Longfellow has a haunting ballad in which the narrator is mesmerised by a sailor's mournful song. As he tries to find out more, the reply is enigmatic:
"Wouldst thou," so the helmsman answered,
"Know the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers,
Comprehend its mystery."
So too, some might say, with the Bermuda Triangle.
The term was apparently first used by one Vincent Gaddis in the journal Argosy in 1964. The myth came into its own, however, 10 years later when Charles Berlitz published a best-selling book on the subject, The Bermuda Triangle. But it all began on December 5th, 1945.
At 2 p.m. that day, five US navy Avengers, famously designated Flight 19, took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in good weather on a routine training mission.
Some hours later, a series of disjointed emergency messages were received from the flight leader, Capt Charles Taylor: "We seem to be off course; we seem to be lost; everything looks strange." And that, essentially, was the last that was ever heard of Flight 19.
The conclusion of the official inquiry was relatively simple: Capt Taylor, whose compass was known to be out of order from the time of takeoff, had simply lost his way. Heading east instead of west, he led his trainees out over the Atlantic, where Flight 19 ran out of fuel and ditched in deteriorating weather.
But, coincidentally, an unusually high number of other aircraft crashed or disappeared in the same neighbourhood in the following 10 years or so. When this statistical clustering was noticed, the legend of the Bermuda Triangle began.
Its apexes are 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.
And other unsolved mysteries, like that of the Mary Celeste found abandoned near the Azores in 1872, were retrospectively attributed to it even though that ship had been nowhere near Bermuda or its Triangle.
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. Others put it down to 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 was quietly forgotten.