A Kaleidoscope of Piloting Heritage

This article was published in the latest issue of MariTimes 2007 Vol. 20 No. 3, the members' magazine of Bermuda Maritime Museum

Piloting is an unusually bright star in the rich constellation that is Bermuda’s maritime heritage. Thus, in my research exploring how and why Bermudians of different generations use the lived experience of maritime heritage to make meaning and identity, I’ve been magnetically drawn to piloting. To gather my data, I’ve stepped into spaces where piloting heritage is naturally produced and performed. I’ve also constructed interviews that stimulate remembrance and other acts of communicating heritage. My interviewees have strong piloting associations, and include aspiring, working and retired pilots, pilot wardens and pilot boat crews, and the descendents of such past mariners. Here, we put an eye to this kaleidoscope of fieldwork to see certain patterns and ideas emerging. These impressions, sprinkled with interviewee quotes, speak to the heritage of piloting specifically and the bigger maritime collage to which it belongs.

At Five Fathom Hole, the traditional site for all shipping leaving and entering Bermuda, the coxswain and his crew skilfully manoeuvre the tiny orange pilot boat St. David alongside the great white Explorer of the Seas. Soon after clambering up the Jacob’s ladder into the cruise-ship hold, I’m on her towering bridge admiring the East End at dawn. I’m in a place few experience, the domain of the Bermuda branch pilot. In his crisp uniform with epaulettes, he stands front and centre, commanding the helmsman, “Starboard 20…Easy 10…Midships,” as 138,000-tons glides through “the Narrows” with only 60-feet clearance port and starboard. The ship’s captain sits behind the pilot, a position that reflects his “still very real” dependence on local navigational prowess, despite his vessel’s expert crew and top technology. Privately, the captain emphasises his reliance to me, and flatly rebuffs any suggestion that having the pilot aboard is some sort of polite tradition. “A captain can look at a chart but how local channels and waters directly affect his ship he won’t know.” a retired pilot explains. Though his role as navigator is vital, as a ship’s first local contact, the pilot also plays Bermuda ambassador. Another pilot highlights this dual role, saying, “You have two voices, genial and command, so they know an order versus a casual conversation.”

Several of the 3,100 guests aboard peek through the bridge’s viewing windows and I’m reminded of Bermuda’s dependence on local pilots to keep the shipping lanes flowing with the tourists and consumer goods on which we so heavily rely. Interviewees stress pilots as a “very essential part of our society,” especially in terms of their built-in responsibility to protect our fragile Island environment from shipping disaster. Interviewee complaints about a lack of community appreciation actually serve to emphasise just how much piloting is valued at the local-level. My fieldnotes are laced with expressions of high esteem and “great pride” for pilots, engineers and crews across all three Marine & Ports divisions: the ferry service, branch piloting and the tug service, including aids and navigation. Branch pilots nonetheless occupy an elite position in a hierarchy of local mariners, a hierarchy that is both professional pecking order and social standing. The words of an accomplished former ferry pilot are apt: “Ultimately, I wanted to handle ships—not becoming a branch pilot is my greatest regret in life.”

The morning after cruising from Five Fathom Hole to Dockyard up the North Channel, I share the vantage of another senior pilot as he shepherds the Empress of the Seas down the “more traditional” South Channel. As we slide along North Shore, he silently analyses between each command. I wonder if he might be drawing on the assortment of skills and knowledge that interviewees describe. Perhaps he is: adapting to this ship, to changing conditions; applying principles of small boat-handling to this large scale; using his knowledge of the channels, reefs and currents; relying heavily on his own sight, prediction and sensitivity, and less on the technology at his fingertips; seeing “a picture of the route in his head” and matching what happens to that picture; feeling the ship “the old-fashioned way;” assuming nothing is routine, remaining “ever-vigilant,” and carrying a contingency plan; embracing the “big responsibility” in what “has always been a risky occupation;” using his “intestinal fortitude” and “nerve to carry through” the theory of piloting in action; shouldering the unforgiving and exposed nature of work in which “you are not supposed to make mistakes” and where “once trust is lost, you don’t get it back.”

The skills and knowledge used by the pilot to squeeze this soon-to-be-obsolete “smaller” cruise ship through Two Rock and Town Cut passages are based in both academic and experiential learning, or theory and practice. To meet international standards and gain their licence, today’s aspiring pilots must study overseas and then apprentice at length locally. Some seven years might go by before a trainee is trusted to handle a ship alone, whereas older pilots trained quickly and locally on the vast array of ships once here. Although academic criteria are increasingly rigorous, extensive hands-on experience remains essential, and is highly valued by younger and older pilots alike. A senior pilot explains: “You can’t explain to an apprentice pilot the ship is drifting—they have to experience it, to be in command of the ship to feel something like that.”

Beyond learned skills and knowledge, expressions such as “pilots are born” and “it’s just in my blood” stress the belief that local pilots have a natural affinity or genetic link to the sea. This belief is supported by the entirely Bermudian composition of the pilot service today. Following the statement, “I think piloting is one of the more Bermudianised areas of Bermuda,” there is strong awareness of the local makeup of this workforce and its rarity in an Island that remains highly dependent on guest workers and international expertise. There is widespread knowledge and presumption this Bermudianisation has always been the case, and confidence it will be sustained. “Bermuda pilot service has enjoyed for years being a Bermudianised field…we’d love to keep the pilot service all Bermudian, because who knows Bermuda better than Bermudians?” said one interviewee. This pride is fertilised by the largely black and totally male makeup of local pilots present and past. Though women are making inroads into a piloting service that is open to all, and the memory of white pilots and pilot wardens certainly survives, piloting heritage is firmly attached to the history and idea of a male black Bermudian collective. A newly-licensed branch pilot remembers his first encounter as a teenager and suggests how this “brotherhood” is maintained, “when [the Tug Pilot] spoke to the ship and a Bermudian voice answered, I was hooked after that, just knowing that I could be the one up there.”

The idea of a genetic or heredity connection also strongly relates to a sense of place, particularly the traditional harbour and clan areas of local pilots and crews. Tug piloting has a strong connection to the West End and Dockyard, as reflected by a fourth-generation aspiring tug pilot who is proudly part of a dynasty, but defends he’s “not riding on family coat tails.” Branch piloting history is largely localised to the East End, and St. George’s and St. David’s most of all, given their proximity to the natural channels and their rich maritime culture. My own great-great-great grandfather, Captain Andrew Cochrane Hayward (1806–73) was a Warden of Queen’s Pilots and St. David’s Islander. His legacy is our family history and a heritage we choose to cherish and highlight because it reconnects us to the sea and to St. David’s.

Today, branch piloting is no longer just “an East End thing,” with ‘pilots now from all over. As the profession and culture of piloting spreads throughout the Island, it changes the meanings and identities linked to that maritime heritage. It expands the potential for new connections, but also raises sustainability concerns for family and area traditions, illustrated by the comment, “It’s sad there’s not so much a piloting community in St. David’s now.” Still, just as piloting remains vibrant in today’s relatively declined maritime society, the East End connection to branch piloting remains ripe with energy and significance.

It’s an ongoing connection to the people of that place. Schemes for reviving piloting traditions, such as competitive gig racing, are inclusive of all of Bermuda but aim to target descendents of pilots. Says one advocate: “It’s nice to have great-grandsons of some of the pilots.” It’s also about a connection to the physical environment of that place. Interviewees use the landscape and seascape to embed and animate their memories and knowledge of piloting. Current and former pilot stations, harbours, channels, official and unofficial navigational markers, not to mention boats—they all figure prominently into constructions of piloting heritage. In these constructions, land and sea are not always thought of as separate entities, but are often connected or merged. This interaction is symbolised by Figurehead at St. David’s Head, a “beacon” visible from land and sea. During the 2006 dedication of this memorial to Bermudians lost at sea, families looked seaward from the consecrated ground to meet the landward gaze of pilots and crew standing by.

Figurehead is inscribed with the names of a pilot gig crew lost in 1856, thanks to the research of the late Dr. Kenneth Robinson, whose seminal book Heritage is referenced by many interviewees for exposing them to the legacies of black Bermudian mariners. Irrespective of knowing the stories of those inscribed, many see the “monument speaking specifically to pilots.” A practising pilot spoke of the meaning for him, “because I can relate to those risks, I can relate to those missing seamen.” Another interviewee imagines the upright vessel to represent “one of the old gigs pilots rowed out to old ships,” though Bermudian artist Bill “Mussey” Ming actually cast his bronze off an abandoned English working dinghy. Interviewees “remember” events they have never witnessed, using memory to imaginatively construct an image of the fierce competition and physical endurance of early freelance pilots to reach ships miles offshore in their long, narrow gigs. Interestingly, mariners and their boats are often “remembered” together—inseparable and interdependent—much like they must have been at sea.

Other commemorations are less tangible and lasting, but no less powerful. On April 12, exactly 192 years following the day he died, Pilot Jemmy Darrell was celebrated by a large congregation that included his descendants, practising and retired pilots, and the TS Admiral Somers Sea Cadets. Besides exalting Darrell’s achievements as a self-manumitted slave, early black homeowner and “an ordinary person who did great things,” the ceremonies lauded his skill, knowledge and determination as a pilot. One interviewee remarked, “The important thing to me is that he gained freedom through his knowledge of the sea.” Pilots say recognition of this “forefather” translates to feeling recognised themselves. “It was a worthwhile commemoration for one of our own. For him to earn freedom by nautical skills, I cannot say how proud I am to be a pilot.” Though few pilots I spoke with knew much of Darrell prior to the commemoration, and though he lived two centuries ago, they made a fast and easy connection with him, especially as a mariner. A working pilot shared, “There is so much emanating around this gentleman…I could relate. I went back in my mind to the act that he did. I went back in time—that’s how deep I went.”

The 1927 “misadventure” of the pilot gig Ocean Queen II and the loss of her six-man crew is also commemorated—along with other local and international seafarers who have died at sea and on land in Bermuda—by an annual service at sea organised by the Guild of Holy Compassion, with the Bermuda Pilot Service and St. Peter’s Church. Coming full circle in my fieldwork exploring the domain of local pilots and the heritage that interfaces with them, we wait aboard the St. David at Five Fathom Hole for this year’s service at sea. One by one, senior pilots deftly disembark onto the tossing pilot boat. As one of the last cruise ships of the 2007 season slips away from the Island, we gather on her stern to witness the pilots honour and commune with the “mystical men” who preceded them. Three wreaths are laid in the wake and soon drift out of sight, but not out of our expanding sense of piloting heritage.