Grail Knights of North America

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Memorial
University, reviews editor of The Northern Mariner, and editor of
Northern Seas.

In Holy Grail Across the Atlantic (1988), Bradley maintained that
refugee Knights Templar from Scotland founded a settlement in Nova
Scotia a century before Cabot. In his new book of crypto-history, he
contends that Atlantis really did exist nearly 13,000 years ago, and
that evidence exists to link that advanced civilization with everything
from ancient Egypt to the Albigensian crusade of the Middle Ages, and
then on to Prince Henry Sinclair, who allegedly established the
14th-century settlement of Knights Templar in Nova Scotia.

The Atlantic Ocean, it would seem, was a busy place throughout those
many millennia. Bradley insists that “almost all the seafaring people
around the Atlantic discovered America long before Columbus.”
Academics who stick to more traditional interpretations are summarily
dismissed; Gwyn Jones (who is mysteriously transformed into “Gwyn
Daniels”) is “the worst, and most pompous, offender of this ilk.”
Bradley goes on to claim that the New World civilization of the Knights
Templar influenced New France and even the American Republic. He takes a
recently discredited idea—that those who drafted the American
Constitution were influenced by political principles of the Iroquois
Confederacy—and turns it around by arguing that the Iroquois
Confederacy received its political philosophy from British parliamentary
principles brought to North America by Prince Henry Sinclair and
company!

Those who subscribe to Bradley’s notions will find their faith
reaffirmed by this book; others will very sensibly have nothing to do
with it.