The Family at Serpiente

by Raymond Tolman

  While there we discovered the possibility of an Irish fellow by the name of Saint Brendon the Navigator who is said to have ventured into the area of the United States about 484 A.D. supposedly he came over in skin boats. Evidence is found all over the eastern states in the form of dug out enclosures and writing found on rocks. An example of the writing is Caros, shaped like a large “R” which is a combination of two letters, an “X” and a “P” which are the first letters of Christ written in Ogham text that were used in Ireland at the time. But then, writing was being found all over the country. In Oklahoma there were reports of Ogham writing that we would eventually examine.

  We all had some real questions. Not only were writings discovered at Bat Creek, but in such places as; Morristown, Tennessee. There was a rock inscription there that appeared to be the same as an inscription found on a rock in a mound near Grave Greek, near West Virginia in1838. The writing on both rocks had been interpreted as being from ancient Semitic or Iberian people with the same thing written on both of them; “Mound in honor of Tadah. His wife caused this engraved stone to be inscribed.” Could there be two people with the same name? Hidalgo immediately decided one or both of them were fakes. But there were other sites that were even more mysterious.

  In 1891 in present day Bradley County, an Isaic Hooston Hooper discovered a wall on his property. The wall was discovered covered with mysterious inscriptions interspaced with pictograms of exotic animals, and sun symbols. The experts determined that the writings were a form of old Hebrew written by scribes from an ancient culture. They theorized that the giant document had been created in a desperate attempt to preserve their cultural knowledge and history for future generations to rediscover. Some experts thought the wall was between four thousand and four thousand and five hundred years old, constructed by one of the lost tribes of Israel. Others thought that the writing was actually tracks left from burrowing worms, making it a natural phenomenon.

  The next few days we took in several sites, all either enigmatic rock carvings that were undecipherable or Woodland sites that were part of the Mound Builders. The Mound Builders were a culture of early American Indians that were centered in Cahokia along the Mississippi River. Fragments of their culture are found all over the eastern United States. The mystery is in the date. Throughout the entire world many cultures peaked in the eleventh century at about the same time. It was the same time that the Chaco Canyon phenomenon occurred. Why did they all simultaneously appear after thousands of years of dull Paleolithic culture?

  Several theories have been proposed for this, such as the appearance of a supernova on July 5th, 1054. It was so brilliant that it was easily visible in broad daylight and at night was the most brilliant object in the sky. People who expound this theory say that the ancient people seeing such natural phenomena interpreted this as a religious sign and changed their way of doing things. Most archeologists believe a favorable climate was the reason cultures flourished but apparently no one theory can account for what happened throughout the world.

  After this trip we returned to Camp Creek, early the next day we packed up a few odds and ends and headed toward Bulls Gap then on to Morristown. In Morristown we turned due north going through the Cumberland Gap, the route that Daniel Boone had pioneered on his way into Kentucky. To us we were all traveling over new roads, pioneering a route to Manchester, Kentucky.

  The Red Bird River

  The Red Bird River is the main tributary of the south fork of the Kentucky River, running over a bed of rock, gravel, and mud. The river winds through the Daniel Boone National forest draining the eastern half of Clay County, Kentucky.

  Canoes often float the river in late fall and spring, the river being best described by river runners as a busy Class I with almost continuous riffles, small waves, and shoals. At higher water, several of the shoals and small rapids may be classified by river runners as borderline Class II. The Red Bird is not known as a whitewater river. Rarely there do you see those intrepid kayakers who love to flirt with death, showing off their skills.

  In the Red Bird River you are far more likely to see a solitary fishing rig with crusty old souls with wrinkled faces and fishing poles in hand, wondering why in the world some foreigner like you is floating through their favorite fishing hole. The Red Bird Valley is one of the most beautiful in the Daniel Boone National Forest, with steep hills looming above the river and lush vegetation everywhere.

  Setting up a car camp alongside the banks of the river was easy for us. Without mules or horses to deal with and plenty of excellent camping gear along with cold drinks in a cooler, we were in heaven; the kind of heaven that most young people never get the chance to experience. We were discovering America, and we might even get paid for doing it.

  There were no stars out that night. When the water temperature is warmer than the air temperature above a river, everything is smothered in a shroud of fog. The mood of the river had changed along with everyone else. Visibility was only a few yards. While the three of us sat on the edge of the river an absolutely silent apparition appeared.

  An ancient derelict boat was drifting downriver through the mist, silently slipping along in this eloquently mysterious river. A homemade fishing rig, an anachronism to today’s plastic and aluminum boats, floated into view, meandering through the maze of gravel bars. Even after several minutes we still couldn’t make out the old man who was commanding the fishing rig. Everyone felt a little nervous; we had heard stories of arguments, shootings and disappearances along rivers. We didn’t want to startle the apparition; an altercation was the last thing we wanted to be involved with.

  As the old fisherman drifted into within a few feet of us, Hidalgo cleared his throat to allow the man to know that we were there.

  “Hello, came a voice from the apparition; then a face appeared with long disheveled grey hair and beard. “I’m just fishing, not bothering anyone.”

  Hidalgo answered him, “You are not bothering us, come on over and let’s chat awhile, besides I’m getting tired of dealing with these two lovebirds, looking at Corey and me. They don’t seem to want to talk to me, just hug each other.

  The old man was more than willing to talk to Hidalgo. “The fishing should be really good tonight but I haven’t caught a thing, I haven’t eaten anything since early this morning and it doesn’t look like we are going to have anything to eat tomorrow morning, much less tonight. You got any extra grub to eat?”

  “Sure,” answered Hidalgo. Corey and Hidalgo helped him out of his home made watercraft and Hidalgo signaled for me to bring some food from the trucks. Upon examination of the boat, it was apparent that the old man was sincere. He had no gear other than a homemade fishing pole and some cans which presumably had fish bait in them. A boater in this vast emptiness of humanity, what was he doing there?

  Not really knowing what to say, the old man explained that his wife of forty years would each day drop him and his old boat off upriver and he would float downriver to catch their daily supply of food. “Can’t afford to go to those stores in town,” he volunteered. “Besides they always cause trouble for me and Lily, my wife. We prefer just to live out here during the summer and return to our cabin in Hancock County over in Tennessee when it gets cold. Say, are you an Indian or something? You look different than these hillbillies around here.”

  Hidalgo didn’t quite know how to answer him but he explained that he was a Navajo from New Mexico and then started to explain what they were doing there. “We have come here to examine the mystery rock in Manchester.”

  “Yeah,” he responded. That old rock was part of the cliffs overlooking the river and has been there for many years. Nobody really knows who carved the pictures on it but I suspect that they were early white people who came into this area. What some people believe though, is that ancient Phoenicians made the journey across the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. Desiring to explore the new lands they had discovered they paddled up the Mississippi until they encountered the confluence of the Ohio
River, from there they continued until reaching the Kentucky River. Always taking what appeared to them at that time the biggest fork of the river, they continued until they reached this river, the Red Bird River. This land was given the name Kaintuckee by the first pioneers of the 18th century because that was what all the Indians called the territory.”

  “The Phoenicians discovered wild turkeys here that resembled peacocks that lived in their homeland. Because the birds were similar, they named the place Tukkiy. The word was spelled “Kentuck” by the first historian, John Filson. The Virginia Assembly spelled the name “Kentucky” when it became a county of the state of Virginia.”

  “Anyway, years ago the whole rock fell down when they were constructing the road through here. They loaded it up on a large truck and hauled it into Manchester so they could draw tourist in.”

  Listening and enthralled by the conversation, I had already returned with an armload of French bread, cheese, ham, and a large bag of potato chips. As we sat and watched, the old man began wolfing down food, pausing every few seconds to stuff a morsel into the pockets of his tattered jacket. Obviously the man was famished and was trying to hide some of the food for his mate.

  I returned to the truck and gathered up another supply of food which I put into a cardboard box that I placed into the floor of the old boat. Noticing what I was doing, he stopped stuffing bits of food into his pockets and appeared to be very grateful.

  Hidalgo had noticed that the old man’s face was very dark, made even darker because of his white hair. “You are not one of the local hillbillies are you,” asked Hidalgo?

  “Be careful,” many of them would get into a fight with you if you used the word hillbilly even thought they might brag about being a hillbilly themselves. “No, he answered, “I am a Melungeon.”

  Mystified, Hidalgo asked him “What in the world is a Melungeon?” The old man was hesitant in his answer; he seemed to be afraid to explain himself as if there was something terribly wrong about the fact that he was a Melungeon.

  “Ask around, people will tell you about us. I hate to be unsociable but my wife has not eaten as much as I have. Thank you for the food and company.” With that he climbed back into the relic of a boat, pushed off and began paddling, rather than just drifting, with the current, disappearing into the fog.

  Melungeons

  The following day, after breakfast, we returned to Manchester, Kentucky where we pulled up to a very small but public library. Inside we got directions to the Manchester Mystery Rock and collected several small publications that were for sale by local authors. Sitting down at one of the tables the library provided for people to read, we browsed thought the short pamphlets we had acquired and Hidalgo read through one small book about Melungeons he discovered on the shelves.

  From the booklet: “Melungeons are a Tennessee mystery people who were living alongside the Cherokee Indians when the first Scotch-Irish peoples moved into this area. Melungeon people themselves, have always preferred to have been associated with descendants of Portuguese pirates or sailors. Early on, they anglicized their Portuguese names to those of settlers in the Marlboro, South Carolina area. Whether they were pirates or merely shipwrecked sailors would have made no difference. Their only safety lay in changing their names. With the passage in 1699 of the stringent anti-piracy laws, rope happy citizens were apt to act first and think afterwards. They appear to have settled near the headwaters of the Pee Dee River some time before the American Revolution and to have drifted north into the mountainous areas of East Tennessee.

  It was a rough time for them. Not only were the land transfers still in a state of confusion at the present, so was the confusion over the color line. In 1844, three hundred and ten free persons of color were listed along with whites, slaves, and all others which meant Indians.

  They were classified as mulattos because of their dark coloring. As such, they were required to pay taxes, but were not allowed to vote or hold office and of course Negroes were not legally citizens until after the Civil war. During the Civil war the Melungeons were ruthless guerrillas, preying on both sides of the conflict.”

  One quotation caught Hidalgo’s eye; “Early in the last century, when the white folks first came here, the Melungeons was already here, holding all the good land in the creek bottoms. The white folks were covetous of that good land, but didn’t want to just take from the Melungeons, brutal like. Well, it wouldn’t abeen no trouble if the Melungeons was ordinary heathen Indians. They would a just kicked ‘em out. But here they was sorta living like civilized folks, and they was speaking English, and some were believing Christians. But their skins were brown on account o’ their Injun blood. So the white folks begin saying’ nobody with nigger blood could vote, hold office, or testify in court. Then they went to court and before long they got hold o’ that good bottom land. So, there wasn’t nothing’ left for the Melungeons to do but move up on the ridges.”

  In the last few years, due to the modern serological studies, the mysteries of the Melungeons have partially been solved. They are indeed descended from Portuguese.

  The Manchester Mystery Stone

  After prompting by the locals, we learned a few things about the Manchester Mystery Stone. Indeed it had rolled down to the main rode during construction and was carried to the town. It was even rumored that it was being considered for a documentary for PPS television. This particular slab of lenticular sandstone has many carvings of what is believed to be a Phoenician message written from over two thousand years ago. There apparently is several ancient languages involved, making the writing almost undecipherable.

  From the pamphlet I read out loud for everyone’s benefit. “The Golden Age of the Phoenicians lasted for only about three hundred years. Born in about 1,150 BCE, from the fusion with Cherethites and Pelethites, it was nearing its end by about 850 BCE. For three hundred years the cities of Lebanon had been independent and had become rich solely on the basis of a few small ports and a coastline of about two hundred and fifty kilometers, a bare minimum of land and possessions. Seen in this light, ‘wonder’ is inadequate to describe their achievements.”

  “The Phoenicians have always seemed rather an uncanny and mysterious people, particularly to the Greeks. The Hellenes could not understand how this tiny race had succeeded in building up an empire which spread over almost the entire area between Gibraltar and the Lebanese coast, and it was all the more difficult to understand because their empire was so elusive.”

  “The Phoenician empire was not built upon great cities and ports but rather dense networks of trading routes, routes over large bodies of water whose only visible trace was the wake left by a fleet of fragile ships. Where evidence of Phoenician cities has been discovered, they were always sea oriented. The land served these people as a base from which they could launch themselves into their true element, the ocean. The Phoenicians, or more exactly, the most important of many tribes which later came to make up the Phoenician race, came, as far as we know, from the Sinai, between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba.”

  “Deserts seem to make good incubators for the human race. The Bible describes migrations of this Bedouin tribe. The question of how this nomadic people from the desert took to the sea is a mystery. A precondition was wood suitable for building ships, amply provided by the abundant cedars of Lebanon. A simple process therefore; they came, they conquered, and from nomads of the steppes’ became ‘nomads of the sea.’ They gradually developed from the small beginnings of primitive coastal navigation to the navigational techniques which later enabled them to extend their empire from Lebanon to the Mediterranean and even across the Red Sea to the east coast of Africa. All of this occurred between the period of 1200 B.C. and 900 B.C.”

  Exploring Eastern Pre-History

  We learned of many mysterious sites and discussed plans to explore them. We had planned to go north all the way to the Viking sites, documenting them and hopefully getting some research leads. Along the way we planned to visit universities
, historical sites, museums and anywhere else where we could ask questions. We had learned long ago that showing up in person often produced interesting meetings with people who would discuss the subject off the record. We were working, yet it seemed like play to me. Everyday seemed to have a new adventure and learning experience.

  One place we wanted to visit was in New Hampshire, located on a farm and was being billed as the Stonehenge of America. No one knew who had built it. But some of it seemed no different than many other large structures found throughout America. After some exploration of the site people had found small tunnel like structures that allowed a beam of sunlight to focus on an alter rock at the summer solstice. Was it built that way on purpose or was it just a coincidence?

  The site also had a rock structure that for all purposes appeared to be a sacrifice alter. The problem was it could also be a table used by farmers to butcher hogs or other animals. The groove along the edges of the rock would collect the blood from the animal that would be processed into such epicurean delights as blood pudding.

  One site, however, definitely did seem to have some merit. Off the coast of Halifax, Canada an ingenious treasure trap was discovered on Oak Island. In 1795 a teenager found what appeared to be an underground shaft which later revealed alternating layers of flagstone and timber. Thinking that possibly pirate treasure was hid in it excavations took place but after a certain depth, the shaft would fill in with water preventing the workers from continuing excavation. It turned out that the core shaft had feeder tunnels stretching to the ocean deliberately flooding the areas once one of the tunnels was hit.

  Experiments with red dye traced three connected tunnels and it was soon assumed that more tunnels would be found further down. Despite all that, money poured in from investors such as politicians the like of Franklin D. Roosevelt, movie stars such as John Wayne and other businessmen hoping to be a part of a new discovery and treasure. Being unable to dig deeper to access the treasure the workers used drills and cameras in an attempt to discover what was down there. They reported finding strange markings on stones, fragments of paper with an unknown lettering on it and they supposedly caught a glimpse of what appeared to be tools, some which looked ancient and others with futuristic appearances. It is said that they even managed to bring up a piece of gold chain. They were also able to determine that there were higher than normal concentrations of mercury and radiation. Whatever was buried at the bottom of that hole is truly a mystery and considering the amount of work that must have been involved in building the site, something incredibly valuable was hid there. But then again, it might just be a natural sinkhole with nothing in it: which due to the amount of money used in its exploration is why it now is called the money pit.