Melvin v Reid pitted a homemaker, who had once been a prostitute wrongly accused of murder, against filmmakers who used her actual maiden name in "The Red Kimono", a movie based on her life. The Melvin court held that the policy interest of the state in rehabilitation justified allowing the woman's privacy suit to stand. One of the most intriguing privacy tort cases of all time went the other, more typical, way. William James Sidis brought a lawsuit against The New Yorker magazine after a reporter weaseled into his apartment for an interview and then published a story that belittled Sidis' eccentricities and shabby circumstances. Mr. Sidis had been a celebrated child prodigy, the youngest person ever to attend Harvard, and a college graduate by age 16. Stressing the enormity of his past fame, the court held that a magazine story describing his descent into obscurity was newsworthy.

Anita L. Allen, "Dredging-up the Past: Lifelogging, Memory and Surveillance", 2007.

Many people and professions have an interest in finding out what happened in history. People who claim not to be interested in the Past ignore a central truth of human reality: nearly all that we know is from the details of past, for we cannot truly know the future except as the Past. The Past is what we are. For example, by the time I finish writing this article, every word on the page will be a part of what has already happened. That reality is encapsulated in the adage, "Live for today, for tomorrow never comes", or if you prefer, "Here today, gone tomorrow:, substituting "history" for "gone".

Some people are trained in dredging up the Past, often, may I say in these pages, like newspaper reporters, who seek the Past to embarrass the Present, for good but often unjustifiable reasons. When in May, 2000, the restored Commissioner's House was opened with an exhibition on slavery in Bermuda, telephone calls were received asking why the Museum was dredging up the Past, upsetting some people. It was pointed out that it is the responsibility of museums to represent all sectors of the community and periods of the past, warts and all, and that such presentations by exhibition paid respect to the people on whom the displays focused. Paying respect is a good thing and had such activity happened earlier, such dredging of the Past would perhaps have opened, widened and deepened the channels of communications between peoples, for a greater mutual understanding and respect for one another. Hiding, or indeed rewriting history is the way of tyrants and unfortunately of many governments.

Historians and archaeologists are some of the foremost professionals in the discipline of dredging up the Past, the former by study of documents and the latter by the interpretation of the buried remains of former times, a record more reliable than documents. As the great geologist Charles Lyell stated, the stratification of the Earth (and archaeological sites) is "undesignedly commemorative of the Past". Unlike documents, many of which were written by those in authority to a particular end, no one set out to amass the geology of the Earth or to create archaeological remains. The latter are a byproduct of human life and therefore, if correctly excavated and recorded, can give an unbiased view of what happened in history. That is why archaeology is so important to the study of the Past. It may perhaps also be said, no other profession has contributed so much to our understanding of ourselves as people through time.

There are of course other dredgers of the Past and one, a type of machine that digs into prior days, is vital to Bermuda and any nation that relies on transportation by water. The "dredger" is a vessel that can excavate channels or waterways through a series of buckets on a conveyor system. Keeping channels clear is essential to maritime commerce, but the dredger in the first instance will destroy geological deposits of ancient origins to create a path in the seabed and later it will excavate and dispose of more recent accumulations of sands and silts. Dredging up the Past in that context is seen as a good thing but because of its destructive nature, it is often impossible to know what interesting fossils, like prehistoric cahow bones, have been chewed up without recovery or record. Lately, the idea of dredging a wider and deeper channel into St. George's Harbour has again arisen, the original passage being cut by the dredger King George in 1911.

One of the earlier dredgers at Bermuda was the Majestic, which operated here in the 1890s. The King George and the Queen Mary replaced it and the Lord Cochrane and the Rockbreaker superseded them. A number of persons yet present worked on the last two, the former commanded for some time by the respected Captain Charles I. Dale.

Lobnitz & Co., of Scotland, built all of those dredgers, excepting Lord Cochrane, and is still in business building such excavators of the Past. Named for the great naval officer, Admiral Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald (as in the Bermuda channel), the Lord Cochrane was constructed by Ferguson Bros. of Glasgow and arrived in Bermuda on January 8, 1931. The King George was scuttled a few miles inside North Rock sometime thereafter and is a fine scuba diving site. The last of the Bermuda dredgers, the Rockbreaker, was sunk off Dockyard in 1981.

Nowadays, dredgers are brought in as necessary.

Any investigation in prior actions by people involves some form of dredging up the Past, be it a financial audit, a murder case, or a study of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The results contain both pleasant and uncomfortable aspects, depending upon your point of view. Much of our own heritage remains buried under the silts of time, in memory, in archives and libraries, and in archaeological sites. In order to understand who we are in Bermuda and how we came to be and what we have in common or otherwise, we owe it to our forebears and to generations yet to come to continue to dredge up the Past and to preserve the record of all the discoveries, no matter their effect on present sensibilities.

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. The opinions in this column are his own. Comments may be made to drharris@logic.bm or 704-5480.