myfarewelltodightonrock

My Farewell to Dighton Rock!
By Manuel Luciano da Silva, Medical Doctor

Dear Dighton Rock:

It is very painful to bid goodbye to our beloved ones! I recall with great emotion the dozens of times I tenderly embraced my beloved Mother before I would return to America. I embraced her with tears falling down my face without being able to utter a word!

If saying goodbye is so emotional, my Mother always remarked: “It hurts more those staying behind, than those that depart!”

If it hurts more the one that stays behind than the one that departs, You, Dighton Rock, are going to suffer more because you cannot leave. However you can stay tranquil because now you are protected by a glass enclosure. You have become a precious stone! Be proud of yourself!

We are both immigrants

Remember, you and I are both immigrants. You came eleven thousand years ago from somewhere North, pushed by enormous pieces of ice during the last glacial period. When the earth began warming you rolled innumerable times until you landed belly up on the left bank of the Taunton River! You became an immigrant against your will. The same thing happened to me. I did not want to become an immigrant either! But I came from much further away, from the other side of the Atlantic, more than three thousand miles distance! It was a “Liberty” ship that carried me, and it also rolled a lot, during the January winter, taking 16 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Lisbon to New York, in 1946.

Forty four days after my arrival in Brooklyn, New York, in 1946, I was classified officially as “Mental Deficient “ because I did not know English, but you were treated much worse! Everyone abandoned you, vandals threw stones at your face, they urinated and defecate on you, covering you with stinky sewage from the City of Taunton for so many years! Evil people!

When I heard of you

I heard of your existence in 1943, before I came to America in 1946. My teacher of World History, João Santos, alerted me to you. In 1918, Professor Edmund Delabarre, Chief of the Psychology Department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, U. S. A. had a summer house in Berkley near you. He fell in love with your inscriptions and after investigating them for twenty years he announced to the world that you had engraved on your face: the date 1511, the name of Miguel Corte Real and also the Portuguese Coat of Arms in the shape of a triangle inside of another triangle.

All the world newspapers including Portuguese published that news item and my teacher João Santos taking note of that historical fact began passing it on to his students.

Because it was known in Oliveira de Azeméis that my father was working in New York, my teacher asked me in front of our class, that when I arrived in America I would send him a photograph of you.

I wanted to learn where you were and I discovered that your line of latitude was a close “neighbor” to the latitude of Oliveira de Azeméis -- 40 degrees and 50 minutes north on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Your latitude in Berkley, Massachusetts, on the western side of the Atlantic is 42 degrees and 48 minutes north. Less than one degree between our latitudes!

Hotel “Rock of Dighton” in Oliveira de Azeméis, Portugal

Our personalities

Dighton Rock, you were born two billion years ago as a very small particle of vapor which condensed into hard rock! You weigh 40 tons and have a sandy composition, rich in feldspathic, mica, calcium and iron, which gives you a gray-reddish color. Your enormous face is plane, has 55 square feet, reminding us of the Sphinx in Egypt!

Because your face has many inscriptions they started calling you “Dighton Writing Rock” as if you were a black board in a class room. Many people wrote their initials on your face and even a variety of doodles. What protected you was the fact that you had your face covered by the tidal water 20 hours per day. This prevented further damage by vandals. Despite all the mistreatment that you suffered for so many years , you maintained yourself undaunted and serene. Fantastic!

I am incomparably much younger than you. I was born in a small village on the north of Continental Portugal at the beginning of September of 1926, at 5 AM, on a very hot Sunday that you could “fry eggs in the sun” as my Mother used to say.

I did not want to become an immigrant as I already told you. I began to feel an attraction, since I was small, for the sea because my Father worked as a sailor in American commercial ships. In high school I was captivated by the history of the Portuguese World Discoveries. I was fascinated with water currents, with the techniques of navigation and even by the different types of land markers, called Padrões, that the Portuguese navigators used on the new lands they discovered. Because of these facts you can better understand why I became so deeply interested in verifying if indeed you were the true Portuguese land marker in the Discovery of North America.

If I seem to you that I have “an angelical face”, I want you to know that I have a strong personality and when I decide to assume the responsibility for an objective, I will never give up until I attain it. This is exactly what I did for you. It took me 63 years from the time when I first saw you. But with persistence and guts I reached our goal, well worthy of our efforts and determination. I have been intellectual all my life, but also much pragmatic!

The diagnosticians of your inscriptions

Dighton Rock, you have had many admirers from various parts of the world. Even without ever seeing you, without ever examining you, without touching you, without surveying you on the place you have been for such a long time, some of them from many thousand miles away from you. All of them have declared their love for you stating that they have discovered the secrets of your inscriptions. Here is the list of your lovers by alphabetical order:

(1) American Indians; (2) Carthaginians; (3) Chinese; (4) Christ; (5) Devil; (6) Egyptians; (7) Japanese; (8) Jews; (9) Greeks; (10) Libyans; (11) Persians; (12) Phoenicians; (13) Pirates; (14) Portuguese; (15) Romans; (16) Scythians; (17) Scotch; (18) Siberians; (19) Tyrians: (20) Verrazzano; (21) Vikings; (22) Welch.

As you can see at first glance the large majority of these groups have nothing to do with your inscriptions, not only because they are very far away from you, but also because they do not have any of their national icons engraved on your face!

Practically all of them wanted their name to be associated with you because you are famous and mysterious!

But this is not the correct way of doing epigraphic scientific investigation! We have to investigate as in Medicine. We have to examine the patient from head to toes, using medical scientific methods to attain the correct diagnosis. Practically none of these “admirers” did that!

With your permission I present you with a panorama of the various diagnosticians and their analysis of your inscriptions:

(A) - Reverend John Danforth – in the Fall of 1680. Taunton villagers were cutting the high grass around you to use as hay for their domestic animals when they stumped into your face covered with inscriptions. They were very startled and decided to call on Reverend Danforth to decipher your mystery!

This Protestant reverend made a drawing of your inscriptions, but only drew the upper half perhaps because of high tides.

Based on a tradition of the old Wampanoag Indians “that a wooden house came up the river”, Danforth said that your inscriptions meant “ a ship without masts and a cape ” perhaps in reference to Cape Cod.

On this first drawing in 1680 Reverend Danforth drew the
extremities of the Cross of the Order of Christ without
recognizing them!

(B) – Reverend Cotton Mather - The drawing made by Reverend Danforth had an enormous impact on another Protestant Reverend, Cotton Mather, Religious Director of the Old North Church in Boston. This religious leader wrote about many different subjects. Without ever laying eyes on you, Cotton Mather declared his opinion that your inscriptions were made by Jesus Christ! But two years later he changed his sermon stating that he had reconsidered his diagnosis concluding that your inscriptions were instead made by the Devil! How ridiculous can one be?!

(C) Ezra Stiles – Here is another Protestant Minister. But this one was considered the most scholarly of New England at that time. His name was Ezra Stiles. He became a lawyer and later pastor for many years of the Congregational Church in the City of Newport, Rhode Island. In the last years of his life he even became the President of the Yale University in Connecticut. When a drawing of your inscription was shown to him he gave his sharp opinion this way: “I believe its diagnosis will never be found ! ” So much petulance and omnipotence! This is the same as if I, a physician, make the statement "that Medicine will never be able to find the cure for cancer!

( D) – Antone Court de Gebelin – Another Protestant Minister, but this was much worse! He lived in Paris, France and his main objective in life was esthetic sciences, occultism and the etymology of the words. He discovered that the word Phallus or penis was originated in Phoenicia, today’s Lebanon.

Gebelin never saw Dighton Rock in person. When he received from America a drawing of the inscriptions, he managed to ADD to it a phallus or penis and with this gesture he created the Phoenician theory for the Dighton Rock inscriptions. Examining the face of the Dighton Rock we do NOT see any signs of a penis engraved on the face of the rock! This Phoenician theory is pure fraud!

Let me relate to you a true episode. Many years ago when I finished giving my illustrated lecture with color slides to the members of a distinguished Historical Society, during the period of question and answer a wise guy came up with this question: “How can we know for sure that you did not add any Portuguese inscriptions to the rock?”

My answer to this malicious question was to project on the screen the photos taken by Delabarre on July 16 and 17, 1920, which show very clearly the “V” shape Portuguese Coat of Arms and also seven letters of the name of Miguel Corte Real. Then I shouted: I was born on September 5^th, 1926, six years later and I do not believe in reincarnation!

(D) – Carl Christian Rafn – This one was not a priest but he committed historical fraud! He was the Director of the Historical Society of Copenhagen, Denmark. He received a copy of your inscriptions from the Historiacal Society of Rhode Island in Providence, sent to him in 1834. Basing himself on the “Viking Sagas” that relate that a Danish navigator, by the name Thorfinn, came to North America in the year 1000, Mr. Carl Christian Rafn decided to ADD three letters FIN to the center of the drawing of the inscriptions to coincide with the name Thorfinn. Fraud! Mr. Rafn should never have done that! That is criminal!

Your “long distance lovers” could not rape you because they were thousand of miles away from you, so they did it on paper changing your inscriptions to fit their preconceived theory. Fortunately we caught their malignant intent.

I know some people that still look at your face to discoverer some Runic letters, because they are so obsessed in their heads that the Vikings did it!

As you clearly can see you have been very unlucky with the gang of courtiers interested on you. They are egotists, opportunists, swindlers and even fraudulent investigators! But one of the saddest things of all this, is that we still have so called “historians” that continue to repeat the false “theories” initiated by these evil men! Why do people continue to do that? What are their motives? When are they going to end this shameful behavior?

Dighton Rock, you have heard me many times, in English and Portuguese, explaining, in front of your face, to your many visitors that for any one to experiencing the great satisfaction of understanding the original inscriptions it is only necessary to known the rudiments of the History of the Portuguese discoveries and also of the famous Corte Real Navigators.

I know you already know by heart the “U” and “V” shape Portuguese Coast of Arms; the Cross of the Order of Christ with extremities at 45 degree angles; the date 1511 with the 5 like a capital S; also the shape of letters forming name of Miguel Corte Real. The Corte Real navigators belonged to the highest class of Portuguese nobles and they were also Knights of the Royal House of the King Manuel I.

During the XV century the Portuguese Navigators were champions of maritime discoveries.

Because the caravels used the Latin (triangular) sails and they could navigate against the wind, the Portuguese were the first able to discover all the world. Portugal was then the most advanced nation in naval construction, in the knowledge of water and currents and the winds, in astronomy, and in cartography and even in naval armory and in the construction of forts and round churches in many distant lands.

To appreciate the achievements of the Portuguese navigators, the Americans should compare their successes to the successes of our American Astronauts in the conquest of the Outer Space.

You continue to be mysterious with your inscriptions, but I was able to decipher your secret. With a flash light, in the dark, hitting your face with the beam of light sideways, I was able to see and reveal your Portuguese inscriptions!

Concerning the Portuguese Theory you have had three true friends. Each one dedicated more than 30 years to study your inscriptions. They were: Edmund Burke Delabarre, Professor of Psychology; Joseph Dâmaso Fragoso, Portuguese, Instructor; and Manuel Luciano da Silva, Medical Doctor.

I want you to know that since 1918, for 93 years, NOBODY yet has refuted the Portuguese theory. In 7 more years we will be celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the discovery of the Portuguese Theory.

Now that your Maritime Museum of Dighton Rock is complete (June 2011), I foresee that from now on your relationships with your neighbors, the Town of Berkley, is going to become much more friendly and optimist. For many years there has been a certain animosity from the people of Berkley towards you because of your name continued to be Dighton. But this was not your fault. The people of Berkley became independent of the Town of Dighton on April 18, 1735. Do you know why? You have forgotten it? In 1735 the Taunton River froze over for several weeks preventing the people of Berkley from crossing the river to attend church services in Dighton.

Because of this situation the people of Berkley decided to declare their independence and create a religious service of their own. But they did not think at that time to change your name to Berkley Rock.

Professor Edmund Delabarre owned a house in Berkley, but he never asked the people of the town to become involved in the historical meaning of Dighton Rock. I do not want to make the same mistake.

We are going to request that the Town Authorities, the Police, the Firemen, the Farmers, the Schools, the Teachers, the Students, the Professionals, the Young and the Old, to become involved so that all the inhabitants of Berkley will feel pride and patriotism for their Town. This would be similar to the Town of Bristol, Rhode Island, where I have lived with my family for almost half a century.

There are some already talking about global warming. If that becomes reality the huge polar ice capes will melt causing sea levels to rise more than 200 feet. If that tragedy occurs, your Museum and many thousands of cities will become submerged. The same will happen to your three Replicas that are already monuments in Lisbon, Portugal (close to Jerónimos’ Cathedral), in Funchal, Madeira, and in Vila da Lagoa, Saint Michal Island, Azores. But don’t not give up! There are still two more Replicas of you in Portugal that will not be submerged. One in Oliveira de Azeméis which has an altitude of 606 feet above sea level and another even more secure location in the Museum-Library with my name in Cavião, Vale de Cambra which has an altitude of 1564 feet. This Replica is situated in the patio between the house where I was born and the library that houses the panels and all the historical information about you.

All your the Replicas were made scientifically, in such a way that we can see your pores on all of them. They were made of fiber glass so they will last more than a million years. Therefore, Dighton Rock, you will live for a long, long time.

Lately astronomers have been saying that because of recent changes on the surface of the sun in the next ten years the earth’s temperature will decrease. So we just have to wait and see…

Inauguration of your Replica No. 3, on June 12, 2001,
at the Museum-Library with my name in Portugal, at an altitude of 1564 feet
where you will never be destroyed by the sea level!

Your size is so big that it reminds us of the dedication and love we have had shown you for more than six decades. At this moment of saying good bye our arms cannot embrace you, so my wife and I, will give you two kisses, Portuguese style, one on each side of your face, while our tears are streaming down our cheeks…