Turning The Templar Key - Part 1: The True Origin of Freemasonry by Lomas Robert

Author:Lomas, Robert [Lomas, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: QCS eBooks
Published: 2012-02-23T21:00:00+00:00

Viking America

It was another fifteen years before Leif, Erik the Red’s eldest son, made his first landings in the New World. The Greenland Saga (Grœnlendinga Saga) tells how hard it was to set up a functioning colony in Greenland, with few ships to carry materials from Europe to support the colonists. It is hardly surprising that it was not until the Greenland colony was stable and able to feed itself that the Greenlanders found enough spare time to investigate his findings.[ Foote, P.G., and D.M. Wilson (1970) p xxii.] Gwyn Jones explains that Bjarni’s account was accepted, but there were simply no resources available to investigate Markland, Woodland, and Vinland, as he called them:

There was no question of them not believing him. Medieval geography favoured the notion of more land to be found beyond Greenland and, more practically, when men climbed high mountains they could see the far distant land itself or the cloud formations they associated with land.

[Jones (2001) p. 298.]

The implication of these facts is that Norse sailors were exploring the lightly populated coasts of North America with a view to colonization about a hundred years before Christian Europe came up with the idea of Holy Violence as a way to justify colonizing the heavily populated Holy Land. This does rather negate the idea that Columbus discovered America in 1492. But exactly where did the Vikings get to? It was an Icelander, Thorfinn Karlsefni, who set up the first trading colony on Vinland in the early years of the eleventh century. Gwyn Jones says:

While there is general agreement that the Norsemen reached North America, agreement does not extend to how far south they reached. An increasing weight of opinion has now settled for southern Baffin Island as Helluland, Labrador south of Nain as Markland, but Vinland, Wineland, where the voyagers are said to have found grapes and wheat growing wild, is a different story. The St Lawrence Estuary, Baie de Chaleur, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, New England, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Long Island Sound, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida have been argued for with acumen and eloquence . . . Maybe it was as a result of far-ranging voyages . . . that tales of grape-clusters, self-sown wheat, and kindly winters enriched the Norse tradition of Vinland; maybe longer voyages and later travellers blurred the outlines of Leif’s landing and Karlsefni’s settlement . . . Bishop Eirik sailed there in a year variously stated to be 1112, 1113, 1117, and, most probably, 1121, with what result we do not know. As late as the middle of the fourteenth century men were still sailing there, presumably to fetch timber and furs. The Icelandic Annals record that in the year 1347 a ship with seventeen or eighteen Greenlanders on board was storm-driven to Iceland as they sought to return to their own country from Markland. But after that there was silence.

[Jones (2001) p. 299.]

Jared Diamond agrees with this, and goes further:

The coast of northeastern North America . . . lies thousands of miles from Norway .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.