The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar Read online

  There is also evidence that Antonio Zeno wished to return home in 1400 but was not given permission by his Scottish employer—this notion derives from his letters home. He finally made the trip back to Venice in 1404, which could be evidence that Sinclair’s death in that year freed him from his obligations. It is also possible that Henry Sinclair came home in 1400, made a second trip to the New World, and then returned to Scotland to meet his death in 1404. Under any scenario he had little time and less motivation to publicize his travels and, as we will find out, a strong motivation to keep the secret within his family. In 1558 a descendant of Antonio Zeno’s reconstructed the old maps and letters of the voyage and turned them into a narrative. At the time it was widely accepted and the maps and charts were published by some of the great mapmakers of the era. But in our own time, doubt was cast on the voyage. The greatest reason for disbelief stemmed from an island that is no longer an island.

  The Problem of Icaria

  The staunchest critic of the Sinclair-Zeno expedition is Samuel Eliot Morison, and his greatest criticism is for what he cynically calls the “FlyAway Islands.” The confusion of identifying Frisland and Fer Island could be a result of translation or even simply misspelling. The story of Icaria and a king, however, caused Morison to brand both the Zeno maps and the entire journey as fake. Worse, he goes on to blame the future explorers’ misfortunes on their use of the Zeno map.23 If the tale of the Zeno journey was recorded correctly, then what happened to Icaria?

  Arlington Mallery and other modern mapmakers finally proved that the Zeno map was correct after making a startling discovery.24 There was once a group of islands between Greenland and Iceland that no longer exists today. These so-called FlyAway Islands are also known as

  Gunnbiorn’s Skerries, and they didn’t actually fly away. They are named for the Norse trader Gunnbiorn, who was blown off course in A.D. 920 and reached Greenland. Gunnbiorn is given credit for discovering Greenland, and it was his description that led Eric the Red to make a settlement in that inhospitable land.25 The islands he found off the eastern coast were given his name. There is no doubt that they existed. They are, in fact, depicted in Description of Greenland, which dates to 1873, and are now shown on the United States Hydrographic Office maps.26 The only problem is that they have sunk and are now underwater. Today they form an undersea plateau that was determined to be the result of a sinking ocean floor.

  By 1456 most of the main island of the Skerries was underwater, although the islands are still shown on maps until 1600. In 1456 the main island was sixty-five miles long and twenty-five miles wide and was called Gombar Skaare. William Herbert Hobbs was brought into the debate on the Sinclair-Zeno journey because of his extensive research into the coastline of Greenland. He was a professor of geology at Michigan and in charge of the university’s expedition to Greenland. He served as the president of the International Glacier Commission until 1936. When he saw the Zeno map he was immediately fully convinced that it was an accurate depiction of Greenland’s coastline. It was the superimposed lines of longitude and latitude that was its shortcoming. “The long axis of the island appeared rotated clockwise through about half a right angle.”27 These lines, however, had not been drawn by Zeno but were added later by a relative. In Charles Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, the author also defended the original Zeno brothers’ work and concluded that the member of the family who was responsible for publishing the map and the narratives in 1558 was the cause of the error.28 It was this armchair explorer, the younger Zeno, who incorrectly placed longitude and latitude lines on the map of his ancestors.

  Captain Arlington Mallery, a navigator and an engineer, studied differences in the coastline of Iceland on the modern map and on the Zeno map. His work led him to a book entitled Floods and Inundations by Cornelius Worford, written in 1879, and an account of volcanic activity in Iceland by T. Thoroldson. These accounts and other references to Iceland discussed the submergence of “several provinces” of Iceland that occurred after a forty-year period of “terrific volcanic explosions” that took place from 1340 to 1380; the effects lasted into the next century. In his own work, The Rediscovery of Lost America, co-authored with Mary Roberts Harrison, he concluded:

  Scholars have been frustrated mainly because they have overlooked the tremendous changes in the natural features of the Greenland-Iceland area due to natural phenomena. Unaware of the consequent sinking of land and the forming of undersea shelves as the surface of the earth shifted under the weight of glacial ice, they have not realized that some landmarks on the Viking trail have even vanished under ice and water.29

  Mallery and Hobbs were not the only ones to document the activity of the restless floor of the Atlantic. History records the eighteenth-century earthquake that devastated Lisbon, Portugal. In six minutes, sixty thousand people perished, and the harbor fell six hundred feet to the Atlantic floor. In 1811 a large volcanic island rose from the sea into the island chain known as the Azores. Named Sabrina, the island was put on the maps, only to be reclaimed by the sea again. In 1963 an island grew from a volcano off the coast of Iceland. Named after the Norse god of fire, this one did not “fly away” but instead reportedly grew at an incredible rate of one acre per day. There are literally scores of coastal towns, harbors, and islands that have been lost to a changing ocean floor, from Martinique to the Mediterranean.

  The damage to the credibility of the Zeno charts and the expedition had been done before the works of more modern cartographers and scientists. Morison blamed Zeno’s map for the errors of Mercator and Ortelius, who worked from the Zeno charts in the late sixteenth century, and the problems of Frobisher, who carried a Zeno map in his 1576 expedition.30 Frobisher reached the eastern coast of Greenland and decided he was in Frisland. Whose fault was it? When Frobisher was sixteen days out of the Shetlands he also mistook an island off the coast of Baffin Island for Labrador through no fault of the Zenos. He then sailed north, where he first mistook Inuit natives in kayaks for seals and later called them Tartars. Failing to find the sea route to Cathay, he returned home with iron pyrites he believed were gold and a kidnapped Inuit native who later died from pneumonia. Morison’s decision to blame Frobisher’s inadequacies on Zeno seems thin at best and is certainly misplaced.

  Explorer John Davis, for whom the Davis Strait is named, did not recognize a certain inlet of Baffin Island in 1586, thinking it was Greenland. Morison again put the blame on later mapmakers for using the Zeno map.31 The French cartographer Alexandre Lapie, however, had also depicted a wide strait cutting through southern Greenland on a map that dates to 1841. Lapie was not referring to a Zeno map. The letters that were sent by Antonio Zeno to his brother in Venice told of the landfall at Icaria and the people encountered on this island. Because the island no longer exists, Morison brands the entire journey as fictitious. From evidence cited by more modern writers, such as Hapgood and Mallery, who have determined the Gombar Skaare to be a very large landmass once existing just where Zeno placed it, it is very possible that this island was Icaria. Brendan, too, had a description of Icaria and admitted even his journey was not a first made by Irish Christian monks who fled the mainland to practice their religion and remain free from the pirates and Vikings who plagued coastal settlements.

  The most recent biographer of Sinclair and his voyage to America is a distantly related descendant, Andrew Sinclair. For this modern historian, the story of the voyage is interesting in a personal sense, and he was able to add much to the knowledge about the Scotland Sinclairs. He, too, had a problem with Icaria, which he attempts to explain away as an out-of-sequence part of the tale. His argument is that the expedition must have stopped in Kerry or Saint Kilda and that somehow the order of the Zeno letters was confused. The problem, however, is that neither Kerry nor Saint Kilda matches the physical description of “Icaria” or the description of the denizens of this remote isle.

  Morison believed that there would not be a “king” on such a “FlyAway island.” Zeno had al
ready dubbed Sinclair a “prince,” and in this light incorrectly calling a religious leader a “king” would not discredit the entire expedition. The Zeno narratives record great shoals that threatened the ship as it was leaving Icaria. No such shoals threaten the seafarers at Kerry. Since Gombar Skaare was the main island of a sinking chain, there should be no surprise that such dangerous shoals existed, and this description adds credibility to the travelogue. The inhabitants of Gombar Skaare (I Caria) eventually left their isolated outpost but would not be the last inhabitants of Gunnbiorn’s Skerries. Mallery states: “In 1476, Didrik Pining, sent by the King of Norway to put an end to pirate raids in Greenland waters, made his headquarters on this mountainous island, which he named Hvitserk.”32 Pining later became a pirate himself. Amsterdam maps continued to show the islands until A.D. 1600 and the United States Hydrographic Office put Gombar Skaare on its chart in 1932, noting that it was 120 yards below sea level.

  Historians who are critical of the Sinclair voyage claim there should be more evidence than the letters and charts sent home by Antonio Zeno. They also question just why the discovery set off no shock waves in Europe. One hundred years later Columbus’s voyage would start a frenzy among gold- and glory-seeking Spanish adventurers. There are several answers. The first is that the expedition was not “sent.” It was not sponsored by the Spanish Crown or the king of France or of any country. The Sinclair expedition was made simply because Henry Sinclair could mount such an expedition. The second reason is that these were lands that northern sailors had known about for almost four hundred years. They were not on a “sea route to Cathay” or even likely to turn up the gold and silver sought by the Spanish. They were simply new lands, possibly rich in fishing and good forests but too far north to be promising farmland. Irish and Norse sea travelers knew that beyond the western isles lay Greenland, and farther west there was more of the same. The lands had some positive attributes but were not likely to start a land rush of immigrants or gold seekers. Instead of firing the imaginations of wealth-hungry Spaniards, the new lands were kept secret by the dour Scotsmen. A third reason is that the printing press had not yet been invented when Henry returned from the New World. But the most important reason is that Henry Sinclair wanted his discovery kept secret. For Henry Sinclair and his family, the land so far from the English king and the Roman Church offered a refuge. It was best kept secret.

  The North American Evidence

  In Nova Scotia there is evidence of another sort. The native population encountered by Sinclair was the Micmac tribe. Micmac legends tell of a “Great Prince” who brought his people to their world “on the backs of whales.”33 This prince stayed with them for half a year, only to leave. Legend records that he returned to their land a second time. The Micmacs claim he lived in a wigwam he called “Winter.” The word wigwam is one of the most significant words in the pre-Columbian history of the North Atlantic. While we have no problem believing that ancient mariners of Scotland and Ireland and even the Saxons could cross large expanses of water in flimsy skin boats, we give the natives of North America no such credit. It is very possible that Inuit, Pictish, and Micmac peoples and a horde of unnamed residents of the north had been sailing both west and east well before Columbus, Leif Ericsson, or even Brendan. The word wigwam might be part of the evidence.

  Inuit natives in subarctic Greenland built their homes by digging into the ground, as a defense against the weather. Picts, the “tribe” of people found in the north of Scotland by the Romans, did the same. The Inuit people called their homes gammes; the Picts, who later used such earthen structures just for storage, called them weems (wee as in “little”). From the two words, we can derive “wigwams,” or “little houses.” The American Indian tribes of the frozen north built their houses in the same manner and also had less permanent tent structures for homes. Both found their way into our language as “wigwams.” American Indian tribes and the neighboring Inuit peoples may have had direct contact with each other, and perhaps contact between the Micmacs and the Picts was made only through the Inuit, who lived between these two groups.

  The Picts and Inuit peoples shared the same “ulo blade” tool—a stone knife—and both made boats from various materials. Skin boats had been in use from prehistoric times and were still in use during the fourteenth century. As a part of their Orkney heritage, the Gunn clan would be no strangers to hunting whales (orcas) from these tiny craft. These “sea pigs,” as whales were called, and those other “sea pigs,” dolphins, gave their name to the Orkney Islands in antiquity. Just how far back in time the Picts, the Orkney sailors, the Celts, and the pre-Viking Scandinavians had been launching these frail craft in the choppy frigid seas of the North Atlantic may never be known. It is almost a certainty, however, that their seagoing ability led them to communication and commerce with each other well before any historian would record such trade. The rulers of the Orkneys, the sea kings of the western and northern isles, are recorded from early times as using wicker craft, hide-covered boats, and, later, wooden ships manned by as many as sixteen rowers. It is likely that such Orkney fishermen reached America, either by intention or as a result of storms that blew them off course.

  And there are other points of connection. The Celtic, Norse, and North Amerind languages have several words in common. One of the most interesting word similarities between the Celtic and North American languages suggests their early communication. The word is mac. The Micmac tribe of Nova Scotia shared matriarchal customs with the Picts of Scotland. Every member of the tribe was a maqq, a “child of the tribe.” Wealth was passed to the children through the mother. Maqq took on the meaning of “friend,” as in “one of us.” The Picts used the same prefix for the same reason. For the Picts, too, wealth passed from the mother to the children. Women were equal to men and were even allowed to rule. On both sides of the Atlantic the practice of fosterage was an outgrowth of matriarchal custom. Sons were given to the mother’s brother to be raised. The natural father did not have any social importance to his children. Maqq may have become mac in Scotland, where the same matriarchal customs prevailed as a result of transatlantic communication. From Scotland, mac traveled to Ireland as mc when the Scots settled there in early times. The shared prefix, which denoted “belonging to” a tribe, a clan, or the smallest subset, the family, attained the meaning “child of” when patriarchal customs and more Roman Christian practices reached the Celts.

  “Kin” is another concept shared by Norse and Celtic peoples in Europe and the American Indian peoples on the northeastern Atlantic coast of North America. The word kin referred to a related person and meant loosely that this person was a member of the extended family. A variant on the word sounded almost the same but meant “head”—either the head of the kin or literally the head attached to the neck. An old custom of the Celtic and Norse peoples in war was to take the head of the enemy. The skull was removed and would be made into a drinking vessel. It was a show of pride, a trophy of war; in a spiritual sense it was an act signifying that the owner took the strength of the person killed. Skulls would be used as drinking and cooking vessels.

  While few of us have ever taken our meals from a skull, the word for a skull used as a cooking vessel survives. In Old Norse the term for cooking pot and skull was the same—canna; our modern equivalent is “can.”34 A much bigger pot was used for cooking but also for religious and magical practices. Animals were sacrificed and put into this big pot, which in Norse was called the ketill, and in Norse its meaning is “sacred cauldron.” Christianity and civilization reached the more primitive northern Europeans later and changed the word for this utensil and its use. Ketill became kettle, and no more eye of newt concoctions were ritually prepared, just meals.

  Just how early North American Indians and Celtic Europeans made contact is unknown, but the North Atlantic Indian word for kettle is kannaken, which might have meant “big skull” on European soil. In the British Celtic language, kenn (spelled ceann in Ireland) meant “head.” When the
Celtic languages split, penn took the same meaning among the P-Celtic–speaking groups (those using the “P” sound) as kenn had to the Q-Celtic–speaking groups (those using the “Q” sound). Our own former President John Kennedy’s surname literally means “ugly head.” Canmore (alternately spelled Kenmore) means “big head,” which could refer to a chief or may simply be a descriptive term.

  The pelican, a bird with a distinctively long beak, was named by the Greeks for its pele (meaning axelike) can (meaning head). The pelican was literally the “axhead.” In the language of the Welsh, which was P-Celtic, an example of penn referring to an important person, a chief, is “Penndragon,” the name of King Arthur’s father. He is the “chief dragon,” or “head dragon,” a term with the connotation of a practitioner of magic. It was the sailors of Sir Francis Drake’s most celebrated voyage, which passed by the Antarctic coast, who named the strange birds they saw there on the ice floes. For lack of a better term, these Welsh and Cornish sailors called the white (gwynn in Welsh) headed (penn) birds “penguins.” These funny-looking denizens of the ice were lierally “whiteheads.”

  In the Scottish language, the name MacCan took on the meaning “son of the chief” as the father’s role and patriarchal custom emerged from more ancient Pictish customs. The name Duncan came to mean brown (dun) chief (can). The Celtic spelling was Donnacaidh, and everyone with the name Duncan is supposed to have descended from the original brown chief. In 1534 when Cartier met with the American Indians along the Saint Lawrence Seaway, he was introduced to a certain Donnacana. This individual had the role of “chief of the chiefs.” The relationship of Donnacaidh and Donnacana may be considered coincidental, but it is one of many shared words whose meaning is similar to or exactly the same as its meaning on the opposite shore.