Cuba
versus Hispaniola – the Atlantis debate continues In 1794 Guatemalan doctor and scholar Paul Felix Cabrera proposed that Hispaniola was Atlantis as well as a mysterious Atlantic island called Septimania. Yet, as we shall see, his theories, although revolutionary, were flawed by political bias against neighbouring Cuba.
Andrew Collins Reports GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS demonstrates that the core source material behind the Platonic Atlantean tradition originated in the Caribbean and was transmitted to the Mediterranean world by Iberic-Phoenician and Carthaginian seafarers. In complete secrecy these nations had been trading with the Americas, probably in concert with Berber peoples from northwest Africa, for hundreds of years prior to Plato’s age. There is ample evidence to this effect in the accounts of Atlantic journeys recorded by classical writers, as well as from the discovery of artefacts and inscribes stones in the Americas and the presence of tobacco and cocaine in Egyptian mummies. The discovery of Roman wrecks off the coasts of Brazil and Honduras helps support the notion that after the fall of the Carthaginian Empire in 146 BC the Romans gained knowledge of these transatlantic sea passages and exploited them for their own purposes. To some readers these ideas might seem like astounding revelations. Yet it is clear that ever since the `discovery’ of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 certain open-minded scholars have attempted to demonstrate almost exactly the same thing. They have cited evidence from classical accounts to show that Phoenicians and Carthaginians reached the Americas and became the ruling elite of the Olmec, Maya and Toltec peoples. In addition to this it has long been argued that Plato’s Atlantic island was one of the West Indies. For example, in the mid nineteenth century French philologist and language scholar the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg attempted to demonstrate that Hispaniola was a surviving portion of a much greater Atlantean landmass, while in 1885 American historian Hyde Clarke proposed that `the head seat of the great king [of Atlantis] was possibly in the Caribbean Sea; it may be in St Domingo [i.e. Hispaniola]’.(1) Although the view that Hispaniola was ancient Atlantis has been given a boost again recently by Professor Emilio Spedicato of Bergamo University, I argue that the island of Atlantis described in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias is the neighbouring island of Cuba (see the TRUE LOCATION section of the website). Even Emilio, after reading GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS, has admitted that Cuba is `a very good candidate’ for the title of Atlantis. He further adds that `only archaeological work will perhaps solve the riddle.’ Understanding why scholars of the past 200 years might have chosen Hispaniola over and above the more obvious candidate of Cuba, the largest and most fertile of the Caribbean islands, is a curious story – and one which appears to have clear political motives. I drew this conclusion after reading a book entitled TEATRO CRITICO AMERICANO; OR, A CRITICAL INVESTIGATION AND RESEARCH INTO THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICANS by Paul Felix Cabrera, a Guatemalan doctor and scholar of the city of New Guatemala. Although the work was composed as early as 1794, the manuscript was overlooked until its rediscovery, along with a detailed description of the ruins of the Maya city of Palenque executed by Captain Don Antonio del Rio, some years later. The two works were finally published in one combined volume by Henry Berthoud and Suttaby, Evance and Fox, both of London, in 1822. Cabrera sets out to prove that the Tzendal culture hero named Votan was either a Phoenician or Carthaginian mariner who sailed to the Americas 206 years before the first Punic war, providing a date of 470 BC (264 BC + 206 years). The erudite manner in which the author uses biblical, classical and native American sources to present his case is quite extraordinary. He reaches many of the conclusions I draw in GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS using entirely different evidence, most of which is no longer valid due to the greater understanding of history we have today. His knowledge of Votan was derived from the works of Nuñez de la Vega, Bishop of Chiapas, who possessed and subsequently burnt a codex pertaining to be a personal account of Votan’s odyssey, and Friar Ramon de Ordoñez y Aguilar, canon of the cathedral town of Ciudad-Réal in Chiapas. He had discovered the ruined city of Palenque at the base of the Tumbala Mountains in 1773, and had learnt of Votan’s story from Nuñez de la Vega. Since Cabrera was a friend of Ordoñez y Aguilar, his rendition of Votan’s journey is perhaps more accurate than later accounts by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who in the 1850s featured his odyssey in a four-volume work on the myths and religion of Central America. In Cabrera’s opinion, Votan departed from his homeland called Valum Chivim, seen as Tripoli in Syria, and sailed via Gades in Spain and a location known as the `houses of the thirteen snakes’, identified as the Canary Isles,(2) to somewhere called Valum Votan. This Cabrera identified with the island of Hispaniola. From here Votan sailed on to the American mainland, taking with him seven families `in which he recognised "culebra", or snake origin’.(3) This last statement was news to me as I have argued in GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS that Valum Votan was the original homeland of the Mesoamerican peoples, where the ancestors of the seven (sometimes eight or thirteen) clans, or tribes, emerged from a mythical location known as the Seven Caves. This tradition was sometimes altered to suggest that the seven tribes or clans lived in seven cities before their departure from an island homeland known variously as Aztlan, Tulan or Tlapallan. I suggest that Votan belonged to the Hebrew giant race known as Nephilim, the sons of the Serpent, since Votan referred to himself as `snake’, or a `son of the serpent’, an expression that confirmed his so-called chivim lineage. The Hebrew word chivim means `sons of the female serpent’, identified as Eve (Astarte in Canaanite tradition), the legendary progenitor of the Nephilim. Furthermore, I have suggested that, `accompanied by representatives of the different clans or tribes from the island’, Votan and his Nephilim cohorts left Valum Votan bound for the Yucatec coast. On his arrival in the Yucatán, Votan is said to have founded Na-chan, the `city of the serpents’, which Ordoñez y Aguilar identified with the Maya cult centre of Palenque, even though it dates only to c. AD 600. Cabrera associated the place where Votan established his ruling dynasty with a legendary place named Amaguemecan, which he said conveyed the idea of a `place in the waters’. Since Ordoñez y Aguilar tells us that Votan’s place of landfall in the Yucatán was the Lagoon de Terminos, Amaguemecan might well have been the Isla de Terminos, the largest of the islands placed between the outer sea and the lagoon. Mesoamerican tradition speaks of it as being the place of landfall of the peoples known as the Olmec and Xicalanca, and the island as the site of the latter’s first city. Calmet’s Three Voyages Presented above is the basic outline of Cabrera’s remarkable work. Yet he provides us with far more than simply an account of Votan’s odyssey. Constantly, he draws on the findings and statements of earlier historians who would seem to have embraced similar ideas regarding transatlantic journeys in ancient times. One such person was the French Benedictine exegete and learned scholar Augustin Calmet (1672-1757). He wrote a 23-volume dictionary of the Bible, published in stages between 1707 and 1716, as well a number of subsequent literary works translated into various different languages. Cabrera tells us that Calmet, himself quoting one Georg Hornius (1620-1670), said that there had been three Atlantic voyages to the Americas in ancient times. The first was made by the Atlantes, the peoples of Atlas, the hero-god ‘who gave his name to the Ocean and the islands Atlantides’.(4) They were most probably the Berbers (or Taureg), the sea-faring peoples of Morocco and Algeria who unquestionably reached the Canary Isles during the first millennium BC. The second voyage involved the accidental discovery by Phoenicians of an island with `navigable rivers’ mentioned in the works of Diodorus Siculus.(5) The third and final voyage, we are informed, was that of Hercules, who gave his name to the legendary columns which marked the exit of the Mediterranean and the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean. In his work, Cabrera acknowledges that there was more than one Hercules in classical tradition, before going on to say: Certain however, it is, that Diodorus speaks of a Hercules who sailed round the world and who founded the city of Lecta in Septimania: but no writer has pointed out its situation (note 24).(6) I was stunned at reading these words since I knew that no other contemporary writer ever makes reference to this statement. More important, it is not to be found in the surviving volumes of Diodorus Siculus’ multi-volume work the Library. What Cabrera is here implying is that Hercules circumnavigated the world and on that journey founded `the city of Lecta’ in a place called Septimania. In the knowledge that Hercules was considered certain classical writers to have sailed to the islands of Hesperides, which I identify with the Greater Antilles, I wondered whether Septimania might have been synonymous with one of these islands. The name itself seemed important, for in Latin septi means seven or a seven-fold division while mania has echoes of manes or manium, meaning `ghosts’, `shades of the dead’, `the lower world’ or `bodily remains’. It is from this same Latin root that we derive the English word `mania’, as in madness. Thus Septimania might be translated as meaning the ‘seven-fold place of ghosts or shades of the dead’. This interpretation of the place-name was so close to the mythological concept of the Seven Caves that it seemed unlikely to be pure coincidence. Not only was it seen as the place of emergence of the first human beings, but it was also to here that, in Aztec tradition, Quetzalcoatl and his twin Xolotl retrieved the bones of those who had drowned at the end of the world age known as the Fourth Sun. These bones were crushed and mixed with ground maize in order to fashion the present human race. The only known representation of the Seven Caves, found in the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca codex, shows bones and religious symbols of the ancestors scattered about its seven compartments, implying that it was looked on not just as a place of the dead but also as the place of the island’s original inhabitants. In GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS I propose that it was knowledge of the Seven Caves/seven cities/seven tribes tradition which was transmitted back to the Mediterranean world by Iberic Phoenicians and Carthaginians (perhaps working in concert with Berber tribesmen). This knowledge was reintroduced to medieval Spain and Portugal by the Moors (the mixed Berber-Arab peoples of Morocco) as the concept of Antilia, the Island of the Seven Cities. The American geographer William H. Babcock made a study of fifteenth-century maps which showed this island and came to the conclusion that it was Cuba, an opinion accepted by L. Sprague le Camp in his important work LOST CONTINENTS. It can be demonstrated that the place-name Antilia is derived from the Semitic root ATL, `to raise’ or `to elevate’ (the Carthaginian ATLA), from which we get Atlas, Atlantic and, of course, Atlantis. Returning to Cabrera’s account, we see that Note 24 provides us with a quote from Calmet regarding Hercules’ round-the-world voyage. The reference is in Latin and reads as follows: Non est ergo locus ambigendi, Herculem Gaditanum sive aliquem, ex posteris, vel saltem, quempiam ex Phoenicibus, cui par esset cognomen, ultra Gaditanum fretum excurrisse, narrant enim de Hercule totum ab illo orbis ambitum maritimo itinere decursum;cui etiam Diodorus Alectam Septimaniæ urbem conditam tribuit. (7) I sought a translation of this passage from Ann Deagon, Professor of Classical Languages Emerita at Guildford College, Greensboro, North Carolina. In her opinion it reads: There is not therefore room for doubting, that Hercules of Gades or someone of (his) descendants, or at least some one of the Phoenicians who had the same name made an excursion beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, for they say of Hercules that by him the whole circuit of the globe was traversed by sea passage. To him Diodorus even attributed the foundation of the city Alecta (in) Septimaniæ. As we may plainly see, the short passage does not provide us with a reference to Hercules’ all-important sea-journey. Who `they’ might have been is open to conjecture. It could have been other contemporaries, such as Hornius, or more ancient sources now lost to us. All Calmet says is that Diodorus affirms that this Hercules of Gades, the Iberic port so crucial to Atlantic journeys, was considered to have founded the city of Alecta in `Septimaniæ’ (spelt `Septimania’ by Cabrera). Yet as Cabrera informs us `no writer has pointed out its situation’.(8) A city called Alecta is not found in any other classical account, while the only known historical place called Septimania is a region which formed the border territory between the Moors of Spain and the Frankish Christians of south-west France from the eighth century onwards. However, it is not thought that the name predates this epoch. Cabrera seems clear that the Septimania mentioned by Calmet was encountered by Hercules during his circumnavigation of the world. This is confirmed a little later on in the book when Cabrera draws his own, quite staggering, conclusions in respect to the location of Septimania, for he says: Diodorus asserts that one Hercules navigated the whole circuit of the earth, and built the city of Alecta in Septimania. All these circumstances, in conjunction with what I have already stated, induce me, and will lead any erudite examiner to conclude, with every appearance of probability, that Hercules Tyrius was the progenitor of Votan, that Septimania is, beyond a doubt, the island of Atlantis, or Hispaniola, that the city of Alecta was Valum Votan, capital of the same island from whence Votan embarked his first colony to people the continent of America, and whither he departed for the countries on the old hemisphere.(9) Although much of what Cabrera has to say here might seem like pure conjecture, he has built up his case carefully before making these conclusions. Cabrera obviously believed Septimania to be cognate with Plato’s Atlantis, while Valum Votan and the city of Alecta were also seen to be synonymous. I too have concluded that Atlantis and Valum Votan were one and the same, and that Septimania might be a more ancient allusion to Antilia, the Island of the Seven Cities. However, whereas I identified the Antilian island in question as Cuba, Cabrera considered it to have been Hispaniola. What led him to make this choice? He states why in the next paragraph: I am confirmed in my selection of this island from among the many dispersed throughout the Atlantic, not only on account of its position and magnitude exceeding all the others, but also, from its fertility and numerous navigable rivers, and chiefly from its having been the island of the Olmeca nations.(10)
These then are his reasons for choosing Hispaniola as the site of Plato’s Atlantis. Let us look at each point in turn and then compare them with our knowledge of the neighbouring island of Cuba. First, we will consider its `position’. The Case for Hispaniola Hispaniola is the middle of the three largest members of the Great Antilles, with Cuba to the west and Puerto Rico to the east. Hispaniola’s coastline is almost entirely rugged and precipitous, making it of little significance to mariners. Cuba, on the other hand, has a large number of lobe-like bays on all its coasts, making it a far better choice for the establishment of ports or places of refuge in storms and gales. Furthermore, Cuba’s coastal waters guard the northerly and southerly entrances into the Gulf of Mexico, making it an ideal stop-over point before a journey on to the Yucatec coast. In addition to this, by using the Bahaman and Mid-Caribbean chains of islands a vessel easily can reach, respectively, the Florida coast or the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. It was for these reasons that soon after the time of the Conquest Cuba was christened the `Key to the New World’.(11) In no way can Hispaniola be awarded the same honour. Next we consider Cabrera’s assertion that Hispaniola was in `magnitude exceeding all the others’. This is blatantly untrue. At around 640 km in length and 256 km in width, Hispaniola is approximately two-thirds the size of neighbouring Cuba. Why Cabrera should have thought otherwise is beyond comprehension. In addition to these points, Cabrera further adds that Hispaniola was the most important of the islands because of its `fertility’. Once again, this is completely untrue. The island is dominated by extensive mountain ranges which cover much of the island and make crop cultivation difficult. It is Cuba that is the most fertile island of the Greater Antilles. As American historian Robert Hill wrote in 1898: Cuba… is the fairest, most fertile, and most diversified of the tropical islands; its economic development during four centuries of European occupation has fully justified the title, `The Pearl of the Antilles’, first given to it by Columbus … The whole island is covered with rich soils, fertile, calcareous loams – which, under every form of useful vegetation of the tropical and temperate climes.(12) It is on Cuba’s fertile plains, protected from the cold northerly winds by mountain ranges of the sort described by Plato in respect to Atlantis, that the tobacco for Havana’s famous cigars are cultivated. They also once produced more sugar cane than any other country. With the help of Cuba’s rich red calcareous loam, its cane yields a higher content of sugar than anywhere else other than Mexico. On the subject of Hispaniola’s `navigable rivers’ - an allusion to the fertile islands with navigable rivers said by both Pseudo-Aristotle and Diodorus to have been discovered by Phoenicians in the Western Ocean - he is also overlooking Cuba. It too has navigable rivers, one of which was explored by Christopher Columbus and his crew during Santa Maria’s voyage to the West Indies in October 1492. Many of these mighty rivers cut deep into the interior and rise in its central mountain ranges. Cabrera’s last reason for singling out Hispaniola as the all-important island of Atlantis is that it was the `island of the Olmeca nations’. He goes on to explain that: In the Mexican tradition, which has been adopted by many eminent authors, (Siguenza, and Botutini among others), it was considered certain, that the Olmecas arrived at this island from the eastward, and crossed from thence to the continent. Botutini, however, is of opinion, that when the Olmecas were driven from their country, they proceeded to the Antilles Island and thence to the southern part of America.(13) Cabrera infers here that the Olmec, one of the earliest peoples to inhabit Mexico, arrived in the Greater Antilles from the east (i.e. across the Atlantic); the first time I had read such a statement. Yet other similar traditions speak clearly of Cuba being the original homeland of the earliest Mesoamerican peoples. In his History of de Nuestra Señora de Izamal, the Spanish historian Lizana included a detailed look at the early history of the Yucatán. He collected memories which suggested that the earliest inhabitants of the peninsula had come originally from Cuba, where they had settled after leaving Haiti.(14) According to the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg other Spanish authors concluded from stories related to them by the Nahua, the native peoples of Anahuac, that Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caves, could be found either in Florida or on the island of Cuba.(15) More importantly, Ordoñez y Aguilar, who recorded the odyssey of Votan, and from whom Cabrera heard the same story, stated, quite clearly, that Valum Votan was Cuba. Indeed, rather romantically he had Votan setting sail for the Yucatec coast from Havana. Why then should Cabrera have gone against Ordoñez’s own location for Valum Votan and opted instead for Hispaniola? Why did Cabrera also become convinced that Hispaniola was Atlantis and Septimania? Over 200 years later we can only guess at the motivations which might have led to these conclusions. One might, however, suspect that there were political issues to be taken into consideration. Let us quickly review the history of Cuba and Hispaniola. Following the discovery of the Bahamas in 1492, Columbus and his crewmen enquired among the indigenous peoples where they might obtain gold in great quantities. With a finger pointing southwards, they said `Cuba’, which thus became Columbus’ next destination. On reaching the island’s north-east coast the Admiral tried to imagine where he might be. Thinking that they had made landfall on the coast of either Cathay (China) or Cipango (Japan), he sent out an envoy with a letter of introduction to the Great Khan, signed by the sovereigns of Castille and Aragon. When this advance party failed to find any evidence of either the Great Khan or any cities of gold, Columbus lost interest in Cuba. The natives there directed him to another island known as Bohio. This turned out to be Espanola, modern Hispaniola, where he went on to establish La Navidad, the first city of the New World. This, however, was destroyed and replaced by the city of San Domingo which went on to become the administrative centre of the Spanish Caribbean. Despite further explorations by Columbus along its extensive coastline, Cuba was not colonised until 1511. It was the maniacal Spaniard Diego Velasquez who undertook this mission which ended with the decimation of almost the entire population of the island. Yet before his death in 1521, the conquistador had founded the so-called `seven cities’, or `seven villas’, echoing the Seven Cities which Portuguese legend asserted had existed on the island of Antilia. Despite fierce battles with the French, the English and Dutch buccaneers the Greater Antilles remained under Spanish rule for over 200 years. Then in 1697 France was granted sovereignty over the western half of Hispaniola, which subsequently became the republic of Haiti; the eastern half, known as San Domingo, remained under Spanish rule. France was granted the right of sovereignty over the entire island in 1785, although it took until 1801 for the last Spanish inhabitants to depart, due mainly to the concerted efforts of a former black slave and voodoo priest named Toussaint l’Ouverture. The French gave Haiti its independence, although this lasted only until 1806 when Spain reclaimed the eastern half of the island previously under French control. Then in 1821, during the Spanish-American revolution, San Domingo seized the opportunity to claim independence, establishing a republic under the wing of Colombia. Afterwards the island’s two republics united themselves under one single name, Haiti, although this unity was broken in 1843. The following year San Domingo proclaimed itself the republic of Dominican. Despite Spain briefly reclaiming San Domingo between 1861 and 1865, the two countries have remained separate to this day. We can see from this brief history of Hispaniola that political motives might well have influenced peoples’ decisions on where they might have wanted to locate Plato’s Atlantis. For instance, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English believed that North America was Atlantis, due mainly to the fact that most of it belonged to them. On the other hand, the Portuguese believed, initially at least, that Antilia, the medieval form of Atlantis, was the Azores, perhaps because they claimed sovereignty over the island group. There was no way that an anti-Spanish nation could concede that Plato’s lost island empire, which was thought to express the utopic ideals of a former golden age, lay in Spanish territories. Since Cabrera drew extensively from the work of French exegete and scholar Augustin Calmet, the chances are that his choice of Hispaniola as the location of Atlantis was influenced by France’s sovereignty of the island.(16) Yet having set a precedent for associating Hispaniola with Atlantis, this same opinion would seem to have persisted throughout the nineteenth century. It might well explain why the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg believed that Hispaniola was the surviving portion of an Atlantean continent, which once extended out towards the African continent, and why in 1885 Hyde Clarke concluded that `the head seat of the great king [of Atlantis] was possibly in the Caribbean Sea; it may be in St Domingo’.(17) As a consequence of this persisting political climate Cuba would seem to have been overlooked as a possible candidate for the title of Atlantis, since it remained under Spanish sovereignty until the island’s two wars of independence at the end of the nineteenth century. Cuba was finally granted independence in 1901 on the agreement that the USA would have a hand in running its affairs. This was the state of play when in the late 1950s Fidel Castro’s communist movement gradually seized control of the country and ousted the pro-American Battista government. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when President Kennedy demanded that the Russians withdraw nuclear warheads from Cuban soil, Castro’s poverty-hit country has been shunned by western powers, its only ally being the Soviet Union. Trade embargoes, diplomatic isolation and a concerted propaganda campaign has kept Cuba out in the cold until recent years. Who would want to find Plato’s utopic realm in a dull, grey communist country? Even Antarctica seemed a better option than Cuba. Now that the political climate is gradually changing for Cuba, we can see why the island becomes a primary candidate for the title of Atlantis. Underwater ruins have been noted occasionally in its coastal waters - one report even coming from Leicester Hemingway, the brother of the great American writer Ernest Hemingway. Furthermore, out-of-place artefacts and early sites of uncertain origin have been located here, while in 1857 the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg asserted that: ‘Modern travellers assure that they have seen sculpted rocks and ruined buildings around Havana indicating the presence of ancient civilised populations on this Island’.(18) I have argued that Cuba was most probably the ancient homeland of the ruling elite and earliest ancestors of the various Mesoamerican tribal cultures. It can also be identified as Antilia, the Island of the Seven Cities, one of the Hesperides and, most important of all, the flagship of the Atlantean island empire. This is not to say that Hispaniola did not have a role to play in the construction of the Atlantis legend, since it would seem to have been one of the islands which formed part of Plato’s Atlantean `empire’. It is even possible that some aspect of its topography found its way into the writings of Plato. However, the Atlantic island with a fertile southerly plain protected from cold northerly winds by mountains as described by Plato in the Critias is, in my opinion, Cuba. Moreover, the seven-fold division of the Atlantean city focused around a cave of emergence set within a mountain which was `nowhere of any great height’ is, I believe, a variation of the Seven Caves tradition. This mythical location I have identified as Cueva # 1, the prehistoric `Sistine Chapel’ at Punta del Este on Cuba’s Isle of Youth. Before the sea-level rose at the end of the last Ice Age, Cuba’s great western plain extended all the way to the Isle of Youth. Yet just as Plato describes, it was drowned beneath the waves following `earthquakes and floods’ of the sort proposed in connection with the Carolina Bays cometary impact of the ninth millennium BC (see GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS). If Cabrera was right to conclude that Septimania was an Atlantic island visited by Hercules of Gades during his global circumnavigation, as well as both Atlantis and Valum Votan, it would seem that some knowledge of the island’s seven-fold symbolism really was carried back to the ancient world by Iberian Phoenicians. It is my supposition that this was equally so among their trading rivals and successors the Carthaginians of North Africa. Through the Moors these abstract ideas resurfaced in medieval Europe as the Island of the Seven Cities, or Antilia, which is simply another name for Atlantis. Cabrera’s work is important in that it provides us with further evidence of transatlantic voyages in ancient times and confirmation of the true location of Atlantis. Moreover, it shows us that the theories outlined in GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS are nothing new. They have been around for at least 200 years, and possibly much longer still. The answers, it seems, remain the same; it is just the nature of the evidence that changes with time. Notes and References
Michael Baigent informs me with reference to Dom Calmet: `… he had, or at least was reputed to have, a very odd link with Templar residues (See our THE TEMPLE AND THE LODGE, p.166f in the hardback - just after the beginning of Chapter 11). He had close links with the Scottish exiles in Paris, many of whom were Freemasons of a very ancient and arguably, very curious, type. He was reputed to have received a genuine Templar Cross from a Scottish Noble who was a Master of a clandestine surviving Templar group. He may also have received some information which made him interested in voyages across the Atlantic. This is very speculative but not so much so to disregard it. We [he and Richard Leigh] provide some data which justifies at least, filing it away as plausible. More detailed notes and references are to be found in the author’s book GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS. Bibliography Baigent, Michael, The Temple and the Lodge, Jonathan Cape, London, 1988. Brasseur de Bourbourg, l’Abbe, Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l’Amérique-centrale, durant les siécles antérieurs a Christophe Colomb, Libraire de la Société de Géographie, Paris, vol. 1, 1857 Clarke, Hyde, Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference Protohistoric Communication with America, June 1885, Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1886. Collins, Andrew, Gateway to Atlantis, Headline, London, 2000. Diodorus Siculus, Library, trans. C. H. Oldfather, 10 vols., Wm Heinemann, London/Harvard UP., Cambridge, Mass., 1935 Hill, Robert T., Cuba and Puerto Rico with the Other Islands of the West Indies, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1898 Río, Antonio del. Descriptions of the ruins of an ancient city, discovered near Palenque, in the kingdom of Guatemala, in Spanish America: Translated from the original manuscript report of Captain Don Antonio del Rio: Followed by Dr Paul Felix Cabrera, Teatro Critico Americano; or, A Critical Investigation and Research into the History of the Americans, Henry Berthoud, and Suttaby, Evance and Fox, London,1822. Spedicato, Emilio, `Apollo Objects, Atlantis and other Tales: A Catastrophical Scenario for Discontinuities in Human History'. The first revised edition was published in Journal of New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA), vol. 26, 1991, pp. 1-14 and also Kadath, vol. 84, 1995, pp. 29-55. It can also be found at http://www.unibg.it/maths/dynamics/apollo.html
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