Barry Fell - July 1,

In the year 1558, when Elizabeth I had just been crowned queen of England, an obscure French churchman, the Abb Amiot, became the literary sensation of Europe. He had discovered ancient Greek manuscripts by a historian named Plutarch in monastery libraries in Italy, and he published a French translation of what he found. His great find comprised a series of biographies of many of the most famous men of ancient Greece and Rome, together with literary and scientific essays on a variety of subjects.

In London, Sir Thomas North brought out an English translation of Amiot's French version, and this in turn became the source of many of the plots of William Shakespeare's historical plays. Not until 1624 did the original Greek appear in print. Among the lesser known of Plutarch's wide-ranging writings is one that is apparently the script of rough lecture notes that he used as a teaching philosopher in the academies of Greece. In it Plutarch discusses an ancient Carthaginian manuscript he says he found in the ruins of that city, one dealing with voyages across the Atlantic. Few if, indeed any English or French literary men of Amiot's time had sailed the Atlantic; at all events, not one of them noticed anything unusual about the Carthaginian passage.

And so it was not until America celebrated the 400th anniversary of the voyage of Columbus, in 1892, that a historian in New York noticed Plutarch's account of the parchment from Carthage, and realized that it presented a truthful and verifiable description of routine voyages made to and from America. In May 1942, when the U-boat blockade of Britain was mounting in intensity, a chance decision of military and naval authorities placed me on board a ship whose commander was under orders to sail from Britain to New York by the so-called Iceland route, then adopted as a makeshift means of skirting the blockade. The ship was the Port Nicholson, and she made the crossing safely, set me ashore in Nova Scotia, and then sailed on to her doom. The following day, she and two other ships came to rest on the seabed off Cape Cod, their hulls blown open by torpedoes. Years later, when I read Plutarch, and Verplanck Colvin's 1893 discussion before the Albany Institute, New York, it was at once as clear to me as it had been to Colvin himself that Plutarch's account of the sailing directions of the Carthaginians is indeed the truth. My own voyage of 1942 had covered the same track, and the sequence of landfalls and sightings had been just as he described.

Colvin's deductions were published by the Institute in 1898 and, sad to say, aroused little interest. A quarter of a century later, Samuel Eliot Morison, the biographer of Columbus, dismissed as poppycock all reputed voyages to America before Columbus. Since then another fifty years have gone by, and with their passage has come a shift of opinion. Already a number of American historians accept the reality of Norse voyages in the eleventh century, and some admit to even earlier voyaging. But one thing has always crippled speculations on the subject: the lack of tangible proof that such voyages occurred. And it is just that area of uncertainty that demanded detailed research.

As in the case of the work done in preparation for writing my previous book, far-ranging travel was required. My colleagues and I visited the ancient sites of Carthaginian settlements in North Africa and Spain, and also the ruined cities of peoples who were allies of the Carthaginians, or whose mariners sailed on Carthaginian ships. We visited archeologists and historians who work on these Old World sites and discussed our American finds with them. Then, encouraged by their enthusiasm and obvious confidence in the validity of our researches here, we returned to America to implement their suggestions. We consulted widely with American investigators interested in the problem, sought and obtained their assistance where special skills were demanded. Then, finally, some of the colleagues overseas whom we had visited now came to America to see for themselves the evidence we had reported, and to lend us their skills. But before I deal with our American work, let me first review what had been done in Europe and North Africa by earlier investigators, before the American aspects became apparent.

Who were the Carthaginians, and why do we associate them with long sea voyages? The Phoenicians, as most people know, were an ancient trading people of Semitic origin (at least in part). They spoke a language akin to that of the ancient Hebrews, and frequently wrote it in much the same alphabetic letters as the ancient Hebrews used. Their best-known homeland is the war-torn country we presently call Lebanon, and their most famous ancient cities were Tyre and Sidon. However, around 800 B.C. they established strong trading posts along the North African coast, west of Egypt and as far afield as Morocco and southern Spain. One of these settlements grew into a powerful city-state, apparently named Kharkhedona, and located in a bay at the northern tip of Tunisia. The Greeks and Romans and we today call this city Carthage.

Thus the Phoenicians were now separated into an eastern or Lebanese branch, and a western or Carthaginian stock. Both groups were famous for the purple cloth they manufactured by a secret dyeing process utilizing the pigment of a sea snail called Murex; the Greeks named the traders who brought such wares "The Purple-People," Phoinikoi from which we get our word Phoenician. The Romans called them Punici, which means the same. However, as most of the historical events that linked the Romans and Phoenicians in alliances (and later in enmity) concerned only the western Phoenicians, we usually restrict the use of the word "Punic" to serve as a synonym for Carthaginian. Thus we speak of the Carthaginians as using the Punic language.

As time went by, the Punic dialect and alphabet came to differ from that of the Lebanese Phoenicians. Punic often has very long tails on the letters, and is apt to be carelessly written so that different letters often look the same. It is an easy language to recognize when written, but a hard one to read because the writing often is so bad.

From early times, the Carthaginians were famed mariners. They had to be, for their principal wares were rather cheap imitations of Greek and Egyptian goods, and their principal buyers were savage or semi-civilized peoples in distant lands that produced the raw materials the Carthaginians needed to supply their factories.

Tin is one of the raw materials essential in the manufacture of hardened bronze, and hence for the making of swords and other weapons, armor, and domestic tools; for bronze is an alloy of tin and copper. Somehow the Carthaginians learned that a supply of tin existed in an unknown land to the north of Spain. They themselves obtained it by bartering with the Celts of northwestern France. As no other source of tin was available to the Greeks and Romans, the Carthaginians established a complete monopoly, which they jealously protected by blockading the Straits of Gibraltar so that no foreign vessel could leave or enter the Atlantic without their knowledge and permission.

The Illyrian historian Strabo, who lived in Yugoslavia in the same century as Christ, recounts an ancient story of how Romans tried to discover the source of the tin. A Roman captain masqueraded as an ally of the Carthaginians and took his ship into the port of Gades (Cadiz) in southern Spain. When his spies reported that a Carthaginian trader was about to sail for the Tin Isles, the Roman vessel sneaked along astern. The Punic captain soon discovered that he was being followed, and he ran his ship ashore on the coast of Portugal, he and his crew making their way overland back to Gades. When he told his story, he was rewarded by the merchant princes of the town and given a new ship to replace his loss.