"An Idle and Most False Imposition"; The Shakespeare Authorship Question - Part Two: The Baconian Heresy

In 1932, The Times Literary Supplement published evidence that questions about Shakespeare’s authorship had arisen decades earlier than the mid-19th century, when they had previously been thought to have appeared. The paper published was from a small 1805 meeting of the Ipswich Philosophical Society, at which one James Corton Cowell presented the 18th-century findings of a clergyman named James Wilmot, who lived near Stratford-upon-Avon and had conducted some research into Shakespeare. According to this document, the Reverend Wilmot around 1795 had gone in search of books that belonged to Shakespeare and had been surprised to not find any in the private libraries of the area. He had been further unsettled not to find anyone able to offer any clear anecdotes about the playwright. Perhaps this Wilmot should not have thought it so odd, since he was asking for anecdotes nearly 180 years after the man’s death, and more than 130 years after the last of his surviving family had passed away, but regardless, the reverend apparently found this suspicious enough that he decided the Shakespeare of Stratford must not have really been the author of the works attributed to him, and instead, he leapt to the conclusion that it must instead of have been Sir Francis Bacon, who was a true genius and luminary of the same years, and who would certainly have had the knowledge of Court life that it seemed Shakespeare must have had. But Reverend Wilmot was disturbed by his theory, and he burned all of his research, or at least, that is the story that Cowell tells in his paper to the Ipswich Society, claiming that he only knew about Wilmot’s conclusions because the reverend had confided in him. At the time that this document appeared, in the 1930s, this was no revolutionary idea, having been popularized in the middle of the previous century. It certainly was curious, though, that this document came from the collection of a devout Baconian, someone thoroughly convinced that Bacon was the real Shakespeare. Naturally, considering the long history of forgeries related to Shakespeare, this too would need to be authenticated. A biography of Wilmot seemed to confirm that he was who the document said he was, that he did admire Bacon and that he had actually consigned his papers to be burned. However, this biography was written by, it turns out, a forger who would later make false claims of having been born into royalty. Her claims about his burning his papers don’t appear to have been true, and moreover, there was no indication even in this unreliable source that Wilmot had ever conducted research into Shakespeare, nor that he had ever had a meeting with James Cowell. Indeed, no strong evidence for the existence of this James Cowell had even turned up. Curious, the author of my principal source, Contested Will, scholar James Shapiro, examined the document printed in 1932 in The Times Literary Supplement, and based on its use of anachronistic language, its knowledge of details that had not been discovered at the time, and other errors, determined that it was likely a hoax. Indeed, there is a long history to the claims that Sir Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s works, but not so long a history as this forgery would claim. Just as those who were desperate for some historical evidence to corroborate their conceptions of Shakespeare had resorted to many a forgery over the years, so too have those who are desperate to lend credibility to claims that Bacon authored Shakespeare, because without some earlier proponent of the theory, it is often pointed out that the first person to come up with it had been a mad spinster, also named Bacon.

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When we hear the term Renaissance, which is a French word simply meaning “rebirth,” we of course think of a time of new ideas in philosophy and new achievements in art, and we typically think of Italy. Indeed, it is often argued that the Renaissance began in Florence, with the writings of Dante and Petrarch and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael—all the ninja turtles. But of course, the Renaissance was not a strictly Italian rebirth of culture, and elsewhere these developments were seen as well. In England, William Shakespeare is of course counted among the luminaries of Renaissance artistry, as are some of his fellow dramatists, like Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and other major English poets, like John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and John Donne. On the list the philosophers who contributed to this rebirth in thought in England, you may see many recognizable names, like William Tyndale and Thomas More, but always atop this list you’ll find Sir Francis Bacon. A true polymath, Bacon was a prolific writer on many subjects, from legal treatises, to politics, to history, to the philosophy of education and knowledge, and to natural philosophy or science, in which field he is credited as a forefather of the scientific method. He wrote every kind of thing, from tracts and pamphlets to political reports and parliamentary speeches…everything but poems and plays, funny enough. He served as a counselor to Queen Elizabeth, and later in legal positions under King James, proved himself a formidable statesman as Lord High Chancellor of England. With some questionable charges of corruption in 1621, he lost his positions and was even confined for a time in the Tower of London, after which he retired and passed away a few years afterward. But just as Shakespeare’s star would brighten years after his death, so too would Bacon’s. During the Enlightenment, the French philosophes esteemed him as a social reformer and opponent of dogmatism, and in the 19th century, he continued to be admired. Ralph Waldo Emerson heaped praise on him in much the same way he did Shakespeare, calling him “an Archangel to whom the high office was committed of opening the doors and palaces of knowledge to many generations.” And two mysterious undertakings in Bacon’s career would end up, during Emerson’s time, encouraging his identification with the works of Shakespeare: the first being that he had never finished his work, Instauratio Magna, the “great restoration,” the final, lost part of which promised to be his “New Philosophy,” and the second being that he had once developed a cipher, acting as both a substitution and a concealment code, that allowed messages to be hidden within texts. As you might already imagine, this would lead to claims that his lost philosophy was hidden within Shakespeare’s works.

A portrait of Sir Francis Bacon at the height of his career.

With the claims about Reverend Wilmot proving doubtful, it appears that the first person to not only claim Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him but also to actually name Francis Bacon as their true author was Delia Salter Bacon, a remarkable Puritan woman—with no relation to Francis Bacon—who had been born in a rustic log cabin in Ohio. After their Puritan community failed and her father, who had organized it, passed away, her brother was sent off to Yale, but she, who was far more intellectually gifted and eloquent than he, had to remain in their Connecticut home and support the family as a schoolteacher. Yet she would not be held back. She began to win short story writing contests, even beating out Edgar Allan Poe for one prize, and soon she was a popular lecturer on history in New Haven. She moved to New York City in 1836 and began to acquaint herself with the intelligentsia there, such as Samuel Morse, who was then engaged in developing Morse code and, as Sir Francis Bacon was a figure of interest to her, spoke with her about Sir Francis Bacon’s cipher. She became involved with the New York theater scene, befriending a famous Shakespearian actress, for whom she wrote a play with decidedly Shakespearian themes. After the failure of this play, she withdrew from society, beginning to develop a theory about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays that would preoccupy her for the rest of her life. During the years that she was developing this theory, she also became involved with a man, whom she seemed to believe had intentions of marrying her, but when her family confronted him about his intentions, he claimed he had none and began reading their love letters to people he knew, mocking her for her unrequited expressions of affection. Since the man was a theology student intending to become a clergyman, Delia Bacon’s brother actually took him to ecclesiastical court over it, claiming “calumny” and “disgraceful conduct.” The result was that Delia had to testify, their love letters were made public, and the rumormongering became far worse than it ever might have otherwise been. Delia began to lose her faith over the whole affair, and she would never again be connected romantically to another man.

So Delia Bacon withdrew into her studies, becoming more and more convinced of her discovery that Sir Francis Bacon had been behind the works of Shakespeare. She took the famous writer Nathaniel Hawthorne into her confidence, since he too had a family background in Puritanism, and Hawthorne thought her theory had such merit that he introduced her to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The great essayist Emerson too was quite impressed with Delia’s writings, though he expressed his doubts about her theory quite eloquently: “you will have need of enchanted instruments, nay alchemy itself, to melt into one identity these two reputations.” Nevertheless, she was convincing, for she insisted that she had found secret evidence in Shakespeare’s very works, hidden by the Baconian cipher. So convincing was she that Emerson introduced her to Thomas Carlyle, the famed historian and essayist from Scotland, and arranged for Delia to visit England to further research her theory. Of course, fleeing to England to escape the humiliation of her recent scandal greatly appealed to Delia, so she went overseas, where Carlyle actually laughed in her face about her theory, encouraging her to make use of the British Library, where the extensive materials in their collection should disabuse her of her misguided notions. But Delia Bacon was confident that there was nothing in the library to help her. Instead, she spent her time in St. Albans and Stratford, not completing archival research but rather lurking around the tombs of Sir Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare, asking about having their crypts opened because she suspected that some secret proofs of her theory, such as the lost manuscripts, had been buried with them. According to her theory, Sir Francis Bacon, along with a coterie of co-conspirators, had chafed under royal authority, and believing that his New Philosophy, which was essentially a call to throw off the yoke of monarchy for freedom and knowledge, must be directed to the people, he conspired with these others to circumvent censors and embed this philosophy within a series of plays to be put on for the public. The plays themselves proved it, she claimed. Their message about the evils of kings was Bacon’s. Her evidence was much what we have heard already, that there is no record indicating the Stratford man capable of composing the works. She relied on invective, calling Shakespeare a “stupid, illiterate, third-rate play-actor,” while Bacon was exactly the sort of person one would expect to have written them—both completely unsupported claims since there is no evidence of Shakespeare’s illiteracy and in fact ample evidence that he was quite literate, and likewise no evidence that Sir Francis Bacon was capable of composing the sorts of poetry and plays she was attributing to him.

A photograph of Delia Bacon.

Indeed, there are many other problems with the Baconian heresy, as it came to be called, other than these obvious ones. First, Delia Bacon’s entire argument rested on the content of Shakespeare’s plays being secretly subversive political narratives, and as examples she interpreted Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Coriolanus in such a way as to support this view. It is a remarkable work of what would later be called New Historicist literary criticism, but it is too flimsy to support the conspiracy theory she imagines. She ignores dozens of other plays and all of Shakespeare’s poetry, presumably because it would be a Herculean task to try to interpret all of the works according to this perspective. Moreover, even if her close readings of these plays are accurate, that the politically subversive subtext was intended by their author, that does not prove that Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon himself, could not have intended it. Any philosophical notions about freedom or equality or the tyranny of monarchs that Delia imagines must have come from Sir Francis Bacon were also ideas with which the playwright Shakespeare himself could have wrestled. Her presumption that a “play-actor” from a modest background would not be capable of profound thought and could not possibly comprehend royal court life betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of not just Elizabethan culture but also of human nature in her assumption that only people of high breeding could accomplish anything great, a notion that even her own career disproved. Disappointingly, though, the linchpin of her theory, the smoking gun that she always promised her patrons would clinch the argument, that somehow hidden evidence of the conspiracy could be uncovered using Bacon’s cipher as the key, did not appear in her writings when she published. But to be fair, some of her work was lost. She had the first of four essays published in Putnam’s Magazine, but after a Shakespeare scholar called on by the magazine to introduce the essays refused and suggested they not publish any further works of Delia’s—another genuine example of scholars actually working to silence the authorship controversy, which would only fuel the fires of controversy in the future—Putnam’s did back out of their deal, and when they sent the unpublished essays back to her, they were lost. Having no other copies, Delia Bacon was devastated, but she went to work on writing a full-length book on the topic, writing in poverty and anxious to the point of mental disturbance that someone would steal her theory. Indeed, after her initial essay appeared, a man in England printed a pamphlet making essentially the same claim, minus the co-conspirators, and the same year that Delia finally came out with her book, a long and maundering manifesto that again produced no smoking-gun cipher as evidence, this same Englishman came out with his own book. In the end, Delia Bacon’s work was a flop, as she’d feared. She was thereafter institutionalized, having been driven insane by the entire ordeal, and this, in the end, would so invalidate her theory, since it had been dreamed up by a mad woman, that future Baconians have been willing to forge precursor texts just, it seems, to dissociate the theory from its origin.

Despite the initial failure of Delia Bacon’s work, it proved to be something of a cult favorite, surviving not only in her own work but in the references of others, and among the converts to this Baconian cult were, surprisingly, some astonishing luminaries of American letters who would try to validate the Baconian heresy as a legitimate historical view. Already Delia Bacon had major literary figures like Hawthorne and Emerson writing about her in glowing terms, admiring her intellect and insight. After her passing, Hawthorne portrayed her as a tragic figure in “Recollections of a Gifted Woman,” and Emerson called her “America's greatest literary producer of the past ten years.” Even if they did not subscribe to her theory, they certainly were not dismissive of her accomplishments. Soon, though, another major figure in American literature would become impressed by her, and this masterful writer, Mark Twain, would not only subscribe to her theory but also help to promulgate it. Twain had read Delia Bacon’s work, and throughout his career, he found himself drawn to it. Over the course of his own development as an author, he came to believe that all great fiction was by necessity autobiographical, as was his own—Tom Sawyer, for example, drawn from his own childhood experiences in Mississippi. Therefore he was amenable to the notion that Shakespeare must have written his plays from personal experience, and that, since he had no personal experience of court life, the man from Stratford could not have written them. Twain also knew a thing or two about writing personas, as the riverboat pilot Samuel Clemens had not only written under a pseudonym but also cultivated a character to go with the name. So he imagined that he knew something of what Francis Bacon had done in creating the playwright persona of Shakespeare. And there was no shortage of works to encourage Twain in his thinking during these years, as countless anonymous pamphlets and articles in major magazines appeared during the decades after Delia Bacon’s work, picking up where she had left off, crafting clever arguments in an effort to prove her thesis, or some version of it, as well as to challenge it. In 1886, The Francis Bacon Society began to publish their journal, Baconiana, in whose pages the Baconian heresy would be heartily endorsed and fleshed out. Then in 1888, Twain himself published the first major book-length work on the topic since those of Delia Bacon and her plagiarist. This work, The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays, was written by Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota Congressman who had found fame writing about Atlantis and ancient catastrophes. Today Donnelly is known as a major figure in the history of pseudohistory and pseudoscience. I mentioned him as a precursor to Immanuel Velikovsky in my series on chronological revisionists because of his fringe catastrophist views of ancient history, and certainly I will be discussing him again whenever I get around to tackling the massive myth of Atlantis. It is unsurprising, since Donnelly was obsessed with the idea of hidden truths and historical cover-ups, that he would be drawn to this topic and predictable that he would focus almost entirely on the idea of the works of Shakespeare being secretly encoded. His work would go on to inspire a generation of Baconian cipher seekers who believed they could decrypt secret messages in Shakespeare.

A photograph of Ignatius Donnelly.

Donnelly was no cryptologist, and he went about his work rather backward, imagining what Bacon’s secret message might be and then searching for it in acrostics. The notion that a work might be misattributed and that the true author’s signature might be discerned in an acrostic, taking the first letters of certain words, was not actually a fringe idea. Indeed, within a decade of the appearance of Donnelly’s book, a work long attributed to Chaucer would be discovered to have been authored by one Thomas Usk because of just such an acrostic signature hidden within it. But Donnelly was forced to choose rather arbitrary key words, separated each time by a rather arbitrary number of characters, for his acrostics to work, and he often miscounted purposely in order to make the text fit his preconceived secret message. Donnelly also imagined how Bacon would have had to lay out his pages in such a fashion as to make sure that each keyword was in the right position, but in doing so he betrayed a clear ignorance of how Elizabethan printing worked. These problems would continue to plague all the theories of later cipher seekers, as would Donnelly’s eventual obsession with finding the original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s works. Authorship theorists regularly point to the absence of manuscripts as some indication that the man from Stratford had not written the works attributed to him, despite the fact that manuscripts of plays written for the stage were often not preserved, since plays could be viewed as a performance art rather than a literary art. Remember that Shakespeare’s collected plays would not be published in the First Folio until years after his death. But to cipher seekers, the absence of manuscripts was somehow proof that they contained evidence of the code written into them, and they imagined that Sir Francis Bacon had hidden them away like buried treasure. This is the origin of the absurd notion that Shakespearian manuscripts are buried on Oak Island. Donnelly believed the manuscripts to be buried on Bacon’s estate but could never convince Bacon’s descendants to let him dig up the grounds.

A photograph of Orville Owen.

After Donnelly came Orville Owen, a Detroit doctor, who claimed that he had found some sort of encrypted manual for decoding Bacon’s code, which he had decoded. So he decoded the key to the code he needed to decode, which, as one skeptic pointed out, seemed “like picking the lock of a safe, only to find inside the key to the lock you have already picked.” Owen claimed that the decoded message instructed him to build a device with wheels on which he would lay out Shakespeare’s plays and spin the text past his eyes in such a way that keywords would jump out. As with Donnelly’s arbitrary selection of keywords, though, Owen baked into his conception of the code much laxity, in that when he found a keyword, it would be possible to find the actual encoded terms or phrases several lines away, giving him great swathes of text in which to find whatever he wanted to find. His assistant in this work, Elizabeth Gallup, would eventually become a rival, believing that Bacon had also woven in a biliteral code through his use of two distinct fonts. Owen’s and especially Gallup’s theories both suffered from the same problem as Donnelly’s in that they depended on the notion that the plays’ author had been closely involved with the actual printing work performed by compositors, but Gallup’s theory specifically would later be entirely disproven when it was pointed out that Elizabethan compositors typically worked with trays full of lots of different typefaces, explaining the variation in font that she suspected was a code. The codes that Owen and Gallup believed they were uncovering led them to pretty outrageous conclusions; according to them, the plays’ cipher revealed that Sir Francis Bacon was really Queen Elizabeth’s son and thus heir to the throne! And Gallup’s nonexistent biliteral code took it a step further, revealing that within the plays were encoded other lost plays of Shakespeare that told the history of Elizabethan England, including tragedies about Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Boleyn, both of which I’d have loved to read. Unfortunately, Gallup only provided summaries of these plays she had supposedly found buried within other plays—taking the idea of a play within a play to absurd heights. Eventually, their decipherment led both Owen and Gallup to the location of the hidden Shakespeare manuscripts: Gallup’s code sent her to North London and Canonbury Tower, while Owen’s took him to the bottom of the Severn River. Unsurprisingly, neither of them found a single page.

Throughout the twilight of Twain’s career and lifetime, a number of other books were released on the topic—Francis Bacon Our Shake-speare by Edwin Reed in 1902, The Shakespeare Problem Restated by George Greenwood in 1908, and in 1909, the year before Twain’s passing, he had the opportunity to read the prepublication galleys of a new book making further claims about Baconian codes in Shakespeare, called Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon, by William Stone Booth. By the end of his life, Twain had become thoroughly convinced that Shakespeare could not have written the works attributed to him, his conclusions leaning heavily on the fact of the sparse biographical records of the man, saying, “He is a Brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris.” Nor was Twain alone among his literary contemporaries in succumbing to the Baconian authorship theory. Walt Whitman, who loved the idea of the mundane world being infused with some mystical secret, wrote the poem “Shakespear Bacon’s Cipher,” which begins with the words “I doubt it not.” And Twain’s close friend, Helen Keller, who had once written “my Shakespeare was so strongly entrenched against Baconian arguments that he could never be dislodged,” would eventually propose to write a book of her own in support of those same Baconian arguments—something she thankfully never did. As for Twain, so preoccupied was he with conspiracy claims about Shakespeare that he tried to come up with a few similar such theories himself, arguing at one point that The Pilgrim’s Progress could not have been written by the preacher John Bunyan and must instead have been authored by John Milton. At one point he even tried to argue that Queen Elizabeth was really a man, because no woman could have accomplished what she did. At the end, the Shakespeare authorship question had become such an obsession that he made it the subject of his final work, which he called Is Shakespeare Dead? In it, he plagiarized an entire chapter from another writer, lifting a whole section about Shakespeare’s apparent knowledge of the law from another book that he failed to credit. So at the end of his illustrious career, the Shakespeare authorship controversy led him to folly and scandal. As James Shapiro points out in my principal source, Contested Will, Twain seems to have plagiarized that section because it makes a convincing case that Shakespeare could not have had the legal knowledge that the author of the plays displays. As Shapiro puts it, Twain borrowed the material “to challenge Shakespeare’s claims to authorship, on the grounds that you had to know something about law to speak with authority about it. Yet in doing so, Twain does what Shakespear himself had done: appropriate what others said or wrote, using their words to lend authority to his own—something that Twain had argued wasn’t possible.” Shapiro goes on to note the further irony that Twain believed Shakespeare to be illiterate because he left no books behind, yet after his own death, Twain’s own book collection was immediately sold off by executors looking to make a quick profit, much as might have been the case with Shakespeare’s library. In the end, with no convincing evidence of a cipher, no lost manuscripts, nor any compelling evidence to show that Bacon wrote any plays, let alone that the language of Shakespeare’s plays could be likened to his known work, the Baconian heresy faded, only to reappear far later with the advent of History Channel nonsense that the conspiracy-addled Internet. But the authorship controversy would not fade. It merely needed a new candidate, and it turned out there was no shortage of them.

 Further Reading

McCrea, Scott. The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question. Praeger, 2005.

Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.

"An Idle and Most False Imposition"; The Shakespeare Authorship Question - Part One: Drama's God.

“Doth anyone here know me?” These are the words of William Shakespeare’s doomed King Lear, whose kingdom is divided, and who, in the end, loses himself to madness and despair. Since the illustrious career of the bard, the greatest of English playwrights and poets, and perhaps even the greatest in the world, there have been scholars of Shakespeare who, lacking much contemporary documentation of the man’s life, turned to his works for indications of who he was, imagining all his works autobiographical, and thus interpreting his characters as versions of himself. According to this view, then, we might imagine the words of King Lear, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” in the mouth of William Shakespeare himself, especially because his very identity would eventually come to be doubted. How could this be? In part it is because of a dearth of primary source records about his personal life. We do know that a man named William Shakespeare was born into a farming family in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, his father a glovemaker and city alderman. At 18 years old, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman 8 years his senior who was already pregnant with their first child, a daughter. Their firstborn would be followed by twins, one of whom, his only son, would eventually die at only 11 years old. But what Shakespeare is remembered for, of course, is his theatrical career, which commenced in London at some uncertain point. During a period called his “Lost Years,” between the baptism of his twins in 1585 and the known establishment of his reputation as a playwright at least by 1592, he either burst onto the theatrical scene or worked his way up, slowly but surely, to become a renowned dramatist whose plays were published. By 1597, he had accumulated enough wealth to buy the largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon, which was called New Place, and spent his years traveling back and forth, dividing his time between family and the London theater scene, where for about 20 years with the same company, he produced some 38 plays that are today celebrated, along with his poetry, as the pinnacle of English language literary artistry. He passed away at 52 years old in 1616, and it is a testament to the enduring legacy and genius of his work that within 200 years, Shakespeare had become like a god to many. With the 1623 publication of the First Folio, the first collection of his great plays, his legend grew, not only among theatergoers but among the literati, and it was commented regularly that he had survived death, that he had defeated death in some Christlike fashion because he lived on in his work. In the next century, Voltaire would remark that the English customarily refer to Shakespeare as “divine,” and in 1769, this deification became nearly literal when the first Shakespeare festival was organized, and a temple was built in Hampton to honor him, complete with a few personal items displayed like relics: a glove, a ring, a dagger, and a chalice like the very Holy Grail. The person who staged the festival and built the temple, David Garrick, an actor who owed his fame to certain Shakespearian roles, was explicit in his worship of the playwright, calling him, “The god of our idolatry” and earning the title of “Shakespeare’s priest” from his contemporaries. Within a quarter of a century, Garrick’s godmaking bore fruit when the Drury Lane theater in Covent Garden unveiled a statue of Shakespeare, dedicated with a verse: “And now the image of our Shakespeare view / And give the Drama’s God the honour due.” So a man was transformed into a deity, but already there were those who would come to declare that this god was dead, or perhaps that he had never been.

When this podcast and blog first started, I imagined that one theme of the project, when I covered historical mysteries, would have to do with the unreliability of the historical record, and the parts of history that we simply cannot know about for certain. That has definitely been an aspect of certain topics, from time to time, but I have been surprised by how much academic historians are able to determine even without a strong contemporary historical records, and how lacunae, or gaps in the record like these, can fuel historical misinformation, like, for example, the claims of Christ mythicists. It is a gap like this, and the poor reliability of sources that have appeared, that led in the first place to theories that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, or rather that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon was not the true author of the works attributed to him. While the works of Shakespeare were thankfully preserved when they were collected by his theater company and published in folio edition, no actual manuscript, that is, handwritten original document, has survived. More than this, absolutely no personal papers of his, which might help to resolve the authorship controversy once and for all, have ever been discovered. We have no personal correspondence, no diary, no commonplace papers of any sort. Indeed, the only handwriting samples that exist of this, the most famous of writers, are six signatures applied to a variety of mundane documents, a deposition, a deed, a mortgage, and his Last Will and Testament, in which he famously left his wife only his “second best bed.” Beyond these records, and some others that are contested, there are only anecdotal mentions of the Stratford man’s life, of the growing reputation of someone going by the same name in late 16th century London theater, and of this playwright’s association with other dramatists and actors. Strangely, no surviving anecdotes or documents concerning the man from Stratford seem to corroborate that he was one and the same as the London dramatist, and considering nothing written in his hand survived beyond a few signatures on legal documents, and no papers or books were mentioned in his will, it would eventually be argued that there was little evidence the Shakespeare from Stratford was even literate. The fact is, however, that no one bothered to talk to Shakespeare’s colleagues in the theater about him, or even to interview his surviving family members, until it was far too late to do so. In the first several decades after his death, there was only interest in his writings, not his person. As for the lack of papers and books in his will, such items went unmentioned in wills of many of his Elizabethan contemporaries, listed instead on inventories of household effects, a document less likely to be preserved and thus often lost, as was the case with Shakespeare’s. So, among the growing idolaters who came to worship “Drama’s God,” searching for his personal effects became a sacred undertaking, like seeking pieces of the True Cross. Indeed, it seems many a pilgrim came to New Place seeking a piece of  the mulberry tree Shakespeare was said to have planted himself, and in 1756, annoyed at the souvenir hunters, the new owner cut the tree down. Afterward, carvings began to appear, like the chalice that would later be displayed at Garrick’s temple to Shakespeare, said to have been cut from the wood of Shakespeare’s mulberry. However, much like the True Cross, far more carvings would circulate than could ever have been cut from one mulberry tree, making many of them certainly frauds. And this would not be the only example of such fakes relating to Shakespeare.

A depiction of Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee.

By the end of the 18th century, many a Shakespeare scholar busied himself in the hunt for Shakespeare’s papers. His will had turned up in 1737, the mortgage in 1753, and a letter from a neighbor to Shakespeare had been found in 1793, so it was known that important documents were still out there to be found, and it was hoped that someone might chance upon the real trove: Shakespeare’s letters and papers. In 1794, collector Samuel Ireland toured Stratford with his son, William-Henry, then a teenager, and they were told by a farmer that only a couple weeks earlier he had burned baskets full of Shakespeare’s papers. Ireland was devastated, though in all likelihood this farmer was having a bit of fun at the collector’s expense. Later that same year, though, Ireland’s teenage son became acquainted with a wealthy gentleman named “Mr. H,” who possessed a great many old deeds and let the boy look through them. Astoundingly, William-Henry Ireland claimed to have found yet another legal document with Shakespeare’s signature, which he gifted to his father for Christmas. Urged on by his father, William-Henry returned to Mr. H’s country manor to more thoroughly search his collection of papers, and lo and behold, he came back with exactly what everyone was hoping one day to find. He came back with numerous legal documents and receipts in Shakespeare’s name, a profession of Protestant faith, several books with what appeared to be Shakespeare’s own annotations in the margins, letters to his wife and others, and even a letter of thanks from Queen Elizabeth to Shakespeare! The literary world was in shock! Biographies were immediately emended. But William-Henry had not exhausted the astonishing finds among Mr. H’s collection, for early the next year, he came up with an actual manuscript of King Lear, which revealed the true first draft of the play before censors and actors had altered it. This was followed by more manuscripts and even by previously unknown plays Henry the Second and Vortigern. What a time to be alive, if you were a Shakespeare scholar! And alternatively, what an unfortunate time for any hoaxer to attempt to fake any such findings, for it was the dawning of an age in which Shakespeare studies was becoming a scholarly discipline, and thus there were experts out there who had devoted their lives to studying Shakespeare and could see right through any such impostures. The finds of young William-Henry Ireland were almost universally authenticated, though, and he was the toast of London literati because of it. That is, until one Edmond Malone got hold of the papers that William-Henry had found and that his father had published. Malone published a devastating critique of the Irelands’ claims, demonstrating that words supposedly used by Shakespeare in the papers weren’t in use at the time, and that the dates on documents did not accord, and that the signatures appended did not match. Malone came with receipts, if you will, making a nearly undeniable allegation of forgery. Though Samuel Ireland did deny, questioning Malone’s authority to judge the papers, the matter was settled when young William-Henry confessed that all his finds were forged. There was no “Mr. H,” and it was frankly embarrassing that no one had even attempted to ascertain who the source of all the documents actually was. William-Henry, who at only 19 years old had successfully fooled the world with fake Shakespeare plays of his own composition, finally admitted that he’d only done it all to please his father, who was obsessed with Shakespeare.

The Ireland forgeries demonstrate the fact that authorship was long a question when it came to Shakespeare’s works, though not in the same way that the question is now framed. What we can take from this story is the fact that Shakespeare scholars have always been at the forefront of such controversies, sussing out truth from false claims, or as Shakespeare put it, “To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.” So Edmond Malone has long been viewed as an early champion of Shakespeare scholarship, but as my principal source for this episode, James Shapiro in his book Contested Will points out, Malone himself bears some blame for the eventual emergence of the claims that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. This is because, as his career continued, he pioneered a new kind of biographical literary criticism. In the frustrating absence of real biographical information about William Shakespeare’s life, he turned to the texts themselves, suggesting that within them could be found hints about the man’s life. It began with his efforts to place the plays into some kind of compositional order. To accomplish this, Malone scoured them for anything that might be construed as a reference to contemporaneous events, in order to guess when each play had been composed. His reading into the texts in this fashion first raised the notion that the plays were some kind of cipher, with a secret message woven into them, an idea that would eventually feature in a lot of conspiracy claims about Shakespeare. Beyond some political message, Malone would go on to popularize the idea that Shakespeare’s works were secretly autobiographical in nature. Beginning with assumptions like, if some sonnet were about feeling betrayed in love, then that meant Shakespeare must have been betrayed himself, perhaps by his wife, and evolving to claims that, if some passage or other showed a knowledge of law then that meant Shakespeare must have worked as a legal clerk. The entire approach lacked merit, since it denied that Shakespeare could have had any knowledge outside of his profession, rejected the idea that Shakespeare could write about feelings he had not himself felt, and finally disavowed the actual storytelling of his plays, such that they were no longer about his characters, but rather about himself. This kind of literary criticism, of course, continues to be practiced today, though typically having some actual, verifiable historical documentation is usually preferred, and it is typically recognized that such conjecture is not valid grounds for rewriting a literary figure’s biography, but in Malone’s case, his speculation would result in assumptions about Shakespeare’s life being recorded as if they were history. And eventually, his same techniques would be used by those who would argue that the man from Stratford simply could not have written the works attributed to him.

William-Henry Ireland, notorious forger.

This view of Shakespeare’s writing long outlived Edmond Malone, and throughout the 19th century, great writers and critics, like William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, would focus more specifically on Shakespeare’s sonnets, which came to be viewed as confessional. By many a reading, the figures that appeared in these poems—the “fair youths” and “rival poets”—were references to real people that Shakespeare must have known. Thus, for example, the Dark Lady sonnets, a series of sonnets that refer to what some believe to be the same woman, have sparked heated debate and rival theories about who the “dark lady” might have been, when in fact she may very well have been a literary construct and not a real person at all. Likewise, some theories have it that all the sonnets were written directly to Queen Elizabeth I, a notion that would be used by deniers of Shakespeare’s authorship to contend the works were written by someone within the queen’s orbit. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would extend the notion beyond the sonnets, claiming first that certain plays were entirely autobiographical, so that Prospero in The Tempest was actually meant to represent the bard himself, and then moving on to suggest that this was the case with the entire Shakespearian corpus, which could be read as an encrypted memoir of sorts. The problems with this view of Shakespeare’s works should be obvious. Not only does it make massive assumptions about authorial intention, elevating perceived subtext above the obvious stories and themes of the works, it also tends to ignore any works that don’t fit with the interpretation. So if one cannot see how some play or other fits with the biography one is inventing, it is simply omitted. Additionally, for any of this to be true, it must mean that Shakespeare was a solitary writer, working alone and pouring himself into every work, but actually, historical records that Edmond Malone himself turned up seem to indicate that Elizabethan playwrights regularly collaborated. Indeed, there is evidence that numerous works attributed to Shakespeare may have been written in collaboration with other dramatists. Henry the Fifth, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Taming of the Shrew are just a few of the plays that scholars have suspected of being written by Shakespeare collaboratively with others. Tellingly, when Edmond Malone came into possession of the diary of a certain theater owner, which proved how Elizabethan playwrights collaborated, he sat on it, never publishing it. It would not become public until after his death. Beyond the frauds and hoaxes that surround Shakespeare, which Malone himself helped to expose, Malone’s speculation about the biographical details hidden within the works of Shakespeare prefigure the later claims about Shakespearian authorship, and his refusal to acknowledge evidence that might upend his pet notions about the playwright certainly do make later claims about a scholarly coverup more credible than one might think.

It was this refusal of Shakespeare’s later idolaters to in any way bend or alter their conception of him as a divine and solitary genius that would lead to the questions of his authorship, for in Warwickshire, the region where they expected to find evidence of his singular character, they found only records of a regular man. 17th-century memories of the man in Stratford only extended to his having poached deer, and of his apprenticeship with a butcher, activities that sounded far to rustic for the man many imagined Shakespeare to have been. It was learned that he was a heavy drinker, when many imagined that only a sober mind could compose such divine works. It should have been telling, of course, that he was said to have died of a fever after a drinking binge with friends and that those friends happened to be two other well-known poets and playwrights, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. Regardless of rumors of the man’s carousal with other writers, though, the image of the man that emerged from the meager records he left behind simply did not comport with the icon they had raised up for worship. Documents that came to light revealed that he had been a money lender, and had even pursued legal actions against a neighbor over unpaid debts, and that he hoarded grain even when his neighbors went hungry. The picture emerging seemed to be of a callous and greedy businessman, not a brilliant and emotionally complex poet. The simple truth was that, while a writer, he was also a businessman concerned with preserving wealth for his family; he practiced money lending in much the same way many others did, and the practice of storing grains and dealing in them was very common in Warwickshire, such that some of his neighbors hoarded and sold far more than he. And finally, there is the sometimes overlooked fact that much of the business dealings in Stratford had been conducted by his wife, in Shakespeare’s name only. Nevertheless, it was disappointing enough that Shakespeare’s admirers in the 19th century simply began to forge the proof they lacked to uphold their image of the man. In 1811, Richard Fenton claimed to find a journal of Shakespeare’s that revealed his friendship to a young Italian lodger who tutored him in Italian and Latin: a total hoax. In the 1830s and 40s, researcher John Payne Collier began to publish numerous genuine discoveries that helped to fill in some gaps regarding Shakespeare’s career in London. He discovered more real evidence about Shakespeare’s life in Stratford-upon-Avon and about his business transactions than anyone ever had or ever would, but he also, it would eventually be discovered, mixed in numerous skilled forgeries intended to shed light on Shakespeare’s work in London theaters. Like others, Collier had just fabricated the evidence that he hadn’t managed to find in order to fill in his image of the playwright.

John Payne Collier, Shakespeare scholar and forger.

The last tool that questioners of Shakespeare’s authorship would use was then being developed by scholars of so-called “Higher Criticism,” an approach to biblical studies that emerged in German academia. Johann Eichhorn originated it with his studies of how biblical texts had changed over time, and those who followed his historical approach to bible scholarship, emphasizing the origins of texts, their transmission, and their transformation through the ages, would show that the authorship of any book of the bible, or any ancient text, really, was highly questionable. In 1795, Friedrich August Wolf would take this model and apply it to literature, specifically the works of Homer, casting serious doubt on the existence of any one poet named Homer and through philological analysis demonstrating that the works were really orally transmitted songs, not the work of some individual genius. These questions about the authorship and reliability of biblical texts and the question of whether a person really existed in antiquity would, of course, eventually be applied to the New Testament and to the person of Jesus Christ. You can revisit my recent holiday special to hear about the claims of Christ mythicists, but suffice it to say here that through a philological argument, it has been asserted that there was no Christ, and it was not long before these arguments, questions of gaps in records leading to doubts about authorship and even about a person’s existence, were applied also to Shakespeare. Ironically, though, they were first applied to Shakespeare only rhetorically, to demonstrate how ridiculous the claims were. In 1848, a Lutheran minister named Samuel Schmucker published a critique of the claims of Christ mythicists in which he showed how the very same sorts of arguments made against the existence of Christ could also be made against the existence of Shakespeare. It was meant to reveal how ludicrous the claims of Christ mythicists were, for he could not fathom that anyone in their right mind would actually doubt Shakespeare’s existence. What this Schmucker did not know, though, was that already, the very argument he used as an example of something patently absurd was being developed by another writer, this one a Puritan woman, who would popularize the notion that Shakespeare did not author the works of Shakespeare, whose work would convince many brilliant luminaries of her day, and who would in the end be driven mad by her theory.

Until next time, remember, even important and valid scholarship, like the Higher Criticism that brought with it such great strides in Bible scholarship, can be abused and used to make spurious and dubious claims as well.

Further Reading

McCrea, Scott. The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question. Praeger, 2005.

Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.

The Oak Island Scheme - Part Two: The Cursed Treasure Fraud

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

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

Dan Blankenship, at work on the island.

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

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

The fake Roman sword found near Oak Island.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

Before Columbus - Part Two: False Claims

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

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

Portrait of John Dee.

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

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

St. Brendan the Navigator depicted on his imagined voyage.

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

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

20th century depiction of Madoc on his voyages.

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

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

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

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

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

A reproduction of the Zeno Map.

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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