Bermudan Dovetailing by James Bump

Bermuda is a lovely semitropical island about 600 miles off the Georgia coast. Today it is a center for tourism, international banking and a couple of "country club" military bases. I was surprised to find, on this 20-square-mile paradise, a distinctive tradition of Cabinetmaking. From the 17th century, Bermudan craftsmen carried on an individual style of decorative, cogged dovetail uncommon in either Britain or America . Settled in 1609 by shipwrecked British sailors, Bermuda has been a British colony ever since. Early accounts cite plentiful supplies of timber as the island's only natural resource. Its cedar trees were used in furniture, in musical instruments, and in the Bermuda sloop, this seafaring community's lasting contribution to shipbuilding. Bermudan ornamental dovetailing evidently had its rigins in medieval Moorish workshops. It then spread to Spain and finally to Bermuda . To my knowledge, fancy dovetailing was used in Bermuda only for chests-on-frame. Early island cabinetmakers used Bermuda cedar (Juniperus bermudiana), now blighted and struggling against near-extinction. Today, Bermudan craftsmen import what they call Virginia cedar. Both cedars are aromatic, closegrained and knotty, and they finish to a gorgeous red-brown color. Each cabinetmaker in Bermuda probably had his own individual designs for dovetailing. I made my own and found that templates were necessary. I cut the joint like a lap dovetail, the tails cut through, the pins blind. This leaves material for decoration on both pieces, which I shaped with a fretsaw, chisels and files. Test-fitting the joint is nearly impossible. The two boards have to be cut accurately before they will fit together at all. Since there is so much room for error in the first attempts, I used pine to make my dovetails. I am a lutemaker, not a cabinetmaker, and I struggled a bit with the joint. Someone handy with dovetails should have no difficulty.

Bryden Bordley Hyde's fine book on Bermudan furniture, Bermuda 's Antique Furniture and Silver, published by the Bermuda National Trust, shows examples of this sort of work

The early Bermudan chest-on-frame at left displays two patterns of cogged dovetail. The author designed his own pattern for his pine box at right.

Cut joint as for lap dovetails, trace around templates to set out decoration.