Tiny Island, Made Large by Hemingway

Literary history generally concedes that Ernest Hemingway beat up everybody he fought on this tiny island during the mid-1930s, when he fished, boozed, wrote and issued fighting challenges to the locals.

But at least one resident says the official record of Hemingway’s time on Bimini is incomplete in one important detail: “I was way smarter than him in boxing,” says Sammy “Bonefish” Ellis, now 82. “I whipped him; he didn’t beat me. I refused to get beat in boxing.”

In the most definitive biography of the American writer to date, “Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story,” Carlos Baker wrote that the oft-told story of Hemingway offering $250 to any native islander who could last three rounds with him is true.

Baker wrote that Hemingway’s first challenger, Willard Saunders, was a formidable opponent who could carry a piano on his head, but lasted only a minute and a half against Hemingway, then 35 years old and in good condition.

Four Bimini islanders responded to Hemingway’s challenge, and he reportedly beat them all.

Ellis said Baker and other Hemingway scholars left him out, and a photograph of Ellis as a young man lends credence to his claim. On the wall of his home, a neat though cluttered house close to a cluster of small churches, the photo is displayed prominently. It shows a young Ellis with broad shoulders, huge arms and a massive chest, who looks like he might have given Mike Tyson a good fight.

On this Sunday, Ellis, now a Baptist preacher, is fresh from church and wearing a flowing white clergyman’s robe edged in maroon.

Ellis’ claim, and some dubious boasts by others, are difficult to confirm because so few islanders remain who were alive or on the island at the time.

Clement Saunders, better known as “Piccolo Pete” and a distant relative of Willard Saunders, says he was the model for the old fisherman in the Hemingway novel “The Old Man and the Sea.” The man usually accepted as the model for both the old man and the boy who went to sea with him was Cuban angler Gregorio Fuentes.

“I wrote two-thirds of that book,” declares a still-fit Saunders, now 89. He enters the ramshackle bar he owns, Precious d’Paris, bare-chested but, seeing he has visitors, excuses himself to put on a clean shirt.

“Look at these hands,” he says when he returns, showing upturned palms callused and scarred from his days of fishing with hand lines. “I’d tell him all about my experiences, then he’d go and write it down. I never got anything from that book, not one dime.” Saunders refuses to answer any more questions about his relationship with Hemingway until he is paid some money.

Hemingway left his mark on many places, but perhaps nowhere is his influence so concentrated as on this island four miles long and 300 yards wide, where golf carts and motor scooters zip around.

By all accounts, it was a mutual love affair. Bimini, the thin strip of land surrounded by a dazzling array of aquamarine waters, became the setting for his last book, “Islands in the Stream,” published in 1970, nine years after he died. And Hemingway told friends that discovering the Bahamian island off the Florida coast was one of the great events of his life: He cited the world-class fishing and relaxed, idyllic setting that he said might as well be “the end of the world.”

And from the End of the World bar with its sand floor, wall of wild photos and windows open to the sea, to the Compleat Angler Hotel, which advertises room No. 1 as the place where Hemingway worked on “To Have and Have Not,” his legacy is treasured and exploited.

“Hemingway is like Jesus himself on this island,” said Ashley Saunders, who wrote a book of poems titled “The Sun Makes It Red” and published a history of Bimini. “He’s immortalized. Hemingway is the backbone of the economy. You take Hemingway away from Bimini and there’s nothing left.”

In Bimini, “The Old Man and the Sea” is required reading in public schools, and both the novel and video of “Islands in the Stream” are popular among island students.

The fishing prowess of Hemingway, who once boasted that he “changed the whole system” of fishing in Bimini, is disputed by some old-timers. Though there are pictures of Hemingway on the dock with marlin, Ellis, who considers himself a friend of the writer, says Hemingway never caught one.

Hemingway, he said, was stubborn and “had a way of his own, the way he used to fish. Everybody else loved to troll. Hemingway liked to drift fish. Everybody else would come in with a marlin, flags flying, but he’d come in with nothing.

“He’d go and rig a big bonito or mackerel and drift on the edge of the [Gulf] Stream about 200, 300 feet deep. He caught tuna but never any marlin,” Ellis said. “We’d hoot at him for the way he fished, but he’d just laugh at you. He didn’t care. He had his own way of doing things.”

Hemingway Resource Center: https://www.lostgeneration.com/hrc.htm