I
EXplORATiON iN TEXAS
ANCiENT & OThERWiSE
Exploration in Texas
Ancient & Otherwise
With Thoughts on the Nature of Evidence
by John L. Davis
Copyright 1984
The University of Texas
Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio
Jack R. Maguire, Executive Director
Designer and Typesetter: Meredith Rees
Editor: Sandra Hodsdon Carr
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 84-80759
International Standard Book Numbers
Hardbound 086701-018-5
Softbound 086701-019-3
This publication was made possible, in part, by a grant from
The Houston Endowment, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
.,
..
. EXplORATiONiN~ XAS
ANCiENT & OThERWiSE
WiTh ThOUGhTS ON
ThE NATURE Of EVibENCE
+ JOhN L. bA\7iS
The University of Texas
Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio
1984
iNTRObUCTiON
This is an unusual book, but then Dr. John L. Davis
is an unusual writer.
As both a dedicated scholar and a prolific author, his
previous books have explored such diverse subjects as the Texas
Rangers, Spanish shipwrecks, and the histories of Houston and
San Antonio. In other peripatetic forays he has produced a volume
attesting the thesis that Texas had a role in the American Revolu­tion
of 1776, a work on the supposed humor of William Blake,
and papers on the history and occurrence of vampirism.
In this latest result of his serious research, however,
he looks far beyond recorded-at least, beyond provable- history
and suggests that explorers from far lands may have traveled Texas
thirty-six centuries ago. Could it be that a Chinese was the first
non-native to discover America?
The reader is left to draw his own conclusions; Dr.
Davis presents only the evidence as he has found it. And the story
he has turned up is fascinating indeed.
In these pages one sails with the Africans, Phoenicians,
and Carthaginians across an unknown Atlantic; sees Columbus
and his sailors disagree as to where they actually stopped in 1492,
and learns of a strange tablet found in the Big Bend of Texas
which may, or may not, be evidence that Mediterranean people
reached the area centuries before the accepted discovery of the
New World.
It is like a good mystery story in which all known facts
are presented, but the solution is left to the reader. Or there is
no solution . ... The book is not, finally, about the earlier explor­ers,
but about the nature of fact and evidence.
This is high adventure, expertly told by a scholar who
also can write. It is a book to be savored, then studied, and then
read again and again.
Jack Maguire
Executive Director
The Institute of Texan Cultures
.,
"Who were the first people to explore this place?" is
one of the most commonly asked questions anywhere. Curiosity
itself may lead to speculation, and questions of historical "firsts"
seem to attract wild stories, guesses, or questionable documents
as well as to generate abundant historical teeth-gnashing. A few
people have spent lifetimes and wagered reputations digging for
and presenting the facts. But what are the facts? What are facts?
Most stories claiming "first arrivals" are hard to prove.
Proof of the stories is not the object of this book. Many of the
stories mentioned here are not accepted as fact, or as proven,
by the majority of scholars. Yet, happily, facts are not the only
end product of a search.
This book speaks of three things. First, it collects some
of the more controversial stories of Old World explorers who may
have come to the Texas area before A.D. 1520-but not including
the American Indians. They may be regarded as settlers or immi­grants
or natives- not explorers.
The second topic concerns the nature of an explorer:
what he does and how he is different from other people such as
settlers or immigrants.
The third and main topic concerns the nature of facts
and proof, truth and evidence. What are they? Just what is a
fact in the humanities? If something is speculative, what good
is it? These are important considerations not only in the context
of early explorers but also in everyday life.
fOREWORb
'.>
AC]{NOWLEbGMENTS
The main acknowledgments, and thanks, go to the
initial readers who slogged through an early draft, pointing out
errors and corrections that should be made in fact and tone: Dr.
Thomas R. Hester, Dora Guerra, Dr. Jeremiah F. Epstein, Dr.
Tom Gibbons, Dr. Roger Bailey, Anders Saustrup, Rosemary
Catacalos, Dr. William Newcomb, David Haynes, and Rosemary
Davis. They are responsible for helping with large matters from
arguments over epistemology to Chinese translation, tone of
language to references. The correspondents are too numerous
to mention here, but they were important to many a concern.
Remaining errors of fact and interpretation are, I hope, entirely
my own.
Special thanks go to Pete Graeber and Nella Tolk for
having me aboard the cutter Df!fiance where I learned a bit about
sailing-and thereupon collected experiences which were useful
in judging assorted data surfacing in later days and nights.
NOTE ON ThE NOTES
The notes in this book, I hope it is not really necessary
to point out, are themselves a display, or exhibit, in Pound's words,
of examples of evidence. They are ,so in most books. Here, the
reader should consider which are enlightening or confusing,
which seem to be necessary or unnecessary, which are defensive,
pompous, useful, and so on, realizing that the standards for such
judgment are in the reader's head and that the standards are the
subject of this book.
The notes are keyed to the general bibliography by the
author's name and, where necessary, by the first words of the title.
The not-so-helpful reference term passim is used only
where numerous page references would have had to be cited and
the topic is readily traceable in the source index or the reference
is quite generally concerned with a broad topic, e.g. Chinese
history. However tempting, passim is not here intended as equiva­lent
to "I've forgotten the specific reference" or "read the whole
thing like I had to!'
j.l.d.
CONTENTS
1 Some Chinese Stories: The Other "Far East" · 11
2 What Is a Fact? 27
3 Classical References and Old Manuscripts 33
4 Phoenician Sailors and Yellow Cats 41
5 A Few Inscriptions: Lost Greeks and
Wandering Romans 47
.,
6 Lost Tribes and Atlantis 55
7 A Churchman and a Prince 57
8 The Vikings in Warm Water 67
9 African Sailors and a Lost Colony 73
10 One of that Company of Explorers 85
11 Filling in the Map 97
12 Exploration 103
Appendices 109
Bibliography 111
Illustration Credits 131
Index 135
SOME ChiNESE STORiES:
ThE OThER "fAR EAST"
A group of explorers paused in the brilliant afternoon.
They looked out over the last few yards of sand and
gravel to a river that boiled around rocks as it emerged
from the canyon. In places dark green cane grew almost down
to the brown water. The tall, jagged sides of a mountain were
etched in the sunlight above them.
One of the men shaded his eyes and pondered a piece
of blue-green rock he had picked up. Behind the travelers were
a hundred miles of land covered by cactus and yucca, with grasses
and trees growing along intermittent streams.
The man standing in front walked down to the river,
dropped his pack, pushed back his hat, and sat down on a rock.
His few companions did likewise, taking off their sandals and
bathing their feet in the turbulent water where it ran up on the
sand, cold in the sunshine.
From his pack the man took a notebook, which was
made of a few strips of local cane, dried and shaved almost fiat,
laced together with a cord at one end. Earlier he had written
on thin pieces of wood, but his supply of these had run out. Taking
a small square stone from his pack, he dipped a bit of water into
its low depression. He then started rubbing a stick of solid ink
into the water. Gradually the water turned black. Setting the
freshly-made ink to one side, he took a small brush between his
.. ,
11
1 Or Shan-hai-king (Leland) or
Shan Hai Ching (Shao ), etc. A
transliteration of ..L ;It .~£ is,
like all such, probably impossible.
The forms used in this book,
although they reproduce incon­sistencies
even in the use of the
hyphen, reflect the most com­mon,
older forms used in the
indexes of the major references
... most commonly the Wade­Giles
system. But times are
changing. Peking is already
Beijing; Fa Hsien becomes
Faxian; Shan Hai King becomes
Shanhaijing; but Fusang seems
to be remaining Fusang (see
Fang Zhongpu or Luo Rongqu).
12
fingers, then looked around at the clear day for a moment before
beginning to write.
"Have walked about three hundred li since Bald Moun­tain.
Here, Bamboo Mountain is near the river which looks like
a boundary. There is no grass, or trees, but some jasper and jade
stones. The river is impeded in its course here by rocks, but flows
on southeast to the great body of water .. .. "
Santa Elena Canyon, the Big Bend
Years later the account this man was writing would find
its way into one of the oldest books in the world, the Shan Hai
King, 1 often called the Mountain-Sea Classic or the Classic of
Mountains and Seas. Edited at least three times and subjected
to one national bookburning, it survived and retained the story
of explorations over unknown lands.
The man was Chinese, the time was perhaps 3,600
years ago, and he had been walking across part of what was later
called the trans-Pecos area of Texas.
And that statement and the foregoing scene are specu­lative-
Yet perhaps not entirely fictional. This is one of the best
examples of a historical account that could be true. 2 The story
is just tantalizing enough to be fascinating, and this interpretation
of it is speculative enough to drive many historians into a frenzy.
To be able to judge the truth of the story- to consider
the evidence for the story-a person needs to know a few elements
of Chinese history, beginning with a look at the Shan Hai King.
This book, containing a wide variety of accounts and stories,
often is called the world's oldest geography. 3 It is also one of the
earliest works of Chinese literature. In addition to geographical
descriptions, it speaks of monsters and weird beasts, myths and
wild tales; and it includes enough of these to cause many scholars
either to brand the work nonsense or to ignore it completely. 4
However, it contains no more wonders than other
records which are accepted as generally true by later critical
readers. Many European works regarded as classics are laced
with metaphor (or outright lies), but these entire works are not
therefore condemned. 5 Sir Walter Raleigh speaks of headless
warriors; Marco Polo writes of the Ore, a bird so big it could
fly off with an elephant in its talons; Herodotus, one of the greatest
Greek historians, includes winged serpents and ants as large as
oxen; and even the level-headed conqueror Julius Caesar, in his
account of northwestern Europe, speaks of the unicorn and of
elk which never lie down to rest. Yet the basic reliability of these
writers is not questioned.
But even if an occasional monster can be overlooked,
there are other problems. The date of the Shan Hai King is hard
to estimate. Furthermore, no certain author is known. Such things
worry scholars. Early Chinese writers ascribed the work to Yu,
Minister of Public Works under Emperor Shun, in 2205 B.C. 6
The date is regarded by most historians as being too early­much
too early- in the near-legendary Hsia Dynasty. 7 Yet, since
the turn of the present century, archaeologists in China have
steadily pushed back the dates of known cultural achievements. 8
Dynasties mentioned in earlier classics, once considered legend,
have been documented through recent field work. It appears more
and more likely that China's civilization has all the antiquity
ascribed to it by its oldest stories. But there are still other problems
with accepting the document.
Could the Chinese have carried out such a journey
some forty centuries ago?
For generations historians considered that the Chinese
were not an ocean-going people. This opinion has largely
changed. 9 The Chinese are now known to have sailed open-ocean
vessels since the eleventh century B.C. and probably earlier. Stone
anchors, of the style carried by early Chinese vessels, have been
found off the California coast, but their authenticity is in doubt. 10
Absolute proof, such as remains of Chinese ocean-going ships,
cannot be dated to the time of the Shan Hai King, but descrip­tions
of Chinese ships of a somewhat later time indicate previous
ship development.
2 See the general Chinese refer­ences,
note 11; for climate, see
McGregor, J annings, Wendorf,
Bryant, Schoenwetter, and Flint;
for methods of writing, see
Loewe, "Wooden and Bamboo
Strips;' 13, and Young, 27. Ink
sticks, brushes, even the strip
notebooks may be anachronistic.
Scholars do not agree. The
National Palace Museum dates
ink and brushes before 1100 B.C.
Western references (Lowe, for
example) say brushes do not date
before 201 B.C.
3 Vining, 669 (quoting de Rosny
from La Civilisation Japonaise,
Paris, 1883).
4 Vining, 643, 669. See also note 9.
5 Vining, 451-52 for a discussion
of other "errors" in European
accounts.
6 If one accepts the list of earlier
rulers. See the comments of M.
Bazin Sr., in an article from the
journal Asiatique reprinted in
Vining, 670f, which summarizes
earlier accounts.
7 Leland, 12.
8 Chang, passim; Creel, passim.
9 See Fang Zhongpu citing his own
opinions and those of J ia Lan po
and Frost.
1° Fang Zhongpu, 66, believes in
their authenticity. For the other
side of the story, see the excellent
examinations by Frost and Luo
Rongqu.
13
11 General statements on Chinese
history are based on Ho, Chang,
Needham, Watson, Li, Creel,
Hopkins, and Breuer. See
Chang, Shang Civilization, par­ticularly
for dating.
14
A Chinese warship, c. 1520
The Shang Dynasty, the earliest so far confirmed by
most modern archaeological studies, existed from the eighteenth
to the thirteenth centuries B.C. and was an advanced culture.11
The Chinese of this period were highly learned: they had a written
language; a bronze fabricating technology; fully developed insti­tutions
such as art, agriculture, and government; distinctive archi­tecture,
plumbing, weapons, musical instruments, chariots, and
all the items that archaeologists call :~aterial culture. They also
had practices that are not socially acceptable today, such as human
sacrifice. Yet it seems clear that had they wanted to, Shang people
could have put a party of explorers on another continent.
But did they?
That question causes one to look closely at the evidence
of the Shan Hai King. It is a written record but a curiously
choppy account which reads like a collection of notes.
The book in existence today is not the complete,
original record. Even though the Chinese people are very devoted
to their classics and are constant note-takers and compilers of
encyclopaedias, they have at various times in their history allowed
written records to lapse. In 213 B.C. the emperor Ch'in Shih
Huang decided to abolish all records of the past. He was not
the first, nor the last, dictator to decide that accurate knowledge
of the past was a dangerous thing in the minds and hands of
the people. His premier, Li Ssu, suggested that destroying
books- selected books, to be sure -would accomplish the desire
to control information rather neatly. The effort was made but
was ultimately unsuccessful. Books hidden in walls and wells later
came to light.
By the fifth century A.D. the volume of records and
books in China had grown to such a total that no one could hope
to read even a small fraction of those in existence. This was a
different problem. The government decreed a massive editing
project during which almost all former written works were read
by teams of scholars and condensed. The originals were destroyed.
In the thirteenth century more condensation was
ordered, and even the fifth century versions were cut down. Again,
the "originals" were discarded. The enormous effort was under­standable.
One encyclopaedia, in manuscript form, had grown
to the equivalent length of 22,93 7 books.
Because of such condensation and destruction, the
Shan Hai King, originally about thirty-two books long, also exists
in an eighteen-book version, each book from one to thirty pages
in length and most in summary form. 12 Thus, more · than one
version exists. What is reprinted today is most certainly not the
whole story.
Here is some of what is left:
... to the south, Lone Mountain is found. Upon
this there are many gems and much gold, and below
it many beautiful stones. Muddy River is found
here, a stream flowing southeasterly into a mighty
flood, in which there are many T'iao-Yung. These
look like yellow serpents with fish's fins. . . .
And it says that, three hundred li to the south,
Bald Mountain is found ... wild animals are found
here which look like suckling pigs, but they have
pearls. They are called Tung-Tung, their name being
given to them in imitation of their cry. The Hwan
River is found here, a stream flowing easterly into
a river ... one authority says that it flows into the
sea. In this there are many water-gems [quartz or
agate crystals] .
. . . three hundred li to the south, Bamboo
Mountain is found, bordering on a river. One
authority says that it is on the shore- or that it is
at the boundary line. There is no grass, or trees,
but there are many green-jasper and green-jade
stones. The Kih River [water impeded in its course
by rocks] is found here, a stream flowing into T'su­Tan
River [or body of water]. In this [country] there
is a great abundance of dye plants. 13
12 Vining, 669, discusses this
(quoting from the Catalogue des
Livres Chinois, Paris, 1873).
.. ,
13 See Appendix 1 for text; the Ji is
perhaps about Y3 mile, 486 yards
(Quatrefages, 203).
15
14 Vining, 670f; Mertz, passim.
1s The translation of T'ai as "bald"
is questionable. The translation
used here is largely that of Vin­ing
with help from Dr. Roger
Bailey, San Antonio College, San
Antonio. Vining's citation is Wil­liams's
dictionary, which does not
give "bald" as a translation, but
does give "slippery" and "smooth''
as possible readings. The charac­ter
can also be read as "large" or
"extensive" (Wieger, 643). The
etymology of the character T'ai
seems to be water held inside of
both hands with "great" added.
This would be slippery indeed.
Some rocks in the Davis Moun­tains
area are very slippery after
a sudden rain, but this seems to
be going too far afield. Perhaps
16
These are the descriptions of some of the last sections of a land
traverse that covers a dozen points of geographical interest along
a generally north-south line. The Shan Hai King records three
such traverses in this section and two others in subsequent books.
Although the hand of an editor is obvious, it sounds neither
whimsical nor mythical. The notes are not complete (or they
suffered in the condensations), but they do give distances between
major mountains and drainage patterns and some notes on plants
and animals. The accounts do appear to be an explorer's record
of a new land.
The first question later readers had was where this land
might be. There is enough description left to confirm distances
between prominent mountain peaks, observe the proper direction
rivers flow, and match the occurrence of some minerals, animals,
and plants.
Many generations of scholars searched for routes in
China or other parts of Asia which would fit the descriptions.
Matching land forms were not found there. 14 The Shan Hai King
notes that the traverses are in a place beyond the eastern sea from
China-and the routes do match mountains and rivers in parts
of Canada, the western United States, Texas, and Mexico. In
the section quoted above, the course appears to be along part
of a line of peaks through Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico,
and Texas. Mountain peaks, wooded and desert areas, stretches
of sand, and river directions fit the description.
Lone Mountain may be Guadalupe Peak, highest
· · ~
mountain in Texas near the Texas-New Mexico border, and very
much a lone peak, with Delaware Creek draining east into the
Pecos. About a hundred miles (three hundred li) south is Mount
Livermore, or Baldy, as it is called even today, 15 and the animals
here are surely peccary, with pearl-like tusks. Limpia Creek,
-· ,., .
Guadalupe Peak and El Capitan
although hardly a river now, flows east. And there are enough
beautiful "water gems''--agate and quartz-in the area to satisfy
the description.
There are two possible routes south. About a hundred
miles south and east is the Emory Peak area, part of the Big Bend,
with a logical route down Terlingua Creek to the west. The Rio
Grande, indeed impeded there, breaks out of the spectacular
Santa Elena Canyon. Or, the explorers, going less than a hundred
miles, may have swung to the west, ending up at the river after
skirting the Chinati Mountains.16 Along either route, a local dye
plant in great abundance is the creosote bush.
The three quoted sections would hardly be called good
evidence. Three locations, taken alone and only generally describ­ing
the landscape, would prove nothing. But the whole traverse
from Wyoming to Texas- correctly mentioning rivers, desert
areas, wildlife, distance between notable mountains, minerals,
and plants- is more convincing. And comparisons of the Chinese
text with maps and field observations show that five ~outes in
the Shan Hai King fit more or less accurately on land in the
western part of North America. 17 This would seem to be more
than coincidence. At least the routes do not fit China, and there
is nowhere else to put them (South America was even tried, with
no success ). 18
'' I
I
I
I
'
----------- -\---------- __ j
~ \
Guadalupe Peak
Ci. c
it is best to stay with Vining's
interpretation that the intended
meaning is a smooth, bare, slip­pery
mountain, analogic to "bald"
as used geographically. See Wil­liams's
dictionary, 848, 991, 962,
lxxiv, and lxxi (the 1874 edition).
16 Author's field work; Johnson and
Maxwell, passim; Mertz, passim.
17 Mertz, passim; U.S. Army maps;
author's field work.
18 Mertz, 112.
...
17
19 Mackenzie, passim.
20 Vining, 193. On mounds, see
Silverberg, passim. The mounds
have been attributed to everyone,
including pre-Christian Danes
who wandered south to become
Toltecs (Barton as quoted in
Silverberg, 30f).
21 Creel, 46, discusses origin of
blades in China; Krieger as
quoted by Mertz, 99.
22 Li, 31.
23 Mackenzie, passim.
24 Vining, 184.
2s Epstein, passim, on the nature of
evidence not only concerning
coins but also the conditions
under which coins are lost.
26 Note how the stories creep into
the contemporary press, e.g.
Noorbergen. See also Riley, sec.
15: 293, on "Pre-Columbian
Contacts:'
27 Or Hui Shen, Huishen, etc., see
note 1. His monastic name may
have been Huiji (Fang Zhongpu,
65).
18
But such evidence satisfies few people-and for good
reasons. Unlike the conquests of Caesar in Europe, there is almost
no other evidence the Chinese were here. For a statement to be
considered "unquestionably" true, there usually has to be support­ing
evidence of several kinds.
A few things have been noticed: American Indian
legends mention the arrival of strangers long before Europeans;l9
certain prehistoric earth mounds in Mississippi are similar to
some in China;20 particular stone axes and blades are much the
same- indeed, one Chinese story relates how stone points were
offered the emperor Yu as souvenirs. 21 North American Indian
and Shang artists alike depict animal forms as if the body were
split with joined halves. 22 Central American legends speak of the
gifts of language and agriculture being brought by travelers. 23
One cache of old Chinese coins was found by miners in British
Columbia in 1882, but not under conditions that would guarantee
it had been hidden at a pre-Columbian date. 24 This kind of data,
however, can easily be coincidence or hoax. 25 Final decisions
cannot be made on the basis of such things. 26
Even a number of other documents telling the same
story would add support, but no other records speaking of such
a journey at this early date have yet been found.
Interestingly, one other Chinese document does seem
to describe a much later visit to North America-some twenty­two
centuries later. It is an account told by a Buddhist priest,
on his arrival at a Chinese court about A.D. 500 from what he
considered to be the far east. His ~arne was H wui Shan, 27 and
he should be heard next.
Fu Sang is twenty thousand 1i or more to the
east of the Great Han country, which is east of the
Middle Kingdom [China]. The region has many
Fu Sang trees, giving the country its name. The
leaves of the Fu Sang resemble T'ung and the first
sprouts are like bamboo. The people of the country
eat them and a fruit which is like a pear, but red
in color.
They spin thread from the bark [of the Fu
Sang] from which they make cloth. They make
houses of planks, but have no walled cities. They
have a written language and use the bark of the Fu
Sang to make paper. . . .
Hwui Shan commented at length on the system of justice, the
method a ruler follows in assuming power, the colors and style
of the ruler's clothing, ceremonial processions, social ranks in
the land, and the presence of cattle (perhaps bison) and deer.
"The ground is destitute of iron, but it has copper.
They do not value gold and silver and have no taxes in the
markets:'28 The priest went on to outline wedding customs and
the manner of burial. He also noted carefully that the people
of the land were ignorant of the Buddha's way of life until about
A.D. 458 when the five priests voyaged to that country and tried
to convert them.
Reconstructed drawing of a Chinese court, c. 831
Added to the priest's account in the court record is a
story of certain unnamed men who a few years later (A.D. 507)
were crossing the sea and were blown ashore in the unknown
land. Their story confirms some of the priest's comments. The
women of the country to the far east resembled Chinese women,
but their language could not be understood. The men had human
bodies, but dog heads and dog voices. These people made round
adobe houses, the doors of which resembled burrows.
It sounds like a wild story, but to judge the account,
one must consider the history of the document, the existence of
the priest himself, and another slice of Chinese history. How the
priest's story was written is particularly important because it
explains why some of the descriptions of the land and peoples
far to the east are hard to understand or to believe.
The story of H wui Shan was recorded in the Liang­shu,
the Records of the Liang Dynasty, a part of the N an-shih,
28 The Liang-shu, see Hwui Shan
and Vining, bibliography.
._,
19
29 The text speaks also of Hwui
Shan as being from Fu Sang, but
this reference does not imply he
was a native of the New World.
30 Vining, 448, for a further dis­cussiOn.
20
or History of the South, written by Li Yen-shau who lived in
the seventh century. The account was copied by Ma Twan-lin
in his "Antiquarian Researches;' published in 1321. Both versions
are copies of the earlier court records.
No one now knows Hwui Shan's homeland. 29 It may
have been perhaps within present-day Afghanistan or Kashmir.
He almost certainly had only crossed China, or had been there
only for a short time, before his long journey. His name is simply
an epithet meaning "very intelligent;' similar to names taken by
many another priest.
The priest apparently made a successful return from
a most interesting and almost unknown land far to the east, but
he had trouble telling his story. China was in disarray.
Around A.D. 500 China was embroiled in civil wars
and split into northern and southern kingdoms. Ruling families
and capital cities shifted like autumn leaves. H wui Shan bided
his time. '
In A.D. 502 the Southern Ch'i Dynasty, with Chien­k'ang
(Nanking) as its capital, was overthrown by Liang Wu T i.
He established the Liang Dynasty which for a short time was
stable. It suddenly became possible for Hwui Shan to appear
at court.
The choice of the southern capital for a reception was
a good one, both for the priest and for the record which exists
today. Emperor Wu Ti was not only a good ruler by the standards
of the day but also a patron of .B, uddhism. Hwui Shan, who
probably could speak little court Chinese, was nevertheless heard
politely, and it was realized that his story was a most unusual
one. In fifth -century China a land far to the east was known only
as a myth-a land where the sun was born and used as subject
matter only by poets. But what the priest said rang true- or the
court was just being polite.
When the priest related his story, a number of noble­men
were at court. One of them, Yu-kie, was asked by the
emperor to question Hwui Shan further, translate, and write his
story for the court records. Working together, certainly misunder­standing
each other from time to time, Hwui Shan and Yu-kie
produced a short narrative of the journey. 30 But the Chinese court
of the day was, if anything, highly cultured, and Yu-kie could
not resist writing a parallel version of his own, satiric and inter­spersed
with humorous comments.
Literary scholars rather enjoy these two versions of the
land of Fu Sang; historians, however, are a bit uneasy with the
second version because a humorous document is always an uncer­tain
record. How can one decide when the author is being serious?
But the versions are identifiable. Hwui Shan's is mat­ter-
of-fact for the most part. Yu-kie's version has the thread of
Hwui Shan's words, but the bulk of it is humorous burlesque
on a basic story. They support one another, however, and give
a check on the basic facts.
The story is that Hwui Shan and his companions
traveled east from China about thirteen thousand miles and, from
a coast, traveled inland at least three hundred fifty miles. They
met many primitive people along the way and, once in the far
eastern land, saw other people who had heads of dogs and lived
in round adobe homes. Traveling on, they reached a relatively
civilized people having a written language, a type of paper, a
government, buildings, and a culture perhaps like that of Indians
of central Mexico. Hwui Shan described the geography only gen­erally
but had much to say of the social organization of the people.
It is not known what the emperor thought of the priest's
story, but into the court records it went. More than a thousand
years passed before anyone else apparently wondered where Hwui
Shan might have been.
Western scholars made the first controversial com­ments
about the story. In 1753 Phillippe Buache made the out­rageous
suggestion that Buddhist priests had established a colony
on the west coast of America.31 In 1761 Joseph de Guignes
presented a paper to the French Royal Academy concerning Hwui
Shan's account. Not only did he give a translation ofthe priest's
words, but also de Guignes maintained that Fu Sang was Mexico
and that the final people described by Hwui Shan were the
Indians of Mexico and the southwestern United States. For some
years there was a curious scholarly silence. Then in 1831 Julius
Klaproth, an eminent German scholar, attacked de Guignes's
view, and the fight was on. The contention quickly attracted a
handful of other scholars. Even to this day the argument has not
been resolved. 32
The first disputes were personally bitter and poetically
violent, in the style of academic contention that was to endure
until the early 1900's. Since those original arguments, a few others
have analyzed the account, argued over it, and tried to prove­or
disprove- that the land of Fu Sang was Mexico or the south­western
United States. Some of the priest's story fits . The men
with dog heads could be Pueblo Indians. Such masks are still
worn. Certainly the Indians look somewhat Chinese, although
their language is different, as the priest noted.
The multi-use Fu Sang plant- source of fiber, thread,
food, and drink- is possibly the maguey, the century plant. The
red, pear-shaped fruit could be either early American corn, such
31 Shao, 6.
...
32 Vining, passim, for the best sum­mary;
supporters are Leland and
Mertz; examples of opponents of
writers like Mertz are Shao and
Wauchope (102, especially); Hen­ning,
34-41.
21
33 McGregor, passim.
34 For a compilation, though not to
the Americas, see Mills (particu­larly
his preface-bibliography,
3-4); Chapman, 21-30. For an
earlier, general reference to the
area, see Coxe.
35 Bancroft, vol. V, 51-53; Beazley,
502; Davies, 112.
22
The Chisos Mountains in the Big Bend, c. 1937
as has been found in abandoned storage pits, or the tuna of the
nopal- the fruit of the prickly pear cactus- still a common food.
The circular houses were common in the Mogollon
culture ofthe southwestern United States around A.D. 350 and
later. 33 The social customs match fairly well- or can be made
to match-much that is known about the pre-Aztec Indians of
central Mexico and the southwestern Indians of California,
Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
The journey itself-via the Aleutian current or along
the coast- is a plausible one. 34 It is even possible for unmanned
ships to drift to the California coast, as evidenced by many a
Japanese wreck, particularly in the favorable autumn winds. 35
What the priest describes along the way also matches
the culture of some former Siberian and Alaskan peoples, as far
as they are known today. And the geographical sites he mentions,
including descriptions of places hard to miss such as the La Brea
tar pits of California, seem to fit.
Even the stranger comments-a kingdom of women,
ladies taking serpents for husbands, and men speaking with the
voices of dogs- can be explained, if one grants the changes that
the Chinese text must have gone through. Hopi tradition, for
example, was largely matriarchal and the ladies there did wed
serpents-members of the Snake Clan who considered themselves
physically one with snakes. Hwui Shan would have had a hard
time trying to explain that to Yu-kie. In addition, the Chinese
were very fond of offering insults and half-insults to the language
and the physical aspects of foreigners. Language that sounded
like the barking of dogs or men who looked like filthy devils are
common epithets in some Chinese texts for even close neighbors. 36
But again, the only evidence of the priest's journey
is an old document mentioning similarities which very well might
just be coincidence.
Since the days of the start of the controversy- but
rarely outside professional papers-various authors have devoted
themselves to establishing cultural links between pre-Spanish
Mexico and the Orient. Similarities have been noted in art,
religion, myth, architecture, and social institutions. It is said of
some Mexican antiquities that had they not been found in the
Americas, they would have been called colonial Chinese without
question. 37 Some Chinese and Japanese images of the Buddha
are so similar to Mexican jades that they could be interchanged;
some carved wall designs are similar; the earlier Spanish ·explorers
in the west reported seeing strange trading ships;38 there are
resemblances in the calendars, and one of the oldest New World
pottery styles is virtually identical to early Japanese. 39
Indeed, the appearance of the bow and arrow can be
dated about A.D. 500 among native American peoples of the
southwest-about the time such a weapon could have been
brought by Hwui Shan and his group. This statement is regarded
with a wide variety of responses by archaeologists. Some think
it a possibility; others consider such an idea stupid and irrespon­sible.
Such is the variation in opinion today.
Some scholars have viewed the similarities with cau­tions
that the fact of similarity does not mean contact between
peoples. Those who want to see similarities can see them; those
who do not, do not. Others can cite significant differences or claim
parallel but independent development of cultural traits. 40 Even
contact between peoples would not necessarily mean a colonial
venture but perhaps only an exploration. 41 At the present state
of archaeological knowledge, however, there are those who say
that evidence in support of early cultural connections across the
Pacific Ocean appears to be better than the evidence that there
were cultural relations between the early peoples of the central
valley of Mexico and Guatamala. 42
A reader of such stories might also question whether a
Buddhist priest of the fifth century would have had a motive for
such a journey. Few Chinese perhaps had a motive, or the inclina­tion,
but for the priest the answer is almost certainly yes. 43 It
36 Vining, 81.
37 Heine-Geldem, "The Problem of
Transpacific Influences;' 278; see
also Waters, 116; Mackenzie and
Shao, passim.
38 Gomara, saying that ships laden
with merchandise-and strange
to the Spanish- were seen off
California (Quatrefages, 205).
39 Meggers , "Early Formative
Period," passim; Lommel, 74, 137.
...
40 Shao, passim.
41 Heine-Geldem, "The Problem of
Transpacific Influence;' 293, and
Shao, passim.
42 Meggers, Prehistoric America, 66f.
43 Beazley, 468; Shao, 10.
23
44 Giles, introduction; Leowe,
"Spices and Silk," passim, for other
aspects of trade.
45 Kennedy, 219f.
46 Beazley, 4 7 5f.
47 Beazley, 472; Needham, sec. 7,
"Travel of Ideas and Techniques,"
176-80, 206-11, 223-25.
48 Giles, passim; Beazley, 479;
Legge, passim.
49 Beazley, 486.
24
is particularly believable that Buddhist priests would have made
such a trip. 44
Traveling Buddhist priests and scholars, such as the
famous Fa-Hsien, traveled west, south, and north over all of Asia
and most of Africa and Europe as pilgrims and missionaries of
the first major religion to actively take its belief to others. 45
Buddhist priests were particularly active in the fifth and sixth
centuries. 46 They apparently even visited early Britain and the
Roman Empire, often leaving written records that are not ques­tioned
-as long as the journey does not cross the Pacific Ocean. 47
Fa-Hsien, Buddhist traveler of the fifth century, jour­neyed
from China across central Asia, came back into India from
the west, took ship for Ceylon, traveled across the Indian Ocean,
around Sumatra, across the China Sea and back home. It was
a stupendous journey, and his written accounts sound much like
H wui Shan's. 48 This journey is believed in spite of his notes about
"evil spirits;' Buddha's shadow left on a rock, and an invisible,
white-eared dragon. Like Hwui Shan's account, his journey is
also a human story of hardship and faith. Unlike Hwui Shan's,
it is accepted as true. 49
The explorer Fa-Hsien regards a fallen companion
So the question might become-When an account of
A.D. 500 is read that speaks of going the proper distance east
from China to reach North America, and gives many details that
could fit that strange land, why should it not be believed?50
There are reasons. Not only is good secondary evi­dence
lacking, but also, as far as archaeological or anthropological
theory goes, many things-for some scholars-are at stake. Early
contact between peoples of the Americas and the Old World is a
subject highly charged with emotion today, particularly where
the transmission of inventions and beliefs might be involved. 51
Even the consideration of "insignificant" contact creates great
interest and argument.
If it is ever proven that mankind's common inventions,
art forms, or beliefs were made independently in many areas
of the world, this would support the innate inventiveness and
perhaps even inevitableness of mankind's achievements. It would
also mean man's culture is not unique to any place in thi~ world­or
perhaps in another world. And it might mean that lost cultural
accomplishments are probably regained.
If, on the other hand, major things are only invented
once and thereafter passed on from person to person, the culture
of man is apparently unique, even accidental-and susceptible
to permanent loss. In this case, no one can count on man's culture
to regenerate if destroyed. 52
At present, the stories of an early Chinese explorer and
a wandering Buddhist priest have no unquestionably supporting
facts outside of a few old documents and cultural observations
which could be coincidence. This is evidence which by no means
forms what is known as "proof:'
Indeed, many archaeologists today question all evi­dence
related to the topic of Old World arrivals at any period
before Columbus. In their definition American archaeology is
only American Indian archaeology. 53
The most liberal opinion which attracts general support
at present is that a boat or two may accidentally have been driven
by storms over the Pacific in early years, but any contact was
culturally insignificant. 54 In other words, no one has yet discovered
the ruin of a fifth century Buddhist shrine in Texas.
But the stories remain intriguing. And they remain.
They are a long way from being forgotten, and their consideration
can lead to a great flexibility of thinking. That's a good thing
to develop. Above all, the stories are illustrations of a basic
concern: Just what is a fact? And that consideration- being able
to make such a consideration- is perhaps more important than
the "truth" of the stories.
50 Larson, 109.
51 Meggers, Prehistoric America, 4-5;
Gladwin, passim.
52 The anthropological "schools" of
"independent invention" and
"contact" theories of cultural
advance (parallel evolution and
diffusion) have argued the point
for generations. See Taylor,
Morgan, .:Boas, Schmidt, and
Lowie.
53 Author's experience; also see
notes to chap. 2.
54 Davies, 103f.
25
26
WhAT iS A fACT?
Facts in the humanities-fields of concern such as
history, philosophy, literary criticism-are often unlike
facts in the natural sciences. They are sometimes
statements about what happened or is happening ('john F.
Kennedy spent the night in Fort Worth, Texas, on November
21, 1963" or "Spanish is spoken by a majority of the people in
Hidalgo County"), but they are often associated with an inference
or interpretation about what happened, is happening, or estimates
of what will happen ('john F. Kennedy was killed the next day
by a single gunman" or "Spanish will be spoken by a majority
of people in Hidalgo County in the year 2100").
Now science, although it indulges in similar inference
and interpretation, would like its facts ("There is no measurable
difference in the speed of light measured in vacuum in different
directions in the universe") to be general, always true, and repro­ducible
on demand or at least observable in the present. Most
facts in the humanities, however, cannot be tested by experiment.
Often, even though specific, they cannot be directly observed.
A fact in the humanities is usually from the past,
however distant or recent. It is most often a statement about a
particular thing, has usually gone through several hands or heads,
and is often subject to some question. Proof usually means simply
that most people agree that the data, the evidence behind the
fact, is reliable, correctly interpreted, and sufficient.
27
28
Stepping around the words "reliable;' "correct," and
"sufficient" for the moment, it remains that facts in the humanities
are usually neither experimentally reproducible nor immediately
observable. Some researchers have tried divine revelation and
seances, but it apparently remains impossible now to ask Hwui
Shan if he were ever in Texas or ask President Kennedy if he
ever spent a night in Fort Worth. It might, however, theoretically
be possible to personally ask every person in Hidalgo County
if he speaks Spanish.
When one looks at records such as news stories that
indicate where Kennedy was the night of November 21, 1963,
one is considering secondary information (as long as Kennedy
did not write the record); when one asks someone if he speaks
Spanish, the reply is primary data-as would be a genuine letter
written by Hwui Shan.
Primary data are often considered to be the most
accurate. A~ eyewitness or participant's account of an event,
written or recorded close in time to the event, should be reliable.
Yet even a witness may have some bias or vested interest that
would cause him to alter what he asserts to be true. Possible
motives for such alteration must be considered by the examiner
of the data. Also, a recollection of an event written fifty years
later by a witness may not be as accurate as an account recorded
when his memory was fresh.
Secondary data are often considered to be more reli­able
if compiled some time after an, event. Conflicting stories
may be resolved or at least explained by an investigator, and an
event somewhat removed in time may be easier to view objec­tively.
But in the case of secondary information, the person
recording that information is not a witness- he heard it from
somebody else.
Either kind of data may be laced with interpretation
by the person doing the recording. And that person may in fact
be incorrect in what he thinks he sees or hears. And, again, the
word "incorrect" only indicates a type of judgment made by yet
other people looking at what the person said.
Scientists prefer to deal with primary data (even if that
is a fossil). Humanists use both in varying mixture.
Whatever data is used, the way it is handled by the
user often differs. A natural scientist tends to use the kind oflogic
called inductive. That is, a common part of scientific method
is to observe many instances of something happening a particular
way (measuring the speed of light in all directions and doing it
again and again); and if the "something" happens, or is observed,
the same way each time, a scientist may assume with some degree
of reliability that it will always happen that way. As long as it
does, the statement of what happened is considered to describe
a correct, reliable, general fact . This is one way of moving from
evidence to proof.
Another way to look at this is that a sufficient amount
of cogent, believable evidence is proof, or constitutes proof. Of
course, "cogent" and "believable;' as well as "reliable;' "correct;'
and "sufficient;' are only words to evaluate the opinions one holds,
or that others hold.
The humanities tend to be deductive. They take a
specific happening, combine it with other facts derived from other
happenings, and draw inferences from them. (A majority of
people in Hidalgo County speak Spanish; people in Hidalgo
County who speak Spanish are of Mexican descent; therefore,
the majority of people in Hidalgo County are of Mexican de­scent.)
Deduction works well unless any part of the process is
false- as in the example just used. Then, the whole construction
turns out to be logically unsound, even though the truth of the
conclusion may still be proven or "demonstrated" valid by other
evidence. Conclusions in the humanities may be either specific,
particular statements or simply generalities.
')
29
1 Obviously, author's opm10n
derived from experience. There
are no other notes to this chapter
because of the general nature of
the discussion. Logic and the
nature of proof have been consid­erations
since the earliest re­corded
utterances of man.
The literatures of the
philosophy of history, histori­ography,
logic, and the character
of language may now be almost
endless. The following books
would be a good few to read first
(and from which much of this
chapter is drawn):
Ayer, Language, Truth & Logic
Barzun, The Modem Researcher
Carr, What Is History)
Gottschalk, Understanding History
Walsh, Philosophy of History
Walsh and Carr are splendid
places to start; Gottschalk and
Barzun are practical handbooks;
and Ayer gives a most incisive
analysis of language, truth, and
logic- exactly as his title indi­cates.
Epstein's "Pre-Columbian
Old World Coins" is a good
example of the handling of data.
For fun, see Lamb's, "Science by
Litigation." Concerning the
phenomenon of "cult" archae­ology,
see Cole.
The question of what evi­dence
is admissible in scientific
reasoning is becoming quite
heated in some areas, e.g. archae­ology.
In addition to Cole, the
following works deal with the
phenomena of what has been
called "cult" archaeology and the
nature of "popularizing" scientific
30
The social sciences- sociology, psychology, even a lot
of education these days-are on the borderland of all this. They
try to devise scientific conclusions from their data, which means
that some workers in these fields try to establish general, repro­ducible
facts through tests and experiments in the same manner
as that used by physicists.
But this mid-ground makes little difference to a fact.
In all disciplines, absolute fact frequently becomes or seems to
become somewhat relative. (The physicist often will admit relative
uncertainty the most readily, followed by the humanist, then the
social scientist. . . .)1
Most statements can never be absolutely proven, par­ticularly
when they refer to events removed in time. There are,
however, some statements recognized by so many people and sup­ported
by so much data that they are held as absolute truth. And
some statements are true by definition: "I'm holding four marbles
in my hand" or ''All bachelors are unmarried?' These are state­ments
true by arbitrary definition. But everyone is aware that
most of the statements of history (including many of the dates
and names) are hardly definitions- they are questioned, changed,
and reinterpreted in different centuries even when taken from
the same data.
Indeed, most accepted beliefs in the humanities are
inferences or opinions, but are documented so well that most
people don't question them- or they are statements so obvious
to common knowledge (or indeed so useful) that they almost never
get questioned. .,
This is not a failure of the data. Natural scientists are
faced with somewhat the same situation. They realize that it is
impossible to describe, absolutely and completely, a physical state.
But this does not mean chaos for either physics or
history. Enough can be known to describe a rational, dependable,
predictable world for life as we know it. There's no practical reason
to question the definition of "four" every day. A knowledge of
past happenings, definitions, current consensus, and acceptability
of things among one's neighbors- and what is in one's own
head- is necessary for a life that is not repetitive, unreliable, or
at times dangerous. If one remembers the "past" meaning of a
red traffic light, one will probably not get flattened by a truck;
if a nation remembers the past meaning of an atomic bomb blast,
such an explosion might not easily happen again. But a person
must consider and judge evidence- not just swallow "facts'!.... in
order to live a productive or creative life.
One should be able to make some sort of judgment
of evidence and consider how "facts" are supported. History may
not repeat itself totally in a useful or predictable way, yet a person
can get along in the world a lot better if he has a knowledge of
facts in the humanities and can judge those facts. Without them,
a person could never even hope to understand his own age and
himself. It is a question of efficiency, and the importance is direct.
A person comes to know when one's newspaper or neighbor might
be trusted. A person who can judge evidence can also present
his own ideas more effectively to others.
Even beyond the reliability of the evidence, the motive
of the source of data, the feelings and beliefs of the person doing
the writing or talking must always be considered. Is there a reason
for someone editing and choosing among the data; is there evi­dence
of direct lying or alteration of data? Then, one should also
consider the possibility of a person not following the urge of an
obvious motive. One of the most common ways to cast doubt
on a statement is to show that a reporter had a motive to "slant
the facts"-whether he did so or not.
Naturally, the genuineness of documents needs to be
considered, and this again may reflect a motive. Could such
evidence be a forgery? Some scholars, needing a professional
boost, have even created "hitherto unknown documents:' Some
newspapermen have done the same. And some humanists, while
not making up material, so edit the data as to support only one
interpretation; some just make careless errors; and some may
be wonderfully accurate in all things.
Everyday life is the greatest of the humanities. Judg­ment
is difficult in this field but important. When one hears that
"our national security is in danger unless we revive the national
draft" or "nuclear-powered electric plants are actually safe;' one
should consider whether the statement is defensible. Is it an infer­ence
or an opinion? Is it rational? And, further, does the statement
make any difference? Then, if it does make a difference, how
can the evidence be judged?
And in structure, the judgment of everyday questions
is often the same as deciding whether an explorer by the name
of Hwui Shan walked through North America about fifteen
hundred years ago. That decision might not make any differ­ence-
the ability to make such a decision might be the most
important talent a person can have.
theory (see the bibliography for
full references):
Charles J. Cazeau and
Stuart D. Scott Jr., in Exploring
the Unknown, examine the
phenomenon of "pseudoscien­tists"
and provide a good discus­sion
of the scientific method­with
examples. They include a
section on "ancient mariners"
(21f).
William Sims Bainbridge's
"Chariots of the Gullible" is a
statistical look at von Daniken
believers and non-believers, or,
who is likely to believe what.
For another side of things,
see Fell and Totten.
·.•
31
32
ClASSiCAl REFERENCES
ANb Olb MANUSCRipTS
Stories about early Old World explorers going to the
Americas from Europe and Africa are legion. There
is almost no end to the accounts that mention early
travelers making their way across the Atlantic, but-much before
A.D. 1500- supporting evidence is a little scarce, to say the least.
For each story, usually preserved in a single, old manuscript or
an often-copied note, there is not a wealth of further evidence
to indicate that the story is true. Evidence becomes speculative,
and those who venture out on the seas of such speculation risk
their professional reputation just as the early mariners constantly
risked their lives.
Hubert Howe Bancroft, writing almost a century ago
as one of the United States' most renowned historians, likened
historical fact concerning early exploration to a coastline itself:
The sixteenth century is a bluff coast line
bounding the dark unnavigable sea of American
antiquity. At a very few points along the long line
headlands project slightly into the waters, affording
a tolerable sure footing for a time, but terminating
for the most part in dangerous reefs and quicksands
over which the adventurous antiquarian may pass
with much risk still farther from the firm land of
written record, and gaze at the flickering mythical
lights attached to buoys beyond. 1
' ,)
1 Bancroft, vol. V, "The Native
Races;' 134-35.
33
2 Ibid., 153.
3 Ibid., 154.
34
Imaginary sea monster, 16th century
Those adventurous antiquarians, according to Bancroft who used
the term in a beautifully insulting way, were false historians
who are continually dreaming they have found
secure footing by routes previously unknown, from
rock to rock through the midst of shifting sands
. . . they carefully sift out such mythic traditions
as fit their theories, converting them into incontro­vertible
facts, and reject all else as unworthy of
notice .. . . 2 :'
Continuing his metaphor, Bancroft said that this kind
of speculator was one who
steps out without hesitation from rock to rock over
the deep waters; to him the banks of shifting quick­sand,
if somewhat treacherous about the edges, are
firm land in the central parts; to him the faintest
buoy-supported stars are a blaze of noonday sun;
and only on the floating masses of sea-weed far out
on the waters lighted up by dim phosphorescent
reflections, does he admit that his footing is
becoming insecure and the light grows faint. 3
The style is that of academic contention of a century
ago. The opinion is still most clear. Bancroft thought little of the
speculative antiquarian. But he thought that the historian who
engaged in speculation- properly labeled-was doing acceptable
work, indeed even desirable work. In fact, after saying that he
himself wanted to write carefully documented history, Bancroft
went on to say:
I would pass beyond the firm land, spring from
rock to rock, wade through shifting sands, swim to
the farthest, faintest light, and catch at straws by
the way;-yet not flatter myself while thus employed
. . . that I am treading dry-shod on a wide, solid,
and well-lighted highway. 4
Bancroft knew the value of speculation and imagina­tion,
but the last phrase makes a great deal of difference. One
should know what one stands upon. The stories concerning the
first Old World arrivals traveling west to what became known
as the Americas should be considered in the light of Bancroft's
cautions. And in a hundred years of modern archaeological
search, there are indeed few hard facts pointing to anyone­except
the Vikings in Newfoundland in A.D. 1000-having made
landfall in the Americas before 1492. Yet the disputed facts and
the questions, the possibilities and probabilities, even admittedly
unproven hints have spawned scores of books and articles.
The trouble that confronts an investigator today is that
what record remains is most often an incomplete reference, a
shattered clay tablet there, a folktale with perhaps a basis in fact
here, or a manuscript that is only a fragment and perhaps quite
literally moldy. But a few things do remain. There are stories
concerning arrivals in the Americas by early sailors, priests,
princes, merchants, soldiers, mercenaries, traders, pirates, and
private citizens among other explorers of unknown intent, all
bent on seeing what was beyond an ocean or perhaps accidentally
blown the wrong way much too far. 5
Stories attesting, however unreliably, to a continent
west of Europe and Africa have likewise been numerous for almost
as long as man has written. Before becoming specific concerning
Texas and the Gulf of Mexico region, a few general concerns
can provide background for explorers to the Texas area and
background for deciding one's position in Bancroft's terms.
People, some people, that is, of Europe, Africa, and the
Near East always thought that there was a continent to the west
or at least a collection of islands of great interest. These lands
were not easily attainable. Their supposed distance, the dangers
of the ocean, and the fact that few seemed to return from such
a place made travel apparently risky.
To most European and African travelers, the far east
and far west were either places one visited very rarely or were
entirely mythical. The west, to the eyes of the European Old
World, was the place where the sun set and thus was poetically
a place of haven, life's end, or death. It was Hades to some or
the location of the Isles of the Blest to others. It was even the
4 Ibid., 154-55.
5 For recent sei)Ondary collections,
see Fiske, Boland, Fell, Crone,
Gordon, McKern, Wauchope,
Trento, Cohen, Riley, and
Marschall.
35
6 Benitez, 1-14; "Ancient Explor­ers;'
by J.V. Luce in Ashe, 53f;
Plato's Timaeus and Critias present
not only the Atlantis myth, but
also the former speaks of the con­tinent
to the far west; Herrmann,
156-62.
7 As an example, see Plutarch
(Goodwin's translation, Loeb),
vol. V.
8 Ashe, 15-21.
9 Crone, 2.
10 The "common people" did indeed
see maps- in churches, for
example, see Crone, 2-3.
36
suspected Atlantis, the drowned continent, among a host of other
ideas that a great majority of people at one time or another firmly
believed in. 6 These ideas were not usually based on stories of
voyages, however, but were rather what had to be true to balance
earlier ideas of western philosophy, religion, or geography. 7
Yet lands beyond the Old World were also real places.
Even at the time of classical Greek civilization, say 400 B.C., the
world was known to be spherical. 8 Europe and North Africa and
Athenian merchant ship, c. 500 B.C., copied from a vase painting
Asia represented the known world (for the peoples of these places),
and this area was clearly on one side of a sphere. Erathosthenes,
in about 200 B.C., measured the ·correct size of the earth, and
Crates of Pergamum built a globe in the second century B.C.
showing the philosophically nec~ssary but unknown continents
to the west. Other maps (such as that composed by the Roman
Macrobius in the fourth century A.D.) represented the faces of
the world as two hemispheres, one adorned with relatively crude
drawings of Europe, Asia, and at least part of Africa. 9 The other
side was, in some of the more complete books of geography,
simply a blank circle. For this reason, the second side was often
left out. Book producers then had just as much reason as those
today to save money, and why have a blank circle?
Thus, people looking at the picture- particularly those
who could not read the accompanying Latin text-were unaware
that the simple-looking circle represented half of a globe, and
so they assumed that the illustrated picture was of a fiat earth. 10
In the minds of the not-so-learned (most of Europe's population
at that time), the earth became a fiat disc.
But even if some people knew the earth was round,
there were other problems. It was still not easy to go to the other
side. The earth consisted of various belts of climate. The northern
part was obviously too cold for habitation, and the zone at the
equator was just as obviously hot enough to set ablaze the sails
of any ship taken there by an overzealous captain or hot enough
to burn the sandals off of anyone intrepid enough to try to walk
that far south in Africa. A perilous world for travelers, indeed.
But the spherical shape also guaranteed that if there
was any land further south of the equator, it should be temperate.
Likewise, there would be two pleasant zones on the other side
of the earth. 11 This was, of course, only theoretically known. The
catch was that the equator and its impassable heat bisected the
earth one way, and a fearful ocean split the earth the other way.
Mart{n Behaim's map of the New World, 1492
Europe, Asia, and North Africa were confined. There
was even a moral question as to whether man should try to cross
into another zone.
But there is a curious thing about some men and
women. They will often try to go precisely where their reason
(correctly or not) says they can not or should not go. Now the
motive may indeed be obstinance or curiosity, gold or spices, wine
or women, or men for that matter; but they will go. And the
motives vary. When Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt ordered an
expedition through the Red Sea about 1500 B.C., she sailed for
the usual gold and spices, wine and curiosity- but also for cos­metics
and men.12
So even though the heat of an equator promised to
vaporize boats and the oceans to mysteriously swallow ships, there
were mariners who dared the horizons and overland caravan
leaders who steered by the stars.13
The first known mariners in the Atlantic-the Afri­cans,
Phoenicians, and Carthaginians- found it a strange place.
11 Diodorus (Oldfather translation,
Loeb, 19), I. V. 19; Crone, 3.
')
1z Marx, "Egyptian Shipping,"
passim; Anon., "The Queen Who
Would Be Different" (a romanti­cized
version, but fun); Ashe, 71;
and S0lver, "Egyptian Shipping
of About 1500 B.C."- by far the
best.
13 Benitez, chap. I, for a romantic
picture of exploring the unknown
37
and the dependence of explora­tion
on myth. And by this time,
there is apparently no question
that there had been ships capable
of sailing oceans for at least forty­five
hundred years or that they
could sail to windward. See Ver­wey
on the last point, who quotes
Aristotle's Mechanica, 8.
1
4 Al-Idrisi, passim; Galvano
(Galvao ), passim; Morison, Portu­guese;
Riley, eds., particularly sec.
14, 274.
15 Herodotus, iv. 41.
1
6 Babcock, 1-10; King, 38-40;
Herodotus, i. In spite of numer­ous
stories, the Carthaginians, at
least in literature, held that no
one had taken a ship across the
Atlantic. But perhaps they were
also hiding a secret. See Heeren,
i. 178.
17 Crone, 8.
18 The peculiarities on some maps
had very specific purposes, such
as political display. Herodotus, v.
49; Cassidy, 37-39; Babcock,
Harrisse, and Brown, passim.
38
An Egyptian ship, c. 1600 B.C., from a rock carving at Deir el-Bahri
Unlike the M<cditerranean, the ocean had obvious tides, a very
uncertain western shore (if any at all), massive storms, and was
undoubtedly filled with monsters.
But not everything was against them. The waters could
be sailed like other water, and the weather and shoals, landfalls
and passages could be learned.14 Phoenician mariners circum­navigated
Africa in the sixth century B.C., about two thousand
years before the Portuguese Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope
in 1488-but in the other direction. 15 Later, the Phoenicians and
their kinsmen from their main colony, Carthage, sailed out of
the Mediterranean to the west, setting up colonies in Africa and
the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal, and visiting Britain and
various Atlantic islands. 16
In the course of all this, more than a few boats were
blown about considerably, and interesting stories began to accu­mulate
about a rather large land to the west. Some of the stories
were certainly powered by myth. The early maps, charts, and
accounts were fed not only by the philosophical tradition of a
western land, but also by the poetic tradition of mythical lands
which were places of paradise, rest, and haven gained after a life
(or a voyage) of trouble.l7 In time, Hades-the more somber
western tradition- was forgotten.
Islands and shorelines flickered on the early maps
limited only by the cartographers' imagination. 18 When one is
drawing a map, blank space is both very boring and professionally
embarrassing. Unexplored inland areas became peopled with
strange animals, speculative mountains, specious hermits, and
questionable cities; reaches of unknown ocean were broken with
complicated islands, erotic mermaids, colorful wind roses, and
dreadful sea monsters_l9 Accounts of voyages west which accom­panied
the charts ran the gamut from logical-sounding narratives
to the science fiction of the day. 20
19 Among the decorations the wind
roses were the only things per­haps
meant to be helpful. These
were the eight- and sixteen­pointed
designs that set the style
for compass cards. Often highly
colored, they radiated a set of
lines over the chart surface before
latitude and longitude lines were
common. Of more use to mari­ners
who navigated by dead
reckoning, they were mildly
useful for estimating compass
bearings.
20 Morison, Portuguese, 18; Collier,
passim.
39
40
pboeNiCiAN SAiLORS
ANb yeLLOW CATS
The Phoenicians provide many stories of ocean voyages
and overland explorations, but whether they came to
the New World centuries ago is still a matter of con-troversy
that is heating up academically rather than cooling
down. 1 That the Phoenicians were outstanding mariners is well
known. It is not quite so commonly known that they were also
experienced land navigators and caravaneers who took their
bearings from the stars. 2
Their homelands were the eastern shores of the Medi­terranean,
present-day Lebanon and Syria; but they were
respected as traders on land and sea in most of the Old World. 3
They maintained their position as the foremost navigators from
about 1200 B.C. to 146 B.C. when Rome sacked their colonial
city of Carthage. By that year Carthage was already cut off from
the eastern Phoenician lands. 4
Calling themselves "Canaanites," a one-time Mediterra­nean
synonym for "merchants;' the Phoenicians were known to
have sailed on the Atlantic and Indian oceans, as well as the
Mediterranean and Red seas. 5 Although they operated exten­sive
caravan routes overland to the east, they are remembered
more often as sailors with style and skill all their own. They were
one of very few groups of seafaring men who allowed women
on board merchant ships. 6 It is also thought that the Phoeni-
1 Anon. "Was Hanna discoverer"·
Boland, They All Discovered
America; Johnston, passim.
2 Strabo (Loeb, I, 9 and I, 177),
!.1.6 and !.3.2.
3 Herodotus, i. 1 and iii. 113.
4 General: Moscati, Herm, passim.
Herodotus, Diodorus, and
Strabo along with the Old
Testament are some of the older
secondary references. The Loeb
edition is well indexed, and the
later references provide subject
citations to general Mediterra­nean
history.
5 Diodorus (Oldfather translation,
Loeb, I: 145£), v. 19-20; Kan, "De
41
j~------------------------~
Periplous"; for the ships, see
Anderson, Romola, and Harden.
6 Herodotus, i. 5.
7 Todd, "Cats and Commerce:'
Phoenicians apparently liked
orange and black cats. The Vi­kings
liked white.
8 See Appendix 2. It is also notable
that the Greeks were fond of
pointing out that not all women
aboard Phoenician ships were
there by choice. The Phoenicians
(and others of the eastern Medi­terranean)
did not strictly refute
this statement but did point out
that even this category of women
were loath to leave once aboard.
9 Herodotus, v. 58.
1o Herodotus, iii. 136.
11 For supposed Phoenician finds
on the east coast of the United
States, see Lossing, 632-35;
Boland, passim.
12 But see johnston for a defense of
their discovery of the Americas­from
the west; Mallery, 211f.
42
Phoenician merchantman
cians deliberately took cats aboard their trading ships to control
the rats, thereby not incidentally taking cats all over the known
world. In particular, the yellow-colored tomcat seems to have been
a Phoenician favorite. 7
Most of the existing accounts of their voyages and over­land
travels were written by others- notably the Greeks8 - for,
even though the Phoenicians gave their alphabet to the western
world, few of their own narratives apparently have survived. 9
Either they deliberately did not write of their voyages, perhaps
to keep a monopoly on their routes, of modern archaeologists
simply have not been lucky enough to find tablets bearing their
stories. The Phoenicians are known to have made maps, but
apparently none survived.10 They also kept business records, some
of which have been found, and did inscribe graffiti, notices of
ownership and boundaries, religious inscriptions, and announce­ments
of voyages almost everywhere they went. 11
The Mediterranean area is fairly well endowed with
short Phoenician inscriptions. Inscriptions that may be Phoenician
have been discovered elsewhere- but with little other evidence
of Phoenician occupation. 12 As languages (and governments)
changed in the Mediterranean area, Phoenician came to be
written not only in Phoenician characters but also in early Greek
characters (which were actually "modern" Phoenician) and
Hebrew. Some writers even mixed alphabets in a single inscrip­tion,
which gives pause to modern scholars.
Variously written, Phoenician inscriptions are found
most places the Phoenicians went. Old World inscriptions create
no other trouble than occasional difficulty in transcription. Similar
inscriptions in the New World usually give rise to one word: fake.
A long inscription was found in Brazil a century ago,
which, when allegedly translated, told the story of a voyage from
the Red Sea to the Brazilian coast in the tenth century B.C. 13 13 Herrmann, 211f.
Most scholars were not slow to label the original as fake and the
translation a hoax. These authorities generally believe that sailors,
before Columbus, were self-confined to sailing along coastlines.
A very few saw the story as a logical extension of the accepted
Phoenician voyages.
Phoenician galley
Similar inscriptions have turned up on the east coast of
North America, as well as inland. Two such inscriptions have
been found in the drainage of the Rio Grande, one in New
Mexico, the other from the Big Bend area of Texas. Even the
few authorities who say the inscriptions are genuine ancient script
disagree on what language is represented.
The New Mexico stone is inscribed in what appears to
be early Hebrew in a Phoenician alphabet of a form used about
1000 B.C. in the eastern Mediterranean. The stone was discovered
in a very remote place, which creates a puzzle. If it is a hoax,
it is a well-hidden one. 14 If genuine, it means a Phoenician was
exploring the Rio Grande some twenty-five hundred years ago.
Quite a way downriver, within the present boundaries
of Big Bend National Park, a perhaps related find was made. 15
In January of 1962 Charles and Bernice Nickles and Reva and
Donald Uzzell, related families, were vacationing together. Their
tour took them to the Hot Springs area of the park at the junc­tion
of Tornillo Creek and the Rio Grande just above Boquillas.
14 Williams and Pepper, 22-26. For
an alleged transcription, see
Perkins, passim, who maintains
the writer was Greek. Recent,
perhaps more scholarly, com­ment
can be found in the Occa­sional
Publications of the Epigraphic
Society: "The Los Lunas Inscrip­tion,"
vol. 10, no. 237; "The Los
Lunas Stone;' vol. 10, no. 238;
and "A Decipherment of the Los
Lunas Decalogue Inscription;'
vol. 10, no. 239.
1s McGee, passim.
43
16 The Rio Grande (from at least
the Big Bend area south to Ciu­dad
Acuna) is bordered by a
number of hot springs, arising
from some geologically unspeci­fied
source, many large enough
to accommodate a tired party of
fifteen or so, others only large
enough for two tired feet.
44
In 1962, twenty years after the land, bought by the
State of Texas, had been presented to the national government
as a park, Hot Springs was a collection of abandoned buildings.
Just after the turn of the century, however, it was a flourishing,
privately owned spa. At its height it was a small settlement of
a few families, a trading post, motor court, campground, and
bathhouse. The area was frequented by those who came to
drink-and bathe in- the natural mineral waters that come to
the surface at a comfortable 105°F. Today, the bathhouse and
the main hot spring are almost gone, swept away and almost
covered by the eroding Rio Grande.
The area has been known at least since local Indians
scraped out a depression to catch the restorative waters. Many
later travelers stopped to refresh themselves -whether acciden­tally
passing or deliberately visiting the area. 16
When the Nickles and Uzzell families visited Hot
Springs, Dol).ald Uzzell climbed the cliffs on the side of Tornillo
Creek across from the old settlement. Some thirty feet above the
creek bed, he found a fragmented clay tablet protected in a small
niche. The pieces were neatly stacked and bore strange, incised
characters. Scrambling down the cliff, he reassembled the tablet,
and Charles Nickles took photographs of the curious writing.
Unable to decipher the markings, the group took the artifact to
park headquarters and left it with a ranger for safekeeping and
further study. The families were curious about the strange writing,
however, and offered photographs to several authorities including
Dr. Cyclone Covey of Wake Forest University and Dr. Cyrus
Gordon of Brandeis University.
At first no one could decipher the markings, although
the most favorable opinions classified it as a phonetic language,
at least related to early Greek, written in a blend of Judean
Hebrew and Sidonian Phoenician alphabets. Such strange combi­nations
are found in Europe but are not exactly common in Texas.
The least complimentary comments called the markings those
of a Mexican goatherd. Yet the marks do include Phoenician
characters that such a person would probably not have known
nor have made up by chance.
One theory suggested by Covey, that a party of Phoeni­cians
might have descended the Rio Grande (leaving the New
Mexico and Texas inscriptions near the waterway), is, in the face
of a lack of further evidence, hard to believe. In any case,
Phoenicians would not have been confined to the waterway since
they were also experienced overland navigators; but the route
would have been a logical one to or from the sea. It provides
a supply of water and is beautiful.
So far only one scholar has offered a complete tran­scription
of the tablet: Dr. Barry Fell claims that the script and
language are very grammatical, centuries-old Iberian, not Phoeni­cian,
and that the message is a supplication to Ahura-Mazda to
protect a small group oflberian Zoroastrians during a plague. 17
Such opinions are questioned- or ignored- by most scholars.
In any case, the motive for a hoax seems thin indeed
because the Tornillo cliff at the Rio Grande is an unlikely place
for someone to hide something that was intended to be found­particularly
on the wrong side of a former spa. And the recent
finders had no apparent motive for a hoax. A clay tablet, or even
a mud tablet, could last for centuries, and the lack of agreement
concerning the script may not be evidence that it is a fake. In
fact, if it were a hoax, it would be more likely that the script could
be more easily read.
The original tablet is no longer in existence. The
ranger, to whom the find was first presented, later said- in
contrast to other observers- that the inscription was not on clay
or rock but appeared to be on recent mud such as that which
forms along Tornillo Creek after every heavy rain. He and other
park personnel agreed that the tablet showed no signs of age,
again, unlike other opinions. It was carefully kept, however, until
it disintegrated. So the story goes.
Tornillo Creek at Hot Springs, the Big Bend
17 Fell, personal communication;
Saga America, 164-65.
.,
45
t .. .. * • ,w
'.* '*1
. Ji
Title page of Regimiento de Navegacion, Pedro de Medina, 1513
46
A FEW iNSCRipTiONS:
LOST GREE]{S ANb
WANbERiNG ROMANS
I
• nscriptions and carvings, supposed Phoenician or not,
are almost always so brief and usually so questionable
as to be unacceptable as dependable evidence of the
presence of early explorers. No inscription of any Old World
language in the New World, before 1492, is accepted by the
majority of scholars today. Indeed, to give credence to any such
inscription is taken as being purely illogical. 1 Some inscriptions,
some stories, are fun to consider, however. There are always a
few that because of their association or their similarity to genuine
records create the impression that they might be legitimate
records of explorers.
A generation ago Esau Nelson found a rather strange
carved stone in the canyon of the Pecos River. It was mainly floral
in design, which might indicate that it was the practice work of
an early stonecutter. Yet it was far away from any logical place
for stonecutting. It bore the inscriptions "D'AVE" (too neatly
spaced out to read Dave) and "Ph.Coni" or "Phi Coni" (carved
a little more questionably). Now on display at Alamo Village
in Brackettville, no one knows why it was carved.
And there the story should stop, and does, but for the
possibility (the records have never been confirmed) that an Italian
sculptor called "Coni" left the Mediterranean world in A.D. 1165
1 See Cole, all articles cited.
47
2 Such was the local story told in
the past, personal correspon­dence,
Wheelis, 1968.
3 Fell, passim; Farley, personal cor­respondence.
4 Fleming, 16.
48
for parts unknown and never returned. 2 And there the story really
does stop.
Naturally this is probably a coincidence of name. It
is the type of evidence that isn't. And there are other mysterious
carvings like this in Texas- such as the stone head found near
Schulenburg a decade ago- but they are unsigned and are surely
only reminders that stonemasons and tombstone carvers need
to practice.
These are instances of things found without any other
records concerning them and with no associated evidence of
where they came from. They are items without provenance­not
found buried in dateable sites nor capable of being indepen­dently
dated by methods known at present. Some inscriptions,
however, appear in groups, a factor that is itself a type of evidence.
North of the Red River, in Oklahoma, a bewildering
array of short inscriptions has been found. Many stones examined
by Gloria Farley of Heavener are thought to bear traces of
Phoenicians or Libyans who visited and perhaps settled the land
more than two thousand years ago. 3 Such thinking is again the
belief of very few people.
Why these Mediterranean peoples might have been
near the Red River area at that time is absolutely unknown. If
they were there, what they were doing is not strange at all, because
people have always done the same- they were exploring and per­haps
settling. The inscriptions- some of them deciphered as
Punic, the language of the Cadiz Phoenicians; or Ogham, a script
of the European Celts; or Libyan boundary markers- if found
in another part of the world, would cause no raised eyebrows.
Since related items include Carthaginian coins, a carved female
figure identified as the Phoenician goddess Tanit, and a transcrip­tion
of Pharaoh Akhenaten's Hymn to the Sun-and since these
items relate to the history of two thousand and more years ago­eyebrows
are raised indeed, most of them skeptically.
Yet the items do not appear to be part of a recently lost
collection and are at least interesting, although there is no fur­ther
evidence of authenticity. 4 Most scholars dismiss the finds
as a hoax or as terribly misguided readings of unknown marks
on rocks. The most liberal theories hold that these eastern
Mediterranean peoples voyaged across the Atlantic, entered the
Gulf of Mexico, and made their way up the Mississippi and Red
rivers. The most conservative opinions are that the marks are
those of recent settlers and that the translators of the marks are
simply fools.
Paintings and etchings on rocks (pictographs and
petroglyphs) in Texas have excited the curiosity of many. Existing
Pictograph in Panther Cave at Seminole Canyon
mainly in the drier climate of west Texas where rock overhangs
and ledges provide convenient surfaces, the paintings and carvings
depict events, religious ceremonies, hunting records, and a variety
of things only guessed at today. Their ages are simply unknown. 5
And they are presumably the work of native American Indians.
However, there are designs that could be from other
hands or by Indians who had seen non-Indian things. There is
one possible representation of a Phoenician craft with raised, pro­tected
gunwales; 6 lines that can be read as European Ogham
script, but which are certainly not; 7 engravings which could be
read as runes, but are usually interpreted as Indian "tally marks";8
and some miscellaneous markings which seem translatable.
The most well known in the latter category is an
inscription on the Rio Grande which has been read as a message
in Libyan and Ogham attesting to a crew that took shelter under
the rock overhang during a trip from the Mediterranean area
about 800 B.C. 9 If that reading is correct, it is a hint that the
Rio Grande was used as a route of exploration by hitherto
unknown explorers.
An alleged Ogham inscription in Stephens County has
been claimed to be of Celtic origin, many centuries old, and to
indicate a camping place arranged with the permission of the
local Indians.1°
All of these interpretations are simply items of derision
to most people.
Scores of miles of river rock overhangs still may contain
messages, although today some of the writing is under the waters
of modern Amistad Reservoir. The route up (or down) the Rio
5 Those with Puebloan influence
are tentatively dated from A.D.
900 to 1500 and are considered
relatively recent. Kirkland and
Newcomb, 217.
6 Pecos River cave 1, Kirkland and
Newcomb, 76.
7 Panther Cave, author's exami­nation;
Kirkland and Newcomb,
66; and Lehmann Rock Shelter,
Kirkland and Newcomb, 159.
The question of brief inscriptions
and what their transcription and
translation should be is a thorny
question. Ogham is one of the
hardest since it, as a script, may
phonetically express many lan­guages
(some without the benefit
of vowels). Some markings,
demonstrably not Ogham, can be
transcribed as Ogham. See, in
addition to Barry Fell's America
B.C., Greene, Kelly, and Fraser.
8 Paint Rock site and Panther
Cave, author's field work; also
examples in Kirkland and New­comb,
62.
9 Fell, America B.C., 185.
1o Fell, "Stephens County;' 107.
49
50
Grande is a logical one for exploration. One of the most common
sailing routes from Europe- that followed by Columbus and the
Spanish- drops down south in the Atlantic into the winds leading
to the Caribbean. Once there, the route leads between Yucatan
and Cuba, then into harbors like Veracruz or to the major rivers:
Panuco, Rio Grande, Mississippi.
And there are stories attesting that such a Caribbean
route was followed-at times accidentally-to the New World
before the Christian era. One of the most interesting, recorded
by Pausanias, concerns the Greeks. 11 He tells the story of a
shipload of Greeks who sailed out into the Atlantic more than
')
Greek trader
two thousand years ago. Caught in a storm, they were blown far
to the west, where they sailed among islands of large size. On
one of these they were surprised by the sudden appearance of
men dressed only in tails similar to horses. These men naturally
reminded the Greeks of their tradition of satyrs.
These strange natives immediately spotted the women
aboard ship. Pausanias does not state whether these women were
passengers or servants. The "satyrs;' without uttering a sound,
swarmed up to the ship and attempted to carry off the women.
Exactly how they did this Pausanias does not make
clear, but the effort was enough to scare the Greek sailors. Without
further ado, they simply shoved a "barbarian" woman overboard
onto the island and made good their escape while the "satyrs"
outraged the woman in a variety of ways amazing even to the
sophisticated Greeks.
In this case at least, it was the navigator who brought
the story back to Greece. Euphemus was obviously watching more
than the position of the sun and the coastline during the affray.
He lived up to his name by avoiding most of the unpleasant details
of the story.
An interesting fact is that such a costume, a tail, was
recorded in the later years of Spanish exploration in the Carib­bean.
Some writers cite natives attired with detachable horse­like
tails, who were noted for satyr-like actions.12
But if Greeks left any inscriptions on Texas rocks, they
are yet to be found. 13
Stories about the Romans are cited also, although most
of them concern Christian Romans who were forced to leave the
early Empire.
The Romans were aware of land to the west; at least
there are references to it in the literature. Plutarch, in the first
century A.D., wrote of a continent a thousand miles or so to the
west of Britain. 14 Men had visited the place, the Greeks had put
a colony there, and it was quite possible to sail there- so it was
said. The account, laced with gods in residence and unlikely
geography, nevertheless contains what may be evidence of an
actual visit. The all-night summer twilight of northern lands is
recorded, for example.
In A.D. 64, during the reign of the Emperor Nero, a
great fire swept Rome. Although it almost died out a couple of
times, it was kept going by agents of someone. It was even
rumored that Nero himself wanted to burn the city, so he could
build a new one in his own honor. A scapegoat had to be found.
The people who were eventually blamed were the
Christians, at that time members of a young and disreputable
religious sect. Many Christians were killed in the persecutions
that followed, but some managed to escape-and some who
escaped literally took ship for as far as they could go.
Roman merchantman
12 Hyde, 162; Lafitau, 1:105; 1:1-2,
31f.
13 Although rumors do exist of
"Greek" inscriptions- author's
field work and interviews in Pine
Springs and Marathon, Texas.
14 Plutarch, "Of the Face Appear­ing
Within the Orb of the Moon,"
Plutarch's Morals, 281f. The
distance given is five days' sail
plus five thousand stadia.
51
15 Heine-Geldern, 118.
16 Heine-Geld ern, 117.
17 Boland, 47f.
18 Mallery, passim.
19 Williams and Pepper, 13f; Covey,
passim.
52
Nor was this reason the only one for Romans to go be­yond
the borders of the Empire. Romans and Roman trade goods
went east to India and China and may have gone west. 15 Roman
trade was exceptionally strong through the early fifth century.
In the Americas some evidence has come to light that
would indicate at least accidental contact if not deliberate trade.
A small terra-cotta head, identified as Roman, was found recently
under undisturbed pre-Columbian pyramid paving in Mexico.16
Evidence of early ironworking has been found in Virginia, along
with related artifacts that could be Roman, near the Roanoke
River. 17 Parallel ironworking sites have been claimed in Ohio that
could be a thousand years old. 18 And apparent evidence of a
Roman colony called Terra Calalus has been found in the vicinity
of Tucson, Arizona. 19 The latter, labeled as a complete fraud by
most investigators, is said to have been a colony of some seven
hundred Romans who, after sailing through the Pillars of
Hercules, were blown far across the sea. According to an
Romantic drawing of Roman galleys in harbor
inscription found at the site, they sailed for a long time to a new
land. They landed, and walked northwest through a wild and
new countryside to a desert. This route would be across Texas,
which is in accord with the idea that Texas is an eternal crossroads.
The artifacts at the site, however, are undocumented. They consist
of swords, crosses, a cast of a head, all made of a lead alloy
hardened with antimony. The items were, by some stories, found
in absolutely undisturbed caliche deposits, assuring their age.
Other accounts, however, say the finds were made from auto­mobile
tire balancing weights, then planted with the original
spade marks left visible to later excavators.
With such controversy, no proof is possible. Most
scholars would say no serious consideration is required.
In Texas one unusual find concerns a coin-a Roman
follis, minted in London in A.D. 313-314, and found in an Indian
mound presumably undisturbed for at least the last nine hundred
years. 20 The find is already called a "known and admitted hoax"
by some investigators. But even if such a find were genuine, it
might actually have no real significance.
It is important to note that such a coin would not by
itself indicate Roman-American Indian trade or contact. The coin
might simply have been interesting to Indians. It might have been
found in the wreckage of a ship blown across the Atlantic-or
Pacific-and passed between Indians in the Americas only as a
curiosity. Shipwrecks might have brought coins but otherwise
have had no real effect on American Indian culture.
Most finds of ancient coins in the Americas were cer­tainly
lost by later collectors. 21 A single coin if found in an undis­turbed
Indian mound would be harder to explain, but in itself
would lack significance.
Some curious things in Texas rise to the level of the
fantastic. Several peculiar "giant man tracks" are found in lime­stone
rock, exposed by rivers- rock far too old for contemporary
theories of the development of man. 22
One well-preserved series of footprints is in the bedrock
of the Paluxy River in Somerville County. They are next to well­preserved
tracks of a trachodon of the Mesozoic Era- thought
to be far too early for the existence of any man. The humanoid
tracks, all about twenty-one inches long, have a stride of seven
feet, easily twice that of modern man. Dr. Bull Adams, familiar
with the dinosaur tracks of the Glen Rose area, argued in an
earlier day that the human-like tracks were those of a giant sloth.
Others, such as Dr. C.N. Dougherty, call attention to the perfect
form of the footprints which would never be questioned if they
were not so large and not preserved in limestone -limestone
seventy million years old. 23
If the tracks were human, they would certainly be those
of the earliest Texan- but probably not an explorer.
But aside from footprints, aside from myth, marks on
rocks are interesting in two ways. First, their very existence is
interesting. There are strange and unexplained inscriptions in
Texas which are either the messages or graffiti of earlier travelers,
or the occasional occupation of recent travelers with a flair for
old languages, or planned frauds, or coincidences.
Second, it is significant, when deciding about authen­ticity,
to consider that the inscriptions not only are difficult or
20 Watkins, passim; Epstein, passim.
21 Epstein, passim.
22 Tolbert, "Track of Man-like
Giant."
23 Dougherty, passim.
53
24 Indeed, it is more than just a
matter of humor perhaps that a
recent computerized bill received
from a leading gasoline credit
company bore strange marks
curiously like written Ogham
down one side. This accidental
Ogham could be phonetically
transcribed to make fairly good
nonsense statements. If it had
been cut into a rock, it might
have been taken as a message
done some centuries ago.
54
impossible to date but also can mean different things. Whether
they are "authentic" or not, they can be interpreted in different
ways by different investigators. Chance markings can be mistrans­lated,
and genuine inscriptions could be unrecognized. One
should take the more simple of multiple interpretations-a tenet
of western natural science.
Ambiguous, or dual, interpretation of data is an inter­esting
facet of human understanding. Such possibility is signi­ficant
in human experience from fields such as information theory
to forms of art. It is a critical concern when dealing with frag­mentary
data. 24
Ogham from the Book of Ballymote
..
lOST TRiBES ANb ATlANTiS
Worth only passing comment is the unprovable collection
of theories which, most arising in the last century, strive
to connect the American Indians with the lost tribes
of Israel or with the former inhabitants of the mysterious
continent of Atlantis. 1 These theories are discounted today,
although they had great currency in earlier years, notably before
the floor of the Atlantic Ocean was substantially sounded and
charted. For a time the Sargasso Sea, the great swirl of North
Atlantic current in which not only sargasso seaweed but also
sailing ships can be becalmed, was thought to be shallow water.
In earlier centuries it was believed to be only a few feet deep
and filled with such masses of seaweed that a person could actually
walk on the surface. This, some people thought, was surely the
site of Atlantis, perhaps at one time virtually a land bridge
between Europe and the Americas which sank in a cataclysm
eons ago. Since the mapping of the Atlantic basin, it is held by
most geologists that the floor of the Atlantic has never been an
elevated continent.
In a similar vein, the prophetjoseph Smith in the first
half of the last century issued the Book of Mormon which traces
some native American cultures back to Mediterranean peoples. 2
So far, such statements depend upon divine revelation and not
on scientifically verifiable fact. This is not to say that such a theory
1 Ignatius DQnnelly, in his Atlan­tis:
The Antediluvian World, says
that then! were (in the 1880's)
over five thousand works con­cerning
Atlantis in twenty
languages. There are probably
twice that today. They include
ideas as specific as the supposed
similarity between Atlantis's pre­sumed
capital city and the Cortes
map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan
(Spence, The Problem of Atlantis) to
the general speculation that the
southeast United States is actual­ly
Atlantis, mostly still high and
dry (Mertz, Atlantis, Dwelling
Place of the Gods). Aside from
noting claims like Donnelly's that
Atlanteans "populated the shores
of the Gulf of Mexico;' there is
no reason to consider such stories
here.
2 Ashe, 9; Silverberg, 88-96.
55
56
may not be objectively true, but it does mean that any such theory
is not yet provable, is not yet verifiable by external evidence, and
is not capable of being scientifically discussed. One simply has
the choice of believing in the theory or statement, or not believing,
as one wishes. In any case, these theories do not concern those
who can be called explorers.
Mermaid of the eighteenth century
Legendary Welsh 'dragon
A ChURChMAN ANb
A pRiNCE
Two travelers who do qualify, if curiously, as real explor­ers
are a churchman and a prince. Their narratives
are quite unproven but are believed by many. The first
is St. Brendan, an Irish man of the church born at Tralee around
A.D. 490. He had a busy life filled with church activities, but
he is also known for one or more voyages into the Atlantic. Most
of the activities of Brendan's life, founding monasteries, for
example, are believed without question as given in ninth, tenth,
and eleventh century records. And in most of these cases, second­ary
evidence is available. However, Brendan's Atlantic voyages
are questioned rather closely.
The most liberal interpretation of the Navigatio Sancti
Brendani, a Latin manuscript work of about A.D. 800-1000, is
that it records one or more voyages which took Brendan through
the North Atlantic from the Arctic to the Caribbean. 1
One might at first question why an early Irish priest
would sail the Atlantic. In fact, many people did so then. Ireland,
in the centuries after the removal of the Roman government from
England, for a time became a land of renowned learning and
dynamic Christianity. Even so, many an Irish churchman felt
the desire for isolation-a need for a place secure from secular
influences where one could meditate in peace, pray, endure hard-
1 See Ashe, 21-47; Chapman and
Severin are the most liberal of the
interpreters of the voyage.
57
2 The western "Great Ireland" or
"white men's island" is mentioned
in the Landnamabok, the Saga of
Erik the Red, and in the Eyrbyggia
Saga as well as in the works of AI­Idrisi,
the Arab geographer. Un­like
some references in these
works, "Great Ireland" appears to
refer to a literal continent some­where
west. Whether it was a
land settled by the Irish, or occa­sioned
by Irish monks, or pure
fiction, is unknown. The thread
of reference runs through many
an extant record. See also Crone,
10f. For the Brendan manuscript
and comments on his life and the
propensities of Irish churchmen,
see Selmer, Navigatio Sancti
Brendani Abbatis.
3 Severin, passim; for the boat con­struction,
27f. For the history of
the somewhat related coracles,
see Hornell.
4 Irish writers were also aware of
the classical Greek and Latin
references to western worlds.
58
ships in partial atonement for sin, and perhaps retire. The rocky
islands off the north coast of Britain served this purpose, as did
Iceland and possibly Greenland. The Norse not only had legends
that the Irish preceded them to the northern isles but also gave
accounts of continually finding Irish priests in the most isolated
and unlikely places. 2
That the voyages west were possible is clear. 3 The Irish
had boats made of ox hides, oak-bark tanned, oiled with wool
grease, and stretched over wooden frames, which were quite sea­worthy
and capable of carrying up to twenty men. How early
they used wooden boats is unknown.
In any case, the Irish did to some degree sail the
Atlantic and did to a great degree inject a mix of geographical
references into European literature from the sixth century on.
These stories, like any heroic tales, tend to congregate around
leading characters, no matter who actually did what. Most of
the stories of voyages gathered around St. Brendan -who was
soon known as "the Navigator'~ and became part of his quest
westward for an Earthly Paradise. In fact, his story is a collection
of the best parts of all that is remembered about early voyages,
Irish and otherwise, 4 stuck together into an occasionally
incoherent narrative.
An alleged incident from Brendan's Vl!)lage .
Specific details are plentiful. Brendan, for at least one
voyage, used a wooden boat capable of carrying sixty people (far
in advance of any other evidence of wooden boats in Ireland).
He sailed beyond the known bounds of a large ocean and
described events, islands, and lands which range from the fantastic
to the probable.
The most interesting details come from a voyage
ascribed to about A.D. 550. Brendan sails to well-known and
easily identified places, such as the Faeroes. He describes sheep
which, according to other records, were in fact introduced there
but not until many generations after Brendan. The compiler of
the story evidently included facts from times well after the life
of Brendan. The Navigatio may be thought of as a compendium
of maritime knowledge, however confused, from someone writing
about the year A.D. 950.
Other places allegedly visited by Brendan include
islands and lands in a tropical setting which sounds like the
Caribbean. He describes exotic fruits, beautiful islands, and clear
seas such as are in the Bahamas or along the western Florida
coast. 5 In passing to these places and on his return, he describes
rather poetically what could be the Sargasso Sea, icebergs, and
the volcanoes of Iceland.
NOVA TYPIS
TRAN SAC TA N..;\_
',, ,.y~J~1 9r • >" .
N~p;:f:~i~.Qxi-
~4DMoDvM R E-VE.
RENn r ssrMoRvM P'P.
JU f'F.R<vn•tnJ~f/imi su )ff'!fir<fffi~~iiJcmitti,
Jm.RVELI..II l:A:rALONI AhPafi.r nt.m&
.S(to/afi,&in V!~ivt't'Jam Attw.,·rmnjtYNMittl
~n s.,n·:r Srdis ku!Mirl1 ~tl4' liL:tn't!­Ltqati.
licll1j. ;~.r: P.:.;;m·th~r:s~,;~'Um~ Me~
~achl)"rurn ~X Orditt(S.P.NBmtJitfiaJfir'li
JicliN,;MunJi larl•m gmt'" Cl.'iflis£.,.,.
gdiutn f"'JiranJi {}"rli4 4rkg'""""" S"ml"-
tum Dimjj}i prfs.DD.Ptp4trJ Af~X4nJt*UI1t­l'I.
Atrnc Cht·j/ii. i +J'l..
' NVNC PR[),iVM
E v~tr~is ~"'ct'ipt_~rib us in Yll Um collc­do~.$
1: h~ttri J ot'tut.l .
Avi'HORE
Nova typis frontispiece
5 Interpreted by some (Crone, 16)
as water in a Norwegian fiord,
however.
59
6 Ashe, 39-40.
7 Pohl, 261, for a summary of this
voyage.
8 Other early English explorations
or claims of early explorations
include the ships of Thomas
Croft to North America in 1481
(Quinn, 278) and the better­known
John Cabot in 1497 and
1498 (Hartwig, 335). These,
however early and interesting,
have nothing to do with the Gulf
of Mexico and Caribbean area
exploration. See also Eden's The
first Three English books on America.
9 Deacon, passim.
10 Powel, 226 (see Powel, 193f).
60
Brendan even finds the Earthly Paradise but says little
about it. Further, he does land somewhere and take a forty-day
expedition into the heart of the country. The finding of an Earthly
Paradise was not taken lightly for centuries. Columbus, many
years later, held in part the same desire, naming a South American
river the Gihon (from Genesis II, 13) and saying he thought that
South America might include the Paradise. Both Brendan and
Columbus, among many others, not only knew that the earth
was round but also surmised that the route west might lead to
other things than spices. The way west might lead to China, but
it might also lead to the fading medieval dream of a paradise
on earth. 6
In the case of Brendan, there is no secondary evidence
from the Americas that he went anywhere. The only possible
interest is that his stories exist at least in legend, and they parallel
others such as the Greek story about the land of the satyrs. Taken
together, it appears either that somebody had been sailing around
the New World rather early or that several writers had vivid and
parallel imaginations.
Other stories do exist but with perhaps even less evi­dence.
Norse sagas tell the story of the Irishman Ari Marson
who was driven by storms across the Atlantic in A.D. 983 to a
land where he was baptized by Christians who had preceded him.
But no other evidence exists for his journey, although one can
speculate whether the Norsemen might have had any ulterior
motives for writing the story. 7 Most' of the tales, wherever they
come from, point to a route west, into the Caribbean and Gulf
of Mexico, as a logical end of a European voyage.
A prince is said to have made that voyage five hundred
years after Brendan- on about the same amount of evidence.
The man was a Welshman, Madoc (Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd,
and in A.D. 1170 he may have found what was to become North
America. For years, a mild controversy has been maintained as
to whether Madoc sailed to America and perhaps the Gulf of
Mexico in the twelfth century. 8 There is some evidence that he
may have done so, or at least tried. 9 There is no evidence that
allows proof.
Madoc was apparently a real Welshman but perhaps
never a prince, although called so in later days. Madoc was a
son of Owain Gwynedd (Owen Gwyneth), a Prince of North
Wales, in an indeterminate line of succession. His father had
numerous children, including many sons, whom even historians
despair of unraveling but simply note that he "left behind him
manie children gotten by diverse women .... "10 These children
(more than twenty) naturally quarreled over the succession, and
Madoc thought it best to leave the land "in contention betwixt
his brethren" and go elsewhere by "sailing West:'
Whatever the original story, like St. Brendan's, it
became considerably embroidered as the centuries went by. Per­haps
unfortunately for Madoc and his reputation, the story was
seized upon by both over-zealous Welsh chauvinists and Welsh
detractors. Madoc became a legendary figure around whom
revolved a collection of stories related to voyages west, most
sounding a little too much like the imaginings of a poet.
Robert Southey- taking his background information
from the bard Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams, 1740-1826),
who apparently made up most of his Madoc material, and Dr.
Owen-Pughe, who did stick to probable fact amidst a host of
inaccurate, romantic references- took Madoc not only to the
Americas but also into an Aztec sacrifice. Madoc happily escaped,
but his reputation has been damaged ever since.n
That there are some records attesting to a voyage of
some sort is well known. Madoc, after a family dispute, made
a voyage of exploration to an unknown land and found it to his
liking. He returned and collected a colony of Welsh, "such men
and women as were desirous to live in quietness;' and took them
to the west across the seaY Just where Madoc established this
colony is what remains in dispute. That he did in fact leave Wales
is not usually questioned.
In 1584 David Powel compiled and wrote his Historie of
Cambria, which collected much Welsh history, including the
Madoc stories. Powel, dealing with old manuscripts and verbal
stories, noted that the "common people" were wont to augment
rather than to diminish tall tales. This had happened to Madoc,
but Powel's opinion of Madoc's presence in the west was that "sure
it is, that there he was:'13 Powel found few details of the voyage,
but he notes that Madoc journeyed far south of Ireland and- in
two voyages- settled a land that was later part of New Spain or
Florida. Powel's opinion was that the Welshman went to "some
part of Mexico:'14
There are later writers who believe Madoc's voyage,
but they have found no other evidence than had Powel. Their
belief is not additional evidence. Richard Hakluyt, in his Principal!
Navigations, expressed his theory that Madoc had sailed at least
to the West Indies or some other part of New Spain. 15 He does
note that there may have been elements of Christianity in Indian
beliefs before the Spanish arrived. 16
Many of those who later remarked on Madoc's story
also thought that the Gulf of Mexico was perhaps the end of the
voyage or voyages. Part of the claim of Sir George Peckham, in
11 Southey, Madoc, or Fitzgerald, ed.
In Fitzgerald's edition, the work
runs a turgid one hundred forty­eight
pages.
12 Powel, 222f.
._,
13 Powel, 228.
14 Powel, 229.
15 Hakluyt picked up his entry
almost entirely from Powel, but
changed the "Mexico" reference,
for some reason, to "West Indies."
16 Hakluyt, in the "Third and Last
Volume" of the Principall Naviga­tions,
133-35 in the convenient
Glasgow edition of 1904.
61
62
his efforts to prove that England had an inherent right to much
of the Americas, was that Madoc had sailed to the lands later
called New Spain. Sir George may have had motives somewhat
different from other historians.
Nevertheless, in this century the Daughters of the
American Revolution placed a marker at Mobile Bay, Alabama,
as the place of Madoc's landing. The marker depends not so much
on older references to the voyage, perhaps, as on the fact that
there may have been Welsh-speaking Indians north of there at
one time. This unlikely occurrence has a long background and
involves an Englishman who may have walked across Texas more
than four hundred years ago.
David Ingram was an English sailor who, along with
one hundred fourteen others, was set ashore north of Tampico
in 1568. Ingram had been with a fleet headed by Captain j ohn
Hawkins, who was trading but also teaching Francis Drake about
~
/ /
/
Sir John Hawkins
the profits of pirating against the Spanish. Drake, later Sir Francis,
learned well, but that is a different story.
Their small fleet of six English ships had stopped in
Africa for slaves to help increase the profits of the trip, and all
had gone well at first. The cargo had been illegally sold to the
Spanish in the New World at a handsome profit, and the English
had turned their attention to what Spanish ships they might
plunder. Theirs was a curious business.
Caught by a sudden storm, the English fleet had little
choice but to seek refuge in the Spanish port ofVeracruzY Their
bad luck was just starting, for an unexpected Spanish fleet trapped
them there. Four of the English ships were sunk, and two man-
The defeat of the British under Sir john Hawkins at San Juan de Ulloa
aged to escape. Francis Drake sailed thejudith out of the harbor
and back to England as fast as he could. Hawkins's ship, the
Minion, had taken on board most of the survivors from the other
ships and, although it managed to escape the harbor, was so
crowded that the men realized a run for England was impossible.
"They very well sawe, that ... if they perished not by drowning,
yet hunger would force them in the ende to eate one another:'18
That the English would not consider. More than a
hundred men elected to take their chances ashore. Many walked
back south to be captured by the Spanish; the rest went north.
Only three of the latter survived, David Ingram, Richard Browne,
and Richard Twide. They walked across Texas and on to the
Atlantic and were eventually picked up by a French ship and
returned to England.
David Ingram published his account, one of the first
descriptions of the New World for English readers, some years
17 If all this sounds unlikely, it was.
The English traded with the
Spanish (illegally, of course) as
well as making their ships the
subject of plunder. However, any
port in a storm, as the old saying
goes, was occasionally true. Actu­ally,
the English were not entirely
seeking refuge. Hawkins notes
that they had three hostage ships
and passengers which they
planned to exchange for food and
time to make repairs. It was
nevertheless a brave and some­what
reckless move. Trouble
developed after the arrival of the
Spanish fleet, and a fight started
later.
18 Miles Philips in Hakluyt's Prin­cipal!
Navigations.
63
19 Hakluyt, Principal! Navigations,
560.
20 Deacon, 66.
21 Deacon gives a collection of the
stories, as well as a fine outline
of the controversy. See also the
collected documents by Burden
which do support the existence of
spoken Welsh among American
Indians in the eighteenth cen­tu
ry.
22 Deacon, 207£.
64
later in Hakluyt's collection of voyages. Of note were his remarks
concerning the use of Welsh by native American Indians. One
bird, similar to a goose, had received a name curiously like
"penguin;' which to Ingram "seemeth to be a Welsh name:' '~nd
they have;' Ingram continued, "also in use divers other Welsh
words, a matter worthy the noting:'19
Indeed, such a thing was worth noting, and people did
so for the next three hundred years. Sir Walter Raleigh made
the same such observation, 20 followed by many others. One of
the clearest reports in later years was that of Governor John Sevier
of Tennessee about an Indian chief who recalled stories of the
Welsh arrival in America (and a landing near Mobile Bay) and
of traders who spoke Welsh with various groups of American
Indians. The stories were common through the end of the nine­teenth
century. 21
. A great amount of information was eventually gath­ered
to support the fact that some Indians of North America,
perhaps the Mandans, were of Welsh descent and spoke a form
of Welsh. 22 A number of people attested that this was so, but
no recordings were made, no transcripts were gathered by trained
linguists in the field, and the language- if it ever was u sed in
America among Indians- does not exist today.
The evidence for Ingram's walk, and Hawkins's voyage
itself, is rarely questioned now, even though the main documen­tary
difference between it and Madoc's presumed voyage is a small
collection of secondary documents: a corroborating comment by
Spanish and English government records. It was so questionable
for a time-at least Ingram's part of it-that the narrative was
removed from a later edition of Hakluyt.
Whether New Spain or Mexico or somewhere else in
North America was the end of Madoc's voyage-or whether it
actually happened-will probably never be known. There is
simply not enough evidence to constitute proof.
The only fact that exists is the legend itself. Madoc's
questionable return from somewhere, after an initial voyage o
exploration, with stories of a land across the sea, did become
legend in Europe. By all accounts, at least, he never returne
from his second voyage. Whether his adventures became legen
in the Americas as well is not clear. There were early stori
among some North American Indians about a group ofpeopl
coming from the east over the sea, but the stories have apparencl
died out. The Aztecs had the legend of Quetzalcoatl, a whit
man who came from the east. It was because of this legend (an
a great number oflndian allies) that Cortes found the conqu
of Mexico at first relatively easy. Zealous supporters of Mad
see the adventurous Welshman in the stories of this Quetzalcoatl;
detractors see only coincidence in the stories of a white man
arriving from the east into the Gulf of Mexico .
Which proves that legends are hard to prove.
------------=~~~~------------
The Relation of Dauid Ingram of Barking, in the Countie of
Ejfix Sayltr ,offundry things 111hich bt IPitb othtrs (JjJ /tt ,in traueiling bJ
land from the mofi Non:hcrly panes ofthc Baic: ofMcxico (where he with
many othen were fet on lhom: by Maller Hawkins )through a great
part of America, vntill he came within lifiie leagues or
there abouu of Cape Britton.
·;:or· ~ 'Bout t!JC bt[!inning' ofOctobrr, Anno 1 5~S . Dauid Ingram \nit~ d)e rtft Ill
~~, ~ '" bta cumpanp brrn[!Ioo,pcrfonsmall,lllrrc ret on lanD bp Sfj,lohn Hawkins, •q.fi, .~ about Ore Lc,1rrura to tbc ruca oftuc nucr LJ m1lla, O) Rio de Minas, hlblq
Uannct(J about I4o.lta[!U£S mea IJ bp J'lo)tb from tbc cape ofl'lorida,llltlott•
urhng tolllaros cape Dntton,fpmt about lt.moncti)s in tbe lll(Jolc,lnDabout
rcum monctus tbcrcof m t(Jofc ~ourums,lnbtc(J he toll arosrbc Bo!tb oftbe
tiucr nfMay,tn llllnciJ cunr(as tbc fatD Ingram tbmkcti))bttraucilco bp lanDtl!lUi)oufanl mi~
at tlJt lean, ann ncucrconunuco tn anp one plact abouttb)te D} rourc Dapti, fauing Ollclp ac *
~I tie of B•lma,\lliJCrc be aapco fi~e D) feuea naper.
IAIIIi•· ~bert are in c!Jofc pamscrapcb uc)brr~ manp 11\in!!s,commonlp lllitlJin a IJmlb}t!b o, a llaJt..
b)ttb anb tl!lrntp miles onefrom an ot!)4'r;w(Jo are atcontinual wams togctbrr: ~~drll Still
tbat tl)cp catnr bcfo)r,nl!ltlt en a ~ountrrp calltn Giricka, lnbocauren t(Jrm to br nnppcD naktD,
anb lllono,ing gMttlp ac tbr lllbittncs oftbeir fkins,lct t:JCtn Depart lllltbout 1 ... tbfr IJamlr,
~be Bmgs tn t(Jofc ~ountrirs m clotbtb \llitb paintcb O) rollouttb garments, anD tbtrRp
~:~1f.1>1rdmlt pou map knolll tbrm,anb tiJtP l!lfatr grratp)tciottt ltonrs, hlbicl.l commonlp are Rubies, bciq
· + tncbrslong, ann t'mo incbrs b)oao, !lnb if cl!e Came bee taken from tbtm, eitbtt bp fOJ" 'I
firtglJt,tbcp arc p)rfmtlpDCiJ1iUrb oftbttr kingoomrs •
.:brlun;•m WlJcn tbcp mcanc to fpcake lnitb anp perf on publtlttlp,tbrp arc al\llltitscmfrb bp mm ill
11Jm m•Jrt11t. fumptUOUS cbairt of !etlurr 0) ~b!iUat gacnilbtb blitb biuttJ fo)trll Dfp)rciOUI aontG, <(lit.,...,.., gnn tfpou will fpc~kr blitb c(Jr king at pour llt1f app}Dd)ing nmcto ~tm, pou mat! kntdl
:mngrprn nobmc on bot{) poar knees, nnb tbrn arifr againr anb come fomr\D~t nrrrcr bim, l!litllta pour
"
1111
• lrngtb,tbt knrrlr Dotllnr againe as pou DiD bcfo)r.~bcn cake oftbe urtb O)~alfr bcrlllfcn bot11
pour g.mDs,ktffing tbr back fine of mb ofd)rm,anb put tbe rartb O) gralft on rbr crobnle or pout
brao.ano ro come ,\f kirrr tbr kings fcctr.Wbicb citcumaances bring \Xtfourmrb,pou map Cbm
anfr anD nann bp,ano talkc \IJttlJ btm.
~=~.~':. ~: ~be .0oblc men anb furb as be m fprcial fauour lllitb tbcWng. Do commontu weare ftat!)Ctll
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----------~=~~~~------------
The initial page of Ingram's account showing the ambiguity of the place of landing.
"Florida" included Texas at the time. The distance in leagues northwest is (perhaps)
incorrect, the distance traveled east is (perhaps) correct, to place the landing in the
western Gulf of Mexico.
:>
65
66
ThE \7i]{iNGS iN WARM WATER
The Vikings were a people to generate legends. Accounts
and artifacts support the fact of their travels from the
Mediterranean to Central Russia and from Greenland
to Africa. 1 Further west than Greenland, the stories are thin. The
Norsemen are, however, strong contenders as the European dis­coverers
of America- or at least one-time discoverers whose
discovery was not too successful. Their western claim rests on
a number of sagas, stories written centuries after the actions they
describe; one or two archaeological sites; a few questionable New
World artifacts; church records; and a collection of runes on rocks.
There are no original maps. Early Vikings apparently did not
have time for maps. 2
Few people today doubt the truth of Viking voyages
in the north Atlantic, including that of Bjarni Herjulfson who
apparently saw North America in A.D. 986 after he was blown
there while trying to reach Greenland. 3 He did not land. Bjarni
was on his way, with great resolution, to join his father for yuletide
ale and could not be persuaded to go ashore, even though his
crew gave him "hard words" about his refusal to land.
Greenland had been settled by Norse and native Ice­landers
around A.D. 950. Erik the Red was foremost of these
settlers, and it was his son Leif who, apparently curious, reversed
Bjarni's route and sailed to Vinland about 1000.4
1 Jones, for the best general
history. .,
2 For a close translation of the early
sagas, see Anderson's The Flatey
Book. On later charts, see Kohl.
See Pohl, 238f, for the question­able
North American artifacts
and 299 for a Norse chronology.
Wallace, 155f, gives evidence that
the North American artifacts are
not authentic.
3 Or A.D. 987 or 985. See Taylor,
253; Mowat, 873.
4 Bruun, Mowat, passim; Pohl,
276f.
67
5 The sagas are available today in
many translations such as the
admirable Penguin series, but see
The Flatey Book for facsimiles of
the Flatey manuscript, the
Hauksbook, the Saga of Erik the
Red, and the Vatican manu­scripts;
Mallery, 60f.; Jones, 255;
and Mowat, passim.
6 Bolton, Terra Nova, 46; Ingstad,
88; Schmidt, 276, 283.
7 Bolton, Terra Nova, 33, gives a
good summary; see also Pohl,
308, for a list of Vinland locali­ties,
according to about fifty
authorities, ranging from Green­land
itself to Florida.
8 Pistilli, Holland, Pohl, Bruun,
Fischer, and Jones.
68
After Leif came Thorwald, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and his
wife Gudrid as part of a colonial effort. The Karlsefni's son Snorri
was born near or in Vinland about 1007. These settlers were fol­lowed
by other Norse whose ultimately unsuccessful colonies
beyond Greenland came to an end as late as 1360 and probably .
much before. 5
Greenland and Vinland even had their own series of
bishops. Quite a few were duly appointed by Roman officials
over some two hundred years, the first being Erik U ppsi
(Gnupsson) in 1112. 6 Even before such church records began,
before the sagas were written down, Adam of Bremen mentioned
Vinland in 1073, the earliest dated reference that has survived.
But where was Vinland and the other places the sagas mention
west of Greenland? How far did the western voyager go?
This is not exactly known. Most scholars think Yin­land
was someplace on the northeast American coast. 7 Speculation
on othe'r possible sites strays into sheer guesswork. Dr. Helge
Ingstad has discovered remains of Norse settlement at L'Anse
aux Meadows, Newfoundland, which most professional archae­ologists
term clear, reliable evidence. The controversy of Min­nesota's
Kensington runestone is perhaps not settled, but a mere
handful of people think it genuine. Then, there are only a few
investigators-and perhaps no professional archaeologists- who
believe various islands in the Caribbean, the coast of Mexico,
and sites in Paraguay were visited and settled by Viking groups.8
Imaginary concept of the discovery of Greenland by the Norse
Viking boats could sail any part of the north Atlantic.
They were sixty to a hundred feet long, up to twenty feet in beam,
could be beached easily, and were also excellent river craft. They
sailed best before the wind, could be rowed fairly well by a crew
of from six to thirty men, but were at the mercy of adverse
storms. 9 They were capable of coasting North America and trav­eling
on many an inland river.
But capability says nothing about an actual visit. If the
Vikings ever sailed the warm waters of the Gulf, their journey
is now preserved only in legend. Juan de Torquemada does record
an Indian story of such a landing-very close to Panuco. He says
that Mexican Indians met people from northern regions-white,
fair-haired, bearded, finely built -who arrived wearing clothes
of dark sacking, open in front, without cowls, cut out round at
the neck, with short, wide sleeves. The dress fits that of northern
Europe, or the Norse Greenland settlements, after A.D. 1000.10
These newcomers, traveling south and inland, were
welcomed as they passed through the area of Tollan and settled
for a time near present Cholula. This, of course, is an origin­one
of several origins- of the Quetzalcoatl story. Those who came,
in ships that looked like serpents and whose sides were girt with
an ornament of coiled snakes, later departed saying that others
would come again.
At least it is a story that the Spaniards had no motive
for inventing. Concerned with colonial claims, the Spanish were
usually reluctant to admit precedence.
If Vikings saw present Texas, it was on this trip down
the coast from the decks of their ships. The clearest evidence of
a very different nature attesting to a Viking visit in the Texas
area comes from a site in southeastern Oklahoma, in the drainage
of the Red River. A state park on Poteau Mountain near Heav­ener
houses the much-studied, eight-character runic inscription
called everything from a fake to the coded evidence of a Norse
visit on St. Martin's Day, November 11, 1012_11
ri\DfR<XPH~I~
t:jl{ttMMtaM~
Runes from a Norse futhark
Certainly the date is logical. A monk, traveling with the
group, would have been capable of writing an encoded message­and
his presence, as a Christian, was an accepted thing among
Vikings of that year. This is exactly the opinion of some contem­porary
scholars who claim that the stone, and several others found
9 Tornoe gives a mariner's estimate
of the ships, saying that a square­rigged
vessel could sail two hun­dred
miles a day and operate at
fair angles into the wind.
10 One source for the rewritten
story is Herrmann, 165f.
.,
11 Landsverk, Farley, passim. See
also Pohl, Atlantic, 45f. Wyckoff,
state archaeologist for Oklahoma
in 1971, gives facts on both sides
and states his conclusion that
Viking presence in Oklahoma is
"premature and unjustified" as a
finding.
69
12 Long, passim, quotes an
Oklahoma City man, Lester
Shipley, who said he carved most
of the stones about 1937. He did
not do the Heavener stone
(although he said he saw some­one
working on it), which was
observed much earlier. See
Farley, passim.
13 Then there is the ephemeral story
of the "Viking Boot" discovered
in Montague County-a semi­fossilized
boot with a leg and heel
bone protuding from within.
(McGee, Runestones, 65-66 .)
Whether it is Norse, or even a
boot, has not been determined.
14 See Krause, 71, 74