Odd this day
4 May 1978
It’s the 47th anniversary of the United States and Mexico’s first go at dividing the Gulf of Mexico between them and agreeing on a ‘maritime border’. Why does such a mundane event deserve marking here? Because they signed a treaty which, outrageously, said that an island which had been on maps since the 16th century — and which would have given Mexico access to lots more of the Gulf which bears its name, and thus also to much more oil — had vanished. The only sensible explanation was that the CIA had dynamited it. Obviously.
The Treaty on Maritime Boundaries between the United Mexican States and the United States of America, to give it its thrilling full title, decided that the border would be 200 nautical miles from each of their shores. The shores in question were deemed to start at the Isle Dernière, or Last Island, which sits just off the coast of Louisiana, and the Alacranes Islands north of the Yucatán Peninsula.
This was an appalling injustice, because it did not take into account Bermeja, north of the Alacranes, which would have given Mexico about 15% more watery territory — and more importantly sea bed, full of that lovely, gloopy black gold. Given that this map below showing Bermeja dates back to 1846, and is held in the Library of bleedin’ Congress, I think we can all agree that something is afoot.
Here’s a close-up.
What’s odd, however, is that this appalling theft, or act of sabotage, or whatever it was, did not appear to make headlines until 2009.
Apparently that year, a report to the Mexican Congress by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which followed extensive sea and air searches, concluded that
the island does not exist.
Shady gentlemen in suits, clearly, had leant on the academics to produce this result. But what had happened in the intervening years, and when exactly did the dastardly Americans blow up the island, or use alien technology from Area 51 to arrange an undersea landslide, or whatever it was they absolutely definitely did?
Well, to begin with, in 1978, only one country ratified the treaty. No prizes for guessing that — according to vol.37 of the Houston Journal of International Law, 2015 —
the U.S. Senate took more than twenty years to ratify it under pressure from the industry that by then had developed enough technology to do deepwater drilling and was interested in the areas surrounding the pending borderline. In fact, the United States was already auctioning submarine tracts in the Western Gulf of Mexico in 1997 regardless of the fact that the Treaty had not been ratified.
Then, in 1998, when Mexican President Zedillo was apparently having dubious dealings with American oil firms, only one Senator in Mexico opposed him — and promptly died in a car accident which was put down to
mechanical failure.
A likely story. Definitely the CIA.
Anyway, in 2009, Agence France-Presse reported that Mexico and the US had agreed in 2000
to protect oil deposits in the gulf that lie beyond their 200 nautical mile limits. But a moratorium on oil exploration and exploitation in the treaty area expires next year.
This was where the report from the university came in. Mexico had belatedly decided that it must be at least worth checking whether that mysterious island really had disappeared (or been disappeared by the perfidious gringos, perhaps). Elias Cardenas, chairman of the Mexican parliament’s maritime committee, was not happy with the conclusion that either it had vanished or had never been there, and said there were four more possible sites to investigate. Unfortunately, the sea is — to use the correct oceanographer terminology — quite big, so exploring is expensive.
Still, I think we can all agree that the CIA almost certainly had something to do with it. We have a clearly established motive, after all: America wants the estimated 22.5 billion barrels of oil in the area that Mexico would get if Bermeja was found, and will stop at nothing to get it. So they arrange with Neptune, god of freshwater and the sea, to send Bermeja the way of Atlantis in return for all those cod that mysteriously disappeared from the fishing grounds, and we’ll say no more about it. Yes?
Well… an academic paper from 2018, Ex-Isles: Islands that Disappeared (published in the magnificently named Review of Historical Geography and Toponomastics), says… a number of things. Bermeja (which gets its name from the Spanish word for red, bermejo, fact fans), first appeared on a 1539 map, again in 1564, and then in the Imperial Mexican Atlas of 1794. Well, that last one, especially, sounds jolly official, does it not?
However, expeditions by the Spanish army in 1775 and by captain Ciriaco de Ceballos in 1789 failed to locate Bermeja. In the nineteenth century, serious doubts surrounding the island existence began to surface. In 1885, the United States Hydrographic Office’s The Navigation of the Caribbean Sea dismissed the island existence as “more than doubtful”, due to the inability of several navy officials to find Bermeja in searches conducted earlier in the century. The British, too, appeared to have written off the curious red island, as shown in British maps reporting that it had mysteriously sunk into the sea and was, thus, no more.
Ah.
Yes, the island being… not especially easy to pinpoint is, in fact, nothing very new. According to the Independent, it “made its last mapped appearance (in the Geographic Atlas of the Mexican Republic)” in 1921, “after which it seemingly vanished from the ocean altogether”.
Back to that geography and toponomastics (no, me neither) paper for some possible explanations:
Some attribute the island vanishing to simple cartographical mistakes carried forward erroneously in the maps of past centuries. Others, such as the President of the Mexican Geographical Society, Julio Zamora, theorize that Bermeja was an imaginary island purposely charted incorrectly in the Gulf of Mexico in some sixteenth and seventeenth century maps to dissuade enemies from traversing these waters, which were routes of navigational interest.
And I fear, unless you believe that Elvis is alive, Paul McCartney’s dead, and we didn’t go to the moon, those do seem a tad more likely than one nation dynamiting another’s territory with no one noticing, even a long way out at sea.
However, while the National Autonomous University of Mexico said “the island does not exist”, in 2009, the then director of its Institute of Geography, Dr Irasema Alcántara, told the BBC:
that following the analysis of various historical accounts in which the island was described in great, precise detail, they believe the island is real. It probably just exists in a different location from the coordinates that have been searched.
Someone else in the same department said much the same in 2021, and that 2018 paper concludes that, while
the jury is still out on whether the island ever existed … In Mexico, especially, people still hold out for Bermeja’s discovery — perhaps not the same size, shape or location, but Mexico’s ancient missing island all the same, a treasure lost at sea. And as life goes on, possibly nothing more than a memory lost with time.
…which is quite poetic (and an understandable sentiment). For another perspective, Mexico News Daily looked to “geographer and islands specialist Israel Baxin Martínez”, who said the obsession with the island was evidence of a flaw in human nature:
Culturally, what we see with Bermeja, as in many other cases, is that people don’t care about what they’ve got, but they do care about what they’ve lost. People are jealous of what has been taken from them, but they refuse to do anything with what they already have.
…which is pretty good, too. But one of my favourite things about this story comes from a BBC World Service documentary made by Mexican journalist David Cuen in 2009.
He interviews a couple of fishermen in a bar, who have extensive experience of these waters, one of whom says he’s been going out there for 40 years and never seen it, but hasn’t given up hope. The second man sounds really promising, though: he’s seen it and says it’s a sandbank. There is a pause, and the journalist adds:
He has been here several hours, drinking beer with his friends…
Ah, well. In the end, all we can say with any certainty is that if it ever was there, it isn’t now. But I think Cuen speaks for many of us when he rounds off the documentary with a reference to the edge of the continental shelf and adds:
Give me a boat, and a year, and that’s where I’ll start.
