A historical investigator par excellence, Jeremy Belknap, who lived in late eighteenth-century New Hampshire, posed this question to his many readers in a two-volume work, the first of its kind in American publishing history, The American Biography. He began his two volumes, which was filled with biographies of the first explorers and the first English colonizers of America, with an interesting essay, Preliminary Dissertation. on the Circumnavigation of Africa by the Ancients; and its probable Consequences, the Population of some Part of America.

This question of who first came to America had exercised the minds of European and American intellectuals and historians since Columbus’ four voyages to America ending in 1504. The Europeans were astonished to find a new continent, a New World, other than the three continents taught by the ancients, Europe, Asia, and Africa. And to find this new place, America, inhabited by people hitherto unknown, was even more astonishing.

Ancient writers had long speculated on the possibility of lands to the west of Europe and Africa. Plato placed his imaginary Atlantis there. Now to actually prove the existence of such an unknown land and people required European intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and theologians to discover how and when such people came to America. And had no one from the Old World ever crossed the Atlantic or Pacific to visit and perhaps influence the development of these people?

The great European intellectual Michel de Montaigne wondered about the Americas in his essay, Of Cannibals. Thomas More imagined a Utopia across the Atlantic. Francis Bacon imagined a superior culture in New Atlantis. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as the English historian William Robertson speculated on the first visitors from the Old World to the New World. Thomas Jefferson hypothesized that people had migrated from northeast Asia to northwest America in the distant past. Others wondered if the indigenous people could have been descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.

Of great interest among the intellectuals of North America was a stone in Massachusetts with ancient writing inscribed upon it: the Dighton Rock. Intellectuals from Cotton Mather to Ezra Stiles tried to decipher the strange script. Stiles believed it was of Phoenician/Carthaginian origin. He wasn’t alone in his interpretation.

One of the leading scholars of the eighteenth century, William Robertson, had hypothesized that the ancient Phoenicians had the seafaring ability to cross the Atlantic in the centuries before Christ. There was much literary evidence in support of such a conclusion. Most noteworthy was the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who in his Histories recorded a story of ancient Phoenicians about six centuries before the birth of Christ voyaging south from the Red Sea along the African coast into the southern hemisphere, where the sun was always to the north (rather than the northern hemisphere, where the sun is always to the south). As they sailed west then north around Africa into the Atlantic, they apparently had the navigational ability to parallel the African coast tacking into the northwesterly trade winds, thereby returning through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. If the Phoenicians could do this, then why not cross the Atlantic with the benefit of the trade winds into America? Carthaginians, Phoenician colonists in North Africa, also had the ability to sail far into the Atlantic, and there are various ancient sources recounting stories of their voyages finding unknown lands. Would the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, had they arrived in America, had any impact on the indigenous people by which to remember them? This is an unanswered question.

More modern researchers into this question, such as the Norwegian archeologist Thor Heyerdahl, have discovered evidence that the Egyptians and the people of Iraq, the Mesopotamians, built reed ships out of the papyrus reed. Heyerdahl made some dramatic voyages, one successfully crossing the Atlantic in a reed vessel, to show the possibility that ancient Egyptians could have come to America. Heyerdahl, in another much publicized voyage, built a reed boat on the Tigris River and sailed down the river from the Persian Gulf to Indus River. Heyerdahl and others of his ilk are cultural diffusionists, convinced that ancient societies shared knowledge all over the world. Why else would there by pyramidal like structures in America, Egypt, and Iraq, than by communication between cultures?

Some scholars argue that the ancient Greeks had the ability to sail the Atlantic. An example is Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles France), three hundred years before the birth of Christ, who sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) to the Atlantic, sailing north to a place called Thule (Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, or maybe even America).

Others argue that before Columbus the Irish could have made their way to America. Fanciful evidence is the story of St. Brendan, an Irish monk who according to legend about fourteen hundred years ago sailed with his fellow monks in an Irish curragh (small boat made of seal-skin), where they discovered Paradise, saw a Crystal Castle (iceberg), and met a friendly whale who told them the directions. Timothy Severin, a modern explorer, built an Irish curragh and repeated the feat, sailing from Ireland to America.

Beyond historical evidence is the imagination. What would Phoenicians three thousand years ago who came to American shores have experienced? Would they have interacted peacefully with the indigenous inhabitants. Would they have introduced their polytheistic pantheon of deities to the Americans? Would Baal have been worshipped about the campfire in the northeastern American forest of thousands of years ago?

Let your imagination run wild reading a fictional account of some of the information presented in this blog post. “The Search for the Bronze Amulet” is a fictional historical fantasy about eighteenth-century seekers of the bronze amulet of Baal, left by Phoenicians along the New England coast centuries before. The fun can be experienced by purchasing the paperback on Amazon at this link: The Search for the Bronze Amulet: Lawson, Russell M.: 9798246856833: Amazon.com: Books