WE have a great capacity to delude ourselves and to accept as fact much of what is served up to us. This is especially so in historical matters, where our critical facilities have not been well honed and suppositions become legend and then fact.

One still repeated fact is that the Dockyard is built of imported stone, "brought out in ballast", a phrase which for some reason catches people's imagination.

As any visitor to Home Depot or Wal-Mart will know, very little comes to Bermuda in ballast, now or then. Cargo is always number one on the manifest, for goodies, not rocks, and is what is desirable in the Isles of Rest.

The Dockyard, as John Burland told me 25 years ago, is made of Bermuda stone and "don't you believe what everyone else will tell you: that it is from England". Of course, I did not believe him until I sent some samples to the Geological Museum in London. The reply somewhat embarrassingly said "the samples are not English, but match perfectly with specimens of Bermuda limestone in our collections".

Trying to change such set ideas is like rolling a pile of jail-nuts up Lighthouse Hill; while some are being moved up, the others are running back down to the South Shore Road. One such wayward fact is the description of a photograph of the gunpowder magazine on Agar's Island as "the Causeway to St. George's under construction", so published on a number of occasions, despite attempted corrections to the contrary.

THE photograph shows black workmen standing on the walls and vaulted roofs of a structure under construction. In the background is a narrow body of water with land rising behind, a geographical configuration that cannot be matched at the Causeway, built in 1871. Sizing up the width of the structure, this Causeway would have been ready for autobahn status upon its completion, with three lanes of traffic in each direction.

The walls are not continuous, which is what would be expected if the rooms were tunnels to allow the waters of Castle Harbour to wash through into Ferry Reach. The division between the walls is rather a corridor. The roof of the rooms is arched and made of half a dozen courses of brick, which would be overkill for a horse and carriage roadway of the 1870s. No hurricane would have ever budged this structure, as Fabian did so effectively to the real Causeway.

This picture records the only known view of the construction of one of Bermuda forts and magazines in the great rebuilding of the late 1860s. It also records that Bermudians were carrying out the building of those structures, under the supervision of the Royal Engineers. Given the geography and architecture captured in this early photograph, the building can only be the huge Rifled Muzzle Loader powder magazine on Agar's Island, which forms the north side of Two Rock Passage into Hamilton Harbour.

In the later 1850s, the English developed a cannon that could be loaded from the rear, for better sealing and effective use of the propellant. This gun also had a barrel with twisted rifling to impart a spin to the new elongated projectiles, a major departure from the round cannon ball of the previous three centuries.

These guns revolutionised the world of artillery and began the modern arms race.

Their existence led to the development of iron ships and to the remodelling of old forts and the building of new designs to match the increased firepower of rifled artillery.

Once again, Bermuda was in for an economic bonanza created by the construction of military works throughout the island.

The new gun was called a Rifled Breech Loader, or RBL, and was made of wrought iron. A fundamental design flaw in the RBL led to the making of wrought-iron Rifled Muzzle Loaders, or RMLs. Bermuda possesses four RBLs and 46 RMLs, several of the latter were found under the grass in the Keep Yard of the Maritime Museum some years ago.

During the RBL and RML building bonanza at Bermuda, six new forts were constructed and an equal number were remodelled.

The military provided Bermudians with a number of construction extravaganzas, beginning after the American Revolutionary War in the 1790s.

The building of the Dockyard and forts of the time then took 50 years from 1809 onwards.

No sooner had those projects ended, than the new works of the RBL guns commenced in the 1860s. The invention of gun steel led to further money-makers, including St. David's Battery, in the late 1890s.

The Dockyard was expanded and from this time and many men of the West Indies came to work in the major construction market that was Bermuda of that day; their descendants are here today.

THE final military contribution to the economic wellbeing of Bermuda came with the building of the United States bases in the early 1940s, especially Fort Bell and Kindley Field, the landing strip of which was later crucial to the tourism bonanza that began in the 1950s.

Two free-standing RBL/RML gunpowder magazines were built in the 1870s, one on Boaz Island and the other on Agar's Island.

The commodious magazines and light passages in the Agar's building were used to create the first aquarium in Bermuda in the 1920s.

An explosives magazine it was first, a watery attraction secondly, but a causeway never.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. The views expressed here are his opinion and not necessarily those of the trustees or staff of the Museum. Comments can be sent to drharrislogic.bm, to PO Box MA 133, Sandys MABX, or by telephone at 734-1298.