The Bermudian - Winter 2017

would accept a swap of its 37 acres for an 80-acre chunk of the still-unutilised former military base at Morgan’s Point. An intricate negotiation followed, buffeted by the 2008 economic crisis. Good politics is about finding the middle ground and in 2010 the Morgan’s Point Resort Act struck that balance. Bermuda would get its glittering, high-end resort—the Ritz-Carlton Reserve Resort at Caroline Bay on Morgan’s Point—while Southlands would be reserved in its own right as a piece of Bermuda’s natural heritage.

As if to sanctify the deal, the Bermuda National Trust staged its Palm Sunday Walk at Southlands that year, allowing Bermudians to take in the still-evident natural beauty of its paths and exotic plants.

Seven years have passed since the politicians and developers put down their pens.

Architects have now finalised the design of the hotel, spa and restaurants that will soon grace the shore of Caroline Bay. A grand marina on the bay was ready for the America’s Cup festivities, giving proof of what the 2010 deal promised would be “a glorious future for Bermuda’s tourism product.” Alas, on Bermuda’s south shore the news is not as encouraging. Despite being designated in 2014 as a “listed” historic building, Southlands still stands pretty much as it did in 2006. A few more shutters have fallen off the Morgans’ once-grand home, more quarry gardens have subsided and the overgrowth of the paths and gardens continues. A group called the Friends of Southlands has initiated a programme of community gardens on the estate. But there has been precious little evidence of a concerted effort by Bermuda’s government to turn Southlands into an accessible national park. The rhetoric is still there, but the purse would seem to be currently closed. Is it not time for Bermuda to see in Southlands what Anna and James Morgan saw in it a century ago? Or what the poet Andrew Marvell long ago saw in the beauty of a garden:

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy dear sister!

Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men;

Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow, Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude.

The ultimate indignity came when vandals raided the Morgan mausoleum, presumably in vain search of pharaonic loot. Horrified Morgan relatives had their forebears’ remains brought to Canada. Southlands was left to intrepid naturalists who explored its now-tangled wonders.

In 2005, Bermudian businessmen Craig Christensen, Nelson Hunt and Brian Duperreault purchased Southlands from Willowbank.

Their company, Southlands Ltd., then began to craft a new vision for the remaining 37 acres of the estate, one that capitalised on the property’s intrinsic beauty by marrying it with a vision of five-star tourism. The Bermuda government, recognising the acumen of the investors and acutely aware of the island’s faltering tourism, enthusiastically engaged the process of possible redevelopment. In due course, negotiations were opened with the Jumeirah Hotel group, a Dubai-based operator of luxury hotels famed for their daring hotel designs and high-spending clientele. Many Bermudians, however, recoiled at the idea of turning one of the last unspoilt tracts of natural Bermuda into a gated sanctuary. Petitions were circulated and widely signed.

Letters to the Royal Gazette described the hotel
proposal as a “monstrosity.” Bermuda thus
found itself at a crossroad: nature versus job
creation and the rebranding of Bermuda as a
“private island.”
It took a flash of inspiration from then-
Premier Alex Scott to cut the Gordian knot.

In 2006, Scott suggested that Southlands
might be saved for posterity if the developers
she had a Bermuda buggy bell installed on the
hood of her Cadillac.

War broke the Torreys’ idyll in Bermuda. The menace of German submarines made crossing the Gulf Stream risky and ultimately impossible for tourists. In 1942, Southlands was leased to the United States Army as an anti-aircraft training school. Ack-ack guns arrayed along Southlands’ once-tranquil beach pumped round after round of munitions out over the south shore.

Magazine sheds, control towers and instruction halls blighted the garden. In 1945, the Americans transferred the school to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Southlands soon passed into the hands of an eccentric retired British military engineer, Brigadier Harry Dunbar Maconochie.

The brigadier, it is whispered, embraced the bottle more than the beauty of Southlands with the result that the Morgans’ garden never regained its Edenic majesty.

In 1977, Southlands was bought by the Willowbank Foundation, a Canadian nondenominational Christian trust. Earlier, Willowbank had bought a beachfront property in Sandys, which it turned into a resort dedicated to low-key, restorative visits by harried North Americans. Willowbank’s acquisition of Southlands was predicated on a vision of building a 130-unit retirement complex for a similar constituency. The plan never advanced; Willowbank lived with perpetual financial troubles (its hotel would eventually close in 2011). In its absence, Southlands deteriorated. Quarry walls collapsed. Fiddlewood overwhelmed the gardens and its rustic paths became encroached.