"Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute" Pembroke Parish Travelogue by grandmaR

Back to the Hamilton 2004 overview

Velocity outside the BUEI with Bob walking past

The BUEI was not opened 1997 - after we made our 1995 trip. Outside of the museum is the ship VELOCITY that Bermuda entered in the "Around Alone" race in the 2002 – 2003 school year, 18 Bermuda schools followed Alan Paris on his historic 30,000 mile single-handed circumnavigation.

Entrance to the museum

On the porch is this exhibit of SCARAB I, a deep water diver. You enter at the first floor level - they number the floors like they do in Europe so the first floor is really the second floor. What we call the first floor is Ground Level. On the first floor is an auditorium for large presentations and the gift shop where you pay your admission

First Floor exhibits on Bathysphere

On the first floor were exhibits explaining the Sea Mount that Bermuda is on, and various kinds of diving, including SCUBA, which seemed to be sponsored by a local dive shop. The lady in the picture is watching a movie about diving bells like the one to her right.

Then we got into what was basically a tricked out elevator, and 'dove' to the depths of the ground floor

Shipwreck listing north of St. George

The ground floor shipwreck gallery has a lot of information about treasure hunting around shipwrecks, and it has this map which shows the locations of the shipwrecks on the reefs around Bermuda. This is just one section of the map.

Ship diagram

There were many exhibits depicting the lives and circumstances of the old ships and the men who sailed on them.

Important Note: If you exit from the museum, like to go to the bathroom - you won't be able to get back in again. The doors are set to be one way.

Shell Collection

Look here: %L*[http://www.buei.bm/] for a 360 degree%L* picture of the Shell collection room - shells collected by Jack Lightbourn.

In 1968, Jack and his friend Arthur Guest were inspired by the fact that they hadn't found any new species in three years to try dredging and trapping in deep water – in depths of 300’ to 400’ and in depths of 800’ to 1,500’. Their efforts were immediately successful to the extent of adding during the next 20 years, 300 new species to the Bermuda listing, 10 of which were new to science. Of these 3 are named after Jack as follows: Pterynotus lightbourni, Fusinus lightbourni and Conus lightbourni. It was during this same period that Jack started to collect foreign shells comprising of cones, cowries, murexes and many other miscellaneous species.

One of the collection cases

Jack and Arthur had from the beginning decided to pool the Bermuda species, which resulted in this collection numbering some 756 species – the largest ever in Bermuda

In his will, Arthur Guest left his entire collection to Jack, who in turn presented the large Bermuda collection to the Bermuda Zoological Society as a gift from Arthur and himself. Jack also presented a quantity of his collection comprising 1,200 shells of 1,000 species to the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute. Of these, 110 are from Bermuda, the remainder are foreign.