Graham Hancock's Ideas about Ancient North America Were Proposed 200 Years Ago, by a Plagiarist and Fraud

​If you’ve been reading fringe media or even the mainstream news this week, you likely saw one of dozens of articles claiming that a new scientific paper evaluated the evidence for an advanced civilization millions of years ago. They were lying. The paper isn’t about proving such a civilization existed. It was a thought experiment asking us to consider the impact of civilization on the planet and how permanent our footprint will be in the long term. There is no evidence of an ancient lost civilization millions of years ago and the authors even wrote in the Atlantic that they don’t believe there ever was such a civilization, though they suggest that it might be worth looking for any geological traces of one, if only for the accidental discoveries it might produce. It’s about as much proof of prehistoric Old Ones as At the Mountains of Madness.

​Meanwhile, you have probably heard that Graham Hancock is writing a new book called America Before about the prehistory of North America, and his thesis is going to be that a comet struck the continent during the Ice Age, wiping out an advanced civilization whose legacy is embodied in the astronomical alignments of the famous mounds of the Ohio Valley and elsewhere. He wrote on Twitter last week that he is currently writing a chapter about Ohio’s Serpent Mound. There is a degree of irony that Hancock’s book is essentially a mirror image of my own current project, which is a narrative history of the rise and fall of the mound builder myth—essentially the same “lost civilization” hypothesis.
 
The interesting thing is that this material can be found all the way back in 1801, in the work of Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, also known as John Hector St. John, the former French consul at New York and a friend of Thomas Jefferson. Crèvecoeur was an unrepentant plagiarist, and he accidentally concocted the myth that a comet destroyed a lost civilization in America when, in creating his Travels in Upper Pennsylvania and the State of New York, he pieced together from a series of books a fake speech to place in the mouth of Benjamin Franklin. He first has Franklin talk about a lost white race that must have been the true builders of the mounds. Then he has him say:

“This planet is very old,” he continued. “Like the works of Homer and Hesiod, who can say through how many editions it has passed in the immensity of ages? The rent continents, the straits, the gulfs, the islands, the shallows of the ocean, are but vast fragments on which, as on the planks of some wrecked vessel, the men of former generations who escaped these commotions, have produced new populations. Time, so precious to us, the creatures of a moment, is nothing to nature. Who can tell us when the earth will again experience these fatal catastrophes, to which, it appears to me, to be as much exposed in its annual revolutions, as are the vessels which cross the seas to be dashed in pieces on a sunken rock? The near approach or contact of one of those globes whose elliptical and mysterious courses are perhaps the agents of our destinies, some variation in its annual or diurnal rotation, in the inclination of its axis or the equilibrium of the seas, might change its climate, and render it long uninhabitable.” (trans. E. A. and G. L. Duycknick)

​This is basically Hancock’s entire raison d'être at this point, and it is all the more remarkable that the idea is a fortuitous product of Crèvecoeur’s random selection of texts to raid. Here I will share just a small part of my analysis in my book:

When Crèvecoeur was casting about in 1801 for material to plagiarize for his Voyage, there was surprisingly little to choose from if he wished to write about the mounds except for the material emerging as a result of the Webster controversy. As an admirer of the Americans, he could not help but want to contribute to the glorification of the country through the creation of an epic past equal to that of Greece and Rome. But what to do? Crèvecoeur picked up a copy of Gilbert Imlay’s Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, a best-seller a decade earlier, and started copying. The connection must have occurred to him because an appendix reproducing Benjamin Franklin’s views on immigration to America appeared just pages from an appendix by a soldier named Jonathan Heart speculating on the history of the ancient earthworks in the 1797 edition Crèvecoeur used.
 
Imlay had been a businessman in Kentucky in the 1780s, where he developed a strong sense of regional pride and an even stronger sense that he did not want to pay back the massive debts he owed. He had been a colleague and friend to Gen. James Wilkinson, known then as a Revolutionary War hero, but secretly a double-agent working for Spain to foment the secession of the western part of the United States, a fact that would only come to light after his death in 1825. For now, he merely seemed to be a patriot working to establish Kentucky as a separate commonwealth from Virginia. Imlay bought into Wilkinson’s two-faced patriotism, and even after fleeing to Britain he continued to push the cause of Kentucky. To this end, he wrote the Topographical Description in 1792, extolling immigration to the West and the primitive virtue of frontier life. Imlay took his primitive virtue to Revolutionary Paris the next year, where he started a relationship with the famed British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who had just published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Nine months later, Wollstonecraft bore Imlay’s love-child, Fanny Imlay, the half-sister of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. Imlay skipped town for London, leaving Mary and Fanny to fend for themselves amidst the Terror.
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The Topographical Description was exceedingly popular among British liberal thinkers, going through three increasingly lengthy editions in 1792, 1793, and 1797. The last of these was restricted only to Britain and appears to be the edition Crèvecoeur used. Since this work was well known in its day, were it not for the fact that so few read Crèvecoeur, his plagiarism might have been caught long before it could do so much damage. What must have caught Crèvecoeur’s attention was a January 5, 1791 letter included in the expanded edition of the Topographical Description from Army Capt. Jonathan Heart describing his reaction to the Webster controversy playing out in the Columbian Magazine and the American Museum. Heart had published a description of the Muskingum mounds in the Columbian in May 1789, having viewed these constructions himself. In his 1791 letter he informs his correspondent, botanist Benjamin Smith Barton (who would become the first to argue—and then repudiate—that the Toltecs of Mexico had built the mounds), what he had heard of the region’s other mounds. He then speculates about the origins of the mounds. It was this section that Crèvecoeur plagiarized quite heavily in 1801 in constructing Franklin’s imagined speech—even having the gall to have “Franklin” in 1787 cite Heart as a source of information years before Heart had published anything about the mounds! Nearly the whole of Franklin’s speech is there—from the uncertainty whether humans could ever unravel the peopling of the Americas to the same speculation about the ethnology of the lost race. The most pregnant and important line in Heart’s letter was this: “…they were not constructed by the present Indians, or their predecessors; or some traditions would have remained as to their uses, and they would have retained some knowledge in constructing similar works.”
 
It was as though the past two centuries of European observation of Native peoples had never happened—and for an Army captain on America’s frontier, with limited access to scattered historical texts it might just as well have never happened. Yet it was this view that would predominate among the most educated Americans going forward. Heart, at least, had the good sense to recognize that Native Americans were not Israelites, and any similarity to the Lost Tribes was mere the coincidence of peoples living close to the “state of nature.” Few would be so scrupulous in the next century.
 
Crèvecoeur’s passages about the ages of mankind and the role of comets appear to derive from the 1773 controversy when the French mathematician Joseph Lalande set off a panic when the French public mistakenly thought he predicted the imminent collision of earth with a comet, prompting some clergy to begin selling dispensations to a worried public preparing for the end of days. Such a memory might have been prompted in Crèvecoeur by Heart’s discussion of the wooly mammoth, whose fossils had only recently been recognized as an extinct species distinct from the elephant. Heart strongly implied that just as the mammoth had vanished without a trace, so too might a prehistoric American culture. Crèvecoeur, in casting about for a good way to rid a continent of Mound Builders, could have done worse than a comet.
 
Crèvecoeur’s Voyage, composed in French, was not a commercial success. It did not sell well and none of it was translated into English until in 1855 the passage about Benjamin Franklin was translated for the well-received and widely-read Cyclopædia of American Literature. There, the plagiarized, falsified speech sat alongside the greats of early American letters, including James Fennimore Cooper, John Winthrop, and three selections from Thomas Jefferson, as an exemplar of the new country’s best writing. It was from this publication that generations of scholars claimed Franklin as a powerful voice in favor of the “lost race” theory.