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Hartley's
Undersea Walk
Underwater Wonderland Ltd
Nassau, Bahamas

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             History    

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  Pet Octopus  		 Bronson Hartley is the founding father of Hartley's Undersea Walk, which in the early years was called Hartley's Helmet Diving Cruises. Bronson was born in N.Y. City in 1920, son of a surgeon who served in world war one as a field doctor (Frank McBeth Ende), who upon returning from the war did not wish to keep up with his socialite wife Gladys. Soon after, Frank took off with just the shirt on his back, as a ship's doctor.  Bitter that she being so beautiful and of such good character should be abandoned, Gladys moved to Bermuda and soon after changed the family name of both her boys to her maiden name, which was Gladys Burbank Hartley.
On arriving in Bermuda in 1930, Bronson expected to find a tropical island full of exotic animals.  Bermuda is an isolated island between the United States and Europe which has no native people or animals, except for birds.   Bronson, in search for exotic animals to interact with, went undersea.  One of his favorite undersea pets was the extremely intelligent octopus. In fact, Bronson was the first person successfully to transport a live specimen of the Bermuda octopus to the New York aquarium.   The amusing part is, on returning home from boarding school in Toronto, Canada, he informed the aquarium in New York that he wished to take his pet octopus back home to Bermuda.  Bronson discovered that the vibrations from the ship's engines were the cause of death of previous octopuses. The secret to the successful transportation of the octopus was by hanging the octopus in a tank suspended by a steel spring and bicycle inner tube. FirstHelmetNormal.JPG (56086 bytes)
First Helmet

 Scuba was not invented at this time and I believe the mask was either not invented or had not been popularized at the time, but helmets were available. Bronson's boyhood friend had acquired such a helmet, but was from a strictly religious family who believed that Sundays should be dedicated to religion. The helmet was kept at Bronson's house and his friend would cover himself in zinc cream to block the sun from giving away the fact that he was out diving, and they would take turns pumping air down to each other with a hand pump. Soon after Bronson set about building his own helmet (seen above without lead added yet).