Despite its strong cultural and touristic association with the Caribbean, Bermuda sits far to the north, roughly 1,050 kilometres off the coast of North Carolina in the Atlantic Ocean, its warm climate owing not to tropical latitude but to the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water up from the Caribbean and keeps Bermuda’s waters and air temperatures far milder than its actual position would otherwise suggest. That geographic quirk makes Bermuda the northernmost point in the world with extensive coral reef development, reefs that would typically require much warmer, more tropical conditions to survive.
Bermuda was settled accidentally rather than by design, an English ship bound for the Jamestown colony in Virginia wrecked on Bermuda’s reefs in 1609, and the stranded survivors’ accounts of the island are widely believed to have inspired Shakespeare’s setting for The Tempest, written just a few years later.
An Island That Named a Color and a Mystery
Bermuda shorts, now a globally recognised style of tailored knee-length shorts, originated on the island in the early 20th century as a practical compromise between British colonial formal dress codes and Bermuda’s genuinely warm climate, eventually adopted as acceptable business attire, a distinction few other places have achieved with casual clothing. The so-called Bermuda Triangle, a loosely defined area of ocean associated with unexplained ship and aircraft disappearances, has drawn outsized popular fascination since the mid-20th century, despite most maritime experts attributing the region’s incidents to a combination of heavy traffic, severe weather, and simple statistical coincidence rather than anything genuinely mysterious.
Hamilton, Bermuda’s capital, remains one of the smallest capital cities in the world by both population and area, its pastel-coloured buildings and famously white, stepped limestone roofs, designed specifically to collect rainwater since the island has no natural freshwater rivers or lakes, giving the city a distinctive architectural character shaped directly by necessity.
Painting Pastel Roofs and Atlantic Blue
Hamilton’s pastel buildings and distinctive white stepped roofs against Bermuda’s clear water give a watercolourist a genuinely unique architectural palette to work with. We’ve captured that character in our own Bermuda Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of the Atlantic for a wall at home.
Settled by accident and mistaken for tropical ever since, Bermuda remains an island whose geography rarely matches the assumptions most people carry about it.