Horst’s Diaries entry 1 ver 2

Horst’s Diaries

…Antonio Zeno was the eldest son of an Italian family with a long sea fairing tradition. His name, given to him by his grandfather, came by him through an ancestor, the allegedly true discoverer of America. He loved the sea from the first time his father took him to fish on the family dingy. On the other hand he inherited his interest in archeology from his mother’s great grandfather, who had visited the Egyptian pyramids while serving under Napoleon. 

He had a lot in common with his father, especially in his angular face. Their sharp jaws covered in shaggy black beards played perfectly with their physical nature. Like him, he had also lost interest early on in the world of academia, choosing to leave home at 15 to become a sailor, and by his 23rd birthday he became captain of his own ship, the Scylla...

March 15, 1xxx

… Since I had been in a rush to arrive to our meeting. Today I had the interesting pleasure of meeting a young captain named Zeno.  My office window looked out to the bay, and the rain hid most of the horizon from my sight. Most of the ships had been docked until the storm broke, and Zeno’s Scylla was one of the few still braving the maelstrom. I knew the boy’s father; we had been partners in a couple of expeditions to southern Africa over 20 years ago. But that had been a long time ago, during my late thirties I had been somewhat of an amateur archeologist and history buff, fancying myself as something of a sleuth. But that rainy afternoon, young Antonio came to me with some interesting project of his own. Antonio had a particular style, with a long overcoat, beige with deep pockets from which he produced a couple of notebooks. 

He started talking about a German explorer, Horst Zeiller, who had been presumed lost after an expedition to Greenland had vanished without a trace. I vaguely remembered hearing about this man, and was quite intrigued by the young sailor’s tale. He didn’t give me a chance to examine the books, smart boy. He talked about a man who had some very outrageous theories of the discovery of America, something about the tribe of his mother’s ancestors, Magnusians he called them. He believed that this tribe had in the year 913, led by a man the diaries called Ulfrd Gunnbjörn, his ancestor. Then he dropped it on me, after years of research Horst had discovered a link between these first settlers and an expedition of Temple Knights in the year 1306. The boy knew my weaknesses no doubt with his father’s help. 

So his plan was to complete the missing parts of the diaries continuing with Zeiller’s travels, and both him with Scylla and his father with Charybdis. They needed me to finance part of the expedition and to be the diaries’ decipherer. I was intrigued to say the least; the potential of any discovery besides Columbus had immense consequences, but the link with the knights? And the date 1307? A fundamental year, because that was the year when King Philip used all of his power to eradicate the order with the intent to clear his considerable debt with them; abusing his power over the church, he managed to discredit and eventually disband them. Since childhood I heard about the amazing riches the Knights of the Temple left that the evil King of France was never able to find. 

Those stories were told to me by my grandfather, Alphonse Turpó, a French immigrant who painted boats for a living, drank his life away and died poor, in my parents’ attic telling me these stories. The mix of fantasy and history excited my imagination. I remember one day I got home from school and ran up the 32 steps between the entrance and his little room. He was sitting against the backboard of the bed, a greenish gray, like a green turkey, with his eyes fixed on the high little window. That little window let a little of the salty air into his musky room, and that afternoon it was dank I could barely breath. I sat on his lap and he never moved. A few hours later my mother came in and panicked. I always thought it was because she hated the old man. I never realized he was dead. I was just 9 years old.

Readers note: Most of Mr. Julio Viteri’s notes became lost after the Charybdis sank near Cape Horn, they were discovered in a makeshift camp in Tierra del Fuego, there 3 tents partially remained, but no bodies were ever found. He had been last heard of as being part of an expedition to Greenland on the Demeter, looking for traces of earlier European settlements in America. Because most papers were lost or damaged due to water, investigators have only been able to piece around half of his travel diaries.