"they had landed in the Bermudas. To those on the beach who had any knowledge of the island chain at all, the announcement would have been terrible news. The Bermudas were known, as passenger Sylvester Jourdain noted, as "the most dangerous, infortunate, and most forlorn place in the world." Small wonder, then, that they had never been inhabited, as he wrote, "by any Christian or heathen people."3"