The Bimini Road and the three sisters-Atlantis in the Bahamas?
Bimini is a small chain of Bahamian islands located about 50 miles due east of Miami. It carries an outsized reputation for mystery. Ernest Hemingway fished its waters. The Bimini Shark Lab has been studying its marine life for decades. And just off its northwest coast, in roughly twenty feet of clear Atlantic water, lies one of the most debated underwater formations in the world.
The Bimini Road
The Bimini Road exists. I have snorkeled over it twice with my wife and one of my brothers. The "Road" consists of large stone blocks, some measuring nine to twelve feet across, arranged in a roughly linear formation that runs for about half a mile along the seafloor. The blocks are composed of a type of limestone called beachrock, which is native to the Bahamas. They are rounded and heavily eroded, so much so that if tool marks ever existed, they are long gone.
The scientific consensus is that the Bimini Road is a natural feature: beachrock that was fractured by orthogonal joints into roughly rectangular and polygonal blocks over thousands of years. But the consensus has never entirely silenced the debate. The formations are unusually regular, and two additional parallel linear features lie shoreward of the main Road, details that proponents of a human origin find intriguing. After snorkeling around the Bimini Road, five out of the seven of us believed the Road to be artificial. The other two, including me, remained skeptical. Although the formation looked artificial and unusual, we weren’t convinced.
What makes the timing of the Road's discovery particularly striking is that it was found in 1968, the very year when the American psychic Edgar Cayce had predicted that portions of Atlantis would begin to reappear. Cayce, known as the Sleeping Prophet, gave hundreds of readings about Atlantis throughout his lifetime. He claimed it was a technologically advanced civilization roughly the size of Eurasia, whose final remnants sank beneath the waves around 10,000 BC. He named three of its principal islands: Poseida, Og, and Aryan. And he predicted that a new land would appear off the east coast of North America in 1968 or 1969.
To Cayce’s followers, the discovery of the Bimini Road that same year seemed like a remarkable fulfillment of his prediction. It sent a wave of excitement through Atlantis believers worldwide. The formation has inspired debate ever since.
The Three Sisters
The Three Sisters are a different matter entirely. Three small coral islands sit just off the western shore of North Bimini, a short distance south of the Road. I have snorkeled there close to a dozen times over the years.
The underwater landscape around the Sisters is spectacular. Schools of colorful reef fish swarm around the coral formations. I have watched a fever of spotted eagle rays glide past in the turquoise water beyond the reef, one of the most beautiful sights you can encounter while snorkeling. The underwater scenes I describe in Legacy of Atlantis—the fish, the rays, the light filtering through the water—I have seen with my own eyes.
There is a tunnel beneath the coral island nearest to Bimini. I have swum through it many times. On most visits, a five-foot nurse shark rests motionless on the sandy bottom of the tunnel, completely unbothered by the occasional snorkeler passing a few feet overhead. Nurse sharks are docile, slow-moving bottom dwellers and pose no threat, but encountering one in an enclosed space for the first time is an experience that tends to stay with you.
That tunnel is the inspiration for the scene in Legacy of Atlantis in which Charlie takes shelter beneath the Three Sisters from Thor, the giant hammerhead shark. The tunnel is real. The nurse shark is real. Thor is based on the local legend of the Harbormaster, a massive hammerhead that supposedly inhabits the waters around Bimini. I will tell the story of the Harbormaster in a separate post.
Why Bimini?
When I decided that scenes in Legacy of Atlantis would take place in the Bahamas, Bimini was the natural choice. Its proximity to Florida, its reputation for mystery, its extraordinary marine life, and my own personal history with the place all made it feel like the right setting. The Bimini Road gave me an actual physical link, or possible link, to Atlantis. The Three Sisters gave me the geography for a chase scene and a great setting for one of my characters to find an Atlantean relic in the sand. And the waters around the island gave me memories of gorgeous corals and schools of multicolored tropical reef fish to use as a backdrop for my characters’ adventures in the area.
Whether or not the Bimini Road is the remnant of Atlantis, it is the kind of place where the question still feels open as you snorkel above it. That ambiguity is exactly what I needed.
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