Gunnar Thompson's Lonely Voyage In Time
And he does most of this without leaving his modest Port Townsend home. Thompson’s vessel is an intellectual time machine, guided by ancient maps and journals. And his mission is to sink what he considers the greatest myth in history: That Columbus discovered America.
“I’m proving that Columbus was not the first,” he says. “Everybody beat Columbus.”
For some 30 years, he has been obsessed with that mission. He has written five books, all self-published, detailing what he believes to be conclusive evidence that, long before 1492, the Americas were explored repeatedly – by the ancient Chinese, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, Irish, English, and who-knows-who-else.
He argues, for example, that a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, sailing in the early 1400s, explored the coasts of the Americas, and he has copies of maps to prove it. He says Marco Polo sailed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and to the beaches of Port Townsend in the 13th century. He believes that Sir Francis Drake did much the same 300 years later. And he has copies of those maps as well..
Need some proof? Give him a chance, and he’ll fill a room with his hand-drawn and photo-copied maps – Chinese maps that he believes depict Puget Sound and the Columbia River, Roman maps that show the Florida peninsula, signs of Asian and European art among the ancient Aztecs and Incas.
Now he’s compiled much of what he’s learned into a 265-page, lavishly-illustrated volume called “Secret Voyages,” or “True Adventure Stories from the Forbidden Chronicles of American Discovery.”
“This book represents the culmination of nearly 30 years of research,” he says.
But it’s a lonesome journey. Most of the time, Thompson sails single-handed. Established historians dismiss his theories. Google his name, and you’ll find pages of bluster from academics who sniff and pick at his research, clearly outraged by his heresy.
“They seem to be very angry,” Thompson says. “They don’t like people questioning these things. But history is too important to be left to historians.”
Thompson is an affable 60-year-old bachelor with a mop of dark brown hair over a round Nordic face. He lives in a small “shed” he rents from a friend in the housing cooperative just north of the golf course.
He attributes his skeptical nature to his parents. His father was an engineer and artist, his mother a nurse who crusaded for the polio vaccine before it was widely accepted. “They were troublemakers who taught me the value of truth. I struggled early at church, constantly asking: Is what I’m hearing really true?” As a youth in suburban Chicago, the family took cross-country car trips, stopping along the way at museums and Native American sites, where Thompson developed an interest in art, history and anthropology.
At the University of Illinois, he “figured out what was going on.” He asked questions and learned to write “from an artistic standpoint.” He went on to graduate school in anthropology, where he became fascinated by archaeology and by striking similarities between art forms from ancient China and the Americas.
“I was experimenting with other cultures and religions, and this didn’t go over too well. I was kicked out.”
In time, he grew accustomed to academics who didn’t welcome his maverick ideas. He taught anthropology, but was fired because he refused to conduct an exam that conflicted with an antiwar protest.
Eventually, he earned his PhD in “rehabilitation counseling,” and set out looking for a job. He taught at five colleges, from Wisconsin to Hawaii and the University of Washington, but never earned crucial tenure. He kept moving, always keeping one hand in ancient art and maps, until he found his way to Port Townsend, and worked four years for Jefferson Mental Health Services. “That was my last real job,” he says.
Since then, he’s devoted full time to his global quest, launching a website while writing and illustrating his books on ancient explorers.
Three years ago, Thompson finally found an intellectual ally in Gavin Menzies, a former British submariner who had written his own controversial book, called “1421,” about the pre-Columbian voyages of Zheng He. They spent three days in a Seattle motel room, studying each other’s maps and exchanging ideas. Menzies eventually wrote a glowing introduction to Thompson’s new book.
Together, they’ve made a bit of impact. They’ve given talks at the Library of Congress and at a couple of conferences. There have been stories in “The Economist,” and on British television, focusing on a recently-discovered Chinese map which Menzies and Thompson believe proves Chinese knowledge of the Americas a century before Columbus.
Still, a bit of publicity for the heretics only doubles the criticism. Historians argue that Thompson and Menzies essentially started with their conclusion, and search the globe for fragments of evidence to support it. “Given only one data point, you can draw any line you want to,” one critic argues.
Thompson is undeterred. “I’m reminded of the bumper sticker I see around town,” Thompson says. “Don’t believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”
The history establishment is hopelessly handicapped, he says, by its insistence on written documentation. Such records of ancient voyages either don’t exist, or haven’t been found, because they were systematically suppressed, censored or destroyed by ancient rulers intent on secrecy.
“For me, the real breakthrough came when I began to understand the importance of secrecy in early exploration,” he says. “Why would Marco Polo lie about what he’d seen? Because he worked for a maritime government (Venice) with a huge incentive to keep that information proprietary.”
If journals were suppressed, maps tended to survive, passed along from one ship’s captain to the next, but always preserving the crucial information, he says.
That’s the gist of “Secret Voyages.” In each case, from the ancient Chinese to Francis Drake, Thompson attempts to explain why and how the details were kept secret.
But the controversy continues, he says. “Academic historians hate Gavin Menzies and his book,” Thompson says. “When he spoke at the Library of Congress, they tried to prevent it. I can’t name a single historian who accepts our evidence – except in China.”
Challenging historical orthodoxy isn’t easy. Literary agents won’t look at his books. Publishers won’t stick their necks out.
But this is the Age of Google and Wikipedia, which provides troublemakers a chance to bypass the establishment and confront conventional wisdom without costly corporate backing. Whether the historians like it or not, Thompson’s theories are out there, bouncing around the Internet, challenging us to rethink what we thought we knew.
None of this pays Thompson’s rent. His savings are almost gone, and soon he’ll be back on the streets, looking for a job to support his obsession.
But he won’t quit.
“I’m a reluctant detective,” he says. “I’m an artist by nature, not a historian. But when an artist gets an inspiration, you have this need to express it.”
