The Albans entered the British Isles as the ice sheets retreated around 7000BC. (all dates are up for grabs. I’m just using the most generally accepted dates) They maintained a presence there until 900AD when the fall of the Pictish kingdom of Scotland resulted in their removal from history. The Picts, also, lost their place. The victors — a tribe of Kelts known as the Scotti and the Keltic tribes of northern England — took their place and became the Scots. However, long before then, the Albans were already on the move.

The Albans were a dark complexioned, non Indo-European people whose closest relatives were the Picts (Pictones, as the Romans called them), the Basques, the Tartessians, and the Iberians. By modern rules of racial classification they would have been Caucasian but they tended toward mid-brown to brownish red, especially among the men as they aged. Their language is entirely lost to us as are the languages used by the Picts. We know they used a form of hieroglyphics and something akin to Ogham script, but deciphering it is a challenge: a few thousand years of exposure to sun, wind, and rain or being buried beneath the peat can wear down inscriptions and cause misinterpretation. (for example, with Ogham script, you might not be reading the script but the marks of a plow that passed over the stone!)

One of the first records of contact with the Albans comes from a Greek geographer, mathematician, and astronomer named Pytheus. He and some friends outran the Phoenician blockade at the Straits of Hercules and entered the Atlantic. He writes of a visit to the northern island of Thule (Iceland) where he found a primitive people who lived on herbs, fruit, grains, and roots. They had little or no domestic animals and they kept a watch out for anyone approaching the island. Pytheus would have been refused entry except that he had first gone somewhere in northern Britain (various claims have been made for Ireland and Scotland) and befriended the Albans there. They took him to Thule in their skin-covered boats called curraghs. He made that trip in 310BC.

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The Polynesians used much smaller vessels made of woven reeds to travel distances twice as far as the Albans ever did, but it is still impressive to think of challenging the Northern Seas in such small boats. (the largest curragh known in ancient times was 50 feet long, but most were 14-23 feet in length)

When the Vikings (the Northmen) arrived in Iceland in 860AD, they found a Christian people had already settled there. They called them Papars (monks) or Culdees (an early Christian people). These people showed the Vikings how to sail west to Greenland to hunt for ivory, fur, and meat. Wintering places for Albans have been found in Northern Canada and Greenland. They look like rectangular rooms made of stone with no roof. For a very long time, they puzzled historians until someone came along and turned a curragh upside down over the rocks… and it fit. When caught out in winter, the Albans would turn their boats over and have a fairly robust shelter. As more Vikings came to Iceland, more Albans left, sailing west.

Not all Albans went west, of course. Some intermarried with the Picts, Scots, and Vikings. And still other large groups of them never left the eastern mountains of Turkey. In fact, when genetic studies were done on Icelanders (who consider themselves 85% Norse and 15% Irish), they found genetic markers that typically denote Turkish heritage, too! Melungeons in the American Appalachian mountains also have those markers. No one else does. Other Albans intermarried with the populations they found in northern Canada and Greenland. These long gone tribes — the Tunit or Dorset people — first appear in Newfoundland around 1000BC, predating the Inuit, or Eskimo, people.

When the Norse made it to Greenland, they found settlements made up of Albans and Tunit in St. George’s Bay and Albans, Tunit, and Beothuks (an Indian tribe aka Innu) living in Conception Bay. The Tunit were described as being tall, artistic, and with a personality and culture that eschewed war. When challenged by the Inuit, they withdrew rather than defend themselves. They are lost to history shortly after this time. The Albans had no such qualms and, when the Norse showed themselves, they attacked. Skirmishes were common and explain why the Norse settlements on Greenland were always hidden deep up a fjord. The Norse Annals of Greenland — an ancient collection of Viking tales — tells of Ari Marson who was blown off course by a sudden storm, landing on Newfoundland around 982AD. He was captured by Albans and assumed he would be put to death. However, when they found out he was a Christian, they accepted him (though they required him to be baptized again!).

Contacts such as these were common. As late as 1371, a fisherman from the Orkney Islands survived the sinking of his ship. He and several of his shipmates made their way inland and found a tribe of Christian Albans who had books in Latin they couldn’t read. After being cared for, the survivors were taken south in the Albans’ curraghs as they looked for their countrymen. Here, they part from the Albans and the Orcadian man continues his tale. He ended up being traded around as a slave, living with 25 tribes in 13 years before finally coming upon the Micmac of Nova Scotia who helped him reunite with other northern people. The man went home and wrote his story down in great detail including current charts, maps of the land, and how to use the stars to find them. He delivered his account to Prince Henry St. Clair, the Earl of Orkney… and the protector of the banished and dissolved Knights Templar…