Lost Fleet Of The Templars By David Hatcher Childress

I’ve never read a Childress book before, and I was not disappointed with this first read. I

have a personal interest in pirates and navigating because the first Browning to come to America was Captain John Browning, who crossed over in a ship commissioned in England in 1622 by the Berkeley Company, an offshoot of the Virginia Company.

It’s not clear how many trips he made, but they were paid for by the Berkeley Company. Captain John was a Captain of the British Royal Navy, but there’s no record that he actually captained the ships bound for Virginia. Be that as it may, he lived under the rule of King James I, who was liberal in his favors to both Protestants and Catholics, having more trouble with the Parliament than with religions. James I was willing to enter into agreements with France and Spain to protect Catholics in England, but the House of Commons was mostly Protestant and objected to bringing back the older ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps in the mists of time the Browns were pagans, but by the time Captain John crossed to America they were Protestants, the Browning heart was in business and certainly they had nothing to do with the intrigues that pitted Protestants and Catholics against each other. In fact the biggest disagreements in English government came over the raising of taxes by the King, who, as God’s divine representative, acted without the consent of the Parliament.

Childress mentions that the infamous Scottish St. Clairs (Sinclairs), protectors of the Templars, and early visitors to Nova Scotia (1398), and eventual founders of Scottish Masonry, were, centuries before that, first cousins to William the Conqueror. The Sinclairs lived in Scotland before the Norman conquest, and the Sinclair knights came to William’s side at the Battle of Hastings. William Sinclair was granted the land of Rosslyn (in Scotland) by King William "in life-rent," for services rendered, in 1057. In other words, the Sinclairs were given an estate, "Scot-free" of rents and taxes, for as long as the king favored them.

Queen Elizabeth’s line (the Plantagenets) directly descended from William the Conqueror, and Elizabeth at least was not a Catholic. One theory on the early history of the Brownings is that they came over to England with William the Conqueror: they were of Germanic origin, or at least from somewhere in what is today known as Germany. Flanders is frequently mentioned in family histories because history knows Flanders best as the capitol of the textile industry, of cloths and woolens. However before the Normans officially took over there was a thriving Saxon textile trade in England, involving a wide array of weaves and dyes produced in London and imported from abroad. Archaeological remnants of these early English weaves date to the late 800s CE. Whether the Brauns came over with the Norman conquest, as warriors, or shortly afterwards, in some other capacity, or if as Saxons they lived in England before the Normans officially ruled there, is unknown.

In any case Captain John Browning may have known of a shared interest between his forefathers and Queen Elizabeth, both having early historical links with William the Conqueror. Virginia was Elizabeth’s land, named in her honor by the first settlers. Though many people afterwards settled there, Captain John may have selected Virginia as his American foothold out of a sense of loyalty to a tradition of some sort. (As did perhaps the ancestors of Washington, and all the Virginia estate holders who later became founding fathers.)

So there may be something to the theory that 80 percent of the founding fathers of America were Masons, both French and Scottish, the Scottish lodge following the tradition (we are told) of the Templars who were ousted from France starting in 1307 by King Phillipe, a Roman Catholic.

*Navigators Need (and Make) Maps*
Part of being a navigator is having charts. And this book really makes a strong case for some maps that the Templars may have possessed which show in astonishing detail not only Europe, but the entire world, including the Americas, Southeast Asia, and the polar regions, before any of these regions were fully discovered.

Scholars have known about these maps since the 1900s, but they went unexplained. Charles Hapgood, a New Hampshire professor, was the first to analyze the evidence head on. (Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, 1966, also from AUP.)

These maps are possibly derived from older maps originally kept in Persian archives, dating back to the 1300s at least. The theory is that during the crusades there was a transfer of technology, from the conquered Shi’ite Islamics to the Order of the Templars. A few centuries later, when the Templars were routed from France, the Templar fleet escaped unharmed and sailed to Portugal and Scotland. In the 1400s and 1500s the quality of the maps used by navigators in Europe increased dramatically; the evidence shows that these maps were all copied from one or two master originals, probably in the hands of Templar navigators.

But the very interesting thing about some of these early maps, from the Arab world as well as Europe, is that they show in astonishing and correct detail, as viewed from a global vantage point, the entire world as it appeared 10,000 years ago.

The geophysicists and geologists who have examined the Hadji Ahmed map from Syria, are agreed that the features correspond with all the predictions, as well as shipboard observations, of the coastal regions as they would have appeared if the sea level had dropped by about 200 to 300 feet, which is exactly where the sea level was at the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago.

Even though no master maps from which all the others seem to have been copied have yet appeared, the evidence of the copies, along with the modern analysis, presents a very strong case that this Earth was either in contact with outsiders who possessed global maps and left them with trusted kings on Earth; or that 10,000 years ago a culture here on Earth existed which developed space travel, and thus had the means to facilitate a mapping of the entire planet from a global vantage.

*Back to Captain John Browning*
Captain John Browning would have certainly used the then-current maps to make his journeys to America, but who can say whether he was an ardent map afficionado or had any interest in older maps? He was a captain of the British Royal Navy, and this Navy had Templar roots; Childress recounts the story of Sir Francis Drake, a State-sanctioned "privateer" during Elizabeth’s reign. (Remember, Elizabeth was not Catholic.)

The Brownings remained in America after the revolution, the name didn’t die out, and so one must assume that the British Brownings that arrived in 1622 lost their British allegiance over the decades and by the 1770s were "Americanized," and thus among the founders of the nation. Later the Brownings became Mormons (as left-field of Catholicism as you can get) and were metalsmiths and machinists, and then gunmakers (two generations in turn). The technological migration from early seafaring (trans-Atlantic voyages being akin to modern-day space travel, a miracle of technology for the time), to the machining profession (another technological pursuit crucial to the industrial revolution), to gunmaking (the machine gun being a highly technical device and a critical global deterrent) is not hard to conceive, because that’s how it happened.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the advent of technology (be it maps, ships, metalsmithing, or guns) has all evolved from the Templar vision of a New World, something which Childress addresses in his fascinating account of Christopher Columbus, whose motivations may have been related to the founding of a New Jerusalem of sorts. If Childress is right about the single-minded pursuit of a New Jerusalem independent of Rome, and one looks at America as it currently stands, as the primary superpower of the world, one might conclude that the visions and dreams of the American founding fathers have been realized, and then some.

*Agendas*
Childress explains the antipathy between Templars and Roman Catholics in terms of opposite agendas:

"It is not so far-fetched to believe that the Knights Templar secretly opposed the Church since their inception. As we queried earlier, what was their actual mission? If they truly wanted to protect the pilgrims in the Holy Land, why didn’t they simply join the order of St. John [the Vatican knights], which was already in existence?

"As mentioned above, some people believe that the Knights Templar were the Middle Ages version of a society that had its inception far earlier. It was the purpose of this society to secrete and preserve truly valuable items, documents and knowledge, from the swing and sway of changing temporal powers. If this is the case, it would be logical to assume that the knights were following their own agenda – one that would vary greatly from that of the Roman Catholic Church in that era, which would seem to have been to establish hegemony, collect as much money as possible and put fear into the hearts of the people."

At the end of the Middle Ages the Templars were persecuted and driven from France by Philip IV, a Catholic. Philip persuaded the pope to disband the Templar order throughout Europe in 1312. For the next 500 years the western seas were pirated. England grew as a nation and so the list of pirate nationalities came to include "English." Of interest is Captain Francis Drake, who elevated piracy to a semi-legal profession known as "privateering."

Privateering was the practice by which the English crown employed privately owned vessels to capture enemy shipping commerce during wartime. It was a new name but the practice was piracy: coming alongside and seizing the cargo of Spanish-Catholic ships in the name of England. Drake, a staunch Protestant, was also a famed explorer. He sailed around the world in the Golden Hinde in 1578.

Drake was proclaimed a hero after he drove the Spanish armada off the English coast in 1588. He died in 1596 off the coast of Panama, after an unsuccessful shipping venture. His immense popularity in England and his spirit of discovery must have encouraged Captain John Browning a few generations later to sail for America, in 1622.

*Portolans*
For some reason precise maps called "portolans" began to appear in Fourteenth Century Europe, which is curious. The premise is that the Templars held and guarded a "cache" of artifacts, including maps of ancient sea kings. The entire nation of pirates, which was as varied a group as any nation of people having different backgrounds, could not have been in on this secret. One must take it on faith that the Templar organization, once it was disbanded in 1312, still managed to maintain some kind of cohesion, even if it came down to two or three individuals with a secret.

The fact that precise portolans started appearing among European shipmen as early as the fourteenth century – after the Crusades had ended and the Templars had been driven out of France and Spain – and that Columbus himself used such a map – had the key result of encouraging private enterprise in the New World.

Perhaps the first portolans appeared among fellow Templar sailors, and as these sailors and their sons started to become legitimate enterprisers, the maps were shared with non-Templars to stimulate competition and to boost the shipping economy. The Templars were businessmen who knew that after the first whirl of excitement any enterprise is subject to fail. It was a perfectly natural progression which completely challenged Catholic shipping interests. The Vatican had their own maps but closely guarded them to keep their shipping advantage. With accurate maps in the hands of free enterprise, the Vatican completely lost its New World shipping advantage, and that was precisely what the Templars wanted.

The pirates during the Templar era were a diverse group, some state-supported, some rogues and scoundrels. Their sole technology was ships and faith in God. The best ships tended to be the fastest, because trade had been extended to the Americas. A faster crossing of the Atlantic increased profits.

It’s unlikely that the ancient sea kings "dreamed" the precise outlines of the world’s continents and then mapped them. The evidence is quite the contrary: all the early portolans were copied from a master original, and so the master map must have been a rarity, there was only one.

*Piri Re*’*is Map of 1513*
The loving care and preservation of a single map over the aeons is a romantic story, but reality dictates otherwise. In 1513 an Admiral in the Turkish navy, named Piri Ibn Haji Memmed, also known as Piri Re’is, charted the seas and laid down some claims in the making of it. Only a fragment of the original map has survived, but what is most interesting are the claims that this Turkish mapmaster made.

Charles Hapgood studied the surviving Piri Re’is fragment, and with the help of cartographers from the U.S. Air Force, determined that its center of projection was at Memphis in Egypt. This is shown in the illustration below.

One immediately thinks of how the globe of the Earth is seen from outer space:

And though the alignment here in these examples is off, the idea is right on: the world was mapped by selecting a web of locii, the main one being fixed on the Egyptian capitol of Memphis, and then projecting lines from one locus to the "winds," in eight directions around the center, or sixteen or what have you. This kind of linear radial mapping was the distinctive mark of mid-millenium portolans.

*Thunder Gods*
Though this is a review of Childress’ book, now I turn to Gertrude Stein, because Gertrude Stein must always be invoked in matters of prime importance. She wrote a little poem that goes like this:

It is Anonymous Portrait 6, and though it appears to be unrelated to the ancient sea kings, in fact it sparked the memory of some investigations that I had made into very old documents now called, after the Greek, brontologians. Brontos means thunder.

The question remains, who made those maps 10,000 years ago? Drawing a map with accuracy is something which takes time, especially if it’s a map of the world. A space-farer dropping in from the skies would have no time to map the world. At some point there had to be a concerted effort to carry this off.

This brings us to thunder. The brontologian was a way to keep track of the comings and goings of angels, based on the position of the Moon relative to the constellations of the zodiac. The actual arrival was marked by a sonic boom, in the same way that space vehicles returning to Earth at supersonic speeds produce a boom. This was the "thunder" that caused a priest to check the heavens and then the sacred thunder-guide (to use a non-Greek name) to see if it was an arrival or a departure, and how it boded.

Presumably there was some exchange with these visitors from the stars, called angels, and so given a unique identity, though they may have been successive generations of humans, able to speak Earth languages.

Childress mentions the Phoenicians quite often, and this is a good guess since they were master sailors and neighbors of Palestine and Jerusalem, where the Templars carried out their crusades. But the trail runs deeper: the Phoenicians were contemporary with the early Jews, around 1000 BCE to 500 BCE. They melted into the Greek confederation by 300 BCE.

The earlier and closer culture, and owners of the oldest brontologians, were the Akkadians in Assyria. Though their brontologian was a compendium of deeply held religious beliefs, as scholars understand such things, these religious beliefs about ascending and descending angels at certain times of the year, arriving like thunder gods, could have been checked beforehand in order to prepare for arrivals, to know how long the universal window would remain open, and thus how long the visitors would be staying.

And this is exactly the kind of exchange that would be required for the intricate and large-scale effort of mapping the world. The Kings of Akkad are called "antediluvian," which means "before the flood." Precisely the right name for the end of the ice age, before the ocean levels started rising 10,000 years ago.

*A Strong Wind Blowing*
Childress writes: "While modern isolationist historians maintain that oceans are barriers to world travel, the modern diffusionist maintains that oceans are highways, not barriers." If angels helped map the world, there is the further question of "whence?" One might start with the poles, which are distant and removed even now. But traveling along a meridian from pole to northern hemisphere wouldn’t require supersonic speeds, nor result in a sonic boom.

The next closest entity is the Moon. Consider the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This distance is extraordinarily short for such magnificent bodies, only three days by rocket. Likewise for Mars, only six months by rocket. If one considers the timeframe of the effort – the end of an ice age when ocean levels were lower than now – Mars is an appealing choice, since the north pole of Mars was once an ocean. Water moves along the cosmic byways between planets.

Childress writes, "It has been suggested by some historians that the kings of ancient seafaring nations were the navigators, the highly educated men who could read the stars and navigate a vessel across the wine dark sea." To a navigator with kingly knowledge there is very little difference between crossing the Atlantic to America, and crossing from Earth to Mars. Childress points out that the first discovery of America may have been by ancient seafarers who "drifted there," carried by ocean currents. The same may be said for spacefarers, ancient cosmic travellers who tried to leave the Earth and succeeded.

The ancient sea kings not only mapped the world, but mapped the star tides, and their brontologian was an accurate schedule of the best currents; they were able to manage two lands; and they were able to coordinate resources.

Alas! The tides changed over time, as tides do, and the arrival and departure of sea kings could no longer be anticipated with precision. Too many windows were missed and when kings were stranded on the wrong world it stopped work for stretches at a time. In short, the once-reliable schedule of the thunder-guides became more and more a guesswork, on both sides of the horizon. Eventually the door closed for good.

*Mistakes and Lies*
The door had closed but the maps and the brontologia were preserved over the millenia by kings and the sons of kings. The thunder-guides were so carefully written that they lost their true meanings, eventually becoming the basis for astrology. The maps also lost their meanings, which explains why the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans didn’t take America.

The mapmakers who made copies treated the fantastic existence of a whole western continental system (North and South America, accurately mapped) as if it were a fantasy. Childress sums it up: "Look at the situation from the cartographer’s point of view: he may have a map showing the whole world and places that had not yet been discovered, but he had no idea how accurate this map might be. He knew well enough how accurate his own charts were. Not very accurate at all. Why should he assume that his priceless mappamundi was any more reliable than the best maps of his own age? He had no good reason to make any such assumption, and therefore he had every right, and even an obligation, to correct matters to the best of his ability."

"And so we come," writes Childress, "full circle from the ancient seafarers, to the early days of piracy with the Phoenicians, to the lost fleet of the Knights Templar, to the Masonic pirates who created the United States and her magnificent navy. To all those scurvy dogs and their motley crews who sail the Seven Seas, I say, "It’s a pirate’s life for me!"