American Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War known as the American War of Independence, was an 18th-century war between Great Britain and its Thirteen Colonies which declared independence as the United States of America. After 1765, growing philosophical and political differences strained the relationship between Great Britain and its colonies. Patriot protests against taxation without representation followed the Stamp Act and escalated into boycotts, which culminated in 1773 with the Sons of Liberty destroying a shipment of tea in Boston Harbor. Britain responded by closing Boston Harbor and passing a series of punitive measures against Massachusetts Bay Colony. Massachusetts colonists responded with the Suffolk Resolves, they established a shadow government which wrested control of the countryside from the Crown. Twelve colonies formed a Continental Congress to coordinate their resistance, establishing committees and conventions that seized power. British attempts to disarm the Massachusetts militia in Concord led to open combat on April 19, 1775.
Militia forces besieged Boston, forcing a British evacuation in March 1776, Congress appointed George Washington to command the Continental Army. Concurrently, the Americans failed decisively in an attempt to invade Quebec and raise insurrection against the British. On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted for independence, issuing its declaration on July 4. Sir William Howe launched a British counter-offensive, capturing New York City and leaving American morale at a low ebb. However, victories at Trenton and Princeton restored American confidence. In 1777, the British launched an invasion from Quebec under John Burgoyne, intending to isolate the New England Colonies. Instead of assisting this effort, Howe took his army on a separate campaign against Philadelphia, Burgoyne was decisively defeated at Saratoga in October 1777. Burgoyne's defeat had drastic consequences. France formally allied with the Americans and entered the war in 1778, Spain joined the war the following year as an ally of France but not as an ally of the United States.
In 1780, the Kingdom of Mysore attacked the British in India, tensions between Great Britain and the Netherlands erupted into open war. In North America, the British mounted a "Southern strategy" led by Charles Cornwallis which hinged upon a Loyalist uprising, but too few came forward. Cornwallis Cowpens, he retreated to Yorktown, intending an evacuation, but a decisive French naval victory deprived him of an escape. A Franco-American army led by the Comte de Rochambeau and Washington besieged Cornwallis' army and, with no sign of relief, he surrendered in October 1781. Whigs in Britain had long opposed the pro-war Tories in Parliament, the surrender gave them the upper hand. In early 1782, Parliament voted to end all offensive operations in America, but the war continued overseas. Britain scored a major victory over the French navy. On September 3, 1783, the belligerent parties signed the Treaty of Paris in which Great Britain agreed to recognize the sovereignty of the United States and formally end the war.
French involvement had proven decisive. Spain failed in its primary aim of recovering Gibraltar; the Dutch were compelled to cede territory to Great Britain. In India, the war against Mysore and its allies concluded in 1784 without any territorial changes. Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765 to pay for British military troops stationed in the American colonies after the French and Indian War. Parliament had passed legislation to regulate trade, but the Stamp Act introduced a new principle of a direct internal tax. Americans began to question the extent of the British Parliament's power in America, the colonial legislatures argued that they had exclusive right to impose taxes within their jurisdictions. Colonists condemned the tax because their rights as Englishmen protected them from being taxed by a Parliament in which they had no elected representatives. Parliament argued that the colonies were "represented virtually", an idea, criticized throughout the Empire. Parliament did repeal the act in 1766, but it affirmed its right to pass laws that were binding on the colonies.
From 1767, Parliament began passing legislation to raise revenue for the salaries of civil officials, ensuring their loyalty while inadvertently increasing resentment among the colonists, opposition soon became widespread. Enforcing the acts proved difficult; the seizure of the sloop Liberty in 1768 on suspicions of smuggling triggered a riot. In response, British troops occupied Boston, Parliament threatened to extradite colonists to face trial in England. Tensions rose after the murder of Christopher Seider by a customs official in 1770 and escalated into outrage after British troops fired on civilians in the Boston Massacre. In 1772, colonists in Rhode Island burned a customs schooner. Parliament repealed all taxes except the one on tea, passing the Tea Act in 1773, attempting to force colonists to buy East India Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to Parliamentary supremacy; the landing of the tea was resisted in all colonies, but the governor of Massachusetts permitted British tea ships to remain in Boston Harbor, so the Sons of Liberty destroyed the tea chests in what became known as the "Boston Tea Party".
Parliament passed punitive legislation. It closed Boston Harbor until the tea was paid for and revoked the Massachusetts Charter, taking upon themselves the right to directly appoint the Massachusetts Governor's Council. Additionally, t
Aerodrome
An aerodrome or airdrome is a location from which aircraft flight operations take place, regardless of whether they involve air cargo, passengers, or neither. Aerodromes include small general aviation airfields, large commercial airports, military airbases; the term airport may imply a certain stature. This means that all airports are aerodromes. Usage of the term "aerodrome" remains more common in the Ireland and Commonwealth nations. A water aerodrome is an area of open water used by seaplanes or amphibious aircraft for landing and taking off. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization an aerodrome is "A defined area on land or water intended to be used either wholly or in part for the arrival and surface movement of aircraft." The word aerodrome derives from Ancient Greek ἀήρ, δρόμος, road or course meaning air course. An ancient linguistic parallel is hippodrome, derived from ἵππος, δρόμος, course. A modern linguistic parallel is an arena for velocipedes. Αεροδρόμιο is the word for airport in Modern Greek.
In British military usage, the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and the Royal Air Force in the First and Second World Wars used the term—it had the advantage that their French allies, on whose soil they were based and with whom they co-operated, used the cognate term aérodrome. In Canada and Australia, aerodrome is a legal term of art for any area of land or water used for aircraft operation, regardless of facilities. International Civil Aviation Organization documents use the term aerodrome, for example, in the Annex to the ICAO Convention about aerodromes, their physical characteristics, their operation. However, the terms airfield or airport superseded use of aerodrome after World War II, in colloquial language. In the early days of aviation, when there were no paved runways and all landing fields were grass, a typical airfield might permit takeoffs and landings in only a couple of directions, much like today's airports, whereas an aerodrome was distinguished, by virtue of its much greater size, by its ability to handle landings and take offs in any direction.
The ability to always take off and land directly into the wind, regardless of the wind's direction, was an important advantage in the earliest days of aviation when an airplane's performance in a crosswind takeoff or landing might be poor or dangerous. The development of differential braking in aircraft, improved aircraft performance, utilization of paved runways, the fact that a circular aerodrome required much more space than did the "L" or triangle shaped airfield made the early aerodromes obsolete; the city of the first aerodrome in the world is a French commune named Viry-Chatillon. The unimproved airfield remains a phenomenon in military aspects; the DHC-4 Caribou served in the U. S. military in Vietnam, landing on rough, unimproved airfields where the C-130 workhorse could not operate. Earlier, the Ju 52 and Fieseler Storch could do the same, one example of the latter taking off from the Führerbunker whilst surrounded by Russian troops. An airport is an aerodrome certificated for commercial flights.
An air base is an aerodrome with significant facilities to support crew. The term is reserved for military bases, but applies to civil seaplane bases. An airstrip is a small aerodrome that consists only of a runway with fueling equipment, they are in remote locations. Many airstrips were built on the hundreds of islands in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. A few airstrips grew to become full-fledged airbases as strategic or economic importance of a region increased over time. An Advanced Landing Ground was a temporary airstrip used by the Allies in the run-up to and during the invasion of Normandy, these were built both in Britain, on the continent. A water aerodrome is an area of open water used by seaplanes or amphibious aircraft for landing and taking off, it may have a terminal building on land and/or a place where the plane can come to shore and dock like a boat to load and unload. The Canadian Aeronautical Information Manual says "...for the most part, all of Canada can be an aerodrome", however there are "registered aerodromes" and "certified airports".
To become a registered aerodrome the operator must maintain certain standards and keep the Minister of Transport informed of any changes. To be certified as an airport the aerodrome, which supports commercial operations, must meet safety standards. Nav Canada, the private company responsible for air traffic control services in Canada, publishes the Canada Flight Supplement, a directory of all registered Canadian land aerodromes, as well as the Canada Water Aerodrome Supplement. Casement Aerodrome is the main military airport used by the Irish Air Corps; the term "aerodrome" is used for airports and airfields of lesser importance in Ireland, such as those at Abbeyshrule. Spaceport
Battle of the Atlantic
The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign in World War II, running from 1939 to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, was a major part of the Naval history of World War II. At its core was the Allied naval blockade of Germany, announced the day after the declaration of war, Germany's subsequent counter-blockade, it was at its height from mid-1940 through to the end of 1943. The Battle of the Atlantic pitted U-boats and other warships of the Kriegsmarine and aircraft of the Luftwaffe against the Royal Canadian Navy, Royal Navy, United States Navy, Allied merchant shipping. Convoys, coming from North America and predominantly going to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, were protected for the most part by the British and Canadian navies and air forces; these forces were aided by ships and aircraft of the United States beginning September 13, 1941. The Germans were joined by submarines of the Italian Royal Navy after their Axis ally Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940.
As an island nation, the United Kingdom was dependent on imported goods. Britain required more than a million tons of imported material per week in order to be able to survive and fight. In essence, the Battle of the Atlantic was a tonnage war: the Allied struggle to supply Britain and the Axis attempt to stem the flow of merchant shipping that enabled Britain to keep fighting. From 1942 onward, the Axis sought to prevent the build-up of Allied supplies and equipment in the British Isles in preparation for the invasion of occupied Europe; the defeat of the U-boat threat was a prerequisite for pushing back the Axis. The outcome of the battle was a strategic victory for the Allies—the German blockade failed—but at great cost: 3,500 merchant ships and 175 warships were sunk in the Atlantic for the loss of 783 U-boats and 47 German surface warships, including 4 battleships, 9 cruisers, 7 raiders, 27 destroyers. Of the U-boats, 519 were sunk by British, Canadian, or other allied forces, while 175 were destroyed by American forces.
The Battle of the Atlantic has been called the "longest and most complex" naval battle in history. The campaign started after the European war began, during the so-called "Phoney War", lasted six years, until the German Surrender in May 1945, it involved thousands of ships in more than 100 convoy battles and 1,000 single-ship encounters, in a theatre covering millions of square miles of ocean. The situation changed with one side or the other gaining advantage, as participating countries surrendered and changed sides in the war, as new weapons, counter-measures and equipment were developed by both sides; the Allies gained the upper hand, overcoming German surface raiders by the end of 1942 and defeating the U-boats by mid-1943, though losses due to U-boats continued until the war's end. On 5 March 1941, First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Hillsborough asked Parliament for "many more ships and great numbers of men" to fight "the Battle of the Atlantic", which he compared to the Battle of France, fought the previous summer.
The first meeting of the Cabinet's "Battle of the Atlantic Committee" was on March 19. Churchill claimed to have coined the phrase "Battle of the Atlantic" shortly before Alexander's speech, but there are several examples of earlier usage. Following the use of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany in the First World War, countries tried to limit abolish, submarines; the effort failed. Instead, the London Naval Treaty required submarines to abide by "cruiser rules", which demanded they surface and place ship crews in "a place of safety" before sinking them, unless the ship in question showed "persistent refusal to stop...or active resistance to visit or search". These regulations did not prohibit arming merchantmen, but doing so, or having them report contact with submarines, made them de facto naval auxiliaries and removed the protection of the cruiser rules; this made restrictions on submarines moot. In 1939, the Kriegsmarine lacked the strength to challenge the combined British Royal Navy and French Navy for command of the sea.
Instead, German naval strategy relied on commerce raiding using capital ships, armed merchant cruisers and aircraft. Many German warships were at sea when war was declared, including most of the available U-boats and the "pocket battleships" Deutschland and Admiral Graf Spee which had sortied into the Atlantic in August; these ships attacked British and French shipping. U-30 sank the ocean liner SS Athenia within hours of the declaration of war—in breach of her orders not to sink passenger ships; the U-boat fleet, to dominate so much of the Battle of the Atlantic, was small at the beginning of the war. Much of the early German anti-shipping activity involved minelaying by destroyers, aircraft and U-boats off British ports. With the outbreak of war, the British and French began a blockade of Germany, although this had little immediate effect on German industry; the Royal Navy introduced a convoy system for the protection of trade that extended out from the British Isles reaching as far as Panama and Singapore.
Convoys allowed the Royal Navy to concentrate its escorts
Bermuda Garrison
The Bermuda Garrison was the military establishment maintained on the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda by the regular British Army, its local militia and voluntary reserves from 1701 to 1957. The garrison evolved from an independent company, to a company of Royal Garrison Battalion during the American War of Independence, a growing and diversifying force of artillery and infantry with various supporting corps from the French Revolution onwards, it was at one time fell under the military Commander-in-Chief of North America, was part of the Newfoundland Command in the early 19th Century, an independent command from 1868s'til its closure in 1957. From the 1790s onwards, the garrison existed to defend the Royal Naval Dockyard and other facilities in Bermuda that were important to Imperial security until the HM Dockyard was reduced to a base. Although the last professional soldiers were withdrawn in 1957, the Garrison ceased to exist, two part-time components - the Bermuda Militia Artillery and the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps - continued to exist until 1965, when they amalgamated to create the current Bermuda Regiment.
The English colony of Bermuda was settled accidentally in 1609 by the Virginia Company, when its flagship, the Sea Venture was wrecked off the archipelago. Although most of the settlers completed their journey to Jamestown, the company remained in possession of Bermuda, with Virginia's borders extended far enough out to sea to include Bermuda in 1612. In the same year, a Governor and more settlers arrived to join the three men left behind from the Sea Venture. From until 1701, Bermuda's defence was left in the hands of her own militias. Bermuda's militia included a standing body of artillery men to garrison the forts built by the local government; the earliest of these forts built were the first stone fortifications in the English New World, the first coastal artillery, are today the oldest English New World fortifications still standing. Together with St. George's town, the forts near the town are today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In addition to the full-time artillerymen, all of the colony's men of military age were obliged to turn out for militia training and in case of war.
They mounted units. In 1701, the threat of war led the English government to post an Independent Company of regular soldiers to Bermuda, where the militia continued to function as a standby in case of war or insurrection; the company, a detachment of the 2nd Foot of the English Army, arrived in Bermuda along with the new Governor, Captain Benjamin Bennett, aboard HMS Lincoln, in May 1701, was composed of Captain Lancelot Sandys, Lieutenant Robert Henly, two sergeants, two corporals, fifty private soldiers, a drummer. General William Selwyn had objected to their detachment. Despite this small regular detachment, the militia remained Bermuda's primary defence force. Following the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the Independent Company was removed. A company of the 9th Foot was detached from Florida, reinforced with a detachment from the Bahamas Independent Company, but this force was withdrawn in 1768, leaving only the militia. Regular soldiers invalided from continental battlefields as part of the Royal Garrison Battalion had been stationed in Bermuda between 1778 and 1784 during the American War of Independence, but were withdrawn following the Treaty of Paris.
US independence cost the Royal Navy all of her continental bases between the Canadian Maritimes and the West Indies. As a result, the Admiralty began purchasing land around Bermuda at the under-developed West End, with a view to establishing a dockyard and naval base there; the Royal Naval establishment began with facilities in the town of St. George's in 1795, by 1812 the island hosted an Admiralty and a dockyard, as well as a naval squadron during the winter; these facilities were to play a major role in the American War of 1812, Bermuda would develop into the Royal Navy's largest and most important base in the Western Hemisphere. Following the French Revolution, a detachment of the 47th Foot was detached to Bermuda in 1793. Regular soldierss would continue to be stationed in Bermuda from then'til 1957. With a regular garrison, Bermudians lost interest in maintaining militias; the Militia Acts were allowed to lapse and, other than a brief resurgence during the American War of 1812, the Bermuda Government would not raise local forces until pressed by the Secretary of State for War to create the Bermuda Militia Artillery and the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps eight decades later.
With the buildup of the Dockyard, there was a corresponding increase in the size of the Army garrison, to protect it. This included the construction of numerous fortifications and coastal artillery batteries, manned by the Royal Artillery, camps where infantry troops were stationed. From the beginning, the Royal Engineers were an important part of the Garrison, improving pre-existing fortifications and batteries, like Fort St. Catherine's, building new ones, surveying the island, building a causeway to link St. George's Island to the Main Island, a lighthouse at Gibb's Hill, various other facilities. A system of military roads was built as the rudimentary roads that had existed before had been used by islanders to take the shortes
Lend-Lease
The Lend-Lease policy, formally titled An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, was an American program to defeat Germany and Italy by distributing food and materiel between 1941 and August 1945. The aid went to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, Free France, other Allied nations, it included warplanes, along with other weaponry. The policy was signed into law on March 11, 1941, ended overnight without prior warning when the war against Japan ended; the aid was free for all countries, although goods in transit when the program ended were charged for. Some transport ships were returned to the US after the war, but all the items sent out were used up or worthless in peacetime. In Reverse Lend Lease, the U. S. was given no-cost leases on army and naval bases in Allied territory during the war, as well as local supplies. The program was under the direct control of the White House, with Roosevelt paying close attention, assisted by Harry Hopkins, W. Averell Harriman, Edward Stettinius Jr..
Roosevelt sent them on special missions to London and Moscow, where their control over Lend Lease gave them importance. The budget was hidden away in the overall military budget, details were not released until after the war. A total of $50.1 billion was involved, or 11% of the total war expenditures of the U. S. In all, $31.4 billion went to Britain and its Empire, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, the remaining $2.6 billion to the other Allies. Reverse lend-lease policies comprised services such as rent on bases used by the U. S. and totaled $7.8 billion. The terms of the agreement provided that the materiel was to be used until destroyed. In practice little equipment was in usable shape for peacetime uses. Supplies that arrived after the termination date were sold to Britain at a large discount for £1.075 billion, using long-term loans from the United States. Canada was not part of Lend Lease; however it operated a similar program called Mutual Aid that sent a loan of C$1 billion and C$3.4 billion in supplies and services to Britain and other Allies.
This program ended the United States' pretense of neutrality and was a decisive change from non-interventionist policy, which had dominated United States foreign relations since 1931. After the defeat of France during June 1940, the British Commonwealth and Empire were the only forces engaged in war against Germany and Italy, until the Italian invasion of Greece. Britain had been paying for its material with gold as part of the "cash and carry" program, as required by the US Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, but by 1941 it had liquidated so many assets that its cash was becoming depleted. During this same period, the U. S. government began to mobilize for total war, instituting the first-ever peacetime draft and a fivefold increase in the defense budget. In the meantime, as the British began becoming short of money and other supplies, Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt for American help. Sympathetic to the British plight but hampered by public opinion and the Neutrality Acts, which forbade arms sales on credit or the lending of money to belligerent nations, Roosevelt came up with the idea of "lend–lease".
As one Roosevelt biographer has characterized it: "If there was no practical alternative, there was no moral one either. Britain and the Commonwealth were carrying the battle for all civilization, the overwhelming majority of Americans, led in the late election by their president, wished to help them." As the President himself put it, "There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs."In September 1940, during the Battle of Britain the British government sent the Tizard Mission to the United States. The aim of the British Technical and Scientific Mission was to obtain the industrial resources to exploit the military potential of the research and development work completed by the UK up to the beginning of World War II, but that Britain itself could not exploit due to the immediate requirements of war-related production; the shared technology included the cavity magnetron, the design for the VT fuze, details of Frank Whittle's jet engine and the Frisch–Peierls memorandum describing the feasibility of an atomic bomb.
Though these may be considered the most significant, many other items were transported, including designs for rockets, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self-sealing fuel tanks and plastic explosives. During December 1940, President Roosevelt proclaimed the U. S. A. would be proposed selling munitions to Britain and Canada. Isolationists were opposed, warning it would result in American involvement with what was considered by most Americans as an European conflict. In time, opinion shifted as increasing numbers of Americans began to consider the advantage of funding the British war against Germany, while staying free of the hostilities themselves. Propaganda showing the devastation of British cities during The Blitz, as well as popular depictions of Germans as savage rallied public opinion to the Allies after the defeat of France. After a decade of neutrality, Roosevelt knew that th
Bermuda Police Service
The Bermuda Police Service is the law enforcement agency of the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda. It is responsible for policing the entire archipelago, including incorporated municipalities, the surrounding waters, it is part of, funded by, the Government of Bermuda. Like the Royal Bermuda Regiment, it is under the nominal control of the territory's Governor and Commander in Chief, for day-to-day purposes, control is delegated to a minister of the local government, it was created as Bermuda's first professional police service. In organisation and dress, it was created and has developed in line with the patterns established by British police services, such as the City of Glasgow Police, the Metropolitan Police Service. Bermuda's first police, from settlement until 1879, had been nine Parish constables; as had been the case in England, these positions were filled by men appointed for twelve months, unpaid service, until pay was introduced in the 19th Century. These appointments were akin to jury service.
Dissatisfaction with the quality of this part-time constabulary led to the formation of the Bermuda Police Force under the Police Establishment Act, 1879. The new body consisted of ten full-time constables under Superintendent J. C. B. Clarke. Three of the constables were based in Hamilton, with Clarke, three in St. George's, with Chief Constable H. Dunkley, two in Somerset, there were still twenty-one part-time parish constables; the size of the police force was trebled in 1901. The first detective was appointed in 1919, the force was reorganised again in 1920, with eighteen constables recruited from the UK raising its strength to forty-six; the size of the force grew over the following decades. The Bermuda Reserve Constabulary was created in 1951. After the closure of Bermuda's Royal Naval Dockyard and associated military garrison in 1958, Police Headquarters and other elements relocated to Prospect Camp, the former military headquarters. A Women's Department was established in 1961 with the first five female police officers.
A marine section was formed in 1962, with its first large boat, the Heron, being built by police officers in their spare time. In the 1960s the Bermuda Police performed a new role: internal security, dealing with riots resulting from the struggle for racial equality; this culminated in 1977 with riots following the hanging of two members of the Black Beret Cadre convicted of five murders, including those of Governor Richard Sharples, his Aide-de-camp Captain Hugh Sayers, the Commissioner of Police George Duckett. The death penalty had not been used in Bermuda for three decades; as the two men convicted were black, many blacks saw the death sentences as racially motivated. In 1995 the Bermuda Police Force was renamed the Bermuda Police Service as it was thought that the word "force" had unsavoury connotations; the Reserve Constabulary was renamed the Bermuda Reserve Police and adopted the same uniform as the full-time police officers. This was meant to address the common misconception they had suffered from, that they were not "real" police officers.
In 1995, the United States Navy withdrew from Bermuda, leaving the Bermuda Government responsible for policing the whole of what was now Bermuda International Airport. Bermuda was still feeling the effects of the recession of the early 1990s, this had led to a reduction in the number of officers of the Bermuda Police Service. At the same time, the new Police Commissioner, Colin Coxall, was determined to modernise the Bermuda Police Service by returning it to its roots, it was felt that the service had lost familiarity with the community it was policing, with constables waiting in police stations to react to situations, rather than walking the beat and preventing them. As the Bermuda Police Service attempted to redirect its efforts to more traditional "community policing", which required more officers, it found itself short of personnel. Many non-policing roles within the service were reassigned to civilians in order to place more police officers on the street, but it was decided to withdraw most of the detachment from the airport in order to make-up the shortfall elsewhere.
Policing of the airport, split between the US Navy and the Bermuda Police, was divided between the new Airport Security Police, on the airside, the Bermuda Police Service, which maintained a small detachment at its Airport Police Station, supplied from the complement of the St. George's Police Station, on the landside; that part of the former US Naval Air Station Bermuda, not required for the operation of the airfield was fenced off and patrolled, until final decisions on the disposal of the land were made, by the Baselands Security. This was a unit of security guards recruited and operated by the Bermuda Police Service, which wore Bermuda Police uniforms, drove Bermuda Police cars, but whose personnel were civilians, without police powers; as of 2009, the current strength of the Service is 468 officers, operating from four police stations in Hamilton, St. George's, Southside and Somerset, along with the Headquarters at Prospect Camp, a small Marine Police Station on Barr's Bay, in Hamilton.
Following the closure of the US Naval Air Station in Bermuda, the Scenes Of Crimes officers have moved to a building there. Plans to create a single, new building to house both the Hamilton Police Station and the Magistrates Court on the corner of Court Street and Victoria Street have
Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda
HMD Bermuda was the principal base of the Royal Navy in the Western Atlantic between American independence and the Cold War. Bermuda had occupied a useful position astride the homeward leg taken by many European vessels from the New World since before its settlement by England in 1609. French privateers may have used the islands as a staging place for operations against Spanish galleons in the 16th century. Bermudian privateers played a role in many Imperial wars following settlement. Despite this, it was not until the loss of bases on most of the North American Atlantic seaboard threatened Britain's supremacy in the Western Atlantic that the island assumed great importance as a naval base. In 1818 the Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda replaced the Royal Naval Dockyard, Halifax as the British headquarters for the North America and West Indies Station. In the decades following American independence, Britain was faced with two threats to its maritime supremacy; the first was French, as Napoleon battled Britain for military and economic supremacy in Europe, closing continental ports to British trade.
He unleashed a storm of privateers from the French West Indies in an attempt to cripple British trade in the New World. The Royal Navy was hard-pressed in Europe, unable to release adequate forces to counter the menace of the privateers. In any case, multi-decked ships-of-the-line were designed to battle each other in slow-moving, opposing lines; however many guns they might have to bring to bear, they were not able to run down, or outmanoeuvre the small privateers. The second threat was American; the first successful English colony in the North America, Virginia, which Bermuda was settled as an extension of, was intended to exploit the abundance of timber on that continent. This was at a time when Britain, much of Europe, had long been stripped clear of trees. American timber had been one of the enablers of Britain's ascendancy to maritime supremacy, and, by 1776, a significant part of Britain's merchant fleet was made up of American ships. Despite their own, naval dispute with Napoleon, the Americans took full advantage of their neutral position in the wars between Britain and France, the British Government was enraged by what it saw as America's failure to support it in combating a common threat.
The British Admiralty was enraged by the habit of American merchant and naval vessels to poach sailors from the Royal Navy at a time when its manpower was stretched to the limit. The US had its own interest in breaking Britain's supremacy on maritime trade, from the first days of the Republic it has claimed to champion free trade; the Royal Navy sought to counter the threat of French privateers in the New World by commissioning its own light vessels, built along the lines of traditional Bermuda sloops. The first three vessels commissioned from Bermudian shipyards were 200 ton, 12-gun sloops-of-war, ordered in 1795, commissioned as HMS Dasher, HMS Driver and HMS Bermuda. Over the next fifteen years, the Admiralty would commission a great many more vessels from Bermudian builders, manned by locally recruited officers and crews. Although the first were intended to counter the privateer menace, Bermudian sloops became'advice' vessels, using their speed and handling to evade enemies, carrying communications and vital freight around the globe.
They were used for reconnaissance and maintaining pickets. In addition to ships commissioned by the Admiralty, Bermudian merchant vessels were bought-up and commissioned for this purpose; the most famous was undoubtedly HMS Pickle, which carried the news of British victory back from Trafalgar. The Royal Navy began to invest into Bermudian real-estate in 1795. Early, it began to buy islands at the West End of the chain, in the Great Sound, with the view to building a naval base and dockyard. At that time, there was no known channel wide and deep enough to allow large naval vessels to gain access to the Great Sound. A naval hydrographer, Thomas Hurd, spent a dozen years charting the waters around the Colony, found the Channel through the reefs, still used today by vessels travelling to the Great Sound and Hamilton Harbour; the Royal Navy bought and developed property in and around the capital of St. George's, at the East End; these included Convict Bay, which became a Royal Canadian Naval Base, HMCS Somers Isles, during the Second World War, the brick building now housing the Carriage House Museum, Restaurant.
Once Hurd's Channel had been discovered, the Royal Navy soon relocated all of its facilities to the West End. Numerous islands at the West End, in the Great Sound were used for various purposes, but the core of the base, the Dockyard, began to take shape on Ireland Island, at the North West extremity of the archipelago. Local labourers, free or enslaved, were sought to carry out the construction. With most working-age Bermudian men being skilled workers, involved in seafaring or shipbuilding, local labour proved scarce and expensive. In view of attitudes found amongst the Bermudian population to manual labour, the labour force for the start of the work was, apart from specialist Bermudian artisans, built up from slaves and ex-slaves from various sources. Alongside hired Bermudian slaves, who led unusually independent lives, finding their own work and bargaining with prospective employers for wages and conditions, t
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