Bimini, 80 kilometres from Miami, drew Hemingway, rum-runners and shark scientists
The closest slice of the Bahamas to the United States sits just 80 kilometres east of Miami. That proximity made Bimini a Prohibition supply depot for rum-runners, a marlin-fishing base for Ernest Hemingway, and a quiet retreat where Martin Luther King Jr. worked on his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 1964.
Bimini is a chain of low islands forming the westernmost district of the Bahamas, home to 2,361 people at the 2022 census. North Bimini, about 11 kilometres long but only 200 metres wide, holds the main settlement, Alice Town; South Bimini has an airstrip and around 182 residents. The first inhabitants were the Lucayans, whose word Bimini means two islands, or the twins. Being so flat, the islands could one day be swallowed entirely by rising seas.
Hemingway lived there from 1935 to 1937, working on To Have and Have Not but mostly trolling the Gulf Stream from his boat Pilar. A 500-pound blue marlin landed off Bimini is said to have fed into The Old Man and the Sea. His photographs lined the walls of the Compleat Angler Hotel until a fire destroyed it in 2006, and some of its timber had come from the SS Sapona, a ship that ran aground in a 1926 hurricane and still sits half-submerged, now a favourite dive site.
Legend clings to the place. Juan Ponce de León's search for the Fountain of Youth referred to Bimini, though the Lucayan stories probably pointed to the Gulf of Honduras; a small well on South Bimini carries a commemorative plaque anyway. The Healing Hole, a mangrove pool fed by limestone tunnels, fills with cool mineral-rich fresh water on outgoing tides. Offshore lies the disputed underwater formation called Bimini Road.
Wildlife is a serious draw too. The Bimini Biological Field Station, or Shark Lab, founded by Samuel Gruber in 1990, has recorded 13 shark species in the shallows and studies lemon sharks in particular. The protected Bimini boa is the islands' largest land reptile, and the critically endangered smalltooth sawfish lives in local waters.
Source: Bimini
