Lost & Found

9:00 a.m. Tuesday
The East End, St. George
I ambled through St. George, enjoying its tidy scale and maze of quaintly named cobblestone streets such as Featherbed Alley. I stopped in Caffé Latte, where people nursed cappuccinos. The proprietor, a robust man with graying hair and a Harry Belafonte baritone was, it turned out, the previous town crier. He introduced himself as E. Michael Jones and told me that because news is delivered in other ways now, his role is more that of a history teacher in the UNESCO World Heritage site of St. George. Jones invited me for a coffee in the courtyard where his pink Moluccan cockatoo, Papoose, hopped from a branch onto my arm. Then, Jones started the history lesson: "Juan de Bermúdez sailed past in roughly 1503; he heard screeching noises from the island and wouldn't come ashore. That's why he called it the 'Isle of Devils.' The noise was just the cahow, though, a diminutive bird with an enormous wingspan, which isn't found anywhere else in the world. When the British shipwrecked here 100 years later," Jones continued, "they quickly made friends with the cahow. In fact, they pretty much ate them all. Small birds, but with great breast meat, apparently." Business was picking up, so Jones excused himself, but not before giving me a happy ending: "Cahows were thought to be extinct until about 50 years ago when a group of naturalists found a colony of them on one of the Castle Harbour Islands, off the northeast coast."

1:20 p.m. Tuesday
Coral Sea, St. George's Harbour
Captain Beau Evans was an entertaining raconteur. if Bermuda were a Jeopardy! category, he'd own the board. Cruising out of the harbor on the Coral Sea, a glass-bottom boat, we passed pastel pink, yellow and blue houses topped with china-white rooftops. Evans explained that the white paint on the sandstone roofs contains lime powder. The lime neutralizes any acid in the rain, and then the rainwater gets funneled into the cistern of each house to be used for drinking and showering. Once we emerged into the Atlantic, waves tripled in size and hats blew off heads. We motored through a channel that ran out to sea like a hallway rug. "The Sea Venture got incredibly lucky," Evans shouted through the wind, telling me about the British shipwreck of 1609. "It skirted to within a half mile of Bermuda, thanks to this channel." I peered into the azure water. "Is it still possible to see it?" I asked. "After its excavation in the mid-20th century, it was re-covered with sand, given its precious nature," said Evans. While my fellow day-trippers went downstairs to peer through the glass bottom, I stayed on deck in the sunshine, leafing through The Tempest. With no shortage of influential friends, Shakespeare had access to early accounts of the Sea Venture's ordeal. It inspired him to write a play that opens with a terrible storm. Although the "uninhabited island" that Alonso's ship washes up on is said to lie between Tunis and Naples, scholars acknowledge that The Tempest is rich with New World allusions.

7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Harbour Night: The Hog Penny, Hamilton
fish chowder is addictively delicious almost everywhere, but I was after the best. That's how I came to The Hog Penny. I ate the smoky flavored soup while sipping a Dark and Stormy. Suddenly, the excitement in the room picked up. The Gombeys were passing by! I paid my bill and rushed outside just in time to see a troupe of 15 Gombeys and four drummers bopping down the hill. The dancers' faces were obscured by netted masks, the headdresses contained thick bouquets of peacock feathers extending two feet toward the sky, and their bodies were cloaked in every color of the rainbow. Pom-poms and fringe bounced off their costumes as the dancers jiggled. As they made their way toward Front Street, the audience pulled back. It was their way of begging the dancers to go wild, and they did. This traditional form of dance came from Africa by way of the Caribbean with some surprising Native American influence thrown in. Whistles punctuated the drums, and a snare drum rattled — a British-ism found only in the Bermudian form of Gombey. After three long dances, they boogied back up the hill.

10:00 a.m. Thursday
Boat launch, Tucker's Town Bay
I met Jeremy Madeiros, conservation officer on Nonsuch Island, at the Tucker's Town boat launch in Bermuda's East End. On this special tour, I would help transport baby cahows from one of the undisclosed islands where they hatch to the protected nests on Nonsuch. I was curious of course to see the birds that had inspired so much legend and lore. For 20 minutes, we bounced atop small waves. Madeiros detailed the ongoing conservation efforts to return Nonsuch Island to its precolonial state, which involves removing all non-native trees, plants and animals and repopulating and replanting it with endemic species. As we approached one of the islands where the baby cahows hatch, the wind picked up, preventing our anchoring. So we changed course and headed to the heavily wooded Nonsuch to double-check that everything was ready for the chicks' arrival later. On Nonsuch, I came face to face with a longtail warming an egg in a cliff side nest. Although I didn't see a cahow, it turned out that that wasn't unusual. "The cahow is a ghost bird to most Bermudians," Madeiros told me. "They only come out at night for their courtship ritual." But I'd gotten to see something just as compelling — Nonsuch itself, a living museum of 16th-century Bermuda before the first person set foot on the island.

10:00 a.m. Friday
A hotel, Hamilton
I was staring down at Hamilton Harbour's gleam­ing yachts from a public room on the Princess' second floor. I turned around, wondering what meetings and intrigue this room had witnessed, when in walked a man in yellow Bermuda shorts and a blue blazer. "Ian Fleming, who lived here briefly during the war, liked this room very much," he remarked and introduced himself as Ian Powell, the general manager. "This back wall used to have enormous fish tanks. It inspired Fleming to create the shark-filled aquarium in Dr. No's lair." In real life, the hotel was a hidden lair of a different sort. If Bermuda was "Britain's number-one listening post" during World War II, then the Princess was its headset. It became the island's counterintelligence headquarters for the British, who monitored the transatlantic mail. "A thousand people worked in the basement, checking to see if letters contained messages in invisible ink or if an extra period, when magnified, might reveal a hidden message," Powell explained. He showed me a 1941 article from Life about the motley crew of well-educated Brits who formed the Imperial Censorship. Many of the censors were attractive women and were called Censorettes, an un-PC label for sexy women with serious jobs. Though the schedule could be grueling, with thousands of letters to slog through each day, the censors found time to swim and play tennis and golf, and they even had a debate team. Undoubtedly, there were worse ways to spend the war.

3:00 p.m. Friday
49 Front Street, Hamilton
I hadn't yet spotted a woman wearing Bermuda shorts, so I was headed to the island's number-one authority on this riotously colored but strictly regulated attire to see if there was something in the rule book against me wearing them. I took a short walk from the Princess to Front Street, where I peered into specialty stores. The prim and proper Irish Linen Shop was doing brisk business selling embroidered handkerchiefs. I passed Queen Street, which contains the quaint Perot Post Office, beloved by philatelists the world over, and Gosling's, the go-to guys for rum. When I arrived at the English Sports Shop, I stopped in my tracks in front of a massive wall of Bermuda shorts. Dozens of large cubbies contained shorts of every color, from fuchsia to olive, stacked in every size. David Hamshere, the manager, arrived to give me the same good-natured tutorial required for all of us who come from places that don't consider shorts to be formal wear. It was he who broke the bad news that women don't really wear the shorts. Once you know the rules — no T-shirts, and knee socks and blazer should match — you apply your own fashion sense and, it seems, the longer you live in Bermuda the louder the colors become. Hamshere told me, "Whenever the new consultants for Deloitte arrive, they first come in to buy navy and gray shorts. Six weeks later, they're back for lime and salmon." I purchased lime for my husband.

9:00 a.m. Saturday
Cambridge Beaches, Somerset Island
Steps away from my 350-year-old cottage at Cambridge Beaches, a resort on Somerset Island, is a narrow staircase leading down to Pegem Beach. I raced down and dug my toes into the pink-hued sand. From there, I looked across the bay toward Teddy Tucker's house, a pale yellow Georgian retreat. Tucker, a former treasure hunter, has encyclopedic knowledge of the art and political history of his finds. Later, I walked to his idyllic compound to meet him. At 81, Tucker is still a force, with a shock of thick white hair and blue eyes as clear as Bermuda's ocean. Pointing toward a submarine beached near his home, its dorsal fin shooting like a sore thumb through the water's surface, I asked, "Whom does that belong to?" "That was a very expensive mistake for someone," he replied, shaking his head. A snowbird with too much money and too little sense thought a sub would be a fun toy, he explained, never taking into consideration the enormous system of reefs surrounding Bermuda. It's these reefs that gave Tucker plenty to excavate in the early days. Although he no longer hunts for treasures, Tucker's finds can be seen in the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute in Hamilton.

After saying my goodbyes, I went back to my cottage and thought about my own treasure hunt. When I first read Miranda's list, it seemed too dreamy, too impractical. But not only did the quixotic come true, it also revealed the character of Bermuda, its pastiche of British, Caribbean and American influences. Best of all, these treasures, unlike Tucker's, require no special equipment to unearth. They are within reach of any curious traveler to Bermuda, making all of us treasure hunters on each and every journey we take.