Return to Devil Isle

You can go to heaven if you want. I'd rather stay in Bermuda.

~Mark Twain

No disrespect to Mr. Twain, but I'd take heaven. However, Bermuda is a close second.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we are bookending our World Cruise with two ports we've visited before--Hawai'i and Bermuda. All our other stops with be new to us, but these two are old friends. 

We used to live in Boston so it was effortless to take a cab to the port and head off on a week long trip to Devil Isle--the original name for Bermuda. The name was given to the island because sailors who skirted the treacherous reefs reported hearing the cries of the damned coming from the shore. When the first Englishmen made landfall, they found no people, damned or otherwise, but there were plenty of wild pigs, the source of the otherworldly screams! The pigs were evidently the only survivors of earlier shipwrecks.

Back in 2009, I blogged about Bermuda on my Mia Marlowe website when I was starting to write a couple of books set on the island. Because writers tend to look at places as possible settings, I thought you might enjoy a peek behind the curtain to see what catches our eye. Here's a bit of that old post: 

Writers are hoarders. We go through life gathering faces and names. Our ears prick when a lively conversation kicks up at the next table in the restaurant. We taste. We sniff. We seek out the details that will later find their way out our fingers and onto the page. Like any good director, we're also on the lookout for unique locations for our stories. 

When our cruise ship docked next to this 1820's fort on Bermuda, I knew I'd have to work it into a book sometime. As a fictional setting, Royal Dock has such good bones. There's a stern seawall, the barracks and exercise yard, and an armory as well as the elegant Commissioner's House. 

In my mind's eye, I could see strapping military men swarming over the place. Earnest, upright fellows in their wool uniforms sweating under the Bermuda sun, but not complaining because that just wouldn't be the "done" thing. 

Wherever the English traveled in the world, they took their culture with them and tried to recreate it in the new place. Bermuda was unique in that there was no indigenous population for them to displace when the first shipwreck survivors washed up on its empty shores in the 1600's. Built in 1827, the interior of Commissioner's House is a late Regency jewel of clean, classic lines. 

Of course, the main point of visiting such places for me is to imagine the people who lived there. 

My heroine would glide smoothly through this thick walled-structure. I love this interior courtyard with its splashing fountain and stone walls soaring to the open sky. A perfect place for my heroine to read her book of sonnets without being seen by the populace. But with countless interior windows opening onto it, it's far too exposed a space for a trysting spot. 

And how will the hero make his entrance into Commissioner's House? Through the double front doors as an officer of the regiment? By the back stairs as a blockade-running sea captain? 

The beauty of choosing Commissioner's House as a setting for historical fiction is that there is conflict already built into the place. Royal Dock was built largely by Irish convict labor. Imagine a hero stealing out of the airless convict ship, climbing the iron girders on the corner of the House and slipping into my heroine's jalousy-shuttered window. 

Have you ever visited a place and thought "This is a perfect setting for a romance?" 

Where was it? Why did it strike you as ripe for a love story?