In 1398, did Sinclair sail the ocean blue? Micmac legend in Nova Scotia describes a fair-skinned visitor riding on a whale that supporters suggest was Prince Henry in a 14th-century ship
BY DEBORAH JONES
HALIFAX -- IF the Micmac hero and creator figure Glooskap was as much of a trickster as his reputation suggests, he would have enjoyed the tale that he was really Henry Sinclair, a 14th-century Scottish-Norwegian prince and explorer extraordinaire who, some say, beat Christopher Columbus to the New World by more than 90 years.
The tale of Henry Sinclair could be fact and could be fantasy - most historians are reserving judgment - but this summer, researchers and filmmakers will range through Europe, Scotland, Nova Scotia and Massachusetts to put it to the test.
One undisputed fact is that Henry Sinclair existed; he was an earl in the once-powerful Sinclair clan who enjoyed strong Norwegian connections and whose family seat - now a historic site - was a castle in Rosslin near Edinburgh. The fabulous part of the story begins in the late 1300s in part of his earldom, the Orkney Islands. From there Prince Henry supposedly sailed with an Italian navigator to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and then Massachusetts, making friends with the aboriginal peoples along the way. In his wake, the story goes, he left behind the legend of Glooskap and - as a Knight Templar - a mysterious connection with the Holy Grail.
"I'd love to believe this story; I think it's a great story and I don't think it's all that preposterous," says J. G. (Jack) Sinclair of Dartmouth, president of the national Clan Sinclair Association (Canada), which will hold the clan's international gathering in Nova Scotia this summer. "This has been an interesting, amusing hypothesis, but the official position of the Clan Sinclair is to wait and see what historians have to say as this whole area is probed. We talk about it, joke about it, but we have not made any formal moves."
Clan associations are content to wait, but two Sinclairs in London, England, have embraced the story of Prince Henry's crossing and are behind a documentary film, The Grail and the Stone, being produced for the BBC, as well as a book in honour of their ancestor. Writer and historian Andrew Sinclair is in seclusion working on a book and the script for the documentary about Prince Henry. Niven Sinclair, who owns a business affiliated with the BBC, has donated the equivalent of $200,000 to the project, which is timed to run just before next year's 500th anniversary of Columbus's historic crossing.
"The whole thing is to prove there were other people who came here long before Columbus 'discovered' America," says Tony Foster, a co-owner of Screen Star Entertainment Inc., a Halifax company that is producing 35 minutes of the two-hour documentary and which owns distribution rights in North America. "It's kind of strange," he admits with a chuckle.
This summer, archeologists will examine the Sinclair chapel and castle in Rosslin with new, ground-penetrating radar to investigate the contents of vaults far below the chapel and in the walls of the crypt. The legend of the Holy Grail - the cup said to have been used by Jesus at the Last Supper - is one of the things the researchers are investigating, and their findings will form part of the documentary.
Stories about the transatlantic exploits of Prince Henry have made the rounds for generations, largely based on the so-called Zeno Narratives, a recounting of the journeys of two Venetian brothers named Zeno. The narratives include the story that one of themcrossed the North Atlantic in 1398 with a mysterious northern prince named Zichmni, which scholars have interpreted as an unfortunate misspelling of Orkney.
The late science-fiction writer, Frederick Pohl, published several articles based on the Zeno Narratives in the 1950s, and followed them up in 1974 with a book, Prince Henry Sinclair. The Pohl book draws convincing parallels between descriptions of places in the Zeno Narratives and actual places in North America. For instance, Mr. Pohl writes, the narratives describe Prince Henry's soldiers finding a smoking hole at the bottom of a hill and a spring of pitch flowing down to the sea. Mr. Pohl cites geological research to pinpoint the place as Stellarton, N.S., where exposed seams of coal have caught fire.
But many scholars, including Geoffrey Barrow, a professor of Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh, are dubious about the Zeno Narratives, which were written five generations after the supposed crossing. The author, a descendant of the Zeno brothers, apparently wrote them from memory after reading - during childhood - letters written by his ancestors. Doubters point derisively to the author's confession that he tore up the letters after reading them.
"You either accept the journal as a genuine product or you suspend belief," Prof. Barrow says. "I don't disbelieve it; I'm agnostic, because a historian likes to have two independent sources before taking anything absolutely seriously."
He simply scoffs at "fanciful" suggestions by other authors that Prince Henry somehow hid the Holy Grail at Oak Island, the famous island on Nova Scotia's South Shore. More than a century ago, a labyrinth of underground vaults was discovered on Oak Island. Because the labyrinth mysteriously fills with water when disturbed, the island's secret has defied all treasure hunters.
Among the tangled web of Prince Henry stories, there is one intriguingly solid suggestion that a Sinclair (or a knight, at least) was in Massachusetts in the 14th century. In the rock of a high hill in Westford, Mass., is carved a likeness that several archeologists have identified as a medieval knight in armour. It may or may not be a fantastic stretch to imagine that he holds a shield emblazoned with the arms of the Earl of Orkney, one of Prince Henry's titles.
As for Prince Henry being the mythical Glooskap, one Micmac legend describes a fair-skinned Glooskap riding on a whale. Prince Henry aficionados suggest the "whale" was in fact a 14th-century ship. That interpretation does not sit well with the Micmacs.
"I think it's just a story, nothing else," says Peter Christmas, executive director of the Micmac Association for Cultural Studies in Sydney. "I don't like Prince Henry," he says, adding that he wishes people fascinated with the early explorers "would leave us alone. We weren't just sitting on our hands waiting to be discovered by anybody. We had our own political, economic, educational and social systems. These people are waiting for stories, and we have our story to tell."
Ironically, of all the Prince Henry tales, it is the suggested connection between Prince Henry and the Micmac, including stories about his wintering over in Nova Scotia, that most appeals to the wider Clan Sinclair.
"There's a certain amount of pride in the alleged link with the Micmac," says Jack Sinclair, "in the sense that he was not exploitive of Indians and valued their knowledge and traditions. Here you have a genuine hero who not only came over before Columbus, but who came without exploitation and slaughter."
Copyright Deborah Jones 1991
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