New York. It never
occurred to me that here was an island with virtually no resources, a rock
22 miles square in the middle of the Atlantic, which had traded for
generations on little more than ingenuity and beauty to create a calm,
prosperous society.

THE MOOD
As one of Britain's earliest colonies, on the same subtropical latitude as
Shanghai and Charleston, S.C., Bermuda enjoys a fiscal Gulf Stream of its
own creation. When I arrived the place struck me as highly British -- from
the pillar postboxes to the serenely assured, idiosyncratic architecture
-- but it became less so the longer I stayed and began to sense what being
Bermudian means.

The surprise comes from what the island is not. It is not poor, not full
of junky T-shirt kiosks. There are no casinos. The weather isn't always
hot noonday sun; high season is April through November, not the reverse.
It does not allow tourists to rent cars, which keeps down the traffic,
encourages the use of bicycles or motor scooters and guarantees work for
the taxi drivers incessantly polishing their shiny vans. Less starchy than
the guidebooks would have you believe, it is unfailingly polite. Best of
all, unlike many small places with a deep colonial past, it never feels
like a client state, a humbled dependent. Bermudians resent being lumped
with the other islands and will remind you, with a relaxed pride, that
they're as distant from the Caribbean as Washington is from Dallas.

Visitors come for the plentiful pink sand beaches, and for the golf
courses. But the island now earns far more from offshore businesses and
insurance than from tourism. Local people call it a virtual economy,
afloat on the billions flowing through daily, just as it once rode the
currents of other ideas it got to first -- resort tourism, or trade with
the United States in, say, Revolutionary War gunpowder, Civil War rifles,
Prohibition rum or Bermuda onions. Another first, I'd hazard, is that the
current premier, Jennifer Smith, is a black woman who succeeded another
black woman.

Like Gibraltar, Bermuda really is a rock: all water comes from the sky,
collected deftly off the ridged roofs, and residents speak of having Rock
Fever from not getting away enough. Bermudians do tend to live elsewhere
for years, then return, and one result is an unplaceable oceanic accent,
neither British nor American nor Caribbean, to which each person seems to
give a uniquely different inflection.

I was happy to meet up with an old friend in Hamilton, the capital. John
Zuill is a 14th-generation Bermudian I'd known in the United States, now
co-director of a theater company, Waterspout, whose 2002-3 season included
Mishima, Mamet and Shakespeare. Over coffee we talked about ''The
Tempest'' -- the play's shipwreck may have been prompted by one here in
1609 -- and gazed toward the harbor.

''The key to Bermuda has always been that unless you apply your wits,
there's nothing here,'' Zuill said. ''All we have are sunshine and brains.
There was never any money to be made here unless you were actually here.
There weren't estates to control from afar; there wasn't even fresh water.
The slaves weren't plantation labor, because there weren't any plantations
-- they had specific skills. And a lot of big ideas, like coffee or rubber
or onions, failed. But as long as the United States and European tax codes
don't change, we probably have a secure future.''

Bermuda is careful to avoid any blatant sexiness in its ads, relying on
the affection of repeat visitors who aren't seeking adventure. As I wound
by bus from parish to parish, the coastal roads offered a sea crashing
mildly on the rocks, the lilt of gospel halls, tilled tomato fields
nestled among palms, fresh fish or lilies for sale beside the limestone
walls and low shuttered houses -- some in pinks or creamy yellows, some in
sorbets of grape, peach, mango. As Winslow Homer proved here in 1899,
there is still an immortal calm in the watercolor disarray of a cove, a
spit of beach, a peeling red-and-white wooden boat leaning on pale sand
and fallen fronds, while an ever-changing force of intensifying blue moves
horizonward.

THE FOOD
Dining in Bermuda is always pricey, and most successful when least
pretentious. In general, fresh fish, caught locally that very day or
scrupulously flown in, brings out the best in Bermuda cuisine. Whether in
a high-end restaurant, a traditional hotel dining room or a tavern, you
can't go wrong with grilled fish.

Many visitors end up ensnared in their hotel for all their meals, which is
too bad. Hotel menus often seem undecided as to whether to follow trends
50 or only 20 years out of date. We stayed at Cambridge Beaches, Bermuda's
oldest resort, at the west end of the island, where our dinners seemed
like a throwback, albeit of good quality, with choices like steamed shrimp
with smoked salmon, or cream of asparagus soup. Other establishments
strained for originality, with tall sculptured ingredients from several
continents pacified in a single weird dish.

One strong Bermuda tradition is afternoon tea, and some hotels without
restaurants -- like Rosedon, a charming small inn in Hamilton, where we
also stayed -- still offer a large teatime spread and an equally serious
breakfast.

The broad ethnic mix of island flavors can be grasped in any supermarket,
my favorite being Miles' Market, in Hamilton. Alongside a wall of British
jams and marmalades, for example, are Greek, Thai, Chinese, Indian,
Moroccan, Mexican, Italian, Japanese and Caribbean sauces, spices,
chutneys. The frequency of red bean soup on menus will remind you that a
quarter of the population is, in some Bermudian sense, Portuguese.

There's a long tradition here of Italian restaurants. For my wife, Kylee,
and me, Little Venice, on Bermudiana Road in downtown Hamilton, had the
best cuisine on the island. (We had a regalo vegetariano of wild porcini
mushrooms with goat cheese and a cheese fondue sauce, a risotto of sausage
and avocado and a fillet of local whitefish with garlic and olive oil.) We
also had a fine lunch one day, on a terrace overlooking Hamilton Harbor,
at Tuscany, another Italian restaurant of high reputation. I tried a
Bermudian specialty, the spicy fish chowder that I probably had once a day
during my visit -- done here with a bit more finesse, perhaps, but the
same gusto as elsewhere -- and a chicken and mango salad in curry sauce,
with strawberries, pineapple and tomatoes.

Still in Hamilton, Fresco's, on Chancery Lane, with its delicate soups,
has a tucked-away wine cellar atmosphere and, since it's a little hidden,
tends to attract more local customers than tourists. It also has one of
the very best wine lists on the island, reasonably priced considering the
usual high import costs. I soon became devoted to the local nonalcoholic
ginger beer; the more-or-less official Bermuda drink, the Dark and Stormy,
mixes in Gosling's Black Seal rum.

St. George, at the island's eastern end, has a Ye Olde Town Crier touristy
aspect in high season, but seaside, right on the main square, the White
Horse pub is far better than it has any right to be. Its Bermuda fish
chowder may be the best I had -- a combination of a tomato base with a
puree of local fish, celery, onion, carrot, that I laced with local black
rum and sherry peppers, a kind of good cop-bad cop combination. (''You
don't want to watch it being made,'' a waiter told me. ''Let's just say
it's various parts of the fish.'') Then a superb grilled wahoo. (''Caught
in Bermudian waters, man, but I can't say if it was carrying Bermudian
papers.'') In Hamilton, we became daily habitues of an excellent cafe,
Rock Island Coffee, on Reid Street. Another hangout good for learning
what's going on is Casey's Lounge, a smoke-wreathed lair on Queen Street
where the drinks are actually cheaper than in the United States, and
lawyers or bankers still in suits are playing cards with house painters.

THE STYLE
Bermuda's look is a gentle truce between climate and empire: formally
relaxed. In Hamilton, you'd never guess that 13,000 registered companies
are squeezed into those scalloped stucco buildings of yesteryear with
their breezy wooden verandas. Business attire for men is often tie,
jacket, shorts and knee socks. For lawyers, it's a half-wig and robes; for
magistrates, the full wig. ''Never mind summer,'' one lawyer told
me,''you're itchy in any weather in all that clobber.''

If you amble by the shops on Reid or Front Streets, the city (population
1,100) feels resolutely up-market, though without the luxe of, say, St.
Bart's. The emporiums bear family names: Trimingham's (est. 1844), Smith's
(est. 1889), A. J. Cooper (est. 1897), with its surprising Wedgwood door
handles. In short, a world of Irish linen, not sunstruck flesh; indeed, a
young woman in a rare miniskirt was stared at as she walked coolly past me
one day -- not in disapproval as much as in amazement.

Though one version of Bermuda begins with sand and ends with sand traps, I
was more struck by the past, writ small in a human-scale architecture. In
Hamilton, my favorite nook was the Perot Post Office on Queen Street, at
the entrance of Par-la-Ville Park, with its white walls and black
shutters, its native orchids in planters, its slots marked
Local/Boat/Airmail. William Bennett Perot, appointed postmaster in 1821,
also built a large house behind a big rubber tree next door, now housing a
museum of the Bermuda Historical Society.

Over in Somerset Village, nine miles to the west, I walked one of the most
evocative stretches of the old railway trail. The train ran only from 1931
to 1948, before being dismantled soon after cars were permitted on the
island. The trail, paved now, wandered through foliage, past limestone
shoulders, morning glories and tart loquats that I picked and ate, then
became a neighborhood road behind little houses with boats in their
gardens.

Dockyard, at the western tip of the island, was the Royal Navy's base from
the early 1800's. A Maritime Museum has exhibits from 16th-century
shipwrecks to 1930's cruise ships to the Bermuda fitted dinghy, a 14-foot
anomaly with an absurdly tall mast, a huge sail and an inexplicable way of
cutting rapidly through rather than over the water.

Nearby, in the Commissioner's House, the displays devoted to the slave
trade, complete with shackles and collars, were enough to make me want to
go stand in the sunshine and weep. At least Bermuda, right after the 1834
British decree of abolition, immediately freed its 4,200 slaves -- about
half the population.

At the island's eastern end, I spent a day exploring the slow lanes of St.
George, the first settlement -- the preserved cottages in lime, lemon,
mustard, salmon, set amid palms on Featherbed Alley, Barber's Alley, Pound
Alley, Princess Street. It has an array of small, personalized museums:
Tucker House, with a George III chamberpot hidden in a mahogany chest of
drawers; the Globe Hotel, where blockade runners conspired to outfox Union
ships; a homespun Black History Museum with mementos of cricket teams and
gombey dancers; a wharfside Town Hall with its signed, faded portraits of
Elizabeth and Philip. And there is St. Peter's, the hemisphere's oldest
Anglican church continuously in use, its interior rich with the cigar-box
fragrance of cedar.

Bermuda is small but, on the other hand, I haven't seen anywhere else this
large without any ugliness. I hadn't expected such a diverse and amiable
island. Go for a walk in Hamilton up Cedar Avenue, past the Queen's Club,
past a church of Christian Scientists and a house of Bahais, to the
Catholic cathedral and its convent next door -- now a mosque. Or, better
yet, take a morning stroll in Victoria Park to see the black, white, Asian
schoolkids, of every continental extraction and possible mix, hollering
and playing hand in hand -- just as, in the Botanical Gardens, I came upon
a gigantic banyan tree, with innumerable, ever-multiplying downward roots.

Anthony Weller's third novel, ''The Siege of Salt Cove,'' is forthcoming
from Norton.