1/09/72, Sunday Article:
Detroit Free Press
BIMINI'S STRANGE STONEWORKS
By Bill Barry
Special to the Free Press
There is a curious thing that certain birds do.
Sometimes the birds fly out from the coastal mainlands in
chattering flocks, heading purposively for open sea. The
last island flecks finally pass below, but they continue on.
And far out in mid-Atlantic, the flocks veer off, circling,
crying, looking down, expectant, as if there is supposed to
be something there.
Only a vast and unbroken expanse of deep ocean is there.
The flocks chatter in confusion, streaking downward
helter-skelter, then soaring up to circle, and circle, and
circle - baffled and bewildered - until they die, exhausted,
and fall into the open sea, dead.
Men possessed of the dream say that in the birds it is
memory, inherited memory, which recurs through the collective
instinct of millenia, secured to the time long ago, when the
ancestors of the birds gathered flocks on the continent of
Atlantis...
Bonefish Sam never dreamed of Atlantis. He never heard of
it. All his life he lived on the island of Bimini, in the
Bahamas. He knew where the fish were, and Americans hired
him to take them to fish. One thing Sam knew about Americans
- they were all a little batty. Nothing they did surprised
him anymore.
So, one day a tall old skinny American asked Sam if he could
find the mountain in the water. The Pinnacle, was what the
American called it. It was 60 feet down in the Gulf Stream,
and its sides dropped straight down out of sight, maybe 3,000
feet or more. The top of it was a long, elliptical shelf.
"Oh, yah," Sam said. "I know de place. The fishin's no
good. The charks is much too bad dere."
"We're not going fishing," the old man said. "We're going
diving."
"Ho, boy," Sam laughed. "Okay. We go."
So they went, on Robert Angove's 30-foot cabin cruiser out
of Fort Lauderdale. It was Labor Day, Sept. 2, 1968.
THE OLD MAN was Dr. J. Manson Valentine, naturalist and earth
scientist. A very slight but exuberant Frenchman was aboard,
Jacques Mayol, who held the world's underwater free dive
record - 250 feet down, on his own air.
There was a chill in the air, and the water was choppy.
They set sea anchors, then the Frenchman went over the side,
wearing just mask snorkel and flippers.
The Frenchman didn't come up, and after a while, he still
didn't come up. And minutes later, no Frenchman. No man
got that much air, never.
Ho, boy, Sam was thinking, those charks...those charks.
The Frenchman's head popped awash out of water, not even
gasping.
"Some - sing," he said, thumbing downward, and he shrugged,
unsure.
So then the old man went over, a little rusty in his joints.
A long way below the water's surface, there was indeed
something. But Valentine could not be sure that it was the
key he sought - the mountain which once stood on the land.
He could not hang on it for a real close look, as Jacques
could do. The current was bad, and there were shadowy
shapes gliding about, staying just out of ken, a little
frightening.
Come on, back to the boat, Valentine signaled. They climbed
aboard.
"I think we ought to head in," Valentine said. "There isn't
much light left. Maybe Sam can find us a nice shallow reef
we can all dive on. Just for the fun."
On a hot August day, in 1927, Edgar Cayce in trance was
being asked about the future commercial prospects of the
Bahamas Islands - would they be developed for mineral
exploration, industry.
Cayce told what he foresaw: Many large and modern hotels
gathered in particular areas; a hydroelectric plant at the
mouth of a harbor channel; a search for rich oil deposits
that would fail; and the remains of a once mighty continent.
"Is this the continent known as Alta, or Poseida (Atlantis)?"
"A temple of the Poseidians was in a portion of this land,"
he answered.
"How deep in the ground will that be?"
"In the wall that would be builded from the western portion
of the south island...in the 12 to 15-foot levels...extending
in the northeast-southwest direction..."
Sam guided the boat to a place about a half mile off the
western shoreline not far from Paradise Point. The water
was 12 to 15 feet deep.
Valentine jumped in, and the others followed, cavorting.
Below the surface chop, the water was clear as air. On the
bottom, there was no coral reef. Instead, there were two
rows of enormous rocks, which on first sight had all the
appearance of having been laid there as part of a giant
Cyclopsean roadway.
They all saw it at once, and shot up, hollering, snorkels
askew.
"What is it?"
"We've struck it rich," Valentine yelled. "We have really
got something here. This is really...something!"
And he dove down again.
The rows were exactly parallel, extending in a northeast-
southwest direction. On closer look, they appeared to form
walls, huge loaves of stone placed down one after the other,
some as large as rooms, interdicted by sandy avenues.
Smaller squares and hexagonals formed mosaics, and there
appeared to be deeper layers of stone beneath the topmost.
They dove again and again, roving over the structure.
Valentine's excitement over-whelmed him. He lost his
weight belt, but kept diving, fighting to stay down. The
rocks were composed of eolithic sandy limestone, typical
Bahamian beach rock, simple to quarry. But if man had done
the work, not nature, the wall would have been built when
the land was water, and that would have to have been...At
least 10,000 years before!
Then, perhaps, Valentine even said the word.
Atlantis. The antediluvian world, before the earth's
magnetic poles went blooey, hurling the world topsy-turvy
on its axis, the great Ice Age of the Pleistocene, the
cataclysms and the floods.
He shot up for air.
"Do you know what it is, Sam?"
"Yes, sir," Sam said. "It's sort of like a road."
"How far does it go?"
"Oh, it goes off 'bout a mile, then goes under."
"Do you know where it came from?"
"Nope. But if you like these so much, I'll take you to a
really big one, out in 50 feet or so."
Sam took them out to the really big one. Right away, they
saw that he had been straight and true.
In 50 feet of water, a vast system of rocks formed a maze
of megalithic stone work. It had the appearance of city
blocks shaved off buildings at their foundations. The head
of the maze curved into a circular courtyard that reached
backward toward the first two walls, then abruptly
disappeared beneath the silty bottom.
Pilot Robert Brush heard about Valentine. A mutual friend
introduced them. Brush was flying a regular cargo flight
between Miami and the Bahamas, for Southern Airways. After
talking to Valentine, Brush began scanning the ocean floor
from his cockpit.
In 1968, at the same time Valentine had happened upon
the walls of stone leaves, Brush spotted a series of
configurations off the north coast of Andros Island in the
western Bahamas. The patterns were both hexagonal and
rectangular.
Brush showed Valentine the area. The water was only three
to four feet deep. They made a close and careful inspection
of the site. The structures appeared to be an organized
sequence of enclosures - not the smaller, staked pens native
fishermen constructed to retain turtles, conchs and sponges -
but low walls of eoithic stones, within which patterns of
squares and polygons had been set.
ONE RECTANGLE measured 100-by-60 feet. Its four corners
were squared. Partitions rose out of its east and southeast
ends. The floor plan duplicated almost exactly the floor
plan of a Mayan ceremonial building thousands of miles away -
Uxmal's Temple of the Turtles in Yucatan.
Using probes, the men determined that the walls were at least
nine feet deep, as far as the probes would reach. Layers of
stone, laid block upon block, had been sealed together with
mortar.
Valentine and Brush were certain; Craftsmen had made the
structures, though they could not say who or when.
On a nearby key, other discoverers found what appeared to be
an entire ancient ceremonial court - cut stone discs placed
in exact patterns, ranks of half moons, stone fences which
led into the jungle brush and turned off at right angles,
setting off boundaries for what some probers envisioned as
symbolic guidelines for the practice of once sacred but now
unknown rites of worship. Parts of the patterns, however,
were also similiar to remains left by Greek sponge gatherers
in other parts of the world.
Shortly thereafter, 20 miles away, a dozen similar sites were
found. Also, fragments of columns which looked like broken
pillars. And southeast of Andres, in three to four fathoms,
a vast underwater plateau was discovered - cut through with
fresh water rivers, and pocketed by flooded caves in which
stalactites had formed.
But stalactites need air in which to form. Valentine
believed that the area was once part of a large land mass,
above water, perhaps 300 to 700 feet higher - before the
Pleistocene, before the earth dropped into the sea.
All of them vowed to keep the underwater finds a secret,
until much more could be factually learned about their
origins. But word trickled out anyway.
In February of 1969, a matronly devotee of the Edgar Cayce
Foundation, Margaret Adams, brought two young epatriate
adventurers to Valentine. They wanted to know about
Atlantis. Their names were Robert Farro and Michael Grumley.
Mrs. Adams entreated Valentine to take the men to the
Bahamas sites. He did.
The next month, Count Pino Turollo came to Valentine and
also asked to be guided to the place. Valentine took him.
He and Jacques Mayol had discovered a curious trenchline
seaward of the Bimini rocks. The trench ran almost perfectly
straight for hundreds of yards. It was 18 inches deep and
18 inches wide. It appeared to lie in some kind of
juxtaposition with rock formations engulfed in turtle
grass. In order to investigate the formations, they needed
money. They didn't have it.
Farro and Grumley wrote a book - "Atlantis, The Autobiography
of a Search."
Count Pino Turollo took underwater photographs which
circulated around the world.
Then came the flood.
Robert Brush intercepted a boat bearing down on the Temple
off Andros. The boat was loaded with dynamite. The people
on the boat were going to blow up the Temple and search for
the gold Cayce had said would be found below.
An American produced a thick book composed of parchment
palm leaves which he said he had found in an Andros cave. On
the 300 pages of parchment was written with sharp stylus a
language unknown to the modern world, though it was similar
to writings attributed to ancient Ceylon.
The man told Valentine that he had found the book in a mental
tube. Valentine asked to see the tube. The man said he had
discarded it.
Sure that the book had been a "plant" Valentine was later
astounded to discover a massive inverted script E made of
rock off Orange Key. The same symbol appears with frequency
on the parchment pages found in the Andros cave.
Dimitri Rebikoff, inventor of underwater equipment, then
photographed the entire rock wall off Bimini, fitted the
individual pictures together as is done in aerial photography
and used the underwater montage in a pamphlet advertising
his school of marine technology. Point blank, he labeled
the picture: "The Sunken Megalithic Atlantic Civilization
at Bimini."
WHAT ENSUED was verbal mayhem. Scientists in quest of
publishable treaties made claims of discovery already claimed
five times previously.
The internecine fighting finally took it toll. The Bahamian
government refused to give anyone permits to excavate the
sites. Brush and Valentine took flight from any publicity
associated with the controversy.
And a silence finally consumed public interest in Atlantis.
In the spring of 1971, "Atlantis Undiscovered," was written
by Dr. Wyman Harrison, of the Virginia Institute of Marine
Science.
The Bahama stone works, he wrote, are natural rock formations
which fell into the sea and cracked, either from their own
weight or from storm swells. The overall result is a field
of blocks that at first sight appear to have been fitted
together.
The rocks are no more enigmatic than any other outcropping
of jointed limestone found throughout the area. The pillars,
or columns are cement, probably from wood casks carried in a
ship that sank there.
But at the same time, a young graduate student at the
University of Miami Marine Laboratories also wrote a report
about the finds. John Gifford had participated in several
expeditions to the sites.
There was, to him, no question about the extraordinary
regular pattern repeated in the underwater structures, and
thee patterns were not found in the natural rock formations
elsewhere through the islands.
There was, to him, no question about the extraordinary
regular pattern repeated in the underwater structures, and
the patterns were not found in the natural rock formations
elsewhere through the islands.
Methodically, he undertook a series of tests. Foremost in
his mind was a simple but iron-clad point of geological
physics: If the top layer of rocks had been cracked by
nature, the second layer would have been affected by the same
force.
The title indicates the discipline that Gifford put into his
work. "Geological Investigation and Survey of Submerged
Feature off Paradise Point, Bimini, Bahamas."
"The blocks are a geological enigma...None of the evidence
conclusively rules out possible human intervention in their
formation...Most importantly, if the blocks were produced by
stresses acting in a vertical direction from below, the rock
underlying the blocks would show some signs of jointing,
perhaps not as well developed as the overlying blocks, but at
least some small fractures. The area of bedrock exposed by
us which lay directly beneath the interblock space, showed
absolutely no sign of jointing, or cracking..."
Nonetheless, Gifford says: 'Right now it looks slightly in
favor of their being a natural phenomenon. We simply do not
have conclusive evidence to the contrary. So it has to be 60
to 40 in favor of nature, at least until we learn more about
what is down there."
On that point, sanity prevails. Other scientists involved
agree with Gifford. They also agree with Robert Brush, who
says:
"One, a reputable archaeologist is needed to approach the
Bahamian government, secure permission to thoroughly
investigate the finds, spend a year or so of dedicated and
concentrated work and determine finally what is actually down
there.
"Some of it can be traced to colonial origin. Some is the
work of Lucayan and Arawk Indians. But there are other
patterns which cannot yet be traced to any known
civilization."
The skinny old man raised his balding head and looked out to
sea. In his smoked and watery eyes, a dreamy gaze lingered -
a dream of a land on which a civilization had thrived, and
which had communicated with the rest of the world, for the
gold plates he had found in a cave high in the Andes had come
from the earliest Egyptian dynasties.
Perhaps a legacy from the time when the continents were all a
single land mass. Or when cataclysm came and mountains rose
out of the sea.
But the mountains had disappeared. The ancestors were gone.
Atlantis had become the Atlantic...
