Museums & Galleries in Royal Naval Dockyard

Why here

The National Museum of Bermuda is the island's largest museum and the place to understand how a speck of coral in the mid-Atlantic ended up mattering so much. It occupies the Keep, the six-acre fortified citadel at the tip of the Royal Naval Dockyard, the base Britain built in the 19th century to guard its Atlantic sea lanes and nicknamed the Gibraltar of the West. Convict-built ramparts, bastions and the great 1820s Commissioner's House, the first house in the British Empire framed in cast iron, hold a collection of some 75,000 objects across 500 years of Bermudian history. The story runs from the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture, which stranded a group of English colonists here and led to the island's settlement and, through the survivors' accounts, is thought to have inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, on through the Atlantic slave trade, privateering, the Royal Navy, the two-hulled Bermuda dinghy and the island's role in two world wars. The museum runs one of the region's serious underwater-archaeology programmes, so much of what is on display was raised from the very wrecks divers still visit. It takes a half day, and it gives the pretty West End the depth of history it deserves.