Yet not only does he seem to have known where he was going but, on some accounts, when he was going to get there:
Now and then Pinzon and Columbus consult and deliberate – mutually discuss their route. The map or chart passes not infrequently from the one captain to the other; the observations and calculations as to their position are daily recorded, their conduct and course for the night duly agreed upon.
On the eve of their due arrival Columbus issues the order to stay the course of the armada, to shorten sail, because he knew that he was close to the New World and was afraid of going ashore during the obscurity of the night …
How does he know the place and the hour?
‘His Genius’ says the Columbus legend in explanation. But the Map? The critics will ask, what did it contain? Whose was it? What did that map contain that was so frequently passed from Columbus to Pinzon during the voyage?44
I’ve presented my case that what the map may have contained was an accurate but ancient, and indeed antediluvian, representation of the coast and islands of Central America, notably the north-south-oriented Great Bahama Bank island, which Columbus – no less ignorant than any of his contemporaries about the existence of the Americas – took to be an accurate map of part of the coast of China and the islands of Japan.
An interesting sidelight on this story concerns Pinzon himself. In 1515, nine years after Columbus had died, the Pinzon family brought a lawsuit against the Admiral’s estate on account of promises of benefit-sharing that he was said not to have kept. During this lawsuit it emerged that Pinzon too claimed to have had prior information of the route to the New World:
Arias Perez Pinzon, the son of Martin Alonso testified that his father had definite indications concerning the Lands to the West, which indications he had found in documents in the library of Pope Innocent VIII. The witness said that he saw given to his father a document which contained the necessary information for the discovery. His father took it and carried it away with him, and upon his return to Castile from Rome he decided to set out to discover the said lands, and often talked with the witness about the voyage. Meanwhile the Admiral arrived … with a plan to discover the same lands. The father of the witness, hearing of it, went to see this Christopher Columbus and told him that his plan was a good one, that he was sure of it, and that if the Admiral had delayed a little longer he would have found Martin Pinzon already started with two caravels to make the discovery himself. The Admiral, knowing that, put himself on intimate terms with the father of the witness and brought about an agreement whereby the said Martin Pinzon was engaged to accompany him.45
It is not obvious from the proceedings exactly what Pinzon found in the Papal Library in Rome or how it set forth ‘the necessary information for the discovery’, but Gregory Mcintosh argues that it must have been ‘an old document (a manuscript book or portolan chart?) that told of a mythical expedition that sailed west to Cipango …’46
Cipango again. And here are the words that Pinzon is reported to have used to recruit crews for Columbus’s ships:
Friends, come, come with us on this voyage! Here you’re creeping about in poverty; come and sail with us! For with God’s help we’re going to discover a land that they say has houses roofed with gold.47
Houses roofed with gold are diagnostic of the fabulous island of Cipango described in Marco Polo’s Travels.48 It is therefore clear that whatever posthumous disagreements may have occurred over their relative roles in the discovery, Pinzon and Columbus had been absolutely of one mind from the very beginning that Cipango was to be their first destination and that the old charts or documents that they possessed showed the way there. They were not to know that their ‘Cipango’ was the outline of a ghost island amidst a ghost archipelago drowned 6000 years previously or that the mainland it lay off was not the end of the old world but the beginning of a new one.
The previous sentence, of course, is pure speculation on my part – just a hypothesis launched to provoke inquiry into neglected possibilities. And it still leaves the problem of Antilia unresolved.
Professor Fuson’s lateral thinking about Antilia and Satanaze
The identity, location, size and orientation of the ‘mythical’ island of Antilia underwent continuous bewildering changes on all kinds of maps and charts over a period of hundreds of years. There is, however, a definite beginning to this energetic metamorphosis and that is marked by the 1424 Venetian portolan on which Antilia first appears – presumably in its purest, least-changed form. On that chart, a smaller island is also shown lying to the west of Antilia. And it is important to remember that a second large ‘mythical’ island, Satanaze, is shown lying to the north-east of Antilia, again with a much smaller island (named Saya) near by, this time to the north.
The identification of the two larger islands by Professor Robert H. Fuson of the University of South Florida – in his 1995 book Legendary Islands of the Ocean Sea49 – is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of historical detective work. And it illustrates, better than any other example I know, how the ghosts of islands can migrate not only through time but also through space, and sometimes through both dimensions simultaneously.
What Fuson has demonstrated, conclusively I think, is that Antilia and Satanaze, marooned in mid-Atlantic on the 1424 Venetian chart, are in fact the earliest true maps to appear in the West of the Pacific islands of Taiwan and Japan. His argument in brief is that the mapmaker Pizzagano had somehow come into possession of Chinese nautical charts of Taiwan and Japan and – being as ignorant as Columbus and others of the existence of the Americas – had placed these islands in the Mid-Atlantic with the assumption that the mainland of China lay somewhere beyond.
Why Antilia is Taiwan
Fuson begins provocatively:
A number of large, Asiatic islands were charted by the Chinese during the active maritime period of the first two decades of the 15th century. One of these islands, Antilia, is known today as Taiwan.50
As was said in many of the legends about Antilia, Fuson points out that Taiwan has gold-bearing sands.51 Moreover,
Taiwan also has something else that Antilia must have, and that is a small island to the west. On the 1424 Pizzagano chart it was called Ymana. Today it is the Peng-Hu group, or Pescadores (Islands of the Fishermen). There are 64 islands totalling 50 square miles.52
Some quotations from Fuson gave a taste of the quality of his proofs and the strengths of his arguments:
Antilia on the 1424 nautical chart is about the right size and its shape articulates well with modern Taiwan.
Every one of the eight or nine river mouths of Antilia matches one of the principal river mouths of Taiwan.
The five largest rivers are correctly placed on the 1424 map of Antilia. Of Taiwan’s ten major rivers, seven are indicated on the map of Antilia and in approximately the correct locations.
Every significant coastal feature is plotted: embayments, capes and peninsulas. Antilia and Taiwan also share a unique north-eastern coastline. There the tip of the island terminates in a sharp, narrow cape. To the north-west the coastline is smooth and rounded.53
Why Satanaze is Japan
Fuson’s case for Japan is equally well made and again I will give the gist of it briefly and in his own words:
North of Antilia on the 1424 chart are two islands: Satanaze and Saya. Without question these are the Japanese islands. Saya … the Japanese word for ‘bean pod’ … is Hokkaido, while the three main islands (Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu) are represented by the single island of Satanaze. The channel between Kyushu and Shikoku/Honshu is well defined.
The origin of the name Satanaze is easy to understand … The southern tip of Kyushu is Cape Sata (Sata-Misaki). Approximately 300 kilometres to the south, in the northern Ryukyu islands, is the city of Naze.
The most important bays in Japan are depicted on the Satanaze/Saya chart … and two of them merit special notice. The entrance to the Inland Sea at Bungo Strait is the largest oceanic indentation (as it should
be) and Tokyo Bay is guarded by the volcanic island O Shima, one of the most prominent harbour landmarks on earth. From a mariner’s perspective it is quite appropriate to exaggerate a feature such as O Shima.
Saya [Hokkaido], which was not even mapped by the fifteenth-century Japanese, was depicted in its bean-pod shape for more than 300 years. Its 1424 rendering by the Venetians reveals all the important features along the south coast and is every bit as detailed as Portuguese examples in the seventeenth century.54
After first appearing on the 1424 chart, notes Fuson, the Antilia group of islands found their way onto at least seventeen other charts and one globe (the Behaim globe):
Nomenclature was chaotic and occasionally one or another island was omitted. Antilia was mapped as an island in the Ocean Sea until at least 1508 (the Ruysch map), but Japan had captured its form in 1492 on the Behaim globe … The old Antilia/Taiwan shape continued to appear in what had become the Pacific Ocean and in 1546 (Munster map, Basel) carried the label ‘Zipangu’. A major problem had arisen as the shapes and locations of Antilia/Taiwan [and] Satanaze/Cipango … became entangled … When the West Indies became the Antilles in the middle of the sixteenth century, Antilia-the-island was no longer needed. The original island was relegated to mythological status and Japan was free to use its body. By 1570 the magnificent atlas Theatrum orbis terrarum (by Abraham Ortelius) placed Japan in its proper location and labelled it ‘Iapan’ (Japan).55
Ghosts of a drowned world
It is Professor Fuson’s view that Chinese charts of Taiwan and Japan were the source of the 1424 portrayal of Antilia and Satanaze. He makes a very persuasive case that such charts are likely to have originated from the seven spectacular voyages of discovery made by the famous Ming admiral Cheng Ho between 1405 and 1433.56
Cheng Ho was a giant of a man, ‘seven feet tall with a waist of 60 inches’,57 and is worth a giant of a story in his own right – though unfortunately this is not the place to tell it. Much suggests, however, that Robert Fuson is correct to deduce that the charts of Taiwan and Japan that somehow found their way into the hands of Zuane Pizzagano in Venice in 1424 must have originated from the voyages of Cheng Ho.
Yet there is a problem. As we will see, Antilia and Satanaze on the 1424 chart don’t show Taiwan and Japan as they looked in the time of Cheng Ho, but rather as they looked approximately 12,500 years ago during the meltdown of the Ice Age.
Is it possible that Cheng Ho, too, like Columbus, was guided in his voyages by ancient maps and charts, come down from another time and populated by the ghosts of a drowned world?
PART SIX
Japan, Taiwan, China
25 / The Land Beloved of the Gods
As a tradition which began in the High Heavenly Plain,
I humbly speak before the sovereign Deities
Who dwell massively imbedded like sacred massed rocks
In the myriad great thoroughfares …
Ancient Japanese ritual prayer1
The highest peak of Mount Fuji … is a wondrous deity … and a guardian of the
land of Japan.
The Man’ yoshu2
The identification of the ‘legendary’ Atlantic islands of Antilia and Satanaze with Taiwan and Japan is the hypothesis of Professor Robert Fuson, and is delivered as the punchline to his utterly convincing book Legendary Islands of the Ocean Sea.3 He further suggests that the source-map from which the outlines of Antilia and Satanaze were derived must have come from China and would most probably have been drawn up during the voyages of the great Chinese admiral Cheng Ho.
What Fuson does not notice – there is no reason why he should – is that Antilia and Satanaze on the 1424 Venetian chart do not portray Taiwan and Japan as they looked in the early fifteenth century, the epoch of Cheng Ho’s voyages, but as they looked around 12,500 years ago during the meltdown of the Ice Age. One would have to go back to around that date, for example, to find the three main Japanese islands – Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu – joined together into one larger island, as is the case with Satanaze. I will substantiate this statement and pursue this mystery to its conclusion in due course.
Meanwhile, by a strange, roundabout route I had found my way back to Japan, encountering it where I had least expected it – in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Long before I learned that it had been shown in its Ice Age configuration on a 1424 chart, however, I was already acutely aware of another Japanese mystery centred on the end of the Ice Age when rapidly rising sea-levels inundated a series of massive rock-hewn structures around the coasts of the Ryukyu archipelago of southern Japan.
I’ve outlined some of the background to this in chapter 1 – how I first heard of Japan’s underwater ruins in 1996 and how the generosity of an extraordinary Japanese entrepreneur enabled me to explore all the main sites between 1997 and 2001. I made close to 130 dives at Yonaguni with logistical assistance from Seamen’s Club, Ishigaki, and with the best and most knowledgeable local teams led by men lik e Kihachiro Aratake and Yohachiro Yoshimaru. Then there were around eighteen dives at Kerama (on five different visits there) again in the company of great local specialists lik e Kuzanori Kawai, Mitsutoshi Taniguchi, Isamu Tsukahara and Kiyoshi Nagaki. I successfully dived twice at Aguni, i n a most forbidding, inaccessible and difficult spot, and around a dozen times at Chatan off the west coast of Okinawa – once again, in both places, with exceptional local support.
In chapter 1, where I briefly describe the four main Japanese underwater sites, I also suggest that the solution to the mystery of these places – and to the interminable wrangle about whether they are natural or man-made – cannot be arrived at purely by a consensus of geologists. This is not only because there is, in fact, no consensus of geologists on the character of these structures (on the contrary, opinions are polarized) but also because geological opinion alone is not adequate to settle the matter. One need not be a specialist in anything to see that Japan has cultivated a unique sensitivity to the beauty that is immanent in natural forms and to realize that such a refined intimacy with rock and mountain, forest and valley is likely to have extremely ancient roots. Sculpting in rock and the placing of sculpted rocks in artistically manipulated landscapes remains a distinguishing Japanese passion – and an intensely spiritual one – to this day. It therefore makes sense, in pursuit of reasoned conclusions about the underwater rock structures of Japan, to take into account not only geological considerations but also what is known about the character, the level of development and the artistic and religious culture of the ancient Japanese at the end of the Ice Age when those rock structures (whether natural or man-made) were not yet submerged.
Preconceptions about the Jomon
At first glance I could see nothing encouraging about prehistoric Japan. The consensus view for the past half century has been that during the period from 17,000 years ago (roughly the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the beginning of the global meltdown) down to about 2000 years ago the islands were populated exclusively by a culture of hunter-gatherers, the Jomon, who were in most respects extremely primitive.
The ‘Stone Age’ image of the Jomon put me off the idea of researching them. How could so backward a people, who supposedly never discovered agriculture, have anything to tell me, one way or another, about my central interest – the possibility of a great lost civilization of antiquity? Small tribal bands wandering from place to place, grubbing around in the mud for nuts and berries, spearing the odd fish or mammal, did not fit with my idea of what I was looking for.
Nevertheless, I knew that I could not afford to discount the Jomon entirely -if only because their culture seems to have emerged very suddenly in Japan around 16,500 years ago, at which remote date it is attested to by fragments of the oldest known pottery in the world. The pottery itself at such an early date is highly anomalous. And whatever the end of the Ice Age really meant – then and for thousands of years afterwards – the Jomon witnessed it, went through it, were part of it, and triumphantly survived it down al
most to historical times. I still felt a definite reluctance but I realized that sooner or later I was going to have to learn more about this prehistoric people whose story was veiled by the mists of the past.
The prehistoric city and the man-made mountain
In 1998, on the suggestion of Japanese friends, I visited the Jomon site of Sannai-Muryama in Aomori Prefecture, and was surprised to discover how large and how well-organized the ancient settlement had been at its peak 4500 years ago – the same epoch exactly as ancient Egypt’s ‘pyramid age’. Sannai-Muryama, with its spacious public buildings, wide streets and planned sanitation, was not at all what I had expected of primitive hunter-gatherers. These were the obvious signs of permanent settlement, stability, order, organization and economic success. And they were accompanied by equally clear indications of a society with evolved spiritual ideas. In particular, the use of grave goods by the ancient inhabitants, and of symbolic burial patterns, are suggestive of complex beliefs in the afterlife of the soul. A ceremonial pathway that dominates the site proved, on excavation, to be lined on each side by tombs with the feet of the dead pointing towards the path and their heads away from it.
On the same trip I learned that certain pyramid-shaped mounds, hills and mountains are regarded as sacred beings in Japanese mythology and saw evidence which suggests not only that this belief is rooted deep in Jomon times but also that it sometimes led the Jomon into ‘artistic manipulation’ of the landscape on an even larger scale than the disputed structures now underwater at Yonaguni, Chatan and Kerama.