PRINCE HENRY SINCLAIR PART IV

   PRINCE HENRY SINCLAIR PART IV

Antonio Zeno said that Prince Henry sent the fleet away and retained only rowing boats. He kept only those who wanted to spend the winter. That means his Templar's, it is said that 500 of the warrior Monks accompanied him with at least part of the treasure which is known as the Holy Grail. He spent at least one winter in Nova Scotia and perhaps two.

Antonio says that Prince Sinclair conceived the idea to start a settlement, evidence shows that perhaps he started two or more. He made friends with the Micmac Indians which are indigenous to the area which are part of the greater nation of Algonquin Indians which extended into present day Maine and into New England at least into the Massachusetts and Rhode Island to the area of Newport.

These Indians were quite friendly, intelligent and were quite open to learning new methods. They had a quite advanced form of communication for this time, they would write symbols on tree bark or etch it into stones or wood and send it to another group of Indians that would respond in like using the same bark or stone. Just like we would send letters or notes.

Prince Sinclair became part of their legends and history and they called him Glooscap;

Glooscap being a handsome and very stately warrior

with the air of a great chief, was admired by all,

especially by the women, so that everyone felt honored

whose wigwam he delighted to enter.

He read the thought of men as though they were the

strength of wampum seeing deep into everyone's heart

He was ever a boon companion and a right valiant smoker

in all the world no man was who loved a well filled pipe

of good and fragrant pipe tobacco so heartily as he.

The Indians were amazed at his tireless exploration of the country. Micmac legends state that he crossed the Nova Scotia peninsula to the Atlantic and returned to the Bay of Fundy. He crossed to the Atlantic by first paddling southwest along the Bay of Fundy to the site of present day Digby.

From Digby he followed the shore to modern day Annapolis where he discovered the mouth of the Lequille Stream, following this as far as possible by canoe “ a short but rugged portage” would have brought him to the Liverpool head lake.

The lake was a long system running the length of the peninsula and drained by the Mercy River which drains into the Atlantic at present day Liverpool. The route was all by water except for the short portage This was the easiest way across the widest part of the Nova Scotia peninsula. Nova Scotia is a peninsula not a island. There is a 17 mile land bridge connecting it to the continent.

He very well may have crossed at its narrowest point by following the shore of Mahone Bay to the south he would have noticed a medium sized island about 2 miles to his left and would Probably have stopped to explore it and perhaps spent the night.

A bought 20% of the island had spruce trees growing, the rest of it was mainly flat with a lot of underbrush and bramble, perhaps some berry bushes like most lake islands. They probably hiked the shore line before before entering into the interior of the island.

On the north shore of the island looking across Mahone Bay to the western shore of the Peninsula there were a couple of small islands not much more than mudflats and past them to the south is an expanse of water which is the entrance to the Gold River leading to the interior of the peninsula. Prince Sinclair probably would have followed this river because there was a very high point that he would have been able to climb and get quite an expansive view of the peninsula and both bodies of water.

Half way down the island was a indentation at the narrowest point of the island, with a swamp crossing it from shore to shore. He probably went to the center of it and commenced a expanding rectangle search pattern noticing the quality of soil, signs of wildlife, and any signs of habitation. He probably split his crew into several groups each taking a section of the island.

The crew taking the southern portion of the island came across a depression of earth with a covering of branches and old brush that didn't look natural more like it was a pile of brush, walking across it the feel of the ground was distinctly different.

Probing the ground with a walking stick they encountered a large flat stone. Strange because there weren't any stones or rocks that size and type any where around it. They pried it off the ground and to their surprise it was covering an entrance. They cleared rubbish out of the entrance and about two feet down their was another flat stone protecting the entrance. They proceeded to remove that stone also and then there was blackness, one of the men dropped a stone down and no sound was heard.

The tunnel was very exciting to the crew, but Prince Henry decided to re secure the sight and planned for further investigation, they retired to there camp site and planned for a early departure oh dark thirty the next morning.

They departed across Mahone bay from the north shore of the island, and 2 miles later they were traveling with the incoming tide up the Gold River. They traveled along the river making a map as they proceeded along the very scenic river banks lined with oak and elm maple and spruce trees. After a 17 mile trip they made camp at the foot of a very tall rocky hill which they planned to climb in the morning to catch the view from the top.

At daybreak the following day they climbed the hill arriving at it close to noon, and what they found was quite interesting. A Castle, falling apart and in disrepair but a fortress non the less. With a working well none the less. With an incredible view up and down the peninsula and both the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic were also plainly visible and cape D' Or was visible to the north. The island they were at in Mahone Bay was also plainly visible along with the river called the which came to an end at the foot of the hill where they made a camp site last night. But interesting enough just a short distance off it started up again and flowed into the Bay of Fundy. This River is called the “Gaspereau”. Interesting though, another island lay a short distance off the mouth off the mouth of the river draining into the Bay of Fundy .

OK time for me to digress, first with the hilltop castle. The Zeno map of the north shows two settlements marked by castle's on the Zeno map. One at the river hilltop site which is called the cross and the other in the northern part of the island on the bay called Pictou, the Indians call it the “ town of a hundred wigwams”. The location of the castle at the cross is now part of a hilltop village. It is owned by a couple who are descendants of Eric the Red and also of Robert the Bruce through the Stuart dynasty. They came over from England specifically for this property. They have tried to have the site professionally excavated by the government but its being delayed by politics, they don't want to have to write the history books. Just wait till I start beating up on John Cabot

Just to satisfy their curiosity they started a very small dig. The property still has the crumbling walls of the castle with rubble stone construction They dug down four feet and noticed that the stone had changed to squared stone that was fitted together and squared. At four feet in depth they still hadn't reached the foundation. They decided to halt the dig at that point to maintain an undisturbed site. They recovered a few stone implements. They recovered a stone called a herm, a roughly man made cut stone which was on the property. It had a Celtic style known as a petromantic. There was also a portion of a flaked stone knife it appeared to be Celtic from the Neolithic period as late as the Julian conquest of Gaul. They also had a very corroded pin or “fibula” and a portion of a sword blade. Also a dagger blade. The sword blade could just as easily be from a piece of farm implement, but never the less significant.

According to the owners, they felt based on family legends Europeans were settled on the hilltop before the time of Christ. They were prospecting gold which they used to finance Stuart dynesty military operations and other dynesty ventures during the middle ages.

The Norse came to the same hilltop years later. The Norse were related to the Stuarts of Scotland and built a village over the earlier site. They built what she believes is the lost city of Norumbega. The Norse site was built after Columbus but well before any European occupation. This was essentially a safe house for Royal members of the Stuart dynesty.

When a area is deemed historic in Nova Scotia, it becomes under government control. Which means people can be forced to move and loose their properties, real estate values take a nose dive and in general tension is running high in this village. This property has come to be known as the castle at the cross.

The island in the bay is of course the infamous Oak Island. I will be presenting this in a separate post within the next few days. There are two Oak islands at the ends of the rivers . These are landmarks. The significant thing about Oak Island as it relates to this story is that the “Money Pit” is essentially a sinkhole 250' deep with a cavern at the bottom.

Mining companies have entered it with fiber optic cameras and located a body. They believed they have discovered two wooden chests with metal in them and a small piece of parchment has been retrieved. Everybody suspects this is a location of the Holy Grail and also pirate treasure specifically Captain Kids lost Treasure. But there is significant possibility that it goes back to Ancient times. The original wooden beams are spruce timbers dating to 800B.C. If their was oak on the island these also would date to that time era.

It takes 200 years for oak to mature. It is felt if there was oak on the island when Prince Henry was their he would have used it. The oak platforms are dating to the 1600's, the time area of piracy. If Prince Henry planted oak tree's in the early 1400's, as markers for the river entrance, they would have been matured by the age of Piracy in the 1600's. Also as you might imagine, there would be quite a significant reason, for Henry to go through this much work, if the Oak Island location wasn't extremely significant.

Also on this subject if you haven't ever approached a island with out charts, trying to locate landmarks, separating small coves and bays from streams and rivers in the foggiest spot on the earth, well you just haven't lived!

The warm gulf stream comes up from the gulf of Mexico, its warm full of fish and birds flying around sailors know when they are in it. This is why Florida has such warm waters full of fish and corals. As it moves north at four knots, its like a river in the middle of a ocean. If you get a stiff breeze going against this current, well just review some of the stories of the Bermuda Triangle, like I said, you haven't lived until you've messed around with the gulf stream.

As the gulf stream flows north at 4kts, which is fast, most sail boaters wished they averaged 4kts on a voyage, the cold Labrador current is coming south from Canada, across the grand banks, and down the Jersey coast, which is why the waters of Atlantic City and the Maryland beaches have frigid waters. These two ocean rivers bump into each other off of the outer banks of North Carolina the 21 mile stretch of area that Cape Lookout serves is known as Horrible Headlands. The cold and warm waters mix, the fog is as thick as pea soup, the large ocean waves have been coming from Europe non stop driven by strong currents with 50kt storm gales running against them, yep you haven't lived until you've messed with North Carolina.

Meantime the gulf stream is running north about 70 miles off the coast of Maryland, that’s where the charter skippers take you fishing, and heading for the grand banks where these streams once again converge and the fogs that occur in the gulf of Maine and the grand banks, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland are legendary.

However the explorers in the age of discovery didn't have weather satellites, NOAA, buoys and maritime radio's. They frequently send half a dozen ships on voyages and don't expect them to all make it. Nova Scotia is not sailor friendly waters, when you run aground, and your not considered a sailor until you have run aground, it's granite. Mud, sand, coral you can plow through and mess up your paint job, the coasts of Canada, Maine and New England, well that's ugly.

When your approaching a coastline and your looking for a river entrance, it doesn't look like a river it looks like the shore line has taken a curve, or it looks like a bay, the river may be ½ mile wide inland but becomes extremely wide at the entrance.

I believe the Amazon is 200 miles wide, and the float-some that comes out of that river fifty miles out to sea is incredible. Even the color of the water can be brown after heavy rain storms and flooding. Also you frequently have not one river entrance, but several, which all look the same, especially in my home waters of the Chesapeake bay, and Bay of Fundy is an absolute challenge, it separates the sailors from the wanna be sailors.

This why Oak Island has oaks on it. They are the only islands within hundreds of miles that have oak on them. Next question for you, Why two Oak Islands, brush up on Trig, next lesson is celestial navigation before time pieces were invented.

Damn, I digressed again, OK, class is out!

When the French arrived in the early 1600's they were the first to report this form of communication that the Micmac were using. It was quite unique for a group of people living at the level of cave men, actually frequently they did live in caves. but it wasn't until relatively recently that Professor Barry Fell of Harvard University performed a comparison to Egyptian script and also North African ancient script's and he concluded that they were Egyptian and more specifically North African in nature.

An interesting observation is that there were symbols for silver and gold however the Micmac were at the level of the stone age people's and didn't have any metals at all in their culture. Not any tools or weapons that were metal.

However when Champlain surveyed the area that the Micmac were prominent in specifiably Nova Scotia and especially around the headwaters of the Bay of Fundy, there were so many gold mines silver mines and copper mines even the small bay off the head of Fundy was called the golden bay, because it has a golden hue. It was appropriately named Minas Basin, or Bay of Mines.

Copper had been imported to Europe primarily Great Britain during the Bronze Age between 3300 and 1200 BC. Copper was smelted with tin to make Bronze. This was most commonly done by Jewish tin miners in Cornwall and Devon in Briton.

The Bronze Age is placed between the stone age and the Iron Age, 3300BC and 1200BC. Its the 2^nd phase of a three tier system of classification and studying ancient societies. A region could be in the Bronze Age either by smelting their own tin and copper or by trading with those production areas that did.

An important aspect to the spread of the Bronze Age was the development of a written language. First in Mesopotamia, with the Sumerians, using “Cuneform” and this knowledge passed to the Egyptians using “hieroglyphs and from Egypt into North Africa and the Mediterranean with the Mycenaean ( Linear B) script most commonly associated with early Greek which pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries.

Tin is a very rare element in the world. There were areas in Asia but it was primarily mined in Great Briton, in Devon and Cornwall, and South America . It was also to a lesser degree mined in Brittany France, Germany, Spain and Portugal.

The primary production area of Copper came from Indonesia, Chile, North America, and in ancient times Cyprus.

The word Phoenician means “Red Hair”. They built their cities on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean. They had two main colonies Phoenicia and Carthage. They became known as Carthaginians THEY WERE THE ORIGINAL CELTS.

After the end of the Trojan war they began to expand their horizons with voyages into the Atlantic .

In 1972 off the coast of Honduras a Carthaginian ship wreck was discovered containing a cargo of amphorae.

Some believe that the Toltec Indians were Carthaginians who after being defeated in the Tunic wars by the Romans left the Mediterranean for North Africa, West Africa, the Iberian Peninsula. The group that went to West Africa, either on purpose or by being blown out to sea during a storm by way of Trade Wind route made their way to South America, the Caribbean and Central America.

They were conquered by the Aztec Indians and their leader Montezuma acquired their cargo of gold , precious metals, and scripts and other cultural items. This became part of Montezuma's treasure which was later discovered by Cortez in present day Mexico City.

Montezuma was confused when the conquistadors arrived, he didn't know weather to associate them with the feathered serpent sun god Quetzalcoatl which the legend stated that one day the god would return to the land of the Aztecs to claim his throne and he would be recognized by his shine hair and white skin.

The Phoenicians were also called Sidonians which were one and the same. They were considered masters of sorcery and magic. They were the original occultists. They came to possess a civilization that goes back 30,000 years.

Sidonian navigators were in great demand by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Egyptians. Navigation, mathematics,and the sciences were considered the occult and all religions of that time were its enemy. The Greek alphabet was taken directly from Sidonian script and applied to the sounds of the Greek Language, hence the word phonetic.

Now that I am done digressing lets return to the Carthaginians expanding their horizons. One group went to Africa and eventually to central and South America. Another group went to the Iberian Peninsula, they founded Cadiz Spain. This group became known as “Celtiberians” by archeologist's.

They migrated to the British Isles, where they were just referred to as Celts. In their migration through the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula they accumulated many languages and alphabets. In 1200A.D. The “Book of Ballymore” was written at a monastery in Ireland using African Script.

In 1960 this script was shown to be an ancient North African script used in the time frame of 1000 A.D. The Celts of Ireland, England and Wales the “Ancient Britons” used many different writing systems which they preserved in monasteries.

The Celts went from Ireland to the Shetland Islands then on to Iceland where they started some settlements, on to Greenland where they also started settlements. They always seemed to be one step ahead of the Vikings but by generations.

They were well established in Greenland when Eric the Red arrived in 982 A.D. From there to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and several points on the eastern seaboard of North America. There is unquestionable Celtiberian influence in the Algonquian writing system.

If the Celtiberian's brought African script to Ireland, which was used in the Book of Ballymore, it wouldn't be unheard of to bring North African hieroglyphic's to Nova Scotia.

Algonquin legends state that some of the their Ancestors came from across the Atlantic and that white men lived among them in times long past. Celtic contact seems to have been massive and long standing. It makes one wonder about the legends of the white Indians of Narraganset Bay.

Carthaginian began moving out of the Mediterranean starting around 700B.C. St. Brendan was suppose to have traveled to North America in the times of King Arthur. When Viking explorer's arrived in North America, they reported natives with auburn or lite brown hair. They were told of a “white mans land” inland from the coast. Part of this groups customs were to walk as a group in a procession chanting, sounds like Irish Monks to me!

There is a Norse legend concerning an Icelander from around the year 1000 A.D., his name was Ari Marson he was a explorer who was shipwrecked in the lands to the west, he was also baptized there.

There have been several discoveries in the New England Area of Phoenicia sites with writing in a Celtiberian script known as Ogam. They are possible Temples to the Phonetician Sun God Baal.