It appears that Bermuda will escape the wrath of Larry:
At just over 20 square miles, the island of Bermuda is barely a blip in the North Atlantic Ocean. Yet for much of the 1800s, this small British territory boasted an outsized reputation for one unlikely export: onions. In All About Bermuda Onions, Nancy Hutchings Valentine, a prominent Bermudian artist in her lifetime, writes that the island was growing 332,745 pounds of onions by 1844, mostly for foreign export. “Bermudian merchant seamen became known as ‘Onions’ and Bermuda was nicknamed ‘The Onion Patch,’” Valentine writes.
Bermuda onions, which flourished in the semi-tropical soil, became so famous that they attracted the attention of the literati. By 1877, when Mark Twain paid the island a visit, he was so struck by the alliums that he wrote, “The onion is the pride and joy of Bermuda. It is her jewel, her gem of gems. In her conversation, her pulpit, her literature, it is her most frequent and eloquent figure. In Bermudian metaphor it stands for perfection—perfection absolute.”
By the mid-1900s, though, this once-coveted crop vanished into near obscurity. It’s not that Bermuda onions ceased to exist. Locals on the island still grow plenty of alliums and are still sufficiently proud of them that the Carter House, a museum in a historic house dating back to 1640, holds an annual Onion Day Festival. St. Georges even hosts an annual “onion drop” in honor of New Year’s Eve. Instead, Bermuda’s onion preeminence was usurped by the muscle of the American agricultural industry....
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