Sea Venture

Sea Venture, July 28, 1609.

The Sea Venture, carrying colonists en route to Virginia, was wrecked on a reef off Bermuda, which led to the accidental colonization of Bermuda. (Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast, pp. 76.) By the wreck, William Shakespeare was inspired to write The Tempest.

The wreck itself was totally un-mysterious:

On June 2, 1609, the Sea Venture set sail from Plymouth as the flagship of a seven-ship fleet (towing two additional pinnaces) destined for Jamestown, Virginia, as part of the Third Supply, carrying 500 to 600 people. On July 24, the fleet ran into a strong storm, likely a hurricane, and the ships were separated. The Sea Venture fought the storm for three days. Comparably-sized ships had survived such weather, but the Sea Venture had a critical flaw in her newness: her timbers had not set. The caulking was forced from between them, and the ship began to leak rapidly. All hands were applied to bailing, but water continued to rise in the hold. The ship's guns were reportedly jettisoned (though two were salvaged from the wreck in 1612) to raise her buoyancy, but this only delayed the inevitable. The Admiral of the Company, Sir George Somers himself, was at the helm through the storm. When he spied land on the morning of July 25, the water in the hold had risen to nine feet, and crew and passengers had been driven past the point of exhaustion. Somers deliberately drove the ship onto the reefs of what proved to be Bermuda in order to prevent its foundering. This allowed all 150 people aboard, and one dog, to be landed safely ashore.

But wait, we're in the realm of cheap horror writers. So before the wreck, Somers saw a mysterious light dancing in the rigging, "like no phenomenon of heaven or earth he'd ever seen before." (Thomas Jeffrey, Bermuda Triangle, p. 24.) William Strachey, secretary-elect of the Virginia colony, mentioned it in his journal, and Shakespeare fashioned the "apparition" into the spirit Ariel.

Dare I say, St. Elmo's fire? Yep, my man Billy agrees, and he was there:

Only upon the Thursday night, Sir George Somers, being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the main mast and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, 'tempting to settle, as it were, upon any of the four shrouds. And for three or four hours together, or rather more, half the night it kept with us, running sometimes along the main yard to very end and then returning; at which Sir George Somers called divers about him and showed them the same, who observed it with much wonder and carefulness. But upon a sudden, toward the morning watch they lost the sight of it and knew not what way it made.

The superstitious seamen make many constructions of this sea fire, which nevertheless is usual in storms, the same (it may be) which the Grecians were wont in the Mediterranean to call Castor and Pollux, of which if one only appeared without the other they took it for an evil sign of great tempest. The Italians and such who lie open to the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Sea call it (a sacred body) corpo sancto; the Spaniards call it St. Elmo and have an authentic and miraculous legend for it.

Thanks, Billy. Ragnar 1, Adi-Kent 0.

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus' flotilla: Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, September/October 1492.

Christopher Columbus is the first European on record crossing the Bermuda Triangle. Conveniently for sensationalists, he supposedly observed some weird things. (Chaplin, pp. 22; Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, pp. 17; Thomas Jeffrey, Bermuda Triangle, p. 20.)

He saw a "marvelous branch of fire fall from the heavens into the sea," (Columbus, log, September 15) which obviously was a meteor.

I doubt that it was a meteorite. They would be commonplace to seamen and hardly cause for such a furor. (Chaplin, p. 23.)

That's a prime example for how sensationalists work. According to the log, there was no furor over the meteor, only later on over the long journey and the malfunctioning compasses. Plus, in that day and age it wouldn't at all have been strange for folks to make a furor out of a meteor, commonplace or not. After all, in those Dark Ages, celestial phenomena were considered omens.

Columbus saw lights, which may or may not be called strange and which may or may not have been luminous fish, or torches belonging to Indians on a native three-hour tour.

His compasses may or may not have malfunctioned more or less, for which there may or may not be a simple, naturalistic explanation, like his being confused by his discovery of magnetic variation, or some iron object wreaking havoc on the compass.

Sunday 23 September

 Since the sea had been calm and smooth the men complained, saying that since in that region there were no rough seas [Sargasso Sea], it would never blow for a return to Spain. But later the sea rose high and without wind, which astonished them, because of which the Admiral says here that the high sea was very necessary for me, a sign which had not appeared except in the time of the Jews when they left Egypt and complained against Moses, who took them out of captivity.

 …

 The sea "rising" without any reason might be explained that they encountered the North Equatorial Current while exiting the Sargasso Sea. Without this, it is hard to explain, except as undersea tremors.

From this grudgingly reasonable explanation for the waves, the same author in another work veers into UFO territory regarding the light:

The unexplained light, rising and then hovering in the west, is perhaps the most propitious phenomenon recorded in the Triangle. It happened on the eve of discovering the New World, and it inspired Columbus and his crew to sail on and discover the Bahamas. Columbus saw it first, then Pedro Gutiérrez, then "After the Admiral said it, it was seen once or twice; and it was as a small wax candle that arose and lifted up." What both arose (alçava) and lifted up (Levatava) imply is hard to say — whether it means it rose up, hovered, and then disappeared upward or merely vanished while levitating is unclear. (Quasar, p. 116.)

To me, it implies that someone lifted up a torch. Like the Statue of Liberty. Not so hard to imagine.

Rule of Ragnar: If any language can be interpreted to be that of a UFO sighting, someone will.

Today, it is hard for landfall specialists to explain it, since Columbus was too far at sea to have seen any bonfire or torch on land and local island fishermen would not have been so far at sea at night with torches to attract catch.

Apparently, for some people it is harder to believe in venturesome native fishermen than in venturesome aliens.

Some say high winds made the presence of a fisherman unlikely, but others say there were no high winds. As Columbus' original log has been lost, we don't know exactly what the weather was like at landfall.

Then again it is possible that the light did come from an island. The exact location of the island where Columbus first made landfall, called Guanahani by the natives and named San Salvador by Columbus, is disputed. The island today called San Salvador was known as Watlings Island until 1925, when historians prevailed with the theory that this was the one true place. Yet it is just as likely that Columbus unwittingly passed the light-bearing island in the darkness and landed on a more westerly island.

Of the arguments I've read, Pickering makes a convincing case for the Plana Cays with his plot boxes. Ultimately, however, due to the shapes and sizes of the islands, I tend to agree with Verhoog that the Caicos chain was the one true place. I'm convinced that Island IV was Great Inagua, and from there pretty much everything falls into place.

I'm not an expert on Columbus though and may very well be wrong. Still I wonder whether a changing sea level and shifting sands may be the causes why no combination of islands seems to fit perfectly.

Other explanations for the light include bioluminescence and distant lightning.

Ultimately, it boils down to whether you are a skeptic or true believer. A skeptic would accept that Columbus & crew may have been fallible and medievally ignorant of the true workings of a compass enough to put some iron object near it. A true believer would paint Columbus as a renaissance superman who would never do something like that. Thus the mystic conveniently leaves intact and unsolved the mystery he craves.

After all, if the Bermuda Triangle is so all-encompassing and powerful, how could the very first man known to have traversed it have escaped its spell? (Permit me to editorialize some in this first article, this first, so representative, case.)

The Columbus case (if you want to call it a case) sets the tone for the whole Bermuda Triangle legend, puts it in a nutshell. It's a perfect example of the tug of war between skeptics and mystics, the former ready to accept any naturalistic explanation, even if it is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and the latter fighting tooth and nail to discount any naturalistic explanation not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, in order to preserve the mystical worldview they crave for kicks or to feel how insignificant and ignorant they are. Call it an armchair traveler's Grand Canyon:

"You've never felt how small you were when looking at the ocean."

 He laughed. "Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man's magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes."

 "Yes. And that particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature — I've never received it from nature, only from…" She stopped.

 "From what?"

 "Buildings," she whispered. "Skyscrapers."

 "Why didn't you want to say that?"

 "I… don't know."

 "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window — no, I don't feel how small I am — but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, p. 446.

A mystic will try to preserve a mystery as another excuse to feel small and remain a helpless victim of nature. A proud, reasonable person will use his mind to solve any mystery he encounters.

Or in a nutshell:

"Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge. Others only want to gargle."

— Lawrence Kusche, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved, p. xiii.

That's what Bermuda Triangle Central is here for — to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truly mysterious cases waiting to be solved from the zombie cases kept alive undead by the mystics. And of course, if possible, to solve the mysteries.