Message #34790

[Bianca]

Dr. Gordon acknowledges his debt to Charles H. Hapgood, whose Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (See review article, "A Question of Maps," Sunrise, August 1967) concluded that at least 6,000 years B.C. there had existed a world-wide civilization some of whose most important members were expert navigators and sea kings. Hapgood offered startling evidence that some of these people must have lived before the most recent ice age had ended in the Northern Hemisphere and when Alaska was still connected with Siberia by the Pleistocene ice age "land bridge." Moreover, he shows that they were able to determine longitude, an art that was later forgotten until the mid-eighteenth century A.D.

Although he focuses mainly on Mediterranean-Mesoamerican prehistoric links, as his professional competence lies in those areas, Professor Gordon uses his discoveries to range much farther, believing that to restrict investigation to any one area is dangerous unless we have in view the total nature of the research problem we face, which is that of the existence of an ancient world-wide ecumene. He emphasizes that these transoceanic mariners came to the Americas from many places and during many periods, not only from Japan to the shores of Ecuador around 3000 B.C., but very possibly from China, Southeast Asia, and India via the Pacific.

While much of his data is new and he has brought together both new and old evidence in a fresh way, Dr. Gordon is only one of a long and honorable line of well-known as well as obscure protagonists of the startling ancientness of the New World.

Lecturing at Oslo in 1936, for example, the Norwegian scholar A.W.Brogger spoke of a period roughly 4,000 or 5,000 years ago as a golden age of deep sea navigation when all the world was known. In 1940, the American polar researcher and explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, said the idea that "man of the Old World discovered the Americas from Brazil to Greenland" five thousand or more years ago is still only a theory, although "we can prove it likely" (Greenland, p. 26). Elsewhere in his books Stefansson described this early era as one during which Stone Age and Bronze Age inhabitants "swarmed the Atlantic." He wrote:

There are rock carvings in Norway to indicate that Norwegians were sailing the seas, and doubtless visiting Britain, contemporaneously with the New Stone Age sailors of Crete, who have been considered here as of from 4,000 to 10,000 B.C. The same navigators were, in that case, visiting the Arctic in the same period those of them, that is, who were not living within the Arctic Circle and visiting the Temperate Zone instead. (Great Adventures and Explorations, pp. 22-23.)

We may also mention Peter H. Buck's treatment of early Pacific voyages in his Vikings of the Pacific. (First published as Vikings of the Sunrise, 1938.)