There can be little doubt that Norse explorers sailed around Baffin Bay and into Lancaster Sound, the beginning of the Northwest Passage to the Beaufort Sea and the Pacific Ocean. A scattering of Norse artefacts has been found across the Canadian Arctic, some undoubtedly taken by Inuit from abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland but others reflecting Norse contact and exploration. No Viking ship has yet been found in these waters, but an extraordinary discovery close to the polar ice cap may suggest a shipwreck. At tiny Scraeling Island, a barren rock off Ellesmere Island—some eight hundred miles north of Ilulissat—
an Inuit site has yielded more than fifty Norse artefacts, including woollen cloth, fragments of chain mail, ship rivets, knife and spear blades, a carpenter’s plane, fragments of wooden barrel and a gaming piece. Radiocarbon analysis suggests a date towards the end of the Norse period in Greenland, similar to the Kingigtorssuaq runestone. A comparison can be made with Franklin’s overwintering site at Beechey Island during his attempt to discover the Northwest Passage in 1845. Despite the “Little Ice Age” of the medieval period, analysis of ice cores from Greenland suggests that there were warm spells—one in the early fourteenth century—when the waters between the islands of the Canadian Arctic may have been clear. The possibility must remain open that the Vikings discovered the Northwest Passage, backtracking along the route taken by the first Inuit hunters, and that the last Norse to abandon Greenland went this way.
What is certain is that the Vikings sailed over a thousand miles southwest from Greenland to establish the first known European settlement on the shores of North America, at a place they called Vinland—perhaps “Land of Meadows”
rather than “Land of Vines,” as has commonly been assumed—almost five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Their main interest was probably timber, which was almost completely lacking in Greenland. The site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, identified by many as Leifsbúδir in the Norse sagas, is one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time.
“Great Sacred Isle” may have been a navigational way-marker—there are cairns on the mainland that may be Norse, and the story of the keel set up on the cape at Kjalarnes comes from Erik’s Saga—though no evidence has yet been found.
Today the site at L’Anse aux Meadows is maintained by Parks Canada, and you can visit the reconstructed longhouse next to the site of three dwellings and a smithy excavated during the 1960s. The evidence indicates a short-lived settlement established about AD 1000. The story of Freydis and her murderous rampage comes from Erik’s Saga and the Greenlanders’ Saga, the two Viking written sources on Vinland, and it could be that the pall cast by this event dissuaded the Norse from continuing the settlement, along with the threat of attack from Scraelings—“wretches,” the native Indians—and the easier availability of timber along the coast of Labrador to the north.
The only authenticated Norse artefact discovered in the Americas south of L’Anse aux Meadows is a worn silver coin excavated from an Indian site beside Penobscot Bay in Maine. It has been identified as a Norwegian coin of King Olaf, Harald Hardrada’s son and successor who had been with him in England in 1066, and it may date to the very year of the fictional voyage in this novel. No Viking coins have been found at L’Anse aux Meadows or in Greenland, and how this coin came to be lost almost a thousand miles beyond the farthest known Viking settlement is a mystery.
There is no evidence that seafarers from across the Atlantic reached the shores of the Yucatán in Mexico before the Spanish in the early sixteenth century.
However, the Maya prophet Chilam Balam, “Jaguar Prophet,” is said to have foretold the arrival of “bearded men, the men of the east.” The Books of Chilam Balam were mainly written down after the Spanish conquest, leading some to speculate that the prophecy was a later embellishment, but the possibility remains that it was genuine and based on a memory of foreigners who had arrived before the Spanish. Only one group of “bearded men, men of the east”
are known to have visited the New World before the fifteenth century, and they were the Norse; and the evidence suggests that Norse exploration west and south of Greenland reached its greatest extent during the eleventh century.
The fictional jungle temple with its wall-painting is based on a remarkable discovery in 1946 by two American adventurers in the Yucatán, at a place which became known as Bonampak, Maya for “painted walls.” Inside an overgrown corbelled building they found a narrative wall-painting of extraordinary power, showing a jungle battle, the torture and execution of prisoners and victory celebrations, including white-robed Maya ladies drawing blood from their own tongues. The painting dates from the height of the Maya period, about AD 800, but another painting, in the Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, dates from the time when the Toltecs swept into power in the eleventh century. It shows canoe-borne Toltec warriors reconnoitering the Maya coast, a great pitched battle on land and the heart-sacrifice of the captured Maya leaders.
If you visit the ruins of Chichén Itzá today, you are likely to be told that the stories of human sacrifice were exaggerated by the Spanish or relate only to the Toltecs, not the Maya, whose descendants still occupy the Yucatán. You can reach your own conclusion at the Tzompantli, the Platform of the Skulls, where you can look past the sculpted rows of decapitated heads towards the sacrificial altar on the Temple of the Warriors and then gaze down the ceremonial way to the Sacred Cenote, the Well of Sacrifice. Many of the depictions of torture and execution in Maya and Aztec art pre-date the arrival of the Spanish, and the latest techniques of forensic science are, almost literally, adding flesh to the picture: archaeologists in Mexico have discovered that the floors of Aztec temples are soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.
In the Yucatán, the most telling evidence comes from underwater archaeology.
The Well of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá, dredged between 1904 and 1911 and excavated by divers in the 1960s, contained hundreds of human skeletons—
men, women and children—as well as a treasure trove of artefacts: gold discs, carved jade pendants, a human skull made into an incense burner, a sacrificial knife, numerous votive wooden figurines and other offerings. The story is similar at other cenotes in the Yucatán, including several in the ring of sinkholes that formed over a huge meteorite impact site close to the north coast. Many of these cenotes remain unexcavated and are vulnerable to looters. The fictional cenote in this book is based on my own experience exploring these sites, and especially diving in the spectacular caverns and passageways of Dos Ojos, “Bat Cave,” near the Maya coastal stronghold of Tulum.
The story of the last days of the Maya kings, almost two centuries after the Spanish conquest, is based on the account of Father Andrés de Avendaño y Loyola (Relation of two trips to Petén, made for the conversion of the heathen Ytzaex and Cehaches), who was eyewitness to this extraordinary scene beside the remote jungle lake of Petén in 1695 or 1696. A further fragment of this account came to light in the 1980s, and is quoted in Chapter 21. The true source of Maya gold, as described by Avendaño and found by archaeologists in the Well of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá, remains a mystery.
The quote at the beginning of the book is from Josephus, Jewish War VII, 148–
62, translated from the Greek by H. St. J. Thackeray (Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press). Old French quoted in Chapter 2 is the actual inscription visible in the lower left-hand corner of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The Bible quote in Chapter 4 is an abridgement of Exodus 25: 31–40, King James Version. In Chapter 5, the two quotes from King Harald’s Saga, part of the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson, were translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (Penguin, 1966). The poetry in Chapter 13 is from Morte d’Arthur by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92). In Chapter 15, the sentence in Old Norse describing Harald’s sea voyage is fictional, but the phrases that make it up are taken verbatim from the thirteenth century Eirik’s Saga, describing the Norse voyages to Vinland.
The Old Norse phrase par liggr hann til ragnarøks, “there he lies until the end of the world,” comes from the poetic Edda (Gylfaginning 34) also by the prolific Snorri Sturluson, written down some time in the early thirteenth century.
The two silver coins described in Chapter 15—and one of them in the Prologue—
truly exist, and can be seen along with other images from this book at www.davidgibbins.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of Canada, at the age of fifteen David Gibbins dived on his first shipwreck in the Great Lakes. He has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After taking a PhD from Cambridge University, he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England and Canada.
For centuries, people have speculated about the fabled lost libraries of antiquity.
If one were found, what marvels would it contain? Now, a fearless team of adventurers is about to unearth that long-hidden secret, and it will lead them to the most astonishing discovery ever made…
THE LAST
GOSPEL
by
David Gibbins
Coming from Dell in February 2008
READ ON FOR AN EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEEK!
THE LAST GOSPEL
On sale in February 2008
1
Jack Howard eased himself down on the floor of the inflatable boat, his back resting on one pontoon and his legs leaning against the outboard engine. It was hot, almost too hot to move, and the sweat had begun to trickle down his face.
The sun had burned through the morning haze and was bearing down relentlessly, reflecting blindingly off the cliff face in front of him, the limestone scarred and worn like the tombs and temples on the rocky headland beyond.
Jack felt as if he were in a painting by Seurat, as if the air had fragmented into a myriad of pixels that immobilized all thought and action, that caught him in the moment. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, took in the utter stillness, the smell of wetsuits, the outboard engine, the taste of salt. It was everything he loved, distilled to its essence. It felt good.
He opened his eyes and peered over the side, checking the orange buoy he had released a few minutes before. The sea was glassy smooth, with only a slight swell rippling the edge where it lapped against the rock face. He reached out and put his hand on the surface, letting it float for a moment until the swell enveloped it. The water below was limpid, as clear as a swimming pool, and he could see far down the anchor line into the depths, to the shimmer of exhaust bubbles rising from the divers below. It was hard to believe this had once been a place of unimaginable fury, of nature at her cruelest, of untold human tragedy.
The most famous shipwreck in history. Jack hardly dared think of it. For twenty years he had wanted to come back to this place, an itch which had nagged at him and become a gnawing obsession, ever since his first doubt, since he had first begun to reassemble the pieces. It was an intuition that had rarely failed him, tried and tested over years of exploration and discovery around the world.
Intuition based on hard science, on an accumulation of facts that had begun to point unswervingly in one direction.
He had been sitting here, off Capo Murro di Porco in the heart of the Mediterranean, when he had first dreamed up the International Maritime University. Twenty years ago he had been on a shoestring budget, leading a group of students driven by their passion for diving and archaeology, with equipment cobbled together and jerry-built on the spot. Now he had a multi-million-dollar budget, a sprawling campus on his family estate in southern England, museums around the world, state-of-the-art research vessels, an extraordinary team at IMU who took the logistics out of his hands. But in some ways little had changed. No end of money could buy the clues that led to the greatest discoveries, the extraordinary treasures that made it all worthwhile.
Twenty years ago they had been following a tantalizing account left by Captain Cousteau’s divers, intrepid explorers at the dawn of shipwreck archaeology, and here he was again, floating above the same site with the same battered old diary in his hands. The key ingredients were still the same, the hunches, the gut feeling, the thrill of discovery, that moment when all the elements suddenly came together, the adrenaline rush like no other.
Jack shifted, pushing his diving suit farther down around his waist, and checked his watch. He was itching to get wet. There was a slight commotion as the divers pulled the buoy underwater, and he could see it refracted five metres below, deep enough to avoid the props of passing boats but shallow enough for a free diver to retrieve a weighted line that hung from it as a mooring point. Jack had already dared to look ahead, had begun to eye the site like a field commander planning an assault. Seaquest could anchor in a sheltered bay around the cape to the west. On the headland itself the rocky seashore dropped in a series of stepped shelves, good for a shore camp. He rehearsed all the ingredients of a successful underwater excavation, knowing that each site produced its fresh crop of challenges. Any finds they made would have to go to the archaeological museum in Syracuse, but he was sure the Sicilian authorities would make a good show of it. IMU would establish a permanent liaison with their own museum at Carthage, perhaps even an air shuttle as a package trip for tourists. They could hardly go wrong.
Jack peered down, checked his watch again, then noted the time in the logbook.
The two divers were at the decompression stop. Twenty minutes to go. He leaned back, made himself relax and take in the perfect tranquility of the scene for a moment longer. Only three weeks earlier he had stood by the edge of an underwater cavern in the Yucatan, drained but exhilarated at the end of another extraordinary trail of discovery. There had been losses, grievous losses, and Jack had spent much of the voyage home ruminating on those who had paid the ultimate price. His boyhood friend Peter Howe, missing in the Black Sea. And now Father O’Connor, an ally for all too brief a time, whose appalling death had brought home the reality of what they were ranged against. Always it was the bigger stake that provided the solace, the innumerable lives that could have been lost had they not relentlessly pursued their goal. Jack had become used to the greatest archaeological prizes coming at a cost, gifts from the past that unleashed forces in the present that few could imagine existed. But here, he felt sure of it, here it was different. Here it was archaeology pure and simple, a revelation that could only thrill and beguile any who came to know of it.
He peered into the glassy stillness of the sea, saw the rocky cliff face underwater disappear into the shimmering blue. His mind was racing, his heart pounding with excitement. Could this be it? Could this be the most famous shipwreck of all antiquity? The shipwreck of St. Paul?
“You there?”
Jack raised his foot and gently prodded the other form in the boat. It wobbled, then grunted. Costas Kazantzakis was about a foot shorter than Jack but built like an ox, a legacy of generations of Greek sailors and sponge-fishermen. Like Jack he was stripped to the waist, and his barrel chest was glistening with sweat. He seemed to have become part of the boat, his legs extended on the pontoon in front of Jack and his head nestled in a mess of towels at the bow. His mouth was slightly open and he was wearing a pair of wraparound fluorescent sunglasses, a hilarious fashion accessory on such an unkempt figure. One hand was dangling in the water, holding the hoses that led down to the regulators at the decompression stop, and the other hand was draped over the valve of the oxygen cylinder that lay down the center of the boat. Jack grinned affectionately at his friend. Costas was always there to lend a hand, even when he was dead to the world. Jack kicked him again. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. I can see them at the safety stop.”
Costas grunted again, and Jack passed over a water bottle. “Drink as much as you can. We don’t want to get the bends.”
“Good on you, mate.” Costas had
learned a few comically misplaced catchphrases in his years based at the IMU headquarters in England, but the delivery was still resolutely New York. He reached over and took the water, and proceeded to down half the bottle noisily.
“Cool shades, by the way,” Jack said.
“Jeremy gave them to me,” Costas gasped. “A parting present when we got back from the Yucatan. I was moved.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m not sure if he was. Anyway, they work.” Costas pulled them down again, passed back the bottle then slumped back. “Been touching base with your past?”
“Only the good bits.”
“Any decent engineers? I mean, on your team back then?”
“We’re talking Cambridge University, remember. One guy took a portable blackboard with him everywhere he went, would patiently explain the Wankel rotary engine to any passing Sicilian. A real eccentric. But that was before you came along.”
“With a dose of good-old American know-how. At least at MIT they taught us about the real world.” Costas leaned over, grabbed the bottle again and took another swig of water. “Anyway, this shipwreck of yours. The one you excavated here twenty years ago. Any good finds?”
“A typical Roman merchantman,” Jack replied. ‘About two hundred cylindrical pottery amphoras filled with olive oil and fish sauce laden on the edge of the African desert, due south of us. A fascinating selection of ceramics from the ship’s galley, which we were able to date to about A.D. 200. And we did make one incredible find.”
There was a silence, broken by a stentorian snore. Jack kicked again, and Costas reached out to stop himself from rolling overboard. He pushed his shades up his forehead and peered blearily at Jack. “Uh huh?”
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