You may have noticed, if you glanced at this page in recent days at all, that its author has been sampling a Keatsian beaker full of the warm south, and perhaps even, now and then, the odd
. . . draft of vintage, that hath been
Cool'd a long time in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green.
Yes, I have been to Florida, at Cape Canaveral, to watch a weather satellite take off.
The excursion, however, is not without an element of risk. Assuming I got there - and if I didn't you may very well have heard by now - I still have to negotiate what some believe to be most dangerous expanse of water in the world; to get from there to here, I have to enter, or go very close to, the Bermuda Triangle.
On December 5th, 1945, five US Navy Avengers, famously designated Flight 19, took off from Fort Lauderdale in Florida, in good weather on a routine training mission, and disappeared completely without any trace. The conclusion of the official inquiry was relatively simple: Flight 19 had simply lost its way, run out of fuel and ditched in the Atlantic.
But coincidentally, an unusually high number of other aircraft crashed or disappeared in the same neighbourhood in the following 10 years or so, and when this statistical clustering was noticed, the legend of the Triangle took root.
Its apexes were said to be Bermuda, San Juan in Puerto Rico and Miami, Florida. In addition to the aviation incidents, when the history books were consulted it was found, not surprisingly, that many ships had also disappeared in the same region; even Columbus, it was said, recorded strange happenings as he voyaged through the triangle. With great enthusiasm, all unsolved mysteries in the vicinity were then retrospectively attributed to its evil influence.
Those with an interest in such matters consigned the happenings to the paranormal, and maintained - with confusing geometry - that the missing planes and ships were still circling the triangle, locked in a timeless, extra-terrestrial dimension as a result of magnetic phenomena set up by UFOs. Others sought more mundane, but esoteric, scientific explanations.
But then the anomalous statistics of those balmy waters returned more or less to normal, and the enigma of the Bermuda Triangle has been quietly forgotten - by all except me.
Never mind. Now, more than ever, seems it rich to die, to.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.