A syncing ship, a lost colony

By Andrew West Griffin
Posted: October 31, 2012

The synchromystic nature of the loss of the tall ship replica of the HMS Bounty in the Atlantic Ocean, during Hurricane Sandy, is undeniable.

For a descendant of key mutineer Fletcher Christian to have died in the shipwreck of the Bounty replica is too strange. Fourteen Bounty crew members would survive. Claudene Christian and the Bounty captain would not survive the tempest.

Claudene Christian, most recently of Vian, Oklahoma, touted the fact that she was a descendant of Fletcher Christian, the man who led the original mutiny aboard the Bounty in 1789. She was so fascinated by her lineage and her desire to follow in Fletcher Christian's footsteps (minus the mutineering, of course) took on a job as a crew member aboard the replica tall ship.

But Hurricane Sandy would change all that. This crazy, late-season superstorm would result in the Bounty captain taking the ship out into the ocean, rather than keeping it in port where it could have been damaged or sunk. But the captain, Robin Walbridge, made a terrible miscalculation and took the 50-year-old Bounty out to sea, having recently been in New London, Connecticut. It was scheduled to "winter" in Galveston, Texas and spend next summer on a tour of the Great Lakes. That was not to be.

And yet pop culture, history and tragedy all came together and seemed to lead to the dramatic death of Fletcher Christian's fifth great-granddaughter.

As The Christian Science Monitor noted, "Maritime historians say the Bounty story as told by Hollywood – the heroic (Fletcher) Christian versus the evil Captain Bligh – created a false reality, as actors such as Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson all portrayed Christian. To some, (Claudene) Christian’s death at sea seems almost as surreal, a bizarre series of events that reads like a Hollywood script.”

Claudene Christian, 42, had joined the Bounty crew in May. 

Staying on this theme of "tempest," which Hurricane Sandy certainly was, we noted in a synchromystic post on RedDirtReport.com that dwelled on the idea of 2012 being a year of tempest - from the London Summer Olympics to the release of Bob Dylan's new album Tempest. And it is one of shipwrecks. Just as 2012 began with the synchromystic shipwreck of the Costa Concordia, off the Italian coast (a wreck that echoed the Titanic in a number of ways), a replica of the infamous HMS Bounty goes down in a tempest off of the Atlantic coast - the historic area of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, home of Roanoke Island and the "Lost Colony."

This settlement, led by English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, was established in 1587 - 200 years before Fletcher Christian's famous mutiny in the South Pacific, which ended with him at the English-owned Pitcairn Islands - discovered by Spanish explorers in 1606 and originally called The Incarnation and St. John the Baptist islands. (Mormons, which we talk about later, do not believe in the Christian idea of the Trinity and the Incarnation - God the Son). 

Three years earlier, in 1584, Queen Elizabeth I had granted Raleigh a charter to establish a colony called "Virginia." This would eventually be led by a man named John White. (Your humble writer was born in Roanoke, Virginia, curiously enough).

And just as magician and alchemist John Dee (whom we wrote about this summer, in connection to the London Summer Olympics) was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I's court, so was Sir Walter Raleigh. In fact, Raleigh was part of the mysterious "School of Night." The line comes from William Shakespeare's 1598 comedy Love's Labour's Lost, written more than a decade before The Tempest, which was inspired, in part, by John Dee who is linked with the Prospero character.

In the book Following the Ark of the Covenant: The Treasure of God, it notes that Dee, Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon had been pressuring Queen Elizabeth I - an arcane organization loosely known as the "Dragons" - to establish a "New Atlantis" in the New World. These men, notes the book, belonged to Bacon's Rosicrucian group of "Dragons" who sought a Druidic "harmonious" way of life in the New World. 

Curiously, there was a connection with the Dragons to ancestors of Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) founders Joseph Smith and Isaac Morley. As Following the Ark of the Covenant notes: "(A)ncestors of both Joseph Smith and Isaac Morley were personal acquaintances of John Dee and were members of the so-called Dragon society of the Rosicrucian order!"

We should note that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has an ancestral link to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the Mormon religion's most revered figures and founders. It is clear now that Romney will likely sweep next week's presidential election. Will Romney bring arcane ideas into his presidency?

But back to Roanoke Island. The only thing remaining of the "Lost Colony" was a carving in a tree - CROATOAN. A name of a nearby tribe. It is also suggested that the colonists left at Roanoke Island, were perhaps swept away by a major storm in 1588 - just as Hatteras experienced the great tempest of 2012, 424 years later.