“Oh Pilot! ’tis a fearful night,There’s danger on the deep.” — Thomas Haynes Bayly, The PilotIn a couple of days, the tide, or more importantly, the time, will turn as the world that sets its clock by the Gregorian Calendar transitions at midnight on 31 December 2012 into the New Year, Anno Domini 2013, that is to say, in the year of our Lord A.D. 2013, that many years after the birth of Christ at Bethlehem. As a guiding light, a ‘time pilot’, if you will, ‘the Gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar in the world today. For decades, it has been the unofficial global standard, adopted for pragmatic interests of international communication, transportation and commercial integration and recognised by international institutions such as the United Nations and the Universal Postal Union’.The comings and goings of the sea and the passage of 2012 illustrate that ‘time and tide wait for no man’ in this last year or any before it. As we sail or surf through the days, months and years that form the calendar of our lives, pilots of many types are essential, as are yet those of a transportation ilk and have been for Bermuda these past 400 years since first human settlement in July 1612. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘pilot’ as ‘a guide though some unknown place or through difficulties and dangers’. In those words can be found the fundamental significance of the pilot and piloting in our daily lives. Indeed as the great novelist, George Meredith, wrote in The Wisdom of Eld, penned by Oscar Wilde as ‘his style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning’:We spend our lives in learning pilotage,And grow good steersmen when the vessel’s crank!That is to say we pilot ourselves through life and often improve our skills when the going gets rough and storms and hurricanes invade our personal space. There are others who provide piloting at a higher level and that in particular is the role of politicians and government, who are supposed to provide the steerage to keep Bermuda on a steady course, hopefully avoiding the rocks, reefs and hard places that spell social and financial ruin. Since 1 August 1620, we have had our own place of social pilotage, the “House of Assembly”, the oldest parliament in the British Commonwealth after that on the River Thames at London. As a result of the recent general election, we have a new set of government pilots, appropriately led, at least regards a ship of war, by a Cannonier! We must wish them well as they pilot the Bermuda ship of state in difficult waters ahead, caused by a global recession and difficulties in the rigging and seaworthiness of our cedar vessel.Those piloting in the shipping arena are by definition persons ‘duly qualified to steer ships in and out of harbour or wherever local knowledge is required’ and it was that function and those people of Bermuda that the Meyer Group of Companies honoured at a ‘Pilots Reception’ on 17th May 2012. The idea of the gathering was ‘to honour Bermuda’s past and present Pilots, Cutter Crews and Meyer Line Boat Crews, in recognition of the extraordinary work that they have carried out over many years’. Present incumbents were also honoured as such ‘pilots and crews are responsible for the safety of visitors that come to our shores aboard cruise ships; they also ensure that cargo vessels safely deliver their essential goods to the islands ports, and they often risk their lives in ‘Search and Rescue’ operations’.Historically, the pilots of Bermuda came from both the western and eastern ends of the island and were considered ‘kings on board ship and highly esteemed on land’. Private pilot gigs raced one another by sail and oar, for the first to an approaching ship was the one that received the job. From the beginning of the 1800s, piloting became a governmental operation and so it remains, with the service operating out of the east end, where ‘The Narrows’ channel, the only such passageway for ships through the Bermuda reefs is to be found. Pilots remain highly regarded members of the community, especially in the sometimes close-knit St. David’s Island.Setting aside the men of the Pilot Service and the serving politicians, we end this year on a personal note, for as Ben Jonson (‘a man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy’) wrote in Illiteratus Princeps: ‘Yet the best pilots have needs of mariners, besides sails, anchors, and other tackle.’ That is taken to mean that we all, individually, have a responsibility as mariners, or workers, for the pilots in our lives, and to ourselves, to chart the course of our days and years as good, perhaps professional, citizens, without which the pilots of ships, planes and governments cannot fulfil their vital roles in human society. Most of us will not become the pilots of ships of state or of the sea, but if responsible landlubbers will spend the days of our lives ‘in learning pilotage’, to the betterment of all, for that is the nature of human existence in 2013 and beyond: Happy New Year to all the pilots among us.Dr Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480.