A. E. Verrill— The Bermuda Islands. 477 
crust has been formed, an unusually severe storm may cut into the 
weaker spots of the hills, where the sand is least consolidated and 
protected and, by undercutting, in a few hours it may drift away 
immense quantities of sand, depositing it farther inland. 
We noticed, in 1901, marked instances of this mode of action on 
the sides of some of the Tucker’s Town dunes, where the wind had 
very recently cut perpendicular sections. Nearly the whole region 
about Tucker’s Town is covered with this more or less loose sand, 
which extends about two miles along the shore; in many places it is 
becoming covered with vegetation, such as the sage-bush and black- 
berry (Scevola), etc. This district looks as if it had always been a 
barren, sandy region, but it is probable that in Governor Tucker’s 
time (1616), when he had sugar cane and figs planted here, these 
sands had not invaded the district, and that the soil was fertile. 
The Tucker’s Town lands are often mentioned by early writers as 
cultivated. 
The early settlers made no mention of shifting sands, nor did they 
complain of the barrenness of the soil in the several places where 
active sand-dunes have prevailed in modern times.* Lieutenant 
Nelson, writing in 1837, says that the Tucker’s Town sand-dunes 
were reported to have become active about 60 years previously, or 
about 1777. 
Probably the cutting of the cedars and burning of the brush and 
vines to clear the lands, combined with the disturbance of the surface 
of the soil to build roads or in cultivating it, usually led to the 
activity of the destructive sands in these later times. 
Norwood mentioned worthless sandy land as existing on Ireland 
Island, in his day, but not elsewhere, nor do we find any particular 
mention of any such drifting sands in the voluminous history of 
Governor Butler, 1612-24. 
Lieutenant Nelson, in his account of the geology of the island, 
1837-40, described active and extensive sand-dunes as existing at the 
time of his residence (1827-33), both at Elbow Bay and Tucker’s 
* In the ‘‘ Orders and Constitutions” of the Bermuda Company, adopted in 
1621, there was an allotment of a tract of public land, in these terms: ‘‘ save 
that two hundred acres of the Iland called Davies Iland [Davids] shall be annexed 
to Harrington and Hamilton’s Tribe, to make recompense for the alleaged 
sterility of the Land in that Tribe.” (No. 107.) 
This sterile land could not have been that of the Tucker’s Town sand-hills, 
and the neck of land farther east, because the latter was, at that time, a part of 
the public land, not a part of either Tribe. It may have been the salt marshes 
and swamps that were referred to. 
