The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (11 page)

Andrew Sinclair made the observation that it is the sign of a second Sinclair settlement in the New World.
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Its construction is the same as the round churches of the Knights Templar, which are circular and complete with eight arches. These churches are rare; the only one in Scotland was built in Orkney, the home of Henry Sinclair. The Sinclair family acted in Scotland as the protectors of Freemasonry, an outgrowth of the outlawed Templars. Hjalmar Holand had reached a similar and more intriguing conclusion thirty years before Sinclair’s work. The tower was modeled on a first-century “baptistry” constructed by followers of Jesus Christ.
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Such baptistries did not last long, but after the Crusades, the knights brought the model home from the Holy Lands. They then started constructing a handful of such baptistries in Europe. While this could suggest that either the Sinclair expedition or a Norse expedition could have used the model and constructed the tower, Holand goes on to trace the construction to the Cistercian monastic order. It was this order that was influential in both starting the Crusades and founding the Templars. This information pushes the scale in favor of a Sinclair-initiated construction.

The Templars were an order of soldiers who were sworn to vows of poverty and chastity very much like the monks. This order, founded in the twelfth century, grew in power and wealth over a two-hundred-year period and like the Cistercian order of Saint Bernard, they were also builders. Europe is still dotted with bridges and churches from this era.

Sinclair’s base of operations in North America was likely situated in Nova Scotia. It is possible that Sinclair had brought as many as three hundred men to America. His fleet, as previously mentioned, was larger than that of the Norse king of Norway. It is also possible that Sinclair made more than one journey. How long he stayed in the New World is not known. We are not even sure of the year of his death. Father Hay, an early Scottish genealogist with a reputation for hurried biographies, says that Henry died in the year 1400 as a result of an English raid. Another biographer, Raphael Holinshed, says that the fatal raid took place in 1404.
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A more contemporary biographer of Sinclair and his voyage,
the late Frederick Pohl, says that just about all of Sinclair’s life can be accounted for except the years 1400 to 1404, but he believes that Sinclair stayed in North America until 1400 and came home to Scotland to be felled in a raid that same year.

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

The Problem of Icaria

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

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

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

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

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

Scholars have been frustrated mainly because they have overlooked the tremendous changes in the natural features of the Greenland-Iceland area due to natural phenomena. Unaware of the consequent sinking of land and the forming of undersea shelves as the surface of the earth shifted under the weight of glacial ice, they have not realized that some landmarks on the Viking trail have even vanished under ice and water.
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Mallery and Hobbs were not the only ones to document the activity of the restless floor of the Atlantic. History records the eighteenth-century earthquake that devastated Lisbon, Portugal. In six minutes, sixty thousand people perished, and the harbor fell six hundred feet to the Atlantic floor. In 1811 a large volcanic island rose from the sea into the island chain known as the Azores. Named Sabrina, the island was put on the maps, only to be reclaimed by the sea again. In 1963 an island grew from a volcano off the coast of Iceland. Named after the Norse god of fire, this one did not “fly away” but instead reportedly grew at an incredible rate of one acre per day. There are literally scores of coastal towns, harbors, and islands that have been lost to a changing ocean floor, from Martinique to the Mediterranean.

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

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

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

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

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