(1) A quote from The Seven Storey Mountain from Thomas Merton:

“Bermuda in those days had no big hotels and no golf-courses to speak of. It was not famous for anything. It was simply a curious island, two or three days out of New York, in the Gulf Stream, where the British had a small naval base and where there were no automobiles and not much of anything else either.”

“We took a small boat called the Fort Victoria with a red and black funnel…and although I was very eager for my first site of the island, it came upon us suddenly before I was aware, and stood up before us in the purple waters, green and white. You could already see the small white houses, made of coral, cleaner than sugar, shining in the sun, and all around the waters paled over the shallows and became the color of emeralds, where there was sand, or lavender where there were rocks below the surface. We threaded our way in a zig-zag between the buoys that marked the path through the labyrinthine reefs. The H.M.S. Calcutta lay at anchor off Ireland Island dockyard, and father pointed to Somerset where, among the dark green cedars, was the place where we would live.”

(1a) The Sinking (and Exploding) of the RMS Fort Victoria in New York Harbor