You may have heard of the Bornholm Triangle, also known as the Bermuda Triangle, where a number of ships have been lost over the years, probably due to a magnetic field affecting the ships’ compass. These shipwrecks, however, are not at all comparable to those in the real Bermuda Triangle, where ships disappeared without a trace. Here on the island the unfortunate ships were fully visible.
The Bornholm Triangle or Bermuda Triangle, however, has a completely official name, which certainly does not bring to mind shipwrecks. The name is innocent and beautiful – Heaven’s Gate. Where the name comes from is not known, but it may have originated from old sailors who have been at sea in a raging storm and finally saw the Bornholm rocky coast, and felt like going to heaven, now that they could finally get solid ground under their feet again.
The name Himmerigets Port can be found on older maps of Bornholm. The area is located about halfway between Gudhjem and Saltuna, more specifically, the rocky coast of the Baltic Sea Glass.
But what actually happened in this apparently special coastal area.
What happened was that several ships and smaller coasters simply sailed into Bornholm, some of them so far up the cliffs that you could walk from shore and onto the ship without getting wet feet. When accidents like that happen, there must be a hearing at sea. Here, the vast majority of skippers or captains said that their compass was behaving strangely, the needle in the compass was going round and round and couldn’t show which way the ship was going, which caused them to sail into the rocky coast in the dark. Whether there is something to the magnetic field in the area of the Heavenly Gate remains to be seen. However, it is curious that since ships started using satellite navigation, no ships have run aground at the Port of Heaven.
This is not to say that groundings no longer occur off Bornholm, as they happen about every 2 years. These groundings are often caused by the skipper or captain falling asleep on watch or looking a little too deeply into the bottle, and I wonder if some of the many groundings at the Port of Heaven could be caused by the same problem. However, a few accidents have also occurred due to “forgetting” to turn around Bornholm.
But if you’re curious to see if there really is a magnetic field at Heaven’s Gate, you can take a compass in your hand and see for yourself if the skippers and captains were telling the truth.
