Solomon's Treasure SOURCEBOOK - Book - Page 151
THE SEARCH FOR KING SOLOMON’S TREASURE SOURCEBOOK
149
Magellan's Voyage Around the World
from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of
almug trees, and precious stones.” II Chronicles
9:21 says: “For the king's ships went to Tarshish
with the servants of Huram: every three years once
came the ships of Tarshish bringing gold, and silver,
ivory, and apes, and peacocks.” Elsewhere these Old
Testament books agree in saying that Solomon re
ceived more than four hundred talents of gold from
Ophir.
We shall not enter into the centuries-old
150
de
bate as to what and where these lands actually were.
I Kings certainly meant that the jour
ney to Ophir began by way of the Red Sea, because
The writer of
in connection with Ophir (9:26)
he says: “And
the king Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion
geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the
Red Sea, in the land of Edom.” Later Christian
writers for centuries associated the gold of Ophir
with East Africa, but at the time of the Portuguese
discoveries Ophir was thought of as the Aurea Cher
sonnesus (Golden Peninsula) of Ptolemy, in which
that Greek geographer also placed Cattigara, men
tioned by Pigafetta as the immediate transpacific
goal of Magellan. But Magellan connected Solo
mon's treasure with something else he had read in
Barbosa:
Facing this great land of China there are many islands in
the sea, beyond which [on the other side of the sea] there
is a very large land which they say is mainland, from which
there come to Malacca every year three or four ships, like
those of the Chins, belonging to white men who are said to
21
NOTE: Nowell admits Magellan located Ophir and Tarshish and then
forgets that he landed in the Philippines not Japan nor Taiwan. The Philippines is across to the East of China as well. You will notice he simply
ignores the Philippines in drawing conclusions. He even recognizes that
Chryse is an island North of the equator and yet, forgets that the Philippines is just North of the equator but skips it to Japan and Taiwan in
willing ignorance. These authors ignore the obvious. Anyone who characterizes this as North of Indonesia and skips the Philippines, is simply
not interested in representing the truth.
Introduction
be great and rich merchants: they bring much gold, and
silver in bars, silk, rich cloth, and much very good wheat,
beautiful
porcelains, and many other merchandises.”
Barbosa, in mentioning this great land across
the water from China, might have been referring to
Japan. More likely, though, he meant the island
of Taiwan, or Formosa, separated by the Gulf of
Fukien from mainland China. At the time Barbosa
wrote, the Portuguese can scarcely have had infor
mation about Japan. They had some regarding For
mosa and the Ryukyus, whose exact latitudinal posi
tion they did not know but correctly placed
northward of Malacca and the Moluccas and hence
north of the equator. These are obviously what
Magellan took to be Tarshish and Ophir.
If further proof is needed that he sought these
places in addition to the Moluccas, we have it in
the agreement between the Spanish crown and Se
bastian Cabot. On April 4, 1525, less than six years
after Magellan sailed, Cabot, now pilot major of
Spain, signed a contract to make much the same
though with objectives more concisely
stated. He offered to go with three ships through
voyage,
the Strait of Magellan to reach the Moluccas “and
other islands and lands of Tarshish and Ophir and
eastern Cathay and Cipangu.” “The Spanish gov
ernment had preferred to leave the names Tarshish
and Ophir out of the earlier Magellan contract, but
now that the western route to the Orient had been
discovered, security regulations could be relaxed to
the extent of openly mentioning the biblical lands.
22
150. “Magellan’s voyage around the world; three contemporary accounts [by] Antonio Pigafetta, Maximilian
of Transylvania [and] Gaspar Correa.” Charles E. Nowell, Northwestern University Press, 1962. P. 21-22.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822013755558&view=1up&seq=9
