A poor-quality picture of Jacobs from 1957. Conservative, poetical, genealogist, academic, literary detective: a Fortean.
Charles Juan (Stephen Richard) Jacobs was born 19 April 1902 in Rochester New York. Through his father, Homer Jacobs, he could trace his lines of descent to Italy—and to the American Revolution. In the years after, Charles was born, Homer was a harness maker,. Charles’s mother was Catharine “Nellie” Gugelman. She was the daughter of immigrants. Charles had three younger brothers, Howard, Homer, and Francis. No later than 1907—the year Homer was born—the family had relocated to South Dakota, and they were still there in 1910, when the census was taken. Homer owned his home free and clear.
By 1914—the year Homer the younger was born—the family was back in New York, any by the time of the 1920 census, if not before, lived in Victor, New York, in Ontario County. Homer the elder was now a salesman at an agricultural store. Charles was 17 at the time of the census, and in high school. After graduation, he attended the University of Rochester, whence he received his bachelor’s of art in 1926. He returned home, then, and I am not sure what he was doing during the end of the 20s. At the time of the 1930 census, Homer the elder had become a clerk at a general store—and that was supporting almost the entire family. (Only Howard was no longer at home.) The younger Homer and Francis were still in school. Nellie was raising the kids. Charles had no job listed.
Charles Juan (Stephen Richard) Jacobs was born 19 April 1902 in Rochester New York. Through his father, Homer Jacobs, he could trace his lines of descent to Italy—and to the American Revolution. In the years after, Charles was born, Homer was a harness maker,. Charles’s mother was Catharine “Nellie” Gugelman. She was the daughter of immigrants. Charles had three younger brothers, Howard, Homer, and Francis. No later than 1907—the year Homer was born—the family had relocated to South Dakota, and they were still there in 1910, when the census was taken. Homer owned his home free and clear.
By 1914—the year Homer the younger was born—the family was back in New York, any by the time of the 1920 census, if not before, lived in Victor, New York, in Ontario County. Homer the elder was now a salesman at an agricultural store. Charles was 17 at the time of the census, and in high school. After graduation, he attended the University of Rochester, whence he received his bachelor’s of art in 1926. He returned home, then, and I am not sure what he was doing during the end of the 20s. At the time of the 1930 census, Homer the elder had become a clerk at a general store—and that was supporting almost the entire family. (Only Howard was no longer at home.) The younger Homer and Francis were still in school. Nellie was raising the kids. Charles had no job listed.
Soon enough, he was off again, though, and in 1933 received his Masters of Divinity from Boston University. The school is associated with the Methodists, and that may or may not have been the faith of Charles’s family. The evidence suggests that, at least late in life, Jacobs identified as Catholic. On 22 September 1934, he married a woman named Elsie at a Methodist ceremony in Manchester, Connecticut. And the year after that, he finished a master’s degree (in Old Testament study) at the University of Denver. I don’t know when he moved to Colorado, whether it was before his marriage or not, but he stayed in the west until 1939 teaching English at a mining college. He moved back to New York, where he did factory and mining work until 1944, as well as some teaching—the 1940 census has him in Victor, New York, as a teacher.
After what seems to have been a hard and peripatetic two decades, Jacobs found his groove in the mid-1940s. Probably because of age, Jacobs did not serve in World War II—he was of that blessed cohort which was too young for World War I, too old for World War II. In 1942, he applied to the Sons of the American Revolution, following in his father’s steps. (They applied at the same time.) He became a full-time instructor in 1944, a position he kept until 1946, when he moved to the University of Bridgeport, where he spent the rest of his professional career as a professor of English. I do not believe that he and Elsie (some five years his junior) ever had children.
Very likely, it seems, the application for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution came out of Charles’s interests, for he would develop into a genealogist of some renown, putting out a couple of monographs and serving in various administrative capacities. (His researches seem to have been the occasion for having him add the extra two middle names to the one which he received upon birth.) Jacobs also did a lot of teaching, basic English composition as well as outreach classes to the community at large, including a course on the Bible as literature early in his career. And he had interest in Columbus and some obscure areas of literary history. His primary focus seems to have been poetry, and he published under a number of pseudonyms, each for the different moods of this poems: Goronwy Bonheddy, Michael Havock, Shane Carvel, Stephen Fitzomer, Etieen Richard, Richard Dulwich, and Frank M. Arouet. By the 1960s, he was associated with the Catholic Poetry Association of America, which suggests he converted to Catholicism sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
There do, indeed, seem to have been many moods to his writing, although I have not found something published for each of his pen names. Michael Havock wrote an intense power “Awakened,” which received some play in 1954. Richard Dunwich—note the Lovecraft reference—published “Voodoo” in the genre magazine “Macabre” (Summer 1959). His poetical work seems to have culminated in 1968, when The Pageant Press put out his collection “The Violent Universe.” It was reviewed in his hometown newspaper, “The Bridgeport Post,” which celebrated it for its conservativism: “In an age whose poetic expression consists principally of coruscations of intuitive creativity, and bewildering obscurantism, it is decidedly refreshing to read contemporary poetry the meaning of which an educated person can perceive without puzzling over archetypes, symbols, and mythopoetic folderol.”
It is not surprise, then, that there are some overlaps between Jacobs and the defender of old-fashioned poetic virtues—a warrior in the battles over modernism in the 1950s and 1960s that expunged the radical politics—Stanton Coblentz (himself associated with the Fortean poet Lilith Lorraine). I don’t know that Jacobs was particularly receptive to all of Coblentz’s ideology—or any of it, for that matter—and some of his pseudonyms (I’m thinking of Stephen Fitzomer) might imply him playing with a Joycean voice.
He became an emeritus professor in 1974.
Charles Juan Jacobs died 27 January 1983 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was 80.
*********************
There is no evidence that definitively specifies when and why Jacobs came to Fort or the Fortean Society. On first blush, it’s a bit surprising: his working-class roots, and his toff and tosh career put him out of the mainstream of Fortean Society members. The likeliest route was through weird literature. Jacobs enjoyed Lovecraft and similar writers. Coming into his majority at about the time that Fort published the first of his four nonfiction books, he had time enough to come across one of the books, if not all of them. At loose ends in the early 1940s, he had opportunity to pick up the omnibus edition, or see it advertised in science fiction magazines. A wide ranging litterateur, he could have seen mention of The Fortean Society in a number of magazines, particularly The Saturday Review of Literature.
He was a member no later than May 1949, when issue 25 appeared, as he appeared in that issue with the honorific MFS: Member of the Fortean Society. He had sent in a letter that Thayer excerpted and printed. It showed the connection between Jacobs’s interest in weird literature and Forteanism:
“My duties as instructor have left me no time for such research or even to work the original statement to a more organized or more pleasing form. However, the aforesaid duties (in my English Literature class) have led me across the perennially interesting trail of Roger Bacon, and therefrom develops another mild brain storm to keep company with my former aberrations.”
He went on to describe the Voynich Manuscript, an indecipherable manuscript that was found in 1912 and dated back to the time of Bacon. (The manuscript remains an object of controversy, with many thinking it a fake of some kind.) Jacobs noted that the manuscript included drawings of a number of constellations as well as what is taken to be the star Aldebaran. He continued, “As a student of the short story in its various forms, I have been interested in the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft and the preoccupation of some of them with the star Aldebaran.”
Jacobs was pushing at the conclusion that Lovecraft may have been influenced by the manuscript. A University of Pennsylvania professor William E. Newbold proffered a translation in the early 1920s. The interpretation is now widely considered wrong, but Jacobs thought that it might have influenced Lovecraft—thus the concepts of Things from Outside and flying saucers may have grown from Laconian soil: the same soil, as it were, that nurtured the early history of science and empiricism, as well as the historical “controversy”—though on the fringe—about the authorship of Shakespeare’s writings. Jacobs did not mention these other connections—nor did he mention that other obvious parallel between the Voynich Manuscript and Lovecraft: the manuscript bears a family resemblance to the occult tomes Lovecraft imagined, such as the Necronomicon. (Jacobs even suggested that the cypher may have had an extra-terrestrial origin.)
He ended with a post-script that may have been a poking at his own lassitude (or busy-ness) but also had an occult feel: as if there was some force keeping him from investigating the connection between the Father of Science and the Father of Cosmic Horror: “Ironically enough, although I am within an hour of New York [where Newbold’s book was] and a half an hour of Yale [where the Voynich Manuscript was], I have not found opportunity during the past few months to check either Newbold’s book or anything else on the subject.”
The connection between the Voynich Manuscript and Lovecraft would persist in Fortean circles down the decades. The Willis brothers, who put out the Fortean ‘zine “Anubis” after Thayer and the Society died, wrote about the connection, referring to Jacobs. And they would re-print that article in their later “INFO Journal”—that is to say, the International Fortean Organization Journal. That was in the 1980s. The idea had legs, if not substance.
After that relatively invigorating start (?) to his Fortean career, Jacobs was mostly quiet for the next several years, though that may have been do to the demands of his job, as he implied in his letter, than a loss of affection for Fortean speculation—indeed, his Fortean tendencies may have outlived the Society itself. His name appeared in Doubt once more during the 1940s, two issues later (September 1949), when he—as with many, many other Fortean Society members—contributed a clipping about the fish fall in Marksville, Louisiana, which was widely reported and put the topic of rains of fishes in the limelight again, after a couple of years during which the phenomenon was debunked or dismissed. There was then a lay off of 8 years—perhaps he sent in material that Thayer just chose not to use, but whether he did or just sent in nothing, the result looked as though eh belonged to that class of Forteans who dropped out of the Society in the early 1950s after active involvement during the late 1940s.
It is entirely possible, as well, that the clippings which arrived in 1957 were from a different Jacobs. The surname is common enough, and there is nothing about them which suggests that they had to come from Charles Juan. The only reason to suspect it was the same Jacobs is that Thayer was often (though not always) careful to give a first initial in cases where there were members with the same last name, and that Charles Juan continued Fortean philosophizing in the 1960s, though bereft of the Society. At any rate, these were fairly mundane clippings and would only confirm that Jacobs had an interest in aerial phenomena, be they falling fish, flying saucers, or things from Beyond. Both were referenced in Doubt 54 (June 1957). The first referred to the report of dust high in the atmosphere near Hawaii—which could not have come from those islands because of the prevailing winds. Exactly why this dust was mysterious is not clear, given that dust can reach high levels in the atmosphere, but explaining weird rains by the presence of dust from some far away place was one of Thayer’s bugaboos, and this prejudice likely explains his printing Jacobs’s contribution. The other was a generic flying saucer report, the exact story referred to unknown because Thayer lumped Jacobs in with a long list of other members who contributed similar stories.
All of which is to say Jacobs was a relatively minor Fortean who followed a well-known path, an initial surge of enthusiasm eventually swamped out by other obligations. But he maintained some ideas with a decided Fortean provenance at least into the 1960s, if not longer.
In 1965, the perennial controversy over whether Columbus was the true ‘discoverer’ of North America went through one of its episodic reinvigorations. Such debates started in the 1500s, not even a century after Columbus’s first voyage. (The Chinese are often cited as the first to have reached the so-called New World.) In this case, a map was discovered, eventually finding its way to Yale University from a book dealer, which seemed to offer more credence to the (relatively recent) claim that Scandinavians had come to the northern reaches of the continent long before Columbus. Italians and Catholics were particularly exercised by the revised history, and there were protests of varying seriousness. As it happens, the map itself was a fake—among other things, the ink on it contains pigments from the 20th century—even if the larger claim, that Vikings reached North America first was true.
This controversy had been taken up by the Fortean Society in its early years. Issue 22 (autumn 1948) of Doubt was a bibliography of works on pre-Columbian contact with North America. Thayer likely approached for membership one of the early proponents of Scandinavian contact—the dissident amateur scholar Reider T. Sherwin, who argued that some Native American languages descended from Old Norse, which was spread in North American when Norwegian explorers reached the land around the year 1,000. Reider’s ideas found no purchase among scholars, but did have a second-life among bring theorists, who attached it to a second controversy, about a document known as the Walam Olum, supposedly the origin story of the Native American Lenape, and also supposedly written in a language related to old Norse.
How much of this history Jacobs knew is unknown. Raider was mentioned in issues Doubt 18 and 21 (and probably 22). Jacobs was first mentioned in Doubt 25. He may have been reading earlier than that, of course. And the idea of some mysterious language being passed on bares some resemblance to his own interest in the Voynich Manuscript. (And the Manuscript has parallels in the map—fakes in the Yale archives that suggest alternate histories.) What is clear is that Jacobs was open to these heterodox ideas, so much so, in fact, that he expected they were true, beyond argument. Indeed, what irritated him—and was the impetus for him joining the debate—was that so many people refused to accept this obvious idea. He wrote into the Bridgeport Post on 19 February 1966:
“To the Editor:
A news item to the effect that the Mandan Indians probably are descendants of Norsemen, alerts me tot he possibility go a new superfluity of letters claiming with misguided enthusiasm that Columbus alone discovered America. I am weary of letter writers, who in the first place are ignorant of the facts and secondly too lazy to look them up—perhaps thirdly, too confused to use the facts intelligently when they have them.
I assure fellow readers I am in no sense anti-Columbus or anti-Italian. I am of Italian descent in the direct male line and to my knowledge have at least three other lines of Italian descent. I am an admirer of Italian achievement. I also am an avid student of American prehistory and have been for well over 50 years. I grant Columbus credit for his achievement; without question his discovery is responsible for developments which have resulted in our pressrun civilization. But the first discoverer? Nonsense! There is in my mind not the slightest question that the Norsemen were here long before. Not only that, there is an increasing mass of data to support the thesis that even the Norsemen were johnny-come-latelies. The Romans may have been here; the Greeks have a greater likelihood; the Phoenicians almost certainly; at least one scholar presents evidence that Sargon of Akkad planted a colony here. There may well have been others.
There will be howls of rage about the Yale map; shouts about the Mandan Indians or the Newport tower, ad nauseam. I am not committing myself to a brawl along any of these lines, though I confess that such a hassle would be downright interesting. I merely call attention to a fact that all our Italian correspondents have overlooked up to this point. Columbus used old maps; I do not think anybody denies this. Do not try to tell me that they were done by someone who wasn’t here—or who did not get his detailed information from someone who was here.
Whether the original mapmaker was a Norseman or a Roman or a Greek or a Phoenician, or someone else, it had to be someone before Columbus, who used the map. I hope that there are no Post readers with so retarded intelligence that this fact is not apparent. As for the rest, viva Columbus! I am all for him!”
Jacobs’s ratiocination is of course ridiculous. By his reasoning, no explorer could ever go anywhere without someone else having been there first. And in Columbus’s case, the map he (likely) used was discovered in 1962 . . . and given to Yale University! The Marcellus Map, as it is called, after its maker, did not show any of the New World.
Jacobs’s arguments were not sound in either of his contributions to Fortean thought, before and after the Society’s demise. But they contributed to controversies that both outlived him and the Society.
After what seems to have been a hard and peripatetic two decades, Jacobs found his groove in the mid-1940s. Probably because of age, Jacobs did not serve in World War II—he was of that blessed cohort which was too young for World War I, too old for World War II. In 1942, he applied to the Sons of the American Revolution, following in his father’s steps. (They applied at the same time.) He became a full-time instructor in 1944, a position he kept until 1946, when he moved to the University of Bridgeport, where he spent the rest of his professional career as a professor of English. I do not believe that he and Elsie (some five years his junior) ever had children.
Very likely, it seems, the application for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution came out of Charles’s interests, for he would develop into a genealogist of some renown, putting out a couple of monographs and serving in various administrative capacities. (His researches seem to have been the occasion for having him add the extra two middle names to the one which he received upon birth.) Jacobs also did a lot of teaching, basic English composition as well as outreach classes to the community at large, including a course on the Bible as literature early in his career. And he had interest in Columbus and some obscure areas of literary history. His primary focus seems to have been poetry, and he published under a number of pseudonyms, each for the different moods of this poems: Goronwy Bonheddy, Michael Havock, Shane Carvel, Stephen Fitzomer, Etieen Richard, Richard Dulwich, and Frank M. Arouet. By the 1960s, he was associated with the Catholic Poetry Association of America, which suggests he converted to Catholicism sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
There do, indeed, seem to have been many moods to his writing, although I have not found something published for each of his pen names. Michael Havock wrote an intense power “Awakened,” which received some play in 1954. Richard Dunwich—note the Lovecraft reference—published “Voodoo” in the genre magazine “Macabre” (Summer 1959). His poetical work seems to have culminated in 1968, when The Pageant Press put out his collection “The Violent Universe.” It was reviewed in his hometown newspaper, “The Bridgeport Post,” which celebrated it for its conservativism: “In an age whose poetic expression consists principally of coruscations of intuitive creativity, and bewildering obscurantism, it is decidedly refreshing to read contemporary poetry the meaning of which an educated person can perceive without puzzling over archetypes, symbols, and mythopoetic folderol.”
It is not surprise, then, that there are some overlaps between Jacobs and the defender of old-fashioned poetic virtues—a warrior in the battles over modernism in the 1950s and 1960s that expunged the radical politics—Stanton Coblentz (himself associated with the Fortean poet Lilith Lorraine). I don’t know that Jacobs was particularly receptive to all of Coblentz’s ideology—or any of it, for that matter—and some of his pseudonyms (I’m thinking of Stephen Fitzomer) might imply him playing with a Joycean voice.
He became an emeritus professor in 1974.
Charles Juan Jacobs died 27 January 1983 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was 80.
*********************
There is no evidence that definitively specifies when and why Jacobs came to Fort or the Fortean Society. On first blush, it’s a bit surprising: his working-class roots, and his toff and tosh career put him out of the mainstream of Fortean Society members. The likeliest route was through weird literature. Jacobs enjoyed Lovecraft and similar writers. Coming into his majority at about the time that Fort published the first of his four nonfiction books, he had time enough to come across one of the books, if not all of them. At loose ends in the early 1940s, he had opportunity to pick up the omnibus edition, or see it advertised in science fiction magazines. A wide ranging litterateur, he could have seen mention of The Fortean Society in a number of magazines, particularly The Saturday Review of Literature.
He was a member no later than May 1949, when issue 25 appeared, as he appeared in that issue with the honorific MFS: Member of the Fortean Society. He had sent in a letter that Thayer excerpted and printed. It showed the connection between Jacobs’s interest in weird literature and Forteanism:
“My duties as instructor have left me no time for such research or even to work the original statement to a more organized or more pleasing form. However, the aforesaid duties (in my English Literature class) have led me across the perennially interesting trail of Roger Bacon, and therefrom develops another mild brain storm to keep company with my former aberrations.”
He went on to describe the Voynich Manuscript, an indecipherable manuscript that was found in 1912 and dated back to the time of Bacon. (The manuscript remains an object of controversy, with many thinking it a fake of some kind.) Jacobs noted that the manuscript included drawings of a number of constellations as well as what is taken to be the star Aldebaran. He continued, “As a student of the short story in its various forms, I have been interested in the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft and the preoccupation of some of them with the star Aldebaran.”
Jacobs was pushing at the conclusion that Lovecraft may have been influenced by the manuscript. A University of Pennsylvania professor William E. Newbold proffered a translation in the early 1920s. The interpretation is now widely considered wrong, but Jacobs thought that it might have influenced Lovecraft—thus the concepts of Things from Outside and flying saucers may have grown from Laconian soil: the same soil, as it were, that nurtured the early history of science and empiricism, as well as the historical “controversy”—though on the fringe—about the authorship of Shakespeare’s writings. Jacobs did not mention these other connections—nor did he mention that other obvious parallel between the Voynich Manuscript and Lovecraft: the manuscript bears a family resemblance to the occult tomes Lovecraft imagined, such as the Necronomicon. (Jacobs even suggested that the cypher may have had an extra-terrestrial origin.)
He ended with a post-script that may have been a poking at his own lassitude (or busy-ness) but also had an occult feel: as if there was some force keeping him from investigating the connection between the Father of Science and the Father of Cosmic Horror: “Ironically enough, although I am within an hour of New York [where Newbold’s book was] and a half an hour of Yale [where the Voynich Manuscript was], I have not found opportunity during the past few months to check either Newbold’s book or anything else on the subject.”
The connection between the Voynich Manuscript and Lovecraft would persist in Fortean circles down the decades. The Willis brothers, who put out the Fortean ‘zine “Anubis” after Thayer and the Society died, wrote about the connection, referring to Jacobs. And they would re-print that article in their later “INFO Journal”—that is to say, the International Fortean Organization Journal. That was in the 1980s. The idea had legs, if not substance.
After that relatively invigorating start (?) to his Fortean career, Jacobs was mostly quiet for the next several years, though that may have been do to the demands of his job, as he implied in his letter, than a loss of affection for Fortean speculation—indeed, his Fortean tendencies may have outlived the Society itself. His name appeared in Doubt once more during the 1940s, two issues later (September 1949), when he—as with many, many other Fortean Society members—contributed a clipping about the fish fall in Marksville, Louisiana, which was widely reported and put the topic of rains of fishes in the limelight again, after a couple of years during which the phenomenon was debunked or dismissed. There was then a lay off of 8 years—perhaps he sent in material that Thayer just chose not to use, but whether he did or just sent in nothing, the result looked as though eh belonged to that class of Forteans who dropped out of the Society in the early 1950s after active involvement during the late 1940s.
It is entirely possible, as well, that the clippings which arrived in 1957 were from a different Jacobs. The surname is common enough, and there is nothing about them which suggests that they had to come from Charles Juan. The only reason to suspect it was the same Jacobs is that Thayer was often (though not always) careful to give a first initial in cases where there were members with the same last name, and that Charles Juan continued Fortean philosophizing in the 1960s, though bereft of the Society. At any rate, these were fairly mundane clippings and would only confirm that Jacobs had an interest in aerial phenomena, be they falling fish, flying saucers, or things from Beyond. Both were referenced in Doubt 54 (June 1957). The first referred to the report of dust high in the atmosphere near Hawaii—which could not have come from those islands because of the prevailing winds. Exactly why this dust was mysterious is not clear, given that dust can reach high levels in the atmosphere, but explaining weird rains by the presence of dust from some far away place was one of Thayer’s bugaboos, and this prejudice likely explains his printing Jacobs’s contribution. The other was a generic flying saucer report, the exact story referred to unknown because Thayer lumped Jacobs in with a long list of other members who contributed similar stories.
All of which is to say Jacobs was a relatively minor Fortean who followed a well-known path, an initial surge of enthusiasm eventually swamped out by other obligations. But he maintained some ideas with a decided Fortean provenance at least into the 1960s, if not longer.
In 1965, the perennial controversy over whether Columbus was the true ‘discoverer’ of North America went through one of its episodic reinvigorations. Such debates started in the 1500s, not even a century after Columbus’s first voyage. (The Chinese are often cited as the first to have reached the so-called New World.) In this case, a map was discovered, eventually finding its way to Yale University from a book dealer, which seemed to offer more credence to the (relatively recent) claim that Scandinavians had come to the northern reaches of the continent long before Columbus. Italians and Catholics were particularly exercised by the revised history, and there were protests of varying seriousness. As it happens, the map itself was a fake—among other things, the ink on it contains pigments from the 20th century—even if the larger claim, that Vikings reached North America first was true.
This controversy had been taken up by the Fortean Society in its early years. Issue 22 (autumn 1948) of Doubt was a bibliography of works on pre-Columbian contact with North America. Thayer likely approached for membership one of the early proponents of Scandinavian contact—the dissident amateur scholar Reider T. Sherwin, who argued that some Native American languages descended from Old Norse, which was spread in North American when Norwegian explorers reached the land around the year 1,000. Reider’s ideas found no purchase among scholars, but did have a second-life among bring theorists, who attached it to a second controversy, about a document known as the Walam Olum, supposedly the origin story of the Native American Lenape, and also supposedly written in a language related to old Norse.
How much of this history Jacobs knew is unknown. Raider was mentioned in issues Doubt 18 and 21 (and probably 22). Jacobs was first mentioned in Doubt 25. He may have been reading earlier than that, of course. And the idea of some mysterious language being passed on bares some resemblance to his own interest in the Voynich Manuscript. (And the Manuscript has parallels in the map—fakes in the Yale archives that suggest alternate histories.) What is clear is that Jacobs was open to these heterodox ideas, so much so, in fact, that he expected they were true, beyond argument. Indeed, what irritated him—and was the impetus for him joining the debate—was that so many people refused to accept this obvious idea. He wrote into the Bridgeport Post on 19 February 1966:
“To the Editor:
A news item to the effect that the Mandan Indians probably are descendants of Norsemen, alerts me tot he possibility go a new superfluity of letters claiming with misguided enthusiasm that Columbus alone discovered America. I am weary of letter writers, who in the first place are ignorant of the facts and secondly too lazy to look them up—perhaps thirdly, too confused to use the facts intelligently when they have them.
I assure fellow readers I am in no sense anti-Columbus or anti-Italian. I am of Italian descent in the direct male line and to my knowledge have at least three other lines of Italian descent. I am an admirer of Italian achievement. I also am an avid student of American prehistory and have been for well over 50 years. I grant Columbus credit for his achievement; without question his discovery is responsible for developments which have resulted in our pressrun civilization. But the first discoverer? Nonsense! There is in my mind not the slightest question that the Norsemen were here long before. Not only that, there is an increasing mass of data to support the thesis that even the Norsemen were johnny-come-latelies. The Romans may have been here; the Greeks have a greater likelihood; the Phoenicians almost certainly; at least one scholar presents evidence that Sargon of Akkad planted a colony here. There may well have been others.
There will be howls of rage about the Yale map; shouts about the Mandan Indians or the Newport tower, ad nauseam. I am not committing myself to a brawl along any of these lines, though I confess that such a hassle would be downright interesting. I merely call attention to a fact that all our Italian correspondents have overlooked up to this point. Columbus used old maps; I do not think anybody denies this. Do not try to tell me that they were done by someone who wasn’t here—or who did not get his detailed information from someone who was here.
Whether the original mapmaker was a Norseman or a Roman or a Greek or a Phoenician, or someone else, it had to be someone before Columbus, who used the map. I hope that there are no Post readers with so retarded intelligence that this fact is not apparent. As for the rest, viva Columbus! I am all for him!”
Jacobs’s ratiocination is of course ridiculous. By his reasoning, no explorer could ever go anywhere without someone else having been there first. And in Columbus’s case, the map he (likely) used was discovered in 1962 . . . and given to Yale University! The Marcellus Map, as it is called, after its maker, did not show any of the New World.
Jacobs’s arguments were not sound in either of his contributions to Fortean thought, before and after the Society’s demise. But they contributed to controversies that both outlived him and the Society.
