Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  47. Did Native Americans Discover Europe in 60 BCE?

  Did you know that Native Americans discovered Europe in 60 BCE? No? Well, you aren’t reading the right websites and alternative history books. In 2012, Cracked.com, an online humor site run by former ABC News producer Jack O’Brien, published a piece on the “Six Ridiculous Lies You Believe about the Founding of America.” Cracked.com articles present humorous or satirical discussions of fact-based material. O’Brien and co-author Alford Alley claimed that their article would expose the facts behind government and media distortion and simplification of American history. The authors sparked widespread discussion online by writing that “Columbus wasn’t the first to cross the Atlantic. Nor were the vikings. [sic] Two Native Americans landed in Holland in 60 B.C. and were promptly not given a national holiday by anyone.”[429] Within one week of publication, more than 1.7 million people had viewed the article and its shocking report of a Native American voyage to Roman-era Europe.

  When I read this, I immediately wondered how I had missed such an important ancient record of trans-oceanic crossing. Surely, such a claim must have a solid basis in fact. Well, as it turns out, the Cracked.com writers are uncritically repeating a piece of centuries-old speculation that is widespread in alternative publications and online. In the original ancient texts on which this claim is ultimately based, the people were not Native Americans, were not two in number, and did not land in Holland. 60 BCE is about right, though, give or take.

  Roman around Europe

  The alleged Native American encounter with Europe in 60 BCE winds its way through alternative history like kudzu. It begins, however, with a pair of ancient texts that seem almost completely unrelated to the modern claim, though they are the only facts on which the claim rests. The first of these texts comes from 43 CE and the pen of the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela in De situ orbis, referencing material Mela is quoting from a now-lost earlier work of the Roman writer Cornelius Nepos (c.100 BCE-c. 25 BCE) on events that took place when Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer was a proconsul in Gaul (62-59 BCE):

  When he [Celer] was proconsul in Gaul, he was presented with certain Indians as a present by the king of the Boti; asking whence they had come to these lands, he learned they had been seized by strong storms from Indian waters, that they had traveled across the regions between, and that at last they had landed on the shores of Germany.[430]

  The following parallel passage from the Natural History of the Roman writer Pliny the Elder from 77-79 CE also preserves the same quotation, and many scholars believe that Pliny derived his version from Mela (a source he used elsewhere in the Natural History) rather than from Nepos himself:

  The same Cornelius Nepos, when speaking of the northern circumnavigation, tells us that Q. Metellus Celer, the colleague of L. Afranius in the consulship, but then a proconsul in Gaul, had a present made to him by the king of the Suevi, of certain Indians, who sailing from India for the purpose of commerce, had been driven by tempests into Germany.[431]

  These texts do not immediately seem to refer to America, and there is no indication that the Indians were exactly two in number. Mela, like Pliny, insisted that this event referred to a voyage from the east—from “beyond the Caspian gulf” in his words, not the Atlantic because both Mela and Pliny believed that there was a water route between India and the Baltic. (We could argue that this is a mistake on Nepos’ part, but if so, then we have no warrant to accept any of his testimony in the affair.) The difference in accounts between Mela’s Boti and Pliny’s Suevi is due to Mela using the specific name of an otherwise unattested tribe[432] and Pliny using a more generic term with two distinct meanings: a Rhineland tribe, or central Germans in general.

  No further information is given about the visitors—not their language, appearance, habits, or faith. All we know is that they were merchants, and as such they must have had a boat big enough for trade. At any rate, whoever the visitors were, they appear to have spoken a language known to Europeans, unless they were particularly good pantomime artists, since they were apparently able to answer Celer’s questions without difficulty. Again, we could argue that we are missing essential parts of the story, such as time spent teaching the captives a new tongue, but to do so calls into question acceptance of any part of the story—how would we know what to accept as true and complete? Such are the problems when dealing with ancient fragments.

  The Spanish Imposition

  The story, as told in Pliny and a widely-read medieval textbook by Martianus Capella, remained known throughout the Middle Ages (more than 200 medieval copies of Pliny survive), though the story was not the subject of much interest until the discovery of America. In the mid-sixteenth century the Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara read the story and suggested in chapter ten of his Historia general de las Indias (1552), that the Romans had been “deceived by the color” of Native Americans from Labrador who had been carried across the North Atlantic. He was the very first author to connect the Roman story to the New World:

  But to sail from India to Caliz by the other part of the north by a clime and regions of extreme cold, should be doubtless a difficult and dangerous thing, wherof is no memory among the old authors saving only of one ship as Pliny and Mela do write, rehearsing the testimony of Cornelius Nepos who affirmed that the king of Suevia presented to Quintus Metellus Celer, Lieutenant of France, certain Indians driven by tempest into the sea of Germany: if the same were not of the land of Labrador or Bacallaos [“cod-fish land”; i.e., Newfoundland], and they deceived in their color.[433]

  Gómara, of course, was merely speculating; he is the same man who in chapter 220 of the same book argued that the Americas were identical to Atlantis because the Aztecs had words that used the letters “atl”: “But there is now no cause why we should any longer doubt or dispute of the Island of Atlantis, forasmuch as the discovering and conquest of the West Indies do plainly declare what Plato hath written of the said lands. In Mexico also at this day they call that water Atl, by the half name of Atlantis, as by a word remaining of the name of the Island that is not.”[434] He did not write from evidence, merely speculation, in order to provide Classical antecedents to justify the Spanish conquest of the Americas. He was criticized even in his own lifetime for the inaccuracy of his work. In all likelihood, Columbus’ misnaming of Native Americans as “Indians” suggested this passage to Gómara’s mind.

  Nevertheless, very shortly after the publication of Historia general de las Indias, the story of Native Americans in Roman-era Germany entered the English-speaking world. Gómara’s text was translated in 1555 as an appendix to Richard Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s Decades (1530), and from there it became a frequent element in discussions of early America. The suggestion seemed to carry weight because Gómara also referenced as support the quite similar story told by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) in his Historia rerum ubique gestarum (1477) that in the time of the “German emperors,” probably the reign of Frederick Barbarossa as claimed by later sources, “an Indian ship with Indian merchants was taken on the coast of Germany which evidently had been driven there from the east.”[435] Again, the text directly states that the voyage came from a direction other than the Atlantic. Christopher Columbus would read Piccolomini’s account and find in it, as well as those of Pliny and Pomponius Mela, the seeds of the idea that one could sail to “India” (i.e., Asia) by going west, across the Atlantic, since improved fifteenth century geography had made it impossible to believe in an imaginary eastward waterway between Germany and Asia. Some Elizabethan Britons (see Chapter 46) actually attempted arctic voyages because they were convinced the ancients had done so based on these texts.

  However, we do not possess Piccolomini’s source. This source was a man named Otho or Otto, whom many scholars believe to be identical with Barbarossa’s uncle Otto of Friesling, though this passage does not appear in any of that Otto’s extant works. Pliny’s story, though, was well known in the Middle Ages, and
a form of it was part of the standard educational textbook, the Marriage of Philology and Mercury by the Late Antique writer Martianus Capella. Capella, in turn, had completely misunderstood the entire textual tradition and transmitted to the Middle Ages the false notion that “the same Cornelius, after capturing Indians, sailed by Germany.”[436] The story Piccolomini relates Otto as having given is a fairly direct summary of the three versions of the story known in the Middle Ages (Pliny’s, Mela’s, and Capella’s), assuming Otto considered all three to be equally correct facets of the truth.

  It is impossible to tell without the original text whether Otto’s account is dependent upon these sources or whether by coincidence some unknown people were discovered sailing near Germany, and we can only speculate why Otto would fabricate an account, if that is what he did. We could suggest, for example, that this may have been an effort to legitimize his nephew’s seizure from his cousin Henry the Lion of lands in Swabia named for the Suevi by demonstrating that events that occurred to an ancient Suevi ruler were also visited upon the new rightful ruler of Swabia. Alternately, Piccolomini may have misunderstood a reference in Otto to ancient German kings (the Suevi) as taking place in “the time of the German emperors,” certainly an odd phrase given that there were still Holy Roman Emperors in Piccolomini’s day. Nevertheless, it is telling that in all of these texts the “Indians”—whoever they were—were so utterly unremarkable that every author from Mela to Piccolomini used the story only to illustrate an obscure point of geography and cared not a whit about the people themselves.

  Speculating about Speculation

  It is only after the discovery of America that new details drawn from encounters with Native Americans begin to be grafted onto this preexisting story telling us more about these visitors and their peculiarities. Gómara began the process by naming the voyagers as Native Americans. Then, Gómara’s various descriptions of Pliny, Mela, and Piccolomini were conflated in the Discoveries of the World (1563) of the Portuguese António Galvão, who repeated Gómara’s claim that a long “canoe” (no longer a merchant ship) full of Indians had come from Newfoundland (Bacallaos) to Germany, giving the date as 1353 CE. (Later translators amended this to 1153 CE, during Barbarossa’s reign). He also added the detail—unsupported by any ancient or medieval text now extant—that the Germans could not understand the sailors’ speech and that these Indians were Native Americans. Galvão, who relied extensively on Gómara as his source, did make plain that he was interpreting this tale in light of modern knowledge of America.[437] The similarity between the descriptions of Galvão and Gómara makes quite clear that the Portuguese author was merely expanding upon the Spanish with details drawn from his own understanding of Native Americans, and in the process restating Gómara’s suggestion as settled fact. Thus, the Flemish cartographer Cornelius Wytfliet could repeat the story of Nepos’ Native Americans as true in his 1597 supplement to Ptolemy’s Geography.

  With all of these accounts of alleged Native American travelers to pre-modern Europe, it followed that nineteenth century scholars began working backward to search for “scientific” explanations for how these travelers got from Labrador to Germany, since many took the older texts at face value and assumed that the early modern interpretations were correct. Georg Hartwig,[438] in 1860, following the earlier work of Alexander von Humboldt,[439] suggested that the Gulf Stream could have carried some unfortunate Inuit (Eskimo) from America to Northern Europe, accounting for Nepos’ report. In 1900 Peter de Roo reviewed all of the earlier texts in his speculative and frequently inaccurate History of America before Columbus, and de Roo stated as plain fact that Celer (and thus Nepos) mistook the Native Americans for people from India because of their “Asiatic features,” features neither Mela nor Pliny had noted.[440]

  From this impressive accumulation of texts (and many more like them), the story percolated among alternative scholars before hitting the mainstream in the 1990s. It appeared for example in Ivan Van Sertima’s Afrocentrist work They Came before Columbus (1976), where he claimed the Native Americans may have brought a South American pineapple (!) to Europe with them (see Chapter 37).[441] The late Native American scholar-activist Jack D. Forbes included the story in his Africans and Native Americans (1993), in which he analyzed Pliny’s passage. From Pliny’s scant sentences and Forbes’s dim knowledge that the tribal name of the Suevi could sometimes refer to a people of the Rhine, he reinterpreted the text until he made it say that the Native Americans had landed in the Netherlands or Belgium, which he said were part of Germany in Roman times.[442] This is not true; Belgium and the southern Netherlands in 60 BCE were known as Gallia Belgica, not Germania, though the province was renamed Germania Inferior in 80 or 83 CE. The area now Holland was, though, always part of Germania. Generally, the border between Gaul and Germany was considered the Rhine.

  Forbes then repeats the claim current from Gómara onward that America was the only possible place people with dark skin could have traveled from in order to reach Germany by ship. Unlike Gómara, Forbes said these travelers might have been either the Olmec (c. 1500-400 BCE) or Teotihuacan people (c. 100-700 CE), whom he mistakes for contemporaries of Nepos, whose lifespan overlaps neither.[443] And he leaves it at that, though he would discuss the topic again in greater detail in 2007’s The American Discovery of Europe, this time with greater adherence to fact.

  Forbes’s relatively obscure academic text might have been the end of the story had James W. Loewen not used Forbes’ book as a source (along with Van Sertima) for his bestselling 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me, in which Loewen writes, “Two American Indians shipwrecked in Holland around 60 BC became major curiosities in Europe.”[444] Loewen, who in the same paragraphs credulously repeated the claim that the sixteenth century Piri Reis map shows the Antarctic coast, was sloppy in his paraphrasing of Forbes, Van Sertima, and other diffusionist authors. Forbes did not specifically call the presumed landing place “Holland,” so this appears to be Loewen’s misinterpretation of Forbes’s mention of the Netherlands, using the incorrect synecdoche of the province for the country. How Loewen came to believe the visitors were two in number or caused “a sensation in Europe” can only be guessed.

  In writing “Six Lies” for Cracked.com O’Brien and Alley turned to Lies My Teacher Told Me as their source for the “fact” that two Native Americans reached Europe in 60 BCE, which they cited with a link. Thus, a sixteenth century speculative argument was transformed into internet fact.

  The Incredible Voyage

  An actual Native American voyage to Europe is, in fact, possible, and every so often new scholars make claims that some historical tale references actual transoceanic voyages. One of the more convincing accounts of such a voyage relates that in 1508 a seven-man bark canoe carrying what seemed to be Inuit was captured by a French ship near England. Unlike Mela’s Indians, these people spoke an unknown language, wore clothes made of fish skins, and drank blood.[445] They were decidedly not merchants in a trading ship, but like Mela’s Indians, the one captive who survived was presented to the King of France as a gift. As we move forward in time, we find better-attested stories of an Inuit-style canoe reaching the Orkney Islands in 1682 and again in 1684,[446] though the people of Orkney thought the sailors to be Finns. A mysterious sailor arriving in Scotland due to a storm in 1700 left a canoe, now in the Marischal Museum at the University of Aberdeen, which has been identified as Inuit.[447] The people encountered in 60 BCE could not have been Inuit, however, since the Inuit did not enter eastern Canada before 1000 CE, when they began to replace the earlier Dorset culture.

  However, aside from a few disputed Inuit-style harpoon heads that may have been carried to the British Isles by whales,[448] there is no physical evidence of a Native American presence in Europe before Columbus. A Native voyage is probably the least likely explanation for the event of c. 60 BCE since Cornelius Nepos and the later Roman writers seemed to find nothing particularly noteworthy about the Indians in Germany, implying they were a known pe
ople with whom Romans could communicate. Too, there are no known Native American vessels that could reasonably be confused for a cargo ship suitable for mercantile trade.

  In fact, the Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York noted in 1891 that Pliny, writing in 77-79 CE, merely repeated the statement of his source, Mela, from 43 CE, and Mela in turn has an uncertain manuscript tradition, with several variants and possible errors. It may well be, the Journal suggested, that a copyist’s error transformed into “Indos” (Indians) the original word “Irenos” (Irish) or even “Iberos” (Spanish), making this a perfectly plausible story of a Celtic shipwreck on German shores that Mela and then Pliny misunderstood.[449] Earlier scholars, recognizing the clear evidence for Roman contact with India and vice versa, argued that Nepos’ account was garbled and that the Indians had arrived in Germany not by sea but by a different route. Rabelais differed, suggesting in Pantagreul that the Indians had circumnavigated Africa,[450] while Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin argued that they were Wends, a Slavonian people from the Baltic who could have been mistaken for Indians because the Romans believed in a nonexistent water route between the Baltic and India.[451] Several publications from India simply accepted the story as prima facie true via a Bering Strait and Arctic Ocean route![452] And, of course, some writers, like Edward Herbert Bunbury and James Oliver Thomson, considered the story to be nothing more than a tall tale repeated by a credulous Nepos[453]—something even Pliny seemed to suggest in criticizing Nepos’ “insatitate credulity.”[454]