Step Aside Columbus: The Irish Got There First

Did the Irish beat not only Columbus but also the Norse of Leif Erikson? Fr Longenecker thinks it's possible. As Tertullian said, “Certum est, quia impossibile”.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Fr Dwight Longenecker

Could the Duhare of North America have been the descendants of Irish explorers who ventured across the Atlantic long before the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria set sail?

Maybe it’s the Amish in me, but there’s an ornery streak that delights in eccentric theories, provoking the establishment, undermining the accepted narrative, pondering alternative histories, and subverting the certain certainties.

Many will be familiar with alternative theories about the discovery of the New World. Was it really Christopher Columbus who first set foot in the Americas or was it the Vikings? What about St Brendan the Navigator—the sixth-century Irish monk who some think sailed in his curragh across the Atlantic? His fantastic adventure was immortalized in the ninth-century Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, which tells of sea creatures, a floating crystal pillar, and various mystical islands, including one thought to be a giant whale.

Could St Brendan have made it across the Atlantic in a curragh? British author/explorer Tim Severin thought so. In the 70s he researched medieval Irish boat building and constructed a craft that did indeed take him across the Atlantic, and told the tale in his best seller The Brendan Voyage.

Were Brendan and his monks the last Irishmen to find their way to North America? What if there were others and they didn’t go home to Ireland? Some Spanish explorers in the 1520s made an unusual discovery: Moving their way up the coast from Florida they discovered the Duhare tribe.

In 1520 Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, an Italian historian and professor, was appointed by King Charles V of Spain to chronicle the discoveries in the New World. In 1522, he interviewed explorers Francisco de Chicora, Gordillo, Quejo and Ayllón who had explored Florida and the coastal regions North to what is now the area of Charleston, South Carolina. He then submitted a detailed report to the king. d’Anghiera died in 1526, but this report was published posthumously in a book named De Orbe Novo.

The Italian recounted what the Spanish had discovered. The Duhare tribe were physically different from the other “Indians.” They had distinctly European features: red/ brown hair cascading down their backs, gray eyes, and they were taller than both the Spanish and the other native American tribes. Furthermore, unlike the other Native Americans whose facial hair was sparse, the Duhare men sported full beards.

According to the Spanish reports, the Duhare were not only different in appearance but also in their way of life. They were said to herd deer, not for sport or ritual, but for dairy, creating cheese from deer milk—a practice unheard of among other Native American tribes. The Duhare’s agricultural technology was advanced, growing not just the familiar maize but also a variety of potatoes and grains unknown to the Spanish. They divided their year into twelve moons, a calendric system reminiscent of European practices.

The king of the Duhare was named Datha. He was described by the Spanish as being a giant, even when compared to his peers. He had five children and a wife as tall as him. Datha had brightly colored paint or tattoos on his skin that seemed to distinguish him from the rest of the tribe.

If you know any Irish folks named “O’Hare”, the name “Duhare” hints of a Gaelic origin, some theories suggest it could mean “place of the Clan Hare” or “Eire,” being a name for Ireland, it might mean “from Ireland” or “place of the Irish.” This, coupled with descriptions of the Duhare’s king, Datha, bearing a tattooed or painted body, is reminiscent of the Celtic traditions of body painting. Could the Duhare have been the descendants of Irish explorers who ventured across the Atlantic long before the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria set sail?

Academic historians—the guardians of the “true narrative” scoffed at the idea of a pre-Columbian Irish settlement in South Carolina. John R. Swanton from the Smithsonian said the story of domesticated deer in itself invalidated the Irish settlers theory. He suggested that perhaps these tales were exaggerations, fond fabrications born from the fertile imagination of men far from home, or misinterpretations of native practices viewed through a European lens.

Researcher and writer Richard Thornton dug more deeply into the supposedly de-bunked legend. In an essay for The Americas Revealed website he writes:

I decided to fact-check Swanton. After googling Ireland – deer – milk, I found a fascinating article about an ancient Irish lullaby, called Bainne nam fiadh: In English, it reads, “On milk of deer I was reared. On milk of deer. I was nurtured. On milk of deer beneath the ridge of storms on crest of hill and mountain.”

I contacted the new Irish Consulate in Atlanta. A lady answered, who had a beautiful Irish lilt to her voice and introduced herself as the Executive Secretary for the Consul, Paul Gleeson. She remembered her mother singing her that lullaby. I asked her if deer milk was a myth or did some Irish actually milk deer. She said that she would make a call to the embassy in Washington, DC.

A couple of days later, she called me back. A large, domesticated Red Deer (close relative of the American Elk) was originally the only source of milk and cheese in Ireland.

If the Duhare were indeed of European descent, how did they get to South Carolina and when? Did some of Brendan’s men remain behind? Nearly a thousand years passed between Brendan and the Spanish discovery of the Duhare. I speculate that some other intrepid Irish sailors—inspired by Brendan—set out on their own, landed in Canada, and eventually migrated to warmer climes and never came home.

This sort of alternative narrative tickles my curiosity. It’s one of the reasons I spent years researching my book The Mystery of the Magi, and it always sparks more fundamental questions about truth and storytelling. While admitting that stories may get told wrongly, be exaggerated in the telling, or distorted in the re-telling, when skeptics dismiss a story because “that simply can’t be true,” I want to push them a little.

When you consider a tale that seems unlikely isn’t the more incredible the tale, the more likely that the person is not making it up? If a story is not logically and physically impossible, then, no matter how unlikely, we ought to consider the possibility that the tale is true.

When a story seems unlikely, that’s just the time our interest is sparked; after all, when we tell a lie do we not attempt to make it as believable as possible? This being the case, the more outrageous the tale, the more likely it is to be true—or at least based in a true event, or recounting what the eyewitness experienced and genuinely believed to be true.

If one takes the miracle stories of the Gospels, for example, the more incredible they are, the more likely it is that they really happened, or at least someone perceived the occurrence to have been real. Jesus of Nazareth walked on the Sea of Galilee one stormy night? “Come now. It couldn’t have happened.”

Stop. Who would make something like that up out of whole cloth? No one would believe it, and that’s precisely why we do believe it.

It was the dull skeptic David Hume who insisted that miracles never happen because miracles are impossible. Tertullian was there first. He stands Hume’s unimaginative theory on its head. When contemplating the great miracle of the incarnation, Tertullian wrote, “Certum est, quia impossibile,” or “Because it is impossible it is certain.”

The featured image, uploaded by Cormacmccann, is “An illustration of Queen Mebh by Irish Artist Cormac McCann.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.