Ever since the dredging work by George Washington’s recovery company, reports of the Chinese junk in the Great Dismal Swamp have surfaced occasionally. However, evidence has remained elusive, among other reasons because the area was used during World War II as a practice site for air force bombing runs. Although a great deal of work throughout the years had gone into making the various canals in the swamp navigable, including their widening and the addition of several stone locks, as far as we know the wreck was not seen again until 1939. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had purchased George Washington’s company for strategic reasons and built a canal linking the Great Dismal Swamp and Norfolk with Albemarle Sound, where the Roanoke enters the sea.
The Corps of Engineers kept detailed records of its work at the swamp. To date we have found the Annual Report of Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army for 1928, 1933, and 1943. These summarize the dredging and canal clearance, not least budgets and expenditure. The bulk of the expedition was in 1929 and 1932, and in the southern Elizabeth River rather than in the Great Dismal Swamp canal itself. While clearing the waterway they found the Chinese junk, which was obstructing the canal. They had to cut part of its hull to leave a navigable channel. The engineers’ records do not say which waterway was being cleared nor do they give the position of the junk.
The next steps will be to locate the records of 1929 and 1932, the Corps of Engineers “Inland Waterway” wreck charts, and to search the Norfolk Maritime Museum’s records and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Museum’s records.
This fascinating story was also recounted in Coronet magazine in January 1945:
When the government took over the Swamp and dredged some of the ditches, strange looking hulks of ships were found sunk in their marshes. One, a large Chinese craft, had to be cut through. Sunk in her quagmires are the skeletons of other ships that now belong to the ages—all bearing silent testimony that Old Dismal’s rule stretches far down the corridors of time. . . .
The wreck was discovered yet again, on a third occasion, in 1943, when a fighter bomber took off from Norfolk Naval Base but developed engine trouble and crash-landed into the swamp. The U.S. Navy searched for the crash site and in doing so came across the junk. This information came to us from a family member of the navigator of the bomber.
Narrowing down the search to where we believe the search party for the missing bomber would have been, we can see that the runway from the Norfolk Naval Base is aligned 100/280 degrees. We therefore searched the Great Dismal Swamp along a 280-degree line from the runway, especially where it crossed channels. We found twenty-one wrecks but none appeared to be Chinese, even though some were very old. Besides exploring the area, we have also sought advice from local residents, historians, and farmers. To date nothing has materialized, but we are always hoping for the elusive phone call.
The 1418 map leaves no doubt that the river shown is the Roanoke and therefore that a junk sailed up river from Albemarle Sound. Some twenty miles from the sea, the Roanoke splits in two, the larger stream snaking off due north—it is called the Nottoway River. This river skirts the western edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. A friend of the 1421 website, Richard Perkins, was brought up 120 miles up this river near the town of Jarrat. He recalls:
The place where I was raised was the uppermost navigable limits of the Nottoway River. . . . There has always been a story told around here that when the first white settlers (explorers came through the area) they met “white” people who were unknown to the English settlement in Jamestown and that these people were living in an established settlement in stone houses. . . . I do remember seeing the foundation walls. . . . Also I know of several locals who were in possession of blue and white porcelain fragments which were found in this area as well as one person who many years ago found a strange sword buried in the field for hiding. I have seen this sword once . . . it was dark colored but not rusted as one would have expected. . . .
Chinese junks could have sailed up the Nottoway past the western edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, where one was wrecked in a location that is bearing 280 degrees from Norfolk Naval Base. The plane that crashed was airborne for around seven minutes before engine trouble forced it down. So we should be looking in the Nottoway River near Winton for both the junk and the crashed bomber.
It seemed that the Nottoway was drawing us closer to our goal. We had read several accounts of Europeans arriving in the area to find Chinese settlements already there. The real clincher was provided in October 2004 by a reader of our website, Alec Loker. Loker referred us to the records of the seventeenth-century English explorer Lieutenant Marmaduke Parkinson, one of the first Europeans to explore North Carolina. The records of the Virginia Company of London describe his journey. He traveled north from Jamestown, toward the Potomac River. The records describe Parkinson and others visiting one of Chief Powhatan’s houses, where they saw a “China boxe.” On being asked how the box came into his possession, Powhatan “made answer that it was sent him from a King that dwelt in the West over the great hills [the Appalachians] some ten days journey whose country is near a great sea, he having the boxe, from a people as he said that came hither in ships, that were clothes, crooked swords and somewhat like our men and were called Acamack-China. . . .”
Powhatan’s brother then offered to take Parkinson’s group from their current location, Henrico, near the modern city of Richmond, Virginia, to visit this [Chinese] king, 150 miles west to the ridge of hills running south and north [the Appalachians]. “The discovery whenst will bring forth a most rich trade to Cathay, China, Japan and those other of the East Indies to the inestimable benefit of this kingdom. . . .”
The possibility of this mysterious settlement warrants more study, of course.
The main hurdle to tracking down present-day leads is modern development. More often than not, where once an old stone foundation stood, there now stands a school or shopping mall. Concrete evidence has often been lost to time. Sometimes, however, we can find remarkable evidence that has withstood development and discovery. This was the case of the settlement of Nova Cataia, sheltered away for ages on Cape Breton Island, part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
CHAPTER 15
Nova Cataia: The Island of Seven Cities
Important leads and angles in our research often have come to us thanks to dissemination and broad international interest in our books. We also benefit from leads provided by visitors to our website, along with meetings with like-minded researchers at the many conferences we have attended around the world. One such opportunity led to the examination of the northernmost ancient Chinese oceangoing outpost we have seen, a site remote enough that it has resisted discovery, analysis, and modern development. We have named it Nova Cataia, obviously a Chinese settlement of immense importance to our understanding of the discovery of the Americas.
The information came to us in December 2004 from Paul Chiasson, a distinguished Canadian architect. Chiasson spent his childhood on Cape Breton Island, on the far eastern coast of North America, to the north of the Nova Scotia peninsula. As a child he often explored the abundant wilderness of the island, and grew to learn about its inhabitants’ history and folklore.
The local Native American tribe, the Mi’kmaq, established a cultured and civilized community. The first Europeans that encountered the Mi’kmaq reported that tribal members knew how to write on bark paper. In fact, the Mi’kmaq were the only indigenous people of North America who could write, and they also were well versed in the arts of astronomy and astro-navigation.
Mi’kmaq tradition has it that they were educated by a great god who had sailed across the ocean in huge ships with trees on their decks. The great lord was called Kluscap. Then, before the first wave of European explorers arrived, the visitors sailed away home, as quickly as they had arrived. In their wake they left remnants of their civilization—a stone city up on a steep escarpment overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Chiasson always recalled this as nothing more than a local fable, but about fifteen years ago he decided to explore it fully. He followed a well-built road lined by the remains of what appear to be stone walls that twisted up onto the side of a mountain from the desolate shore. At the summit, surrounded by the Atlantic on three sides, Chiasson came across the ruins of a deserted city.
Over the course of several years he researched the site, both up on the cold windy hills, and in libraries back at his home in Toronto. In 2004 he had collated sufficient information to give him the confidence to publish his research and announce it, alongside members of the 1421 team, at the Library of Congress’s International Zheng He Symposium. His book, The Island of Seven Cities, was published in May 2006.
One of the first indicators of the site being Chinese were the ruins of a two-mile-long wall that surrounds the city. It originally had a stone base and was about fifteen feet wide and the same height—two-thirds of the corresponding dimensions of the Great Wall of China, and the same size as the Great Wall of Vietnam, which was built by Zheng He. Construction methods employed here included a rammed-earth base, also the same as those of the Great Wall of China.
The town could be accessed via a gate facing north—easily identifiable when Chiasson conducted an aerial inspection and took photos of the site. The ruins consist of a series of stone platforms, each situated in a commanding position, as the town slopes down to a river on its northern side. It is clearly a Chinese ruin; it is quite different in layout from Roman, Arabic, or European towns. It is about twice the size of Machu Picchu and a third the size of Roman London. Radiating from stone roads were outlying villages, again laid out by the rules of Chinese town planning. The roads are lined by stone walls with a total length of more than five miles.
Chiasson’s first question was to figure out why the Chinese should settle on an incredibly remote and seemingly barren land off Nova Scotia. “Nova Cataia,” as we shall call the site, happens to sit at the northern edge of the huge Emery seam of the Sydney, Nova Scotia, coalfield, the “Newcastle” of America. Coal was a prerequisite for driving China’s industrial efforts and a highly prized commodity. Furthermore, the settlement was at the center of some of the richest mineral mines in the world. Prospectors would have hit the jackpot, with an abundance of gold, iron, zinc, lead, copper, cobalt, potassium, sodium, zircon, and topaz. Gold mines were found around the Bras d’Or Lake (the site controls entrance to the lake and its name means “arm of gold”). Gold is also found up and down the local coast. The site is ideally placed to exploit sea salt, gypsum, lead, zinc, antimony, manganese, and iron from the Kemptville seams in Yarmouth in the south and from the Clyborn valley goldfields in the north. All of these were within easy sailing distance from the settlement.
Cedric Bell, our compatriot, discovered ore, smelters, carbonized fuel, ore crushers, and a harbor with docks that had been built centuries before at the foot of the Chinese town, which today is called St. Peter’s. As far as we are aware, Cedric Bell was the first to discover this harbor (in 2005). Bell, who has worked with us for some time, is a chartered engineer and member of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science, and Technology.
According to Joseph Needham’s seminal work, Science and Civilization in China, the Chinese have been crushing, separating, and smelting ores since the Han dynasty (220 B.C.). Nova Scotia’s mining history includes the production of gypsum, anhydrite, salt, aggregate, barite, coal, gold, copper, lead, zinc, tin, antimony, and manganese. The East Kemptville Tin Mine has thirty-six minerals, including apatite (phosphorus), beryl (beryllium and emeralds), biotite (mica), bismuthinite (treating ulcers), lead, tin, antimony, fluorite (pottery glazes), galena (silver), pyrite (iron), dolomite (marble), copper, and quartz.1
For a relatively industrialized country such as China in the mid-fifteenth century, the wealth of the land would have been seen as a veritable treasure trove. From the abundant ores they could have made cast and wrought iron, steel, bronze, pewter, mortar, and a variety of glazes, paints, and medicines. The position of the settlement was ideal for a people who came to exploit the natural resources.
Below the ruined city lies one of the finest harbors in North America, around which a variety of trees grow—especially hardwood and pine required for ship repairs. The harbor is enclosed by a deep narrow channel that can be protected by cannon mounted on the headland on which the settlement stands. Similarly, the settlement is situated above another narrow channel to the east. This channel leads to a large inland lake rich in fish. Later this lake became a French center for collecting gypsum, coal, and furs.
The plateau in which the Bras d’Or sits is in effect a huge sponge. Rivers flow from the plateau to the sea, providing fresh water and the means to use locks to raise barges from sea to plateau (as in the Panama Canal); there is power for turbines to crush ore and fire smelters, water for paddy fields, and separate streams to carry sewage and effluent to the sea.
The surrounding sea, not least the Grand Banks, is the richest fishing ground in the world, where the cold winds of the Labrador Current meet the warm Gulf Stream. Walruses and whales, rich in fat and vitamins, congregate off the peninsula. All manner of crustaceans are abundant. Back on land, moose and elk and fat partridges are there for the taking. Wild berries are everywhere.
How would the settlers have arrived there in the first place?
A junk passing the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa would be carried by wind and tide to Nova Scotia via West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America’s Eastern Seaboard. From there the Gulf Stream would carry the junk to Europe and back in a circle to the Cape Verde Islands, thence to South America and home to China via the easterly winds in the southern oceans, the “Roaring Forties.” Cape Breton Island is in a pivotal position, and for that reason it became the focal point for early European exploration of North America.
EARLY EUROPEAN ACCOUNTS OF THE CITY
One of Chiasson’s first lines of inquiry was whether the city was documented in European records of the time. He found several descriptions, but then all activity seemed to suddenly stop, around 1558. Nicolo Zeno (c. 1499) tells the story of a group of fishermen who sailed to Labrador then south along the eastern coast of Canada. On reaching Nova Scotia he discovered “a fair and populous city,” where the king sent for interpreters to translate books in his library. Zeno says that the people of that city “in the past had commerce with our people” (that is, with Venice).2
Later, Miguel and Gaspar Corte Real (1501) brought back slaves from Nova Scotia to Portugal. We are told that one of the slaves wore “Venetian silver ear rings,” and another possessed a gilt sword. John Cabot (1497) reported on his return that he had found “the land of the Great Khan.” João Álvares Fagundes describes St. Ann’s Bay, which the site overlooks: “in a beautiful bay [were] many people and goods of much value.” Jean Alfonse, Jacques Cartier’s navigator (1535–36), sailed from Quebec down the St. Lawrence and across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Breton Island, which he described as “a large island once populated by people.” Alfonse further describes it as “Tartarie.”3
Accounts by Venetian, Spanish, Genoese, French, Portuguese, and English explorers describe Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, as having a fair and populous city (which they never saw) with a good library, where the principal harbor sold goods of great value. Yet the site has never appeared on any maps at any time and remained, until Paul Chiasson’s discovery, unknown. When the first European arrived they found no one but Mi’kmaqs. The Chinese had gone.
Accounts from 1558 and onward make no further mention of the settlement, although the headland on which it stands is depicted on maps without any sign of habitation or human activity. So it appears that sometime between 1536 (when it was last mentioned) and 1558 the settlement ceased to exist. Mi’kmaq legends say Kluscap prophesied the coming of the Europeans and sailed away with his family to his home on “the other side of the North Pole.” Today the bay is deserted—the city abando
ned.
LAYOUT OF THE CITY
Chiasson’s experience as an architect was to prove vital in examining the layout of the site and the provenance of those who designed it. The site did not appear to be of European origin—the layout seemed to be entirely different to contemporary European cities. There was a significant lack of streets, village green, guildhall, or church. Also, most early European settlements in North America were built on the coast or beside rivers—never on mountain plateaus. Nor did it seem to be an Arab site. Arab cities radiate outward from a central mosque, formed almost like a spiderweb.
Chiasson’s research led him to contend that the layout of the ruined city was Chinese, with a wall of “standard” Chinese construction. Typical layout was based around a series of courtyards, with houses coming off them. The foundations were of classic Chinese construction, facing south, with rooms leading off a central courtyard. Roads linking the city and outlying villages are dual carriageways of typical Chinese measurements, built in stone.
The villages are built on level high ground, with uninterrupted views over St. Ann’s Bay. The villages command access to streams that flow north, south, and west down from the plateau of Cape Breton. In short, they are in a fine defensive position where one could observe ships entering and leaving St. Ann’s Harbor and, possibly, bombard them. It seems arguable, therefore, that the villages are in fact a garrison with barrack blocks and stables. An army besieging the city would need to command the plateau on which the villages stand; it would have to land its troops from St. Ann’s Bay, but that means being vulnerable to bombardment by troops on the plateau. So whoever commanded the plateau commanded the settlement.
Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777) Page 18