WHEN the Trade Development Board, forerunner to the modern Tourism Ministry, was first constituted in 1913 its mandate included the immediate editing and rewriting of almost 300-plus years of Bermuda's history.

The TDB was attempting to launch Bermuda onto the emerging tourism market as a luxury spa. Unfortunately, what scant international standing the island enjoyed at that point was hardly conducive to the ambitious undertaking the TDB had in mind. Bermuda, if it was known at all overseas, was more likely to be viewed as a pestilent, once-removed penal colony rather than a mid-Atlantic vestige of Eden. To market the island as an alluring resort destination was a much harder sell than might generally be assumed from this vantage point. So wholesale revisionism became the order of the day.

Ever since the island was accidentally settled in 1609, its name had been a byword for adversity, almost synonymous with misfortune, in the popular European and North American imaginations.

The TDB embarked on what Madison Avenue would today call an "image makeover". In fact, the TDB, by fusing emerging New York advertising techniques with native Bermudian cunning, were among the pioneers of modern niche marketing. They reshaped Bermuda's image completely, transforming what was almost universally considered an uninviting and storm-wracked rock into what was disingenuously - but highly successfully - promoted as "Nature's Playground".

This was a not inconsiderable achievement.

Shakespeare had famously referred to "the still-vex'd Bermoothes" in . His contemporary Fulke Greville declared Bermuda "the monarchy of fear" in one of his couplets. This dolorous reputation persisted right through the 19th century. Even as Mark Twain was beginning to extravagantly sound Bermuda's praises in the pages of , a British military officer writing at the same time labelled the island "a bunch of rocks" that were home to "the centipede, cockroach and jiggers". Lieutenant Francis Dashwood's grim appraisal probably resonated more powerfully with audiences of the day than Twain's gentle reminiscences of his idle Bermuda excursions. Well into the Victorian era a maze of dog-legged streets running behind the Strand in London had been popularly known as "The Bermudas" for more than two centuries; innocents who chanced into them came to grief at the hands of ruffians with almost the same frequency that ships had been foundering on the island's saw-toothed girdle of reefs since the Age of Discovery.

Bermuda's low-standing was, of course, initially earned because of those same treacherous reefs and seas that seemed to be on a rolling boil for months at a time, a setting that led mariners and cartographers designate the island a veritable hell on earth - the Isle of Devils.

This early notoriety was later compounded by less infernal factors: infertile soil that had led to Bermuda's expensive failure as a plantation colony; the grim reality that the island was a breeding ground for all manner of disease; and, of course, double-dealing, compulsively larcenous inhabitants who once made privateering their primary industry and considered both sides in conflicts ranging from the American War of Independence to the US Civil War legitimate profit centres in Bermuda's overall business plan.

The TDB could not, of course, alter the truth about Bermuda's past: it could not bowdlerise the historical record. What it did was successfully contrive to camouflage the less salubrious aspects of Bermuda's long history behind an appealing fa?ade that emphasised the island's natural beauty, stress-free environment and export variety Belle Epoque gentility that arrived in Bermuda along with the British forces stationed here in the Edwardian era.

The TDB did not impose an appealing order on the chaos of Bermudian affairs. Rather, the board disguised the island's inherently chaotic nature through carefully crafted advertisements, alluring marketing campaigns and strategically placed stories in US publications that often bore as much resemblance to reality as Winslow Homer's idealised watercolours of Bermuda.

Perhaps the TDB succeeded too well.

This manufactured image has been handed down to successive generations not only in the island's overseas markets, first tourism and more recently international financial services, but also to successive generations of Bermudians.

This romanticised Bermuda that resides in our collective consciousness is based less on fact than it is on the aspirations and imaginations of those early patrician marketing geniuses at the TDB, men who were dissatisfied with Bermuda as they found it and so endeavoured to craft a new one. The stylish, sophisticated Bermuda embedded in the island's national psyche is less what we were than what the TDB dearly wanted us to be. And what we attempted to be.

many years Bermudians strived to make this ideal into a reality, a synthetic image becoming the basis of a proud Bermudian self-image. Bermudians, by and large, made a common cause with this wholesale image-making in order to guarantee the common economic and social good throughout the tourism era.

But this community-wide impetus to transform the contrived top-drawer Bermuda of the TDB's pamphlets into a self-fulfilling prophecy has clearly not survived into the 21st century, at least not among Bermudian powerbrokers.

The reappearance of long-suppressed national traits is now well under way. Indeed, a slew of recent events would suggest the island is reverting to what is perhaps a more natural ? but far less agreeable ? state, with ruthless self-interest and a mystified contempt for the norms of civic society re-emerging and reasserting themselves in the Bermudian character. All manner of crude manifestations are in evidence, the lowest depths of brutish nastiness are being plumbed on a daily basis.

Today the TDB-engineered camouflage has deteriorated to a degree where Bermuda is now in imminent danger of reclaiming its once unassailable - and unwanted - reputation as an island of pirates and predators, a rapacious and self-serving backwater.

With a Government that now ranks as a Category Four man-made catastrophe on whatever Saffir-Simpson Scale measures Political Ineptitude, yet more damage is clearly imminent.

What might most politely be termed as the false start of the Progressive Labour Party Government under Jennifer Smith's confrontational leadership has now been entirely eclipsed by the patently false values of her successor. The peevishness, serial dissembling and overarching insecurity of the current Premier all make clear that he is hopelessly inadequate to the occasion. The magnitude of the corruption and graft that has become entrenched on his watch is matched only by a corresponding erosion of public confidence in Bermuda's major civic institutions. Even the Police Service, seemingly reluctant to follow the money trail leading from the looted Bermuda Housing Corporation accounts, is viewed as politically compromised. Whoever Prospect serves and protects these days, it is clearly not the Bermudian taxpayer.

Bermudians and, just as importantly, their overseas clients are slowly taking on board some disquieting facts.

Chief among them is the realisation that an island which represented the gold standard of micro-states, an uncorrupted and largely incorruptible jurisdiction, is just another off-shore domicile where public service is simply a means to self-advancement, a taxpayer-subsidised, get-rich-quick scheme for careerist mediocrities.

Facing growing discontent and dissatisfaction, confronted with widening fissures in his own political support base, it's probably only a matter of time before the Premier embarks on a national call to arms in the form of a full-throated Independence campaign.

Such attempts to restore a seriousness of purpose to trivialised and tarnished public affairs, to seize on an overriding national objective as a supposed remedy to all internal divisions, is a time-honoured red herring employed by harassed politicians.

Instead of attempting to restore Bermuda's stained honour by doing what's necessary ? purging the more crassly corrupt members of his administration and instituting essential reforms and fail-safe procedures within Government ? the Premier is more than likely going to try and distract from these failings by vaguely delineating what he will argue is a new national purpose, Independence.

He will fail.

has never been viewed as a moral imperative by the great majority of Bermudians. And the fact is this Premier now lacks the authority and suasion to persuade most of the unconverted to buy a used car from him, let alone a desperately conceived package for Independence. Even long-term supporters of sovereignty would be nonplussed if this goal was used in so asinine a manner, introduced to the public agenda as a political expedient rather than a matter of principle.

No matter how a Premier who considers himself to be Bermuda's Great Communicator attempts to promote Independence at this juncture, he will find only the most limited of audiences for his sales pitches.

Currently Bermudians want their self-image as an urbane, constitutionally-advanced and law-abiding community back. They want the damage to our reputation repaired, any potential fall-out that could poison the island's status as a well-regarded off-shore business domicile eliminated.

Bermudians have experienced quite enough of what constitutes an image makeover in Alex Scott's terms: the disdain for due diligence and accountability, the instant rewriting and editing of the last six years of Bermuda's history.

Very few Bermudians would now consider serving under him in a new role as absolute monarch of a reconstituted realm of fear ? the Bermuda that would inevitably emerge if the systemic ethical failings of his administration were institutionalised at Independence rather than dealt with in a comprehensive fashion long before that irrevocable constitutional step is ever taken.