A Comment on 'The Farfarers' by Farley Mowatt ( entered at wikipedia-probably temporarily)

I wrote a science fiction novella with an ancient Irish voyage to and across America myself in 1994. Published in 1995 as 'Just Search for the Spirit', I used ideas motivated by my trip to Newgrange Ireland and the Earth-mound there at 54 degrees north latitude. I read of the curraigh and St. Brendan too. Living at 54 degrees north latitude at Wrangell Alaska later the obvious likeness of the petroglyphs at Wrangell and at Newgrange, along with the similarity of stone penance huts of Ireland with the small stone shelters on hills above the Stikine River debauching at Wrangell suggested the obvious conclusion; that ancient Irish had made the voyage.

I enjoyed reading Mowatt's book and learned quite a bit from it. It has the sound of truth to it. It has some very interesting historical reconstruction of the sociology of the Vikings at Iceland. We know that the Vikings plundered and killed the Irish monks that had discovered and settled the Island or at least followed up on the earlier Albs, what we did not know is that even the rugged, randy row-about Vikings of Iceland outlawed Eric the Red because of a murder he committed there. He had little recourse besides going a-Viking (these are the bad Vikings that search for plunder prospects and give water wings of lungs excised sometime to those they unfairly biased toward).

If the 900 a.d. time frame of the rise of Cahokia and Earth mounds at East St. Louis is right, it is possible that Albs traveling across America in that time period encountered or coordinated the construction. Certainly Vikings at Kiev became the first kings of the Rus. There is a precedent for ancient peoples accepting a foreigner or exotic for leadership such as the Democratic Party today). This is of course controversial for conservative historians, and entertaining for others