The Island of California
The earth is not stable, it shifts and mysteriously *changes* without warning. Phantom islands vanish, rivers contort and coastlines can radically reconfigure in an instant.
California was an island when it was first discovered.
Hundreds of maps from a multitude of sources verify this.
The Reddit egregore and vile gradualist geologists will insult you by asking you to believe it was a "European misconception".
This is a very detailed misconception.
Notice the general accuracy of every other land mass. This map is from *1721*. Do you realize how much exploration had occurred by then, expeditions over land and by sea?
This map below was made in 1790! Noticed the abundance of named rivers along the interior coast.
Extensive explorations by Fernando Cortes (1535), Francisco de Ulloa (1537), Hernando de Alarcon (1539), and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo (1542), with those of Ulloa and Alarcon to the headwaters of the Gulf of California had all reported it to be contiguous with the continental mainland.
However, many cosmographers and navigators persisted in their belief that California was an island.
Discalced Carmelite Fray Antonio de la Ascension, between the year of 1608 and 1632 firmly established the concept of California as an island with the entrance to the Strait of Anian as its terminus.
Graduate of the Academy of San Telmo in Sevilla, a distinguished institution for professional preparation of navigators, pilots, and geographers, Fray Antonio established what would become the general concept of geography of the Pacific coast of North America. Apart from his credibility as a religious and professional cosmographer, his experience as a scientific officer on previous expeditions gave Fray Antonio impeccable authoritative stature concerning the geography of the region.
Numerous fruitless and tragic searches for the Northwest Passage, as the Strait of Anian was called from its Atlantic approaches, were made by the English navigators Martin Frobisher (1576-1578) and John Davis (1585-1587). The disenchanted Anglos met with failure time and again but, by the early seventeenth century two individuals, Juan de Fuca and Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, were able to traverse it from the Pacific.
Fuca claimed to have entered the Strait of Anian, and sailing through a land rich in gold and pearls, after twenty days entered the Atlantic. Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, perhaps inspired by Fuca’s success, also journeyed through the straits of Anian and recorded his expedition in precise detail.
Another explorer, one Martin d'Aguilar is known to have found the entrance to the strait in 1603. Then, a certain Thomas Peche is said to have sailed 120 leagues within the Straits of Anian in 1676. Throughout this period, a number of secondary reports by the order of Augustinians recorded many credible accounts, all confirming the existence of an insular California.
The mainstream story is that, motivated by some fantastical romantic vision, all of European cosmography was confused by the tales of one or two adventurers. They would have you believe a century of navigators were liars. What else is lost in the sloppy construction of this papier-mâché façade?
Franciscan Fray Geronimo de Zarate Salmeron included in his manuscript, ‘Relaciones de todas las cosas que en el Nuevo Mexico se han vis to y sabido, asi por mar como por tierra, desde el ario de 1538 hasta el de 1626’, this extremely interesting detail—
”on the shore of that sea, there were many as well as large settlements, among which there is a nation of white people who ride horses and fight with lances and daggers, and it is not known what nation this would be.”
A Young Noblewoman from Secoton, from 'Admiranda Narratio..', engraved by Theodore de Bry (1528-88).
There are many reports that the nobles of Eastern American natives were pale-skinned, giant in stature, and had colored hair. Perhaps farther west there were still entire white tribes, still clinging to the remnants of technology and civilization.
In 1605, Father Francisco de Escobar wrote an account of his journey with Don Juan de Oñate from northern New Mexico to the mouth of the Colorado River. He gives us another insight, a tale of an island—
”And showing them a pearl, they gave it a name and said there were many and very large. And one Indian, coming up to the Father Commissary and taking a rosary of large beads that he wore on his neck, said that there were pearls as large and thick as the beads of that rosary; and in regard to the island of Ziñogaba, they said that the mistress or chieftainess of it was a giantess, and that she was called Cifiacacohola, which means chieftainess or mistress. They pictured her as the height of a man-and-a-half of those of the coast, and like them very corpulent, very broad, and with big feet; and that she was old, and that she had a sister, also a giantess, and that there was no man of her kind, and that she did not mingle with anyone of the island.”
This is confirmed three decades later by the same Father Antonio de Ascensión mentioned earlier. He gives a name to the island: Ziñogaba.
Ascensión wrote:
”They also made signs that in an island nearby in the middle of the sea there was a noted large town, of which an Amazon Indian, half giantess, who wears on her breast a very precious plate of pearls and who is accustomed to take them ground up in her drinks, is queen. These Indians said there were many pearls in that sea....the greatest quantity being found around the island of the Amazon Queen.”
Thus appears the Islands of the Giants between the island of California and the mainland. This island is depicted in dozens of maps.
There are many more mysteries found in this region, including the possibility that Cibola and Quivara, two of the mythical Seven Cities of Gold truly existed in one form or another.
But let us return to the Island of California for now and discuss the possibility that it truly may have been an island for a time.
One indication is the existence of Lake Cahuilla or the Blake Sea, a so-called “prehistoric” salt-water lake. Stretching across the Coachella and Imperial Valleys, it still remains to this day in the form of the Salton Sea.
We have the record of a massive 19th-century storm in the Pacific region that opened up a 300-mile-long sea that stretched through much of the central part of California.
For more than 40 days, from late 1861 to early 1862, the windows of the sky opened up over central California. Rivers running down the Sierra Nevada mountains turned into torrents that obliterated entire towns. The storm was caused by something called an “atmospheric river”.
Has such a deluge happened before? Are we perhaps overdue for another?
There are many accounts among the native tribes of California and the Pacific Northwest of such floods.
1650–1825 (1c). “This is not a myth … my tale is seven generations old …
there was a great earthquake and all the houses of the Kwakiutl collapsed.”
— La’bid in 1930.
1657–1777 (28). “… there was a big flood shortly before the white man’s time, … a huge tidal wave that struck the Oregon Coast not too far back in time … the ocean rose up and huge waves swept and surged across the land. Trees were uprooted and villages were swept away. Indians said they tied their canoes to the top of the trees, and some canoes were torn loose and swept away … After the tidal wave, the Indians told of tree tops filled with limbs and trash and of finding strange canues in the woods. The Indians said the big flood and tidal wave tore up the land and changed the rivers. Nobody knows how many Indians died. —Beverly Ward, recounting stories told to her around 1930 by Susan Ned, born in 1842.
One medicine man related the events of such an event, a disaster Out of the
Human Scale—
”My father also told me that following the killing of this destroyer … there was a great
storm and hail and flashes of lightning in the darkened, blackened sky and a great and crashing “thunder-noise” everywhere. He further stated that there were also shaking, jumping up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters“
Canadian Indians tell of the ancient times when “demons came and made slaves of our people and sent the young to die among the rocks and below the ground. But then arrived the thunderbird, and our people were freed. We learned about the marvelous cities of the Thunderbird, which were beyond the big lakes and rivers to the south. “Many of our people left us and saw these shining cities and witnessed the grand homes and the mystery of men who flew upon the skies. But then the demons returned, and there was terrible destruction. Those of our people who had gone southward returned to declare that all life in the cities was
gone—nothing but silence remained.”
The following is the tale of Thunderbird and Whale—
Thunderbird soared far out over the placid waters and waited for Whale to come to the surface. As quick as a flash the powerful bird darted and seized it in her flinty talons, lifted it, and soared away toward the land areas. Passing beyond the oceans she was compelled to alight and rest her wings, and each and every time the bulky beast was allowed to reach solid land there was a terrible battle, for it was powerful and fought for its life with terrible energy. High into the air, the bird carried it over the land, dropping it to the surface. The great thunderbird finally carried the weighty animal to its nest in the lofty mountains, and there was the final and terrible contest fought. There was a shaking up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters. The waters receded and again rose. The water of the Pacific flowed through what is now the swamp and prairie. (Composite of several stories from Reagan, 1934 and Reagan and Walters, 1933)
A medicine man from the northern Olympic Peninsula relates—
“My father also told me that following the killing of this destroyer … there was a great storm and hail and flashes of lightning in the darkened, blackened sky and a great and crashing “thunder-noise” everywhere. He further stated that there was also a shaking, jumping up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters.”
Many of these tales can be dated to the 1700 Cascadia super-quake, a megathrust earthquake with a moment magnitude of 8.7–9.2. (Interestingly, one of the “plates” involved is named after Juan de Fuca, one of our visionary explorers. A subtle hint?)
The tsunami it caused hit the coast of Japan.
Relics devoted to Thunderbird and Whale which are far more ancient than the 1700 event have been discovered among coastal archaeological sites, and local Indian populations certainly witnessed untold cycles of earth-altering events: geologic evidence reveals at least seven in the last 3,000 years. The Lore of a repeating earthquake cycle may be encoded in a story where Thunderbird becomes a man, sending his Thunderbird costume back to the sky, saying:
“You will not keep on thundering, only sometimes you
will sound when my later generations will go die.
You will speak once at a time when those who will
change places with me will go die.”
The way many of these stories sound, describing Thunderbird and Whale as actual titanic beings, one wonders if they were perhaps some kind of ultra-terrestrial or flying war machines. Something about Thunderbird feels very familiar to me.
I have laid before you more than enough evidence that California was certainly an Island, at least for a time. Now all we can do is focus on Thunderbird and pray that he finished what he started.