As a maritime country, and in particular one surrounded by reefs, channels are of vital importance to the well-being of Bermuda, as most of our essential food and other cargo come here via oceanic travel.

Without channels, vessels would have to lay offshore, subject to the vagaries of the weather, and tranship their cargo into lighters, or small boats, for receipt on shore.

Channels also require pilots, that is to say, seamen with intimate local knowledge of the passages through the reefs, although for several centuries, buoys have been used to mark the outer limits of a ‘strait’ into safe harbour.

The word strait is often synonymous with channel or passage, so that, for example, the “English Channel” is a strait between England and France and one of the busiest such transiting areas of the oceans of the world, giving access to the countries of northwest Europe, and via the Baltic Sea to Russia.

Other such channels are daily reminders of geographical and political choke points around the globe.

The Strait of Gibraltar joins the waters of the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean and were guarded for several centuries by the great guns of the “Rock”, on the north or European side.

The Suez Canal is an artificial strait connecting the Med with the Indian Ocean, cutting transit time to the Orient by many weeks.

Further east, the Strait of Hormuz between Persia and Arabia of old watches the passage of upwards of 30 percent of petroleum moved through the sea-lanes of the world.

Further east again, the Strait of Malacca connects the Indian Ocean with the Pacific, but for some years has been synonymous with piracy.

Of more exotic, if not romantic, in name, the Strait of Magellan allowed ships to avoid the dangerous voyage around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America by weaving through a narrow passage in the lands of Tierra del Fuego, discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 in the early stages of the first circumnavigation of the earth.

Back in familiar waters, we have no straits but many channels through the Bermuda reefs, or between the numerous islands of the archipelago.

In the early days of the Island after settlement in 1612, most of the channels were for small boats, with slightly larger vessels gaining access from the open sea to Ely’s Harbour in the west and Castle and St George’s Harbours in the east:

None of those channels could be transited by larger warships that were coming into existence in the latter part of the 1700s (bearing in mind that the present ship channel (“The Cut”) into St George’s Harbour did not exist until the 1920s).

That was not a matter of importance to Bermudians until 1783, as there was local knowledge of the channels for small boats through the reefs and about the Islands.

With the end of the American Revolutionary War in that year, the British military decided to establish a naval base at Bermuda, to replace harbour facilities lost in what became the east coast of the United States of America.

Several good anchorages existed within the northern waters of Bermuda, but no channel for large vessels was known through which advantage could be taken of those safe harbours.

Enter the channel-maker, the young Lieutenant Thomas Hurd RN, later Hydrographer of the Royal Navy, being a person trained to survey the topography of ocean bottoms, as opposed to the form of land above the sea.

For some nine years from 1789 to 1797, Hurd and his assistants, along with Bermudian pilots and boatman, plumbed the 200 square miles of the reef platform surrounding the island, producing by 1803 (upon his return to Britain) a magnificent 13ft x seven feet watercoloured chart of the eastern part of top of the volcano, Mount Bermuda.

In the process, he found what he was sent for: a channel for ships through the reefs, being that now called “The Narrows” off the northeast coast of St George’s Island, but named earlier for him as “Hurd’s Deep”.

The Narrows has proved to be the only passage through the Bermuda reefs for large warships and opened the way for the establishment of the Royal Naval Dockyard at the westerly Ireland Island in 1809.

The discovery of The Narrows and, more important, its presentation on sea charts, also led to the establishment of a series of forts on the eastern coast of Bermuda in the 1810—20s, starting with Fort Cunningham in the south and progressing northward to Forts Albert, Victoria and Catherine, the last being located on a promontory at the north end of the Narrows, as its waters gave way to Murray’s Anchorage.

That section of the Bermuda coast remained vital to the security of the only way into the inner harbours of the island and the last major expression for its protection was the construction of St David’s Battery in the first decade of the 1900s, and the rearming of Alexandra Battery and Forts Cunningham and Victoria with the largest guns ever emplaced here, excepting the transient ones of the United States forces for several years in the Second World War.

In that conflict, the men of the Bermuda Militia Artillery operated the guns at St David’s Battery, which covered the entrance to the Narrows and also the examination centre at the offshore anchorage of Five Fathom Hole, originally, according to the Hurd survey, “Jervis’s Roadstead”.

Today, the guns have fallen silent, sentinels only to the bygone era when Bermuda had a major role in military strategies affecting the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Lt Hurd’s reefs, however, remain largely unchanged and are the protectors for millennia past, and hopefully the future, of the fragile lump of limestone we call home.

Unless a new channel is blasted through the reefs, say from the area of North Rock, the Narrows will also remain as defined by Hurd: the only way in.

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.