Moon Bermuda by Rosemary Jones

Author:Rosemary Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avalon Publishing
Published: 2018-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Holy Trinity Church

With a picture-perfect setting, Holy Trinity Church (Trinity Church Rd., off Harrington Sound Rd. or North Shore Rd.) also happens to be historically important. The current building, or at least part of the nave, dates to 1660-1670, but historians believe there was an even earlier stone structure on the site that bore a palmetto-thatch roof. Regardless, Holy Trinity is one of the oldest church buildings in the western hemisphere, having survived hurricanes, storm damage, and numerous alterations and additions over the centuries.

Perhaps the church’s most notable feature is its array of 28 stained glass windows, most of them English and installed since the 1890s. Five of these were designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, a noted pre-Raphaelite artist who designed for the William Morris Company. Experts have declared the quintet the best collection of his work anywhere in the world. Holy Trinity’s furnishings are also impressive, including its mahogany pulpit, the 200-year-old Bevington-built organ, and a bronze baptismal font made in the 1970s by a resident sculptor (the original 1840s stone font can be seen in the churchyard). The church’s silver collection is valuable, with the oldest piece, a handsome tankard, dedicated to “the church of Hambleton Tribe, 1677.” Outside, wander through the churchyard with its roses and royal palms as well as gravestones. The church is open on Saturday while it is being cleaned and during services (10:30am Sun.), but contact the parsonage (tel. 441/293-5366 or 441/293-1710) to arrange a visit at another time.

Into the Deep with Beebe’s Bathysphere

In August 1934, Bermuda made global headlines when two scientists achieved a pioneering feat that captured the public imagination: They descended a record 3,028 feet (a nautical half mile) off the island encased in a steel contraption called a bathysphere. Naturalist William Beebe, a former assistant curator of birds at the New York Zoological Society, and bathysphere inventor Otis Barton had spent several years here, establishing the Bermuda Oceanographic Expedition in 1928. The island made an ideal laboratory thanks to its biodiversity, year-round mild climate, and easily accessible depths. The pod was lowered by a steel cable from a ship at the surface, the two men curled up like spiders and staring out a glass porthole at the wondrous specimens.

“Here I was privileged to peer out and actually see the creatures which had evolved in the blackness of a blue midnight which, since the ocean was born, had known no following day,” later noted Beebe in his 1934 book, Half-Mile Down. Electricity and a phone line were run into the bathysphere, allowing Beebe’s observations to be relayed to an artist at the surface who made fantastic drawings of the iridescent fish, silvery eels, flying snails, and mists of crustaceans for the world to ogle. “We are still alive,” was his comment to the anxiously waiting team at the surface when the pair dipped for the first time to a depth of a quarter mile.

Beebe, who had switched his scientific focus from birds to tropical studies in the 1920s and begun

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