Bermuda

Bermuda (also known as the Bermudas; nicknamed the Somers Isles) is a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic Ocean. Located off the east coast of the United States, its nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, about 1,030 kilometres (640 mi) to the west-northwest. It is about 1,373 kilometres (853 mi) south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and 1,770 kilometres (1,100 mi) northeast of Miami, Florida.

Quotes

• Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you to
  Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama.
  Key Largo Montego, baby why don't we go
  Ooh I wanna take you down to Kokomo,
  We'll get there fast and then we'll take it slow.
  That's where we wanna go,
  Way down in Kokomo.
  • The Beach Boys, Kokomo, written by John Phillips, Scott McKenzie, Mike Love and Terry Melcher (1988).

• The first thing you notice about Mumbai is the first thing you notice about every place the British once occupied, which is how much of themselves they left there. The United States spent over a decade and trillions of dollars in Iraq, and the only physical evidence that remains is a concrete embassy compound, some airstrips, and a sea of steel shipping containers. Maybe because they never considered that they might leave, the British built entire cities out of stone, with railways to connect them. And they did it with reliably good taste. Too often lost in the hand-wringing over the evils of colonialism is the aesthetic contribution of the British Empire. The Brits tended to colonize beautiful places and make them prettier. Bermuda, New Zealand, Fiji, Cape Town—notice a theme? Style wasn’t an ancillary benefit; it was part of the point. Behind every Gurkha regiment marched a battalion of interior designers.
  • Tucker Carlson, “Tucker Carlson's Diary: The Aesthetic Merits of British Colonialism" Spectator, March 3, 2016

• Where the remote Bermudas ride,
  In th' ocean's bosom unespied.
  • Andrew Marvell, Bermudas (1657).

• We, the undersigned, visitors to Bermuda, venture respectfully to express the opinion that the admission of automobiles to the island would alter the whole character of the place, in a way which would seem to us very serious indeed. The island now attracts visitors in considerable numbers because of the quiet and dignified simplicity of its life. … It would, in our opinion, be a fatal error to attract to Bermuda the extravagant and sporting set who have made so many other places of pleasure entirely intolerable to persons of taste and cultivation.
  • Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, petition to the Bermuda Legislature (c. February 1, 1908); reported in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (1974), vol. 17, pp. 609–10. The petition, drafted by Wilson, garnered 111 signatures, including Samuel L. Clemens. The Bermuda Legislature did ban all motor cars.