Obsession propels scholar on long, lonesome voyage

[seemslikeadream]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003752118_thompson18.html

By Ross Anderson

Gunnar Thompson talks about his long study of ancient maps. Before him is a copy of what he says is a 1418 map showing North and South America.

A copy of a 1418 Ming map, said to have been found in a Shanghai antique shop by Beijing antiquities scholar Liu Gang, is held up by Gunnar Thompson as evidence that Asian explorers sailed the world long before Columbus. Critics doubt the map is authentic.

PORT TOWNSEND — Among armchair sailors, Gunnar Thompson is a master mariner. He has navigated oceans and continents, east to west, pole to pole and back again — most of it without leaving his small home near the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Thompson's vessel is a historical time machine, guided by ancient maps and journals, and powered by a fertile imagination and an obsession with early exploration. And his mission is to sink what he considers the greatest myth in history: that Columbus discovered America.

"I'm proving that Columbus was not the first," he says. "Everybody beat Columbus."

Over the course of his 30-year journey, Thompson has written five books, all self-published, detailing what he believes to be conclusive evidence that, long before 1492, the Americas were explored repeatedly — by the ancient Chinese, Venetians, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, Irish, English and who-knows-who-else.

He argues, for example, that a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, commanding a fleet of Chinese junks in the early 1400s, explored the coasts of the Americas. He believes that Marco Polo sailed with the Chinese into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and perhaps into Puget Sound in the 13th century. He is convinced that Sir Francis Drake sailed these waters some 300 years later. And he has copies of maps that he believes prove each claim.

Give him a chance, and he'll fill a room with his hand-copied or photocopied evidence — ancient Chinese maps that he believes depict Puget Sound and the Columbia River, Roman maps that show the Florida peninsula, ancient Chinese and European coins and other artifacts, and similarities between art motifs produced in Asia and among the ancient Aztecs and Incas.

Now he's compiled much of what he's learned into a 265-page, thoroughly illustrated volume called "Secret Voyages," or "True Adventure Stories from the Forbidden Chronicles of American Discovery," self-published last year by Misty Isles Press, Seattle.

[aquart]

1. Or you could read Pale Ink that beat him by two or three decades.

[seemslikeadream]

3. Thanks aquart, I will

;)






http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/pi/pi03.htm

[aquart]

4. During the Van Daniken craze, its title was changed

To Ancient Gods of the ... East (can't remember if the word was Near or Far). But it was actually a straight, non-sensational book about Chinese exploration of the west coast of the Americas as detailed in the Classic of Mountains and Seas. The thesis is that the Classic of Mountains and Seas gives accurate descriptions of major American landmarks like the redwoods and the Grand Canyon, in the correct order that a traveler would encounter them.

[applegrove]

2. Pretty cool that the Chinese visited the Americas in between the vikings and europeans.

[aquart]

5. Probably a bit before, IIRC.

[Adsos Letter]

7. and a "KON TIKI" to you, too, aquart!

:hi:

[aquart]

9. Where have you been????

You got me dependent and then disappeared. Are there archaeological goodies?

[applegrove]

14. What is the IIRC?

[Adsos Letter]

6. KON TIKI!!!

:woohoo:

[aquart]

10. Yeah, but they weren't Chinese.

The way Pale Ink had it, no poet could consider himself educated until he'd taken the Grand Tour of the Americas, sliding down the Kamchatka Current.

[applegrove]

15. My mom read the Kon Tiki to us when we were children.

[Nihil]

8. Romans?

I'm familiar with the journeys of the Chinese, Venetians, Vikings,
Irish and Scottish (which he's probably calling English) - all of
which have sufficient evidence to support the claims - and have
read hypotheses that the Egyptians made it over the ocean too
(though I'm not convinced about that) but Romans?

That's the first I've heard of that idea ... :shrug:

[aquart]

11. Caches of Roman coins all over the place.

Check out Before Columbus by Cyrus Gordon and America BC by Barry Fell. I don't think those guys were friends, though.

BTW, if you hold a glossary of indoeuropean word roots in your hand, you can read the Nahuatl Aztec calendar.

[Nihil]

12. Interesting ...

... will keep my eyes open for those two - thanks!
:hi:

[semillama]

13. Keep in mind that America BC is pretty much a work of fiction, though.

Fell saw what he wanted to see, and had no academic training in linguistics or ancient scripts. He basically saw what he wanted to see without considering context or alternate explanations, cherry-picked data, and manipulated date to fit his ideas. His work has been widely refuted by actual linguists and archaeologists.

That being said, I suggest reading Alice Beck Kehoe's excellent Controversies in Archaeology for a truly balanced discussion, especially the chapter on Diffusion.

The only documented pre-Columbian, non-Native American site in the New World is L'anse aux Meadows -so far.

There are some possible lines of evidence for some contact before Columbus, but not for anything resembling colonization or well-established trading, excepting Polynesian trading - as evidenced by the sweet potato (native to South America, and present in Polynesia prior to the European Age of Exploration). There are some intriguing possibilities suggesting contact between China and Mesoamerica, including the use of mulberry bark for paper, wheeled figurines in Mesoamerican tombs that are similar to wheeled figurines in Chinese tombs, the high value of jade, and so on.

There are some intriguing similarities in ancient astrology as well.

And the presence of cocaine and nicotine in Egyptian mummies seems pretty convincing to me.

(more on that here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/mummy.htm)

[aquart]

17. So you haven't been to Mystery Hill. Which is extremely pre-Columbian.

And don't forget the cocaine residue in the Egyptian mummy, honey. And I don't even want to begin with the cotton genetics.

But I DO have some training in linguistics. Now pick up that Indoeuropean word roots glossary you have handy and go read that Nahuatl calendar.

Egyptian Old Kingdom ships had sails. They were also bigger than the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The crap they tell you about hugging the coastline was just that. You can't make money by hugging a coastline.

You might also want to check out the red paint culture that hugged the arctic circle. They were also pretty good at continent hopping.

Oh, and take your wussy, half-assed, gutless "intriguing possibilities" and stuff 'em.

[semillama]

18. Did I touch a nerve?

Is your name Barry Fell? Or just a gullible fool? I'm going with gullible fool.

You have some training in linguistics. good for you. I am a practicing archaeologist and am far more familiar with the archaeology of the Americas than you appear to be. What you appear to be is a New Age crystal waving believer in theories that have their true roots in the racist ideology of Manifest Destiny (check out the nineteenth century concept of the Moundbuilders and the Mormon version of North American prehistory).

You may have noted I alluded to the cocaine/nicotine/hashish in the mummies, but from your post, you didn't even get past the fact I pointed out the inconvenient truth that Barry Fell is pretty much full of crap. What you didn't notice is that I actually support the idea of trans-oceanic contact - just not the Fell fantasy world of Phoenicians, Romans, Irish and Welsh traipsing across the continent.

It's telling that you bring up Mystery Hill. That site has been well examined by actual archaeologists and all the evidence points to an origin in the 18th and 19th century, regardless of what the New Age folks who charge you a fee to visit the site will have you believe. Here's a link to a good article on Mystery Hill: http://www.bu.edu/bridge/archive/2002/02-01/archaeology.htm

See, what a lot of folks don't realize about supposed "Bronze Age" sites in North America is that they are remarkably clean of any actual Bronze Age artifacts. If these folks were here and moving stones around, then where is their trash? Another thing that folks don't realize is the sheer amount of archaeology that goes on in this country, due to Federal legislation such as Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which basically states that any Federal undertaking has to take into account the effects of the undertaking on historical properties, including archaeological sites. This means that nearly every new highway or road realignment usually has some form of archaeology performed. So, there's archaeology going on pretty much everywhere.

And the third thing: Pretty much regardless of time period, the same certain landforms in North America will attract people: Elevated landforms near a good source of water and food. A good rise on a terrace overlooking a river will likely have artifacts from 10,000 years ago all the way up to the present. Yes not a single one of these landforms has produced ANY pre-columbian artifacts attributable to European, African, or Asian contact. Not a single one.

Now, that doesn't rule out contact and the theory of certain traits developing through diffusion. But it does pretty much rule out sustained trade networks and colonization. The likely scenario is a limited number of random contacts that did not result in any real major cultural changes.

I don't see what your point is about the Red Paint culture (for other folks reading this, the Red Paint culture is more accurately referred to as the Maritime Archaic, and they were a coastal people with a trade network that extended across New England and Atlantic Canada, from between 3000 and 1000 BC). They had a pretty big trading range, but I suppose you're arguing they showed up in Norway or something.

Your point on the Nahuatl/Indo-European languages seems to be a reference to Charles William Johnson, who is apparently the only person who thinks there's any similarities. Other linguistic specialists in Nahuatl disagree.

You're welcome to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.

[Johonny]

16. I think it's important to remember history generally credits

impact and not relative firsts. Many great "discoveries" were not discovered by the people that are credited for the discovery. However the person credited in general was the person that had the greatest impact in pushing that knowledge and spreading that knowledge. Discoveries are not that important if they are not passed on to following generations. I think it's very hard to argue that the Columbus voyages to the Americas did not have the most impact on lasting world culture and every previous voyage had virtually no lasting impact.

[Orsino]

20. Note also that the sort of mind obsessed with proving Columbus tardy...

...has something in common with the crackpot physicist determined to disprove Einstein. Both tend to be short on evidence and long on speculation. Typically, peer review doesn't support the contentions of either.

You have to be proven right to graduate from crackpot to iconoclast, and that takes a lot of work.

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. That map claims to be a copy made in 1763 of an original from 1418

so I wonder what it would really be thought to prove anyway. An article with reasons to doubt it:

Hébert, who has only viewed a small reproduction of the map online, says the map's depiction of the Earth with China not at the center raises a red flag.

"I don't know of any entity at any time, Chinese or otherwise, that did not usually center their cartographic pieces with them(selves) in the middle," he said.

The map's depiction of California as an island also suggests that it could be a copy of a French 17th-century map, Hébert said.

"The other thing that's troubling is the shape of California as an island. That is too much, taken out of what I've seen by French mapping for that <17th> century … (It) almost begs as if we're looking at a 17th-century French world map that had been converted."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0123_060123_chinese_map.html

I'm suspicious of the map getting the east coast of North America comparatively right, while getting India quite badly wrong, for instance - you'd think the coasts and countries nearer China would be the better mapped ones.