Immense wealth – in the form of gold, silver and amethysts – lies just beneath the surface of the vast body of water that is Lake Superior. What’s more, Lake Superior’s mines were the richest source of copper on earth. Over a billion years ago, copper crystallised in the lava bed that lay deep under the waters of the largest and most northerly of the Great Lakes of America. Glacial action exposed some of those mineral riches, in some cases leaving vast rocks of ‘float copper’ in river beds, on lake shores and glinting out of rocks. On Isle Royale, a particularly copper-rich island in the northwest of Lake Superior, and on the Keweenaw Peninsula, a further site on the lake’s southern shore, Drier found over 5,000 mines. Those workings were not from our time: they dated from between 3000 and 1200 BC...
Drier wondered if the missing copper had been made into goods that were no longer in North America. In other words, he wondered if the resource had actually been exploited by outsiders and not by the native peoples of America. In the 1920s, so soon after the loss of the Titanic, this was an almost unthinkable proposition. Could seafarers from the Old World have achieved such a crossing? The mystery remained unsolved.
The Menomonie Indians of north Wisconsin have a perplexing legend that speaks of an ancient network of mines. The stories describe the mines as being worked by ‘light-skinned men’, who were somehow able to identify the right place to dig by throwing magical stones on to the ground. When they struck, the instruments made the copper ores ring, like a bell. It’s possible that the legend conflates the start of the mining process – finding the ores – with the end results of it; in other words, with creating a metal. A similar practice was used to find tin in Europe during the Bronze Age.
S.A. Barnett, the first archaeologist to study Aztalan, an archaeological site near the Menomonie Indians’ native lands, believed that the miners of ancient times originated from Europe. His conclusion was largely based on the type of tools that had been found there, tools which he said were not used by the local people. But where was the workforce and where were the villages, the rubbish tips, the burials? The answer: nowhere. Only their tools remained.
The two world experts on this mystery, Octave Du Temple and Professor Drier, staged a number of expeditions to Isle Royale, hard on the Canadian border, in the 1950s. Their research gradually convinced them that an ancient civilisation far beyond North America had in fact mined and taken away the copper. At first they considered the Egypt of the pharaohs as a possibility, but they eliminated that line of research when they could find no evidence of Egyptian ships having reached North America.
They did, however, manage to fix dates for when the copper was mined. Charcoal found in the bottom of two pits on Isle Royale in Lake Superior confirmed that they had been worked from at least 2500 to 2000 BC.
A huge copper nugget found 5 metres (16.5 feet) down in the Minong mine on Isle Royale weighed 2,390 kilograms (5,270 pounds). There is an old black and white photograph of it in the Detroit Public Library. The copper had been hauled out of the ground on stretchers, or ‘cribs’. In another pit, a crib of solid oak had somehow survived without rotting, because of the anaerobic conditions. It had been crafted out of the original oak tree over 3,000 years ago. Mining had certainly been going on here for many centuries before the birth of Christ – efficient mining, conducted on a huge scale.
The ancient miners built large bonfires on top of the copper-bearing veins. Once the rock was glowing with heat they split it by pouring cold lake water over it. Solid copper of extraordinary purity was taken from the veins and smashed with stone hammers. But there seemed to be no trace of these people. They left behind no carvings, writings or paintings. And they left no dead – or so it appeared. Their tools remained in the American mines, just as if the miners expected to return on the following day. They never did. They disappeared – into thin air, it seemed – around 1250 BC.
These ancient miners were clearly very highly skilled. Every major seam opened in the area had already been worked in prehistoric times. Carbon dating of the wood timbers left in the pits puts the first mines at 2450 BC, and the abrupt end of the mining at 1200 BC. The idea of the ‘singing’ device used by the miners to find the copper was strange, but there was no doubt: these people had been expert miners.
Even today, it is difficult to source original metal ore; in our own times, the price of copper is an economic bellwether, because it is used in so many things, from washing machines to houses. The estimates of the amount of copper ore excavated in the Lake Superior region thousands of years ago are staggering, although they vary hugely. One claim is that as much as 230 million kilograms (500 million pounds) of extremely pure copper was mined here. Another estimate is far more conservative, putting the total at 1.4 million kilograms (3 million pounds).
Yet whatever the precise figures, you would still expect to find large numbers of Bronze Age artefacts here in the New World, either as pure copper or as alloyed bronze. Not so. That copper – tons of it – has disappeared from the archaeological record. The estimate is that if all of the historic copper artefacts of the right date ever found in North America were added together, they would still account for less than 1 per cent of the copper mined from Lake Superior.
We’d chosen the former French fur trading outpost of Thunder Bay as our base and had reserved seats on the port side of the connecting plane. On the beautiful, bright afternoon of our flight, we could see the island stretched out to the southwest, clear as crystal.
Although Isle Royale is technically in the United States, Thunder Bay is right on the border, on the western arm of Lake Superior. Isle Royale itself has been turned into a nature park and is now about as remote a wilderness as you can get.
We were up at dawn, eagerly reporting for duty outside a stout Edwardian classical revival building, the Brodie Resource Library, a minute before opening. Apparently, this part of Ontario holds the world record for wind chill factor: luckily, a helpful librarian let us in out of the cold.
Her name, as it turned out, was Wendy Woolsey and she gave us the quick five-minute tour, explaining that when the library opened in 1885 the Carnegie Foundation had wanted ‘to promote a desire for good wholesome literature’. Along the way, the owners had made sure that readers could also get cleaned up: in the original building, the smoking and recreation room had contained a bath. It was good old, paternalistic stuff; during staff picnics, games were to be played and ‘steps taken for the safety of women and children’. I noted that this effectively meant ‘no liquor’.
The library staff, Wendy, Karen Craib and Michelle Paziuk, were extraordinarily helpful, and kindly agreed to trawl through the library archives looking for:
1. DNA reports on prehistoric miners’ skeletons and the dating of these skeletons.
2. Prehistoric miners’ skulls, especially those which had been carbon dated, with reports on their heritage – whether European or Native American.
3. Reports on the prehistoric mines, not least methods of mining and the tools left behind.
4. Rock art – particularly any pictures of prehistoric ships.
5. Descriptions of artefacts found by the first Europeans to reach Lake Superior – not least by the Jesuits.
6. Legends and folklore of the indigenous Native American peoples. In particular whether they had mined or assisted in mining in prehistoric times.
7. Chemical analyses of Lake Superior copper and in particular Isle Royale copper. Was it really 99 per cent pure? Were there any corroborative chemical analyses?
The five of us had an amazing day. Marcella and I discovered that even today Thunder Bay is a major port, with extensive grain storage facilities. Isle Royale is 15 miles (24 kilometres) from here. The huge poking finger of the Keweenaw Peninsula, another major site known for ancient mining, is a further 40 miles (64 kilometres) south of us, across the water on the Michigan side of the vast Lake Superior. An official ‘water trail’ has been mapped out for those who want to visit what was once called ‘Copper Island’,
but it would take a full five to ten days to complete, depending on weather conditions.
Meanwhile, our three helpers were unstoppable. A list of the reports they helped us dig up is on the website.
While Karen dredged up reports on mining, Michelle tracked down skeletal remains and local myths and Wendy looked up local art finds. She also guided us through textbooks and papers that contained chemical analyses of the local ores.
The mining methods Karen’s reports described are identical to those used at the Great Orme in north Wales. The Bronze Age metal hunters smashed out the ore with copper axes, adzes and awls which were almost straight duplicates of those at the Great Orme, and they bashed the excavated ore with stone ‘eggs’, just as they had done in Wales. Perhaps this was the device behind the folklore, behind the Menomonie Indians’ myth? The ‘eggs’ were once again identical in shape, size and weight to those in the Welsh mine.
Thirteen chemical analyses of Great Lakes copper since 1894 at: the Kearsarge and Tamarack mines; Isle Royale; the Phoenix Mine; the Quincy Mine (Keller); the Quincy Mine (Ledoux); the Atlantic Mine; the Osceola and Franklin Mines; Lake Superior (Carpenter 1914); Lake Superior (US Bureau of Standards 1925); Keweenaw (Phillips 1925); and Lake Superior (Voce 1948), show trace elements in the copper of 0.09 per cent or less. That is, the copper is 99 per cent or more pure. The ten copper ingots found in the Uluburun wreck (out of over 300) as analysed by Professor Hauptmann and colleagues can only be Lake Superior copper, because of this extraordinary purity.
Karen also found page after page of detailed descriptions of prehistoric pottery and tools from thousands of prehistoric mines. We looked at old mine workings; mauls and hammers; skeletons and skulls; copper spears and arrows; knives; chisels; punches; awls; needles; harpoons and fish hooks; necklaces; spatulas. There was even a ‘Minoan-style’ double-headed axe.
The excavation was in 1924 and was known at the time as the ‘Milwaukee Expedition’. Over 10,000 Bronze Age artefacts taken from the mines are now in the Milwaukee Public Museum. Experts like Professor N.H. Winchell later argued that the indigenous peoples had no knowledge of refined metalworking. He also had intriguing evidence that the prehistoric miners had had a distinctive genetic characteristic: a remarkable flattening of the shinbone.12 That took me aback a second – didn’t the ‘Amesbury Archer’, or ‘King of Stonehenge’, and his ‘son’ both have a marked bone peculiarity?
Michelle had so far had no luck with ancient skeletons. She did, though, find us some highly interesting information on the changes in the water levels of the Great Lakes over the past five millennia. The fact that the water levels had changed radically since the Bronze Age would later become a crucial piece of evidence in my search for the truth.13
The first modern-day mining operations began near the Ontonagon River on the Keweenaw Peninsula. Wendy had dug out details of a strange, so-called ‘perched’ rock at Pequaming which is carved with a prehistoric Caucasoid human face. The rock is aligned with a dolmen that sits on top of Huron Mountain – and is in line with sunrise at the winter solstice. Could it have been used by the Minoans as a kind of signpost? Like a child in a sweet shop, I hardly knew which morsel of information to chew on first.
CHAPTER 34
ADVENTURES BY WATER
The imposing scale of Lake Superior comes as a surprise, rather like the sight of the Grand Canyon for the first time. The colours of the shoreline are vivid and varied: red and grey granite, white quartzite, black basalt and golden beaches. The hills behind the shoreline soar to a height of 305 metres (1,000 feet). This is the southern end of the Canadian Shield, a 4-billion-year-old almost soil-free area of the earth’s crust, with its edges clawed but barely diminished by the grumbling glaciers.
And to the west, nothing. No land, no ships, no sails, no people. Just water.
Isle Royale was turned into a national park in the 1950s and today it certainly qualifies as a wilderness – 22 miles (35 kilometres) from Grand Portage, Minnesota; 56 miles (90 kilometres) from Copper Harbor, Michigan; 73 miles (117 kilometres) from Houghton, where the boat service starts. Six and a half hours by boat and then a long hike from the camp site through wild country.
The largest island on the largest freshwater lake in the world, Isle Royale has no modern infrastructure to speak of – no bridges, causeways, or even roads. A deserted, marshy island in the middle of nowhere and populated, I’d been told, mainly by moose. Oh, and wolves.
This is the middle of mining country. You can see on maps that the lake’s silting-up has changed the settlement’s position relative to the water. On a satellite image I could just make out the outline of a likely area, huge and flat, through sun-dappled shadows in the trees.
Why did these miners leave their tools so suddenly, as though they were planning to come back again the next day? Could there have been an epidemic? Could the whole community have fallen sick and died? Or was it connected with matters at home – the Thera eruption? I suppose that is something we will never be able to work out for sure . . .
Another day; another island. This time on Lake Michigan, the midsection of the great butterfly shape drawn by the Great Lakes on the face of America. Beaver Island – 45 degrees 39 minutes north/ 85 degrees 33 minutes west – is also known as ‘the Emerald Isle’. It’s a fertile gem of a place, set among the best fishing fields of the lake. Fourteen miles (22 kilometres) long, it is a thirty minute ferry ride from the city of Charlevoix.
Tracking the Minoans across the lakes was one of the most thrilling moments of my discovery. A treasure trail of clues had already been leading me towards this island, whose geographical position is key to its importance. A large number of storage pits that still hold traces of corroded copper lead from the Keweenaw Peninsula to Beaver Island.
That was as nothing to the news I had read of a stone circle on the island. Apparently, the native Americans call it a ‘sun circle’.
A native American elder had told Professor James Scherz that a mystical series of stone circles lay submerged in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan. The elder told Scherz that these stone structures were all linked by what he called ‘Thunderbird lines’. They all led to a large stone circle on Beaver Island.
In the 1950s Scherz made a study of the ring, which is made up of 39 stones and is 121 metres (397 feet) in diameter. He concluded that it was built for astrological purposes.
As my time in Canada drew to an end, evidence of a Minoan presence here was pouring in. North of L’Anse, on the Pequaming Peninsula in Keweenaw Bay, we’d found raised stone cairns that were probably used as beacon markers to guide in the ships. Archae- ologists have found the remains of prehistoric cemeteries, created for the mine workers of old, near Green Bay opposite Beaver Island. Sea shells from the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic lie beside the fragments of bone – in some cases, alongside copper jewellery. These copper artefacts appear to be identical in style to those found in the Uluburun wreck.
Hundreds of large, cast copper axe heads had been found – a hoard, just like in Europe – by an archaeologist named Warren K. Moorehead. Near Copper Harbor, above what would have been a beach 3,000 years ago after the retreat of the last glacial ice age, a petroglyph (rock engraving) of an ancient sailing ship. The design, roughly drawn, shows a ship that looks just like the graceful Minoan ships of Thera.
Most excitingly, a second stone circle has now been found nearby, near Traverse City: the only problem being that the site is now under water. Mark Holley, Professor of Underwater Archaeology at Northwestern Michigan College, discovered the series of stones 12 metres (40 feet) below the surface of Lake Michigan.
By his account, amidst the watery gloom Holley thought he could see that one of the stones appeared to have been carved. The markings are about 1 metre high and 1.5 metres long (3 feet by 5 feet). They are worn and the pictures Holley brought back were inconclusive: people speculate that the stone carries a pictogram of a mastodon (elephant-like mammal). Yet mastodon, say archaeologists, w
ere not common this far north, and by this time the huge, tusked mammals were dying out.
The Minoans, I was learning, left little to chance. I admired their strategic choice of location. Beaver Island is about halfway between the southern shore of the narrow part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the entrance to Grand Traverse Bay. In other words, it is easy to get to with ships under your command and it’s in a great strategic position. It would also be easy to defend – a great site for a trading centre.
Here, at the heart of America, there appears to be a Minoan star observatory, a mini-Stonehenge. Far from leaving without trace, the ancient mariners had left behind something infinitely more precious, to me at least: a mass of copper tools and artefacts. I felt closer than ever to these fearless seafarers, the sailors who had tamed the Atlantic Ocean to become the men of Atlantis.
CHAPTER 35
A HEAVY LOAD INDEED
There was, however, a problem to resolve. How would the Minoans have transported the copper? There are only two possible routes: the first is east, through the Great Lakes. You would have to work your way laboriously across Lake Erie and Lake Ontario to the St Lawrence and then head for Newfoundland. As a sailing challenge this is very, very hard to do. The advantage would be that you would be on the right latitude to cross the North Atlantic quickly, to reach bases in Britain. The problem is, it’s highly dangerous.
No one is sure whether Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), the first European since the Vikings to reach the eastern coast of Canada, landed at Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island in 1497. Aided by strong west winds and the Gulf Stream, he took only a triumphant fifteen days to get back. However, it almost goes without saying that the North Atlantic is never to be trusted. In 1498 Cabot tried to do it again, but he never made it. He and his five ships, commissioned by the ambitious English King Henry VII to find ‘the Indes’, were lost at sea.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 27
