Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea

by Lionel

  Odysseus was clearly setting out for Ithaca in what he’d intended to be a southwesterly direction when the storm hit him and drove him badly off course. He reached the coast of North Africa and encountered the Lotus-Eaters and the Cyclops there. The islands of Jerba and Kerkenna are strong candidates for real places either visited, or approached very closely, during Odysseus’ journey home from Troy.

  Meester, among other researchers, considers the view that in the original shorter version of the story, Odysseus was still in command of ten or twelve ships and several hundred sailors and warriors when he left the North African coast.

  Was the island of the god of the winds, who was friendly and helpful to them, really Malta, or Pantelleria in the Sicilian Channel? Pantelleria is certainly closer to the coast of Africa than to the coast of Italy. In either case, Odysseus and his men were well received and helped there — and were not far from Ithaca and Kefallinia.

  Leaving out the romantic embroidery about being disguised as a beggar, not being recognized, and then almost single-handedly killing all the evil suitors who were pestering Penelope, the original version might well have ended when Odysseus, at the head of nearly one thousand loyal, battle-hardened warriors, turned up like the Seventh Cavalry and massacred the suitors along with any household traitors who’d been collaborating with them.

  A number of thoughtful researchers have considered the idea that Homer (or the co-operative that wrote under his name) had got hold of another adventure story about a Mediterranean merchant who had sailed to Cornwall to buy tin and got badly blown off course by a storm. The two stories, according to this theory, were then welded together to form the long, popular version of Odysseus’s return from Troy to Ithaca.

  In this second part of the adventure, Odysseus has only one ship with a small crew, and is later totally alone. He goes to Telepylus, where there is a narrow bay with high, steep cliffs on each side. Timmerman, a Dutch translator of Homer, suggested that this was an acceptable description of a Scandinavian fiord. Could Telepylus have been a Greek form of Telemark in Norway? Place names can often provide useful signals to historians. The inclusion of By, Thorpe, or Toft in the name of any East Anglian town or village in the U.K. is a strong indication that it was once a Scandinavian settlement. The authors’ own East Anglian surname, Fanthorpe, suggests Viking genes from the remote past. Over a century ago, Théophile Cailleux wrote Poesies D’Homere: Faites en Iberie et Decrivant non la Mediterranee mais L’Atlantique Theorie Nouvelle — which translates broadly as his new theory that Homer’s poetry describes adventures in the Atlantic, not in the Mediterranean. Iman Wilkens said much the same thing in Where Troy Once Stood. Wilkens argues that Troy was actually in England and Mycenae was across the Channel in France. His theory is based on geography, archaeology, and place names, which he claims are more likely to be Celtic than Greek or Turkish. The point is also made that when Schliemann excavated Troy, the walls were not big enough to encircle a city of fifty thousand people, which was the population credited to it.

  Another factor that favours Europe rather than Asia Minor in Wilkens’s argument is the number of rivers and waterways in the landscape near Troy. Iman reckons that these are more likely to be European than part of Asia Minor. In fact, the fourteen rivers mentioned as being near Troy are, according to Wilkens, near Cambridge in England. He presses the point further: when Troy (Cambridge?) was destroyed, the survivors founded a new city on a great river not very far away. According to Wilkens’s theory, that new city was London! He argues that the Celts referred to it as Caer Troia, and the Romans called it Londinium Troia Nova. As for the River Temese, surely, argues Wilkens, that has to be the River Thames.

  Wilkens’s theory begins as something so wild and way out that it has an almost fantastic, dream-like quality — but it’s full of remarkably clear, sensible, and well-written arguments that leave the open-minded student of prehistory admiring the writer and seriously re-examining all previous ideas about the travels of Odysseus.

  What if Homer (or a member of the Homeric team), visiting Spain, heard the story from one of the Phaeaceans living in the Gibraltar area and then Hellenized the adventure to meet the expectations of a Greek audience?

  Imagine that the second part — the Odysseus-fighting-on-alone part — started with the trip to Cornwall to obtain tin, and then went northwest to Ireland. The Bay of Shannon in Ireland has almost everything needed to match the Homeric description — and it’s even better than a Scandinavian fiord in some ways. Looking carefully at place names again, Homer’s Limus with an Irish ick suffix becomes Limerick, which is right at the end of the Bay of Shannon. In the original Irish Gaelic language Limerick is Luimneach, which is also close to Homer’s Limus. Tipperary is only a few miles east of Limerick, and again, the place name analysis comes close to the Homeric Telepylus.

  Leaving Ireland, our hero (the Greek Odysseus, King of Ithaca, or the anonymous, adventurous tin merchant) sails north as far as Scotland, then east to the Orkney island of Hoy. The Greeks undoubtedly knew about the Orkneys by the time Pytheas the explorer returned from his voyage there in the fourth century BC.

  Pytheas was brought to public attention in the U.K. in 1893, when Sir Clement Markham, then a noted historian, published an article about him. Pytheas came from the Greek colony of Massalia, known in our own century as Marseilles. He explored Britain thoroughly, and then tried to sail north as far as he could. He described encountering a sea of slush, fog, and ice that prevented any further progress, and reluctantly turned back. There is no knowing quite how far north he managed to go: that’s yet another of the sea’s unsolved mysteries.

  In the sixth century BC, Pythagoras had already recorded his firm belief that both the planet Earth and the universe we occupy are spherical. Babylonian astronomers had reached similar conclusions before Pythagoras did. Pytheas would have been well aware of their ideas, and, as an educated man, would have shared them. Ostensibly, his business instincts would have taken him in search of tin, which the Bronze Age Greeks valued highly and referred to as kassiteros. The U.K. was known to them as the Kasiterides Islands because it was the source of their vitally important kassiteros. The Phoenician sailors and merchants also knew it well. But over and above his mercantile purposes, Pytheas had the heart and soul of a real explorer, a true seeker of new knowledge for its own sake. He had two significant advantages over other merchant adventurers who were primarily concerned with the tin trade: Pytheas was an expert astronomer and mathematician; he had also mastered the use of the strange navigational gadget called the Gnomon. This was a Phoenician instrument that worked on a shadow principle that the Greeks had acquired via Anaximander of Miletus, who lived and worked in the sixth century BC. The tireless historian Herodotus described it. Anaximander also drew a map of the world as far as it was known in his day — a great credit to him, as his map showed it to be spherical!

  Pytheas also recorded seeing “fish the size of boats which blew water into the air” while he was up to the northeast of Scotland among the Orkneys. These were almost certainly the Orkas Islands, or Islands of the Seals, which Pytheas also recorded. Whales are still seen in the area today, and must have been much more numerous when Pytheas saw them — long before the modern whaling industry reduced their numbers so drastically.

  Returning to the Odysseus-in-Scotland theory, the Orkney name Kirkwall might even be stretched to sound a bit like Circe. Was it possible — however remotely — that Circe’s island was in the Orkneys? She lived, according to Homer, in a high stone house, or tower. Elpenor suffered a fatal fall from the top of it. The Orkney broch is a tall stone tower. There are hundreds of them in the area. If it’s possible for these ancient stone towers to have been there long enough for Homer to have known about them, was Circe’s tall stone house really an Orkney broch?

  Where did our adventurous tin merchant go next after leaving the Orkneys? Some researchers who accept this Scottish theory of his travels consider that he sailed westwards again, then s
outh between England and Ireland. As far as Odysseus’ communications with the departed are concerned, there are plenty of Mesolithic and Neolithic burial mounds he might well have regarded as gateways to the underworld. And assuming that he was in that area, was beautiful Calypso’s island really the Isle of Man?

  Another tantalizing unsolved mystery of the sea that links with Pytheas and the Homeric voyage of Odysseus is the location of Ultima Thule. To the ancient Greeks and Romans, it simply meant the most remote of the northern lands — literally as far as you could travel before the ice got in your way and prevented all further movement north. It might have been Greenland, Iceland, or one of the northern islands. Going back to place names and their importance to historians, the tiny island of Foula in the Shetland group may be a reasonable candidate. F and Th sound very similar indeed — especially when the speakers and listeners have different linguistic codes as their first languages. Could Foula have been Thule? It’s not impossible.

  The unsolved sea mysteries surrounding Odysseus and the marvels he supposedly encountered on his fateful voyage home from Troy are matched by the equally intriguing sea mysteries that involved Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece. The story begins with the infant Jason being smuggled away to be reared by a wise old centaur because of various court intrigues to usurp the throne of Jason’s father, Aeson. Jason’s evil uncle, Pelias, was now in power in Iolcus, a city in Thessaly in northeastern Greece. After learning all that wise old Chiron the Centaur could teach him, Jason set out to regain his father’s kingdom.

  Greek theology almost invariably sets out to explain human sufferings, setbacks, and disasters in terms of quarrels between the gods or some offence a mortal had knowingly, or inadvertently, committed that had angered the gods. In the case of bad King Pelias, it was Hera, the wife of Zeus, who was angry with him. His sin was to have paid tributes to every god and goddess but her. In New Testament times, when Paul spoke to the Athenians he observed their altar “To the Unknown God” and used it as a basis for his sermon. It had more than likely been erected by a prudent, but superstitious, Greek worshipper who was anxious not to follow Pelias’s road to ruin.

  On his way to Iolcus, Jason assisted what seemed to be a frail old woman across a flooded river. The feeble, but surprisingly heavy, crone turned out to be the goddess Hera in disguise. In his battle with the torrent, Jason lost a sandal — a vital ingredient in a prophecy to Pelias to beware of a man with only one sandal. When Jason and Pelias met, Pelias asked what Jason would do if he was the king and someone was causing him difficulties. Jason replied that he would send the man on a quest to recover the Golden Fleece. Pelias promptly gave him the job!

  There was no shortage of volunteers to help him: Greece’s bravest, noblest, wisest, fittest, and strongest heroes flocked to join Jason’s crew. Argus, the famous craftsman and shipwright, built the Argo for him, and the elite crew, according to some accounts, included the great Greek woman athlete, Atalanta. She was the same lady who could easily have defeated Melanion in the famous race to win her hand in marriage had not the cunning Melanion thrown down three Golden Apples to distract her. This is especially interesting in view of Atalanta’s connections with Arcadia and the semi-mythical Arcadian treasure. According to some versions of her history, Atalanta was the daughter of Iasus and Clymene of Arcadia. Cutting through the romantic mythology and ornamentation of the story, a possible connection can be made between Atalanta as an adventurous Argonaut in quest of the Golden Fleece and Atalanta of Arcadia — with inside knowledge of the very ancient and mysterious Arcadian treasure. Are there links with Admiral Anson’s long voyage, the Argo’s long voyage, and the curious Arcadian Shepherd Monument in the grounds of the Ansons’ Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, U.K.? Is it even remotely possible that there’s a tenuous linguistic link between Arcadia and the Argonauts?

  Another strange mystery connected with Jason, the Argonauts, and their ship is its legendary talking prow, or figurehead. Compare this with the accusations levelled against the noble and indomitable Templar Order. The odious Philip IV of France, ironically called Philip le Belle, treacherously attacked the great Templar Order in 1307. Part of the propaganda he levelled against them was that they worshipped a magical talking head and took orders from it. The Templars, as is well known, are linked with Rennes-le-Château, and Rennes is linked with the Arcadian treasure mystery. In the famous Harrison Ford epic Raiders of the Lost Ark, the suggestion was made that the Ark of the Covenant was “a radio for talking to God.” The biblical account of one important episode in the life of the boy Samuel suggests that he heard a voice calling his name while he slept in the vicinity of the Ark in the biblical holy place known as Shiloh. Taken together, the ancient stories of talking heads, talking prows, and the voice that Samuel heard at Shiloh all suggest that there may have been some sort of highly advanced communication technology in those far-off times. Does that link, perhaps, with legends of the advanced technology reputedly available in Atlantis and Lemuria? Unsolved mysteries are rarely individual strands — they are more like the complexities of spiders’ webs.

  The Argonauts reached Salmydessus to find that King Phineus was being persecuted by harpies. These creatures were described by the early Greek writers as half-woman, half-bird, and all bad. Two of the Argonauts claimed the North Wind as an ancestor — consequently they were blessed with the gift of flight. They drove the harpies so far from Salmydessus that the starving King Phineus, whose table had been a favourite target of the harpies, was never troubled by them again. Phineus was more than grateful and warned the Argonauts about a peril that lay in their way as a very serious — perhaps fatal — obstacle to their quest: the Clashing Rocks.

  These Clashing Rocks, known to the ancient Greek navigators and sea adventurers as the Symplegades, stood near the Bosporus entrance to the Black Sea, which was known as the Euxine to the ancient Greeks. Pliny, the famous Roman writer who died when Vesuvius erupted in 79, had an interesting theory about the Symplegades. He said that they were actually the precipitous Fanari Islands, and, because they were so close together, they appeared sometimes as two, sometimes as one, depending upon the course of the approaching ship and the angle from which the mariners saw them. This gave rise to the belief that they actually moved and clashed together.

  Phineus advised the Argonauts to send a bird through the gap between the rocks ahead of the Argo. The plan was that the rocks would try to crush the bird and would then need time to get back into position ready for their next clashing together. While they were thus imperfectly prepared to crush their next victim, the Argo would have a chance to get through. The plan was duly put into operation: the bird survived, apart from the loss of a few tail feathers; the Argo received some minor damage to her stern, but was otherwise unscathed.

  It’s necessary to go back earlier than Jason’s visit to find out where the magical Ram with the Golden Fleece had originated. Phrixus was the son of Athamas, King of Boeotia, and his first wife, Nephele. They also had a daughter, Helle. Tiring of Nephele, Athamas took a second bride, Princess Ino, who was the daughter of Cadmus, King of Thebes. They also had two children, but Ino realized that Nephele’s son, Phrixus, would become king eventually, as he was older than her boy. The wicked and cunning Ino deliberately interfered with the vitally important seed corn so that it wouldn’t grow. Boeotia was verging on starvation when Athamas sent messengers to the Delphic Oracle for help and advice. Evil Ino waylaid them on their return and bribed them to tell the King that unless Phrixus was sacrificed the corn wouldn’t grow. The next part of the story is so close to the biblical account of Abraham and his intention to sacrifice his much loved son, Isaac — who is saved by the ram — that there is almost certainly a link between these ancient Greek and Hebrew traditions. Athamas was on the point of sacrificing Phrixus to save his people from starving when a golden ram flew towards them. Phrixus and his sister Helle climbed onto the golden ram’s back and it soared away with them. Tragically, Hell
e fell off and was killed, but she was immortalized when her name became part of the word Hellespont, the name of the narrow straits separating Europe from Asia, the strait that is known today as the Dardanelles.

  Phrixus arrived safely in Colchis, the kingdom beyond the eastern shore of the Black Sea, or Euxine. The ram was sacrificed to Zeus and its magnificent Golden Fleece was presented to Aeetes, King of Colchis. Its magical powers were such that Colchis was destined to enjoy safety and prosperity as long as the Fleece was kept there. Prudently, Aeetes had it hung in a huge oak tree with a vigilant, insomniac dragon to guard it. So much for the origin of the Fleece, but what was the origin of the Golden Ram that saved Phrixus? (He, incidentally, married one of Aeetes’ daughters, had several children with her, and lived a long, happy life in Colchis with his princess.)

  Poseidon, god of the sea, features in many of the sea’s unsolved mysteries — and the origins of the Golden Ram come into that category. A highly desirable Greek girl named Theophane was understandably being pursued by half the eligible Greek heroes, who all wanted to marry her. Poseidon wanted her for himself and used his divine powers to hide her on the Isle of Crumissa. The disappointed suitors discovered where she was and set off in hot pursuit. Poseidon then disguised all the inhabitants of Crumissa by turning them into cattle, and Theophane into a ewe. The angry suitors arrived and began to kill the cattle — whereupon Poseidon changed them all into wolves. Then, still lusting after the beautiful Theophane, he changed himself into a ram so that they could mate. The Golden Ram that was born as a result of their union became the magical flying ram that saved Phrixus and ended its earthly days as the Golden Fleece in the giant oak tree of Colchis. Zeus, however, transformed it after it had been sacrificed to him, making it into the constellation of Aries the Ram.