by Dave Franklin

Created on: January 05, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

On the wind-blasted shore of Hudson Bay in Canada there stand some ancient ruins, ruins that, by their own admission, were not made by the indigenous Inuit people. Carbon dating techniques have revealed that the structures pre-date the Viking settlements of the region and as such pose a question mark as to who was actually active in here in a period that equates to the dark ages of Europe. We are now, thankfully, living in a time when many of the old notions of exploration and cultural contact are being toppled. We all know that Columbus was not the first person to explore the Americas, just the best remembered and now it seems that the route taken by Viking explorers nearly one thousand years ago may be based on known sea passages taken by earlier adventurers. The question is which adventurers? The history of contact between the Americas and the Old World is a fascinating one, St Brendan's story of crossing the Atlantic in leather sided boats, Templar fleets escaping persecution, Saxon cod fisherman based on the Canadian shore and ancient Phoenician galleys wrecked on the Brazilian coast all add to the mythology. Those are all subjects that will have to be found elsewhere in books by the likes of Ian Wilson and Thor Heyerdahl, here however author Farley Mowat is on a more specific quest.

The seeds for this quest began many years after being puzzled by the remains on that northern coast line when Mowat found himself on another northern coast viewing remains that were so similar they had to have some cultural connection with is earlier findings. This time he was in Scotland. The obvious question loomed large, was there a race of people now lost to our memory that left roots in both these places. With that the gauntlet is laid down and the whole raison d`etre of the book is summed up. The opening statement of the book comes in the form of a confession. Many years previously Mowat wrote a book called "Westviking - The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America" which supported the then current ideas that the Norse were the first Europeans to cross to the New World. Any good researcher will adapt their ideas and theories in light of new information and the fact that Mowat has written a book that by design supersedes his previous work, speaks volumes for the fact that he has the right attitude, to many authors these days are overly precious about their work. Academic research is by its very nature a fluid and malleable science and Mowat understands this only too

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>