It is always something of a surprise — especially to an American — to learn that Bermuda is one of the most remote places on earth — that is, one of the farthest from other lands and inhabitants.

Being no more than two air hours by jet from such heavily populated cities as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and Baltimore, Bermuda’s remoteness hardly seems like isolation.

And frequent flights from these and other cities in the US, Canada, and the UK, mean Bermuda is not isolated at all. Add the seasonal invasion of cruise ships during the spring, summer, and autumn months, and Bermuda’s remoteness is now more a curious fact than a geographic handicap.

And though Bermuda’s population density is among the world’s highest, at about 4,000 people per square mile, canyon dwellers from New York, Boston, Washington, etc., still come to the Island to escape the crowding and rushing about in their home cities. So density, too, is only a relative thing.

But a scan of some of the world’s most prominent reference works reveals that there is considerable confusion about just where Bermuda is located.

For example, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1964 edition) says Bermuda lies “about 570 miles E.S.E. of Cape Hatteras, N.C.”; and the Worldmark Encyclopedia of Nations (1960 edition), places the archipelago, “580 miles east of Cape Hatteras.” Groliers Encyclopedia of Knowledge (1991) says, “in the Atlantic Ocean about 956 km (600 mi) east of Cape Hatteras”. None of the three says whether these measurements are Nautical Miles or Statute Miles, but the NM variety miles are 15 percent longer than the SM, so fewer of them could represent an equivalent distance to a larger number of SMs.

The World Almanac (1993) also uses the figure, “580 miles E of North Carolina,” but the American Automobile Association [AAA] TourGuide (1998) puts Bermuda, “650 miles (1,040 km) east of Cape Hatteras, N.C.” Of course 580 NM = 667 SM, so these could be roughly the same measure. But AAA’s 1,040 km can’t be the equal of Grolier’s 956 km. In fact, the difference is 84 km or 45.35 NM / 52.2 SM, an unforgivable error in the age of global positioning satellites.

So where is Bermuda, really? Pan Am’s New Guide to The Caribbean, etc., (1970 paperback version of its classic New Horizons guide to the world), says, “approximately 753 miles southeast of New York [City].” The Island’s own, official “Bermuda Handy Reference Map” (1990 edition) shows the same distance as 774 miles.

A scan of Internet Web sites reveals that the confusion has not been overcome by the computer’s precision, either.

The Wikipedia, the Web’s homegrown encyclopaedia that can be read or potentially expanded or rewritten by anyone with Internet access, places Bermuda “around 600 miles (975 km) off the coast of the United States.” This is amplified lower down in the article to be “roughly 580 nautical miles (1074 kilometres) east-southeast of Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and roughly 590 nautical miles (1093 kilometres) southeast of Martha’s Vineyard.”

A website of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research places the Island 700 miles east of North Carolina. According to www.bermuda-online.org, the Island lies “568 miles east of North Carolina, 693 miles south east of New York.”

To summarise, then, published references to Bermuda’s location range from 568 to 700 miles away from Cape Hatteras — including the NM/SM ambiguity — or from 956 to 1074 kilometres — an astounding 118 kilometrs difference, when you consider that an unambiguous single unit of metric measure is involved. And, if you are flying from New York, you must head southeast for anywhere from 693 to 774 miles.

Fortunately, ship captains and airline pilots know where Bermuda is located, and can regularly find it when called upon. But this disparity in published figures makes an interesting footnote for Bermudians and visitors alike.