During the First World War, the it was used by the Pilot Service and the Royal Naval Examination Service, who operated a steamer from the harbour to meet arriving ships at Five Fathom Hole for inspection, before piloting them to harbour. Instead, named the Western Redoubt, it was converted into a magazine, which would have been subsidiary to the Ordnance depot on Ordnance Island.įort George was not one of those re-armed with modern muzzle loading rifles at the end of the Nineteenth Century.
The southern RML 11 inch 25 ton gun at Fort George.įort George was completed and armed, and later re-armed with more modern weapons, while Fort William was completed but never armed as it was deemed by then to be excess to need. George's Town to the then Town of Hamilton in 1815) and Barrack Hill, the site of the Royal Barracks of St. The first proper fort was built on the site in the 1790s, but this was replaced with the current fort the Western Redoubt (originally intended to be named ‘’Fort William’’) was built on another hilltop on the northern side of the town, between Government Hill (from which Government House had moved to Mount Langton in Pembroke Parish with the move of the Parliament of Bermuda and the colonial capital from St. George's Town: Fort George was built at Mount Hill, on the western side of the town (the site of a succession of earlier defence works, beginning with a watchtower in 1612, rebuilt with the addition of a signal gun in 1619, to which the name Riche's Mount (or Rich's Mount) was originally applied). To the rear of these three forts, a pair of identical forts were built in the 1650s on hilltops on either side of St. John Smith's 1624 map of Bermudian forts, with Rich's Mount at right (P) Between them, the three guarded Hurd's Channel and the Northern Lagoon from navigation by an enemy. On Retreat Hill to its rear, Fort Victoria and Fort Albert were built in the 1840s. Catherine's have existed on this point since 1612, and the fifth and last of these was built in the Nineteenth Century. Catherine's Point at the north-eastern end of St. Hurd's Channel led from Five Fathom Hole, the opening in the reefline through which vessels previously had already passed into the original main eastern channel (between Paget Island and Governor's Island, both of which held fortified coastal batteries from the early Seventeenth Centuries) into St. George's as its base pending the construction of the dockyard on Ireland Island. Although the Admiralty began buying and leasing land at Bermuda's West End, on the Great Sound, for the eventual construction of the Royal Naval Dockyard, the lack of development and infrastructure there meant the Navy used St. The Royal Navy spent a dozen years surveying the reef, identifying a channel (originally called Hurd's Channel after then-Lieutenant Thomas Hannaford Hurd, the officer who had located it, but now referred to as The Narrows) suitable for ships-of-the-line to enter the Northern Lagoon, the Great Sound, and Hamilton Harbour before establishing a base at Bermuda in 1795. After the American War of Independence, Bermuda had been selected as the only remaining British territory between Nova Scotia and the British West Indies, being also in a position (640 miles off North Carolina) from which to dominate the Atlantic seaboard of the new United States of America. George's Harbour and Castle Harbour (with its own history of fortification) were the only harbours easily accessible from the open Atlantic due to the reefline surrounding Bermuda. The heaviest concentration of coastal artillery batteries and fortifications in Bermuda had, and would continue to be, at the East End of the archipelago of Bermuda, where St. History įort George was one of a number of new forts (most built on the sites of earlier forts) housing coastal artillery built in the early and mid-Nineteenth Century within or satellite to St. George's Town, near to, but outside of the boundaries of the original main British Army camp in the Imperial fortress colony of Bermuda, St.