How could Wingate, and presumably
Duval as well, tell such stones apart? How could they know whether a stone block
was either from the sea-bed or a mainland quarry? It was a troubling thought,
and one which needed to be addressed one way or another.
In order to settle the matter, I decided to return to Miami, arriving there
on Thursday, 5 March 1998. The following day I took a taxi ride to Jupiter Inlet
and after much tramping around I found the sea-walls in question. They lay
either side of the narrow inlet and extended out as jetties into the open sea.
In the time permitting I was only able to inspect the stones on the southern
side, which consisted mainly of large pieces of white granite and coral
fragments, the latter coming from a location just off-shore.
Some of the granite possessed lines of shallow bore-holes along their edges,
which were clearly done to fracture the stone, while only one piece of granite
bore a distinctive circular borehole. It was around four inches in diameter and
penetrated through its entire depth for a distance of some four feet.
Unfortunately, all the granite stones were unquestionably quarry off-cuts
brought in fairly recently to extend the existing sea-wall. This I know as I was
able to speak to workmen actually working on the reconstruction of the sea-wall
during my visit.
Whether the stones in the sea-wall and jetty on the opposite side of the
inlet contained more ancient stones removed from Moselle Shoals remains to be
seen. Enigmatically, one work-man - looking like an extra from The Village
People - did say that he was unaware of the composition of many of them, saying
only that they were `as hard as Hades', whatever that was supposed to mean. He
was unable to elaborate any further.
Slightly disappointed I returned to Miami and the next day made my way out to
the sea-wall and jetty located at the most southerly point of South Beach. Of
the thousands of loose granite blocks examined many hundreds of them bore
evidence of circular drill holes of varying sizes and depths. These generally
took the form of short incisions in rows, clearly done to fracture, weaken and
finally break the rock away from the bedrock.
Other holes pierced right through the length, width or breadth of individual
blocks, just as Wingate had described. More significantly I found two good
examples of five-sided holes, yet I quickly realised that these had been made by
a powerful circular drill that had simply jolted off-centre as it had penetrated
through the rock, leaving a geometrical, five-sided impression. More telling was
the fact that all around one of these five-sided holes were lines of perfectly
circular holes that matched the diameter of the curve that formed each of the
five sides of the hole, meaning that they had been made by the same drill.
Elsewhere I even found a hole with three beautifully curved sides, caused by the
same drilling defect.
There were literally thousands of huge stone blocks, many several tonnes a
piece, that bore clear evidence of sophisticated drilling operations, and yet
not one of them showed any sign of having lain in shallow waters for many
thousands of years. The ballast was clean and free of ages of slime and coral,
meaning that the vast majority of the stones making up these sea-walls and
jetties were, like those at Jupiter Inlet, quarry off-cuts and not the remains
of Atlantean temples.
Even if the five-sided bore-holes found by myself were not those featured in
Wingate's TV documentary from the 1970s, it is simply too much to imagine that
the ancient Atlanteans were able to bore five-sided holes in solid rock in the
same manner as modern-day quarry drills. In addition to all this, I came across
granite blocks stained with iron oxide, caused it would seem either by poles
having once been placed inside the circular holes or, in case, the remains of
what appeared to be a highly rusted drill bit still stuck in position. I also
found traces of modern concrete attached to some of the stones, making me recall
the `Atlantean glue' referred to both by Duval and Wingate - I suppose you can
mistake one for the other.
Removing the significance of the Miami and Jupiter jetty stones from the
equation leaves little significance in the knowledge that vast quantities of
rock was removed from Moselle Shoals to build sea-walls and jetties in different
parts of Florida in the 1920s. It also destroys Wingate's claims to have found
granite and basaltic masonry from the temples of Atlantis. How this affects
Duval's claims to have found Atlantean temples off the Bimini coast is up to the
reader to decide. The publishers who offered him an enormous advance for
exclusive rights to a book that would prove once and for all the existence of
Atlantis are still hoping that Duval might have something to offer them.
Even if Duval's claims do come to nothing, it is our opinion that major
discoveries are to be made in the shallow waters of the Great Bahama Bank. After
his death in 1994, it was found that J. Manson Valentine had left a detailed
catalogue of no less than sixty-five proposed archaeological sites, all of them
in the vicinity of Bimini and the Bahaman islands in general.
