Sentries posted in that area during that terrible year all died of yellow fever, but even so, it was not until 1849 that anyone considered the stagnant Lagoon to be a health hazard.

— Ian Stranack<$>

>HERE are about this land some areas once or at present called by archaic names, such as the “Scaur” in Somerset. That word derives from “scar”, that is to say an indentation to your personal topography caused by a flop on your moped. The Scaur, a peninsular body of water that forms a scar in Somerset near its southern bridge, divides that island almost to the foot of the fort that has also borne that name since the 1870s.

There is another word in Bermuda of ancient usage, for the parishes were originally called “tribes” (with the exception of St. George’s, which was mostly “common” or Bermuda Company lands).

That was an old use of the word to denote the division of a country physically and sometimes politically. Ancient Rome was once divided into some 30 such tribes, or districts, for political purposes.

Changing names has usually been something of a habit for politicians, but less so for the populace. However, those who state the local population was always loyal to Britain should be reminded of the attempt by Bermudians to change the names of the tribes, in order to remove mention of the great, and possibly good, who were some of the original directors of the Bermuda Company and after whom the parishes or tribes were named.

Thus the Lord Southamptons posthumously would have given way to “Port Royal”, the Dukes of Devonshire to “Brackish Pond” and the nabobs of the Paget family to “Crow Lane”.

This was all the rage for a while, but while the old parish names won out, a number of forts on the south coast were named forever in the new vernacular, such as Crow Lane Battery near the Bermuda College.

Out to the west where Somerset Island forms a good part of the parish named after Sir Edwin Sandys (pronounced as in “tar sands of Alberta”), one of the great intellectuals of his day, there seems to have been little interest in the changing fashion of the lower parishes, downwind to the east.

Out on Ireland Island was “The Crawl”, another place-name of ancient derivation. There is also a hill, so named, down past the Aquarium that slowed many a didlibop to a crawl in the race around Harrington SounBK>From the early 1800s, the Crawl at Ireland Island was renamed the Lagoon. Originally, it was an inlet, open to the sea only to the south and may have been used as a “kraal”, or trap, for turtles and fish, as that is one definition of “crawl”. In the early days of the Dockyard, it was used as a holding pen for ship timbers and its name was moved to an adjacent bay of a similar configuration, still so called.

In 1815, an order was given that on the approach of a hurricane, the “launches, flats and boats are to be promptly removed from the Dockyard and secured in the old Mast Pond and Crawle”.

By 1818, the mouth of the original Crawl had been trespassed by a causeway, stealing its supply of salt water. The water turned brackish and in moved Aedis aegypti and his entire extended family, to the detriment of humans. The mosquitoes spread yellow fever like wild fires in the hot season, but it was not until 1849 that a bridge was ordered for the causeway, to allow the seawater into the Lagoon once again.

By that time, there was a build-up of several feet of decomposed muck, which continued to smell, even with the inflow of salt water under the new bridge.

A doctor suggested that the septic Lagoon might be associated with the yellow fever outbreaks, while a convict of the dockyard recommended that a canal be cut from the ocean to the north to increase its circulation.

That channel was blasted through hard rock in 1850 and spanned by a bridge for the north road to Dockyard. The bridge still exists, but has been buried, with only a small culvert for water to flow through.

In 1857, the Forresters Hall for a Masonic lodge was built on the northern side of the canal. The Bermuda Sea Cadet Corps in 1968 fed TS Venture at the west end and in 1973, they occupied the Forresters Hall, which has been its home ever since.

After a hiatus of several years, the troop is being reformed and a call went out to assist in the clearing of grounds overtaken by peppers and casuarinas. Help is also need with funding to repair the Hall, which took a beating in recent hurricanes.

The Casemates Volunteers and members of staff from the Maritime Museum put in a number of Saturday work sessions and the jungle was pushed back. The canal had become choked with large casuarinas, which were breaking up the stonework and obscuring the v. The<$> volunteers removed the offending trees and a week later, two eminent artists were found painting the new vista of the canal, looking as it did originally, and a pretty sight they have recorded appropriately in watercolours.Standing by the parapet of the bridge, the Lagoon, or Crawl, stretches south into the distance, surrounded by one of the largest stand of mangroves left in Bermuda.

Marching ominously forward, casuarinas are encroaching upon the mangroves on most sides and will eventually destroy them. The casuarina roots will form no spawning grounds for sea life and their needles and berries, which rot but slowly, will return the Lagoon to the fetid state of the 1840s. Viva los Mangroves, Death to Casuarinas>!

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments can be sent tU>drharris<$>U>logic.bm or by telephone to 799-5480.