Thriller fiction and Non-fiction
Well, the cat is out of the bag. The next Mike Scott novel has Mike returning to Grand Cayman for the 10th anniversary of my first adventure novel Cayman Cowboys!
I talked to Greg Holt host of Scuba Radio about it on Saturday. Listen to my appearance on the show below.
What happens when you ignore your own environmental surveys in the interest of installing a cruise ship dock to bring in more tourists? Unfortunately Bimini in the Bahamas is in the process of finding out.
The Bahamian government has allowed Resorts World Bimini to dredge the coral reefs and install a new dock so a fast shuttle from Florida can bring in day-trip passengers. The boat can hold up to 1500 passengers at a time, nearly doubling the population of the tiny island. In the process, the dredging and the boat propellers are covering the coral reefs with silt, killing them. The very attraction that drew people to Bimini in the first place is being killed.
While this situation is sad, Bimini isn’t the only place faced with this dilemma. Cruise ships bring huge numbers of passengers to island, injecting cash into the island economy. Grand Cayman, already a destination for as many as five cruise ships a day, is moving forward with an environmental impact study to install a new, larger cruise ship dock.
The plot from my first novel, Cayman Cowboys (2005, 2013) touched on exactly this issue. A greedy developer co-opted several key officials from the Cayman government to build a cruise ship dock at the expense of the environment. The book is set at the very real Sunset House (follow Sunset House on Facebook), long-considered the pre-eminent dive resort on an island world famous for its coral reefs and scuba diving and a number of scenes take place at My Bar…world famous for after-dive activities. When I wrote the book, I really thought the people of Grand Cayman would never allow something like that to happen there. Now, unfortunately, I’m not so sure.
The environmental impact study in Bimini said installing the dock was a bad idea. The Bahamian government ignored its own study and allowed the dredging and construction to go forward. I have my fingers crossed that the government of Grand Cayman won’t make the same mistake there. My friends Neal Watson (Bahamas) and Keith Sahm (Grand Cayman) are doing what they can to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Find out more:
Tough Lessons: Cayman Islands looking at Bimini for what not to do
![Pageflex Persona [document: PRS0000038_00067]](https://www.booksbyeric.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Maya-cover-web.jpg)
Just last week, I released my first full-length adventure novel set in West Virginia called Heart of the Maya. The story spends some time in the ancient past, but most of it is set in the present day on the campus of Marshall University and in Tulum, Mexico.
A year or so ago, I wrote a column about the Adena burial mounds in West Virginia and how we often ignore the history right beneath our feet. At the time, we had just also survived December 2012, when many “experts” were saying the Mayan calendar ended. Obviously, we lived through that “end-of-the-world” event. It all got me thinking about a connection between the Maya and the Adena in our own backyard. I dug around into the history of both cultures and noticed some interesting similarities, although there is no evidence to say they actually overlapped or had contact.
The same day Heart of the Maya came out, there was a news story talking about a group of divers that found the skull of a teenage girl inside a Mexican cenote dating back to the Ice Age. (Pronounced se-NO-tay, a cenote is a freshwater-filled cave system.) The skull is helping scientists connect modern Native Americans to the people of central Mexico from 12,000 years ago. They believe the people who settled all across North and South America migrated across the Bering Sea from Asia, through Alaska and Canada and then continued to head south.
After working on the story for more than a year and releasing the book, that news story came out suggesting that the connection I created in the dark recesses of my mind may not be fiction after all. So, while the story in Heart of the Maya is pure fiction, it is interesting to think that maybe the mound builders of West Virginia and the Ohio Valley might actually have moved south and eventually become the Maya.
Truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes..
When I wrote the adventure novel Wreck of the Huron, I used the Admiral’s Inquest into the sinking of the ship for much of the background in the story. I wanted the events of that night where more than 100 sailors died off the North Carolina coast to be as accurate as possible.
As it happened, though, one story that I missed in the tragedy was probably the most important of all. In my defense, it wasn’t included in the Admiral’s Inquest because the central character in the story was still in the hospital recovering from his own injuries and wasn’t interviewed.
That night, November 24, 1877, Antonio Williams was on board the Huron when it ran aground near Nags Head on the Outer Banks. Williams was a naturalized US citizen, born in Malta. His heroism that night earned Williams the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valiant efforts to save his fellow sailors. He is the oldest person to ever receive the award. At the time, the medal was given in war time and in peace time. Since World War I, the Medal of Honor has been limited to war time valor.
Steve Lovell, an Englishman, made me aware of Williams’ honor and service after he read my book Wreck of the Huron. As it turns out, Williams eventually retired from the Navy and moved to England to live with his British-born wife. When he died, he was given honors in the England, but more than 100 years later, his headstone is missing and there is nothing on his grave that indicates who was buried there or how he served the United States.
Lovell has made it a personal project to obtain a headstone for Williams’ grave and to give the man, the hero, the honor he deserves. He has been to endless meetings with various cemetery officials and met with the stone mason to make the arrangements. He has done this for no reason other than it is something that should be done..
In honor of the second edition of Cayman Cowboys, I thought I would post some photos from Grand Cayman and the location of most of the book, Sunset House. I took all of these photos in December 2011, with the exception of the one of me by the Mermaid. That was taken by Steve Barnett in 2004 or 2005. He was kind enough to give me a copy.
Check out yesterday’s blog on the second edition of the novel or read the book’s description. You can also get a copy in print or as a Kindle ebook directly from Amazon.
