After the first newspaper articles recording the legend of Oak Island began to appear in Nova Scotia newspapers in the 1860s—or rather, perhaps because of them—interest in digging for treasure on Oak Island renewed. In 1861, another treasure company, The Oak Island Association, invested in the hunt. They made an effort to re-excavate the original Money Pit as well as to dig new shafts. During the course of their work, multiple wooden platforms they’d constructed collapsed, filling the bottom of the Money Pit with ever more lumber that later digs would encounter and believe was sign of some treasure chamber or chests. During the first year of The Oak Island Association efforts, the diggings claimed their first known victim when a boiler on a pump engine exploded, killing one treasure hunter. Still they worked on, attempting to dig down from the beach to cut off the theoretical flood tunnel, but failing, since, as was thoroughly discussed in the previous installment of this series, there is no flood tunnel. After that company dissolved in failure, another formed in 1866, The Halifax Company, and again failed to shut the nonexistent flood tunnels and found nothing but wood in the original shaft, surely just pieces of the some 10,000 board feet of lumber estimated to have fallen in during previous digs. The lure of the legend was dormant then for a time, but in the late 1890s, it returned when a new group of treasure hunters descended on the island. This group used a boring apparatus once more, and claimed to have brought up a piece of sheepskin parchment with the letters “vi” visible on it, written supposedly in India ink, a tantalizing find that would seem to indicate something old buried down below. Beyond this supposed find, however, no sign of a treasure was turned up. Instead The Halifax Company turned its efforts to proving the existence of a flood tunnel by pouring red dye into the pit, after which they found indications of the dye off a few different beaches. In reality, if this even occurred, they had only unwittingly disproven the claim about a flood tunnel from Smith’s Cove and proven that the diggings were flooded by a natural watercourse, through which the dye had been dispersed not just at the cove but into all the surrounding waters. This operation too resulted in the tragic death of one man, who fell into a shaft, and like all the others, ended in failure. In 1909, another group, which included Franklin D. Roosevelt among them, tried to find treasure on the island, and the endeavors of this expedition, which called itself The Old Gold Salvage Group, sounding kind of like a cash-for-gold outfit with a bad cable TV commercial, would later be recorded in a Collier’s Magazine article written by H.L. Bowdoin, a leader of the group. According to Bowdoin, he had seen the supposed inscribed stone and believed it had never been inscribed, and he had seen the scrap of parchment and believed it had not been brought up in the previous diggings. It would have been impossible, he said, for an auger to bring up parchment or even links of chain, for that matter, through 120 feet of water.  Despite the fact that still nothing was found, and a leader of the 1909 diggings even came out in a national magazine to assert that “there is not, and never was, a buried treasure on Oak Island,” still the legend lured in others, and FDR was not the only well-known person to have taken an interest. Movie stars Erroll Flynn and John Wayne would each be involved in organizing or funding a treasure hunting operation on the island. Mostly, though, the digs were spearheaded by true believers, self-styled treasure hunters who abandoned their lives and careers after reading a fascinating article in the press about the island, thereafter dedicating themselves to finding the buried treasure there, often buying land on the island and moving there, making it the whole of their life’s work. After a 1928 article, two such men, William Chappell and Gilbert Hedden, came to live and work tirelessly on the island during the 1930s. They found nothing but a couple of axes and picks that were likely only further debris from previous digs. In the 1950s and ‘60s, it was the Restall family, whose efforts were described in the Reader’s Digest article that captured the imaginations of so many, and they truly gave their lives over to the obsession, for Robert Restall, his 18-year-old son, and two others perished in a shaft after the release of poisonous hydrogen sulfide fumes. There was nothing supernatural about it. The release of poisonous gasses happens when digging deeply underground. This was the purpose of the famous “canary in the coalmine,” to warn miners of such imminent dangers. Nevertheless, despite the commonplace nature of the danger, this tragedy spawned a further legend, that the treasure on Oak Island was cursed.

After the Reader’s Digest article appeared and the legend was spread to a wide audience, a number of later treasure hunters appeared, moving to the island and spending the better part of their lives doing nothing more than digging or even just poking around looking for things on the surface that they imagined to be signs for where they should dig. That’s right. By the later 20th century, people didn’t even know where they should dig anymore. So many boreholes had been dug on the island that the original money pit’s location had been lost. One such treasure hunter drawn to the island in the 1960s was Fred Nolan, and another was Dan Blankenship, who felt compelled to leave his life behind in Florida and run off to dig for treasure all his life. Both of these treasure hunters would leave their mark on the legend, but unsurprisingly, neither would find treasure. Blankenship managed to find U-shaped wooden structure offshore of Smith’s Cove, which he believed was part of the flood tunnel structure, but which was more likely part of the salt cooking operation it’s now thought that fishermen conducted on the island. As for Nolan, his lasting contribution was Nolan’s Cross, a series of boulders that he thought formed a cross if one connected the dots. Thinking it an “X marks the spot” situation, he dug beneath the center and found a rock that looked vaguely facelike, which he imagined had been carved, but which really just looks like a boulder. According to legend, the cross formed by the boulders Nola found was perfectly symmetrical, though if you look at the diagrams that they use even on shows like the History Channel program, it’s manifestly cockeyed. The fact is that a land survey in 1937 marked numerous boulders and piles of stone on the island. True believers have had to continually expand Nolan’s Cross, suggesting it was a triangle or some other shape. With so many boulders on the island, it has now become a kabbalistic tree of life in the eyes of some, with some 10 or 11 rocks they think were purposely placed there. Even as late as 2010, Dan Blankenship was finding more supposed landmarks and showing them to CBC reporters. The CBC long took an especial interest in Dan Blankenship. Before the History Channel program, he was certainly the most media savvy proponent of treasure on the island. Back in the 90s, he was telling them about a new hole he intended to dig if he could get the financing, swearing it would be his last effort. It wasn’t. And before that, in 1970, only five years after he’d come to the island, he got the CBC to come out and put a camera down one shaft he was working on, into muddy waters, and in the murky and indiscernible footage that came back, he swore you could see not just tools like picks, but also treasure chests, and even the skeletal hand of some human remains. Looking at the grainy video today, all that can be seen are vague mud covered shapes, and a piece of wood that is likely just debris that had fallen into the diggings. Every such find is easily explained as their imaginations running away with them, thinking “maybe these rocks line up,” “does that boulder look like a face?,” and “pause! Enhance! Is that a treasure chest in this completely indiscernible film footage?”

Dan Blankenship, at work on the island.

Now, since the premiere of the History Channel program in 2014, we have the Lagina Brothers, Rick and Marty, a retired postal worker and former petroleum engineer, respectively, who like so many before them were inspired as children by the Reader’s Digest story on Oak Island. Also like so many before them, they sought some investment, figuring out a way to get paid even if they didn’t find any treasure. Taking Blankenship’s lead, though, they saw the interest that the media and the public would take in their project, so rather than financers seeking a stake in the treasure, they pitched a television program that would keep them in money so long as they could keep the dig going and keep up viewer interest with consistent tantalizing finds. In fact, the money they would make from their reality TV program would taper and cease if they were ever to actually find the treasure. After a while, if one were to commit the masochistic act of actually watching it, it’s very clear that those involved are just stringing the viewer along. Each season they start focusing on some other geographical feature of the island. It’s no longer about the Money Pit and the flood tunnels to the beach. Now it’s about the stone landmarks, and a swamp that is vaguely triangular in shape, and a field of boulders that is in a “quadrilateral” shape. Of course, a quadrilateral is not a regular shape; it’s an odd shape with four sides, but they clearly want to keep with their theme of finding imaginary geometrical patterns on the island. Beyond just rocks and swamps, they have turned up a few genuine artifacts. They discovered a jeweled brooch, a silver ring, a lead cross, a silver button, iron blacksmith tools, and a few coins. However, all of these were found on the surface, not hundreds of feet below ground. They are no more impressive than the findings of many a metal detectorist. There have been claims about the dating of these objects, that the button and ring are from the 18th century, the blacksmith tools dated to the 14th century, and that one of the coins was a Roman coin. Even if these were all true, it must be remembered that the island had been inhabited for centuries, and the objects could have been brought to the island at any time. What many seem not to realize is that for any such artifacts to be meaningful, they would have to be uncovered in an undisturbed archaeological site, by archaeologists who carefully document the context of the find. Without such scientific method, an artifact is just something that might have been brought to Oak Island as a hoax.

A perfect example of this occurred in 2015, when it was claimed that a fisherman had discovered a Roman sword, not on, but near Oak Island, while out scalloping. It was claimed that this fishermen had found the sword years earlier and fearing some legal reprisal for having illegally recovered a historical artifact, had been secretly keeping it, until he decided to bring it to the producers of the History Channel’s Oak Island program. And one odd character who had appeared on the program previously, J. Hutton Pulitzer, who calls himself a “Treasure Force Commander” and wears a wannabe Indiana Jones outfit, vouched for the sword, saying he had personally confirmed its authenticity with scientific testing. If such a find were true, it was argued that it proved claims about ancient Roman mariners having crossed the Atlantic in antiquity, reaching the shores of the Americas. But as I discussed in my previous series, there have been a few hoaxes perpetrated as evidence of ancient Roman contact with the Americas, including the Tucson artifacts and the fake Roman amphorae sunk in a bay near Rio de Janeiro. And even if the sword were authentic, the lack of provenance, the lack of evidence regarding the context in which it was found, means that it could just be an authentic artifact brought to Oak Island in the modern day. However, the strange design of the sword, which featured a carved Hercules figure as its handle, which would be a very awkward handle indeed, put skeptics on guard, and a few began to write about this, including Jason Colavito and archaeologist Andy White, who is known for exposing pseudoarchaeology. As “swordgate,” as the scandal was thereafter dubbed, unfolded, more and more such swords, struck from the same mold, were brought to light, and analysis of these swords, as well as the one supposedly found near Oak Island, proved they were nothing but modern souvenirs, produced to be sold to tourists outside Pompeii, and that the molds were used to forge numerous other fake Hercules swords. But Commander J. Hutton Pulitzer would not relent. Though even the History Channel program declared it a modern object, he suggested that there was some cover-up. He rallied his social media followers to harass skeptics who questioned him. He threatened legal action against his debunkers and encouraged conspiracy theories that they weren’t even real people. Naturally, Pulitzer himself became a figure of interest to these and other skeptics. His name is actually Jeffry Philyaw, a former marketing guy who rebranded himself numerous times, first as an inventor, next as an entrepreneur, then as a treasure hunter, and most recently as an election integrity expert. His invention, the CueCat, a cat-shaped handheld device for scanning barcodes that would pull up webpages, had been a widely ridiculed failure and the reason for changing his name. His entrepreneurial venture was selling bottled rainwater and was likewise a failure. And after his ignominious treasure hunting career, he most recently appeared in the public eye making false claims about hacking the Georgia voting system, supporting former president Trump’s lies about election fraud. To the History Channel’s credit, they declared the sword modern, but Pulitzer’s presence on the program before the sword’s appearance itself demonstrates the program’s lack of credibility, as well as how cranks are drawn to the legend of Oak Island, fully prepared to endorse hoaxes in order to support their own wild theories.

The fake Roman sword found near Oak Island.

Certainly the myths and crank notions that some try to attach to the Oak Island legend are many. Though the History Channel program was honest enough to admit that J. Hutton Pulitzer’s Roman sword was a fake, they also heavily featured his baseless speculation that it was the Ark of the Covenant buried in the Money Pit. And while Pulitzer favored the notion that ancient mariners had brought this treasure across the Atlantic from the Holy Land, others have claimed that later mariners did the same, more specifically that the… dun dun dunnnn! Knights Templar brought treasure they had unearthed from the Temple Mount across the ocean to Oak Island. Now I’ve erected some scaffolding here, so I need not refute the entirety of this legend. In the previous series I already examined, in detail, the idea of Templar persistence after their order’s suppression as well as claims about escape from France with treasure, or escape to Scotland, and their supposed connection with Henry Sinclair, whom some speculate crossed the Atlantic. None of it is convincingly supported, not their persistence, nor their escape with treasure, nor any presence in Scotland, nor any connection with Sinclair, and neither is there any support for the assertion that Henry Sinclair undertook a trans-Atlantic voyage. In a recent patron exclusive, I further examined and refuted unsupported claims that Templars learned of a star called Merica that ancient mariners had recorded would lead them to a land called La Merica. It’s all based on sources that were imaginary, or at least that we have no reason to believe really existed, appearing only in the breathless fantasies of pseudohistorians. And yet the History Channel’s Oak Island program promoted these myths time and time again. The boulders Fred Nolan thought were arranged in a cross? Must be a Templar cross. The lead crucifix found on the island? Another Templar cross, though it is not the flared Templar cross symbol they wore on there mantles, and thus is just a cross. On one old and weathered coin they found that is too beaten to be identified by numismatists they claim can be discerned a Templar cross, and it can sort of be seen, I think. But this does not make it a Templar coin, as they claim. In fact, Templars did not mint their own coins. Any coins closely associated with their order in the Holy Land would have been issued in the name of the King of Jerusalem, not in the name of their religious order. And the simple fact is that the cross seen on the coin, which is so often called the “Templar cross” is actually just the cross patée, or “footed cross,” in that its arms were narrower in the center and curved out to broad ends. It is perhaps better known today as the Iron Cross of the German Empire. This cross or a variation of it, like the footed cross potent, appeared on numerous coins, including Spanish and Portuguese coins. So even if that is a footed cross on the coin found on Oak Island, it’s really only of interest to rare historical coin collectors, not Templar historians.

Equally unsupported are the claims of Templar infiltration of Freemasonry. It is a striking parallel to the later unsupported conspiracy claims about the Bavarian Illuminati infiltrating Freemasonry, except for the very important fact that Freemasonry as we know it did not exist at the time of the Templar order’s dissolution. Imagined connections between Templars and Scotland have led to speculation about the Sottish Rite of Freemasonry being Templars in disguise, though it must be remembered that Templars were comprised mostly of French-speaking soldiers, who certainly would have stuck out in medieval Scotland, and the lodges of speculative Freemasonry, the kind we think of today with their odd rituals and leisurely gentlemen memberships, didn’t appear until four hundred years after the Templars were suppressed, in London, not Scotland. The Scottish brand of Freemasonry would only appear some twenty years later, as close as we can reckon based on the first mentions of it. It spread because of how popular Fremasonry became in that era. But conspiracists will say Nova Scotia means “New Scotland,” so it must be Masonic, though Scotland is not synonymous with Masonic. And they’ll say that since the early Nova Scotia councilmen were Masons, this shows that Nova Scotia had a Masonic government, but the fact is that many civic-minded men of that era were in Masonic lodges as it was simply de reigueur. As for Oak Island, conspiracists point to the supposed inscribed code on the stone found in the pit, which as I’ve said may never have existed or if it did may not have even been inscribed, and claim it may have been a Masonic code. Or they look at the supposed landmarks on the island for geometrical patterns they can discern as Masonic. Interestingly, skeptics too see a Masonic connection here, but not one that suggests there really is anything buried on Oak Island. Renowned skeptic Joe Nickell, examining the story of the Money Pit’s discovery as it appeared in 1860s newspaper accounts, has pointed out that multiple aspects of the tale, the presence of the three boys seeing signs and discovering the hiding place, matches in key regards with the Masonic allegory of the Secret Vault, in which three sojourners discover a secret crypt into which King Solomon had deposited secret wisdom, an allegory used in the initiation ritual into the Royal Arch degree of Freemasonry, typically granted to three initiates at a time. Nickell’s point, of course, is that the whole story might have been a winking prank, meant only to be understood by other Masons reading the newspaper, perhaps indicating only that McInnis, Vaughn, and Smith had received the Royal Arch degree. Despite his conclusions, though, Nickell’s observations only pour fuel on the fire of conspiracism, as theorists suggest that these parallels only mean Masons are responsible for hiding some kind of treasure on the island.

One such coin featuring a cross patée, a denier, typically called a “Crusader coin,” depicting King Bohemond III of Antioch on the opposite side, and having no particular connection to the Knights Templar, who were just one of many groups of Crusader knights.

There is no shortage of theories regarding who buried something on Oak Island and what that something is. One version was that the British had hidden their soldiers’ payroll there during the revolution, a theory that can be superficially supported whenever some old colonial era button turns up. Dan Blankenship liked the rather mundane notion that some rogue Spaniards had stashed some of their loot before heading home, thinking to keep for themselves some of the treasure meant for royal coffers. Of course, when a Spanish coin turned up, it was claimed as evidence for this theory. According to some reports, Franklin Roosevelts group favored the idea that Marie Antoinette’s jewels had been buried on the island, smuggled out of Versailles by a lady-in-waiting, according to an apocryphal story. So when a brooch turned up on the island, it is touted as proof of this theory. One really outrageous theory is that the original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays await discovery deep beneath Oak Island, and the bit of parchment supposedly—but not really—discovered underground was confirmation of it. This ties in with claims about the authorship of Shakespeare and the idea that his plays were actually written by polymath Francis Bacon. Simple logic would tell us it would be absurd for such lengths to be taken to hide manuscripts of some comedies and dramas, even if they were originals that somehow revealed their true authorship, because who would have cared that much about it? But conspiracists bend over backward, suggesting that Francis was a Rosicrucian, that he wrote codes and hints into Shakespeare’s plays, that these clues lead to Oak Island, on which he buried not his plays but rather other ancient documents and manuscripts of great importance, and that he devised the cipher on the inscribed stone himself.  But remember, there is no evidence that any cipher ever really was inscribed on the stone, as extant drawings of it appear to be fake. Also recall that the piece of parchment supposedly turned up probably never was. H.L. Bowdoin, in his Collier’s Magazine piece, after stating that no auger could pull up a scrap of parchment through 120 feet of water, also says that the scrap of parchment was not found at first, when soil samples were examined, but only later, implying it may have been planted as a hoax. While all of these spiraling conspiracies and tall tales are manifestly incredible, we must remember that the legend of Oak Island has always relied on a fantastical story. It all started with the original tall tale of buried pirate treasure, specifically the treasure of Captain Kidd.

The legend of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure animated many a treasure hunter in the New England area for more than a century. Ironically, as more and more has been learned about Kidd, it has become clearer that Kidd did not bury vast caches of looted money, as had long been thought. William Kidd was a character shrouded in myth for a very long time. Though he started as a privateer and pirate hunter, he became viewed by many as a vicious pirate and murderer himself, leading eventually to his trial and execution. But he may have received a bad rap. As a young man he had apprenticed aboard pirate ships crewed by both Englishmen, like himself, and Frenchmen, and after participating in a mutiny, he became a ship captain. But despite whatever piratical adventures he was involved with in his youth, he made his name fighting against the French in the Nine Years War, not only in the Caribbean but also off the coasts of New England. He was an active member of society in New York City, helping to finance the building of Trinity Church and marrying a wealthy widow. In 1695, he left on his final voyage, to hunt pirates and French warships under a letter of marque signed by King William III of England, but almost immediately he began to earn a bad reputation. When his ship encountered a Navy yacht, his crew didn’t salute them but rather slapped their backsides instead, and in retaliation, the Navy pressed a large number of his crew into service, even though this was illegal since his letter of marque excluded them from impressment. Indeed, this would not be the first time that the Royal Navy would attempt to force his crewmen into service, and at a later date, Captain Kidd resolved the matter by promising to deliver the men but leaving port in the middle of the night. Thus among the Royal Navy, he began early in his final voyage to take on the reputation of a pirate. Kidd’s voyage, which would take his ship all the way around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean, where pirate ships preyed on the rich merchant vessels of the Mughal Empire, would be troubled by disease and rumblings of mutiny. Having not encountered any prizes they could legally take, one gunner urged Kidd to attack a Dutch ship, which would have been illegal. When Kidd refused, the sailor reportedly cursed him and made some mutinous remarks, whereupon Kidd struck him on the head with a bucket. The sailor died the next day, and this incident would later come back to haunt Kidd.

A depiction of Captain Kidd as a gentleman privateer, aboard his ship in New York harbor.

Despite what later legends would claim, Captain William Kidd was not very successful in taking prizes during his voyages in the Indian Ocean, but he did take a couple of merchant ships, and he took them legally, for they sailed under the protection of the French, and Kidd kept the sea pass documents to prove it. However, because the captain of one ship was English, and because the cargo of another belonged to an official in the Mughal court, and because the political tides had turned against Kidd back in England, he was officially declared a pirate, and English men-of-war were dispatched to hunt him down. In 1698, the Piracy Act kicked off a campaign to arrest and prosecute pirates, but it also presented the possibility of a royal pardon to pirates who turned themselves in. However, Captain Kidd was explicitly excluded, so when it became clear that he had no choice but to turn himself in, he felt he had to take precautions, hiding one of his prizes and burying his loot. This is the origin of the buried treasure legend. While it’s true that Captain Kidd did bury some of his looted goods ahead of his arrest, the legends have inflated how much he buried and what he buried. In truth, the bulk of what would be considered treasure that he took from his meager prizes was composed of sugar, opium, and fabrics like silk, not gold and silver. And it is even known where he buried it: on Gardiner’s Island, near Long Island. This cache was soon afterward found and taken to England as evidence in his trial. Kidd found that even his former allies had turned against him, as he had become an embarrassment. At his trial, he was surprised to find he was charged with the murder of his crewman with a bucket, as ship captains were typically granted much leeway regarding the discipline of crewmen and mutineers. And when it was asserted that his capture of a certain ship was an act of piracy, he discovered that his evidence, the sea passes that proved the ship was sailing under French protection, had been conveniently lost. Kidd was hanged, twice because the first time didn’t do the trick, and afterward his corpse was gibbeted, hung in a cage over the River Thames as a warning to pirates. Throughout the 19th century, though, legend of his buried treasure would continue to animate many treasure hunters and serve as the foundation for many buried treasure legends, including the earliest claims about Oak Island. In the 20th century, though, the documentation that could have exonerated Kidd was discovered, showing he was more privateer and pirate hunter than pirate, and in 2007, the wreckage of the merchant ship he had hidden away was discovered near a small island off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Underwater archaeologists assert that there is no sign that the wreck had previously been looted, and yet there was also no treasure aboard her beyond historical artifacts, like a cannon. That’s because Kidd was likely not so rich in treasure as legend would claim, and most everything he hid away was likely soon after recovered, if not by authorities, as has been asserted, then by the pirates who helped him bury it.

In the absence of fact, however, legend flourishes, and there are always characters who will take advantage of that. With the rumors of Captain Kidd’s treasure so popular, a new class of treasure-hunting mystics arose in New England and all up the North Atlantic coast, including in Nova Scotia. These men presented themselves as magicians, or rather, seers. Some of the earliest of them claimed to be able to find buried treasure with dowsing rods. These are the witch hazel rods often said to be capable of finding the location of water underground. So-called “rodsmen” would help farmers find the best spot to dig a well, and before long, they were also helping to find buried treasure. However, according to these mystics, the treasure Captain Kidd or Blackbeard or whoever had left behind was not so easily obtained. Actually, these treasures were cursed, they claimed, guarded by the spirits of dead pirates, or perhaps demons or witches or other spirit guardians, and if certain mystical rites were not followed exactly, such as the drawing of magic circles and symbols around the site, and the sacrifice of an animal offering—if these and other requirements were not met, the treasure would actually be spirited away, moved underground to some other location. People really believed this nonsense, and we know it because there exists a wealth of documentation, much of it in the form of legal proceedings, as these treasure hunters were considered disorderly persons, scamming those who helped them dig. Many of these treasure hunters were known counterfeiters; they would bury their bogus moneys and pretend to find it as a form of money laundering. But once you had earned a reputation, by this or some other means, of being able to find buried money, you no longer needed to actually find anything. The way the scam worked was you would collect investment funds, get sacrificial livestock donated that you could afterward use for meat, and collect actual money from those whom you promised a stake in the treasure. Then you would make claims about magic circles and digging only at night, and declare that no one must utter a word within the circle, lest it wake the treasure’s guardian. Then all they had to do was wait until some impatient digger broke the rule, voicing their frustration, or until the morning light came, and they could claim the dig had failed and the guardian had whisked their treasure away. This may seem absurd, but it’s true. We know it’s true because of documentation preserved specifically because it is of interest to Mormon scholars. You see, Joseph Smith, who would later go on to found Mormonism, used to be one of these treasure hunting scammers. He came from a family of rodsmen, and eventually he would claim to be in possession of a seer stone, a little rock that showed him where buried treasure was. Joseph Smith too would be prosecuted for his treasure hunting frauds, and eventually, he would make a different claim, that he had discovered inscribed gold plates and that his seer stone allowed him to translate them, thereby composing the Book of Mormon and transitioning from treasure-hunter to prophet.

The tools of Joseph Smith’s mystical treasure hunting trade, including drawings of magic circles and a ceremonial dagger used in his treasure hunts.

What does this have to do with Oak Island, you might be asking? Think it through, and you’ll see that it leads us to the most logical and rational explanation for what’s really behind the legend of a cursed treasure on Oak Island. Like many of the treasures that con men claimed to be leading digs to find, it started as a claim about pirate treasure, even specifically Kidd’s treasure. The legends about Captain Kidd’s treasure would inspire many a popular fictional story, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” and the original stories about the treasure’s discovery, about three boys finding signs of buried treasure on an island haunted by pirate ghosts, bear a suspicious likeness to these popular tales, which were often about children and featured the ghosts of pirates. Likewise, treasure hunting scammers typically kept stringing their diggers and investors along by pointing to any little thing they might find in their diggings, like a piece of wood or an odd stone, claiming it was a sign or “mark” that they were close to the treasure or on the right path. Joseph Smith’s seer stone itself was a stone that was turned up in a well digging that he claimed had supernatural faculties. And likewise, the tales of the tackle block in the tree, the depression on the ground, the pick marks in the pit, the wooden platforms, the inscribed stone…there is no evidence that these existed, but they are just the sorts of telltale marks that treasure-hunter scammers would claim. And they would always be just about to get the treasure when something would go wrong and the guardian would prevent their discovery. Think of the claims about being just near the treasure chest when the flood tunnel filled the pit. Indeed, this is what has made the Oak Island legend have lasting power. Rather than a story of demons and spirits guarding buried treasure, it’s the equally false claim that a flood tunnel booby trap is what prevents the treasure from being recovered. This lends the tale more believability in the modern world, but at its heart, the scam is the same. Go back to the original 1860s newspaper articles, and specifically The Oak Island Folly, and we see that it’s a story of investors losing money in the venture because the promised treasure is never found. Yes, this is what makes the name “The Money Pit” so ironic, because it’s just a sinkhole into which people throw their money and never get anything back, but when we start to see that this is by design, it takes on ever starker meaning. The Onslow Company. What was that but a treasure dig based on a false claim, in which Simeon Lynds, the Nova Scotian who it was said organized it, was either scammed himself or was the scammer of his investors. And the same can be said of the Truro syndicate later and perhaps the Oak Island Association and the Halifax Company. Each dig coming oh so close, supposedly, to getting that treasure, but only uncovering supposed signs of it—the platforms, the inscribed stone, the gold links, the parchment scraps—only to be stymied by the guardian of the treasure, the flood tunnel. But where they had failed, perhaps the next company would succeed! And you could have a share of the treasure too for just a small investment in the operation.

So it begins to look like, at its heart, it was only ever a kind of Ponzi scheme. As time went on, even the organizers may have been true believers and dupes of the legend, but it is still only a scam, and the presence of known scammers like J. Hutton Pulitzer attests to this fact.  Today, the most recent group of investors to be scammed have been the audience, who invested their time and imagination in the History Channel program. I have no doubt that History Channel programmers, and perhaps even the Lagina brothers themselves, did not believe that a treasure would be found on the island, but they still sold it to viewers every week and enjoyed the financial rewards it brought  for 11 seasons. Just like the treasure con men of yore, they pointed to every rock and piece of wood as a sure sign they were on to something, and they filled their investors’ heads with all kinds of fanciful stories of treasure, and each season, each episode, they left on a cliffhanger, pretending they were right on top of that treasure, tune in next week to see them finally dig it up. It’s an age-old scam, and it works, so long as no one really thinks too hard on it. If one does, as we’ve seen, there are countless ways the legend falls apart, but the most fundamental problem, lying at the bottom of the Money Pit like bedrock, is the simple flaw in the logic of the entire conceit. If treasure of any sort were buried on Oak Island, first, it would not have been so elaborately buried. This has been pointed out already, that the excavation of slender, narrow flood tunnels from Smith’s Cove to the Money Pit would have required moving all the earth between the cove and the pit. Perhaps such a narrow channel could have been dug by a small burrowing animal, but not humans with crude hand tools. And the cove was not even the closest shore to the pit, so it would not have made sense to tunnel or drill horizontally in that direction. Not to mention what a feat it would have been to dig so deeply and set up the wooden platforms. We must remember that even according to the legend, diggers with hand tools could only get so far before they had to rely on horse-driven augers to drill more deeply. And today they rely on modern coring drills. Are we really to believe that 16th century seamen or ancient mariners were able to accomplish this without such equipment? Beyond that, why would they need to bury their treasure so deeply and elaborately on a deserted island? This is never adequately explained. Why not just bury their chests 20 feet down, as would be perfectly sufficient to hide anything. Nor is it ever explained why they did not return for their treasure. Surely if they took such efforts to hide it they would have come back for it, even if one or several of them had died or was arrested or was otherwise detained. Surely a recovery effort would have been mounted within the lifetimes of those who had buried treasure there. And let’s imagine what that recovery would look like. If it were true that the treasure was somehow buried so deeply below ground that modern equipment was needed to get to it, and whenever you came near it a booby trap filled the diggings with water, preventing any access to it, then how could they have hoped to recover it themselves? If the legend is to be believed, then treasure was not buried on the island, it was destroyed there, made impossible to recover.

There is a term, coined by skeptic Mark Hoofnagle, called “crank magnetism.” It is the idea that belief in one fringe idea, like pseudoscience, conspiracy speculation, or pseudohistory, leads to belief in others, because crank ideas attract each other. Dr. Hoofnagle uses this concept when describing denialism, for example, which often must resort to claims of conspiracy in order to make its claims. But we see this phenomenon all over the place. It’s why QAnon has exploded into a dozen conspiratorial directions, and why believers in the lost Tartarian Empire have been led inevitably to belief in giants. It’s why the Knights Templar and Atlantis always pop up, as we have seen again and again. It’s no mystery, then, why the old legend of Oak Island, a pretty simple pirate treasure story likely used to dupe unsuspecting investors into a treasure hunting scheme, has become so insanely vast in its conspiratorial implications, with ancient Roman contact with the Americas, hidden religious artifacts, Templars and Rosicrucians and Masons all figuring into its legend. The cult of treasure hunting in old New England always relied on fantastical ideas to fire the imaginations of those who would pay to search for treasure. This tendency of mystics claiming in this region to be capable of supernatural insight would lead to a great many other dubious beliefs. Joseph Smith parlayed it into an extremely successful modern religion. And not far from where Smith got his start, the Fox Sisters would pull off something very similar, claiming through ritual and paranormal faculties to be able to interact with the spirits of the dead, and thereby fooling the world into the very popular belief in spiritualism. When viewed in this perspective, the belief in a cursed treasure has led, in the past, through crank magnetism, to a variety of massive frauds and delusions. It should be no great surprise, then, that one treasure fraud, that of buried treasure on Oak Island, would survive the old scams, and through the accretion of numerous complementary legends and myths, promoted on bad cable reality TV and in the darker corners of the internet where conspiracy delusion and pseudohistory thrive, would become a modern myth whose perceived mystery many have devoted and lost their lives to solving.

Further Reading

Bowdoin, H. L. “Solving the Mystery of Oak Island.” Colliers, vol. 47, no. 22, 19 Aug. 1911, pp. 19-20.

Joltes, Richard. “History, Hoax, and Hype: The Oak Island Legend.” Critical Enquiry, 2006, www.criticalenquiry.org/oakisland/index.shtml.

White, Andy. “Swordgate” [category]. Andy White Anthropology, https://www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/category/swordgate.

The Oak Island Scheme - Part One: The Legend of the Money Pit

In January 1965, The Rotarian, official magazine of the Rotary Club, published a curious article by one David MacDonald relating a somewhat obscure tale about buried treasure in Nova Scotia, called “The Strange Case of the Money Pit.” In it, he relates a story a little uninhabited island in Mahone Bay called Oak Island, shaped “like a question mark,” said to have formerly been haunted by pirates, and about three children in 1795 who supposedly discovered signs of buried treasure there: a piece of ship’s rigging hanging from a tree above a clearing with a depression in the ground. As they dug up the spot, they found further indications that something was buried there, including wooden platforms every ten feet, and the article showed an illustration, bringing this Money Pit vividly to life. Though the boys failed to reach any treasure in their dig, their story inspired future treasure seekers, and in the early 19th century, a more well-funded excavation renewed their efforts, finding further indications of buried treasure nearly a hundred feet below ground, including a stone that was said to be inscribed with a message indicating that millions of pounds of gold were buried not far below. Before they could reach this promised booty, though, their pit flooded with water, and despite all efforts to bail it out and continue digging, they were sunk, so to speak. Almost fifty years later, some of the surviving boys brought in a syndicate and financed a third dig with more sophisticated machinery, such as a horse-driven auger that would drill down and draw up material it cut through, and during the course of their boring, they claim to have entered some kind of vacuum, like an empty chamber, and then to have drilled through wood and metal, suggesting they had cut into what sounded like loose metal. They believed they had drilled into treasure chests, and as proof, their auger brought up three golden links of a chain. Realizing that their shaft was flooding with salt water and rising and falling with the tide, they searched a nearby beach and found structures they identified as box drains that lined up with their dig site, suggesting that their Money Pit was not just naturally filling with water. No, it was booby-trapped with manmade flood tunnels, and the colorful diagram in the magazine piece illustrated these as well, to give the reader a clear picture of what even the men themselves could not see. Though the syndicate also failed to find their treasure, local fame of the potential find grew, and decade after decade, further attempts were made, each with its further tantalizing discovery to draw treasure-hunters on. One group in the 1890s put red dye into the flooded pit and claimed to have mapped the flood tunnels by finding where the red dye emerged into the sea. During this time, treasure hunters also claimed to have brought up traces of gold and a scrap of parchment bearing India ink through core drilling. Another group that included Franklin D. Roosevelt made a failed attempt to find something there in 1909. Further efforts are described in the article through the 1950s, each group spending tens of thousands of dollars and coming away empty-handed. But David MacDonald had truly struck gold in telling the tale, as his article was condensed and reprinted that month to a wider national audience in Reader’s Digest. After that, it became something of a sensation, appearing in numerous books and tv series about mysteries, and becoming the subject of more than 50 books that focus solely on the Oak Island mystery itself. This was the real treasure to be had, and the History Channel seized it, producing a reality TV program that followed the latest team of treasure diggers to descend on the island, the Nagina brothers. That 2014 program, The Curse of Oak Island, ran for 11 seasons and still has not officially been cancelled, though they too have never turned up any treasure. Surely, though, with this long history of claims and so many publications and docuseries examining and researching the story, there must be something to it, right? …right?

Considering the nature of the stories I tell in this podcast, and the topics I research, I often find myself using the words “legend” and “myth.” Sometimes it may seem that I use them interchangeably, but there are in fact important differences in their use. Both are used to refer to traditional stories or popular beliefs that have developed about someone or something. Additionally, both myths and legends are typically viewed by those who transmit them as ostensibly historical; they are traditions recounting things that supposedly really happened in the past, even when they may seem manifestly fictional or fantastical, as is the case with most ancient myths. While there is an alternative definition of a myth as “an unfounded or false notion,” a sense in which I also often use the term, this does not mean that all ancient mythology is entirely false or fictional, as many may have some factual basis, which I mentioned in the previous episode with regard to the person to whom King Arthur myths may refer. However, because the word “legend” more specifically denotes a story “regarded as historical although not verifiable,” we might more accurately refer to Arthurian legend, rather than myth. One further connotation, however, is that myths refer to more ancient stories of this kind, whereas legends are “of recent origin,” making them kind of myths in the making. When it comes to the story passed down to us about Oak Island, then, while I am tempted to call it a myth because elements of it have been credibly debunked and because the weight of evidence indicates that the idea there is even a treasure there is false, nevertheless, because it is of relatively recent origin and some parts of it may not be entirely made up, I think calling it a legend is more accurate. Now some listeners may think the 1700s, when the story began with the Money Pit’s discovery, and the indication that its purported treasure must have been buried a century or more before that, makes it old and “historical” enough to consider it myth, but in the grand scheme of things, especially when it comes to myths and legends, that simply wasn’t so very long ago. Less than 250 years have passed since the clearing in the woods was supposedly first identified as the location of buried treasure. Because of the discoveries said to have been made at the pit throughout the 19th century, some listeners may presume that there must be strong enough evidence supporting the claims about the Money Pit that we might move this story from legend into the more rarefied realm of a “historical mystery,” but in that they may be surprised. In reality, there is no historical evidence that any part of the legend occurred as claimed until the mid-19th century. There is a lack of primary source documentation to confirm the story of the site’s discovery and the first several digs. All we have are stories passed down after the fact, repeated without confirmation, and that firmly places this into the realm of legend.

The Reader’s Digest story that transformed a local tale into an enduring legend.

As no treasure has ever been found, and only guesses and fictional stories have been put forward about who supposedly visited this island in the past and buried something there, the start of the story, which me must examine first, is the tale of three boys who discovered something. The names of these boys are given as Daniel McInnes, Anthony Vaughn, and Jack Smith, and already we can find some discrepancies in the spelling of McInnes’s name, sometimes spelled with an “es,” and sometimes with an “is,” sometimes with a “G” as in McGinnis. In MacDonald’s Rotarian article and in other versions of the tale, the boys are said to have paddled over to the island in boats, and there are intimations that the island was entirely uninhabited. Indeed, it appears that legends of phantom lights and ghosts prevent mainlanders from even venturing out there, something that frustrates the boys’ efforts to get help in digging up their pit. The boys are said to have noticed a ship’s pulley on a tree branch. By the time of the Rotarian article, it’s said that this tackle block was on a sawed off branch hanging over a depression in the ground, and an illustration depicts it that way, but in the earliest versions of the story, it’s actually said to have been a “large forked branch” with no indication of the branch having been cut. This shows the way the story has changed through the years. Likewise, most versions say the depression was twelve or fifteen feet, but earliest versions state that it was only seven. Obviously the pulley was seen as a sign that something had been lowered into the ground at that spot, and considering rumors of pirate activity, the three boys got to digging into the clay earth, and it’s said that they even saw the old marks of pickaxes as they dug. At ten feet deep, they struck a platform of aged oak logs; at twenty, they struck a second such platform; and at thirty, a third. They gave up when the ground became too difficult for them to dig with hand tools. Now already, this story contains some red flags. The detail of the pulley seems designed to indicate that a treasure was buried there, but surely if someone were trying to hide a treasure, they wouldn’t leave behind the pulley they used to lower it to mark the spot. Additionally, the detail that they could still see the marks of the original diggers’ pickaxes after the hole had been filled in for perhaps a hundred years must be further embellishment, an image meant to convince an audience that treasure was down there. But we don’t really need to weigh the believability of the tale, because its lack of historical documentation makes it dubious from the outset. There is no record of this event occurring until the first accounts of the story in 1860s newspapers. Historians have attempted to verify the details, and all they’ve been able to confirm just further discredits the tale. A couple of the characters, Daniel McInnis and Anthony Vaughn, did exist, but they were not kids. They were in their thirties. Also, the island was not uninhabited. In fact, McInnis and Vaughn owned property there. And though, according to the legend, these original treasure hunters would also be involved in the next few excavations, having convinced others of what they’d found, it is telling that neither the ship’s pulley nor any part of the oak platforms was preserved as evidence. Already we see that, while elements of it may be accurate, key parts of the transmitted legend are demonstrably false, and this does not bode well for the overall reliability of the tale.

Next came the early 19th century dig, funded by one Simeon Lynds, a wealthy Nova Scotia local who was intrigued by the claims of McInnis and Vaughn, gathered investors, and formed the Onslow Treasure Company. Accounts place this dig in 1803, or was it ’04, or perhaps ’02, ’01? It’s all rather vague, since again, there is no primary source attesting to this event until 60 years later, which is rather surprising since surely such a company, with investors, would have left some kind of paper trail or might have been mentioned in area newspapers at the time of its formation. According to the legend, which again, did not appear for several decades, this company’s efforts supposedly also resulted in some further tantalizing evidence that a treasure was buried below. They continued to find oak platforms every ten feet, and since the claim is that they penetrated all the way to about 98 feet, this means they encountered some seven platforms of oak logs, none of which were ever kept for study and proof. Just imagine, too, if this were true, what kind of an engineering feat is being attributed to pirates or whoever supposedly left these platforms behind. They are said to have dug directly downward more than a hundred feet with, we must assume, only rudimentary tools, and used a single tackle block on a tree branch to lower not just whatever chests are said to be down there, but also each and every oak log used in the platforms. It seems like a lot of strain on that poor pulley. The Onslow Company is said to have further discovered ship’s putty, which sure must have been hard to discern among all that clay earth, as well as charcoal and coconut fiber, this last discovery seeming especially important, since coconut was not native to Oak Island. But yet again, this purported evidence was not preserved except orally, in the legend that would eventually be put down in writing as if it were historical fact.

Especially tantalizing was the reported discovery by the Onslow Company of an inscribed stone tablet at 90 feet. The earliest reports only indicate that a stone with “marks” was found at that depth, but this element of the story has taken on a remarkable life of its own. The legend has it that, just beneath this stone, the Onslow Company diggers drove an iron bar five feet deeper before quitting for the day and felt it strike something wooden. For some reason, rather than assuming it was yet another platform, which he should have come to expect at about that depth, he believed he’d found a treasure chest that he would be able to dig up the very next morning. Why he wouldn’t have just dug it up right then is another unbelievable part of the story. Instead, they all left, and when they returned, the hole was flooded to around the 40-foot level. No amount of bailing managed to lower the water level, so they tried to angle in downward from a second tunnel to the side, hoping to avoid whatever spring they’d opened, but this one too flooded, causing them to eventually call it quits. This flooding of the tunnel, which even sixty years later, in the first known written accounts of the incident, is portrayed as natural, would eventually become a major part of the legend, that the pit had been booby-trapped with “flood tunnels.” More on that later. What’s interesting here is that, after this supposed discovery of chests at 98 feet that the company was prevented from recovering by the flooding, the legend tells us that the stone with strange markings was deciphered, and that its message stated, “10 feet down, two million pounds.” Once again, like the pulley and the platforms and the coconut fiber, seemingly incontrovertible evidence of there being something down that shaft is cited, and once again, there is no proof that it ever existed.

The diagram of the Money Pit as it appeared in the Rotary magazine.

The translator of the marks is cited variously as a “wise man,” or a “professor,” or a “cryptologist,” but is never identified. One may find illustrations of the stone and its markings in books now, but this drawing did not appear until 1949, which is especially strange since by that time, there had been a variety of other publications about the Oak Island legend, including a detailed “prospectus” produced by one later treasure hunting syndicate and a 1936 article in Popular Science, all of which surely would have reproduced such an image. According to the few mentions of the stone in correspondence and in earlier versions of the legend, it was said to have passed between various people, being used as the back plate in a fireplace at one point, and being used as a hammering table by a Halifax book binder until any inscription was conveniently destroyed. Despite rumors that it was in the possession of a local historical society, there is some sense that it disappeared after 1912, if it ever even existed. The drawing just kind of manifested in 1949 in the book True Tales of Buried Treasure by Edward Rowe Snow, a historian of New England whose work can be honestly said to have some reliability issues. The drawing he put in his book appears to have been provided to Snow by a local reverend named Kempton who was writing about the legend himself and had been in correspondence with the current group of treasure diggers then searching the pit, who interestingly believed Kempton’s ideas about the Money Pit were inaccurate. Kempton claimed, in letters, to have received all his materials from an unnamed “minister,” who actually wrote his manuscript and “did not give…any proofs of his statements.” Whether or not Kempton actually drew the stone’s symbols himself, as some believe, or actually did receive them from some third party, they are quite clearly a fraud, undermining many theories about the Oak Island pit that rely on examination of its symbols, as will be further discussed in time.

The last of the treasure digs on Oak Island said to have involved one of the original three treasure finders, Anthony Vaughn, and organized as a treasure company with investors again by the enigmatic wealthy local Simeon Lynds, was called the Truro Syndicate and appears to have formed around 1848 or 1849. This was the group that is said to have dug an entirely new shaft and used a horse-driven auger, which they claimed bit into both wood and metal, that encountered what they described as loose metals like coinage, and that pulled up a piece of gold chain. Interestingly, we do have some documentation of this dig previous to the 1860s newspaper accounts, in the form of an 1849 document granting permission for the syndicate to dig at the location. If we examine the claims made about this effort, we again see indications of embellishment. The first are the claims of what their auger encountered. It should be noted that they did not find treasure at 100 feet, as the phantom inscribed stone and the previous effort’s supposed findings would lead us to believe, and subsequently, later translations of the “inscribed stone” suggest it actually told of treasure to be found “40 feet down,” indicating they just had to dig a bit farther, down to 130 feet. It was during these deeper diggings with an auger that a few links of gold chain were turned up, which certainly sounds impressive, until you read the earliest accounts and find that these links were “possibly from an epaulette.” That means we’re talking about three tiny links of a kind of chain that may have come off the clothing of any number of visitors to the treasure dig during the last fifty years. Likewise, in these later digs, any time wood is encountered, it must be remembered that, even according to the legend itself, the Money Pit had been the site of multiple dig operations that were later abandoned, and thus may have been full of the refuse from previous treasure-digging attempts. This 1849 syndicate’s claims that, in addition to punching through an empty space, they drilled through wood and metal, including “loose metals” they took to be coins, can also be logically explained by the debris from the previous digs, judging only by the later stories told about them. Remember that they had supposedly dug cross-tunnels in an effort to bypass the flooding, which would account for any voids the Truro syndicate’s shaft may have encountered. Additionally, there are reports that the platform and apparatus of at least one previous dig had collapsed and fallen into the pit, which accounts for further wood and metal that the Truro auger may have struck, including some “loose metals,” like chains.

The baseless illustration of the 90-foot stone that surfaced in the 20th century.

It is not entirely clear how the operators of the Truro auger determined that they were actually drilling through these materials, though, especially the “loose metals” they took to be coins. According to the legend, they simply knew because of the sounds they heard and how easily their drill turned. The bit of gold chain it’s claimed they brought up was in mud, but if this bit of gold was encased in mud, then it was not in a chest, or if the auger was able to pull gold chain up its length, and the mud aggregated along the way, then why were no loose coins ever likewise pulled up? The simple answer is that they misconstrued the sound. One 1861 letter written by a visitor to a later treasure dig at the site indicates that the soil being brought up by the operation then underway was mostly “composed of sand and boulder rocks,” indicating that the drill in 1849 may have encountered gravel. The sound of such loose stones being turned would certainly have struck the ear as sounding like coins, especially if that’s what they wanted to hear. And interestingly, the very fact that gravel was encountered deep within the Money Pit helps to explain the flooding in the hole and to dispel the notion that the flooding was due to booby-trapping. Typically, the flooding is said to be unnatural because the earth was clay, and thus impermeable, but the aforementioned 1861 letter from Henry Poole, Esq., the visitor to the later diggings, states clearly that “[t]he watercourse, by which the original money-pit was flooded, is in all probability a layer of gravel creation,” gravel being extremely permeable. Really interestingly, the earliest mention a flood tunnel booby trap theory appears in one of those later news articles, this one from 1861 and called “The Oak Island Folly,” which was actually ridiculing people who wasted their money chasing after a treasure on the island. In it, the author states that “the theory on which these deluded people are proceeding [is that] the money had been buried and sluices or communications with the sea, so constructed, that the localities of the treasure was flooded, while the vicinity was comparatively dry." It is unclear what “vicinity” is being referred to as dry, but here in 1861 we see the theory had already taken hold.

Some of the claims of what the Truro syndicate found appear to have originated from an anonymous 1861 letter, written by one “Patrick, the digger,” who claimed to have been part of the Truro dig and was responding to the derision of the recent article. Much of what this Patrick states is just repeating what the news article had said about the claims of treasure diggers, though when he mentions their boring through loose metals, he actually says, “coins, if you will,” making explicit the claims that they had drilled through a treasure chest. And what happened to those chests at around 100 feet? Well, according to Patrick, the digger, they dug four separate shafts, on each compass point surrounding the original pit, and they dug deeper than the original pit’s depth, and dug directly beneath it, encountering no water at all. He says that what happened then was the treasure chests previously bored through, along with the water from the flood tunnel, crashed through into their new tunnel, filling it with water and soil. There are a few conclusions we can draw from this letter. One, if it were true, then the treasure was there, at around a hundred feet, not down a hundred feet farther, near bedrock, as some later treasure hunters who dug deeper and deeper have insisted, and it would have still been present in the bottom of the shafts among a slurry of water and mud after supposedly crashing through. We can eliminate this possibility because not a damn coin of it was every turned up by the many future treasure diggers who excavated and bored those same old shafts through the years. Two, it if were true that several other shafts were sunk on all sides of the original Money Pit, to an even greater depth and beneath it, encountering no water, then it would seem to disprove the claim of a flood tunnel booby trap. However, it would also seem to disprove the notion that a layer of permeable gravel was present to allow water into the shafts. But we know that water has filled the pit, so we are left with a third and more convincing conclusion, that the anonymous Patrick, the digger, is not a reliable source.

Diagram of geologist who observed manmade structures at Smith’s Cove, including speculation about its purpose.

It must be remembered that all of these details about these digs, not only the original find by McInnis and the others, but also the Onslow Company effort and the Truro syndicate operation, come to us through later newspaper accounts and dubious reports like those of the anonymous Patrick, the digger. Thus we might look askance also at the further claim that the Truro syndicate discovered further evidence of the flood tunnel in the form of drains on a nearby beach at Smith’s Cove. According to the legend, one of the original pit finders, Anthony Vaughn, upon learning that the pit was filling with salt water, not fresh water, led the group there, having recalled seeing water “gushing down the beach there at low tide.” Investigating, they found that the beach was “artificial,” with tons of coconut fibers beneath the sand—which, recall, is not native to the island—and five box drains or finger drains, constructed with beach rocks. We know that these manmade structures actually existed, though, because geologists, both in the 1960s and the 1990s, confirmed the existence of both the coconut fiber beneath the beach and the drains. However, the findings of these geologists did not support the notion of a flood tunnel booby trap. Geologist Robert Dunfield, in 1965, determined that the Winsdor limestone layer, which is honeycombed with natural watercourses, intersects with the Money Pit, making the flooding an entirely natural phenomenon. Reports that the waters flooding the pit rose and fell with the tide were thought to indicate that it was coming from the beach through a tunnel, but its water level only moved around a foot and a half, compared to the nine-foot difference between high and low tide at the beach. If the legend were true, and one could see all the water gushing out of the flood tunnel through the drains as the tide ebbed, then it would seem a simple thing to just wait for it to drain out, stopper the box drains, and dig away. But the fact is that it was flooding by a natural watercourse, not a tunnel connected directly to the beach. And simple logic tells us that no such flood tunnel could possibly have worked, not just because the engineering feet of cutting a drain some 600 feet from the beach to a treasure chamber would have been impossible, but also because no evidence of a constructed flood tunnel has ever been found. Such a tunnel would need to be lined, with flat stones, for example, or cement, and would have been observable. Treasure hunters on Oak Island would have people believe that these tunnels were cut into bare earth, perhaps filled with beach rocks but not lined. Such a tunnel, inundated by seawater daily for hundreds of years, would collapse, fill with silt, become clogged by mud. They simply would not work.

Despite the fact that the flood tunnel theory is manifestly impossible, the presence of manmade structures at Smith’s Cove and of what does appear to be an artificial beach have long puzzled those seeking to explain them. Indeed, for a long time, Smith’s Cove seemed the only genuine mystery of Oak Island. Now, though, that mystery has been credibly solved. Flood tunnel theorists claim coconut fibers were laid out beneath sand to act as a sponge and direct water into the box drains. Since coconut fibers were long used as shipping material, to pack cargo and prevent its movement, this notion went well with ideas about pirates or other early mariners having constructed the tunnels. Other notions have suggested that the island was used by smugglers and their packing materials were simply discarded on the beach, or that it came from shipwrecks in the distant past and was deposited there by storm activity, though these ideas did not explain the drains. Among the first theories to explain everything was that it was a kind of filtration setup to draw seawater toward a nearby well, turning it to fresh water. However, this was proven false by the existence of freshwater wells elsewhere on the island. Finally, in 2010, researcher Dennis J. King proposed the most convincing explanation: that it was the remains of an ancient salt cooking operation. In my recent Blind Spot patron exclusive minisode, I discussed the early activity of European fishermen around the Atlantic coast of Canada. Some of these fishermen, specifically French and English fishermen, were known to land on the Canadian coast to preserve their fish before their return voyage by drying and salting them. And the very first owners of Oak Island in the 1700s were known to use it as a base of fishing operations. Back then, salt was not so very plentiful as it is today, and it was heavily taxed. In fact, a French salt tax is credited as one of the causes of the 1789 French Revolution. The solution for Atlantic fishermen was to cook their own salt, and indeed the structures at Smith’s Cove bear some similarity to salt works in Japan and Normandy. This explanation actually accounts for both the drains and the artificial beach, as the seawater, controlled by a dyke, is filtered through the sand and coconut fiber, the sand catching some salt and the coconut fiber removing sand and silt, whereupon the saltwater solution was carried through the drains to a hypothetical nearby well. Salt could theoretically be harvested and boiled from the seawater in the well, as well as from the sand, a more laborious process. While this explanation too is theoretical, it’s a theory that accords with history and with geology. It’s simply a far more trustworthy conclusion.

So there we are. The legend, nearly fully formed already, with its claims about markers and booby traps, came to wider attention in the newspaper articles of the 1860s. Even though some of those earliest reports called the treasure hunts there foolish, further treasure hunting operations followed, as did further claims of evidence for the existence of some buried treasure there. The story then passed into folklore in the 20th century, when it was included in books like Edward Rowe Snow’s True Tales of Buried Treasure, and this process would continue with The Rotarian and Reader’s Digest articles, and would spread further in numerous anthologies that collected stories of supposed unsolved mysteries, books that were very popular for a long time. The process of legend-making would reach its apogee with the spread of the story on the Internet and the absolutely pointless History Channel program. As I have shown, nearly every major claim related to the Oak Island Money Pit has been reasonably and believably refuted. And yet, we haven’t even really scratched the surface of this legend. We’ve only looked at the earliest of its stories, the tales told about digs that occurred before any known documentation. What about later findings? What about the claims of treasure hunters since? What about further evidence and artifacts said to have been found there? What about the videos that are said to prove there are treasure chambers and skeletons down in those depths? What about all the claims of landmarks and conspiracies promoted on the History Channel? And most importantly, what about the why? If this were all a hoax from the beginning, what was the purpose? All of these further mysteries I will explore, like side shafts branching from the main bore hole, as this series goes on.

Further Reading

Bowdoin, H. L. “Solving the Mystery of Oak Island.” Colliers, vol. 47, no. 22, 19 Aug. 1911, pp. 19-20.

Joltes, Richard. “History, Hoax, and Hype: The Oak Island Legend.” Critical Enquiry, 2006, www.criticalenquiry.org/oakisland/index.shtml.

MacDonald, David. “Oak Island’s Mysterious ‘Money Pit.’” Reader’s Digest, January 1965, pp. 136-40. Oak Island Scrapbook, www.oakislandbook.com/wp-content/uploads/Readers-Digest-January-1965-OakIslandsMysteriousMoneyPit.pdf.

Before Columbus - Part Two: False Claims

While it is important to point out the weaknesses and errors in Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories, just as it is to acknowledge the strength of certain of them, for example the claims of Scandinavian and Polynesian contact with the Americas, it should also be noted that academic consensus does have a working theory for the settlement of the Americas, and it was Asian peoples that are believed to have spread across the American continents. The difference here is that we are not talking about established and recognized cultures making contact with existing indigenous people. Rather, we are talking about PaleoAmerica, in the late Pleistocene, when the migration of early humans from Central Asia and Siberia, across a land bridge at Beringia or along coastlines using ancient watercraft, led to the dispersal of human beings and the growth of Clovis culture and Ancient Native American peoples. Archaeogenetics bear out this version of ancient history, so it’s not a speculative model. When we talk about the transoceanic contact theories, as we explored in Part One, we are talking about cultures of a later age crossing the ocean and encountering the descendants of the early humans who had migrated to the Americas. Yet much like the competing claims about transoceanic contact, there are also competing claims about the origin of the Clovis culture and the settlement of the Americas. One recent hypothesis has it that ancient America was actually settled by early humans of the Solutrean culture. This would mean that North American native peoples are actually descended from ancient Western Europeans rather than Central Asians, as the Solutreans were ancient cave dwellers in the Iberian peninsula, where today we find the south of France, Spain and Portugal. Much like the consensus view of the settlement of the Americas with its notion of Beringia, the Solutrean hypothesis says that there used to exist an ice shelf connecting Europe to the Americas, along which Solutreans traveled in watercraft, hunting for subsistence along the way. As evidence, the similarity of bone and stone tools between the Solutrean and Clovis cultures is cited. The hypothesis has failed to garner broad support, however, because of a lack of evidence and some problems with chronology. There is too great a gap of time between the cultures to indicate that one was descended directly from the other, and the similarity of tools can easily be viewed as an instance of “convergence,” when two entirely unrelated cultures develop similar technology independently. In fact, the difference between Solutrean and Clovis arrowheads is enough, some argue, to prove their separate development. Lastly, it is simply not certain that such an ice shelf existed, which would have made their crossing of the Atlantic far less feasible, and even if it did exist, there is also a lack of evidence that it would provide the rich wild game that such migrating peoples would have needed to survive. Regardless of the problems with the Solutrean hypothesis, though, it has been embraced by a certain group of people. Their support for the thesis appears not to derive from its evidence or its likelihood but rather from its perceived implications. White supremacists have embraced the hypothesis as fact, adding it to their rhetorical quiver. No longer, in their view, could white Europeans be called the colonialist invader who had eradicated Native American populations and seized their lands. No, now they could claim that the original inhabitants of these lands were Europeans, and thus whites. As the Clovis culture disappeared, white supremacists argue that this was the true genocide: “Solutrean whites being here first and then the red man genociding him,” as Neo-Nazi Holocaust denier John de Nugent put it. To him, the story of the Americas “is the story of the first whites to build a great culture, and how they were crushed and died in slavery and agony after they became a minority in their own country.” Thus, even though scholars doubt Solutreans were “white,” we find, as we have time and time again, that  false and dubious history is exploited to serve ideology. And we find this too with other Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact theories, as whoever can claim to have been first to reach the New World from the Old can then claim credit for this great accomplishment and lay claim to these already inhabited lands for their own race or nation.

As illustrated with my example of the Solutrean hypothesis and its exploitation by white supremacists, these ideas are not ancient history, even if they are about ancient history. They are made relevant today, used by racists and ideologues to bolster their false claims, and I use the term in two senses, meaning inaccurate assertions and also falsely laying claim to being the first people or nation to have made the trip to the New World. And the examples don’t cease with white supremacists. In 2014, far-right nationalist Turkish president Recep Erdogan claimed, “Muslim sailors reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178.” In this case, the claim of Muslim contact with the Americas served his purposes of stoking religious pride. When challenged on the claim, he doubled down, asserting that the theory is supported by “very respected scientists in Turkey and in the world.” In fact, this claim is a fringe belief even among Muslim scholars. It can be traced back to a controversial article in 1996 by historian Youssef Mroueh, who states that in Columbus’s own papers, he described seeing a mosque on a hill in Cuba. This report only exists in Bartolome de las Casas’s relation of Columbus’s voyages, redacted from Columbus’s papers, and if one reads it, it is clearly just talking about a hill. Specifically, he notes that, among the mountains near Bahía de Bariay, “one of them has another little hill on its summit, like a graceful mosque.” So it is purely based on a simile, a little metaphor used to describe a natural land formation. And after all, if Columbus had really seen a literal mosque, it certainly would have warranted more than a passing mention. Some proponents of Pre-Columbian Muslim contact with the Americas also cite a 10th-century work that mentions a legend of a voyager named Khoshkhash who sailed beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, into the “surrounding sea,” and returned with treasure after everyone had given him up for dead. Even this 10th-century source regards the story as myth, though, emphasizing that the Atlantic could not be navigated, and if it were true, it wouldn’t mean an Atlantic crossing, as there are plenty of nearer places to find beyond the Mediterranean without risking the open ocean. Nevertheless, even if the theory is fringe and not widely believed, or even insupportable, if its implications are to a leader’s liking, then it may be amplified in order to, as in this case, stoke pride, or to advance a claim on the land said to have been visited. Such has been the case since the time of Columbus, as we saw with Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo’s amplification of the claim that, if the New World had been reached before Columbus at all, it had been by the accidental drift voyage of a Spanish caravel. And among the countries particularly eager to believe any claims that it was they who had actually found the New World first, Spain’s rival, Elizabethan England, was a particular offender.

Portrait of John Dee.

One of the most outlandish claims made on the New World came from John Dee, the polymath and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I who is credited with being the first to call her realm the “British Empire.” Dee pleased Elizabeth by composing an argument for her ownership of the New World in his 1578 work, Limits of the British Empire. In it, he argued, first and foremost, that the lands to the north of the British Isles, Scandinavia and Iceland, had once been conquered by none other than King Arthur of fairy tale fame. But Arthurian conquests did not cease there. No, Arthur went on to take possession of Greenland, the Arctic North, and even all the lands of the New World beyond, southward all the way to Florida, and westward all the way to Russia. As the Tudors alleged some distant relation to King Arthur, Dee asserted that Elizabeth could claim royal title to all of these lands, which the Spanish were then exploring and conquering. Even Dee admitted that Arthur was a figure who had been greatly mythologized, stating there had been many “fables, glosinges, vntruthes, and impossibilities, incerted in the true history of King Arthur,” but he argued that Arthurian conquests overseas were part of true British history. The historicity of Arthur is itself a topic worthy of an episode, but briefly, the source for a historical Arthur, Historia Brittonum, from around 830 CE, just calls him a “leader of battles.” There’s nothing about him being a king or expanding a kingdom overseas, if this even is the Arthur that inspired later legends. For the first mention of a King Arthur conquering distant lands, we have to wait until 1138 and the very unreliable, myth-filled historiography of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but even then Arthur goes no further than Norway and Denmark. It seems Dee did have a source for his claims, but it was rather threadbare: a legend included on a map by Gerardus Mercator, which referenced a lost work by Dutch medieval traveler Jacobus Cnoyen, which itself included information about Arthur’s northern and western conquests in a redaction of another lost medieval work called the Deeds of Arthur. Other works contemporaneous to Dee’s also seem to have taken all ideas about Arthur’s far-ranging conquests from these lost books, which we must view as questionable for a variety of reasons. First, medieval travelers’ narratives were notorious for repeating myths and making claims of having witnessed things that only exist in legends, as were medieval works generally, especially those that describe events that had supposedly transpired hundreds of years earlier, as was the case here. And we know that these lost works were full of fictions because, as Dee and others share, they speak of an Indrawing Sea that encircles the North Pole, with giant magnets on which ships founder, and massive cities in Arctic mountains. They also tell of Arthur encountering tiny little people at the North Pole, and giants 23 feet tall in the distant lands to the west. I won’t debate the historicity of Santa’s elves here, and if you want a detailed refutation of the idea that giants ever existed, check out my series No Bones About It. Suffice it to say that Dee’s sources don’t constitute convincing evidence that King Arthur landed in the New World.

John Dee’s argument did not rest alone on claims from medieval Arthurian legend, however. He also looked to medieval Irish legend, specifically the story of St. Brendan the Navigator. Brendan of Clonfort was an Irish monk, famed for establishing a number of monasteries as well as for a legendary voyage in which he was said to have discovered an Earthly Paradise, the Isle of the Blessed, a Promised Land of the Saints. While Brendan lived from the 5th to the 6th centuries, CE, the narrative of his voyage does not appear until the 10th century in its earliest form, though there is some indication that it was circulating in lost works before then. Just as Dee was encouraged in his theories by the maps of Mercator, many were the maps that included St. Brendan’s Isle, one phantom island among many supposed to be found in the Atlantic that, like Antilia, were identified with the New World after the voyages of Columbus. However, insofar as we can give weight to the legends of Brendan’s voyages at all, we have no real indication of what direction he might have traveled. Far more likely is that tales of his voyaging derived from his sailing along the coasts of Ireland in search of places to found his monasteries. If he truly ranged far at all, considering the currents he would have encountered and descriptions of the Blessed Isle as warm and temperate, then perhaps he sailed south and found Madeira or the Canary Islands. But in truth, we have no good reason to give weight to the narrative at all. While it’s true that the medieval work “The Navigation of St. Brendan” was likely a transmission of an earlier work or perhaps an oral tradition, it fits squarely within the genre of other Irish immrama, a kind of Old Irish tale of sea voyages. In fact, some scholars suggest the Navigation of St. Brendan is a wholesale adaptation of an existing immram called the Voyage of Bran. But regardless of how much it owes to Old Irish immrama compared to how well it fits into the genre of medieval hagiography, the fantastical biographies of saints, either way it is clear that the work is extremely allegorical and mythological. In it, Brendan encounters talking birds, gryphons, sea monsters, and demons. He even runs into Judas Iscariot, who is inexplicably marooned on a rock in the middle of the ocean. It is hard to imagine that it was meant to be anything other than a work of fiction.

St. Brendan the Navigator depicted on his imagined voyage.

Nevertheless, even works of mythology and medieval fantasy look reliable as historical evidence if you are eager to make a case that your nation or people reached the Americas first, it seems, so John Dee concluded that St. Brendan’s voyage showed that the Irish too had crossed to the Americas even earlier than King Arthur, and because of the Tudor conquest of Ireland, Queen Elizabeth could further lay claim to any lands the Irish had first claimed. The tale of St. Brendan the Navigator and the idea that Irish monks had settled in the Americas would later prove attractive to Americans as well. One football coach, insurance agent and erstwhile archaeologist, William Goodwin, became preoccupied with the idea after inspecting a stone quarry in New Hampshire and deciding that the stacked stone structures there were quite similar to Ireland’s cone-shaped beehive huts. So convinced was he that this site, which he called Mystery Hill, stood as evidence of Irish monks settling America that he bought the site and further studied it. In later years, after it was bought from Goodwin and promoted as a tourist destination, it was renamed America’s Stonehenge. In the 1980s, other archaeologists were able to determine that it was not built by Europeans at all. First of all, no European artifact was ever discovered there, whereas numerous Native American tools were found there. Second, tool marks on stones indicate they were quarried using tools consistent with indigenous practices and native stone tools. Carbon dating of charcoal from fire pits indicate that the site was inhabited thousands of years before St. Brendan ever lived, effectively ruling out the Irish monk myth. And it turned out that, of the several stone structures that had been assembled at the site and appeared similar to Irish structures, some of the stones used bore modern drill marks, indicating that the structures were likely raised in more recent years, likely by William Goodwin himself, who was so devoted to his theory that Irish monks had reached America that he seems to have faked evidence to lend his thesis more support. What might have driven Goodwin to perpetrate such a fraud? We can only speculate, but certainly any evidence of Pre-Columbian Irish presence in North America would matter a great deal to Irish immigrants, who had, for much of Goodwin’s lifetime, been discriminated against by anti-Catholic nativists. Perhaps Goodwin truly believed the claims he manufactured evidence to support, or perhaps he thought that convincing others of the claim could change prevalent views of Irish immigration, or perhaps he simply thought that producing evidence for the claim would help his sell his book, The Ruins of Great Ireland in New England.

Whatever was the motivation of later Americans like Goodwin in further promoting the myth of Irish Pre-Columbian contact with the Americas, John Dee was clearly concerned with claims of sovereignty, and thus his purpose was explicitly nationalistic, which of course, at the time, was not separate in his mind from racial pride. And we find that he did not alone rely on the myths of St. Brendan and King Arthur to advance Elizabeth’s claim on the New World. He also raised the legend of Prince Madoc of Wales, a constituent country of the UK considered by some to have been England’s first colony ever since its Norman conquest. However, Wales is also sometimes thought of as a bastion of the true or purely British people, as Ancient Britons had taken refuge there after fleeing Roman conquest. The legend of Prince Madoc is set during the historical period after the death of the prince’s father, King Owain Gwynned, to whom the Tudors also traced their lineage. After the king’s death, civil war erupted, with Madoc’s brothers vying for control of the country. According to medieval romance, narratives which once again did not appear for hundreds of years, Madoc left Wales to escape this conflict, set sail into the great ocean, and then returned to Wales, saying he’d found a fertile land for settlement and embarking on a second voyage back to the land he’d discovered with an entire colony of Welshmen and women. At least the story of St. Brendan was believable in that it seemed to indicate a drift voyage or accidental discovery, since despite his appellation of The Navigator, Brendan was known to sometimes literally let Jesus take the wheel, ordering his monks to cease their rowing and let God direct their vessel. If the Madoc story were to be believed, the Welsh Prince successfully navigated an Atlantic crossing in the 12th century not once, not twice, but three times. In reality, if Madoc made his voyages at all, it may have been northward, to Greenland or some other land to the north. In fact, one of the reports John Dee relied on as support for King Arthur’s conquest of the Arctic, that a certain group of what appeared to be Englishmen came from a northern place to the King of Norway in 1364 claiming to be fifth-generation ancestors of settlers from the British Isles, could just as easily have been evidence of Madoc’s colony. Just as evidence of Irish monks having come to America is nonexistent, though, so too is evidence of Welsh visitation. Dee’s evidence, beyond the legend, came only from a single Welsh sailor in Sir Francis Drake’s fleet who claimed he had heard Native Americans speaking Welsh. Thus a myth of “Welsh Indians” was born.

20th century depiction of Madoc on his voyages.

The myth of “white Indians” would rear its head quite a bit during the colonization of the New World. As discussed in my episodes on the Lost Colony of Roanoke, rumors that the colonists had integrated with native tribes persisted for a while, fueled by numerous claims of elusive light-skinned Native Americans. And as with the myth of the Lost Colonists and Virginia Dare, the myth of Welsh Indians too would come to be exploited by those who wished to strengthen their claim as the rightful inheritors of America. It again cropped up in the 18th century, when a story emerged about one Morgan Jones’s 1660 encounter with the Tuscarora tribe in what would later be South Carolina, which claimed that this tribe recognized his use of English and thus ransomed him from his native captors. After the publication of this tale in a 1740 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine, the floodgates opened. In 1768, a story is published about encountering light-skinned natives who spoke Welsh and carried a Welsh Bible west of the Mississippi. In 1784, another book printed rumors of a native tribe that spoke Welsh and practiced Christianity somewhere up the Missouri River from Kentucky, and these people even spoke about Madoc as the founder of their nation. In 1790, another tale is printed about a white man captured by the Shawnee who was rescued by light-skinned Native Americans when they heard him speaking their language, Welsh, which is, of course, just a retelling of the Morgan Jones story. Gradually, this sort of urban myth, we might call it, became a fixture of tavern talk all over the American frontier, always shared second- and third-hand, as something someone heard someone else was told. With no evidence, either archaeological or genetic, of Welsh colonies in the Americas, especially so widespread as these many stories would suggest, it is clearly just a tall tale or legend of the American West, and it was clearly used as a rationale for westward expansion. No longer did white Americans need to view themselves as invaders, for if the Welsh had preceded them, then they were simply following in the footsteps of their own ancestors. Once again, a myth of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact was used as justification for belief in Manifest Destiny, for a pioneer expansionism that was just another kind of colonialism, which itself was just another kind of conquest, a further genocide of native peoples under the guise of “Indian removal.”

By the time that John Dee assembled his evidence for the English claim on the New World, The English had, of course, already made successful expeditions to its shores. The first of these was in 1497, when the Genoese navigator John Cabot ventured to Newfoundland and along the coasts of North America under King Henry VII’s commission. This is the first known European contact with that specific region since Norse settlement of Vinland, and it embarked from the British maritime capital of Bristol, where Cabot’s financial backers probably resided. Coming as it did 5 years after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus, however, Dee believed it not the strongest claim to those lands, even though Columbus came nowhere near those coasts. So he looked for some indication of pre-Columbian voyages, and he found just such a rumor in the 1527 claim by one Robert Thorne that his father, a Bristol merchant, had discovered the “New Founde Landes” prior to Cabot’s voyage. Ever since this rumor, amplified by Dee, the legend that Bristol merchants had made it to Newfoundland prior to Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies has thrived, with further support showing up in the 1950s in the form of an undated letter from an Englishman named John Day to an unnamed Spanish Admiral often believed to be Columbus, which describes Cabot’s efforts and then, surprisingly, claims that the New World “was found and discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found ‘Brasil.’” This has led scholars to search for evidence of prior Bristol expeditions that might correspond to this supposed pre-Columbian discovery of the Americas by Bristol merchants, documentary evidence of which has actually been found…sort of. More than one mention of ships departing from Bristol in the 1480s in search of an “Isle of Brasil” have been found, though no mention of their success or return is ever recorded, and sometimes, in fact, they are noted to have returned within a couple months declaring that bad weather caused their expeditions’ failures. Now some might read these mentions of an Isle of Brasil and think, wait, how the heck did Bristol merchants know about Brasil in the 1480s, but it’s not the Brazil you may be thinking of. Rather, their objective was the mythical island of Hy-Brasil, said to lie in the waters of the Atlantic west of Ireland. Many were the 14th- and 15th-century maps on which Hy-Brasil appears not far off-shore of the Emerald Isle. According to Irish myth, it could only be seen once every seven years, when it emerges from the mists that cloak it, but even then it cannot be reached. Needless to say, this phantom island is not real, although some have suggested the myths might refer to Porcupine Bank, a shoal about 120 miles west of Ireland. Regardless of the actual existence of this island, though, it does seem that Bristol sailors had gone in search of it, along with, it seems, other phantom islands, like Antilia, the Isle of Seven Cities. And as we have seen with the Antilles archipelago being identified with the mythical Antilia, as well as Coronado’s continued search inland for the Seven Cities of Gold, it was not uncommon for these legendary places to later be applied to the New World. But all the available evidence only points to the existence of rumors among Bristol sailors that such places had been visited, not to any successful contact with the Americas.

The phantom island of Hy-Brasil featured on a 16th-century map.

One other theory of Pre-Columbian contact with the Americas certainly would have appealed to John Dee and been mentioned by him at the time, were it true and known, and that is the alleged 1398 expedition to the New World of Scottish nobleman Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney. Certainly Elizabeth I was not Queen of Scotland, but as a monarch of the House of Tudor, her family had a claim to that throne and kingdom, which would be united with hers by her successor. Her aunt Margaret, eldest sister of Henry VIII, was Queen of Scots, and Margaret’s son, Elizabeth’s cousin, had been James V, King of Scotland for thirty years. That made James’s daughter, Mary, who was Queen of Scots during Elizabeth’s own reign, her cousin as well, and because of the threat Mary posed as a Catholic monarch, Elizabeth had held her in captivity for a decade at the time that Dee was researching all of Elizabeth’s supposed claims to the New World. That Dee did not include any report of Sinclair’s alleged voyage must mean either that he didn’t want to credit the Scottish with the discovery, or that the voyage had been so secret that even Dee hadn’t been able to track down rumors of it, or, as is most likely, that the legend of this voyage simply had not yet developed. The first indication of this claim does not show up until two hundred years later, in 1784, when a naturalist who had been present on one of James Cook’s voyages, Johann Reinhold Forster, tried his hand at writing a history of the New World discoveries and identified Sinclair with a certain mysterious figure named Prince Zichmni described in a 16th-century book by Venetian Nicolò Zeno. In this book, Zeno produced letters by his 14th-century ancestors, two Zeno Brothers, as well as a map they had supposedly drawn, and it detailed how they had found themselves shipwrecked on a populous island south of Iceland about the size of Ireland called Frislanda or Frisland. A ruler of certain portions of this island kingdom, Prince Zichmni, then undertakes a voyage across the North Atlantic with the Zeno Brothers, reaching Greenland. So first of all, this book never claimed that Zichmni went to the Americas, only that he explored Greenland a bit. Second, this huge island, Frisland, which would go on to appear on numerous maps thereafter, is a fantasy place, another phantom island that does not exist. To Forster, the 18th century naturalist writing his history of North Atlantic discoveries, though, it seemed real enough. He imagined at first that it must have sunk like Atlantis, but then he had his real stroke of inspiration: perhaps Frisland was Orkney, though nevermind that Orkney was tiny and Frisland was said to be huge, and perhaps the name Zichmni too was just a corruption of Orkney somehow, though it doesn’t strike the ear as such. After all, wasn’t Henry Sinclair called the “admiral of the seas,” descended from so-called “sea-kings”? In reality, this was only an inherited title of his noble lineage, Lord High Admiral of Scotland, and there is no historical evidence that Sinclair was ever an explorer.

What makes the identification of Henry Sinclair as Prince Zichmni especially effective is that we don’t know much about his fate, allowing many pseudohistorians to speculate that he never returned from the Americas. However, there is documentary evidence, in the form of the Diploma of the succession of the Earldom of Orkney, a genealogical document, that Henry Sinclair simply retired to his lands in Orkney and at an advanced age was “slain there cruelly” likely during an English invasion of 1401. But regardless of the merits of the argument identifying Sinclair with Prince Zichmni—and really there are none—the entire theory rests on the idea that the story about the Zeno Brothers is true, when in fact, the map of Frisland it produced is nothing but fantasy. Indeed, most scholars accept that it was nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by their ancestor, Nicolò Zeno, as it has been proven that the ancestors he made these claims about, the Zeno Brothers, were in Venice at the time he claims they were galivanting around the Atlantic. So in the end, the entire basis for the claim that Henry Sinclair traveled to the New World in 1398 is based on a work of fiction that doesn’t mention him by name and is actually about a voyage to Greenland. Nevertheless, this flimsy foundation has been enough for later writers of pseudohistory to build an elaborate myth, and one load-bearing pillar of that myth is the stone artwork in Rosslyn Chapel, a 15th-century Scottish church that was built by William Sinclair, the grandson of Henry Sinclair. Like evidence we have seen used before to support weak claims of Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Contact, this too relies on a subjective interpretation of artwork, for around one window are carved some patterns that appear to represent plants, and they are popularly claimed to be depictions of maize and aloe, both plants native to the New World that would not have been introduced to Europe at the time of the chapel’s construction. However, experts whose opinion should be given more weight on the topic, such as botanists and archaeo-botanists, reject this interpretation of the art, suggesting that none of the carved depictions of plants in the chapel are realistic, and that carvings taken to be maize are more likely stylized representations of wheat, flowers, and strawberries. As for the supposed aloe plant, it’s pointed out that even if explorers encountered the use of aloe sap, it’s unlikely they would have identified it with the plant itself, and the carvings claimed to be of aloe leaves are just very common greenery patterns such as was often carved into wood.

A reproduction of the Zeno Map.

If the name of Rosslyn Chapel is familiar to you, it’s likely because its supposedly mysterious carvings were made famous by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which suggested it was all wrapped up in the conspiracy theory about the Holy Grail, Freemasons, and Templars. Yeah, that’s right, here we go again. It always goes back to the Templars, and the claims about Henry Sinclair’s imaginary voyage to the New World are no exception. Of course, Dan Brown took basically all his ideas from the grandaddy of pseudohistorical conspiracist bestsellers, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which makes a variety of claims about the Holy Grail being the bloodline of Christ, which they connect to none other than the lineage of Henry Sinclair. You can read in my old episode The Priory of Sion and the Quest for the Holy Grail, or Lincoln's Links and Plantard's Plans, about how the entire theory presented in this book was founded on a hoax, and you can further read about the origin of the Holy Grail myth as fiction in last year’s The Quest for the Truth of the Holy Grail. In short, there is really nothing to any of them, just as there is nothing to the many claims that artwork within Rosslyn Chapel reflects Masonic imagery, which imagery and symbolism didn’t even develop until the 18th century, hundreds of years after the church was built, when Masonic lodges evolved from Operative Masonry, which regulated stonemason guilds, to the esoteric boys clubs of speculative Freemasonry that we know today. But there has long been a notion that the Knights Templar, the wealthy Christian military order that arose during the Crusades about which I’ve had many an occasion to talk, somehow survived its disbanding in 1312 and was absorbed into Freemasonry, especially Scottish Freemasonry, which claim ties nicely in with the further claim that Scotsman Henry Sinclair was an agent of the Knights Templar and that his voyage to the Americas was really a Templar expedition. Many are the claims about the survival of the Templars, and central among them is the idea that when King Phillip IV arrested them and charged them with heresy, most likely in a bid to seize their wealth, the knights had had some foreknowledge and had put their vast treasure onto a fleet of ships at La Rochelle. In truth, the Templars had no extensive fleet of their own, instead relying on rented ships when ships were needed, and when they sailed to the Holy Land, they typically sailed out of Marseille and Barcelona, not La Rochelle, which was a merchant seaport. They did have a presence at La Rochelle, but it is unlikely they could have managed such a feat under King Phillip’s nose. It seems these rumors started in the wake of the order’s suppression, when a group of Templars were tortured to elicit confessions to heresies like spitting on the cross. Among the dubious confessions extracted under torture was one knight’s claim that “the leaders of the Order, having foreknowledge…fled and that he himself met Brother Girard de Villiers leading fifty horses and then heard someone say that he sailed out to sea on 18 galleys, while Brother Hugo de Châlon escaped with the entire treasure of Hugo de Pairaud.” The actual existence of this treasure itself is questionable, but as we see, the origin for the story of the Templar escape, besides being untrustworthy because it is given only by one man, second hand, under torture, also doesn’t mention La Rochelle and seems to suggest the “treasure” was not taken on a galley.

Regardless of the reliability of rumors about Templar escape, pseudohistorians have constructed an elaborate post-suppression history for the Templars, suggesting they sailed to Scotland, where they fought for Robert the Bruce in the Battle of Bannockburn, even though there are no historical records of any French presence there at the time, and surely the arrival of French-speaking knights would have been remarkable. In fact, there is evidence of one former Knight Templar being present at Bannockburn, but he fought for the English. It is further asserted, again without convincing evidence,  that Templars essentially founded Scottish Rite Freemasonry, and that the Templars can be linked to Henry Sinclair through the tenuous connection that hundreds of years later, the first Grand Master of the Grand Masonic Lodge of Scotland also happened to be of the Clan Sinclair, though this was a big and powerful clan with many members. In Sinclair’s own time, there was no Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and there is furthermore no evidence connecting him to the Knights Templar, despite some writers speculating about the Sinclair family’s French branch, the St. Clairs. In reality, when the Pope suppressed the order, it appears that there happened to be just two Knights Templar in Scotland already, and Henry Sinclair actually testified against them. Of course, the fact that Freemasons would hundreds of years later begin to adopt the symbols of the Templars just encourages this false notion about Templar persistence, but they are just one of numerous self-styled orders to have exploited the legend of the Templars and used it as branding. There were also numerous temperance organizations that identified themselves as Templars, but no one believed these teetotalers represented some sort of continuation of the original brotherhood. And actually, the Templars really kind of did evolve into other organizations, and we know this because it was no secret. Most of their assets were given to the Knights Hospitaller, and after the order was dissolved, and the Knights themselves actually absolved of all heresies, which historians learned only about twenty years ago with the discovery of the Chinon Parchment, many Knights Templar were absorbed into a new brotherhood called the Order of Christ. And if one were looking for a connection between the Templars and explorers of the New World, that is where one should really look, for the Governor of the Order of Christ in Portugal was none other than Prince Henry the Navigator. Not to be confused with Henry Sinclair, himself confused with Prince Zichmni, this Henry the Navigator, an explorer of islands off the coast of West Africa, is credited with initiating the Age of Discovery. It was actually at his school that Christopher Columbus learned seamanship. But this real connection is apparently too prosaic, and conspiracists prefer connecting them to secret societies, despite a lack of evidence.

The Westford Knight stone, in which can vaguely be seen a partial engraving that looks like a sword hilt, and in whose glacial striations many have imagined seeing the outline of a Templar Knight. Image attribution: Brian Herzog, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED)

While the alleged evidence left behind by Henry Sinclair of his supposed Templar-sponsored voyage to the New World is really only a conglomeration of hoaxes and rumors and myths and artwork being squinted at by people who want to believe, what evidence might his voyage have left here in the Americas? Well, it’s not too convincing this side of the Atlantic either. The only support that tends to get raised is the existence of a couple puzzling landmarks in New England. One is the Newport Tower in Rhode Island, an old stone mill that has served as “evidence” for numerous Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Contact theories. Carl Christian Rafn argued that it was a Norse Tower. Gavin Menzies argued that it was proof that Chinese explorers had landed in America. And of course it is also said to have been constructed by Henry Sinclair’s Scottish Templars. There is no real reason to spend much time disputing the idea. Newport Tower is none of these things. It is a 17th-century style windmill, and the mortar used in its construction has been conclusively carbon dated to the latter 1600s. So much for the tower. But about 75 miles north of there, in Westford, Massachusetts, about 26 miles inland from the Atlantic coast, there was found in the late 19th century what seems to be a carving in a boulder that looks like the outline of a sword. William Goodwin, the promoter of the America’s Stonehenge site, claimed it was a Norse sword, but in the 1950s, it was suggested that it looks more like a 14th century pommel sword like those used in North Britain, and that the figure of a medieval knight could furthermore be discerned surrounding the sword. So it came to be called the Westford Knight, and once it was connected with the Sinclair myth, it was dubbed Sinclair Rock, and the completely fictitious backstory was attached to it about it being a memorial effigy for one of Sinclair’s Templar Knights who had died while his expedition explored the countryside. However, archaeologist and fake history buster Ken Feder has pointed out that, compared to gravestones in the same region, this petroglyph appears a little too discernible, having not weathered as it surely would have, suggesting that the sword was carved in the 19th century, with an awl, and that through the years as the stone’s fame grew and further elements of its carving, like the knight’s figure, seemed to appear, that these too were either added or are completely imaginary, seen in the glacial striations of the boulder in the same way one sees shapes in clouds. And isn’t that a lot like many of the alternative history and pseudohistorical claims I examine in this show. It fools the naked eye, seems about right at first glance, but look deeper into it, and it’s nothing but misapprehension, often based on fraud. And there is in fact another pseudohistorical myth connecting to the Sinclair myth and the myth of a Templar voyage to the New World that likewise turns out to have little basis in reality, but which warrants its own episode: the myth of a Treasure at Oak Island in Nova Scotia.

Until next time, remember, what some call hard evidence that proves their theories is sometimes also touted as concrete proof of something else altogether. Just as the Westford Knight somehow proved both Norse and Scottish contact, and the Newport Tower supposedly proved Scottish, Norse, and Chinese contact, so too the Olmec colossal heads were said to prove both African and Chinese contact, and Dighton Rock was said to prove Norse contact and Portuguese contact and ancient Phoenician contact. But all these artifacts really prove is that, when it comes to supporting fringe theories about the past, one sees what one wants to see.  

Further Reading

Anderson, John D. “The Navigatio Brendani: A Medieval Best Seller.” The Classical Journal, vol. 83, no. 4, 1988, pp. 315–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3297848.  

Babcock, W. H. “St. Brendan’s Explorations and Islands.” Geographical Review, vol. 8, no. 1, 1919, pp. 37–46. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/207318.  

Colavito, Jason. “White Nationalists and the Solutrean Hypothesis.” Jason Colavito Blog, 31 Jan. 2014. Internet Archive, web.archive.org/web/20231024134820/http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/white-nationalists-and-the-solutrean-hypothesis.

Green, Thomas. “John Dee, King Arthur, and the Conquest of the Arctic.” The Heroic Age, vol. 15, Oct. 2012. Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe, jemne.org/issues/15/green.php.
Smith, Brian. “Earl Henry Sinclair’s Fictitious Trip to America.” New Orkney Antiquarian Journal, vol. 2, 2002. AlistairHamilton.com, http://www.alastairhamilton.com/sinclair.htm#r44.

Spradlin, Derrick. “‘GOD Ne’er Brings to Pass Such Things for Nought’: Empire and Prince Madoc of Wales in Eighteenth-Century America.” Early American Literature, vol. 44, no. 1, 2009, pp. 39–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27750113.  

Quinn, David B. “The Argument for the English Discovery of America between 1480 and 1494.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 127, no. 3, 1961, pp. 277–85. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/1794949.
White, Andy. “Does the Fan Base of the Solutrean Hypothesis Change if Upper Paleolithic Europeans Weren't White?” Andy White Anthropology, 5 April 2015. Internet Archive, web.archive.org/web/20231024013940/https://www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/does-the-fan-base-of-the-solutrean-hypothesis-change-if-upper-paleolithic-europeans-werent-white.

Before Columbus - Part One: First Contact

Though schoolchildren used to be taught that Christopher Columbus had to convince the Catholic Monarchs of Spain that the Earth is actually round and not flat, and thus could be circumnavigated by a westward voyage across the Atlantic, we know this to be a myth. In fact, it had been known since antiquity that the Earth is spherical and that it was theoretically possible to sail west to reach the east. However, Columbus did indeed have his work cut out for him to convince the monarchs to finance his voyages, for it remained to be understood how long such a voyage might take and whether or not there may be some islands or continents blocking his path. Certainly there were legends of islands out there, the phantom and mythical islands of Antillia, Hy-Brasil, St. Brendan’s Island, and Frisland. Some suggest that Columbus had actually gathered intelligence about the lands beyond the seas before pitching his voyages to European monarchs. According to Bartolomé de las Casas, Columbus had firsthand knowledge of these lands, having sailed to the equally mythical northern land of Ultima Thule in 1477, which voyage some have argued took him past Greenland to somewhere on the North American coast near where the Norse had established their Vinland colony. In truth, the only record of this supposed early voyage of Columbus’s is a marginal note by de las Casas, which may have referred to a trip to Greenland or Iceland and may never have even occurred. Further rumor had it that Columbus learned of this route to the Americas from a Bristol sailor, and that the English had established a trade route to these new lands, a claim that the Spanish would not have liked to acknowledge, and which historians also refute. After Columbus’s contact with the “New World,” Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo would argued that, actually, he hadn’t really discovered anything that wasn’t already known. Oviedo’s account of Columbus’s voyages begins with the statement, “Some say that these lands were first known many centuries ago, and that their situation was written down and the exact latitudes noted in which they lay, but their geography and the sea routes by which they were to be reached were forgotten.” He then goes on to mention a rumor that would conveniently establish Spanish claim to the New World—the story that a Spanish caravel had been overwhelmed by winds and sent off course, eventually landing in the West Indies, where its crew made contact with native islanders. According to this legend, only a handful of the crew survived their arduous return to Europe, and even these were so sick that they passed away shortly after their arrival at Portugal. As the legend claims, Columbus knew or met the surviving pilot of this ill-fated voyage, collected information from him at his deathbed, and created a map that he used to find the Caribbean. De Oviedo seems to mention the tale only to qualify the claims about Columbus’s achievements, though he remarks himself on the extreme variation in the legend’s details and declares that it is probably a fiction. Many are the legends of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact like this. Some, as we have seen with the stories of medieval Scandinavian contact with the Americas, are upheld by evidence that supports their truth, even if they are also confounded by hoaxes and unreliable claims. But others lack such confirmatory support and should be questioned. As de Oviedo himself explained, “It is better to doubt what we do not know than to insist on facts that are not proven.”

Any who are new to my content and unfamiliar with the topics I’ve covered in the past may find it informative to learn here, at the outset, that the topic of Pre-Colombian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories has long fascinated me. I have covered such theories in passing or in part in a variety of episodes, including briefly in my episode on the Myth and Mystery of Columbus. Obviously just in the last episode I explored Norse contact with the Americas, which has been confirmed archaeologically in Newfoundland, while disputing claims of contact further inland, as supported by the Midwestern Runestones that evidence leads us to dismiss as hoaxes. Before that, in a series I highly recommend you check out between parts one and two of this series if you haven’t heard it already, I talk about the claims of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, a series that led me to focus even more on the hoax artifacts that support such claims in an episode on The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories. Perhaps the wildest of these theories that I’ve looked at, in an episode that I find continues to get a lot of downloads, is the conspiracy fantasy about a lost globe-spanning empire built by giants called Tartaria, which if you can believe it, claims that a lot of buildings with classical architecture right here in the U.S. are actually ancient remnants of a super-civilization, and this true history of the world is being erased by “elites.” Most of these can be confidently dismissed even with cursory analysis of their lack of evidence and, especially in the case of the Tartarian Empire nonsense, their ludicrous and ignorant assertions. However, even despite the hoaxes of the Midwestern Runestones, the fact that a medieval Norse presence has been proven beyond doubt in Newfoundland goes to show that not all of these theories can be confidently dismissed. The history of the Americas can only be pieced together through archaeological remains and other interdisciplinary approaches, as we will see, precisely because we lack a robust historical record from American antiquity. This is not only because few indigenous cultures developed their own writing systems, but also because, among those that did, the Spanish systematically burned all their written records. “Burn them all,” Diego de Landa, 16th-century Bishop of Yucatán, is quoted as saying, with the rationale that, “they are the works of the devil.” As the discovery at L’Anse aux Meadows proved, though, theories of Pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic contact can be confirmed even in the absence of any extensive indigenous historical record. And why could not some accidental traffic have occurred between the continents, such as the Spanish caravel said to have drifted to the New World, when the circular currents of the Atlantic are known to carry ships off-course and across the ocean. We must search for evidence of both purposeful and accidental crossings to determine what trans-oceanic contact may have preceded Columbus, and since we know from the Newfoundland find that Vinland, which I might point out was found accidentally according to the Saga of the Greenlanders, was no myth, then perhaps we should look at the claims of earlier crossings to determine first contact, as a Trekkie might call it.

Diego de Landa, Franciscan inquisitor notorious for burning Mayan codices.

Among the most popular of first contact theories out there is the argument that the first seafaring people to cross the Atlantic and encounter the indigenous peoples of the Americas came not from Europe at all, but rather from Africa. Indeed rumors of an African crossing go all the way back to Columbus’s time, again, according to Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote that Columbus’s third voyage was actually undertaken to investigate a rumor heard by King John II of Portugal that the West Africans from Guinea were crossing the Atlantic in canoes and had established trade with the inhabitants of the New World. On this same voyage, de las Casas says that Columbus took interest in the claims of natives on the island he called Española, or Hispaniola, where today can be found the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, that “a black people” had come to them “from the south and south-east.” Much has been made of this line, though it seems most likely that Columbus was interested in the rumor not because he believed West Africans had visited the Caribbean but rather because he had been told by the Majorcan explorer Jaume Ferrer that “gold was found most abundantly near the equator where people had dark skins and where the spin of the earth caused it to collect.” De las Casas would not have been the first to have used the term “black” to describe the color of darker skinned Native Americans, as a variety of other Spanish explorers, historians, and clergymen have written about seeing black-skinned natives in the Americas. Just how they differentiated and categorized the variety of skin colors they observed in the New World is unclear, and indeed, there may be an error in translation, as well, since the Spanish word for “black” can also be used to simply mean “dark.” These uncertain beginnings of the theory of African contact with the Americas, however, would expand when, in the mid-19th century, a massive carved stone head believed to have originated from the Olmec culture, an ancient precursor civilization to other Mesoamerican cultures like the Maya and Aztec peoples, was unearthed in Mexico and deemed by many to physically resemble Black African facial features. Thus began more in-depth research and the development of the theory of African Pre-Colombian Trans-Oceanic Contact by researchers such as Leo Wiener in the 1920s, with his work, Africa and the Discovery of America. Others followed, but the most recognized and influential of these theorists today is Ivan Van Sertima, whose 1976 work, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America would take this otherwise fringe academic hypothesis into the mainstream, where it would be championed by Afrocentric critics who criticize Eurocentric academia for distorting and marginalizing the historical contributions of Africans to the world.

Afrocentric critics in many cases make a strong and admirable case about the myopia of academia and the legitimate existence of institutional racism and bias that permeates many disciplines, not only that of history and archaeology. Unfortunately, valid and important arguments such as these are sometimes undermined by the influence of hyperdiffusionist claims. Hyperdiffusionism is the pseudoarchaeological tendency to draw parallels between vastly different cultures and claim, without the necessary evidence to support the theory, that those cultures must therefore have originated from some common precursor culture. Whenever someone says that the construction of certain monuments in two disparate cultures must mean that there had been contact between those cultures, denying the possibility of parallel thinking and independent development, there may be a hyperdiffusionist argument being deployed. One of their most common arguments is that pyramids in both Egypt and the Americas shows that both cultures were related to some progenitor civilization, and often they will resort to unfounded claims about Atlantis or Lemuria. Since one of Van Sertima’s principle argument is that Mesoamerican step pyramids indicate some ancient influence by Egyptians, it seems fair to criticize his work as hyperdiffusionist. And when we examine the broad strokes of his theory further, the hyperdiffusionist rhetoric becomes even clearer. Van Sertima essentially claims that Egyptians, more specifically Black Egyptians, or the Nubians of southern Egypt and northern Sudan, whose dynasties preceded the first Egyptian dynasty, and who conquered Egypt again in the 8th century BCE to establish the 25th Egyptian dynasty, crossed the Atlantic and greatly influenced the Olmec, the “mother culture” that preceded the Maya, in Mexico and Guatemala, as evidenced by not only the Olmec colossal heads but also the Mesoamerican step pyramids. He also claims that Mandingo sailors from Mali returned to the New World in the 14th century, led by their very emperor, Abu-Bakari II, and that between the Egyptian and Malian transfusions of knowledge, much of the technological and cultural development of indigenous New World civilizations could be attributed to the influence of African explorers. One of the most cutting criticisms of Van Sertima’s hypothesis is that it negates the cultural identity of indigenous peoples, instead attributing their accomplishments to other cultures, much like the Myth of a Lost Mound-Builder Race, which I examined at length in what I consider a banner episode. Van Sertima and his proponents take great umbrage with this characterization, of course, pointing out passages in his work in which he explicitly rejects such views, asserting that his research “in no way presupposes the lack of native originality.” However, one cannot read his research without tallying the great many aspects of Mesoamerican native cultures that he attributes to outside influence. Indeed, he literally engages in a version of the Mound-Builder Myth when he asserts that the Olmec burial mounds of La Venta are proof of Egyptian influence. So despite Van Sertima’s insistence that he is not guilty of such cultural erasure, as his staunchest critics have pointed out, those who read his work are “left with the impression that all or most of the complex societies in the Americas were created or in some way influenced by African[s]…, and that Native Americans were incapable of creating any civilization or complex societies of their own.”

An Olmec colossal head.

Van Sertima’s critics do not only take issue with the “impression” his work gives, though. They also have serious concerns about his work’s scholarship, for the evidence he relies on is in several ways unreliable. First and foremost is the likeness of the carved Olmec heads to what Van Sertima and others consider to be typical Black African features. Van Sertima’s critics point out that this evaluation relies on racial stereotypes, and that indeed, the features identified, having to do with lip and nose shape, are commonly found in a variety of other peoples as well, including indigenous Americans. Moreover, if we were to read into the features of these works of art, we might be led alternatively to believe that they depict an East Asian figure, due to the apparent presence of an epicanthic fold on the upper eyelid. Indeed, as we shall see, a perceived likeness to Asians has also led to the Olmec heads being cited as evidence of ancient East Asian contact with the Americas. And as for his most popular “evidence,” about the presence of pyramids in the Americas, there are timeline problems with his claims. Van Sertima argues that Egyptians transmitted their practice of pyramid building to Mesoamerican cultures after 1200 BCE, when Egyptians of this period had not built large scale pyramids for more than 500 years. This issue with chronology troubles much of his research, as he makes claims linking aspects of distant Mesoamerican cultures, thousands of years apart, and does not attempt to or cannot demonstrate how they were transmitted from one place to another or why they were not present in the intervening centuries. Similarly, he claims that Egyptians taught the Olmec the technique of mummification, and that this was passed to the Maya, citing as evidence the sarcophagus of the Mayan king Pacal. However, Pacal was not mummified, and there are no such Olmec mummies or sarcophagi, and thus no evidence of the transmission of such a practice between the cultures.

But Van Sertima’s argument does not rest solely on the colossal heads and pyramids. He also marshals botanical and linguistic evidence, yet errors litter his work in these areas as well. Though the reading public who devour sensational historical revisionist books like these—the Graham Hancock readership, if you will—are thoroughly overawed, experts are not, and they have the knowledge to recognize where such authors are pulling one over on readers. One of Van Sertima’s principal botanical proofs is that purple dye was used in the Americas, and that the process for making it could only have been brought here by Egyptians, who used purple ritually in royal garments. However, despite his assertions, it has been proven that purple dyes were created in an entirely different way in the Pre-Colombian Americas, and there is no evidence that the Olmec attached the same cultural meaning to the color. And as with his claims about the practices of pyramid-building and mummification, he provides no evidence that such practices were transmitted between Mesoamerican cultures over thousands of years. The same flaw can be found his linguistic arguments. As we have seen in our examination of many historical myths, they often rely on armchair etymology, and this one is no exception. Van Sertima makes a detailed case that words in Maya and Nahuatl were derived from a variety of African languages, including Arabic, Manding, and Middle Egyptian. However, while the sources he cites to support the claims are other hyperdiffusionists sympathetic to his conclusions, more qualified linguists have pointed out that, not only does Van Sertima fail to provide evidence for the transmission and changing forms of these words through the centuries, as would be typical of a more credible etymological argument, his Nahuatl words sometimes do not even exist or they have an entirely different meaning from what he claims, and even his understanding of Egyptian words is frequently in error.

Pacal’s tombstone at the time of its discovery. Unlike Egyptian sarcophagi, which are carved of wood and person-shaped, we can see that this is more of a standard engraved tomb lid.

Issues of unreliable source material are in fact prevalent in Van Sertima’s work. He tends to rely, as his critics have shown, on outdated and since refuted sources. He does not avail himself of the most recent and most in-depth scholarship or available primary source material, it seems, because it does not serve his preconceptions, and instead he finds support in the work of amateur writers from the 1920s, like the thoroughly discredited Leo Wiener. And he amplifies conspiracy claims as well, such as those surrounding the Piri Reis Map. This map, created by an Ottoman cartographer, features an unidentified coastline across the Atlantic from Africa. The map was compiled in 1513, and it features a representation of the West Indies derived from Christopher Columbus’s voyages, but as the landmass on the left of the map extends downward, and even across the bottom of the page, it has been a lightning rod for conspiracy speculation, with some suggesting it depicts the entire coastline of South America and Antarctica. To give an idea of how this artifact has been misused by fantasists, Erich Von Daniken, the ancient astronauts theorist, has suggested that it must have been drawn by aliens, as he imagines it contains data only plausibly collected from aerial observation. Although not going so far as claiming extraterrestrials made it, Charles Hapgood, a history lecturer at New England colleges in the 1950s and ‘60s who is now remembered for his pseudoscientific claims and out there takes on ancient history, argued that the Piri Reis map must have been drawn not in the 1500s by its known creator but rather in the Ice Age by some advanced civilization. Just to reiterate, he thought it was too accurate and contained too much knowledge of the world for Piri Reis to have made it in the 16th century, so…it must have been made thousands of years earlier, when it’s even less likely that anyone had the knowledge. Of course, Hapgood wasn’t known for his sound theories. He was a catastrophist who promoted the idea of a recent pole shit, claiming that Antarctica had thus been free of ice when the map had been drawn. Today it is recognized that the imaginary coastline Hapgood claimed was South America and Antarctica was more likely Terra Australis, a theoretical southern continent that had been imagined and drawn into maps since the time of Roman geographer Ptolemy, who suspected there just had to be land down there to balance out the landmasses of the known world in the northern hemisphere. Yet when Van Sertima went searching for support for his notion about Egyptian contact with the Americas, it was this crackpot, Hapgood, and his half-baked notions about pole shifts and ancient advanced civilizations that he chose to cite as support. The quality of Van Sertima’s sources alone, then, casts doubt on his reliability as a scholarly researcher and thus on the credibility of his thesis.

Other hyperdiffusionist theories trace the origin of Mesoamerican cultures east of Africa, coming from Asia. Indeed, as already mentioned, the Olmec colossal heads have likewise been used as support for this theory, which unlike Van Sertima’s more developed argument, seems to rest almost entirely on resemblances. For example, Betty Meggers, an archaeologist whose work focused on South America, published numerous articles on her claims that the Olmec culture was actually begun by visitors from Shang dynasty era China. Her argument rests solely on her perception of similarities in art, including, laughably, the presence of jade in both cultures and the frequent depictions of cats in art, as if it is not perfectly natural for two entirely distinct cultures to both think jade was beautiful and to both like cats. She also cites the work of Mike Xu, who claimed to have recognize glyphs on Olmec artifacts as actual Chinese characters, though Olmec language experts view any similarity as coincidental. There was, long before the discovery of the Olmec heads and the discovery of these resemblances, some previous theorizing about ancient Chinese contact with the Americas, owing to a certain tale from Chinese mythology. According to some versions of the tale, there was a tree of life, called Fusang, known to grow far to the east of China. Legend has it that the founder of the Qin dynasty believed the myth to be true and sent one of his men, Xufu, on a voyage to find Fusang, which he believed to be an Island of Immortals, tasking him with bringing back an elixir of immortality. Xufu claimed then to have successfully discovered Fusang, and a few hundred years later, when a missionary named Huì Shēn returned from his travels to tell his emperor tall tales about the lands he had visited, then the idea of Fusang as a strange land was cemented. This Fusang, Isle of Immortals, was sometimes said to be on the Asian Pacific coast, and was even at times identified with Japan, but in some later maps, the term was applied to North America. Though this was not proof of ancient Chinese travel to North America, and likely both Xufu and Huì Shēn were fabulists telling false tales to their emperors, this led, in the 19th century, to a notion that the Chinese had once, long ago, discovered California. And in 1882, during a gold rush in British Columbia, in Western Canada, a string of Chinese gold coins was unearthed, said to have been found 25 feet below the surface in packed earth. Some thought this proof of Chinese contact with the Americas, and the coins drew a great deal of attention. They were, however, eventually exposed as 19th-century charms cast by a Buddhist temple, and one can imagine that they might have been found not 25 feet below ground at all, that this might have been the prank of a gold miner trickster akin to the members of E Clampus Vitus, the Clampers, who loved to claim that their order could be traced all the way back to Chinese explorers who had discovered America. Listen to my episode The Unbelievable History of the Ancient and Honorable E Clampus Vitus, for more on that myth. Suffice it to say, there is little to any of these claims, just as there is even less to the more recent claim, made by former British submarine commander and autodidact Gavin Menzies that Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He discovered America and circumnavigated the globe in 1421, a claim for which, in the two books Menzies wrote on the topic, he failed to provide a shred of evidence.

1792 French world map that falsely identifies Fusang (“Fousang de Chinois”) as being located near British Columbia.

Chinese transoceanic contact was not to be the only such claim made by Betty Meggers and her fellow researchers, though. They have also argued strenuously for the idea that the Japanese made it across the Pacific and influenced native culture in Ecuador. As before, their evidence relied on subjective resemblances in art, specifically in the pottery of the Ecuadorian Valdivia culture, which they reckoned was a bit too similar to pottery produced during the contemporaneous Jōmon period in Japan. Not seeing precedents for such pottery before the Valdivia culture was active, between 4000 and 1500 BCE, but aware that similar pottery could be traced back another 10,000 years in Japan, they reasoned that the ancient Japanese had brought it to the Americas. To refute objections that there was no evidence of seaworthy conveyance at the time that might have made such a voyage possible, she raised evidence of Jōmon period contact between mainland Japan and Kozushima, a certain island about 35 miles offshore, as proof of ancient Japanese navigational capacity. However, 35 miles of open ocean is a lot easier to survive than a crossing of the entire Pacific. Nevertheless, arguments about the feasibility of an accidental drift voyage have encouraged the theory. In 1834, a Japanese merchant ship that had lost its mast and its rudder in a typhoon drifted 5,000 miles to run aground in Washington state. Three of its sailors survived the disaster only to be taken captive by a local Native American tribe. Around 1850, another Japanese ship drifted to the Pacific Northwest, and its survivors too made contact with a local native tribe. In 1890, these incidents led a judge, who just happened to also be involved in violent anti-Chinese mob action, to further research and theorize on the topic. He found numerous incidents of Japanese drift voyages to North America between the 17th and 19th centuries, all carried by the Kuroshio Currents, and concluded that it was not unreasonable to believe that such drift voyages may have been occurring for far longer. The fact of the matter is, though, that even rudderless and dismasted ships from these more modern eras would have been far more seaworthy than the crude ancient watercraft that Betty Meggers believed capable of surviving such a vast distance. And regardless of the feasibility of even a single such accidental voyage first surviving and second making such an impact on American cultures, the more pertinent and harder to answer criticism was that fired clay pottery was simply too rudimentary a technology to claim it could not have been independently invented, and the stylistic elements that she thought resembled Jōmon period pottery were too simple and obvious to be considered derivative… in other words, anyone could have come up with this stuff. Finally, fired clay pottery thousands of years older than that left behind by the Valdivia culture has since been discovered elsewhere, associated with other ancient American cultures, a fact that basically explodes her idea that no one in the Americas could have come up with it on their own.

It is not East Asia alone that has been proposed as one of the cultural contributors to New World civilizations. Additionally, there are some theories regarding contact between South Asia, and specifically India, and the Americas. In 1879, a British Army Engineer noticed in a stupa, which is a place for meditation, a carving dating to 200 BCE that appeared to depict a custard apple, a kind of fruit that originates from the Andes Mountains in South America and wasn’t introduced to India until Vasco de Gama’s arrival. Actually, it is very common for a transoceanic contact theory to arise from a work of art that seems to feature a plant or animal that shouldn’t be known in that part of the world. In the 1920s, a Mayan relief was discovered that seemed, to European eyes, to depict an Asian elephant, further supporting the idea of Indian contact with Mesoamerica, and in 1989, a 12th-century Indian sculpture was seen to feature what looked like an ear of maize, the quintessential New World crop. In fact, though, as further research revealed, what was originally seen as maize was actually Muktaphala, an imaginary fruit covered in pearls known to be depicted in Indian art. As for the Mayan elephant, it turned out to much more likely be a tapir, a rather common animal that, like the elephant, has a prehensile nose trunk. The custard apple, it turned out, is harder to explain away. We might suggest that such artwork was misconstrued, that perhaps it depicted Muktaphala as well, since like maize, the custard apple is a bumpy or noduled fruit. However, archaeologists recently discovered the carbonized remains of custard apple seeds at a dig site in India and dated them to 1520 BCE. This seems to be hard scientific evidence of the custard apple’s presence in ancient India, if not proof of ancient Indian contact with the Americas. If such evidence of transoceanic transmission of fruit were found in the New World, it might be argued that a drift voyage resulting in a shipwreck might have carried the fruit, which may have been found and then proliferated as an invasive species, but the likelihood of currents carrying a drifting vessel from the Americas to India seems near zero. With absolutely no further evidence of transoceanic contact between India and the Americas beyond the presence of the custard apple, though, then instead of leaping to the conclusion of ancient transoceanic contact, we might question whether the fruit could have been transmitted by some other means, such as by migrating birds, or question whether the same kind of plant might have evolved in different regions independently (as a recent study in Nature Ecology & Evolution has actually observed, in the form of similar leaves evolving independently), or simply question the accuracy of the recent archaeological findings about the custard apple seed remains. 

Above, statue holding the mythical bejeweled muktaphala fruit sometimes mistaken for maize, and below that, the carving of fruit suspected to be custard apples.

We likewise find similar evidence of ancient Roman contact with the Americas in the form of certain New World fruit believed to be recognized in artwork, as in certain mosaics can be found what appear to be pineapples. Though it is argued by skeptics that these are actually umbrella pine tree pinecones, the depiction of vertical leaves sprouting from the top of them makes this identification somewhat weak. Still, though, in this case, the artwork stands alone and can easily be dismissed as misconstrued. We have no physical, dated evidence of pineapples in the Roman Empire, as there appears to be of custard apples in India. But in the Americas, there have been discovered numerous artifacts that have been claimed to be of Roman origin. In 1924, in Tucson, Arizona, 31 lead artifacts, were found including swords and crosses and religious objects, which bore Roman numerals and Latin inscriptions. In Mexico City, a terracotta sculpture of a bearded head was discovered in 1933 that appears very similar to Roman artwork of the second century CE. And in 1982, in Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, a diver discovered what appeared to be numerous jars extraordinarily similar to Roman amphorae, vessels with a narrow neck and two handles. It should be conceded that the possibility of a drift event, of a single vessel being swept off course and carried as a derelict by currents between continents, is not impossible. And Romans did have seaworthy vessels. There is evidence that Romans ranged overseas as far as the Canary Islands, after all, and being lost at sea in those waters could indeed result in the Canary Current carrying a ship into the North Equatorial Current, which would take them out across the Atlantic toward Central America and the Gulf of Mexico. For these artifacts to have ended up where they were found, there only needed to be one shipwreck, and in the case of the Tucson artifacts, some survivors who carried them across a strange new land. But of course, all of these artifacts are likely hoaxes. Experts point out that the Tucson artifacts were crudely cast and that their Latin inscriptions are all of well-known works by Virgil and Cicero and thus easy for a forger to have faked. Skeptics have even fingered a likely culprit, a local sculptor known to work with lead and to collect books on foreign languages. As for the terracotta head of Mexico City, skeptics point out that it was discovered not in a 2nd century archaeological site, but rather in a site that was dated to the 15th century CE. Most likely the terracotta head was deposited there either by a modern hoaxer or by a 15th century European. And finally, the seemingly Roman amphorae that were found in the bay near Rio were promoted by an underwater archaeologist known for self-promotion who had run into trouble with the law for illegally selling antiquities. Though not widely reported in America, nothing every became of this discovery in the eighties because Brazilian authorities determined it to be a hoax after a businessman came forward to claim the jars as his property, explaining that he’d had the jars manufactured in Portugal and purposely sunk into Guanabara Bay twenty years earlier in order to increase their worth by making them appear aged.

 Though all of these intriguing theories inevitably disappoint under scrutiny, leaving us with only the meager evidence of an ancient fruit seed in India, there is actually more reliable and convincing evidence that indeed at least one other Pre-Colombian Transoceanic Contact Theory besides that of Norse contact with the Americas might actually be true. It seems Lin-Manuel Miranda got it right when, in the animated film Moana, he depicted Polynesian cultures as explorers who “set a course to find / a brand new island everywhere [they roamed].” Theories about Polynesian contact with the Americas developed from the late 19th-century to today, based largely on the similarities between Polynesian watercraft and the unique sewn-plank canoes used by native peoples of the Santa Barbara coastal area of California. Additionally, similarities between bone and shell fish hooks used in both Polynesia and California were considered an additional telltale sign of cultural diffusion. Then there is the diffusion of the sweet potato, which can be seen to have spread from Polynesia across all the Pacific islands, including the very distant Hawaii and Easter Island, all the way to the coasts of Central and South America. Such eastward expansion was long deemed impossible due to the prevailing westward winds, which led Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer, to theorize in the 1940s and ‘50s that the civilizations of South America, specifically the Inca, had made contact and colonized Polynesia by crossing the Pacific in a westerly direction on rafts. Indeed, he even attempted to prove his thesis by undertaking a dramatic crossing of the Pacific on a raft in 1947. However, Polynesian scholars have proven that the area was actually settled from the west, and that Polynesian peoples certainly did expand eastward by sailing against the wind in search of new islands, knowing that prevailing winds would always carry them home. Linguistic evidence also favors this model, with a more convincing etymological case being made that the forms of the same words for plank-sewn canoes and sweet potatoes were in use across the Pacific Basin. Finally, just a few years ago in 2020, a genetic study appeared in the scholarly journal Nature that examined genome variation to determine Polynesian – Native American admixture, finding “conclusive evidence for prehistoric contact of Polynesians with Native Americans.” Thus it seems, as with the theory of Pre-Columbian Scandinavian contact with the Americas, this theory too stands up to scrutiny. And unlike hyperdiffusionist claims, this theory does not erase Native American cultural identities or give credit for their greatest achievements to another culture. So far as I can discern, it doesn’t appear to be a bid to take credit for the accomplishments of New World inhabitants or to lay claim by rights of discovery to New World lands, unlike many other transoceanic contact theories, as we will see in Part Two of this series.

The self-promoting “archaeologist” who publicized his discovery of some fake Roman Jars near Rio.

Until next time, remember the words of St. Augustine, as quoted by Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo to rationalize his suspicion of myths about Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories: “When the facts are obscure, it is better to exercise doubt than to argue an uncertain case.”

Further Reading

de Montellano, Bernard Ortiz, et al. “They Were NOT Here before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s.” Ethnohistory, vol. 44, no. 2, 1997, pp. 199–234. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/483368.
Haslip‐Viera, Gabriel, et al. “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs.” Current Anthropology, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, pp. 419–41, https://doi.org/10.1086/204626.

Ioannidis, Alexander G., et al. “Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement.” Nature, vol. 583, no. 7817, 8 July 2020, pp.572-577. PubMed Central, doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2487-2.
Jones, Terry L., and Kathryn A. Klar. “Diffusionism Reconsidered: Linguistic and Archaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Polynesian Contact with Southern California.” American Antiquity, vol. 70, no. 3, 2005, pp. 457–84. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40035309.

Kamugisha, Aaron K. "The Early Peoples of Pre-Columbian America: Ivan Van Sertima and His Critics." The Journal of Caribbean History 35.2 (2001): 234-VII. ProQuest. Web. 18 Feb. 2024.

Kumar Pokharia, Anil, et al. “Possible Evidence of Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages Based on Conventional LSC and AMS 14C Dating of Associated Charcoal and a Carbonized Seed of Custard Apple (Annona squamosa L.).” Radiocarbon, vol. 51, no.3, 2009, pp. 923-930. Cambridge Core, doi:10.1017/S0033822200033993.

Meggers, Betty J. “Archaeological Evidence for Transpacific Voyages from Asia since 6000 BP.” Estudios Atacameños, no. 15, 1998, pp. 107–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25674708.

West of Vinland: The Controversy of the Kensington Runestone

In 1893, the world’s attention turned to Chicago, where a grand spectacle was being staged. The Chicago World’s Fair was a feat of planning and engineering, featuring an entire district of beautiful whitewashed buildings with neoclassical facades that came to be known as the White City. Within these buildings were attractions of all sorts, from museums of anthropology to demonstrations of locomotive technology. But the express purpose of the fair, also called the Columbian Exposition, was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World in 1492. Some, however, took exception to this, and not for the obvious reason that the New World was already inhabited by a rich indigenous culture and civilization. Rather, they took umbrage with giving Columbus credit for discovering the New World because they argued that the honor belonged to others. Numerous countries celebrated their contributions to civilization in pavilions at the fair, but Norway went further. They sent a dozen men on a replica Viking sailing ship across the Atlantic, and then displayed the vessel at the exposition, asserting that credit for the discovery of America rightly belonged to them. Indeed, of all the theories of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact, or claims that Christopher Columbus was not the first European to cross the Atlantic and find the New World, this one, that Vikings were the first people from Europe to visit North America, has always stood out as far more credible than the rest. There is literary evidence for the claim in the form of the Vinland Sagas, Icelandic prose narratives that relate the stories of Viking exploratory ventures. In them, we learn that around the year 1000 CE, Leif Eriksson went off course on his way from Norway to Greenland and discovered a new land rich in grapes or currants, a land which he called Vinland. Thereafter, this Vinland is said to have been discovered and for a time settled by other Vikings. We know that this claim was circulated as early as 1075 CE, for the medieval German chronicler Adam of Bremen wrote about their discovery of some mystery “islands” deep in the Atlantic; however, the actual location of Vinland was long debated. In the 16th century, when European geographers wrote about the land they called America, Icelanders were certain that this was the Vinland of their Sagas, which had only actually been recorded in the 13th and 14th centuries, hundreds of years after the events they describe. The rest of the world, however, did not yet recognize their claim of discovery. In 1770, a Genevan scholar, Paul Henri Mallet, considered the possibility in his book, Northern Antiquities, but the Icelandic Sagas themselves, and by extension their claims about Vinland, did not receive much attention until the mid-19th century. In 1837, the Danish antiquarian Carl Christian Refn advocated for the recognition of Norse colonization of North America, and by the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, it was a very well-known notion, even though no concrete, archaeological evidence had ever been turned up. What a wonder it was, then, when, only five years later, just such evidence showed up in the form of an inscribed stone, specifically a runestone, such as the many thousands found all over Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. This runestone told the tale of an expedition of Northmen on a journey westward from Vinland, and astonishingly, it was not discovered very near to the locations typically believed to have been Vinland, like Newfoundland or Maine or the Chesapeake Bay. No, this runestone was discovered in central Minnesota, and it bore the date 1362. If it is genuine, it completely rewrite the history of European settlement and exploration in North America. But can it be believed?

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As longtime listeners of the podcast must know by now, I love me some stories about inscribed stones whose messages appear to rewrite history but whose authenticity are dubious. Before I ever started the podcast, I wrote a whole novel about Joseph Smith and the beginning of Mormonism, and his claims, about finding inscribed plates that tell the story of the ancient ancestors of Native Americans being Jews who made their way to America in the dim and distant past, marked the beginning of my fascination with such hoaxes, along with my interest in dubious theories of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact. My interest in such stories was in full display when I started the podcast as well, as I was perhaps even more interested in the story of the Dare Stones, the inscribed stone fraud connected to the lost colonists of Roanoke, than I was in the story of the Lost Colony itself. If you haven’t already, check out my rewritten and remastered version of both those episodes, which I just released as a bonus episode. After my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel in 2021, I really delved into claims like these in my episode Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories, in which I told the story of Dighton Rock, another stone whose inscription was claimed to have been proof of Norse contact with the New World by none other than the aforementioned Danish champion of the theory, Carl Christian Refn, though no one could really agree on the markings of Dighton Rock, seeing also Phoenician, Portuguese and Native American pictograms. As that episode went on, I discussed the Pittsfield phylactery, a potential inspiration for Joseph Smith claims about the Hebraic descent of Native Americans, as well as the Kinderhook Plates, another Mormon hoax, and the Newark Holy Stone and Michigan Relics, all very famous and very fake inscribed stone forgeries. If you never listened to that episode, it would make a great follow-up to this one, so check it out. The reason I didn’t cover the Kensington Runestone and other American runestones in that episode is that it cannot be easily dismissed in a paragraph or two, as the others could be.

Anne Stine Ingstad leading archeological excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows, 1963.

Unlike claims about the Hebraic origin of Native Americans, which have been convincingly refuted for a very long time, the claim that North America was visited first by Norsemen has been proven true! As early as 1914, a historian named William Munn from Newfoundland began to theorize the locations of Norse settlements in the New World, namely Helluland and Vinland. Specifically, Munn suggested Vinland was actually located on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, at a place he called “Lancey Meadows,” which is really L’Anse aux Meadows, or “the bay with grasslands.” The prevailing theory of the day, however, was that, since the name Vinland suggested a land rich in wild grapes, then the locations must have been further south, since it was then falsely believed grapes could not grow north of Massachusetts. However, in 1960, Norwegian archaeologists explored L’Anse aux Meadows, led by a local guide to what he called an “old Indian camp,” and discovered the grass-covered remnants of old Norse structures. Thereafter excavating the site and finding artifacts of bone, bronze, and stone, they have convincingly proven through comparison with similar encampment sites on Greenland and Iceland that this was indeed a Norse settlement, though whether it was the storied Vinland remains a point of debate. Some scholars still suggest that the lack of grapes at L’Anse aux Meadows means the Vinland site remains to be found further south down the Atlantic coast. However, while there is some indication that there may have been Viking trading outposts north of there, and west of Greenland, on the Avayalik Islands, Willows Island, and Baffin Island, no evidence of further Viking exploration south and west or into mainland North America has ever turned up. So the fact that, at the height of American interest in this topic, a runestone claiming to have been left by Vikings who had traveled inland from Vinland was found some 2000 miles south and west of Newfoundland, all the way on the other side of the Great Lakes in Minnesota, is understandably hard to believe. But as I said, it cannot be easily dismissed, as there are some scholars who, though outliers in the academic community on this topic, continue to argue that the Kensington Runestone is genuine and represents proof of far more extensive Norse exploration of North America than has previously been established.

The runestone was reportedly discovered in November of 1898 by a Swedish farmer named Olof Ohman. The story goes that he and his son were clearing trees from their land at the time, and they were working on uprooting a particular poplar or aspen tree (versions of the story vary on this point). This entailed digging around the tree, cutting through the roots, and winching it out. On this occasion, though, Ohman claimed to have discovered a 200 pound slab of rock grasped within the roots that had to be removed. Ohman’s 10-year-old son, Edward, was the first to notice the strange inscription on the stone, according to a later affidavit, and Olof Ohman called a neighbor over, Nils Flaten, to examine it. This stone would have a long and storied career, persisting through many eras during which it was variously decried as a fraud and then authenticated as a genuine medieval artifact in a scholarly debate that continues to this day. At first, it was displayed in a local bank window, and soon its runic inscription was roughly translated by a Scandinavian languages professor. The content of its message would be refined through the years with further study, such that today we recognize that its irregular runes bear a message in Old Swedish on its front face that translates to: “8 Götalanders and 22 Northmen on …exploratory journey from Vinland west of…We had a camp by two skerries, one day’s journey north from this stone. We were fishing one day. After we came home we found 10 men red from blood and death. AVM save from evil,” AVM being largely thought to mean “Ave Maria.” On the side of the stone tablet is a further message: “There are 10 men by the sea to look after our ships 14 days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.” Shortly after it was translated, it was sent to Northwestern University, where other professors declared it a modern forgery, determining that, though it claimed to be from the 14th century, its language was not medieval. Chicago newspaper articles also reported on the further indication that it was not medieval because the entire bottom left corner of the stone appeared to be covered in a layer of cement, which must have been present when it was carved because a portion of the runes had been engraved into it. So much for the strange runestone, it seemed, and Olof brought it home, discarding it on his property facedown and using it carelessly as a steppingstone to more easily access his granary.

The Kensington Runestone in 1910.

The story of the Kensington Runestone was not to end there, though, for it was resurrected by a Norwegian-American historian of the Midwest, who made it a career goal to authenticate the stone. He purchased it from Ohman and collected affidavits from witnesses of its discovery. The state historical society thereafter took a further interest and assigned an archaeologist to re-examine it. This scholar viewed the cement substance on the stone’s corner as a “calcite layer,” and though he did admit that calcite would disintegrate quickly in the elements, he suggested that because the stone had been found buried, it had been preserved. This new scholarly support for the stone’s authenticity resulted in its being displayed prominently in the Smithsonian Museum of Washington, D.C., for two years, which then drew further scholarly criticism, this time from linguists and runologists who argued with renewed passion that, through comparison with other medieval runic inscriptions, it was clear the runes on the Kensington stone were of modern, 19th century origin. Nevertheless, a museum in nearby Alexandria, Minnesota, was dedicated to the runestone, and it became something of a mascot for not only Scandinavian immigrants to America, but also for the state of Minnesota itself, which rebranded itself the “Birthplace of America” at its New York World’s Fair pavilion in 1964. And since then, a few outlier academics have bucked consensus by arguing that there are indeed medieval examples of some of the stranger uses of language and runes on the tablet, and that geological evidence can be marshaled to support the stone’s authenticity. Proponents of the stone’s authenticity even go so far as to invent entire historical scenarios, suggesting the travelers who left the stone in Minnesota may not have been from among the original Vinland settlers, but instead were from a later expedition sent westward in 1350 by King Magnus, ruler of Sweden and Norway, in order to reconnect with trans-Atlantic colonies with whom they’d lost contact. Here we begin to see numerous parallels to the Lost Colony of Roanoke. In order to explain the presence of the stone in Minnesota, it’s speculated that the colonies at Greenland and Vinland were found abandoned, and the expedition struck inland, believing the lost Viking colonists may have done likewise. And in a striking parallel to the Dare Stones hoax, one theory has it that the Scandinavian explorers actually hadn’t made it that far inland, but that some Dakota Native Americans had decided to lug the 200-pound stone to that location. Keep in mind that there is no convincing evidence for these scenarios. They rely only on the dubious Kensington Runestone for proof, and this demonstrates convincingly that, in rejecting Occam’s Razor and the by comparison simple and more probable explanation that the Swedish runestone suddenly discovered in the wake of the Columbian Exposition by a Swede was a 19th century hoax, the proponents of the Runestone simply want to believe it’s real and will go to great lengths to convince themselves that it is.

Rather than speculate on the circumstances that might make the artifact genuine, let’s examine the evidence that it is not, first by considering the content of the stone’s runic inscription. The message appears to indicate that, much like the first Dare Stone hoax, this one was meant to stay in one place as a marker (go back to my first two episodes, which I just remastered, to understand this reference). This is clear from the mention of their fishing trip, camping “by two skerries, one day’s journey north from this stone.” Such directions would be meaningless unless the stone were meant to be erected as a kind of landmark or monument, which was common of such runestones back in Sweden and Norway. If we can safely reject as unlikely the theory that Dakota native peoples chose to bear a 200-pound stone far from where it had been placed, then we can begin to think about the logic of the statement that this encampment in Minnesota was west of Vinland, which tracks, but that they left men with their ships 14 days’ travel westward. This makes less sense. The location of Vinland is understood to be on the Atlantic coast, whether you want to locate it at Newfoundland or some as yet undiscovered location on the New England coast. This would mean far more than 14 days’ travel on foot to reach Kensington, Minnesota.  For this to be accurate, then, these medieval explorers’ ship would have had to be anchored in the Great Lakes. However, the first ships known to sail in the Great Lakes had to be built and launched there because Niagara Falls and the rapids of the St. Lawrence River prevented passage all the way from the Atlantic. However, a 19th-century forger might have mistakenly believed that Vikings could sail right into the Great Lakes because the Norwegian Viking replica ship had famously crossed the Atlantic and sailed across the Great Lakes right up to the Chicago World’s Fair. This, however, was only possible because of the construction of the Erie Canal in 1825. Proponents of the Kensington Runestone will typically suggest, however, that the waterways of the Americas had greatly changed between the 14th century and the 19th century, pointing to the mention of islands in the runic inscription as proof. The runes say the travelers camped a day north on two “skerries,” which were rock islets, and indicate that the stone was being erected on “this island.” As there were no bodies of water with islands in the area, and as Olof Ohman’s farm was certainly no island, believers must assert that some boulders somewhere might have been skerries in a wetter era. There is no explaining the calling of Ohman’s farm an island, though.

Olof Ohman displaying the runestone at a local carnival, 1927. Image courtesy Minnesota Historical Society.

In order to explain away these issues, they are typically suggested to be problems of translation. Perhaps the words translated as “skerries” and “island” meant something else. Indeed, some of the most spirited defenses of the Kensington Runestone’s authenticity are linguistic in nature. While most experts have determined that the translated language of the runes is far closer to 19th century Swedish than to the Old Swedish of the Middle Ages, more recent scholarship by defenders of the stone have shown through comparison to medieval charters written in Old Swedish that some of the unusual usage can be found in medieval Swedish writings. Nevertheless, the examples cited are so rare and non-standard that it remains improbable that so many of these unusual words would be present in one text, and some words, like the preposition “from” and the word translated as “journey of discovery,” have never been found used in any medieval text. While these words that don’t seem to have been in medieval usage were common in 19th-century Swedish, there were still some puzzling terms that were not in 19th-century usage, suggesting that, if it were forged, the forger would have had to have some knowledge of medieval Swedish. But in the 1950s, it was discovered that Olof Ohman had in his possession a book called The Well-Informed Schoolmaster that contained these Old Scandinavian words in a section on the history of the Swedish language. Then there are the runes themselves, the script used to write the stone’s Old Swedish message. Its runes have long puzzled both those who debunk and those who authenticate the stone, as they simply do not comport with most known medieval runic inscriptions, but neither do they correspond with more modern runic scripts. This has led to interesting theories about the person who inscribed it, be they medieval traveler or forger. Some say they invented a polyglot runic system all their own, while others say they must have been a scholar using Roman scribal practices that they adapted into a runic script. A simpler explanation emerged in 2004, though, when a folklore research institute discovered a 19th century runes list compiled by a Swedish tailor, which provides both a medieval runic alphabet and a later variant runic code, dubbed the Secret Style, used by traveling Swedish workers. And so, now we know that the most unusual words and characters of the runic inscription, the parts that long puzzled all who examined it, may have been known by Olof Ohman or other Swedish immigrants who had settled in that area, as they were freely communicated in extant schoolbooks and may have been commonly used as a kind of journeyman code by Swedes of their economic class.

It seems inescapable now that we examine the man Olof Ohman himself. Unsurprisingly, since he was a Swede, and he just happened to find a runestone such as the many that were known to stand in Sweden, whose runes seemed to translate into an approximation of Old Swedish, all just a few years after the stunt in which a replica Viking ship sailed to nearby Chicago to assert that the Norse had been the first to settle America, suspicion quickly settled on him. However, it should be emphasized that there is no irrefutable evidence that Ohman was the perpetrator of this hoax. And actually, numerous character witnesses have sworn to his honesty and could not possibly imagine, if he had involved himself in such a hoax, that he would also involve his 10-year-old son in such a way. And certainly the fact that Ohman simply discarded the stone and used it as a step with zero regard for its preservation after it was declared a modern inscription does at first blush seem to indicate that he didn’t really have a dog in the fight. However, we might also imagine that, having been involved in such a hoax, he might have simply considered it failed and worthless after it was immediately seen through, which would explain his disregard for the stone just as well.  Some have suggested that if it was a hoax, it may have been the work of another Swedish-American who had immigrated to the area, for there was a burgeoning community there. One suspect was a schoolteacher named Sven Fogelblad, whose education may have given him the knowledge needed to compose the inscription, and another possible co-conspirator was John Gran, believed by some to have chiseled the message. However, for this conspiracy to work, Olof Ohman still likely had to have been involved, since he was close friends with them, and since it was buried on his land and he was the one who dug it up and started showing everyone. Just as there are character witnesses who say Ohman would never do such a thing, others said that Ohman and Fogelblad were an iconoclastic pair, and such a prank would not have been out of character for them. And there are further claims that John Gran admitted to the conspiracy in a deathbed confession, or at least a sickbed confession, to his son, but evidence for this confession is likewise weak. There is also the fact that a book with the Old Swedish words from the stone was later, after Olof’s death, found to have been in his possession. But owning a Swedish schoolbook is not proof of anything, and according to some reports, if Ohman were involved, no one in his family believed it. While it’s distasteful to bring this up and speculate about it, some who defend Ohman against charges being involved in the fraud point out that both Ohman’s son and daughter took their own lives in separate incidents years apart, and it’s asserted they did so because the stain on their family name was so shameful to them. However, we have no evidence that their tragic suicides were in any way caused by the accusations against their late father, and perhaps just as likely is the fact that both siblings suffered unrelated depression. Both heredity and environment are believed, after all, to contribute to suicide risk. In the end, all we really know is that Ohman dug up a runestone that anyone might have buried there.

Another Midwestern Runestone, the Heavener stone. Image courtesy the Oklahoma Historical Society.

While evidence of a conspiracy is weak to nonexistent, geological evidence of a fraud is, if you’ll excuse the pun, concrete and even more convincing than the linguistic evidence. As with the inscription, archaeologists and geologists on both sides of the issue have gone back and forth on this topic, with some arguing the layer of what appeared to be cement was a natural calcite vein or suggesting that it was a lime mortar such as the kind the Norse were known to use, and others comparing the aging of certain mineral elements in the stone to other stones like old tombstones, though such comparisons of lithologies are problematic, especially since the stones they compared them to were sometimes as far away as Maine. One of the most recent and most thorough examinations, by geologist Harold Edwards in 2020, shows the Kensington Runestone is very unlikely to be authentic. Edwards identified the calcite encrustation as stucco of the sort commonly used in the 19th-century, and pointed out that while 14th-century Norsemen were known to use such mortars, explorers traveling far afield in a strange land were unlikely to be carrying with them the barrels of lime they would have needed to make it. Furthermore, he identified the stone as a kind of flagstone that was being used in Minnesota for sidewalks in the 1890s. Scratches on its reverse side that had previously been mistaken for glacial striations he identified as tool marks, and the kinds of tools that would have been needed by the Norse to make the stone, including a grinding wheel, would again, not have been carried around by explorers. Moreover, there were plentiful nearby limestone boulders that would have been much easier for 14th century Scandinavians to break and cut and carve, and some of the marks on the Runestone, specifically the word dividers, appear to have been made with a 19th-century conical punch. In fact, all the runes measure exactly one inch, a standard of measurement that medieval Norse explorers would not have used. While it was long argued that the stone being found within the roots of a tree proved its age, and that root marks could be observed on it, Edwards could find no such marks. He points out, also, that though the stone logically would have been created to stand upright above ground, the calcite-rich stucco would have quickly been eroded and destroyed if exposed to weather for any significant amount of time before the stone was buried, and that the stone was weighted in such a way that it was more likely to have naturally fallen with the inscription side up. This meant that, since it was discovered with the inscription face down, it was more likely to have been purposely buried. And while it is true that the calcite stucco would have been better preserved belowground, it still would have degraded and actually faster if it were buried so long beneath an aspen tree and wrapped up in its roots. Edwards therefore concluded that the stone was a hoax created not long before its 1898 discovery.
While the scholarly debate over the Kensington Runestone has raged over the years, further evidence of medieval Norse contact in the Midwestern United States would have certainly gone a long way to authenticating it. As it happens, in 1923 another runestone did turn up, this time in Oklahoma, near Heavener. Then in 1967, another was discovered near Poteau, Oklahoma, and in 1969, two more in Shawnee. Finally, in 2001, the same strange letters from the Kensington Runestone, AVM, long believed to mean Ave Maria, were discovered carved into a lichen-covered boulder near the Kensington Rune Stone Park, a historical site preserved at the location of Ohman’s farm, where the original stone was found. However, rather than any of these stones actually serving to confirm the existence of Vikings in medieval Minnesota, they actually help to prove that it was a hoax. The Heavener stone is believed to be of 19th-century origins as well, carved by Scandinavian immigrants to Oklahoma who may have been inspired by the find in Kensington, and the rest of the Oklahoma stones were so clearly of modern origin, with freshly carved runes, that they are universally acknowledged to be hoaxes. As for the AVM stone, shortly after its discovery in 2001, some grad students came forward to say they had carved it back in 1985 as a fun prank and a test of the public’s credulity. But perhaps the most convincing evidence that all of the inscribed runestones of the Midwestern United States are hoaxes, aside from the obvious fact that they were discovered during a time of revived interest in medieval Viking exploration in places where Scandinavian immigrants had settled and formed communities, is the fact that no other signs of Viking settlements have ever been discovered. Consider L’Anse Aux Meadows, the likeliest candidate we have for Vinland and the only confirmed location of medieval Norse contact with the Americas. This settlement could be confirmed because of the signs they left behind: their abandoned artifacts and the remnants of their buildings. Without such an archaeological site, and with only these dubious stones to stand as evidence, the belief that Scandinavians settled the Midwest simply collapses under the weight of its presuppositions.

*

Until next time, remember, scholars too can sometimes be duped by hoaxes, and when one decides to stake their entire reputation on one, they can end up being the most clever and convincing proponents of such lies.  

Further Reading

Edwards, Harold. “The Kensington Runestone: Geological Evidence of a Hoax.” The Minnesota Archaeologist, vol. 77, 2020, pp. 6-40. Academia, https://www.academia.edu/45218145/The_Kensington_Runestone_Geological_Evidence_of_a_Hoax.

Gilman, Rhoda R. “The Kensington Runestone A Century of Controversy.” Journal of the West, vol. 44, no. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 3–7. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=31h&AN=18690882&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Hanson, Barry J. “The Kensington Runestone.” Journal of the West, vol. 40, no. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 68–80. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=31h&AN=4489300&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Williams, Henrik. “The Kensington Runestone: Fact and Fiction.” Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 1, 2012, pp. 3-22. Uppsala Universitet, uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A543322&dswid=3735.

Zalar, Michael A. “16th-Century Cartography, Plat Maps, and the Kensington Runestone.” Journal of the West, vol. 40, no. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 62–67. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=31h&AN=4489299&site=eds-live&scope=site.

The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle - Part Two: Dead Reckoning

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. This is what we’re taught as children, along with numerous myths that I have addressed previously, such as that the Earth was largely believed flat before Columbus’s voyage. We can thank prolific mythmaker Washington Irving for this myth, as well as many others, such as the character of Santa Claus as we have come to imagine him, and the popular notion that Ponce De Leon came to Florida in search of the Fountain of Youth. Well, thanks to Washington Irving, we also find Christopher Columbus all wrapped up with the myth complex of the Bermuda Triangle. It started with Irving’s account of Columbus crossing the Sargasso Sea. Like a horror story, we learn that his ships were becalmed in a strange expanse, with seaweed all around them yet no sight of land. Moreover, his crew witnessed strange sights, a fire in the sky, and an unusual light in the distance. Then, his compass began to behave strangely. In fact, Irving’s depiction was likely relatively accurate in this case. The Sargasso Sea, so named after the Spanish word for seaweed, would long strike fear into sailors. Typically seaweed was seen only when close to land, though it gathers here in the mid-Atlantic because of its circular currents. Seeing the masses of seaweed, sailors typically feared they might run aground, or worse. Stranded for long periods in this sea, sailors began to see things on the flotillas of sea vegetation surrounding them. Creepy crawly creatures that made their home among the branches and gas-filled berries of the pale brown sargassum seaweed lent it the appearance of movement, such that some believed it was alive, grappling their ships, holding them in place. In fact, movement was impeded in the Sargasso because of the so-called horse latitudes, a belt of waters in which wind was rare, with weather so calm that sometimes sailors felt they could not breathe. It was called the horse latitudes because sometimes, which on ships carrying horses were so becalmed that they ran through their drinking water, horses became so mad with thirst that they leapt overboard. As for the talk of a “great flame of fire” seen in the sky, and later of a strange light in the distance, these episodes are easily explained. The crew likely had spotted a meteor falling, and in fact, there is no sense that the sight was unusual or greatly troubled the sailors, who must have seen such things before. As for the light in the distance, this occurred shortly before they finally sighted land, so it was likely a torchlight held by a night fisherman or a native on a nearby island. Of course, UFO enthusiasts latch onto these lights as an indication that Columbus encountered some kind of mysterious flying object during his voyage, and once the legend of the Bermuda Triangle was established, the incident became proof that Columbus had almost been lost to the mysterious forces of the area, which were often linked to flying saucers. In reality, most of the Sargasso Sea is well outside the area designated the Bermuda Triangle, but it does overlap in its westernmost reaches. In fact, there is at least one indication that Columbus had entered the Triangle: his erratic compass readings. Compasses do in fact behave relatively oddly in the Bermuda Triangle. Considering the fact that the most notorious and most mysterious of Bermuda Triangle incidents, the disappearance of Flight 19, is said to have involved the failure of the planes’ compasses, this does indeed seem to connect the experience of Columbus and his crew and the vanishment of Flight 19 to some anomalous phenomenon in the Bermuda Triangle…but when we look further into this, the “anomaly” may not be as mysterious as it seems, and its effect on Columbus and Flight 19 perhaps entirely embellished by those who would make of the Bermuda Triangle a monolithic paranormal mystery when it is really no more than an assemblage of unrelated tragedies.

As we continue to explore the urban legend of the Bermuda Triangle, we must reckon with the inciting incident, so to speak. Strangely, the inciting incident of this drama was not the first disappearance said to have occurred in the Triangle, but rather the one that drew the most attention. The fame and notoriety of the disappearance of Flight 19 and the plane dispatched to rescue them cannot be exaggerated. It was a major, national front-page story that captured the public’s imaginations. Newspapers called them “The Lost Patrol,” though as I described in part one, they were not on patrol. Rather, they were on a navigational training flight, each of the five bombers crewed with three men, and only one, the lead plane, piloted by an experienced aviator: flight instructor Lieutenant Charles Taylor. All four other planes were being flown by student pilots, crewed with student navigators. Initial public interest in the disappearance of the squadron waned after the Navy conducted its month-long investigation of the incident and cited instrument failure and pilot error as the reasons for the loss of the squadron, but as the report would later be amended to conclude that the flight had been lost due to “cause unknown,” the same report would later fuel speculations about a paranormal cause. The seeds of the legend of the Bermuda Triangle first appeared in a 1950 Associated Press piece by E.V.W. Jones titled “Sea’s Puzzles Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton Age,” which paired the story of Flight 19 with the 1948 loss of a British passenger plane, the Star Tiger, near Bermuda, and the 1949 loss of another plan of the same model flown by the same airline, the Star Ariel, on its flight from Bermuda to Chile. As the title suggests, the short article only points out that modern mysteries still exist, and that even in the modern age “men and machines and ships can disappear without a trace.” It was a simple reminder of how vast and untamed the world still was, with no imputation of supernatural phenomena. But within two years, these supposed mysteries were expanded on in the pages of Ray Palmer’s paranormal phenomena magazine, Fate, a magazine credited with popularizing the idea that flying saucers were real and were piloted by extra-terrestrials. By the mid-fifties, the growing laundry list of supposedly mysterious incidents in the area was reprinted and added to in the pages of numerous books that attributed the losses to UFO’s, including 1954’s Flying Saucers on the Attack, 1955’s The Case for the UFO, and Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucer Conspiracy that same year. The name “Bermuda Triangle” would eventually be coined by Vincent Gaddis in his article for men’s magazine Argosy in 1964, which would be reprinted the same year in Flying Saucer Review. From there, the snowball had gathered enough mass and momentum that it could not be stopped, and eventually we would see the legend fully fleshed out in Charles Berlitz’s work in the 1970s.

The Argosy Magazine issue in which the legend took its final form.

No matter what we might say about the way subsequent writers would add onto the legend, drawing tenuous connections and presenting less than mysterious incidents as mysteries in order to manufacture a myth, a fact is that the loss of Flight 19 did seem a genuine mystery. That’s why it captured the attention of the country at the time, why it warranted a Navy investigation that lasted months, and why even five years later it was being written about as a puzzle by journalists. This was not the loss of a single plane. It was a whole squadron, five bombers, and the fact that a rescue plane sent to find them also was promptly lost made it a true enigma at the time. What could have caused all their instruments to fail? Why did they lose radio contact? Why could they not have simply navigated west, making their way back to Florida, simply by following the sun? When they ran out of fuel, the plane should have been able to float for some time, long enough for the crew, who all wore life vests, to get in their emergency, self-inflating rafts. They should have been capable of surviving on their rafts for some time while awaiting rescue, and they were equipped with radio gear with which they could have continued sending SOS signals while in their rafts. If they had all crashed and been unable to launch their rafts, why was no floating wreckage or bodies ever found? Why were no oil slicks observed in the extensive search? And these questions apply as well to the loss of the Martin Mariner, the flying boat sent to search for and rescue the naval airmen. According to numerous accounts of the last radio transmissions of Flight 19, Taylor indicated that they were experiencing an emergency and were off course. When asked for his position, Taylor said he couldn’t be sure, that they were lost. When told to head west, he reportedly exclaimed, “We don’t know which way is west. Everything is wrong…strange…we can’t be sure of any direction. Even the ocean doesn’t look as it should!” What possible explanation could there be for all of this?

In fact, if all of these details were accurate, there are still some feasible explanations. For example, the sea looking strange might be attributed to the fact that methane hydrates are believed by scientists to occasionally release frothy and bubbling gas explosions in the area. Or if the flight had gone off course into the Sargasso Sea, perhaps the rafts of seaweed made the waters look unusual to any pilots who were not familiar with it, which, as we will see, flight leader Charles Taylor may not have been. As for the failure of the flight’s compasses, this may be attributed to the unusual compass readings common in the area, as was observed even by the first European to ply these waters, Christopher Columbus. In fact, there are exactly two places where these odd compass readings are known to occur, in the Bermuda Triangle and in a certain stretch of ocean near Japan called the Devil’s Sea or the Dragon’s Triangle, in which, much like the Bermuda Triangle, many ships and airplanes are said to have mysteriously disappeared. This compass variation is said to be caused by some magnetic anomaly in these areas, which could be linked to reports of St. Elmo’s Fire, or witchfire, being common in the Triangle. This weather phenomenon involves the electric field around objects like ship masts or plane wings ionizing the air and create a glowing plasma field. Perhaps this phenomenon could have caused the confusion of Flight 19 and prevented them from seeing the sun and navigating westward? All of this sounds rather scientific and convincing, but it’s hogwash. The compass variation that Columbus experienced is typical and common knowledge even among hikers. Almost everywhere on earth, compasses don’t point to true north, but rather to magnetic north, which gradually changes, requiring some customary adding or subtracting of degrees. Indeed, Columbus realized right away that his compass needle was being drawn to some other pole, as it was not pointing toward the North Star. The fact is that, in the Bermuda Triangle, compasses are known to point to true north, making navigation easier rather than more difficult. Any tales about magnetic anomalies causing spinning compass needles are nonsense; there is no evidence of any strange magnetic phenomena in the area, and though St. Elmo’s Fire is known to appear on the edges of planes, it does not affect instrumentation or the visibility of the sun. As for the Devil’s Sea near Japan, where it is true that as in the Bermuda Triangle, compasses point to true north rather than magnetic north, this sister mystery to the Bermuda Triangle has also been proven false. A series of New York Times articles from the 1950s are responsible for this legend, as they reported some ships being lost to undersea volcanoes and tidal waves in the area. These losses, which the Japanese did not find mysterious at all, would later be latched onto by American writers as evidence that ships were commonly lost in those seas, when the Japanese do not consider it an especially dangerous area. But after all this, when we delve deeply into the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, we discover that none of these potential explanations are even needed, as the transmissions in which Taylor talks about being unable to see the sun and says the seas look strange, it turns out, never even happened. These words of Taylor’s originate from a 1962 American Legion Magazine article that included fictional dramatizations of Flight 19’s final transmissions. Even though none of these radio messages were real, appearing nowhere in the 400-page Naval investigation report, they have been repeated uncritically as real quotations by writers who promote the Bermuda Triangle mystery.

An early edition of Larry Kusche’s book, whose title, surprisingly, was no exaggeration.

So it went for decades, each writer publishing on the Bermuda Triangle putting their own stink on the mess and not bothering to clean up any of the previous researchers’ garbage. Each new article or book simply recycled what had previously been claimed, listing the incidents others had already compiled without really looking into them or doing much in the way of fact checking. When one of these “researchers” bothered to do some research, it was usually just to find some new incident they could tack onto the lists, rather than actually confirming the mysterious nature of the incidents previously attached to the legend. But then came Larry Kusche in the 1970s. Kusche was a research librarian at Arizona State University. For those who know nothing about library science, this may not seem especially impressive, but if you ever need to track down obscure source material, a reference librarian is who you need, and his background in library science meant he had a strong sense of source quality and credibility and was able to think critically when evaluating what material could be trusted. In the seventies, the topic came to his attention when students wanted to write essays about it and sought out his help in finding credible support material. Kusche took an interest, and while the students who had solicited his help came and went, he continued amassing newpaper and magazine articles and looking further into the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche also just happened to be an experienced commercial pilot, flight instructor, and flight engineer with thousands of flight hours under his belt, making him even more peculiarly suited to cracking the case of Flight 19. Undertaking the project with the intention of writing a book, he wisely moved beyond secondary sources in the news media to examine the actual Navy investigation’s report and the personal records of Lt. Charles Taylor. Over the course of writing his two books on the topic, he conducted almost a hundred interviews, took a ride on an Avenger bomber, and even piloted a solo flight following the same path as Flight 19. What he found was rather surprising. Almost all of the lost ships and flights named by those compiling lists of the Bermuda Triangle’s victims had some rational and mundane explanation—causes as simple and to-be-expected as foul weather, storms that writers failed to mention or even insisted had not occurred—and many happened far outside the area identified as the Bermuda Triangle. As for Flight 19, he discovered that no researcher before him had even bothered to examine the investigative report, which, as he demonstrates convincingly, actually proves that Flight 19 simply got lost, due to flight leader Charles Taylor’s error, and went down in severe weather.

Those who believe nothing can adequately explain the loss of Flight 19 often appeal to the experience and expertise of Lt. Charles Taylor. By all accounts he did have extensive combat piloting experience and was an excellent pilot. But, of course, he was also human, and Kusche recorded indications of his fallibility. For example, he had twice before become lost while piloting and been forced to ditch his planes. The first time was June of 1944. He’d lost his bearings near Trinidad, run out of fuel, and had been unable to launch his raft before his plane sank, triggering the explosion of depth charges below him. He was lucky to have been rescued that day. The next time was January of 1955, earlier the same year as Flight 19’s disappearance. He had lost radio contact and had been unable to find his way to Guam. He put the plane into the water and he and one passenger spent all night in a raft awaiting rescue. This does not indicate that he was a bad pilot, but it does demonstrate a pattern that corresponds with what appears to have occurred on December 5th. There is a story about Charles Taylor having had a premonition about some disaster that would happen on the flight, causing him to ask to be excused and not lead the training flight that day. According to the investigation’s report, he did ask that another instructor take his place, but there is no mention of a premonition. Some writers have suggested that he wanted out of the assignment because he had tied one on the night before and was hung over, or even because he was intoxicated at the time of departure, but there is also no evidence for these speculations. In fact, witnesses said Taylor appeared “normal in all respect.” Just as likely is the possibility that Taylor simply did not feel prepared for the flight. Until recently, he had been based in Miami, flying patrols for a year over the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Keys. All indications suggest that he had never flown the Bahamas route that he was then being asked to instruct trainees in flying. When Kusche examined the lengthy official report of the Navy’s investigation, it became clearer and clearer that not only had the loss of Flight 19 been Taylor’s fault, but the original report had even concluded as much, finding him “guilty of mental aberration.” Yet those who insist on the mystery of Flight 19 consistently claim that the Navy had been unable to determine the cause. This is because Taylor’s mother would later accuse the Navy of wrongfully blaming him, contending that they had no aircraft or bodies, and thus no evidence. So to mollify her, it seems, Taylor was exonerated, and the Board of Inquiry amended their report to state that the cause of the disappearance was unknown. The fact is, though, that the investigation had ample evidence to come to their conclusion about Taylor, all of it from his radio transmissions.

Lt. Charles Taylor, the leader of Flight 19, who was likely responsible for the loss of the five bombers, as Kusche demonstrates

One of the purposes of the training flight was to teach the student navigators the technique of dead reckoning, by which airmen navigate when over the open ocean without any visible landmarks. Dead reckoning requires a timekeeping device, as the plane’s location is calculated according to heading and speed, by keeping track of elapsed time, accounting for wind. During a pre-flight check, apparently it was noticed that the five Avengers had no clocks on board. It’s hard to imagine that the planes would be cleared for takeoff with no timekeeping devices on board, but radio transmissions, in which Taylor was heard more than once asking the time, suggest that this lead plane was without a clock. Nevertheless, even when Taylor began expressing concerns that the flight was lost, there are indications that they were actually right where they were supposed to be. About an hour and a half into the flight, Taylor started asking what one of the other pilots’ compass read, saying, “I don’t know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn.” Communicating with someone at Fort Lauderdale and mistakenly using the call sign MT-28 rather than FT-28 (MT being the designation he’d been using the past year while flying out of Miami, and FT being the designation for his flight out of Fort Lauderdale), he said, “Both my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land, but it’s broken. I’m sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” This is the key to the entire debacle. Flight 19 had flown east and by that time would have been directly over some of the smaller Bahama islands, which can look strikingly similar to the Florida Keys. Taylor had been flying over the Keys for a year but likely had not yet flown over the Bahamas. The simple fact that he looked down and thought he was over the Keys seems to have convinced him that he had accidentally been flying southwest rather than east. Therefore, though there was nothing wrong with his compasses, he presumed they were not working because he felt he could not trust them, believing the evidence of his eyes over an instrument known to sometimes fail. Now we are able to understand why he did not immediately head west, and it was not because the sun could not be seen. Believing himself and the whole squadron to be over the Florida Keys, he believed that to head west would take them out over the Gulf of Mexico, where they would run out of fuel. Instead, he appears to have chosen to fly northward, believing this would take them back to Florida, when in fact it took them out into the Atlantic. We know this to be the case, because about four hours into the flight, Port Everglades, who had come into radio contact with the squadron, was finally able to fix their position well north of the Bahamas. But their position was never transmitted to Flight 19 because radio contact was lost. Like the compasses, this communication failure was no great mystery either. Taylor never switched to the emergency broadcasting channel, which would have had a broader reach, preferring to stay on the channel used for training flights in order to keep in contact with the other planes in the squadron. Then it was dark, and despite what promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend claim about the weather being calm, out over the Atlantic where they ended up, it had grown stormy. As rescue planes would report, the area had high winds and extreme turbulence, and the seas into which the squadron would have been forced to ditch were described as “rough” and “tremendous.”

With knowledge of these transmissions, it becomes very clear why the Naval investigation determined that Taylor had suffered a “mental aberration.” Sadly, he became confused, decided he could not trust his instruments, led his squadron in the wrong direction, directly into stormy weather, and they all tragically ended up in the sea. Whether or not they launched their rafts successfully, it’s clear that they were unable to contend with the roughness of the waves. Another unfortunate factor leading to their certain deaths, if they had managed to ditch their aircrafts and survive for some time that dark and stormy night was the fact that the rescue plane sent to search for them was also lost, and further rescue efforts did not commence until the next morning. So now we must consider the loss of the Martin Mariner, the flying boat sent to rescue them the same evening they were lost. First, it must be noted that the Mariner was only one plane among 200 sent to look for the squadron, along with seventeen ships sent to search their last known location. Nothing happened to any of the other planes and ships out searching for Flight 19. When promoters of the Bermuda Triangle myth tell the story, it sounds like the Mariner flew out immediately and then vanished. A tanker out in the area observed an explosion at 7:50pm, made its way to the site of the flames to search for survivors and found only an oil slick and burning gasoline. Legend promoters typically discount this as unrelated, suggesting that this mystery explosion occurred hours after the Mariner had already vanished, but in truth, the Mariner took off at 7:27pm, only 23 minutes before the explosion was seen. And these flying boats were known to be at risk of such random explosions. They were nick-named “flying gas tanks” because they had a problem with the fumes of their fuel leaking out, such that if any crewman snuck a smoke or if any random spark occurred, they could go up in a fireball. Considering this and the evidence found by the tanker, it’s exceedingly clear what happened to the flying rescue boat in the aftermath of the loss of Flight 19. But despite all this evidence and the unmistakable conclusions of the investigation, legend promoters insist it is impossible to comprehend. They point specifically to the fact that, when the search was eventually called off, a standing order was issued to remain on alert for any signs of the lost squadron, and that this order remains “in effect to this very day!” But the reality of the situation is that whenever a search is called off like this, such a standing order is put into effect. It’s nothing unique or strange at all. It just means the search failed, which unfortunately is not uncommon.

A map produced by the Associated Press to illustrate the flight paths of planes lost in the Triangle.

So, we see the insurmountable mystery of Flight 19, the “sea puzzle” that launched the entire Bermuda Triangle myth, was no unsolvable enigma. In fact, it didn’t even really involve the instrument failure so often cited. It was just a matter of pilot error, inclement weather, slow rescue response, and in the case of the exploding rescue boat, an unsafe aircraft. We’ve seen that all of the many lost ships attributed over the years to the Bermuda Triangle likewise had simple explanations. Can the same be said for all the rest of the lost planes? Let’s look specifically at the Star Tiger and the Star Ariel, the two lost British planes originally cited in the first article to ever suggest that planes had a habit of going missing in the area. As with every other of the more than fifty incidents Kusche investigated, the losses of these two passenger flights were also shown to be explainable even if they remained unexplained. The Star Tiger, for example, seems to have encountered stiffer winds than expected, something typically left out of the sensationalist accounts in favor of claims that weather was always perfect during Bermuda Triangle disappearances, and in the case of the Star Ariel, because contact was lost after the pilots had signed off of one frequency but before establishing contact on the next, search and rescue was not dispatched to find them until the next day. While reports of these two flights’ disappearance emphasizes the fact that investigations came to no certain conclusion, suggesting some inexplicable cause, the truth was that their investigations did not rule out any standard cause with any certainty, and even explicitly stated that causes such as fire, engine failure, and loss of control could not be eliminated. The work of Larry Kusche on this topic is an admirable example of critical analysis and skeptical inquiry.

Skeptics like Kusche get a bad rap. Many people use the word “skeptic” as a pejorative, like it means hater or someone who doubts everything unreasonably. In fact, it refers to a systematic approach that should be taken when investigating most topics, involving suspending one’s judgment, evaluating the reliability of evidence and the credibility of sources, and eventually settling on the most reasonable or logical conclusion…or accepting that no clear conclusion can reasonably be reached. Another pejorative used for skeptics that some have applied to Kusche—a label I too have been given from time to time—is “debunker,” giving the impression that we set out determined to disprove a topic from the start, and implying that we would omit or ignore evidence that runs counter to our preferred conclusions. Kusche has addressed this label before, explaining that when he started his research, he really would have preferred to find something truly mysterious about the Bermuda Triangle, as his book would then have surely been a bestseller and earned him a boatload more money than it did. The problem was that his academic sensibilities and ethical approach to research and argumentation made it impossible to perpetuate and amplify what he realized was a total urban legend. This truly resonates with me. I understand that if I didn’t strive for the truth in my podcast, I could probably find far more listeners among those who yearn for the mysterious and the paranormal to be true. But it’s not just ethics that prevent me from promoting such insupportable claims and misinformation; it’s also, as Larry Kusche has explained, the fact that I believe the real story, the fact that such mysteries have been manufactured as frauds perpetrated on the public imagination, to be even more interesting than the far-fetched ideas of E.T. saucers, time portals, and Atlantean death rays. Maybe others who feel the same will eventually find and listen to the podcast in larger numbers, and legends like the Bermuda Triangle can be relegated to the history of mistaken ideas once and for all.

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Until next time, remember, skeptic is not a bad word, and debunker shouldn’t be either. You can’t successfully debunk something that is true, so using the word “debunker” scornfully just means you resent when the shams you believe are exposed as false.

Further Reading

Kusche, Larry. The Disappearance of Flight 19. Harper & Row, 1980.

Kusche, Larry. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved! Prometheus Books, 1995.

Raine, David F. Solved!: The greatest sea mystery of all. Pompano Publications, 1997.

The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle - Part One: A Watery Grave

It was 1945, and the war was over. In May, Allied victory in Europe had been achieved, and in September, a month after the US dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan finally surrendered. Within days of this demonstration of power, existing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union escalated with the two countries each occupying half of Korea, dividing it as their forces had also divided Germany. It was clear that world peace had not exactly been achieved, as the stage was clearly set for the ensuing Cold War. The US Navy, which grew a great deal in strength and importance during operations in the Pacific Theater, would have to remain vigilant and ready for further operations. Two months after the Japanese surrender, on the fifth of December, 1945, a squadron of five Avengers, the torpedo bombers most effectively and commonly used in the war, undertook a routine training exercise intended not just to maintain readiness and capability of their pilots with regard to bombing and train new pilots, but also, somewhat ironically, to hone navigation skills. It was called a “navigation problem,” basically a scenario intended to challenge the pilots, as they flew out of Fort Lauderdale naval air base, navigated to a certain shallow coral reef near the Bahamas called the Chicken Rocks, practiced a low-altitude bombing run, and returned to Florida. It was the 19th of these training exercises, so it was called Flight 19. The name would end up going down in history for all the wrong reasons, as these five Avengers would never be seen again. It’s said that the flight leader had had a premonition of danger before the flight, and that during the flight, they reported the sea looking strange and their instruments failing, radioing in their concerns about being off course and unable to navigate. After losing contact with the squadron, a boat plane was dispatched to find the airmen, who would have made an emergency sea landing and awaited rescue when they ran out of fuel, but they lost contact with the rescue plane as well, and none of the 14 men in the squadron, nor any of the 13 crewmen of the rescue flight were ever found, nor was wreckage of the aircraft ever located. The loss of Flight 19 was attributed to navigational error, in combination with instrument failure, and its rescue flight was believed to have gone down in a catastrophic midair explosion, but within 5 years, it had already begun to strike some as a mystery. A couple of more years, and some publications began to claim there was a pattern of disasters in the area, which they said claimed planes and ships at a higher rate than elsewhere. Within twenty years of the disappearance, the legend had been fleshed out, and the area of sea between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda had been dubbed The Bermuda Triangle, a patch of ocean stretching from the Caribbean to the Sargasso Sea that its researchers asserted was fraught with mysterious danger, the deadliest waters in the world. It wasn’t long before these ships and aircraft lost at sea were said to have fallen victim to fantastical threats. They had entered time portals, it has been said, or sailed right through rifts into an alternative universe. They were abducted by alien spacecraft, or they had been targeted by the advanced technology of the sunken civilization of Atlantis.

Welcome to the first episode back from my year-end hiatus, as we kick off what I hope will be another great season of the podcast and blog. This topic, the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, will take us on a tour through many of the topics I have covered in the past. In fact, besides the lost first episode, which I’ve taken down because I no longer want the first episode some listen to be a political diatribe (there will be plenty more of that for them later), the very first episode in my main feed is on the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and in fact, strangely, though the Roanoke colonists were not at sea, their disappearance has sometimes been suggested to be connected to the supposed strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Since I am working right now on revising and rerecording that first episode for rerelease (which I hope will help retain new listeners who might otherwise be turned off by the audio mix), this topic seemed the perfect one to explore as accompaniment as we revisit that first episode. But in fact, I am finding that the topic connects further, to, for example, my episode on the loss of Aaron Burr’s daughter Theodosia at sea, and to my episode on the mystery of the derelict schooner the Carroll A. Deering, both of which happened on the Outer Banks, near the site of the Lost Colony. Unlike the Lost Colony, though, the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle did not develop right away. As I indicated, it only developed years after the loss of Flight 19 in 1945, embellished by writers who had latched onto the notion that something mysterious was happening in the area. These writers came from the UFO world. One of the earliest promoters of the legend was the magazine Fate, published by Ray Palmer, the science-fiction enthusiast who almost single-handedly popularized the idea of flying saucers of extra-terrestrial origin. And in the 1970s, perhaps the most influential book promulgating this legend, which compiled numerous other incidents long predating Flight 19, was written by linguist Charles Berlitz, who before that had written pseudohistorical books on Atlantis and afterward, as listeners of the podcast may remember, popularized the Philadelphia Experiment hoax and the Roswell Incident myth in his books of the same names, co-authored with known CIA disinformation agent Bill Moore—yet another connection to previous topics covered on the podcast. What we find, then, is that a genuinely surprising incident—the 1945 loss of a whole squadron of bombers as well as the rescue plane sent after them—was afterward embellished and used as a jumping-off point by people known for fabricating other lasting urban legends and modern myths.

A squadron of TBM Avengers like those that disappeared on Flight 19.

To start, let’s look at the oldest supposedly mysterious incidents said to have happened in the Bermuda Triangle, most of which have been identified by people like Berlitz and his predecessors who had it in their mind that something anomalous in those seas caused the disappearance of Flight 19. They therefore pored over all the records they could find for that stretch of water, believing that any incident in which a craft or vessel or person was lost in that place must have been evidence of the anomaly’s existence. It is a kind of proof by location that does not hold up under scrutiny and logic, since it is never actual evidence of something paranormal or supernatural, and to prove it anomalous would require comparing the number of similar incidents in every other patch of sea all over the world. Otherwise, it is simply an exercise in confirmation bias. Take, for example, one of the earliest incidents ever claimed to be a mysterious Bermuda Triangle disappearance: the loss at sea of American Founding Father Thomas Lynch, Jr. Lynch had signed the Declaration of Independence, stepping in to replace his ailing father, a South Carolina representative in the Continental Congress. Interestingly, in a very early presaging of the Civil War, within a month of signing the Declaration, Lynch was threatening that South Carolina would secede from any Confederation if their ownership of slaves was made a topic of debate. Yet more evidence to refute the Lost Cause Myth. Thomas Lynch, Jr., then became quite ill himself, and he and his father returned to South Carolina. His father died of a stroke on the way, and as his own illness dragged on, Lynch, Jr., retired at just 27. It seems likely that he suffered from tuberculosis, as his condition only worsened over the next two years, and he ended up planning a voyage to the South of France with his wife, hoping the air there would do him good. Their ship, a brigantine called Polly, set sail on the first leg of their voyage, headed for the Dutch Antilles island of Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean, and was promptly lost at sea. To Bermuda Triangle researchers, it’s a vanished ship known to have been sailing through or at least near their Triangle, so it’s perfect. But all this is evidence of is that those were dangerous waters, for any number of reasons. The simple fact that there may have been a lot of lost voyages in those waters does not prove anything unexplainable occurs there. Bermuda Triangle researchers will sometimes focus more on lost ships or aircraft whose wreckage was never found, suggesting that since there was no evidence of a shipwreck, this is somehow evidence of paranormal vanishment. But this logic should be reversed. There may be no evidence of a shipwreck, but there is also no evidence of aliens or portals or lost technological civilizations, and which is more likely to be the case? Also, the fact that ships lost at sea and planes that have crashed into the sea might leave no evidence behind is not surprising. While it may be common for some to leave floating debris or oil slicks, it is also very common for every sign of such a disaster to sink or be swept away, especially in this area, as we will see. According to Popular Mechanics, less than 1% of the world’s shipwrecks have been explored. With 90-95% of the sea floor unmapped, it’s believed that there may be 60$ billion worth of recoverable artifacts and valuables strewn across the ocean. So it’s clear that lost wreckage is common, all over the world’s oceans, and the absence of wreckage cannot stand as evidence of some kind of supernatural disappearance.

The problem here is that promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend present any loss at sea that is deemed “unexplained” and therefore technically “mysterious” as bizarre or unearthly. Cue the X-Files theme music. Really though, most of the losses at sea pointed out by these researchers are only considered to have no explanation because we may not know exactly what happened but do have some likely explanations. What these fabulists do is just reject or purposely omit the rational likely explanations and focus only on the uncertainty, which is misleading. For example, Charles Berlitz in Without a Trace lists the USS Pickering, which left Delaware in August of 1800 bound for the West Indies, as the first known ship lost in the Triangle, but he makes no mention of the USS Insurgent, a frigate that left port in August as well and is believed to have been lost in a severe storm that ripped through the West Indies in September. In fact, it’s believed that both ships were sunk by the same storm. And this is the key to many of the oldest Bermuda Triangle disappearances that frequently get ticked off as proof of some unexplainable danger, as that area is commonly struck by tropical storms and hurricanes. The next two lost ships Berlitz lists, the Wasp and the Wildcat, were lost in early autumn 1814 and in October 1824. These are all squarely in the window of the Atlantic hurricane season, as tropical cyclones are known to form mostly between June 1 and November 30th every year. Yet the actual word “hurricane” only appears once in Berlitz’s Without a Trace, and it’s not to explain these lost ships, but rather to explain the sinking of Atlantis, which he suggests may literally lie at the bottom of all the strange disappearances. The topic of Atlantis is a whole other monster that I cannot address with any depth in a series on the Bermuda Triangle, but suffice it to say here that the entire tradition of a lost civilization called Atlantis originated in an allegorical story told by Plato to illustrate metaphorically his ideas about an ideal state. However, some medieval writers came to view it as historical tradition, and 19th-century pseudohistorians later endeavored to prove that it was real, no longer believing it was in the Mediterranean, as was originally suggested, but in the New World, in the Caribbean. But what’s certain is that, when Plato wrote about Atlantis, he knew nothing about the part of the world where Berlitz and others demarcate the Bermuda Triangle.

The USS Pickering, one of many ships whose loss is attributed to the mystery power of the Bermuda Triangle.

What’s pretty ridiculous is that Bermuda Triangle theorists even go beyond the boundaries they themselves have set in their search for juicy cases of ships lost at sea that they can tout to their readers. Some, for example, have even pointed to the lost schooner Patriot, a swift vessel sailing from South Carolina to New York, carrying the daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia. Likewise, they will group in the abandoned Carroll A. Deering, which did sail through the Bermuda Triangle on its journey back to the U.S. from Rio, but was seen with men on her decks off the coast of the U.S., having obviously made it through the Triangle intact, and was only later discovered abandoned and run aground off Cape Hatteras. In both of these cases, which you can hear about in far more detail in my episodes “The Loss of Theodosia Burr Alston” and “The Carroll A. Deering, Ghost Ship of Cape Hatteras,” there are further, far more rational and supported explanations other than that some mystery vortex swallowed the ships or their crews and passengers. For example, there is some reason to suspect that, whatever happened to the Patriot, it happened along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which is also where the Carroll Deering was found, and the waters off the coast of this chain of barrier islands, on which was located the Lost Colony of Roanoke, as it happens, are notoriously treacherous because of the shifting sands on the sea floor constantly changing the depth of the waters. Because of this, it’s called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Since the late 16th century, there have been more than 350 shipwrecks there. Tellingly, no one attributes those to supernatural causes. But even discounting the very obvious possibility that these ships just wrecked and ran aground in waters known to be treacherous, there is the further idea that they may have been the victims of piracy, which offers yet another rational and believable explanation for the disappearance of ships in the Bermuda Triangle as well. In the Patriot’s time, there were bankers, or wreckers, which lured ships toward the islands with lights and then murdered the crew and stripped the ships of valuables. And during the Carroll A. Deering’s day there was some speculation of pirate activity in the Atlantic, by bootleggers or perhaps Bolsheviks. At the same time that something was befalling the Carroll A. Deering, an oil steamer, the S.S. Hewitt also disappeared off the Carolina coast, and like the Deering, it too seems to have been spotted, and its crew seemed to behave suspiciously. Add to this the fact that another ship, the USS Cyclops, had disappeared on its way from Rio to Baltimore a couple years earlier, and it began to look like ships were being captured off the U.S. coast at the time. In the case of the Cyclops, there were further possibilities, such as that it had been captured by the Germans while the Great War was still being fought, or that its captain and crew, several of whom were of German descent, may have been German sympathizers and purposely delivered the ship to Imperial Germany. But like the Deering, the disappearance of the Hewitt and especially of the Cyclops would be attributed to the mystical powers of the Bermuda Triangle even despite all of these more obvious and credible explanations, like shipwreck, capture, and—a further explanation for more than one disappearance attributed to the Bermuda Triangle—lack of seaworthiness.

In the case of the Deering, when she was encountered before her abandonment, a man on her quarterdeck had signaled a passing ship and said they had lost their anchors in a storm, and when the ship was found, it showed signs of having been out of control, as her emergency lights were burnt out. Certainly if it were out of control, it was no longer seaworthy, though in the strictest sense of the term, seaworthiness refers to the fitness of a vessel prior to undertaking a voyage. In the case of the Cyclops, there is reason to believe that it never should have undertaken its voyage. The captain had reported before leaving Brazil that her starboard engine was not operational due to a cracked cylinder, and the ship had to make an unscheduled stop in Barbados due to being overloaded with the manganese ore she was carrying, which also may have caused the ship to list and even capsize in rough seas. In fact, more than 20 years later, two sister ships of the Cyclops, the Proteus and the Nereus, both were lost in the Triangle while shipping loads of bauxite ore within weeks of each other. Score three for the Triangle it would seem, until you learn that these sister ships, these naval freighters, all had a structural flaw. They were held together with I-beams that ran the length of the vessel, and these beams were known to become corroded due to contact with the kinds of cargo these ships were designed to carry. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that all three of these lost freighters were simply not seaworthy when they undertook their final voyages. Similarly, in 1925 the coal freighter SS Cotopaxi was lost after departing from Havana, but it appears two of her sister ships suffered similar fates. And we know the Cotopaxi sank, rather than pulling some kind of vanishing act, because her crew radioed a distress call, stating that they were taking on water and listing. Still, she was for a long time listed as a victim of the Bermuda Triangle because here wreckage wasn’t recovered. In the 1980s, though, her wreckage was found, and in 2020, they were definitively identified. Yet that won’t stop Bermuda Triangle enthusiasts from still suggesting that it was some mystery force specific to that region that caused her to sink. Likewise, the frigate HMS Atalanta, which was lost in 1880 after leaving port in Bermuda and has frequently been cited as a victim of the Triangle, has been shown to have been unseaworthy by researcher David F. Raines. His exhaustive research demonstrates that the Atalanta was unstable because of its narrow design, as it had been built for speed by a yacht designer. Her sister ship, the HMS Eurydice, sank two years earlier off the Isle of Wight, and the investigation indicated that its instability led to the ship being lost in severe weather. But the Atalanta had even more working against it than just its design. It also seems that it was declared fit to sail again despite having recently taken hull damage in a storm, and on top of that, it was overloaded with an enormous volley gun, essentially dooming the ship before it even departed. Lastly, in 1963, 18 years after the disappearance of Flight 19 and just before the legend of the Bermuda Triangle really began to take off, the SS Marine Sulphur Queen, a tanker carrying molten sulfur, was lost somewhere off the southern Florida coast. While the Coast Guard investigation determined that the vessel was not seaworthy owing to the fact that it had been converted from tanker to a sulfur carrier, concluding that, if not due to capsizing in rough seas, it likely sank because of an explosion or structural failure, it nevertheless is routinely cited as yet another mysterious disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle.

The USS Cyclops, one of numerous ships whose disappearance, though explainable through numerous more rational means, is frequently said to have been the victim of some supernatural forces in the Bermuda Triangle.

Beyond the plain and I think unsurprising facts that ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle most likely just sank in a storm, were captured and absconded with by pirates or perhaps even mutineers, or were simply unseaworthy, there are actually some rational and scientific explanations for vessels being lost in those seas that should really satisfy even the staunchest Bermuda Triangle enthusiast, as they indicate there really is something unusual in that region causing ships to disappear. First, there are the unusual currents of the area. The area identified as the Bermuda Triangle is where the Gulf Stream, the warm waters flow out of the Caribbean and up the coast of North America, meet the circular currents of the Sargasso Sea. At a time when the speed of ships was calculated by tossing a log tied to a knotted rope from the ship’s bow and timing the appearance of each knot, any ships that did not conduct this practice very frequently could find that the surprisingly fast Gulf Stream had carried them significantly off course. They might easily find themselves adrift in the Sargasso Sea, then, which is largely covered in masses of floating sargassum seaweed and, being located on the so-called horse latitudes, without much wind. Often ships found themselves becalmed and trapped there. Additionally, the base of the Bermuda Triangle, the tract of sea between Florida and Puerto Rico, lies above a continental shelf, and at its tip the insular shelf of Bermuda, and in these shallower ocean floors, scientists have shown that methane hydrate fields sometimes erupt, creating a bubbling frothy ocean that can actually affect the buoyancy of ships and theoretically even swallow them whole. Anyone who recently saw the blockbuster film Godzilla Minus One saw this science put into fictional practice in the characters’ efforts to sink the monster. But beyond this relatively recent and technical explanation for ship disappearances in the region, there is also the simple fact that right in the middle of the Triangle, between the continental shelf and Bermuda’s insular shelf, is extremely deep water, especially in the Puerto Rico Trench, which is some 30,000 feet deep. Its depths were only first reached by submersible in 2018 and have yet to be thoroughly explored. It would indeed be unsurprising for the wreckage of many of these lost victims of the Bermuda Triangle to be found down there eventually. These scientific explanations and common sense reasons for why ships may go missing in the Bermuda Triangle should satisfy those who want to believe, as they confirm there are some unique qualities to the area that do indeed make it more treacherous than other waters. But Triangle enthusiasts typically reject such explanations as too prosaic, preferring instead their aliens and Atlanteans. The simple fact, though, is that even with the unique risks in the area, statistically the Bermuda Triangle does not appear to be any more dangerous than other waters. This according to Lloyd’s of London, the oldest and biggest insurer of seagoing vessels in the world, who in a 1975 statement to Fate magazine revealed “that our intelligence service can find no evidence to support the claim that the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ has more losses than elsewhere.”  

As the legend was meticulously created in the following years by writers assembling lists of unexplained but not unexplainable disappearances, they inevitably played fast and loose with facts and ended up amplifying and perpetuating errors. For example, one of the earliest examples of a mysterious disappearance given by Berlitz in Without a Trace is the Rosalie, which he says was found derelict in 1840 with no person aboard, and only a canary. He seems to have taken this from an 1840 London Times article, which actually describes a cat and other birds being left aboard. It turns out that this Times article got it wrong. They seem to have been talking about a ship called the Rossini, which ran aground and was abandoned, but whose crew had been rescued and taken to Cuba. Similarly the creepy tale of the Ellen Austin’s late 19th century encounter with a ghost ship, a tale that has the captain twice putting his own crewmen on the derelict in order to salvage it and twice more finding it abandoned, his own crew somehow vanished, appears to have been a ghost story told and retold among mariners, such that we see among its earliest appearances numerous contradictions, including the year it occurred, what flag the ship flew, and even the discrepancy of what the Ellen Austin was called at the time, its name having been changed, much like the Facebook corporation, to Meta. It was very clearly a campfire tale that Bermuda Triangle myth-makers like Charles Berlitz included in their lists as fact. And not to be fenced in by their imagined watery triangle, they routinely suggested that even people’s disappearances on land might have been part of the same imagined phenomenon. There are the colonists of Roanoke, but also two lighthouse keepers on Great Isaac Cay, a tiny Bahamian island off the southern coast of Florida. The story of the vanished lighthouse keepers of Great Isaac is extraordinarily similar to that of the vanished lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor, which I explored in detail in my episode, “Three Men Gone.” In that piece, I found one compelling explanation of their disappearance to be a rogue wave that may have struck the island and washed the men away to drown. Such an explanation of the missing Great Isaac lighthouse keepers seems even more plausible, since Eilean Mor rises more than 200 feet above sea level, whereas Great Isaac only rises about fifty feet above the waves. But the real drivers of this legend, the stories that started it all and that remain the most compelling support for promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend also have to do with the disappearance of those who weren’t on the seas, but rather flying above it, like the lost squadron of Flight 19, that I will be studying in far closer detail in Part Two of The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle.

Until next time, remember, if something remains for the moment unexplained, that does not mean it cannot be explained. Only fabulists sensationalize the unexplained as if it is unexplainable.

Further Reading

Kusche, Larry. The Disappearance of Flight 19. Harper & Row, 1980.

Kusche, Larry. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved! Prometheus Books, 1995.

Raine, David F. Solved!: The greatest sea mystery of all. Pompano Publications, 1997.