Eons ago, “Mount Bermuda” began its slow formation on the floor of the ocean, one basaltic bubble after another, oozing or exploding from a hotspot perhaps near the ‘Atlantic Ridge’. The top of the volcano became an oceanic mesa upon which reefs thrived, contributing to the formation of dry land, through the grinding up of coral and shells to make beaches and sand dunes. The dunes consolidated through the action of rainwater and so “Bermuda” was born, a glorified ‘house of sand’, comprising limestone rock, later used in structures, now heritage, such as homes, commercial buildings and fortifications.Over thousands of years, plant, bird and sea life moved in to colonise the island. As a Bermuda governor wrote: ‘There is perhaps no habitable spot in the Northern Hemisphere, and few anywhere, except some remote islands in the South Atlantic and Pacific, which were left so long to the absolute dominion of nature.”A natural paradise was thus compiled in the middle of the Western Atlantic, where it long remained free of the depredations of the human species.All that changed on Wednesday, July 11, 1612, when a ship with 50 settlers sailed into Bermuda waters, sent as a colonising force by the Virginia Company of London, the corporation that had established Jamestown, Virginia, but a mere five years previous. The third Governor of Bermuda, Captain Nathaniel Butler wrote of that historic day.“When the new arrivals from the Plough came ashore, they found the three English inhabitants not only alive and healthy, but well-provided with a great variety of food supplies: an acre of good corn ripe and ready to be harvested, a large number of pumpkins and Indian beans, as well as many tortoises trapped and ready, and a good supply of hog-meat salted and made into sides of bacon. This cheered and encouraged them greatly, and they soon got busy landing both goods and people from the Plough on to a small island on the south side of the channel leading into the harbour, which at that time was named Smith’s Island, in honour of Sir Thomas Smith, Governor of the Company in England.”After a few days on Smith’s Island, Governor Moore changed his place of residence from Smith’s Island to St George’s, to benefit from the access to a fresh water supply. Then he built some small huts of palmetto leaves for himself and his wife, and for a few other people, in the valley where the main town of the island was later established’. So began the settled life of Britain’s oldest Overseas Territory, which in this year celebrates 400 years of permanent human occupation of a veritable paradise on Earth, now increasing bruised by buffeting winds of the wrong types of change.Butler describes that paradise at length, but here are some high points: The soil “by its nature produces a great variety of simples, many fine tall cedars, an innumerable number of palmettos, many mulberry trees and wild olives”. A few years after settlement, the ground produced “an endless quantity of white, red, and orange-coloured potatoes, sugar cane, indigo, parsnips, very large radishes, the American bread-fruit, cassava, Indian pumpkin, watermelons, musk melons, and the delicate pineapple, and in short, whatever else of this sort may be wanted to satisfy either necessity or pleasure. But beyond all the rest of the elements, the sea is found to be most abundantly generous to these islands. In it there are as many excellent fish and of as great a variety and most easily caught, as anywhere in the world”.The good Governor also wrote of the heavens, but with a sting of hell in his last phrases: “The sky itself has also done her share for these islands, with good supplies of many sorts of fowl, such as the grey and green plover, some ducks and mallards, red-shanks, sea wigeons, grey bitterns, cormorants, white and grey herons, a profusion of sparrows and robins (which have lately been destroyed by cats), woodpeckers, and very many crows, who for a while were too bold in their wonder at the new sight of men, until many of them paid the price for their curiosity; the rest are now flown away and seldom seen.’If one may paraphrase: “Heritage can be blown away and will never be seen again.”As a Bermudian (of several centuries standing) in this anniversary year, I would ask Bermudians to consider what contributions each has made (or is willing to make) to preserve the paradise we inherited a mere four centuries ago, and to which natural treasures we have added the heritage of architecture, fortifications, a World Heritage town (where it all began) and much more. Or will you help to ‘unlay’ that heritage groundwork, so that a writer in the next 400 years will have to pen a epitaph for our beloved Bermuda: ‘And they threw it all away’, as in the new hit single by Dylan Harris: ‘Heritage is all there is, it makes the world go ’round’?Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480