Bermuda

Coordinates: 32°20′N 64°45′W / 32.333°N 64.750°W / 32.333; -64.750

Bermuda /bɜːrˈmjuːdə/, also referred to in legal documents as, fully, "the Bermudas or Somers Isles", is a British Overseas Territory in the North Atlantic Ocean, located off the east coast of North America. Its nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras, United States, about 1,070 km (665 mi) to the west-northwest. It is about 1,236 km (768 mi) south of Cape Sable Island, Canada, and 1,578 km (981 mi) north of Puerto Rico. Its capital city is Hamilton.

The first known European explorer to reach Bermuda was Spanish sea captain Juan de Bermúdez in 1503, after whom the islands are named. He claimed the apparently uninhabited islands for the Spanish Empire. Paying two visits to the archipelago, Bermúdez never landed on the islands, but did create a recognisable map of the archipelago. Shipwrecked Portuguese mariners are now thought to have been responsible for the 1543 inscription in Portuguese Rock (previously called Spanish Rock). Subsequent Spanish or other European parties are believed to have released pigs there, which had become feral and abundant on the island by the time European settlement began. In 1609, the English Virginia Company, which had established Jamestown in Virginia (a term originally applied to all of the North American continent) two years earlier, permanently settled Bermuda in the aftermath of a hurricane, when the crew and passengers of the Sea Venture steered the ship onto the surrounding reef to prevent its sinking, then landed ashore.

Bermuda (disambiguation)

Bermuda, Islands of Bermuda, or The Somers Isles is an Atlantic archipelago, a British Overseas Territory, and formerly part of Virginia.

Bermuda may also refer to:

Bermuda II Agreement

Bermuda II was a bilateral air transport agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States signed on 23 July 1977 as a renegotiation of the original 1946 Bermuda air services agreement. A new "open skies" agreement was signed by the United States and the European Union (EU) (of which the United Kingdom is part) on 30 April 2007 and came into effect on 30 March 2008, thus replacing Bermuda II.

The original 1946 Bermuda agreement took its name from the island where UK and US transport officials met to negotiate a new, inter-governmental air services agreement between Britain and the United States. That agreement, which was highly restrictive at the insistence of the British negotiators who feared that "giving in" to US demands for a "free-for-all" would lead to the then financially and operationally superior US airlines' total domination of the global air transport industry, was the world's first bilateral air services agreement. It became a blueprint for all subsequent air services agreements.