The ‘Dock’ is wedded to the ‘Yard’

HMS Urgent in for repairs in AFD Bermuda, probably just before her commission as the depot ship at Jamaica in 1877.



The enormous 8,000-ton Bermuda floating dock under construction on the Thames in mid-1868.



The new floating dock for the Bermuda station a short time before launching on 3 September 1868.



HM Floating Dock Bermuda under tow flying the White Ensign, with HMS Terrible astern.



The partly submerged floating dock Bermuda, about 1880, with warships and a convict hulk on the left.



Careening Bermuda by filling some of its tanks, so that part of the bottom can be cleaned.



“The whole town of Hamilton had come out to stare at the strange monster — the most wonderful craft that ever made voyage since Noah’s Ark went cruising.” — A British officer on the arrival of HM Floating Dock Bermuda on July 29, 1869.

It is a curiosity of the Royal Naval Dockyard at Bermuda (est. 1809) that the very rock that provided not only the foundation but the stone for its buildings made it impossible for the base to perform its essential function, namely providing a dry berth for the repair of the warships of the Royal Navy on location at the North America and West Indies Station, headquartered at Bermuda.

After the War of Independence, which started in 1775 with ‘a shot heard round the world’, not physically like Krakatoa, but metaphorically, as in a cannon salute to the concept of freedom from tyranny (in this case charging a tax on tea, no less). When it ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the British lost all its great continental seaports in this American hemisphere, from Maine to Miami, as it were, or would be.

That naval disaster was the start of the good life in Bermuda, as the British Admiralty turned their attention to the civilian island, which they had previously ignored, in appreciation of its convenient (and only!) location in the western North Atlantic, halfway between retained Canada and islands in the West Indies.

Bermuda proved to be a most convenient place from which, operating out of a new naval base, the fleet of the North America and West Indies Station could control the young mustang of the United States Navy. As one countrified British officer put it, in so many other words, Bermuda became the ‘bit in the mouth of the horse’, the Island being the controlling piece of immovable metal to rein in the former British colonies of the east coast.

As the treaty was being signed in the cultured halls of Paris, not a moment was lost in sending Royal Engineers and naval personnel to Bermuda to check the place out for its suitability as a naval base. The first report (and reporter) on the defences of the Island in 1783 unfortunately disappeared with ship and all hands on the way to New York, and so Andrew Durnford, Royal Engineers, later first Mayor of St George’s, was sent to reconnoitre the forts.

About the same time, Lieutenant Thomas Hurd was delegated to survey the reefs to find a channel into the inner harbours on the western half of the Island. That, we now know thanks to his biographer, Dr Adrian Webb, he did in an exemplary eight-year exercise and produced an extraordinary chart of the reef platform, as well as a map of the island itself, an illustration unseen by Bermudians until a couple of years ago, when the Hydrographic Office kindly copied it for the first time.

To return to one of the rocks of this story, it was the very nature of the Bermuda stone, being limestone and erode-able, rather than volcanic, that led to the creation of all the commodious harbours hereabouts and thus to its suitability for anchorages for a fleet of the Royal Navy; thus the Dockyard was approved a mere quarter of a century after the end of the War.

By that time, Mr Yard had been long wedded to Mrs Dock, the latter being the essential ingredient and reproductive mechanism of a ‘dockyard’, and thus a place was left in the land for a ‘drydock’ for the repair and renewal of the ships of war, out of the water. However, the rock of the Bermuda Yard was an infertile place, being of the very hard Walsingham variety, and much fissured by earthquakes; a ‘graving’ dock proved impossible to construct in such hard-headed local stone and thus was invented anew, in iron, the ‘floating drydock’.

The floating dock was constructed on the River Thames in the yard of Campbell Johnstone and was one of the industrial wonders of its day. As seen in a photograph, it was launched, on September 3, 1868, sideways into the river, an innovation that has seen use in modern shipbuilding. The ‘ship’ was 381 feet long, 123 wide, with a height of 74 feet, or about as tall as the old Bank of Bermuda building at Albouy’s Point, that dimension being not from the ‘keel’ but from the ‘deck’.

For its transit to the Island, the first-ever such long distance operation, the vessel was named HM Floating Dock Bermuda, ‘officially commissioned to obviate problems in case weather necessitated shelter in a foreign port’, with a crew of around 80 under Staff Commander William Hains. RN. Two warships, the Northumberland and Agincourt, commenced the first leg of the tow to Porto Santo, Madeira, where on July 3, 1869, it was taken over by HMS Warrior and the Black Prince.

The arrival of the floating dock at Bermuda on July 28, 1869 was recorded in The Royal Gazette: ‘two huge ships, the Warrior and Black Prince, were seen towing the immense structure towards the east end of the Island, with the Terrible acting as a rudder … every height commanding a view of the North Channel was crowded with carriages and people and the water was well covered with boats of all description’. In the event, the two ironclads were too large to tow HM FD Bermuda through The Narrows, so the final task fell to the Terrible and local tug Spitfire ahead, while alongside were the gunboats HMS Viper and Vixen, with HMS Lapwing, which had accompanied the flotilla from Britain, astern.

Bermuda served the Dockyard well for a little over three decades, but its rotting carcass is yet to be found off the bay at Spanish Point. In 1902, Admiralty Floating Dock No 1 replaced the Bermuda and was in turn the largest such repair facility in all of the British dominions worldwide.

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