He was described as “a devoted, knowledgeable and sometimes startlingly original Bermudian” in a landmark 1979 New Yorker profile of the island, at once a custodian of our past and a perceptive and spirited commentator on how that history coloured Bermuda’s present and would help to determine its future.

Writer Susanna Lessard accurately portrayed William Zuill, then the executive director of the National Trust, as a conscientious guardian of Bermuda’s heritage, traditions and culture.

But she was at pains to emphasise that while he was a man who remembered the past in often punctilious detail, Zuill lived very much in the present and looked to the future with confidence and no little interest. For William Zuill, who died this week at the age of 86, Bermuda’s history was as vital and potent a force as the ocean, which has shaped the destiny and provided the heartbeat of this community for more than 400 years.

Equal parts historian, conservationist, cultural anthropologist, storyteller and commonsensical seer, he firmly believed what happened yesterday necessarily provided the prologue to today’s events. And precisely because he never suffered from what she termed “the myopia of the present”, Lessard said Zuill represented a genuine rarity among the literally dozens of Bermuda residents she spoke to for her lengthy and still hugely insightful piece.

For here was an individual with the ability to see and gauge current affairs within the broad spectrum of a long and complex history, a man who could tease out meaning, significance and hidden but long-established patterns from the seeming randomness of daily Bermudian life.

Educated at the Whitney lnstitute, St Andrew’s School, Delaware and Harvard University, William Zuill spent his professional lifetime sharing his passion for Bermuda history, and his particular gift for recognising when that history might serve as a guide to our future, with the community he so loved.

He did so in a number of roles: as a reporter and editor at The Royal Gazette; as the inspired and indefatigable first director of the Bermuda National Trust; and, of course, as the writer of a series of popular narrative history books — he completed editing and proofing his final manuscript only two weeks ago.

“An island is similar in many ways to a ship, and this is particularly true for Bermuda,” Zuill said at the time of the Smithsonian Institution’s 2001 Folklife Festival when almost a million people attended events he helped to plan on Washington’s Mall celebrating Bermuda’s rich cultural heritage. “ ... Islanders, like ships’ crews, have to be self-reliant, struggling to use and reuse, conserve, and make do when the proper tool or spare part is not available. “ ... Like seafarers, we tend to be both fatalists and pragmatists ... Our vibrant island has the curious motto Quo Fata Ferunt — ‘Whither the Fates Lead U’s’. It seems a bit bizarre for a remarkably successful community, but an island is always in the hands of the fates, whether they bring a hurricane or a shipwreck ... Our livelihood [and very lives] depend on bending and turning the winds of fortune to our advantage.”

Bermuda history and both the telling and preservation of that history ran in Zuill’s blood. Able to trace his lineage to some of Bermuda’s earliest settlers, the story of this small, lonely island, which became a crossroads for, and microcosm of, the greater Atlantic maritime world, long held a personal as well as a professional fascination for him.

His father, the businessman and 1940s-era political figure William S. Zuill, had himself been an amateur historian, folklorist and conservationist of some distinction, encouraging his son’s early interest in the subjects.

Assisting his father in his research for the 1946 book Bermuda Journey, a monumental account of all the island’s highways and byways, nooks and crannies and folkways, likely helped to cement the younger Zuill’s view that life amounted to an extended stroll through history. So, no doubt, did growing up with brother James and sister Ann at Orange Grove, the Zuill family seat in Smith’s parish, which remains to this day a sprawling time capsule of Bermuda’s man-made and natural past.

William Zuill would often say he could not recall a time when he was able to walk down Front Street or gaze over Hamilton Harbour without growing curious about how those scenes might have looked a century or more earlier. But this fixation with Bermuda’s past was never simply an intellectual exercise for him — rather it was a tool for better understanding his own times and anticipating what the future might hold.

Throughout his journalistic career, Zuill was aware he was a witness to history in the making, conscious of the need to always provide context and background to the rush of events.

His time as a newspaperman coincided with some of the most momentous days in Bermuda’s modern history: the Theatre Boycott, desegregation, the introduction of a new constitution and two-party political system, and the civil unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s. He wasn’t just an onlooker at this rapid-fire parade of events, he was a participant in some of them.

During the struggle to dismantle the barriers of segregation and discrimination in the late Fifties and early Sixties, Zuill took part in meetings of the so-called “Sharon Group” — named after his brother’s home where the gatherings took place. These were informal talks between those in the vanguard of the black movement and reform-minded, mainly younger whites who recognised full well that complacent, racially stratified Bermuda had to either accept peaceful evolution or face the prospect of possibly violent revolution.

His participation made his reporting better informed and, he added, helped to make him a better man. Zuill had always been conscious that Bermuda had been born with the original sin of slavery, subjecting himself to rigorous self-scrutiny from a very young age on the question of our racially divided past and striving to overcome the inherited prejudices and dogmas of his childhood. For in addition to being exposed to the island’s own antiquated racial practices, he had grown up in an era when Bermuda’s elite was beginning to ape the casual social prejudices of the wealthy and powerful Americans catered to by the island’s early resort-tourism industry.

“My father mingled freely with black boys in his youth,” a rueful Zuill told Lessard. “These friendships waned as he became older, but in my youth such liaisons were utterly unthinkable. By the 1930s and 1940s a much stricter code of segregation had set in.”

At the Sharon meetings, though, he met and befriended Stanley Ratteray, the brilliant young “Renaissance Man” who had been a guiding force behind the Theatre Boycott and who would later emerge as one of the principal architects of Bermuda’s wholesale political, social and structural reforms of the 1960s. It was to be one of the most richly rewarding relationships of William Zuill’s life. The close and mutually supportive friendship he forged with Dr Ratteray endured until the latter’s death in 2003. The friendship between the families continues to this day.

As a founding father and first director of the National Trust, he spearheaded efforts to acquire and preserve architecturally and historically significant buildings and to conserve tracts of open space, which might otherwise have been lost.

Zuill had been instrumental in overseeing the complex handover of the properties and collections of the old Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust, which his father had helped to steward, to the newly created Bermuda National Trust in 1970.

Two years later, he joined the National Trust as its first full-time employee. And for the next 18 years he did arguably more than any other single individual to protect Bermuda’s built and natural heritage from the encroachment of the developers’ bulldozers, as a construction boom sparked by an ongoing economic boom led to an insatiable hunger for land, our most scarce and finite resource.

Zuill campaigned for conservation on other fronts as well, including serving for many years as a trustee and secretary of the Walsingham Trust, which maintains the 25 acres of wilderness and cave systems that make up Tom Moore’s Jungle. He also led by example, fastidiously preserving his own substantial landholdings (“He and his wife, Joyce, both work for a living,” Lessard said, “and though his land could be turned into a fortune ... William Zuill will never sell. For him the land is a treasure he is privileged to guard — a touchstone of Bermuda’s true nature, which in his view has become endangered by the ascendancy of alien values”).

It was as a writer of history that William Zuill may have been best known. His Story of Bermuda And Her People, for instance, has gone through multiple editions and printings since it was first released in 1973, and remains the single best and most accessible introduction to the island’s history. It was also his personal favourite of all his books.

A master of narrative history, Zuill combined an engagingly brisk prose style with clarity, sensitivity and an eye for the picturesque and revealing detail. He could make even the most remote and seemingly unknowable historical figures come alive and wrote clearly and compellingly about the matters, both great and small, which shaped our past.

Zuill routinely produced vivid portraits of various periods in Bermuda’s past, with nary a wasted brushstroke in evidence, his literary canvasses characterised by an intimate and sympathetic understanding of our history.

When it came to crafting his immensely readable books, some of which are among the most durable bestsellers in the history of Bermuda publishing, he took his lead from Pulitzer-prize winner Barbara Tuchman, who said of her highly popular historical studies: “The writer’s object should be to hold the reader’s attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.”

He certainly did, and so do you.

For all the tradition William Zuill embodied, he also possessed a refreshing streak of informality. Combining Old World courtliness with genial quirkiness, he cultivated an air of slightly abstracted eccentricity: the unruly mop of hair, the frequently untucked shirts and a taste for riding asthmatic 1970s-era Mobylette and Peugeot mopeds well into his eighties were among his most recognisable trademarks. And so was his generosity with his time and talents, for William Zuill was genuinely interested in sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge of his little part of the world with allcomers.

He conducted what at times seemed to be a permanent “open house” at his home for both passing acquaintances and those he loved.

Even casual guests at Orange Grove, and there were many, were unfailingly showered with hospitality, bonhomie and unaffected intelligence, and his late wife, Joyce, who predeceased him in 2011. His closer friends, and there were also many, constituted a kind of unofficial salon for him, drawn from the widest spectrum of cultural and social backgrounds, and reflecting the worth he placed on personal merit and individual qualities. He was, in the final analysis, an unabashed romantic. And, again like Barbara Tuchman, he was unapologetic about conducting a passionate, public love affair with history and showing off the object of his affection at every available opportunity. “It is this quality of being in love with your subject that is indispensable for writing good history — or good anything, for that matter,” Tuchman once said, a remark that might have served as William Zuill’s personal credo.

Lessard concluded that William Zuill, decorated as a Member of the British Empire in recognition of his cultural contributions to the island, treasured Bermudian history and tradition because he saw in our native birthright “a redemptive power greater than all the imported idealism and materialism”, which had washed up here like so much flotsam and jetsam throughout most of the 20th century. Only by fully understanding that past, he believed, could we properly go about discharging our responsibilities to the future of Bermuda in the present and so continue to bend and turn the winds of fortune to our advantage.

•William Sears Zuill is survived by his children Rebecca, Catherine and Bill, their spouses Lawrence, Michelle and Dawn and five grandchildren. His funeral service will be held at St Mark’s Church, South Road, Smith’s parish, today at 4pm