by Steven Sora
North of Fer Island are the Shetlands, a more suitable place to take on stores or seek shelter from bad weather. Antonio’s letter indicates that there was bad weather and that they stayed in the Shetlands for a week before pushing north. When the winds were better they took off for the Faeroes, but again a storm intervened. The plan of the Sinclair expedition was to follow the Viking route west. After passing the Faeroes, they would have reached Iceland, where food and supplies could be found. From Iceland, Sinclair’s crew was adept enough to sail directly to Newfoundland without first going north to Greenland. The bad weather changed the plans, and the ships passed Iceland and made one unscheduled short stop on the route to North America, which would cast doubt on the whole voyage. The island in question was called Icaria.9 Either it does not exist anymore, or modern historians are simply unable to identify it.
The narrative of the Zeno expedition records that between Iceland and Greenland they stopped at Icaria, which was ruled by a king. They encountered the openly hostile forces of the king among whom only one man, an Icelander, could speak a language that Sinclair could understand. The Icelander told them they could not have permission to land. Through the interpreter, Sinclair learned that the “king” of Icaria refused to engage in commerce with any foreigners, and at best he would allow one of them to stay. The rest of the group could either leave Icaria without harm, which they did, or face a battle in which every inhabitant of Icaria was ready to fight to the death. Sinclair was further informed that Icaria was made up of those who had fled before religious persecution and Viking plundering, and they were not ready to flee again. The expedition had no desire to engage in warfare.
Sinclair instructed his ships to circle the island to avoid the hostile inhabitants and find a suitable landing. The islanders persisted, however, following Sinclair’s ships as they circled the island. It was decided that the expedition would press on without supplies. From Icaria the expedition sailed directly past Cape Race on the coast of Greenland, where Norse ships in the past had stopped to take on supplies. Zeno reports that while they were now running low on supplies, they did not believe they had far to travel before reaching a safer landfall.
Two days later they reached the coast of Newfoundland, but because of stormy conditions they decided not to risk a landing. The weather cleared, and after two more days they reached Nova Scotia. There, according to William Hobbs, Tor Bay was their most likely stopping place.10 He bases his conclusions on the descriptions recorded in the letters that Zeno sent home to Venice. When they entered the harbor they saw a hill in the distance (Nova Scotia is very flat and has one high hill in what is now Antigonish, in Pictou county, which is visible from afar). After making landfall they gathered food by fishing and gathering bird eggs (extensive fisheries and rookeries exist even today). Sinclair sent one hundred men to cross the “island.” When they returned, they reported sighting another sea (the Northumberland Strait) and a spring where pitch ran into the sea (asphalt, very rare, is found in Stellarton, Nova Scotia).
Hobbs had been the first to show that “a spring from which issued a certain substance like pitch” was almost unique.11 There is, in fact, only one place within a few days’ march from the Atlantic Ocean where such a rare phenomenon exists besides Stellarton, and that is at Trinidad in the Caribbean. Even in Trinidad the pitch formed a lake, not a “spring.” The name Stellarton is derived from Stella coal, an oil-charged coal that runs throughout the area in a very thick vein. Zeno also described a “smoking hole,” which could have been caused by lightning or man-made fire that had smoldered for a long period of time.
The soldiers also reported that very short people had run from them and hid in caves. The Micmacs were a shorter race than most North American natives, and the Stellarton region was one of their main centers of population. They were known by other European traders to be timid, but they had the ability to travel great distances and had experience in trade. The large number of Sinclair’s strange-looking force would undoubtedly have surprised the Micmacs and caused them to flee. The fact that they hid in caves lends further support to the theory of the geographic location, since there are very few caves in Nova Scotia and the area immediately surrounding Stellarton is where these caves are situated.
Frederick Pohl, who wrote extensively on early European discoveries in the New World, added much weight to the observations of Hobbs and pinned down even more specific locales and dates for the Sinclair-Zeno voyage. Recognizing that sailors often took place-names from the religious day celebrated on their day of discovery, Pohl was able to calculate Sinclair’s landing date. The safe harbor of the Sinclair-Zeno expedition was called “Trin,” and the month, according to Zeno’s letters, was June. Pohl found that in earlier times the eighth Sunday after Easter is always the date of the celebration of the Holy Trinity and is called Trinity Sunday. He verified with the Vatican that this day was celebrated in the fourteenth century, and from there he narrowed down the possible dates. Since Easter can be celebrated as early as March and the records from Zeno say the expedition reached the harbor in June, there are very few feast days that match with the dates of Zeno’s letters. Trinity Sunday and Sinclair’s landing in Nova Scotia must have been June 2, 1398—ninety-seven years before the next European reached Nova Scotia and ninety-four years before Columbus “discovered” the New World.
Henry Sinclair liked the new lands he had discovered. The fish and game were abundant, the climate was moderate, and the harbors appeared good for shipping. He declared that he would someday build a city there and leave Scotland behind for a new home. His crew had other plans. They wanted to return home before the seasons changed and the Atlantic crossing became even more dangerous. It was agreed that Antonio would captain the expedition and all who wished to do so would return to Scotland, while Henry and a smaller group would stay on and continue their explorations. Zeno sailed to Scotland, first stopping in the Faeroes. He recorded the voyage and immediately sent his story back to his brother in Venice. Thus the journey was recorded for history.
Apart from the letters Zeno sent home, we have no other written records of this expedition or even of what happened to the crew after they reached Scotland.12 Sinclair did explore the New World further, and one of Zeno’s letters says that he built a “town in the port of the island newly discovered by him.” Since Zeno had most likely not seen the town, this is only a supposition. Other evidence of Sinclair’s overland travels has been preserved. If Sinclair had sailed or marched along a coastal route to explore what would come to be called New England, he would have traveled along coastal New Brunswick and soon would have reached what is now the border between Canada and the United States at Saint Stephen. Just past that point he would have entered Maine in the area of Machias Bay.
Discovery of a whale-back ledge “jutting into Machias Bay at Clark’s Point, Maine,” was made where a “petroglyph of a cross incised beside one of a European ship of the late fourteenth century” stood. The historian Andrew Sinclair, a distant descendant, says this stone confirms the voyage.13
It may, but Sinclair might not have been the first to land in Machias Bay. On my own coastal exploration of Maine, I learned of the belief that Vikings may have been there also. Near the tiny town of Cutler, Maine, is a pond complete with stone walls that no one is able to explain outside the local legend that says Vikings built them. On a very small island named Manana, which is offshore of Monhegan island in Maine, runic inscriptions are found.14 While the Zeno expedition would have left inscriptions in their own language(s), Monhegan gives us further evidence of the pre-Columbian travels of Europeans. Farther south there is more direct evidence.
On a granite perch in the small Massachusetts town of Westford lies a carved rock memorial to a Scottish knight.15 The rock has been known to exist since colonial times, but it had been allowed to become overgrown by brush. Frank Glynn, an amateur archeologist from Connecticut, became interested in the tale of the rock carving and set out to uncover the memorial.16 After fi
nding the rock ledge, which is now on Depot Street in Westford, he cleared the brush. The worn and faded rock was found complete with inscription and immediately sparked a debate. Some say the carving appears to be an Indian with a tomahawk, and not a knight. To highlight the carving, Glynn poured chalk into the punched holes and incised lines. The figure of a knight complete with chain mail and a coat of arms became visible.
Glynn sent a rubbing of the worn stone to T. C. Lethbridge, a British writer, archeologist, and curator of the University of Archeology and Ethnology at Cambridge, England. In 1954 Lethbridge researched both the coat of arms and the figure itself in Wales and Scotland. He concluded that it was a depiction of a knight and that this particular knight was important. The full size of the knight depicted in the memorial carving is six feet. The carving includes a “basinet” helmet, which came into use in the 1360s and subsequently fell out of favor in the fifteenth century, which helped establish a time frame. Lethbridge also told Glynn that such effigies in stone were often made during that time period in Ireland and the western isles of Britain. They would be carved at the place where the knight had fallen, usually a place of battle. The detailed carving included the hilt of a sword held over the breast of the knight and a shield with a coat of arms. The coat of arms depicted a buckle, a crescent, a five-pointed star, and a ship.
Personal correspondence from Lethbridge to Glynn in 1956 describes the armor and the crest as coming from the outer islands of Scotland circa 1350. A buckle (actually a brooch) on the shield was an emblem shared by only a few families; after consulting early Orkney medals, Lethbridge was able to narrow his list of families down considerably. He declared the coat of arms to be “clearly the arms of some maternal relation of the Sinclairs.” Further research brought new information about the incidence of galley portrayals on Scottish coats of arms. Those bearing this heraldic emblem were either from Norse kings of the isles, or from the line of the “Norse Jarls” on Orkney—the Sinclairs. Further research honed down the list even more. In medieval Scotland families in the employ or under the protection of an important family might take their last name from the clan of their protector. The shield and coat of arms belonged to a branch of the Sinclair group, the clan of Gunn, and to a knight that was Henry Sinclair’s principal lieutenant, Sir James Gunn. In 1973 Sir Ian Moncreiffe, one of heraldry’s foremost experts agreed with Lethbridge’s conclusions.17
The importance of the Gunn clan connection and the identity of the knight in the Westford stone carving is that the Gunn and Sinclair clans were closely linked in Scotland. In the north the Gunns were the “Crowners of Caithness,” and tradition held that without their consent, no one could rule over their province in the Scottish northlands. This right was affirmed by the insignia of the buckle on their coat of arms. The Sinclairs gained the lands through inheritance, but still they ruled with the consent of the Gunn clan. Both families had strong Norse ties, and this alliance between the two families might have existed from the eleventh century. The history of the Gunn clan may even predate the recorded history of Sinclairs in Scotland. They are related to the first waves of Norse settlers in the Orkneys, who are collectivized as “south island men,” or Sutherlands.
In addition to the carved rock at Westford, a second marker nearby the ledge emerged in the 1960s. A farmer had discovered it in his field but did not know what, if any, significance the inscribed stone had, and simply left it in his barn. The stone was of little use in solving the puzzle, but it was of the same punched carving style as the stone depicting Sir James Gunn. The depths of the holes as well as their diameter were identical to those on the first stone. A mysterious “184” and an arrow might have been meant as an instruction to the finder; the rock, however, had been moved, and any such instructions were meaningless. Another ship was portrayed on this second carved stone, again the galley design that would fit the style of a Scottish ship in the years 1350 to 1400. The second stone was moved to the lobby of the Fletcher library in Westford, not far from the Depot Road granite memorial. A twentieth-century search for a fourteenth-century camp failed to turn up any other evidence of the Sinclair expedition in this region. From the Westford area, Sinclair may have traveled even farther south.
The Taunton River of Massachusetts empties into Assonet Bay near Fall River, Massachusetts. On the east side of the bay there is a large rock with a seven foot by eleven foot face on which symbols have been inscribed. Described as runic, the “Dighton Rock” has been called a hoax. Since it was Cotton Mather, the fire and brimstone preacher of colonial America, who recorded the rock’s existence in 1690, it is at least a very old hoax. The Glynn-Lethbridge correspondence describes it as being of the same “punch” style as the Westford inscription.
In Fall River in 1831 the skeleton of a man wearing heavy metal plate armor was dug up at the corner of Fifth Sreet and Harley. Could Sinclair have left behind the body of his second-in-command or another in his party after what may have been a skirmish with the locals? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about the mysterious “Skeleton in Armor,” who he believed built the nearby Norse Tower for his “fair lady.” A fire in the museum in 1843 deprived posterity of any further chance to examine the skeleton of the knight. Anthropologists and experts from Harvard’s Peabody Museum did come up with some unusual guesses. Their best explanation was that the armor was that of a Wampanoag Indian, although they were not known for wearing such armor. A knight such as Sir James Gunn, however, would be expected to be prepared for battle, and armor was typical of the fourteenth-century knight.
The piece of architecture with the most controversial origin is a rounded tower of gray stone set above arches that stands guard in Newport, Rhode Island. The tops of these arches are ten feet above ground, with a floor built above the arches. On this floor was found the remnants of a fireplace that may have been used as a signal light for the harbor at Newport. The inner diameter of the tower is eighteen feet, but because the walls are so thick (three feet), it is twenty-four feet in diameter measured from outside the walls. Historians have attempted to explain the nature of Newport Tower for centuries. Some historians favor the notion that the early Norse explorers built it and that it is related to nearby Dighton Rock.18 The tower, they believe, was a church dedicated to Henricus, one of the last Norse Catholics to be sent to the New World by the Church.19 Others claim that it was used as a grain mill by Governor Benedict Arnold (not to be confused with General Benedict Arnold of the American Revolution), avoiding the fact that earlier maps had it situated there well before Arnold owned the property.
The first map on which it was marked was made by the Verranzano expedition, which recorded it as a “Norman Villa”—certainly earlier than the American Revolutionary era, a point missed by those who refuse to accept that there were earlier visitors to the New World. Verranzano’s record also discusses the occupants of this area as “inclining more to whiteness” than the other New England natives. Was a settlement left behind that ended in intermarriage between Europeans and North Americans? Another theory I encountered on one visit there was that it was built by pagan Norse, who were able to calculate time thanks to the circular construction and the series of eight arches. It had ledges especially designed to hold torches at night, from which one could observe from above the ground the positions of the moon and stars. It may also have been a solstice and eclipse calculator—a Rhode Island Stonehenge?
Andrew Sinclair made the observation that it is the sign of a second Sinclair settlement in the New World.20 Its construction is the same as the round churches of the Knights Templar, which are circular and complete with eight arches. These churches are rare; the only one in Scotland was built in Orkney, the home of Henry Sinclair. The Sinclair family acted in Scotland as the protectors of Freemasonry, an outgrowth of the outlawed Templars. Hjalmar Holand had reached a similar and more intriguing conclusion thirty years before Sinclair’s work. The tower was modeled on a first-century “baptistry” constructed by followers of Jesus Christ.21 Suc
h baptistries did not last long, but after the Crusades, the knights brought the model home from the Holy Lands. They then started constructing a handful of such baptistries in Europe. While this could suggest that either the Sinclair expedition or a Norse expedition could have used the model and constructed the tower, Holand goes on to trace the construction to the Cistercian monastic order. It was this order that was influential in both starting the Crusades and founding the Templars. This information pushes the scale in favor of a Sinclair-initiated construction.
The Templars were an order of soldiers who were sworn to vows of poverty and chastity very much like the monks. This order, founded in the twelfth century, grew in power and wealth over a two-hundred-year period and like the Cistercian order of Saint Bernard, they were also builders. Europe is still dotted with bridges and churches from this era.
Sinclair’s base of operations in North America was likely situated in Nova Scotia. It is possible that Sinclair had brought as many as three hundred men to America. His fleet, as previously mentioned, was larger than that of the Norse king of Norway. It is also possible that Sinclair made more than one journey. How long he stayed in the New World is not known. We are not even sure of the year of his death. Father Hay, an early Scottish genealogist with a reputation for hurried biographies, says that Henry died in the year 1400 as a result of an English raid. Another biographer, Raphael Holinshed, says that the fatal raid took place in 1404.22 A more contemporary biographer of Sinclair and his voyage, the late Frederick Pohl, says that just about all of Sinclair’s life can be accounted for except the years 1400 to 1404, but he believes that Sinclair stayed in North America until 1400 and came home to Scotland to be felled in a raid that same year.