“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” — F Scott Fitzgerald

Many Bermudians spend the summer diving off wharves, bridges and rocks, breasting the waves on the South Shore, or floating off the stern of a boat of an afternoon.

We’ve sent swimmers to the Olympics, from John Hinson Young in 1936 to Roy-Allan Burch (who has recently broken both personal and Bermuda records), or to World Championships, like Rebecca Heyliger.

Every August sees a riotous celebration at the Non-Mariners Race, with people in, on and under the sea, though many seem more intent on celebrating liquids other than water.

Swimming is an ancient part of our heritage, for both males and females, and one that has differentiated us from other maritime communities, where many don’t swim.

Perhaps it’s the shape of the Island, with its coves, bays and beaches, protected from the deep ocean swells, where children can safely make the first encounter with salt water and learn to love it.

Perhaps it was born of necessity, for so much of early life was do or die on the ocean. Indeed you might write that nearly every Bermudian is to the water born, and very early borne there to learn to swim or sink.

By contrast, sixty-five percent of the population of the United States does not know how to swim and misses out on one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Diving in the shallow, clear and warm waters of the Bermuda archipelago and reef platform (an undersea mesa of some 200 square miles) necessitated the ability to swim, as early on, the settlers learned to take to the sea for various commercial activities, including salvaging of shipwrecks and diving for pearls.

The latter occupation was to be enhanced by the importation of a native American and an African (apparently the first of his ethnicity to come to Bermuda) by the ship Edwin, out of the Caribbean in 1616, possibly from Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela, which had a flourishing pearl industry.

Unfortunately, pearls in mussels at Bermuda were a rarity (though I found one near Hawkins Island in my childhood), but the men presumably taught their diving skills to the locals, who had only permanently settled the Island a few years previous.

Professor Michael Jarvis in his book, ‘In the Eye of all Trade’ has gathered a number of telling references to the swimming skills of Bermudians, young and older, starting with one in 1687 wherein, according to the then Governor Sir Robert Robinson, youngsters were ‘chiefly exercised in fishing, swimming and diving’.

In perhaps chauvinistic times, women acquired considerable skills in ‘swimming and piloting’ and because most of the population were water rats, another governor noted that although ‘their fishing boats are often overset by violent gusts of wind, yet it rarely happens that any of them are lost’ by drowning.

Bermudian men, particularly slaves, come in for mention in the later eighteenth century and one European traveller in the Americas thought ‘there are perhaps no better swimmers’.

Another tourist, the Quaker Thomas Chalkley, sailing on a Bermuda sloop saw ‘a mulatto sailor named Stavo washed off the bowsprit and run over by the vessel during a gale’: his swimming skills allowed him to get back to the vessel, to swim again another day.

Other seaman often drowned when ships were wrecked, as they knew not how to swim, whereas the Bermudians usually survived, having swum to shore to be later rescued.

One of the signal events that went swimmingly well for Bermudians in the late 1680s was the salvaging of a Spanish ship, wrecked on the Ambrosia, or Silver Bank, between the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, as those islands are now named.

The ‘plate ship’, the Nuestra Senora de la Pura y Limpia Concepción, had been lost on the reefs of that Bank in 1641, but was discovered by one William Phips in early 1687.

Such plate ships carried many tons of gold or silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru, bound for Spain, much of the cargo being headed for the production of the Spanish dollar, which had something of the global import that the United States dollar has today and the ships sometimes sailed in an annual fleet, or flota, protected by armed vessels against piratical activities, the Bahamas having something of the position then in relation to shipping lanes out of the Caribbean Sea that Somalia has today to ships transiting into the Indian Ocean from the north.

The mathematician, Richard Norwood, who later did the famous 1617 survey of Bermuda, invented a diving bell, which was nicknamed the ‘Bermuda tub’, which locals used in 1657 to recover silver from another shipwreck in the West Indies, near Eleuthera, the island where we had earlier settled the Bahamas.

By luck, several Bermudian ships came upon Phips after he discovered the Concepcion and volunteered the use of their tubs and free-diving skills, in exchange, of course, for a significant chunk of change from the wreck of the vessel.

Word reached Bermuda of the extraordinary find of precious metals and as soon as (later) Sir William Phips left the site, other Bermudians settled in to take what else could be found, before he returned to boot them off.

Suggested by Dr Jarvis, one of the Bermudians was a slave and used his share of the loot-by-diving to purchase his and his sister’s freedom, as well as that of a young boy.

Today, the whole lot, including Sir William, would be taken to court by the Spanish Government, which has never relinquished title to its vessels of the Americas and other trades lost at sea.

In Bermuda and elsewhere, ‘swimming’ has entered the language as metaphors for non-maritime activities, of which ‘swimming against the tide’ is one of the most prevalent, connoting individualistic struggles in life against its general flow.

Or in another sense, exclaimed by the financial genius, Warren Buffett: ‘Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.’

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@nmb.bm or 704-5480.