3.3—The Evidences (8 min video)

Transcript

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Welcome back. We looked yesterday at the various myths about the various explorers who might have actually made it over here to this area of the Americas prior to Columbus.

And today, we’re going to take a look at the evidences that actually support that these people might have actually been here, or that somebody left their footprint, so to speak, in this region of the world.

Now, the first one’s very curious. was actually discovered in the last century in West Virginia in a place called Wyoming County. And it’s a carving that’s on a rock, which may not sound all that interesting, but what’s interesting about this carving is it’s written in ancient Irish language. And not only that, but the carving has a special notch that has been carved out of it. And let me read to you what the actual translation of this says. This is what translated in English the carving actually says. At the time of sunrise, a ray grazes the notch on the left side on Christmas Day, a feast day at the church, the first season of the Christian year, the season of the blessed advent of the Savior Lord Christ, Salvatores Domini Christi, behold, he is born of Mary, a woman.

In other words, it’s a special carving written in this ancient Irish dialect, which they’ve dated back to the sixth century, around the time of Brendan, and it’s written in a dialect no one really speaks anymore and the light comes through and that knot was created in such a way that it creates this starburst and only on Christmas day.

So whoever carved this only knew that language and carved it a long time ago, but whoever carved this also had an incredible knowledge of astronomy, which is something you need to navigate here in the first place.

We also have other curious evidences that we found that we don’t exactly have ready explanations for. Both of these are actually from Tennessee. The first one is there’s another carving. It’s a place called Back Creek, Tennessee. They found written in Hebrew something called a comet for the Jews, which refers back to the star given to the magi to guide them over to Bethlehem when Christ was first born.

If that’s not enough, a mysterious Roman coin, along with some scraps of leather, was found at the Elk River in southern Tennessee several years back.

And they’ve dated this coin. and they think it was probably made somewhere in Britannia, when Rome still ruled over that part of the world, and that it was brought over here sometime around maybe the fifth or sixth century BC, sometime roughly around the time of Brendan.

And so we have these interesting evidences that suggest that perhaps the Irish were actually here when all the stories say that they were here.

In terms of Madoch of Wales, who is a very curious character himself, we talked about his story, how he fled from so many of his brothers wanted to actually pursue the gospel of grace and cross the open seas to do so.

Manic of Wales is interesting as well because throughout the southeast in places like Georgia, in places like Tennessee, in places like Alabama, there are these mysterious fortresses that have been left behind.

These foundations to what looks to be like an old castle or looks to be some kind of old citadel. And what’s interesting is that the natives in this area often said, “Well, we didn’t build these.” In fact, the people who built these were called the Moon-Eyed People. What’s also curious is that many of these fortresses, when you look at their layout and you actually map them out, they actually line up to the castle back home in Wales that Maedoc was born in.

And so it’s quite possible that when Maedoc came here, he actually built fortresses with he and his followers, and they left behind those clues for us centuries later.

Not only that, but it’s very curious too when you look at the Cherokee. The Cherokee referred to who built those fortresses. In fact, their chief, Okonostotah, who we’ll talk about later this year, actually referred to a man by the name of Madoc, who was a chief, as he called him, who founded those fortresses.

All this led to a man by the name of George Catlin. He was a painter. He was an illustrator. And in the 1800s, George Catlin decided that he would travel west and he would actually see if he could find out some solutions to this whole mystery of Madoc.

And so George Catlin went and he found a group of a tribe of natives called the Mandan tribe, which you might recognize because Lewis and Clark had encounters with them as well.

And Catlin interviewed all of these different Mandan natives. He asked them things like what their name was, he asked them to tell a little bit about their background and so forth, and he found a few curious things.

For one, he discovered that several of them had fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, which are common features of some of the Welsh people.

He also found that several of them had the name Maidoc, or a variation of the name Maidoc. And if that wasn’t curious enough, they built a strange little boat, which we would probably call a coracle, and they built it by taking various twigs or various long sturdy branches, bending them in hot water, making a frame, and then covering the whole thing with a buffalo hide.

You might have seen that in a museum, or you might see something like this, because Lewis and Clark also reported about these things. But what George Kalin found very curious was that the same type of boat structure, or the same type of coracle, as those are properly called, are also built by the Welsh.

And so he took that to be evidence that the Welsh probably were indeed over here long before Columbus. Before we move on to the next people group and some of the evidences, I’ll mention one more thing about the Welsh. This is another kind of curious legend. We have very little to go off with this legend, but there are tales told by some of the people who knew Christopher Columbus that he had a map he was working from when he first sailed over here in 1492.

Now we don’t know entirely certain if this is true, but some of the tales say that in the sea that we call the Gulf of Mexico, that Columbus had that labeled, and probably would have been in Latin, or some ancient language.

But they say that that labeling said, here be Welsh waters. And so whether or not all this is true, it’s hard to say. But you have to remember, history is not a science. History is really an art. And it’s not so much, did this actually happen this way that we’re interested in? It’s really, why did this happen? What drove these men? What about these men can we imitate and what can we learn from? Finally, we have the Vikings. And out of all of the peoples I’ve mentioned in this video, the Vikings are the ones who have the most evidence about them. After all, if you look or research what you can find throughout eastern Canada, or what you can find as far south as places like Maine, or on the islands of Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, there have been recorded and reported many archeological digs where they have found foundations to old Viking towns or foundations to old Viking churches.

‘Cause you remember, they built 14 churches that we know of over here in the New World. They also, of course, left behind the things that they would have used on a daily basis, things like pottery, things like remainders of tools or furniture or coins.

And so we’ve uncovered lots of this over the centuries. In fact, one of the most interesting things we ever found was in 1982, they discovered in shallow waters. Why it hadn’t been discovered before, it’s hard to say, but they discovered in shallow waters off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. They found pretty much an intact Viking Drakkar. That’s one of those Viking ships you sometimes see with a dragon head on it, only this one was in such good shape that it still had some of the paint left on it.

So we have lots of evidence that these people were over here. We have lots of evidence that there was a lot of activity over here prior to Columbus coming. So we have to keep this in mind when we interpret this history, that people came over here for centuries. And they came over here often for reasons that had nothing to do with gold and nothing to do with greed. But we’ll talk about Christopher Columbus, the most famous of these explorers, the one who we all know in our next lesson.