Bahama Pundit

The First Case Study in Sustainable Tourism

by Larry Smith

MARSH HARBOUR, Abaco - The acrimonious and long-running effort by some residents of Guana Cay to derail the multi-million-dollar Baker's Bay development came to an end last November when the Privy Council ruled against the Save Guana Cay Reef Association, represented by Freeport lawyer Fred Smith.

The environmental contract between the Baker's Bay Club and the University of Miami also came to an end last year, and Dr Kathleen Sullivan-Sealey, the marine biologist who ran the environmental management programme, was at the Abaco Science Alliance conference in Marsh Harbour this past weekend. She gave a report on five year's of work that has been billed as the first "case study on sustainable tourism" in the Bahamas.

Tough Call was also at the conference, which is organised every two years by Abaco Friends of the Environment.  And Sullivan-Sealey was one of a slew of scientists who shared their recent Bahamian research. Presentations were given on the behaviour of deep-diving beaked whales in the Tongue of the Ocean; the results of the first Bahamian conch fishery survey in 15 years; recent fossil discoveries in the Sawmill Sink blue hole south of Marsh Harbour; bonefish conservation; coral reef assessments; and community-based tourism.

A Rock in the Harbour - Latest Travels on the Bimini Road

by Larry Smith

"Ya never get a lickin' till ya go down to Bimini..."

The so-called Bimini Road – long dismissed by scientists as a patch of fractured beach rock – is back in the news again.

Dr Greg Little, a psychologist who dabbles in these things, issued a report (http://www.i-newswire.com/pr49748.html) this month which claims to show the site is actually an ancient harbour.

He doesn’t say who built it, but ever since the pavement-like formation was found in 20 feet of water just off North Bimini in 1968, enthusiasts have tried to link it to the Atlantis myth.

Others (including the first commander of the Royal Bahamas Defence Force, Bill Swinley) have said it is a dry dock built by a Chinese fleet that discovered America several decades before Columbus landed on San Salvador.

Threat of a Superflu Pandemic

by Larry Smith

"The year 1918 has gone...a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all--infectious disease."
1919 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ever since the Huns crashed the Roman Empire’s 800-year party in the 5th century AD, Europeans have been terrified of invaders from the East.

But today’s invader could be even deadlier than Attila the Hun. It’s name is H5N1. It is an avian flu that has already caused the death of millions of birds – and about 60 people - in the Far East. And it has now spread to Turkey, Romania and Greece.

It is not just Europe that is threatened. Experts say the world could soon face another pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu (or Purple Death) of 1918 which - according to latest estimates - killed more than 50 million people in a few months at the end of the First World War.

That’s because scientists have found that the 1918 virus was also a bird flu, one that had mutated so that it could pass from person to person. They discovered this by actually reconstructing the extinct virus out of bits of tissue from 87-year-old autopsies.

The Bahamas DNA Project - Finding Our Ancestors

by Larry Smith

Are the Long Island Deans descended from the Queen of Sheba?

Do the Sweetings of Green Turtle Cay trace their heritage to a Roman soldier?

Are the Eleuthera Neely's related to the tall "blue men" of the Sahara?

Do the Hope Town Malone's descend from Irish royals?

These and other fascinating questions are now being answered by the Bahamas DNA Project, which is slowly filling in the gaps of Bahamian family history. Whether black, white or in-between, if you have ever wondered who your ancestors were, this research will lead you to them.

Launched in 2004, the project is the brainchild of Peter Roberts, a Bahamian professor at Georgia State University, where he has worked as an archivist for the past 18 years. Professor Roberts interned at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, and part of his studies focused on African retentions in Bahamian culture.

The Prospects for Conch Farming

by Larry Smith

Five hundred years ago, the original Lucayan inhabitants of the Bahamas lived in a completely different world than the one we know today.

Early explorers told stories about flocks of parrots “darkening the sky”, of dense hardwood forests, and sea turtles keeping sailors awake by constantly knocking against ship hulls.

Seals and iguanas crowded the shorelines; lobster, conch and fish were abundant. Evidence for this are the large mounds of discarded conch and other shells and fish bones that are a feature of Lucayan archaeological sites.

And since slow-moving conch are found in shallow water, they became a staple food for the first European settlers - giving rise to their nickname, “conchs”, which persists to this day in the Florida Keys. In the Bahamas the sobriquet mutated into “conchy joe” - meaning a white or mixed-race Bahamian.

Atlantis Revisited

by Larry Smith

Earlier this year, we reported the findings of one of the latest discoverers of Atlantis in the Bahamas.

A 23-year-old mechanic from Peterborough, Canada claimed to have found the concentric ring canal system of Atlantis just south of Andros by looking at satellite photos on the Internet (www.atlantisuncovered.com).

“It’s never been proven, so who's to say that I didn't find it,” he told Tough Call at the time.

Discovering Atlantis in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

Just last month, a 23-year-old mechanic from Peterborough, Canada discovered Atlantis in the Bahamas by looking at satellite photos on the Internet.

Chris Shearer (http://www.atlantisuncovered.com) says last year’s hurricanes shifted ocean sands south of Andros to expose the concentric ring canal system of Atlantis - for the first time in thousands of years.

“I was researching a TV show on the Bermuda Triangle,” he told Tough Call recently, “using the Nasa Earth Observatory (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov) to look for planes or boats on the ocean floor. Crossing the Bahamas I saw what looked like the rings and canal I remembered from a show about Atlantis. It has never been proven, so who's to say I didn't find it!”

Chris is the latest of a phalanx of professional and amateur explorers who have located the lost city in just about every corner of the globe in the 123 years since Minnesota congressman Ignatius Donnely published his famous book, Atlantis: the Antediluvian World In 1882.