It was while I was searching for sources for my thesis, looking over speeches and pamphlets to understand the political ideas of pre-Revolutionary America, that I discovered a little-known essay, titled “An Attempt to Shew that America Must Be Known to the Ancients” written by a New England pastor named Samuel Mather. The title and premise seemed so odd, even bizarre, and yet I was drawn to how Mather went into so much detail to prove his point.

Title page of Samuel Mather’s essay from the Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=aeu.ark:/13960/t9c54g054&seq=8.

Mather left no stone unturned, picking out texts and quotes from even the most obscure ancient sources to prove his point that the ancient world knew of America’s existence, but his “best” evidence is Plato’s Dialogues, with the famous story of Atlantis proposed as America itself due to the similar size of the Atlantic Island.

Map of Atlantis by Athanasius Kircher, 1678. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantis_Kircher_Mundus_subterraneus_1678_inverted.jpg

Mather went on to cite Biblical history, again using whatever quotes could be found to explain how the Indigenous people were descended from the survivors of Noah’s Flood. Mather stated that the Native Americans themselves spoke of a great flood. He went on to explain that some of the apostles and their disciples may have reached America, via Iceland and Greenland, to spread the Gospel, which, Mather lamented, had been forgotten by the Indigenous population.

Print of Samuel Mather by John Simon, made between 1690 and 1742. Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:40129

Mather’s essay might seem like a flimsy, over-complicated conspiracy theory, but, to me, it is a fascinating insight into how far some of the learned men of the age would go to draw a connection between the American people and the noble, classical past they so admired and revered. The sheer depth of his analysis, his commitment to scour every source he could find, feels incredibly relatable to my own struggles to find that one quote or phrase to reach the conclusion of my research.