Trojan Odyssey

'Early geological records for the Caribbean are all but nonexistent,' replied Yaeger, fanning out a file of loose papers on the table in front of him. 'We know more about prehistoric meteor strikes and land movement millions of years ago than we know about geological upheavals three thousand years ago. The best projections from leading geologists whom we've questioned is that Navidad Bank, once an island, sank during an underwater earthquake somewhere between eleven hundred and one thousand b.c.'

'How did you arrive at that date?' asked Perlmutter, shifting his huge bulk in a chair too small for him.

'Through various chemical and biological studies, scientists can read how old the encrustations are and how long they took to form on the rock walls, the amount of corrosion and deterioration of the artifacts and the age of the coral surrounding the structure.'

Sandecker, reaching in his breast pocket for a cigar and not finding one, began tapping a pen on the table. 'The hype-mongers will have a field day claiming Atlantis has been found.'

'Not Atlantis.' Chisholm shook his head and smiled. 'I tossed that one in the air for years. My own opinion is that Plato wrote a fictitious account of the disaster using the eruption of Santorini in sixteen fifty b.c. as background material.'

'You don't think Atlantis was in the Caribbean?' said Summer somewhat facetiously. 'People claim to have found sunken roads and cities deep under the water.'

Chisholm did not look amused. 'Geological formations, nothing more. If Atlantis had existed somewhere in the Caribbean, why hasn't one' — he paused for effect—'just one potsherd or artifact of ancient origin been discovered? Sorry, Atlantis did not exist on this side of the ocean.'

'According to paleontology records in my library,' offered Yaeger, 'the Arawak Indians found by the Spanish when they arrived in the New World were the first humans into the West Indies. They had migrated from South America around twenty-five hundred B.C., or fourteen hundred years before the lady was laid to rest in her tomb.'

'Somebody always gets there first,' said Perlmutter. 'Columbus reported seeing the hulks of large European-built ships abandoned on an island beach.'

'I can't tell you how she got there,' said Chisholm. 'But I might shed some light on who she was.'

He pressed a button on the remote and the first image on the stone-carved montage found by Dirk and Summer appeared on the monitor. The scene showed what appeared to be a fleet of ships in procession landing on a shoreline. They looked similar to the Viking longboats, but much stubbier, with flat bottoms that enabled them to travel in shallow coastal waters and rivers. Single masts supported square sails that appeared to be made of hides so they wouldn't shred under the onslaught of Atlantic gales. The hulls had high bows and sterns for sailing through rough seas. Banks of oars extended through locks on the top rails of the hulls.

'The first scene from the stone panel shows a fleet of ships unloading fighting men, horses and chariots.' He pressed another button on the remote, creating a montage. 'Scene Two, the opposing army is seen rising from a huge ditch surrounding a citadel on a steep hill. The next panel has them charging across a flat plain and attacking the enemy before they can unload their ships. Scene Four is the battle to repel the fleet.'

'If it wasn't for all the earthen works and the citadel looking as if it was built of wood,' said Perlmutter, 'I'd say we were looking at the Trojan War.'

Chisholm had the look of a wolf watching a herd of sheep approach his den. 'You are looking at the Trojan War.'

Sandecker fell into the trap. 'Strange-looking Greeks and Trojans. I always thought they grew beards, not bushy mustaches.'

'That's because they were not Greeks or Trojans.'

'Who, then?'

'Celts.'

Perlmutter's face wore an expression of genuine satisfaction. 'I've also read Iman Wilkens.'

Chisholm nodded. 'Then you know his remarkable revelations about ancient history's greatest misconception.'

'Could you please enlighten the rest of us?' Sandecker asked impatiently.

'I'll be happy to oblige,' Chisholm replied. 'The battle for Troy…'

'Yes?'

'Did not take place on the west coast of Turkey on the Mediterranean Sea.'

Yaeger stared at him, looking puzzled. 'If not Turkey, then where?'

'Cambridge, England,' Chisholm answered simply, 'near the North Sea.'

32

Everyone, with the exception of Perlmutter, gave Chisholm a look of pure disbelief.

'The skepticism in your eyes is obvious,' Chisholm challenged. 'The world has been misled for a hundred and twenty-six years, when a German merchant named Heinrich Schliemann declared emphatically that he had found Troy by using Homer's Iliad as his guide. He claimed that the ancient mound called Hisarlik was the perfect location for the fortified city of Troy.'

'Don't most archaeologists and historians back Schliemann's case?' Gunn queried.

'It's still a hotly debated subject,' said Boyd. 'Homer was a man of great mystery. There is no proof that he actually existed. All legend tells us is that a man called Homer took epic poems of a great war that had been passed down orally for hundreds of years, and recorded them in a series of adventure tales in what became the world's earliest written literature. Was he one man or a group, who over the centuries refined the poems until the Iliad and the Odyssey became history's greatest classics? The truth will never be known. Besides the enigma of his identity, the great puzzle he left behind is whether the Trojan War was fable or fact. And if it really occurred in the Early Bronze Age, were the Greeks the true enemies of the Trojans, or did Homer write about an event that took place more than a thousand miles away?'

Perlmutter grinned broadly. Boyd and Chisholm were affirming what he had always believed. 'What no one considered until Wilkens was that, instead of being Greek, Homer was a Celtic poet who wrote about a legendary battle that occurred four hundred years earlier, not in the Mediterranean but in the North Sea.'

Gunn looked adrift. 'Then the epic voyage of Odysseus…'

'Took place in the Atlantic Ocean.'

Summer's mind was spinning. 'Are you implying that Helen's face didn't launch a thousand ships?'

'What I was about to suggest,' Boyd countered with a tired smile, 'is that the truth behind the myth was not about a conflict fought because of a king's rage for revenge over the abduction of his wife by her lover. Hardly an excuse for thousands of men to fight and die for a promiscuous woman, is it? Wise old Priam, the king of Troy, would never have risked his kingdom nor the lives of his people merely to allow a wayward son to live with a woman, who, if the truth were known, willingly left her husband for another man. Nor was it a quest for the treasures of Troy. Rather, realistically, the conflict was fought over a soft crystalline metallic element called tin.'

'St. Julien gave Summer and me a lecture about how the Celts ushered in the Bronze and Iron Ages,' said Dirk, looking up from diligently taking notes.

Chisholm nodded in agreement. 'To be sure, they launched the industry, but no one can say with any degree of certainty who actually discovered that mixing ten percent tin with ninety percent copper forged a metal twice as hard as anything known before. Even the exact dating is hazy. The best guess is that it appeared around two thousand B.C.'

'Smelting copper was known as far back as five thousand B.C. in central Turkey,' said Boyd. 'Copper was in abundance throughout the ancient world. Mining took place on a grand scale in Europe and the Middle East. But when bronze came along, there was a problem. Tin ore is rare in nature. Like later gold rushes, prospectors and traders spread throughout the ancient world in search of the ore. They eventually found the largest deposits in Southwest England. The British Celtic tribes quickly cashed in and built an international marketplace for dealing in