3/30/2023 0 Comments Down in bermuda forest island map![]() ![]() Since the 1970s, the Bermuda Maritime Museum has occupied the Keep, including the Commissioner's House (and, following the end of the Millennium, also took possession of the Casemates Naval Barracks to expand into the national museum of the British Overseas Territory). The Commissioner's House at the highest point atop The Keep (a fortress within the fortified North Yard) on the northern point of the island was home to a Royal Navy Wireless Station from 1939 to 1949 (another had been located since the First World War at Daniel's Head on Somerset Island, and was taken over by the Royal Canadian Navy from the 1960s 'til 1995 as CFS Bermuda, a transmitter location). Otherwise, HMS Malabar served as a supply station and berthing area for Royal Navy and NATO vessels transiting or exercising in the area until closing in 1995). The frigate designated as West Indies Guardship would visit on its way to the West Indies, and again on returning to Britain. Most of Ireland Island, and the other Admiralty and War Office landholdings in Bermuda, were transferred to the colonial government in 1957, but the South Yard and adjacent areas continued to operate as a naval base titled HMS Malabar until the 1980s, when the last vessels based there were withdrawn and HMS Malabar became a supply station. With control of the western North Atlantic ceded to the allied United States Navy during the Second World War (when a United States Naval Operating Base, serving ships and flyingboats, was built on the Great sound, and United States Army Air Forces airbase Kindley Field at the East End) and subsequently under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the Royal Naval Dockyard was reduced to a base in 1951 (with the ships based there required to return to Portsmouth for repairs). As Bermuda's porous limestone did not allow for a conventional drydock, a series of floating dry docks were also moored to the wharf inside the cambers from the 1860s. Although the main anchorage for the fleet was Grassy Bay (with Murray's Anchorage remaining a secondary anchorage), the area of water inside the mouth of the Great Sound between Ireland Island and Spanish Point, there was considerable space within the cambers for vessels as large as cruisers to berth on wharfs or the inner sides of the breakwaters. Each of the yards has a long breakwater, or arm enclosing a camber. ![]() ![]() From this point, the original fortified yard has been known as the North Yard. The dockyard was expanded at the turn of the century by construction of a new South Yard. It first served as the winter headquarters and base for what was to become the North America and West Indies Station (with Halifax, Nova Scotia, filling these roles during the summers), but became the year-round headquarters, main-base and dockyard by the 1820s. The lighthouse was never built, but the dockyard became a strategically important one for the navy during the wars of 1812–15. George's Island while construction began at Ireland Island. George's town with the fleet anchoring at Murray's Anchorage, off the northern shore off St. Although the Admiralty had already begun acquiring Ireland Island and other properties around the Great Sound, in 1795 it first established a base at the East End, where Admiralty House was first located at Rose Hill, beside St. Following the American War of Independence, which left Bermuda the only British territory between Nova Scotia and the West Indies, the Royal Navy bought the island to use for a lighthouse and dockyard.Ī dozen years were spent surveying Bermuda's encompassing reef for a channel sufficient to enable ships of burthen to reach Ireland Island and the Great Sound. In 1618, a privateering vessel under the command of a notorious pirate by the name of Powell ran aground on the main island, and Powell was banished to the island (which at that time was uninhabited) by the colonial governor. ![]()
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