The Missing Lands Read online

  Folklore works in the same manner, recording events that indigenous cultures refer to as "time immemorial." For example, an archaeological excavation on the Heiltsuk peoples’ reservation in British Columbia confirms their oral history of settlement at the site during the Younger Dryas. "It was a place that never froze during the ice age and it was a place where our ancestors flocked to for survival," said William Housty, a member of the Heiltsuk Nation. Subsequent dating of unearthed artefacts indeed places the tribe at this location in 12,000 BC, when much of North America was one massive ice sheet.28

  In many flood myths and traditions the Sun is described as behaving abnormally. It is absent in Central America for five days, while in Persia and the Indus region — on the same latitude on the opposite side of the world — the Sun remained in the sky between five and ten days, suggesting the Earth's rotation did slow considerably or stopped altogether. The same phenomenon was observed much later in China c.2200 BC during the time of Emperor Yao, and evidence suggests another meteorite impacted the Earth c.2345 BC.29

  Ancient accounts also describe a combustible fluid accompanying the global flood. It has been suggested this may have been the debris of a comet's tail, composed as it is of carbon and hydrogen — the components of petroleum that, when interacting with oxygen in the atmosphere, become highly combustible. The effects were predictably devastating: "For seven winters and summers the fire has raged... it has burnt up the earth."30 Hailstones of iron descended from the sky, so say the myths of the Finns, making the Sun and Moon disappear, and the heavens replaced by new celestial bodies.31

  It would be nine thousand years before the philosopher Philo learned of such stories during his tenure at Alexandria’s fabled library. He succinctly summarized how, over the course of long periods of time, the Earth is subjected to "fire [that] pours out from above and spreads over many places and overruns great regions of the inhabited earth,”32 what astronomers today refer to as a mass coronal ejection, an eruption of plasma from the Sun. Before him, Plato compiled similar accounts handed down from those great students of the stars, the Chaldeans, who were under no illusion that the orbits and velocities of planets were in any way absolute, but instead are subject to change and variation.33 They forewarned future citizens of the chaos such changes visit upon the Earth, one of them being the obliteration of all traces of former civilizations. Such observations became the foundation of Plato's accounts of the final destruction of Atlantis, which the philosopher elegantly wove into a dialogue between two statesmen, using the mechanism of creative storytelling to impart vital knowledge to future generations. Since modern historians fail to understand the importance of such a mechanism, his work is dismissed by them as fiction, despite his dating of the great flood aligning to within one hundred years of the latest supporting geological evidence.

  Perhaps the most important thing about the flood stories — for that is what they are, real-life observations — is that they were transmitted by survivors and passed along orally from generation to generation, eventually recorded for posterity on paper, papyrus, vellum and stone. The Vedas of the Indian subcontinent provide a highly descriptive, if sometimes baffling narrative of events that took place in prehistoric times, one of them being the pralayas (cataclysms) which occasionally overrun the Earth, destroying everything, and how certain Rishis (wise men) survived such events to “repromulgate, at the beginning of the new age, the knowledge inherited by them as a sacred trust from their forefathers in the preceding age... Each manvantara or age thus has a Veda of its own which differs only in expression and not in sense from the antediluvian Veda.”34 Rather than haphazard, these catastrophes are claimed by many cultures to be predictable, typically associated with the close of a cycle, and seemingly in response to, or as a consequence of, humans transgressing the laws of nature — rebelling against the high gods, as the metaphor goes. Since what happens in terrestrial life is believed to be mirrored in the sky, a degeneration of society was reflected in the disturbance of heavenly order, when planets alter their habitual motions and meteorites fall from the sky.

  Which brings us to the date of the great flood that brought the Younger Dryas to a close. In 2008 a team of Danish geologists conducting an extensive examination of ice cores in Greenland were startled by a thick layer of soot in the ice which pointed to a cataclysmic world event. “The climate shift was so sudden that it is as if a button was pressed,” they remarked. The samples yielded a date of 9703 BC.35

  What is fascinating about these traditions is how they all feature unusual people coming out of nowhere to forewarn specific humans of impending global doom and afterwards assist them with the rebuilding process.

  Who were those people?

  3. THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE GODS

  Even as a child I had an irrational yearning to visit New Zealand, possibly because it lay on the opposite side of the world to where I was born and was therefore mysterious and unattainable, or because some latent generic impulse motivated me. During my early teens I also developed a passion for volcanology but never followed it as a career because I couldn't figure out how the study of erupting magma could possibly lead to dating girls, at least the type who interested me. This was, after all, the early 1970s and it would be another three decades before geeks became fashionable.

  But patience has its reward. The opportunity to travel to that faraway land finally presented itself in 2005 after I became a best-selling author, and this newly found status afforded a four-week tour. I found New Zealand — Aotearoa in the native tongue — to be a natural paradise. Ironically if one were to insert a long needle into the Earth at my place of birth it would re-emerge at Aotearoa’s North Island and beside the sacred mountain Taranaki, a majestic volcano bearing a passing resemblance to Fuji-yama. This is how the gods get their kicks with mortals. Naturally I climbed the magnificent cone and I have been smitten with the landscape ever since.

  I was also in New Zealand to conduct research. I took an interest in the history of its earliest settlers, little of which is known to most Kiwis let alone the outside world — myself included, until I was presented with a book by one of my hosts.

  What little is known about pre-European settlement in New Zealand comes to us via the Maori who sailed to its shores some time around the twelth century after migrating from Polynesia. Upon arrival they displaced people already living on the North Island,1 among them the peaceful Waitaha who inevitably retreated to the even more isolated South Island, where their numbers dwindled to what they are today, an estimated 10,000. I couldn’t help but draw a comparison with the Hopi — similarly peaceful, similarly displaced by migrating foreigners, and whose numbers nowadays barely scrape beyond 13,000. Both cultures possess folklores describing events before, during and after the flood.

  In the early 1990s a local historian by the name of Barry Brailsford was approached by the reclusive Waitaha elders and given permission to publish their oral traditions, finally setting the record straight concerning the true prehistory of New Zealand and, much like the recently-published Hopi prophesies, to warn humanity of the consequences of living out of harmony with the land and sky. Predictably, like other independent scholars presenting facts that overturn histories written by the victorious and promoted by the complacent, Brailsford endured praise and hate in equal proportion.

  There are complex politics at play here: by highlighting the Maori as non-indigenous to New Zealand risks, in the eyes of their recent tribal council, losing favourable treaty rights awarded by the British after they, ironically, displaced the Maori; not to mention Maori indigenous rights at the United Nations. Also at stake is the unquestionable matter of pride. And yet it is a matter of record in Maori history that its early migrants found people already settled in New Zealand.2 Maori elders of previous generations acknowledge the existence of Kiri-puwheru (red-skinned Stonebuilders) prior to their arrival. Traditions describe giants living on the North Island, one being a celebrated hero by the name Kiharoa who lived in Tokanui Pa,
still referred to this day as a giant’s grave. A giant by the name of Matau lived on a hill above the Wairaka River and by all accounts stood eleven feet tall.3 The discovery in 1875 of another giant buried seven feet below the sand on a spit in Timaru led one reporter to reopen the investigation in 1999.4 And no wonder, the individual was reportedly twenty-four feet tall and belonged to a local tribe of giants called Te Kahui Tipua, who were still in existence in the eighteenth century. Hundreds of their remains have been unearthed, all have mysteriously vanished — along with said reporter’s job after he contacted a local resident who’d kept one huge lower jaw as both evidence and souvenir.5

  A similar fate befell the remains of giants found in caves along the curving neck of New Zealand's northwestern shore, specifically at Port Waikato and Raglan. Residents there have been reporting finds since at least the 1920s, and each time, the bones were taken away by authorities and never heard of again. Except in one case where diggers came across a giant skeleton and were instructed to blow it up. Dumbfounded by such a drastic measure, they saved the jawbone and gave it to the museum in Kao Kao.6 In a similar situation near Raglan, in the vicinity of Mount Karioi (literally Mountain of the Red-haired Giants), a human skull the size of a large pumpkin was unearthed during road works. The find was removed and never heard of since. Meanwhile a nearby cave that yielded dozens of giant skeletons, some with red hair still attached, was ordered dynamited, the bones handed to the Maori council and reportedly ground to dust.7

  As if the prehistory of New Zealand couldn't get any more peculiar, a number of archaeological accounts validate a human presence far earlier than historians are prepared to accept, resulting in official paperwork going missing, books expunged from libraries, even public documents declared classified and made inaccessible to the public for seventy-five years. And no wonder: in 1874 workers fitting a sewer in Auckland dug fourteen feet down through layers of clay, sand and two lava flows before finding a charred stump of a large manuka tree, alongside which lay an adse, a type of ancient axe. The engineer who made drawings of the find noted how the remaining branches showed clear signs of chopping by the stone implement. The veracity of the report was acknowledged by the Inspector of Surveys. After dating the various sedimentary layers it was concluded that a person had been busy chopping a tree on this hill around 30,000 BC.8

  Tree chopped some 30,000 years before the Maori arrived in New Zealand.

  Research carried out by a UK forensic pathologist on skeletal remains from former Waitaha sites in the region at the request of Noel Hilliam, late curator of the Dargaville Museum, traced their DNA to Wales c.2500 BC.9 As with the adse and the tree stump, the results were explosive, and explains why Hilliam requested the tests be conducted in secret from the New Zealand government and the cabal of academics who have carried out a relentless whitewash of the country's pre-Maori history, including the discrediting of anyone whose evidence contradicts their sanitized view of events.

  Speaking with independent ancient history researchers in New Zealand, I was told the topic wasn't always so controversial. A couple of decades ago it was still possible to speak freely with Maori elders concerning the prehistoric peoples of Aotearoa. The subject was hardly taboo. Nowadays such talk is met with denial and derision by a younger tribal council, as David Rankin, chief of the Ngapuhi Maori tribe illustrates: “Maori are not the indigenous people of Aotearoa. There were many other races already living here long before Kupe [first Maori leader] arrived. I am his direct descendant and I know from our oral history passed down 44 generations. I believe this needs to be investigated further because every Maori community talks about Waitaha, Turehu and Patupaiarehe. This goes hand-in-hand with the other research… In 2002 I went to the Austronesian Leaders Conference in Taiwan and we discussed similarities with Taiwanese Aborigines. We traced our origins and the Maori and Polynesian connection to China. All the leaders such as myself and Matiu Rei, Aborigines, Solomon islanders, Rapa Nui and Hawaiians were all interested in early settlement theories. There is a lot of writing about the whole ancestral link.”10

  And to quote Rankin again: "Who were these red-headed, fair-skinned people who greeted our wakas [canoes]? You can't deny your oral history. If we try to as Maori we're actually denying our history."11

  So Hilliam had cause to act without consultation, and in the end was vindicated by the DNA results. A similar independent study by immunologist Jean Dausset on the genetic origins of Easter islanders also found their DNA a close match to Welsh people, along with that of Native Americans, and the Basques of northern Spain, a people with a mysterious origin of their own.12

  The Welsh connection brings up an interesting observation regarding the beautiful art of Maori tattooing, whose spiral patterns some Maori artists claim are not indigenous to their Polynesian homelands at all, but developed only after migrating to New Zealand. For this to have occurred, the early tatooists must have been exposed to another culture already practicing such art, one that is clearly and unequivocally Celtic. Additionally, dual spirals have been discovered cut in relief on rocks in and around the Oahi Caves southeast of Mount Taranaki, and they bear more resemblance to those carved at Tiwanaku than to any known Maori art. As the historian W.J. Phillipps observed, “only on the South American continent is there found an ordered series of spirals which can be compared with those of the Maori.”13 The style of these spirals is also common to the temple of Tarxien in Malta, so the question is, since the older Maori never worked with stone, who exactly carved the petroglyphs?

  That’s the back-story.

  Maori never worked with stone, so who carved these spirals (top) and why are they identical to those in Tiwanaku and Malta?

  THE LONG MEMORY OF THE WAITAHA

  What excited me most about the hitherto undiscussed Waitaha is how they retain the memory of events pre-dating the great flood. Their history begins on the world’s most isolated island Waitangi Ki Roto (Island of the Weeping Waters), or as it was named by European seafarers who only found it in the late 18th century, Easter Island.

  The ancestors of the Waitaha are said to have “walked with the gods and touched the distant stars.”14 These people appear to have been composed of several groups with specific functions. There were Kiritea (Stone People) who came from Asian lands. And then there were Urukehu (Starwalkers), people skilled in reading the geometry of the stars and navigating the oceans who would eventually instruct people in the Pacific how to locate Aotearoa. The Urukehu’s light-colored hair and skin set them apart from Polynesian people. The historian Mākereti Papakura believed this light-skinned strain dates back to their traditional place of origin, Havai’iki, although the word literally means 'homeland' and does not refer to a place; certainly it is not related to Hawaii.15

  Every year on Easter Island the Waitaha welcomed "the appearance of the waka of the gods," the massive double-hull canoe of the Urukehu, and with each encounter another layer of wisdom was added to the kete (basket) of knowledge held by the Waitaha's wisdom keepers. But one year the canoe failed to return when "angry stars gathered close to the Moon to give birth to the Tides of Chaos, the dreaded Deluge. And a terrible tragedy unfolded before them. Far beyond the veiled horizon, seas began to climb to terrible heights before rolling out to attack all in their path. Dark storm winds shredded the clouds, swept birds from the sky, sucked fish out of water and smashed them into the sail. Cold hands struggled to lower it before the waka capsized... Huge waves crashed over the washboards, fierce winds bent the tall mast, and the hull... was forced beneath the waves. It survived but wallowed deep within. Then the winds gained new strength from the gathered stars to push the waka relentlessly across the wild waters."16

  The story describes how the commander of the waka, watching half his canoe crippled and breached, made the sensible decision to cut loose the bindings of the two hulls and allow one to avoid capsizing.

  Could the formidable Tongan double hull canoe be a legacy of the wakas once used by the Urukehu 11,000 years
ago?

  Thirteen days passed. The waka was driven further and further south, pushed by fierce winds until it finally reached the shores of an island to which was given the name of the surviving canoe, Aotea Roa, the traditional name of New Zealand’s South Island but today applied to the nation as a whole.

  The Waitaha narrative picks up some time after the world was “turned by water,” when the children of the gods appear. Sailing from a land in the east and following the star Sirius, a man named Kiwa arrives on Easter Island. From this base he makes numerous voyages across the Pacific, charting its remaining lands, many of which had become islands following the catastrophic rise in sea level. As the Waitaha accurately recall, some of those islands are no more.17