Having regard to the recurring references to the increasing scarcity of available land in the Island to meet the need for housing and other development and the overall necessity of preserving the existing amenities and natural charm of the Island as a means of continuing to attract ever increasing numbers of tourists, it has become apparent to us that short of applying some measure of restriction of population it has become imperative to give serious thought to the possibility of adding to the existing land areas of the Island proper by means of reclamation.

WHAT a mouthful that was! Behold an almost unending sentence grammatically, with a content that would have passed a death sentence on several of Bermuda’s most charming natural sites on the North Shore. Written in the early 1960s, this was the opening gambit in a developer’s proposal to sell the Bermuda Government on the idea of destroying by ‘reclamation’ what it clearly states should be preserved-’the existing amenities and natural charm of the Island’. Fortunately, none of the proposal was accepted and the charming bays and coastline at Spanish Point, Clarence Cove and Bailey’s Bay still exist.The underlying argument in the quotation can be otherwise stated. The existing amenities refer to inland vistas, but instead of building up on that developed land, it is better to destroy significant parts of the coast to ‘reclaim land’, an oxymoron (a ‘contradiction in terms’) if ever there was one. The standard definition of ‘reclamation’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is the making (of land) fit for cultivation<$>. The burial of bays and coastlines for the making of land in this context would destroy the very amenities that have put food in our mouths for over a century, namely the use of the charm of Bermuda, both natural and manmade, in the service of the tourist trade.

Against such developments, we should perhaps apply one of the other classic definitions, which is ‘the action of reclaiming from<$> barbarism’, with the emphasis in italics from the OED. Reclamation at Bermuda is a contradictory term, for the last time there was land at Spanish Point, where we spent many summers splashing about, was during the last Ice Age, when you could have walked from there to dockyard on sand dunes. One is not reclaiming land, but making new land at the cost of destroying other land or geological deposits.

One of the great geological and archaeological tenets is that you cannot make something, or build something, without destroying something else. This is how the evolution of the earth and the history of people on earth have been made, as the stratification-the deposition of layers of soil or blocks of masonry-of the globe builds up in one area by destruction in another. To build the dockyard, for example, some 15 acres of hills of hard Bermuda limestone, replete with wondrous cave formations, were destroyed.

In the case of “land reclamation”, something real has to be destroyed, such as the seabed of Castle Harbour, which was dredged upon, along with its animal life, in the early 1940s, to make the runways for the airport. In many instances, something immaterial is also destroyed, which is the existing surface, or spirit of the place. Thus is the amenity, ‘the quality of being pleasant or agreeable’ of a place consigned to oblivion. The price of material development here is something destroyed there. In our case, we often pay the price of the additional destruction of the context of the island: the scenery, natural and otherwise, that we find agreeable and by which we define the spirit of Bermuda and ourselves as Bermudians.Had the scheme of the early 1960s gone ahead, these are the contexts we would have lost forever. Stovell Bay and Cobbler’s Island at Spanish Point would have been buried, along with 250 acres of turtle grass on the seabed, stretching out to Dundonald Channel. According to the Report, 14 million cubic yards of sand would have been dredged up from the Great Sound or somewhere nearby.Bailey’s Bay and the offshore islands would have been obliterated by 3 million cubic yards of sand to create 90 acres of made ground, while at Clarence Cove, the old Admiralty House property, a major Pembroke swimming hole would be submerged under a similar about of sand, overlaid by the tons of concrete of new deepwater docks. This was of course in the days before the deepwater potential of the dockyard was considered.

If Bermuda could speak, it would perhaps be with sadness of the destruction of its virgin contexts for the reclaiming of lands that never were. The list is long, from the making of innumerable wharfs and docks, the airport and other military facilities, to the taking of ‘trash to de pond’. Be that as it may, some of the things we have built on land and in the sea were necessary and many have become new amenities on the bones of the old.

New development at the cost of destroying the present amenities of Bermuda is not growth that is sustainable, at least in terms of preserving what we consider ‘agreeable’ and Bermudian. Perhaps we have already signed a Faustian pact with the development devils, for as many of us become more rich and more spoiled, we are not so much planting the seeds of the destruction of the spirit of the place, but eating them as well.

To paraphrase the song, “Once it’s gone, you won’t know what you had. They paved paradise so the next generation can grow up in a parking lot”.

Editor’s Note: The writer thanks J.C. (Kit) Astwood obe for a copy of the reclamation proposal, which he donated to the archives of the Bermuda Maritime Museum.