A little confession: I am not a fun-in-the-sun type. The outdoors? My lanai is as close as I get. Summer? The mean season. I'll know it's here the day my after-work read is spoiled by the odor of overheated dog offal.
Say "beach" and I won't conjure up images of little white sails billowing out on some tropical horizon, or abandoned crab shells glistening in the frothy brine of a slowly receding sea, or even a woman's tan, sand-speckled buttocks bifurcated by a lasciviously impacted thong. What I see is melanoma. Black moles growing on my back, an entire constellation of dark stars, each one hoping, straining to grow up to become a genuine malignance.
Call me crazy, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say, I think you feel me.
Which is why I've planned a number of vacations with you (and you and you), specifically, in mind. These aren't "hot spots." In fact, not one of them has ever been spotted. This is real pushing-the-vacation-envelope type of stuff — keys to leaps in knowledge that haven't yet leapt — and all that you, dear reader, gotta do is some legwork. I myself was tempted. And that's saying a lot.
Junk That Sunk
If you happened to be paying attention the day your teacher explained how it was that humans came to this continent, here's what you probably learned: Back during the last great Ice Age (11,000 years ago or so), glaciers formed a land bridge across the Bering Strait, allowing bands of hunters to hoof it from Siberia to Alaska. These avid sportsmen, America's first settlers, chased their meat-to-be as far south as modern-day Chile, ditching select laggards along the way.
Many, many moons later, descendants of these huntspeople, so you were told, came out of the woods to high-five Columbus while he was busy laying the foundation for the first Wal-Mart somewhere not too far from these parts. Everything between the Runaway Hunt and that First Howdy was considered America's "prehistory," up until fairly recently when less-Eurocentric quibblers began insisting it was kind of tacky to refer to Columbus' "discovery" of America, seeing as how it was already peopled and all. I mean, if you open your front door and a stranger's sitting on your couch, are you gonna call 411 to report a "discoverer"? I don't think so.
This is all old news to anyone who recalls the name-calling and plate-throwing that broke out during the 500th-anniversary celebrations of Columbus' voyage in 1992. Anyone hoping all that acrimony is past, though, should know that, increasingly, Columbus' status as the first person to break-and-enter into the home of America's natives is itself being disputed.
Seems not everyone believes Mr. C. won the great transoceanic boat race to the New World. And by everyone I don't just mean Leif Erickson boosters. Alternate theories of America's (re)discovery had already grown so numerous by 1990 that two Brigham Young researchers published the colossal Pre-Columbian Contact With the Americas Across the Oceans, a 1,200-page bibliography of writings by people who believe that Columbus got to the party late and the orthodox academics who want to kill them. The people who believe that Columbus was a malingerer are known as "diffusionists" because they believe that things were transferred ("diffused") between continents by people with little boats and lots of mojo. The orthodox academics who deny that possibility are called "independent inventionists." They insist that Native Americans existed in absolute isolation until 1492, relying solely on their own invention to solve whatever problem happened to come along (it's a claim, by the way, that strikes a chord with some Native American purists).
To those of you who refuse to make vacation plans based on theories derided by orthodox academics, I should warn you: Most of the Ph.D.'s don't just disagree with the Columbus-usurping diffusionists, they laugh and call them nasty names like "abject charlatans." However, since at least some of those abject charlatans teach at places like Harvard, vacationers can take this little diffusionist excursion and still respect themselves in the morning.
So, you ask, how did I decide which charlatan's theory to base this vacation on? I vetted. I sifted through a small stack of books with titles like Columbus Was Last and They Came Before Columbus and America B.C., and the one that brought me to a maximum level of vacation planning excitation (note the psychosexual implications of that phrase) was the most current — Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered America. Why did I find Menzies' book so compelling? Simple. It puts the Chinese right on the shores of Florida, and I'm looking out for the interests of you, my similarly reluctant, ass-dragging, gator-state-fixated vacationer.
I won't bore you with all Menzies' theorizing about circulatory winds and ancient Chinese cartography. Let's just note that he thinks a Chinese fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1421, nosed north along the coast of Africa, cut west and then, as rueful drunks sometimes say, one thing led to another, and before they knew it the fleet was sitting on the doorstep of the long-sought-after land of Fusang (aka America). Since the inclination of all humans in uncharted waters is to split up immediately (how else could we have horror movies?), one of the admirals, a man named Zhou Wen, took one-third of the fleet and headed straight toward Florida, stopping only long enough to chat with some cannibals in the Caribbean and make a mess of the fleet's hulls on some rocks and reefs along the Great Bahama Bank.
By the time the ships — large (400-foot-long) Chinese "junks" — arrived in the Florida Straits, they were in such bad shape that at least eight of them either sank or were abandoned. The remnants of the fleet, lacking the capacity to take excess cargo back to China, deposited the sunken junks' survivors at various spots along our coast, presumably to set up house and mingle with the natives. These unfortunates got ditched at the Florida Keys, Port Sewall, Cape Canaveral, and the Savannah estuary, if I'm reading Menzies right. (He's pretty coy about exact locations, but I don't see that as a problem. When making vacation plans, it never pays to be too anal.)
Depending on how much time off you have, go to one or all of those drop-off areas and look for anything that resembles: 1. a wrecked junk, 2. an ancient Chinese settlement, or 3. a Native American with an inordinate fondness for Dim Sum. Don't be afraid to stop at a gas station and ask for help. Also, to locate submerged wrecks, a 3D magnetometer will come in very handy. Most junks, it should be noted, were made of teak. All wrecks will need to be dried out and then carbon dated. Should you find a settlement, take care to catalogue the artifacts. In particular, you'll want to be on the lookout for early Ming porcelain, Asiatic chickens (they lay blue eggs and go "kik-kiri-kee"), silk and coinage from Emperor Zhu Di's reign, pieces of calophyllum (a wood unique to southeast Asia), and paraffin, which Chinese navigators used to desalinate sea-water for their horses. The junks were also known to carry pots of roses and concubines, but the chances of coming across either of those seem slight.
Everybody Must Get Stones
The island of Bimini is home to lots of things — The Fountain of Youth (Viagra for the world explorers crowd circa 1500), old Ernest Hemingway haunts (read Islands in the Stream), and dolphin wrestling (tell the guys with the badges you thought it was a shark) — you know, touristy types of things. I could have put together a package for any of those, but I didn't. Why? Because we're after the envelope-pushing, paradigm-shifting stuff — big jobs, like the Lost Continent of Atlantis.
Don't believe in it? Lot's of people don't. In fact, the Lost Continent's hokum factor is so high that Roget's Interactive Thesaurus lists "Atlantis" as a synonym for "fantasy." Relax, though, this ain't Iraqi WMD. Proof abounds: Just look off the coast of North Bimini. There in about 20 feet of water is a J-shaped half-mile stretch of huge limestone blocks running in mysteriously precise parallel lines along the sand dunes of Bimini Bay. The million-dollar question, of course, is how they got there. The fish didn't put 'em there. I know I didn't put 'em there. Did you put the submerged and unfathomably parallel lines of stones there? Can you imagine anyone anything at all like you submerging stones in unfathomably parallel lines there? Of course, not. The odds against it would make a bookie blush. According to that no-nonsense, New Age truth-seeker Dr. David Zink (The Stones of Atlantis), a dispassionate examination of the facts indicates that the stones are most likely remnants of a sacred Atlantean temple built, in 28,000 B.C., with the help of extraterrestrials from the star cluster Pleiades. Before you get too excited, it's only fair to tell you that accepting this explanation forces you to disregard everything said in the last section. Menzies thinks the stones were originally ballast in the junks of his Chinese explorers, who built the road to haul their battered junks onto the Bimini beach for repairs.
I would also be remiss if I didn't tell you that a lot of people claim that stone "roads" of the Bimini sort are not the anomalies Atlantis believers like to make them out to be. St. Pete's own Eugene Shinn once wrote ("Geologists, Beachrock & Atlantis True Believers," Skeptical Inquirer) that the Atlantis stones are nothing but beach rock (a natural phenomenon), and "exact duplicates" can be found around the islands on the Australian Barrier Reef, and that the Dry Tortugas off Florida in the Gulf of Mexico sport rocks that are unambiguously Bimini-like. Shinn's debunk is more than a little convincing. The problem with Shinn is that he also claims that belief in the Atlantis hoax underwent a "short period of quiescence that may be attributed to a conservative political twist in the nation" during the '80s — a claim that makes me more than a little skeptical about his particular brand of skepticism. What precisely were the hallmarks of this Reagan-age rationality? Nancy's contributions to national policy based on her consultations with an astrologist, or the Gipper's belief that trees cause more pollution than cars? Perhaps it was the scientific bent of the evolution-disputing creationists who popped up all over the national landscape like mushrooms in those years.
But I digress. For those of you spoil-sports unwilling to buy the alien-subcontractors-built-Atlantis thing, it might interest you to know that, in 2001, explorers in a miniature submarine discovered stone structures off the coast of Cuba that may have been the remains of an ancient civilization. In a Reuters article dated Dec. 6, 2001, one of the researchers, a Soviet-born Canadian ocean engineer named Paulina Zelitsky, is quoted as saying that this particular lost city was likely built when that patch of land wasn't below sea-level — the first warm spell after the last Ice Age, say. And what's true of one lost city (or continent) could be true of another, right? In fact, Plato himself believed that Atlantis had been submerged in some cataclysmic deluge. 'Nuff said.
What You'll Need: A charter boat to take you to Bimini (about 50 miles off Florida's coast), a forensic geologist, a diver-operated coring device to test the stones' composition, and a permit from the Bahamian government to make an unconscionable mess out of one of their biggest tourist draws.
What You're Looking For: a lost continent.
Why Do You Think It's Called T-allah-assee?
In the Babelogue the Internet sometimes resembles, claims can circulate for years, passed on from one message board to the next, one short-lived website to another, without so much as denting the consciousness of the world at large. One claim making the rounds in this fashion is the testimony of one Mahir Abdul-Razzaaq El, "a Cherokee Blackfoot American Indian who is Muslim." I first came across him a couple years ago while doing research for a freelance article for this very publication. I was trying to get a feel for the Muslim presence in Florida, and Google being Google, a document called "Digging for the Red Roots" turned up in one of my searches. The "red roots" of the title seems to look backward from a Muslim perspective: as if the author were saying, hey, (we) Muslims have Native American descendents. Considering the number of Muslims brought to this country via the slave trade (think Kunte Kinte), the chances that Native American-Muslim intermingling took place isn't exactly far-fetched; however, what seems to have given this document a kind of potency in some quarters is its claim that "Native American contact with Islam began over 1,000 years ago by some of the early Muslim travelers who visited us." For the arithmetically challenged, that means those contacts would have happened about 500 years before Columbus arrived. No proof is given to substantiate this claim, although the document does state that there are "many documents, treaties, legislation and resolutions" that establish the presence of Muslims in America. The problem is, the treaties he cites seem dubious. On one reference librarian message board, a single plaintive post asks if anyone has ever heard of the Moors Sundry Act, one of the documents he references. As far as I can tell, the post was never answered. On another message board, an angry post announces that a hunt of South Carolina's state records, where the Moors Sundry Act is allegedly waiting to be perused, had proved to be utterly fruitless. Authenticity aside, it's not clear to me how any document dating from the 1600s to the 1800s establishes the fact that Muslims (re)discovered America. This isn't to say that The Muslims Discovered America Set doesn't have its own stable of authors and academic champions. But none of them seems to claim that the Muslims landed in Florida — and that being the central prerequisite to a Florida ass dragger's vacation plans, I decided to stick with "Digging for the Red Roots" as my Ur document for this vacation package. Its author, Abdal-Razzaaq El, at least, makes a Florida connection. He asks us to ponder the implications of the name of tALLAHassee: "He Allah will deliver you sometime in the future." What else do you want, the discoverers' building permit?
Let's be frank: This particular vacation package is probably not gonna displace the trip to Mecca as the vacation of choice among the Muslim faithful. But for the open-minded vacationer willing to endure a little frustration (and derision), the upside of pulling this one off seems limitless. You find the Muslim who discovered Florida, and I guarantee you will be dragging your ass from one TV studio to the next for God only knows how long. It could be a dream, or it could be a nightmare. You decide.
What you'll need: a healthy sense of incredulity. Farsi phrase book. A spade to dig for red roots with a tinge of green (the color of Islam).
Where you'll look: in Tallahassee.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2004.