Most intriguingly, researchers using sonar equipment have discovered, at a depth of about 2200 feet, a huge land plateau with clear images of what appears to be urban development partly covered by sand. From above, the shapes resemble pyramids, roads and buildings.
‘It is stunning. What we see in our high resolution sonar images are limitless, rolling, white sand plains and, in the middle of this beautiful white sand, there are clear manmade large-size architectural designs. It looks like when you fly over an urban development in a plane and you see highways, tunnels and buildings,’ Zelitsky said.
‘We don’t know what it is and we don’t have the videotaped evidence of this yet, but we do not believe that nature is capable of producing planned symmetrical architecture, unless it is a miracle,’ she added in an interview in her office at Tarara, along the coast east of Havana.7
As the first edition of Underworld goes to press, the status of Cuba’s underwater city remains unresolved. Is it a city? Or is it just a wonderful sonar hallucination? Presumably time will tell.
To clarify matters as much as possible in the meantime I asked Sharif to do a couple of telephone interviews. The first was with Paul Weinzweg, co-founder of Advanced Digital Communications (and husband of Pauline Zelitsky), who confirmed:
The sonar images we have are very extensive, the structures extend over several kilometres. They’re very large. Some as long as 400 metres. Some are up to 40 metres high. They’re of different shapes. But there’s a good deal of architectural symmetry. We’ve shown them to scientists in the US, Canada and Cuba… and they tell us that it’s not geology, or that it’s a great mystery … And we have very extensive bathymetry of that area as well, and it is very interesting that the shelf terraces down in even gradations. And it’s obvious that if it is a major settlement of say a pre-classical or Atlantean nature, then the whole thing just sank, altogether, during some disastrous geological event. There are a couple of fault lines there, and an ancient volcano … It’s off the coast of Cabo San Antonio, off the Western tip of Cuba …8
One of the scientists named by Weinzweg as supporting a possibly non-geological nature for the structures in the sonar images is Dr Al Hine, a marine geologist at the University of South Florida. He described what he’d seen on the images that Pauline Zelitsky had shown him as:
Just bizarre. I couldn’t provide an explanation for it but on the other hand there might be a reasonable explanation. They want to turn it into an archaeological site. I suppose that’s possible but there are just as many alternative interpretations that could be valid as well. It’s something worthy of further study, I suppose … But it was something that didn’t really jump out at you. It was kinda vague and it might be something real or it might not be. That’s the way it is with looking at acoustic geophysics on the sea-floor.9
Additional relevant comment came from Grenville Draper of Florida International University, an expert in the neotectonics of Cuba and its region, who thought it highly improbable that tectonic subsidence sufficient to have plunged several square kilometres of land to a depth of 700 metres below the sea could have occurred any time during the known human occupation of Cuba:
Nothing of this magnitude has been reported, even from the Mediterranean. The only other possibility is that the ‘objects’ were carried into position by an underwater landslide, something possible, even probable, in the Cabo San Antonio region.10
Inundation history
The odds in favour of the Cuban underwater city actually turning out to be anything of the sort don’t look particularly good to me. But it would be nice to be surprised and we shall have to wait and see.
Meanwhile there are other more immediate contextual issues surrounding the Bimini Road that have never been examined. For example, no serious attempt has been made to explore the possibility that some sort of cultural relationship might exist between the ‘Seahorse’ and ‘Shark’ mounds above water on Bimini and the geometrical mosaic of the now-submerged Bimini Road. Likewise, there has been a failure by both sides to consider the topography of Bimini and its changing relationship to the sea since the end of the Ice Age. For until as recently as 6000 years ago, as I was to discover when I received Glenn Milne’s inundation maps for the region in the summer of 2001, Bimini remained part of a large antediluvian island lying across the Gulf Stream from Florida. Very close to the north-western tip of this palaeo-island, overlooking the Gulf Stream then as they do today, were what is now Paradise Point and the present site of the Bimini Road.
My question is this. Doesn’t the existence of a large and perhaps inhabited island in the immediate vicinity of the Bimini Road until around 6000 years ago suggest the possibility that vital information concerning the Road’s origins could now also be underwater? How can anyone arrive at certainties about this enigma when, as remains the case today, no extensive underwater archaeology has ever been done on the Great Bahama Bank?
In July 2001 after my second series of dives at Bimini, this time with the Channel 4 film crew, I flew to Florida to put these doubts to Dr John Gifford of the University of Miami, co-author of the National Geographic Society research report quoted earlier, and one of the leading scientific proponents since the early 1970s of an entirely natural origin for the Bimini Road.
GH: John, when did your involvement with Bimini begin? When did it all start, and why?
Gifford: I came to the University of Miami as a graduate student in September of 1969, and at that time there were articles in the local newspapers describing a discovery that had just been made off the coast of North Bimini, which was described as Atlantis, and the Dean of the school at the time, F. G. Walton Smith, decided that this would be a great project for someone who was interested in both archaeology and geology, as I was, so he essentially told me to go over there and study it and find out whether it was archaeological or geological.
GH: Right. And was that the main focus of your research on Bimini – that specific question? Or was it wider?
Gifford: It was, because at the time, again, in the fall of ’69, it was a major, major news story, and people were calling this place and saying, you know, ‘What can you tell us about Atlantis?’ and so we wanted to be on top of things.
I was interested to note, when I questioned Gifford on the age of the Bimini Road, that he did not rely on the disputed carbon-dates from the cores, but instead on the dates of seashells found under the blocks.
GH: Setting aside for a moment the argument about whether the Bimini Road is in any way artificial or not, how old do you think it is?
Gifford: That particular deposit is somewhat less than about 6000 or 7000 years old.
GH: And that’s based on what? How do you arrive at that?
Gifford: One of the things we accomplished in my fieldwork there back in the early ‘70s, was to excavate underneath the blocks at a number of locations, and we recovered very well-preserved marine shells, mollusc shells. We radiocarbon-dated those and the dates on the shells all fell between 6000 and 7000 years old.
I next pointed out to Gifford that our inundation maps showed a large island behind the Bimini Road down to about the same period – a solid mass of land quite different from the tiny strips of rock and sand that are all that remain of it today. ‘I don’t know what kind of landmass it was,’ I said. ‘Has your work ever touched on that?’
Gifford: No, no.
GH: But it strikes me that it might have been quite a habitable place at the time, when North America was covered in a vast ice-sheet … Gifford: Sure.
GH: And therefore possibly a place where people lived?
Gifford: Well, that’s something that has occurred to a number of people, including myself, and so the first step, of course, would be to go to the Bahamas and look for very early archaeological sites not only underwater but on land.
GH: On land too. Yes.
Gifford: But out of all the archaeological surveys that have been done today on all the islands in the Bahamas, the oldest site that has ev
er been found on land is only about 3000 years old. There is simply nothing older than that.
GH: How much marine archaeology has been done in the Bahamas?
Gifford: Well, prehistoric marine archaeology, very, very little. Certainly there’s been a lot of treasure-hunting for shipwrecks and so forth, but only within the last decade or so have some people begun to do things like explore the Blue Holes in the Bahamas. Those are obvious places where one might look for prehistoric remains. And I’ve heard reports of human bones being found at great depth in some of these Blue Holes, but I think in most cases the bones have been introduced much, much more recently and they’ve simply fallen down in the slopes. So my point is though, you see, if you’ve got an exposed Bahama Bank – thousands of square kilometres – and you’ve got people wandering around, at least some of those people are going to leave some traces on the high points, which are then going to become the islands, which would then be places where land archaeologists would have found some traces.
GH: Now that’s a fair point. But it’s not a conclusive one. If we treat the Great Bahama Bank as an Ice Age island, the archaeology that has been done on it – even if you thoroughly archaeologized every bit of land that’s above water, you’d still be only touching about 10 per cent or 15 per cent of the former island. So that means say, 90 per cent of the former island has never been looked at at all.
Gifford: That’s true.
GH: Don’t you think that’s a bit unparsimonious, to jump to conclusions without doing the archaeology first?
Gifford: Well, it, it’s … it’s just a fact of life in this case that no one and no organization is going to fund a prehistoric underwater archaeological survey of the Bahamas …
A late flood
This is the way with self-fulfilling prophecies. The scientific consensus that there is nothing particularly worth looking for underwater around the Bahamas inevitably affects research priorities and the result is that no serious underwater research gets done. Naturally, in consequence, nothing is found. This in turn reinforces the view that there is nothing worth looking for – and so on ad infinitum.
But coming at the problem from the point of view of inundation science introduces the possibility of a different perspective – one that tends to excite curiosity about the past. Rather than simply being underwater, inaccessible and unlikely to attract research funds, the inundation maps show that the Bimini area once contained not just one but in fact three principal islands, as well as several smaller islands, that are likely to have enjoyed a favoured climate during the Ice Age. The inundation map for 12,400 years ago shows, to the north, a crescent-shaped island around present-day Grand Bahama, Great Abaco and Little Abaco. Clockwise to the south-east from there we come to a second lost island. This island fills in what is now Tarpum Bay under Eleuthera, then connects via the thin but very probably unbroken line of the Exuma Cays to an even larger exposed area stretching almost as far south as Cuba – itself significantly larger than it is today. Third, to the north-west in the direction of the Florida peninsula covering present-day Andros island and occupying most of the Great Bahama Bank, is the largest antediluvian island of all, with Bimini and the Bimini Road right at its tip.
The inundation map for 6900 years ago shows some coastal erosion of the three main islands but otherwise the picture remains basically unchanged – indicating that the islands survived beyond the last of the three great episodes of global postglacial flooding around 7000 years ago. However, in the next inundation map in the sequence, for 4800 years ago, all the islands have gone. The most likely culprit for their inundation is the so-called Flandrian transgression, the final spasm of the Ice Age meltdown, which took place between 6000 and 5000 years ago.
Speculation 1: the chart shared by Columbus and Pinzon
To the strictly limited extent that inundation science can accurately reconstruct former coastlines I find it interesting – nothing more than that – that the formidable antediluvian island of which Bimini formed a part until about 6000 years ago does bear a loose resemblance in size, shape and general orientation, to the ‘mythical’ island of Antilia on the 1424 Pizzagano chart. Like Antilia on that chart, antediluvian Bimini even has a smaller island lying to its west -occupying the position of the present-day Cay Sal Bank.
Is it possible that the mysterious ‘book’ said to have inspired Columbus to cross the Atlantic by showing him that it had an end could have contained a chart of the Atlantic Ocean of the kind proposed by Nordenskiold – a chart dating back to the mapmaking tradition of Marinus of Tyre? Other charts linked to this tradition, such as the Cantino and Reinal maps of the Indian Ocean and the numerous portolans featuring Hy-Brasil, contain memories or ‘ghosts’ of Ice Age topography and coastlines. So perhaps the coast and islands that the ‘book’ of Columbus was said to have portrayed on the western side of the Atlantic were also shown as they looked before being inundated by rising sea-levels? If Bimini on the original ‘Tyrian sea-fish’ source map had been depicted as it looked at almost any time between 12,000 years ago and 6000 years ago, then it could theoretically have provided the model for the ‘mythical’ island of Antilia that began to appear on portolan charts during the seventy years prior to Columbus’s voyages of discovery.
For whatever reason, we do know that Columbus had a special interest in Antilia. Cited earlier, he is on record with a comment that suggests he recognized a specific Phoenician (in this case Carthaginian) heritage behind the appearance of Antilia on fifteenth-century nautical charts:
Aristotle in his book On Marvellous Things reports a story that some Carthaginian merchants sailed over the Ocean Sea to a very fertile island … this island some Portuguese showed me on their charts under the name Antilia.11
Indeed, prior to winning the Spanish sponsorship that financed his expedition to the New World, it is reported that ‘Christopher Columbus was making himself a nuisance at the Portuguese court with persistent requests for an expedition to enable him to verify the marking of Antilia’ on certain maps.12
We’ve already explored some of the issues raised by the alleged ‘book’ of Columbus and the hints that it may have contained an ancient nautical chart of the Atlantic that also showed certain parts of the New World. The suspicion that a map had indeed fallen into Columbus’s hands is further strengthened by certain passages from his own Journal of the first voyage – an abridged version of which, edited by his friend the friar Bartolome de las Casas and often expressed in the third person, has come down to us.13
The Atlantic crossing began from the port of Gomera in the Canary islands on 6 September 1492. Three weeks later Columbus and his three little caravels were deep into the terrifying, unknown reaches of the Ocean Sea – where, supposedly, no man had ever gone before to make a map. It is strange, therefore, to read the following entry:
Tuesday 25 September 1492. The Admiral [Columbus, upon whom the King and Queen of Spain had bestowed the title ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’] spoke with Martin Alonso Pinzon [Columbus’s second-in-command], captain of the caravel Pinta, regarding a chart which the Admiral had sent to him three days before in which, it appears, he had certain islands marked down in that sea. Martin Alonso was of the opinion that they were in the neighbourhood of those islands, and the Admiral replied that he thought so also but, as they had not found them, it must be due to the currents which had carried them to the NE … The Admiral called upon him to return the chart and, when it had been sent back on a rope, the Admiral with his pilot and sailors began to mark their position on it.14
In my opinion this entry leaves very little room for doubt that Columbus and Pinzon did indeed possess a chart – or charts – showing some areas of the New World and suggesting a route across the Atlantic Ocean that would take them directly to it. This might also explain why Columbus consistently and knowingly underestimated the distance travelled each day in the information that he gave to his crew. He did so every day of the outbound voyage. Here are a few of the relevant entries from th
e Journal:
Sunday 9 September 1492. Sailed nineteen leagues today – and decided to count less than the true number, that the crew might not be frightened if the voyage should prove long.15
Monday 10 September. In that day and night sailed sixty leagues … Reckoned only forty-eight leagues, that the men might not be terrified if the voyage should be long.16
Wednesday 26 September. Sailed day and night thirty-one leagues and reckoned to the crew twenty-four.17
Wednesday 10 October. Day and night made fifty-nine leagues progress to the West-south-west; reckoned to the crew forty-four.18
Is it possible that Columbus adopted this practice of under-reporting the actual distances travelled because he had, from the outset, a very good idea from his chart about how long the voyage was likely to be and knew that the men would never have set out at all, and would want to turn back, if he had been more honest with them?
Speculation 2: the world according to Columbus
For all the reasons outlined in previous chapters, let’s speculate that Columbus did – somehow – come into possession of an old nautical chart showing the New World, and that he was sufficiently convinced of its veracity to risk crossing the Atlantic on the strength of it. Moreover, we’ve seen that Columbus promoted his expedition to potential sponsors on the explicit grounds that he had a chart which showed the coast and islands at the end of the Western Sea. Unless Columbus was completely mad, it follows that this chart must have possessed some quality (perhaps to do with the ‘book’ in which it was incorporated) that left him in no doubt that it was accurate. Certainly, it must have distinguished itself in a significant and obvious way from any other maps or charts (for example the Behaim globe – see overleaf) that would have been available to Columbus and already known by his sponsors in 1492. Let’s also speculate that this vitally important and convincing chart did not show the entire Atlantic coast of the Americas but was a fragment featuring only the mainland and islands between the Florida peninsula and Venezuela on the western side of the Atlantic (probably combined, with a typical portolan portrayal of the coasts of southern Europe and north Africa on the eastern side of the Atlantic).