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.
