By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 24, 2022 – While doing research for my next article on POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE BAHAMAS, a journalistic venture I started several weeks ago, I ran across this amazing historical fact in Wikipedia, an Internet-based encyclopaedia, that provided additional information as to why Bimini is my second most favourite island The Bahamas, next to Andros, the island of my birth.
This excerpt from Wikipedia explains why I reached this conclusion: “The Fountain of Youth, a mythical spring, allegedly restores the youth of anyone who drinks or bathes in its waters. Tales of such a fountain have been recounted around the world for thousands of years, appearing in the writings of Herodotus (5th century BC), in the Alexander romance (3rd century AD), and in the stories of Prester John (early Crusades, 11th/12th centuries AD).
“Stories of similar waters also featured prominently among the people of the Caribbean during the Age of Exploration (early 16th century); they spoke of the restorative powers of the water in the mythical land of Bimini. Based on these many legends, explorers and adventurers looked for the elusive Fountain of Youth or some other remedy to aging, generally associated with magic waters. These waters might have been a river, a spring or any other water-source said to reverse the aging process and to cure sickness when swallowed or bathed in.
“The legend became particularly prominent in the 16th century, when it became associated with the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, the first Governor of Puerto Rico. Ponce de León was supposedly searching for the Fountain of Youth when he traveled to Florida in 1513. Legend has it that Native Americans told Ponce de León that the Fountain of Youth was in Bimini.
“According to legend, the Spanish heard of Bimini from the Arawaks in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The Caribbean islanders described a mythical land of Beimeni or Beniny (whence Bimini), a land of wealth and prosperity, which became conflated with the fountain legend. By the time of Ponce de Leon, the land was thought to be located northwest towards the Bahamas (called la Vieja during the Ponce expedition … Sequene, an Arawak chief from Cuba, purportedly was unable to resist the lure of Bimini and its restorative fountain. He gathered a troupe of adventurers and sailed north, never to return.
“Found within the salt water mangrove swamp that covers 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) of the shoreline of North Bimini is The Healing Hole, a pool that lies at the end of a network of winding tunnels. During outgoing tides, these channels pump cool, mineral-laden fresh water into the pool. Because this well was carved out of the limestone rock by ground water thousands of years ago, it is especially high in calcium and magnesium … Magnesium, which has been shown to improve longevity and reproductive health, is present in large quantities in the sea water. While it is not known whether any legend about healing waters was widespread among the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, the Italian-born chronicler Peter Martyr attached such a story drawn from ancient and medieval European sources to his account of the 1514 voyage of Juan Diaz de Solis in a letter to the Pope in 1516, though he did not believe the stories and was dismayed that so many others did.”
Of course, during my youthful years when I fell in love with Bimini, I had no reason to seek the benefits of the Fountain of Youth, so more likely than not, two of the main reasons why I fell in love with Bimini was that it is an aesthetically beautiful island and it produced some of the most beautiful women in The Bahamas, a fact that was supported by the popular calypso song of that era, “You Never Get a Lickin’ ’til You Go Down To Bimini.”
Another reason why I fell in love with Bimini is that I am a baseball fanatic and back in the late 1950s and 1960s, Bimini developed some of the best baseball players in The Bahamas.
As I documented in an OSWALD BROWN WRITES COLUMN of 2019, historically, cricket was considered the Number One sport in The Bahamas because of our British colonial heritage, but after Andre Rodgers became the first Bahamian to sign a professional baseball contract in 1954 and made it to the Major League three years later in 1957, “baseball fever” spread through the country like an infectious disease.
I had a front-row seat in the arena during baseball’s early developmental years, first as a sports reporter at the Nassau Daily Tribune and later as President of the Bahamas Baseball Association (BBA), the governing body of the sport in the country.
In fact, I was President of the BBA from 1964 to 1968 when The Bahamas established a pipeline to the Major Leagues for talented young baseball players similar to what now exists that has resulted in players like Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Lucius Fox making it to the Majors.
During my years as a young journalist, I was always able to effectively juggle my time between my love for sports and my involvement in politics as a die-hard supporter of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP). Following the PLP’s historic victory at the polls on January 10, 1967, which paved the way for the first black-majority government in The Bahamas, on one of his visits to London Lynen O. Pindling, the then Premier of The Bahamas, in 1968 arranged for me to go to England for one year’s “advanced training” in journalism at the London Evening Standard as a sort of “reward” for my contributions to the struggle for majority rule.
However, If my memory serves me rightly, in 1964 I was simultaneously President of the BBA and the Bahamas Amateur Basketball Association (BABA) and took all-star basketball teams on several occasions to Miami to play a series of basketball games with high school teams in the Miami area.
But baseball was and still is my favourite sport, so when I was faced with having to make a decision to give up the presidency of either the BBA or the BABA, it was not that difficult a decision to make, even though I had well-established plans in place to continue annual trips to Miami for games between a Bahamas all-star basketball team and high school teams in Miami. It has always been a strongly held belief of mine that one of the best ways to improve the level of play of participants in any sport is for them to play against teams that were considered better than them.
It was this philosophy that made it mandatory for me to continue a program put in place by the previous BBA administration, which included the late Lester Mortimer and the late Reno Brown, to send a Bahamas team to compete annually in the National Baseball Congress (NBC) tournament in Wichita, Kansas, which was considered to be a major “stepping stone” towards making it to the Major League.
After Andhamiare Rodgers became the first Bahamian to make it to the Majors, Tony Curry became the second Bahamian to do so when he was “called up” by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1960. Other Bahamians who followed in subsequent years included Ed Armbrister (Cincinnati Reds 1973), Wenty Ford (Atlanta Braves), Wilfred Culmer (Cleveland Indians 1983) and Antoan Richardson (Atlanta Braves 2011).
What many Bahamian sports aficionados may not remember is that the late Vince Ferguson — who is better known in The Bahamas as an educator and in sporting circles as long-time president of the Bahamas Amateur Basketball Association — was also an outstanding baseball player. Vince played professionally for seven years and was one step away from making it to the Major League when he decided to abandon his quest to become a Major Leaguer, after playing the 1967 season with the Richmond Braves, which at the time was a Triple-A International League affiliate of the Atlanta Braves.
And, of course, the late Edmond “Ed” Moxey played Class A professional baseball at Modesto in California in 1963. He had a great Minor League career, but never made it to the Major League, and his professional career ended after playing the 1969 season in the Mexican League, which is classified as Triple A.
I stepped down as President of the BBA to go to London on a one-year training course in journalism on the staff of the London Evening Standard, but when I returned from London in November of 1969, the following year I was again elected President of the BBA. Along with team of effective BBA officers and the late Allan Jackson, who was a great Baseball Commissioner for many years, baseball had what I often describe as some of its best years since it became a popular sport in The Bahamas.
A top priority was to resume participation in the NBC tournament in Wichita, and we had the good fortune of having Andre Rodgers as manager of the team we took to Wichita in 1971.
During my first tenure as President in the 1960s, we frequently took teams to play against a team at Bimini, which as I noted historically produced some of the best baseball players in The Bahamas. When I became president again after I returned from London, one year we experimented with including teams from Bimini and Grand Bahama in our regular season schedule.
It was an extremely expensive experiment that included chartering a DC-3 aircraft out of Miami on weekends when games were simultaneously played in New Providence, Bimini and Freeport. The chartered plane was kept quite busy transporting teams to and from the destinations where games were played.
Back in those days, however, baseball fans on Bimini were very supportive of their teams and whenever the Bimini Marlins travelled to Nassau to play, the stadium at the Queen Elizabeth Sports Center generally was filled to capacity and gate receipts amounted to thousands of dollars, often enough to cover the costs of the weekend charter fights. What’s more, baseball fans in Bimini also contributed generously to the housing costs of teams from Nassau and the organizers of the games in Bimini also contributed part of their gate receipts to the BBA.
This arrangement worked extremely well for two seasons, and I can’t really recall why it ceased, but my presidency ended in 1973 due to personal reasons that eventually resulted in me relocating to the United States in late 1974.
Baseball continued to have relatively good years administratively and on the field under subsequent Presidents Tony Curry and George Mackey, but its popularity and level of play declined gradually under the presidency of the late James Woods, who became embroiled in an acrimonious dispute with the founders of the Bahamas Baseball Federation (BBF) over which of the two organizations was the governing body for baseball in The Bahamas.
It was because the BBA had ceased to function as an effective organization that Greg Burrows and other devoted baseball fans founded the BBF, with Burrows serving as President. For a number of years the two organizations were at loggerheads over which group could officially send teams to represent The Bahamas at international competitions.
Meanwhile, Burrows also founded the Freedom Farm Baseball League and focused his attention on the development of young baseball players by teaching the sport of baseball at the Freedom Farm Baseball Fields in Yamacraw Beach Estates.
Today, thanks mainly to Burrows, The Bahamas has a talented contingent of young baseball players in the pipeline on the cusp of joining Jazz Chisholm Jr. in the Majors.
There is no question that baseball in The Bahamas has been restored to good health. What’s more, with the promotion and development of sports in The Bahamas generally being among the top priorities of Prime Minister Philip E. Davis and his PLP government, the Prime Minister could not have chosen a more efficient Minister to head the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture than the Hon. Mario K. Moxey, who has unquestionably done an outstanding job in carrying out his ministerial responsibilities since being sworn in as Minister shortly after the PLP’s landslide victory in last September’s general elections.
