Bermuda's disappearing Bermuda triangle
The first thing you notice as you sail into Bermudas Bermuda Triangle is that it has disappeared.
BERMUDA: (AFP) - The first thing you notice as you sail into Bermuda’s Bermuda Triangle is that it has disappeared. Peruse the labyrinths of gift shops in quaint Saint George and you encounter nary a triangle-themed T-shirt.
Perhaps merchandizing something which makes other things vanish is just too challenging, but I was surprised. After all, other than those long shorts, the sinister triangle is tiny Bermuda’s only other undisputed claim to world fame.
“No, no, nothing like that,” said the woman in the Saint George tourist office, when I asked if there was a Bermuda Triangle exhibit I could visit after arriving here without incident from New York on my sailing boat “Moon River.”
“No. You definitely should write a letter to the museum,” said the local yacht scene’s fixer extraordinaire, known to all as “Mama.”
“No, because it’s rubbish,” sniffed a man (wearing Bermuda shorts) who overheard our exchange.
Actually, it turns out there is a Bermuda Triangle exhibit in a corner of the excellent Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute museum in Hamilton. But the general lack of interest here in the Bermuda Triangle reflects big changes in the world since the phenomenon’s popularity peaked in the 1970s
In case you find yourself drifting in these parts, here’s the scoop. Stretch lines between Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico, and you have an area that has seen untold numbers of sinkings and disappearances. It’s also true that some of these accidents were definitely odd. The famous vanishing of five planes from the US Navy’s Flight 19 – and then the plane sent to find them -- in 1945, plus numerous vessels found floating at sea over the years with no crew or sign of struggle, could add up to a spooky picture.
Or not. Triangle enthusiasts posit that everything from magnetic disturbances to time warps and death rays shooting from the sea floor are to blame. An equally dramatic, if more sober, theory claims eruptions of undersea methane abruptly turn the sky and sea into giant sinkholes, swallowing anything unlucky enough to be passing through.
But skeptics have no problem finding alternative explanations, the simplest being that these waters have long been heavily traveled and so, logically, are bound to witness many a sinking and plane crash. Told about the high incidence of complete disappearances, the doubters just roll their eyes: the ocean here is many miles deep, so what would you expect?
Mass access to accurate navigational equipment has sharply tilted the argument in favor of the sneerers. Back in the ‘70s there might be a good deal of educated guesswork in determining your position at sea or in the sky. Armed with today’s GPS chartplotter, the most unskilled operator can find out instantly where he is, how fast he’s going, how far it is to port, and whether current or wind is carrying him astray. Pick up the satellite phone and he can call for help. In fact, a certain type of modern sailor may be so busy staring at various screens and gadgets that he wouldn’t notice if the Lost City of Atlantis rose up on his starboard bow.
But even if today’s souvenir vendors, tourist agents, and paperback novelists turn their noses up at the notion of something weird going on, people with deep connections to the sea are more open-minded.
Take Bermudan anthropologist Philippe Rouja. He has the cool title of Custodian of Historic Wrecks, a sort of minister for the more than 200 ships littering Bermuda’s reefs. Not that he thinks these ships were doomed by some supernatural force. Most ran aground simply because their captains, using Bermuda as a precious landmark on the long Atlantic crossings, failed to avoid the coral heads extending just under water for miles beyond the visible shore.
On the other hand, Rouja, a lifelong scuba diver, knows very well that powerful, uncharted – impossible to chart – forces lurk in these turquoise waters.
After all, this is an island whose national emblem is a ship on the rocks, recalling the accidental first arrival of English sailors – the country’s founders -- in 1609.
“There are no predictable currents here in Bermuda,” he said, while showing me a sunken 17th century cannon being restored at a warehouse in a disused US naval base, itself once housing top-secret Cold War programs. “And there are a couple spots, places where your compass goes astray. There are two places where this year my compass has literally been spinning.”
Another Bermudian intimate with the ocean depths is Chris Flook, formerly collector of specimens for the island’s aquarium and now working with the Pew Environmental Group to protect the Atlantic’s beautiful and bizarre Sargasso Sea region from overfishing and pollution. As it happens, the Sargasso was also a precursor to the Bermuda Triangle, with tales of sailing ships trapped for eternity in floating weed, rather than the jet age version of vanishing airplanes.
Flook, sporting a small hammerhead shark tattoo on his ankle, agrees that modern communications have removed a lot of the doubt that once plagued sailors -- and stirred legends. But the sea, especially around Bermuda and the Gulf Stream, has a mind of its own, he says, producing “white squalls,” the intense storms that can blow from a clear sky and plunge a well-found boat into sudden trouble.
What’s really amazing, though, Flook says, are the seemingly ordinary fish that swim around us, that end up on our plates and that in our ignorance we take entirely for granted – fish like the wrasse, that magically switches shape, color and even sex, or simply the larvae that drift from reefs to the open ocean, before growing into mature fish and finding their way back to their coral homes to continue the cycle.
Flook’s point is this: spend time at sea and you realize there’s no triangle big enough to contain its mysteries.
“And we humans think we’re so smart because we can do this,” Flook says, pretending to push a button.
