Wilson Scots Who Made America

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-85790-882-7
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 214 Seiten

What would America have been without the Scots? Andrew Carnegie, the humble weaver's son who went there to become the world's richest man, thought it might have been 'a poor show'. This book is an unapologetic celebration of what he was proudly talking about - little Scotland's huge human contribution to the cultural identity of the Big Country. Rick Wilson profiles an intriguing selection of Scottish innovators who have projected their genius, energy and inspiration across the Atlantic. They range from the 14th-century nobleman Henry St Clair, believed to have discovered America before Columbus, through the first private eye Allan Pinkerton, to the photographer Harry Benson, who has captured no fewer than ten US presidents for posterity.Scots Who Made America also features non-residents who have contributed from afar, but whose influence has been no less potent for that - people like Sean Connery, Tony Blair, J.M. Barrie and Robert Burns.

Rick Wilson grew up in the same small-town street where David Buick, founder of the Buick car company, was born. As a journalist he has worked not just on daily newspapers in London's Fleet Street but also in The Netherlands and his native Scotland as a magazine editor.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Richard

Leseproben

Henry St Clair (1358–1400)

He led, Columbus followed

Could it possibly be true that America was discovered by a Scots nobleman almost a century before Christopher Columbus? It is a beguiling proposition that captivates a growing number of today’s natives of Caledonia, the more familiar they become with the story and evidence of Sir Henry St Clair and his medieval meanderings.

One compelling piece of evidence is to be found on Edinburgh’s doorstep today, in a fascinating ancient place redolent of medieval intrigue and mystery just south of the city: a finely hewn building like a miniature cathedral where pagan and Christian traditions live a little uneasily side by side.

This is the well-preserved fifteenth-century Rosslyn Chapel – described by its caretakers as a ‘jewel in stone’ – whose elevated but secluded position near the rolling foothills of the Pentlands is not only beautiful but dramatically illustrative of the difference between Scotland then and now. Why? Simply and mundanely because of its proximity to the hugely popular Edinburgh outlet of the Swedish IKEA furniture group.

Only a few miles apart, both powerful symbols taken together show just how ages and ever-evolving cultures have radically changed the Scots. But they have one thing in common: they can really pull in the crowds – albeit of acutely different kinds of people. The chic-but-cheap store daily attracts hundreds of materialistic home-improvers happily absorbed into the Scandinavian furnishing trend that has flooded almost every corner of every household in the land; the chapel is a magnet for more spiritual and cerebral types like historians, students of religion and mystics . . . joined relatively recently by the Hollywood actor Tom Hanks and waves of international book and movie fans keen to take in and sense the denouement scene of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel and film, The Da Vinci Code.

What they behold is a compact, filigreed masterpiece of the stonemason’s art that defies description – at least by some, such as a lost-for-words author called Britton who, in his 1812 Architectural Antiquities of Britain, said the chapel would be found ‘curious, elaborate and singularly interesting, impossible to designate by any given or familiar term’, its ‘variety and eccentricity not to be defined by any words of common acceptation’.

But should they start to study the detail of the elaborately carved interior, a visitor’s already dazzled eye might settle on the pattern of repeated bulbous shapes that make a sweeping lower border to the arch over one of the chapel windows. These have been identified as American maize, which should not have been known in Britain when the chapel was founded in 1446 by William Sinclair, the third earl of Orkney.

If the American continent was only found by Columbus in 1492, and even if the chapel took another forty years to complete, how did these representations manage to appear in Scotland? It is only logical to conclude that someone with a connection to Rosslyn must have made the transatlantic voyage before that date; and the common assumption is that that person was William’s grandfather, Sir Henry St Clair, sometimes described as ‘Prince’ Henry because of his royal connection. The current earl of Rosslyn, who has written an informative introductory book about the chapel for visitors, simply asks: ‘Is it possible that knowledge [of the plants] brought home by Prince Henry passed to his grandson?’

But for many Scots who look askance at the annual celebration of the Genoese navigator’s ‘discovery’ of America, there is very little doubt that, having crossed the Atlantic at the head of an impressive fleet, the Scottish knight set foot on the rugged shores of Nova Scotia, near to what is now Guysborough, on the Feast of the Trinity in 1398. And they see it as quite natural that his grandson William should have immortalised that early transatlantic voyage in stone at the chapel in the family estate of which he was the baron.

But Henry St Clair was not just the baron of Rosslyn. He was known by many other grand titles: knight, of course, and Lord Chief Justice of Scotland, Admiral of the Seas, and First Prince [or Earl] of Orkney – the last bestowed upon him by King Haakon of Norway, who endowed him with 200 strategically located Scottish islands over which he reigned all-powerful, more like a king than a prince. But he is also thought to have been the legendary figure known as ‘Glooscap’ among the Micmac Native American Indians whose folklore is said to describe his ships as ‘islands with trees growing on them’.

To begin, however, at the beginning . . .

What we know of the story is largely thanks to chronicles of a sixteenth-century Venetian, whose namesake and forebear, Nicolò Zeno, was sailing round the north coast of Scotland when, after being shipwrecked off the Faroe islands, he was rescued and befriended by a local chieftain. Was this St Clair? That point is not clear, but gratefully wishing to help the chief in his endeavours, the Italian summoned his brother Antonio from Venice and together, in 1393, the two skilled shipbuilders led a successful mapping expedition to Greenland. Nicolò died the following year, but Antonio stayed on to make another expedition in 1398, this time almost certainly with Sir Henry.

Known as the Zeno Narrative, the story of St Clair’s voyage to North America was written by the ‘new’ Nicolò Zeno a historian and prominent citizen, in 1558. His claimed sources were letters written by the original Nicolò, and his brother Antonio. Antonio’s letters (as given in the Narrative) also refer to a book he had written that described in detail the lands they visited, and they included a map of the islands and countries of the North Atlantic.

But why was such an ambitious expedition mounted? The St Clairs were linked to the once-powerful Knights Templar, some of whom had fled to Scotland after they were outlawed, and it is speculated that the journey was intended to find and found a Templar colony far from their hunters’ eyes. Formed during the Crusades, the Knights Templar were a wealthy band of warrior-monks who had become the most feared soldiers of Christendom – until, after two centuries of unrivalled power in Europe and the Holy Land, they were abruptly suppressed by King Philip IV of France and proclaimed open to arrest over most of Europe on charges of heresy, blasphemy and obscenity. Scotland was one of only two European countries – the other was Portugal – where the order was not proscribed by the Pope. It was seen as their last refuge from persecution; but was it far enough away from the rest of Europe?

In any case, some records say bluntly that Sir Henry sailed from Orkney ‘with Templar funding’, and it was certainly with a big and well-equipped force that he did so. No fewer than twelve ships set off with what seemed indeed remarkably like a colonising 300-strong company – of Templar knights, soldiers, sailmakers, armourers, carpenters and farming monks – complete with Venetian Pietro cannon.

Sailing via Shetland, they first reached Newfoundland from where, after making an unsuccessful attempt to land, they pushed on south through vicious seas – losing no fewer than five ships – to Nova Scotia. The remaining ships must have been struggling by the time they got there, and readers can surely draw their own conclusions from the fact that, in 1849, two brass Venetian naval cannon of the late fourteenth century were dredged up off the shore of Louisburg harbour on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island.

In any case, perhaps in an attempt to cut his losses, it was in Nova Scotia that Sir Henry is said to have sent most of his fleet back to Orkney while he and his shore party spent more then a year exploring the new land and making the acquaintance of the Micmac Indians.

So the story goes. But what evidence is there? It is largely anecdotal, but it is intriguing nonetheless. Along with other tribes in the surrounding regions, the Micmacs have a legend of a white ‘prince’ who came from across the sea and met their people at Pictou, which has been identified as the second landfall of the expedition. Said to have been wise and kindly, he apparently showed the Indians the European styles of fishing, hunting and plant cultivation. The lore also records that the white prince travelled in ‘a great stone canoe’, also described as ‘a floating island with trees growing out of it’, which surely evokes the picture of a European sailing ship with high masts.

These and other native American peoples are also said to have referred in their folklore to the landfall of a vessel ‘like a bird with a broken wing’ and still act out the arrival of a foreign hero called ‘Glooscap’, a name reckoned by some to be the Indians’ version of Earl Sinclair. And according to Jim Gilchrist, a Scots writer who has done considerable research into the subject, ‘ethnologists say that it was around this period that the natives of the area started fishing with nets, European-style, rather than with lines, while others point to Gaelic and Norse words assimilated into the vocabulary of the Algonquin and other native peoples’.

It is also told that when Sir Henry took his leave of his new-found admirers after his mutually enriching year among them, his intention was to be heading for home. A sudden storm blew up, however, and drove him south to Massachusetts, which was the catalytic moment that meant he was to set foot in what we now know as America almost a century before Columbus. Shortly after his landing there, it is recorded in the Zeno Narrative, they climbed a hill where his close companion and cousin, the Templar Knight Sir...