The Bermuda Department of Tourism (P.O. Box 7705, Woodside, NY 11377/Tel.: 1-800-BERMUDA) provides excellent material on the island’s amenities and history. I especially liked the walking-tour brochures for St. George’s, Hamilton, and Somerset, a community on the western end of the island, where the Royal Naval Dockyard encircles a splendid maritime museum. It is from the fortified harbor here that a British fleet sailed in 1814 on its mission to burn Washington, D.C.

Among the various properties administered by Bermuda’s National Trust, the classically beautiful house called Verdmont shouldn’t be missed. And the guided tours at the Botanical Gardens, just outside Hamilton, are especially interesting for what they reveal about the ways in which the first settlers used the indigenous trees and plants.

Whichever Bermuda hotel you pick, you can hardly go wrong. I stayed first at the two-hundred-year-old Hillcrest Guest House in St. George’s, which sits in a spacious garden. The owner, Mrs. Robinson, lived there as a child, reclaimed it later, and does a fine job of taking care of her guests. In Hamilton, Waterloo House reaches perfection; its hospitality, furnishings, and setting at the harbor’s edge are all first-rate.