This book, by William F. Mann, is a fascinating look at the possibility that the Templar treasure, so long sought by kings and others, was brought to North America in pre-Columbian days.

First of all, the author is himself a high degree Mason, and descended from Templars. On his mother’s side he is also related to the Mik’maq aboriginals. He spends a fair amount of time outlining his genealogy, to the point it gets quite confusing to a reader, such as myself, new to all these theories. Along the way he deals with the Merovingian ideas, Cathar beliefs, etc. I think that Mann ends up convincing himself that he is one of the carriers of the blood of Jesus and Mary Magdalene!

What I found most fascinating in this book is Mann’s dealing with the pre-Columbian history of the Americas. There is, of course, wide-spread acceptance today of visitors to North America centuries before Christopher Columbus. Mann expands this to a fairly regular going back and forth from North America to the Old World. These early visitors went to much more than only the east coast line. He shows that Europeans visited most of the continent at various times, and indeed settled and lived in many places. Relics like the Kensington Rune Stone in Minnesota are some of the evidence of this. Apparently there are similar finds all through central North America.

Mann’s theory then, is that the Templars received a lot of information including maps of the North American continent. He posits that they ended up travelling to the headwaters of the Missouri River (so-called in today’s language) in the present state of Montana and depositing their treasure in a cave in the mountains.

Along the way the author deals with many fascinating aspects of these theories, including the Oak Island mystery in Nova Scotia. For myself, since I heard of Oak Island a few years ago, I have read a couple books on the subject. The most convincing argument for the existence of the Oak Island booby-trapped well, was that it was built by Templars. The engineering required to build an elaborate system of levels, and channels to the ocean tripped by digging into the well, could only have come from an advanced group such as the Templars.

Overall, I found the book a bit overwhelming as to the amount of new (to me) information I was trying to absorb. I wondered if this could have been helped somewhat by a reading of some of the author’s earlier books; this is the third in a trilogy on this subject. He goes off in such detail on trails that seem irrelevant to the main subject that I found myself slogging through some chapters of the book.

But the book left me wondering! Could there be some measure of truth behind all this research and surmising? Fascinating to consider!!!