In the wonderful book about the ecology of the world, “The Song of the Dodo”, by David Quammen, the theory about “islands”, whether oceanic, or locked within an area of land, as progenitors of evolutionary change is much expounded, often to sad effect, as a change in the status of an island often led to extinction. The Dodo of Mauritius, perhaps the world’s most iconic flightless bird, was of course brought to a terminal end by the actions of men, wiping out tens of thousands of years of evolution for a few years of roast bird. A vision was given of the last Dodo sitting on a ledge, facing the sea and the end of its bird-kind, with no one to talk to, no friends of a feather evermore to flock together again.Real islands in the ocean seas have produced a staggering array of new creatures, great and small and sometimes weird, as well as new types of plants and trees. Bermuda apparently had a flightless bird or two, but they vanished long ago in prehistory. The iconic ‘endemic’ one left, albeit it in only one colony of some several dozen households, is the Cahow, perhaps the most Bermudian of all animals on the island, including those humans who might claim incorrectly to be indigenous. An island can only support a population (pre-human of course) of birds, bees and trees in proportion to the carrying capacity of land area, and thus Bermuda, with its small size, even during the Ice Ages, when the landmass was much larger, could never support the diversification of an island like Malta or Australia.Isolation is also something of a major requirement to allow new forms of life to become ‘islandised’, or Bermudianised if you will, and in that our oceanic home is at the top of the pyramid, being one of the most isolated places on Earth, from one spot of land to another. Thus if humans had landed here at the dawn of our evolution in (and then out of) Africa, it is likely that Bermudians could have matured into some form of Neanderthals, ripe for extinction like other Native Americans of both continents, when the diseases of the Old World were imported into this hemisphere, pursuant to Christopher Columbus making that epic landfall in the Bahamas 519 years ago. Unlike the Cahow, we would have likely been reduced quickly after discovery in 1505 to one or two old souls looking out to sea, waiting for the end.Well, that is not the way it went, as only sea birds, plant and a few oddities made the trans-Atlantic flight to Bermuda before 1505 and so only they evolved into something new, like the Bermuda “cedar” or the delightful purple Bermudianas, which are still to be found in isolated pockets, or islands of endemic beauty on some properties and public lands. When we will cease to cut the grass in public lands from October to late Spring, to allow such wild flowers to bloom, to not be consigned to extinction so that the curbs and lawns, particularly on the South Shore, can look like so many sterile suburban situations Stateside?However, I am informed on good authority that an evolution of some human type did take place on some of the smaller islands within greater Bermuda, and according to some, strange peoples were developing. Until the coming of the Severn Bridge (now extinct, but opened on May 10, 1934), which connected the isolated St. David’s Island with St. George’s Island and via The Causeway with the Main, the people of St. David’s apparently considered themselves a group apart from the rest of Bermuda, and claimed perhaps up until the American Base, Fort Bell, destroyed half of their land, homes and gardens, that they were the holders of true Bermudian traditions, particularly as related to the sea. So I am told.That was out there in the Far East, in the lowest of the lower parishes. Up in the uppermost, windward parish of Sandys, another isolated group could be found in the early 1800s on the very remote island of Ireland. Described by one British officer in the 1780s as “less than human”, that group was forced to sell out “in the National Interest” to the British Government in 1809, leaving home and hearth, chickens and pigs, on that land that had been their special island within an island for two hundred years, minus three. Ireland Island, during the time of those ancient Bermudians, never had the treat of the “progress” of a Severn or any other bridge, so the extinction of its Bermudian species, unlike the slow one of St. David’s, was a sudden death knell, when Ireland was requisitioned for what became the Royal Naval Dockyard.Yet, even under the military regime of the Royal Navy, Ireland Island was not connected to its nearest neighbour, the island of Boaz, until 1850 when the famous Admiral on the North America and West Indies Station (headquartered at Bermuda), Lord Cochrane, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Dundonald, opened ‘The Grey Bridge’, thus cementing (well, timbering) the relationship between those two military islands at the extreme northerly tip of Sandys Parish.Bridges of various types connect islands and thus often help to destroy isolated ecologies and peoples, but in the case of Boaz Island, its Bermudian inhabitants got extinction, or the heave-ho, upon the construction of the Grey Bridge, for they were forced to sell out in the National Interest in the later 1840s, so the Dockyard could expand.The relationship between the militarised Ireland and Boaz Islands was truly cemented by engineer Frederick Charles Eveleigh, starting in January 1947, when he replaced the original timber bridge with a truly grey one, for his was perhaps the first in Bermuda to be made with reinforced concrete of Portland cement. And a good job he did, as “Grey’s Bridge”, now yellow, yet stands and has stood against hurricanes, the sea and oversized dump trucks for the last 62 years. Eveleigh completed the bridge (which he called ‘Grey’s Bridge Causeway’) in December 1949, pouring a total of 7,496 cubic yards of concrete, mixed without Mr. Bierman’s modern machinery or fat-bellied delivery trucks.A child on the works in 1947-49, Eveleigh’s son, Francis Charles, recently returned to Bermuda and donated to the National Museum his father’s log book of the construction of the second Grey Bridge. It is replete with a diary and photographs (two shown here) of the building of the concrete and rebar structure, thus cementing another heritage relationship between a monument in the landscape and the archival records of its creation.We thank Frank and his wife Pamela of East Sussex for bridging a major gap in our knowledge of the Grey Bridge with that gift, and for bridging the Atlantic via British Airways to bring that and other items of dockyard heritage back to Bermuda. Heritage Tourism is not extinct, but alive and well, at least on Ireland and Boaz Islands in the Far West (not to say, ‘Wild’) of the Bermuda archipelago.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480