Bermuda - Touring Hamilton Parish3
If you’ve been looking frequently at your map of the islands,
you can’t have failed to notice one small piece of land at the
entrance to Castle Harbour. Its name alone should have
caught your interest. Nonsuch Island is not on your tour.
You may, however, be able to rent a boat or pay someone to
take you out there and wait while you look around. Nonsuch
is another of Bermuda’s nature reserves, not far from
civilization, but very remote, isolated and totally unspoiled.
Nonsuch Island & David Wingate:
Nonsuch Island is the home of the reclusive David
Wingate, Bermuda’s only conservation officer. For
most of his adult life Wingate has dedicated himself
to the restoration of the Bermuda that settlers
found here when they arrived in 1609, and to the
preservation of a small pelagic bird, the cahow,
that was thought to be extinct.
Over a lifetime of living almost as a hermit on
Nonsuch, David Wingate has planted more than
8,000 trees and brought back the cahow. Today,
the 15-acre island is the way Bermuda must have
been when Sir George Somers and his men first
stepped ashore.
You can reach Nonsuch only by a short boat ride. You arrive
on the island at a tiny dock flanked by a twisted, semi-sub-
merged iron hulk. From there, make your way up the cliffs to
a pathway that winds through the jungle, either to David
Wingate’s house high above the ocean, or off into the depths
of the island jungle in the other direction.
A walk around the island will take about an hour. Allow more
time if you want to stop off at one of the many tiny bays and
inlets or spend some time on a pristine sandy beach. Along the way you’ll see a tiny cemetery – there are only a couple of
weather-worn headstones – and a healthy display of vegetation
and trees, all endemic to the islands. You’ll find no hibiscus
on
Nonsuch.
They weren’t
here
when Sir
George arrived,
and
Wingate won’t have them on the island today. Instead, you’ll
find samples of the Bermudian red cedar and the palmetto. From the earliest times, the red cedar was exploited almost
to the point of extinction on the other islands.
The Cahow – Back From Extinction: The cahow,
a member of
the petrel
family of sea
birds, was
thought to
be extinct
until, at the
turn of the
20th century,
a single
specimen was found in the rocky crevices on
one of the Castle Harbour islands. It was identified
as such by a comparison with fossilized bones
found in the limestone caves on the islands. Three
years later another specimen was found when it
flew into St. David’s Lighthouse and was killed. Today,
after a great deal of effort, Wingate is the
guardian of more than 40 pairs of nesting cahows
and the island itself has become a symbol of hope
for conservationists around the world.
Know Before You Go!