Bimini reference

The Compleat Angler Hotel

A record of the building, the Hemingway association attached to it, and the fire of 13 January 2006 — with the contemporaneous reporting the standard citations no longer reach.

The Compleat Angler was the best-known building on Bimini and, for most of the seventy years it stood, the island's principal tourist attraction. It is cited constantly and documented poorly. The standard reference used across the web for its destruction is a Frommer's URL that no longer resolves to anything about the hotel, which means the fire — an event with wire coverage, named officials on the record, and a death — currently reads online as an anecdote rather than a reported event. This page assembles the record.

The building

The hotel stood on King's Highway in Alice Town, at the southern end of North Bimini, a few minutes' walk from the seaplane ramp. It was a three-storey inn of twelve guest rooms with two bars on the ground floor. Soundings described it as English country-house in style and dated its construction to 1935, when it was built as a private club by Helen Duncombe, wife of the British commissioner. The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism's own account credits the building to Helen and Henry Duncombe in the same year, and records that it was damaged by a hurricane in 1936 and repaired. The two accounts differ on whether one Duncombe or two put it up; they agree on the year.

Much of the timber in it came off Prohibition-era smuggling barges left in Bimini's harbour, andSoundings reported that liquor barrels roughly eighty years old were still carrying one of the bars at the time of the fire. That is a detail worth stating plainly, because it explains both what the building was made of and how quickly it went. Bimini's proximity to Florida made it a rum-running centre in the 1920s, and the hotel was assembled partly out of the wreckage of that trade — the same period that put the SS Sapona to work off South Bimini.

Hemingway: what is documented

Ernest Hemingway fished Bimini through the middle 1930s from his boat Pilar. His Bimini period is usually given as 1935 to 1937, and that is the range the hotel itself used and the range the wire copy repeated in 2006. He worked on To Have and Have Not, published in 1937, during those summers, and Islands in the Stream, published posthumously in 1970, is set partly on the island.

Beyond that, care is needed, because the Bimini Hemingway is one of the most heavily embroidered parts of his biography and the hotel had a commercial interest in the embroidery.

• Room No. 1. The Associated Press reported in January 2006 that the hotel “advertised room No. 1 as the place where Hemingway worked on To Have and Have Not.” That is the hotel's advertising claim, accurately reported as such by the wire. It is not the same as documentary evidence that the novel was drafted in that room, and we did not find such evidence.
• The Old Man and the Sea. The 2006 wire copy carried the hedged line that the novel “was said to be inspired by his fishing exploits in the Bahamas and Cuba.” That hedge has since hardened, in a good deal of travel writing, into a claim that Hemingway wrote the book on Bimini. He did not. The Nobel Foundation's own biographical note dates The Old Man and the Sea to 1952 — fifteen years after his last Bimini summer — and it is set off Cuba.
• The IGFA. Hemingway is often described as a founder of the International Game Fish Association. The IGFA's own account dates its founding to 1939, at the American Museum of Natural History, two years after his Bimini years ended. Sport Fishing is explicit that the founder was Michael Lerner, who fished Bimini alongside Hemingway. Hemingway's involvement with the organisation is real; the word “founder” is not ours to use.
• Where he actually slept. Sources describing him as a guest of the Compleat Angler from 1935 to 1937 are numerous and consistent, and Sport Fishing refers to a room in the hotel kept as “the Hemingway Room.” We have not traced that back to a primary document, and the hotel opened in the same year he first arrived, so the overlap is tight. Treat the association as well attested and the specifics as unverified.

What was on the walls

The reason the fire mattered beyond the building is that the Compleat Angler had become an unplanned archive. Frommer's described the collection, in a page captured by the Internet Archive in February 2007, as a museum of Hemingway memorabilia — prints and writings covering his time on the island, displayed in the downstairs sitting room, with a library of his books.

It was not only Hemingway. Contemporary accounts of the loss are consistent that the walls carried seventy years of Bimini's own record: photographs and press cuttings from hundreds of fishing tournaments, licence plates, notes and mementoes left by visiting anglers and celebrities. Bimini's chief councillor, Natasha Bullard-Rolle, told the Associated Press that what burned included books signed by Hemingway, original photographs, and a replica of his boat assembled in his memory after his death in 1961. David Kresge, author of a Bimini guide, toldSoundings: “All that stuff is lost forever.”

The fire, 13 January 2006

The fire began shortly after 4am on Friday 13 January 2006 and levelled the wooden building. Authorities said ten staff and one guest were inside. The owner, Julian Brown, woke the guest and got him out. The guest, Nicholas Rademaker, described being roused and told to leave a building that was already going up. Brown went back in to fight the fire and did not come out.

On the day itself he was reported as presumed dead: the island's volunteer fire brigade had not found his remains, and the Associated Press wire and the AP photograph caption filed from the scene both said so. Human remains believed to be his were recovered over the following weekend, reported by the Freeport News and carried on by the fishing press. There were no other casualties.

Obie Wilchcombe, then the member of parliament for Bimini and the Bahamas minister of tourism, flew in from Nassau and told the AP: “The whole thing is gone, there is nothing left.” Bullard-Rolle said: “It's hard, it's a tremendous pain to bear.”

It was the second severe loss on a small island inside a month. On 19 December 2005 a Chalk's Ocean Airways seaplane bound for Bimini went into the sea in Miami's shipping channel; the AP report of the fire noted that eleven of the twenty people killed were Bimini residents.

The site since

The hotel was not rebuilt. The most specific recent description we found of the site is from Bob Rountree, writing for Florida Rambler on 1 November 2024, who reported that a makeshift stage now stands where the Compleat Angler was, used most nights for live music by and for local people. Nobody from this project has stood on the site, and we treat that as a single dated secondary account rather than a confirmed fact about the plot's condition today.

Alice Town continues to carry the island's older tourism infrastructure, including the Bimini Big Game Club, which predates the Compleat Angler's destruction by decades and remains the other building most associated with the island's big-game fishing history. The rest of the accommodation on North and South Bimini is listed at our stay directory.

Note on the broken citation

This section exists for anyone auditing sources rather than reading about the hotel.

The English Wikipedia article on Bimini attributes the fire to a bare Frommer's URL,frommers.com/destinations/bimini/0263010029.html, labelled “Frommers Guides: Bimini-Fire Guts Hemingway's Favorite Bar,” with no archive parameter. Requested on 12 August 2026, that URL returns a chain of 301 redirects ending at the genericfrommers.com/destinations/bimini/ page, which contains nothing about the hotel or the fire. It is a soft 404: the citation resolves, but not to the cited content.

The URL is well covered by the Internet Archive, with captures running from 2002 to at least 2011. We read the captures of 11 February 2007 and 7 June 2011. Neither describes the fire: the 2007 capture still describes the Compleat Angler and its Hemingway museum as operating, thirteen months after the building burned, and by the 2011 capture the hotel has simply been dropped from the page. Those two captures are therefore useful evidence for what the hotel contained, and are not evidence for the fire. We did not read every capture in the range, so we cannot rule out that some other version of the page carried the fire report.

The three contemporaneous reports listed below do carry it, with named officials, and are the appropriate sources for the event.

Facts on this page were last checked against the sources below on 12 August 2026.