If you thought Columbus was the first to discover the New World in 1492, you haven’t read the works of Barry Fell and his co-workers. In America B.C. Fell offered what he and his followers regarded as proof many groups of people from different parts of the world landed in the Americas centuries before Columbus. Among these were the Celts, a distinctive nomadic warlike people bound together more by common cultural and linguistic ties than by political affiliations. The main period of Celtic expansion probably took place around 400 to 200 B.C. Most Celtic scholars would contend these Celtic migrations were confined to Europe and did not include trans-oceanic voyages before Columbus. Fell, however, asserted Celtic language and culture were important in the New World by 3000 B.C., a claim entirely at odds with standard Celtic history.
The case for early Celtic colonization of the Americas rests mainly on the supposed evidence of epigraphic inscriptions and stone structures found in New England, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Fell claims to have deciphered the Ogam script of the inscriptions and positively identified the language as Celtic. But professional Celtic scholars say this form of writing, which consists of strokes and points for the alphabet arranged on the edges of stone markers, is no later than 400 A.D. and is confined to Celtic countries. Fell and others , however, claimed easily identifiable varieties of the Ogam script are found from the Iberian peninsula to Africa, Paraguay, and Canada, thus supporting the view that the Celts were historically responsible for the inscriptions found in the United States.
Fell claimed Celtic sea power, possibly with help from the Phoenicians, was great enough to allow numerous early voyages to the Americas. He also believed the so-called megaliths in New England were actually 3000 year-old astronomical observatories inscribed with Celtic letters. Therefore, Fell declared, there must have been Celtic Druids in New England. The argument goes something like this. The New England Ogam inscriptions are equivalent to Irish Ogam and the inscriptions found in Spain and Portugal, which Fell dated to about 800 B.C. Further, the New England Celtic inscriptions carry the same sound values and therefore cannot have been made by native Indians, unless they were somehow influenced by Iberian Celts. Since it is improbable that two identical alphabets would develop independently in two separate civilizations, therefore, the inscriptions are Celtic and so there must have been Celtic Druids in New England.
Unfortunately, Fell made some fundamental errors. Professionally, he was a marine biologist, not a language specialist. Most of his linguistic proofs have been rejected by professional linguists. Here is one reason why. Fell gives a list of words supposedly deciphered from Druidic inscriptions. Since the ogam script Fell used showed only consonants, not vowels, he took the reading F-G to stand for faic, a Scottish Gaelic form meaning see (as in M-H-M-H, B-L, G-L-N, F-G,. which he translates as Benevolent is Bel, His eye is the sun, a highly significant reading, if valid). But Fell had already placed his Celtic Druids in New England centuries before the development of Scottish Gaelic. The corresponding Old Irish form would be ad-ci (sees). We do not have space here to go into the history of the development of the Celtic languages, but Scottish Gaelic as a distinct language dates only from around the 15th century. In any case, faic is the imperative form of the verb and cannot be taken to mean eye, the word for which would be suíl. Therefore, even if F-G is the correct decipherment it cannot represent faic ; nor can it mean eye.
It is on the basis of such alleged evidence supporters of theories about pre-Columbian trans-oceanic voyages to the Americas often base their theories. Of course just because the theories and speculations of people like Fell and his followers do not fit the standard academic mold it does not necessarily make them wrong. However, they often ignore orthodox academic findings and views, exhibit poor scholarship, use bad methodology, and have insufficient knowledge of the subject. Therefore, professional scholars tend to ignore everything they say. In so doing they may be missing valuable information, but it is up to those who support the unorthodox theories to prove their point.
History is not an exact science, but at least more rigorous methods could be employed. The idea of pre-Columbian voyages to the Americas is not in itself preposterous, but Fell and others put the cart before the horse. First, they assume that many such voyages took place, then they search for supposed evidence to support the theory and ignore everything to the contrary. If you listen long and hard enough eventually you will hear the grass growing.
