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ANCIENT
AMERICAN * ISSUE #30
An Ancient North African Treasure-Trove... ©
(continued)
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| Juba II, Mauritania's enlightened monarch
of the early 1st Century A.D. |
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warships in the
open seas of the Atlantic Ocean. Their army, trained and equipped
by the Romans themselves, had never lost a battle. Claudius was
forced to dispatch an entire army to Mauritania in what soon
developed into full-scale warfare for seven months, involving
20,000 troops and several corps of chariotry.
Although the Mauri slowed the Roman invasion, they could not
stop it. Defeat seemed inevitable to the wealthy men who initially
backed the revolt. They |
| Emperor Claudius found himself
fighting the Mauritanians he orginally wanted as friends. |
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were confronted
by two alternatives: Await the Romans, who would execute some
and over-tax the survivors, or flee. But to where? Rome controlled
the world to the north. To the east sprawled the largest desert
on Earth, the Sahara. In the south was Senegal, within easy reach
of Claudius' legions. The broad ocean, which the landlubber Romans
feared as "the Pasture of Fools," rolled westward,
the Mauritanians' only escape route. In short, they could only
hope to survive as "boat-people."
Perhaps the scholarly Juba, in his long-since lost geography
texts, described distant territories on the other side of the
sea-- lands he learned of from the Phoenicians, who used North
African ports for their commercially secret, transatlantic voyages.
Indeed, the Canary Island Current runs like an underwater conveyor-belt
from the Mauritanian shores of North Africa, westward across
the Atlantic Ocean, straight into the Gulf |
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including
Plutarch and Dio Cassius. What follows is speculation based on
their factual accounts.
 aced with imminent
seizure, the supporters of Mauritania's revolution appealed to
their admirals for help. But the navy could spare no ships in
its life-and-death struggle against Roman armadas. Instead, the
admirals assigned a number of marines, sailors, captains and
shipwrights to the Mauri leaders. Perhaps they could induce the
boat-builders of neighboring Senegal to construct a make-shift
fleet. Continued resistance against the Romans bought time for
the Mauri and their commissioned Senegalese laborers, working
under the direction of Mauritanian naval architects.
With military catastrophe descending from the north, the just-completed
ships were boarded by survivors of the royal family, the aristocracy
and |
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| Left, A youthful
Ptolemy of Mauritania shortly after his coronation. Right, Roman
emperor, Gaius Caligula, ordered Ptolemy's death and sparked
a transatlantic voyage. |
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of Mexico. It seems unlikely that the scholarly
Juba or Phoenicia's prodigious sea-farers knew nothing of this
obvious phenomenon. After all, it was the same current used nearly
1,500 years later by another sailor, Christopher Columbus, as
his direct route to America.
Meanwhile, the invading Romans announced their intentions of
reducing Mauritania to indentured, colonial status. It was clear,
too, that their immediate objective was to seize the Mauritanian
treasury. It had been moved from Caesarea, ever further southward,
ahead of their advancing columns. The Mauritanian royalty, into
whose keeping the treasury had been entrusted, fled toward the
Senegalese border.
All the events described up to this
point in our narrative comprise the historical record, as documented
by several Roman writers,
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financial backers
with their household guards and priests. Senegalese mariners
were also on board. Trusting their lives to the open sea rather
than facing certain death or slavery on land, they saw the African
Continent gradually fade away with every lunge their ships took
over the surging waves.
Sailing by the stars and coasting westward in the invisible grip
of the Canary Island Current, the refugee fleet of some forty
vessels was at sea for perhaps three months. But even if they
all succeeded in crossing the Atlantic, landing opportunities
in the Americas were more than hazardous. Putting in at somewhere
along the coasts of Florida or Cuba. Warring cannibal tribes
of the Arawak and Caribb Indians, respectively, made settling
there impossible.
Pushing on to Mexico, the Mauritanians would have had to confront
native peoples intent on human sacrifice, in which beating hearts
were removed with |
Treasure-Trove... Page
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