Robert Howling, The Newport Tower

	NEWPORT TOWER: CHOOSE YOUR OWN VERSION OF HISTORY by Robert Howling

	There is a structure in Newport, Rhode Island which allows you to pick your own version of its history. It’s a mystery because there are no known records that claim its origin. It could be pre-Columbus by either centuries or it could be later but still nearly half a century before the Pilgrims landed. The enigmatic structure is Newport Tower in Tuoro Park. Its significance is overshadowed by its neighbors, the famous Newport Mansions. This circular stone structure now surrounded by a wrought iron fence, is hardly anything to look at. Including the base of eight columns it is only 28 feet high and overall diameter is just under 25 feet. It had been covered in plaster, perhaps several layers over its life, though this is only apparent on one of the columns today. If one bends down to peer through the fence and under the eight arches, one can see by indentations on the wall for floor beams as well as by window placements that there were two storeys above the arches. How old the Newport Tower is depends on which historical group you pick as the most likely builders. The likely nonnative groups to have settled in the area before Columbus were the Norsemen in the mid 1300s and the Chinese in the early 1400s. After Columbus but before Rhode Island had permanent settlements, the late 1500s candidate would be Queen Elizabeth I’s flag bearers. The Norsemen actually go back to Leif Erickson and his fellow Greenlanders who pushed past their first permanent settlement in Helluland (Flat Rock Land/Newfoundland) and Markland (Forest Land/Nova Scotia) finally to Vinland (Land of Grapes/New England) where they cut timber for boat building which was scarce further north and on Greenland and Iceland. However, their sagas do not tell of permanent settlements in Vinland until 1355. Due to crusades and intrigues in which Sweden and Norway were involved around that time, Greenland felt abandoned. For history buffs, the Scandinavian crusades were to convert Orthodox Christians in Russia to the Church of Rome and the intrigues were with Hanseatic League factions. Trade with Greenland was almost non-existent and the Eskimos waged a guerilla war against the Greenlanders mostly over fishing territory. As a result, large groups emigrated to America and lost touch with the Church. Magnus, King of Sweden and Norway, funded by Pope Clement VI, wanted them - - and their taxes - - back. They sent Commander Paul Knutson to gather them up. From the Norse Saga descriptions, it can be determined that Narragansett Bay was where a large search party set up headquarters to find their lost flock or to create a new one by converting the natives. From there Knutson sent out smaller search parties. One party of 30 men sailed back north and into Hudson Bay, then trekked inland thinking their lost flock might have made their way into the interior of the continent. At a high point above the Bay, Newport Tower was built as a church complete with an altar. It also served as a fort which could explain the small and limited in number windows and the thickness of the flooring as a fireproof barrier if the natives tried to burn them out. Their models would have been similar churches and cloisters in the old country such as the Augustinian monastery in Konghelle, Sweden for example or the Cistercian Abby in Ghent and several in Ireland all of which these seafarers would have been familiar. The Sagas stop before we find out why they left and abandoned their church. The Norsemen proponents point to the Kensington Rune Stone, which was found in Minnesota, as recorded evidence that disaster befell the Hudson Bay search party looking for their lost brethren inland. Perhaps back in Newport, they just got tired of waiting and intrigues and wars at home refocused attention and funding inward at the expense of further searches and support for colonization. The history of the Chinese in New England is more detailed. The Ming Emperors launched several Treasure Fleets under the command of Admiral Zhen He. On one expedition, Zhen He tasked Admiral Zhou Wen to explore the Caribbean and the east coast of America after rounding the Horn of Africa. Zhou Wen reached the Bimini Islands with 20 ships but due to groundings and wrecks continued with only 13 ships. (For the ancient alien buffs, the “Bimini Road” is not Atlantis related according to this tale, but built by Admiral Zhou Wen as dry dock ramps for the ships he had to repair!) The fleet landed in Narragansett Bay in December 1421. The Chinese ships were not small, Norsemen or Columbus type vessels. The treasure ships themselves were galleons which could hold 450 – 1,000 sailors and concubines each. Grain freighters and combat carriers were not quite as large. With a loss of seven ships, the remaining ships had to carry many more sailors and concubines as well as rice and hops. Just as the Treasure Fleets had done in the Indian Ocean and the eastern coast of Africa, Admiral Zhou Wen’s mission was to establish colonies and trading posts in the Atlantic. To that end and to bring down the overcapacity of sailors, concubines and grain, a colony was set up in Narragansett Bay headquartered in Newport. In order to be easily found again, a permanent lighthouse was built. Newport Tower is a scaled down version of the Zaiton lighthouse back in the Fleets’ home port of Nanjing on the Yangtze River, still today the largest inland port. The second floor window opposite the fireplace in the Tower served as the beacon of firelight. The Tower would not be the only Chinese remains in the area. About a dozen carved stones within the Narragansett Bay basin as well as nonnative rice plants and hops are clues to a larger community having been established. Admiral Zhou Wen continued the journey north around Greenland and through the Arctic Ocean over Russia and returned home from the North. Alas, back home, the Emperors were fighting off the Mongols and funding for Treasure Fleets was redirected to war. The Treasure Fleet itself was kept in Nanjing for defense. No fleets came back to Newport. The race against the Spanish, Portuguese and the French to either get quick routes to the Pacific and China or to claim America for themselves, was a race Queen Elizabeth I wanted to win. Magellan had headed west get to China by going around South America. For the Portuguese, Diaz and Vasco da Gama turned east rounding the Horn of Africa and they were protecting that route for themselves. The French were trying the Artic route and headquartering their American trade in Quebec. Queen Elizabeth’s close advisor, John Dee, convinced her that England had a claim on America thanks to prior explorers such as the Cabot brothers, St Brendan and his monks way back in first century and even King Arthur who he told her retired in America! So she gave Sir Humphrey Gilbert a charter to “to plant Christian inhabitants…upon those large and convenient countries extended northward from the Cape of Florida….yet not yet in the actual possession of any Christian prince”. As a subtext, the Protestant Queen also wanted a place for the Catholics she was persecuting to emigrate to instead of to Europe from whence they could easily conspire against her. In this new land she would allow them freedom of religion. So in 1582 Dee had an expedition organized to reconnoiter a location which Verrazano had earlier described. The expedition consisted of about 80 men and headed to Narragansett then named Dee Bay. There a round church- fort combo was built in what was to be the American continental start of what he called Britannia, the expanded British Empire. The Newport Tower was supposed to welcome a triumphant Sir Gilbert and any Catholics to the newest part of the British Empire in 1583. According the Dee’s plans, the Tower was to be plastered and painted all around and to have a gold dome. The seemingly erratic window placement was positioned to incorporate several astronomical alignments and time keeping functions which were important as it was a time when calendars were changing from Julian to Gregorian, a pet project of John Dee’s. Again the common story: interest and funding dried up as attention was refocused on wars and intrigues. For history buffs, the war was the 1585 -1604 Anglo-Spanish war .The intrigues were Queen Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch Protestants fighting Spain’s King Philip II plus her funding of privateering against the Spanish presence in the Caribbean/Central American area. John Dee fell from favor and Newport was forgotten. Wait a history minute here! If the Newport Tower was built by Norsemen or Chinese or precolonial English, how come no Norse, Chinese or pre-Colonial artifacts have been discovered there? Newport Tower has been widely attributed to the early colonists of the 17th and 18th centuries. Why aren’t they on the list of possible builders? The first governor of Rhode Island, Benedict Arnold, ancestor of the Revolutionary War Benedict Arnold, is said to have built the Tower as a windmill. In excavations done at the end of the 1940’s and in 1954, Carbon 14 dating of the tools, pottery found a well as of the plaster on the Tower’s column, point to that era after all. There are two main counters to the colonial Rhode Island origin of the Newport Tower, one based on its construction and one based on historical documents referring to the Tower. Both the proponents of the Norsemen and Chinese builder theories agree that the measurements used in constructing the Tower were not the English system of measurements of the time in which case it could not have been built by Queen Elizabeth’s crowd or the later colonists. The Norsemen proponents say the 12.35 Viking inch foot called ‘den sjaellandske fod’ was used versus the English foot. The Chinese proponents say the ‘chang’ (10.107 feet) and the ‘chi’ (12.598 inches) measurements were used. Could this three to five percent measurement difference compared to English standards at the time be lost over the centuries thereby putting into question the construction counter argument? Perhaps. Measurements could be skewed due to weathering over the centuries, lack of finished surfaces such as all plaster cladding to measure from or even slight unsettling due to the explosion during the Revolutionary War when the departing British blew up the ammunition they had stored in the Tower which, it is said, also blown off the floors and the roof. The Norsemen and Chinese proponents would stick to the construction counter, however, by stating that standard construction of a windmill in 17th and 18th century colonial America was of wood, not stone and without fireplaces in them given that grain dust can be explosive although there are a limited number of examples of stone-with-fireplace windmills in Europe. No doubt Newport Tower was functioning in some capacity in colonial times, but it was probably repurposed to do so. There are two well-known documents which purport to refer to the Newport Tower before colonial times. The first document is a report to King Francis I of France in 1524 by Giovanni Verrazano which mentions the Tower. He called it a “Norman Villa”. He stopped in Newport for 15 days. He might even have given a clue as to the people who could have built it. Verrazano describes the people in the area being “the color of brass, some inclined more to whiteness, others are of yellow color … with long black hair …. dressing themselves like unto the women of Egypt and Syria”. They also wore “diverse toys [jewelry] according to usage of the people of the East”. Remnants of the Chinese colony absorbed into the Native Americans? Or perhaps the “more to whiteness” folk were as Norse people might appear after years of assimilation? In any case, Verrazano’s observation was before John Dee’s dream so the English scenario is pretty much out. The other document is from 1630, almost a decade before Roger Williams was kicked out of Massachusetts and headed to what is now Rhode Island where he lived and traded among the Indians. It is a decree from King Charles I’s giving Sir Edmund Plowden rights to colonize certain lands north of present day Virginia. The description of what comes with the land is a structure “so that 30 idle men as soldiers or gent be resident in a rowd stone towre and by tornes to trade with the savages and to keep their ordinance and arms neat”. It was located on the shores of what we now call Narragansett Bay. How about the Templars? Unlike the Norsemen Sagas or the Chinese journals or the writing of John Dee along with the Queen’s decrees, the secretive Templars left no trails. They were being hunted down by King Philip IV who was in deep financial debt to them and wanted to capture their treasure then eliminate them. It is said that Henry Sinclair, leader of the surviving Templars, and his men escaped on 13 ships commanded Nicolo Zeno around 1398. The goal was to build a refuge city in the New World. Inland, in Wexford, Mass. there is a vague carving of a full armored knight which could indicate a presence though not necessarily one in great enough numbers or permanent enough to move 450 tons of stone to build a chapel or a fort back by the ocean. In any case, both Sinclair’s voyage and the carving are highly disputed by historians. Portuguese? They were certainly active in the area because of their fishing industry. Could the Tower be some sort of fish drying building? Unlikely. First because they were seasonal. Second, the Tower configuration with its open eight column base is unsuited for fish drying by the Portuguese method (salting) not to mention the Tower would be an inefficient walk high on a hill above any mooring points. Some say it was a watch tower built by one of the lost Portuguese Corte Real brothers as a signal for the other. But, like the Templars, it seems too large an undertaking for small parties and too permanent to watch for one sailing party lost somewhere along the North American coast. Will we ever be able to get to the bottom of the Newport Tower mystery? Hopefully. There are three possible avenues for a definitive answer. First, more analysis of the Tower’s mortar from deeper in the columns instead of the surface area as was done in the late 1940s. Modern tests might detect such things as rice used in Chinese mortar of the 1400s or any other uncommon mortar composition. Second, soil analysis. It is known where the 20th century excavations were done. If a section of one of the four foot deep column foundations not previously disturbed can be located, OSL (optically stimulated luminescence) can measure radioactive isotopes in soil to determine how long ago it was exposed to sunlight, in other words, the approximate date it was dug by the original builders. Third, best of all, if more records - - Sagas or Chinese journals or Templar records - - come to light which specifically tell of building the Tower. In 2000 new records that pertained to Chinese in Italy were found, so it might be possible that some academic out there will find other records in some archives somewhere which might shed more light on the mystery. Until any of these solutions yield a definitive answer, you get to choose the version Newport Tower history. Or, you can head to Newport, inspect the Tower then create your own version of its history!