Tempest ~ Infamy of (non-existent) Bermuda Triangle ! - a La Fiction ?
Posted on the 09 September 2015 by Sampathkumar Sampath
Virender
Sehwag hit a century (114 off 87) - India made 413 in an otherwise forgettable
World Cup in 2007. Russell Dwayne Mark
Leverock, a police man, also a prison van driver weighing 280 pounds [approx.
127 kgs] took a great catch to dismiss Robin Uthappa. Some faint connection,
can you identify this place in the map ?
The Tempest is a
play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and
thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is
set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to
restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skillful
manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his
usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island.
Though
one can find so many maps on the web, no official version exists – none
demarcating the lines – it is a real place though, where people have been
debating on disappearance of dozen of ships, planes and people. Since a magazine first coined the phrase
"Bermuda Triangle" in 1964, the mystery has continued to attract
attention. Perhaps the infamy is older - Bermuda Triangle’s
bad reputation started with Christopher Columbus. According to his log, in Oct
1492, Columbus looked down at his compass and noticed that it was giving weird
readings. He didn’t alert his crew at first, because having a compass that
didn’t point to magnetic north may have sent the already on edge crew into a
panic. This was probably a good decision considering three days later when
Columbus simply spotted a strange light, the crew threatened to return to
Spain.
The first written
boundaries date from an article by Vincent Gaddis in a 1964 issue of the magazine
Argosy, where the triangle's three vertices are in Miami, Florida peninsula; in
San Juan, Puerto Rico; and in the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda; subsequent
writers were not constrained to follow this demarcation. Consequently, the determination of accidents occurring
inside the triangle have depended on the
way the author tries to report them. The
United States Board on Geographic Names does not recognize this name, and it is
not delimited in any map drawn by US government agencies.
The area is one of
the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in the world, with ships crossing
through it daily for ports in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands.
Cruise ships are also plentiful, and pleasure craft regularly go back and forth
between Florida and the islands. It is also a heavily flown route for
commercial and private aircraft heading towards Florida, the Caribbean, and
South America from points north.
The earliest
allegation of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a Sept,
1950 article published in The Miami Herald; there have been quite a few later
including Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger bombers on a
training mission. Flight 19 alone would be covered again in the April 1962
issue of American Legion magazine. In it, author Allan W. Eckert wrote that the
flight leader had been heard saying, "We are entering white water, nothing
seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white." The
article suggested a supernatural element
to the Flight 19 incident.
Bermuda,
is a British Overseas Territory in the
North Atlantic Ocean, located off the east coast of North America. Its
nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras,United States, about 1,030 kilometres (640
mi) to the west-northwest. The first known European explorer to reach Bermuda
was Spanish sea captain Juan de Bermúdez in 1503, after whom the islands are
named. Bermuda's economy is based on offshore insurance and reinsurance, and
tourism, the two largest economic sectors.
An infamous tragedy occurred in March 1918 when
the USS Cyclops, a 542-foot-long Navy cargo ship with over 300 men and 10,000 tons
of manganese ore onboard, sank somewhere between Barbados and the Chesapeake
Bay. Popular culture has attributed various disappearances to the paranormal or
activity by extraterrestrial beings.
William
Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” some scholars claim was based on a real-life
Bermuda shipwreck. Despite all the news
and rumours, Insurers across the Globe are not known to charge any extra
premium for vessels crossing Bermuda Triangle.
In his definitive book
"The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved," Kusche notes that few
writers on the topic bothered to do any real investigation — they mostly
collected and repeated other, earlier writers who did the same. In some cases
there's no record of the ships and planes claimed to have been lost in the
aquatic triangular graveyard; they never existed outside of a writer's
imagination. In other cases, the ships and planes were real enough — but
Berlitz and others neglected to mention that they "mysteriously
disappeared" during bad storms. Other times the vessels sank far outside
the Bermuda Triangle.
To some critics,
the area within the Bermuda Triangle is heavily traveled with cruise and cargo
ships; logically, just by random chance, more ships will sink there than in
less-travelled areas such as the South Pacific.Despite the fact that the
Bermuda Triangle has been definitively debunked for decades, it still appears
as an "unsolved mystery" in new books — mostly by authors more
interested in a sensational story than the facts.
In Shakespeare’s
play The Tempest, spirit Ariel tells Prospero: “Thou call’dst me up at midnight
to fetch dew, From the still-vex’dBermoothes.” ~that reportedly is the only direct mention of Bermuda in the entire
play about a group of noble people brought to a magical island by a violent
storm conjured up by Prospero, Duke of Milan who lives on the Island with his
daughter.
To
conclude, that Sehwag, Ganguly, Yuvraj, Sachin, Dhoni – blitz, was in World Cup
match in 2007 against Bermuda. Leverock who by looks was exceptionally obese,
bowled few overs and took that smart catch in the slips.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
9th
Sept. 2015.
Facts collated from various sources including :
1. Wikipedia
3. http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/bermuda-triangle.htm
4. http://www.livescience.com/23435-bermuda-triangle.html
5. http://www.unmuseum.org/triangle.htm