Tintin Forums

Tintinologist.org Forums / Official Tintin books /

Red Rackham: True location of the treasure?

Page  Page 3 of 3:  « Previous  1  2  3 

yamilah
Member
#21 · Posted: 2 Apr 2005 19:36
Thanks Richard for your answer.
If this funny info was kept -years later- in the English version, maybe there was a reason for it??

Anyway, now do you think Calculus' 6-times repeated westwards attraction was related to his pendulum's dowsing only, or wasn't he possibly hinting at a more sensible information??

********

Do you think Calculus' westwards attraction could be linked -via the parchments' time meridian- to 'somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico' as officially asserted, or to some special place in the Mexican province of Yucatan??

Does actually the English version mention this funny 'westwards' attraction, as it does in the original one??

Two consecutive posts combined - Moderator
Harrock n roll
Moderator
#22 · Posted: 7 Apr 2005 09:02
yamilah Do you think Calculus' westwards attraction could be linked -via the parchments' time meridian- to 'somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico' as officially asserted, or to some special place in the Mexican province of Yucatan??

At the end of the day I can't see that the point about the "Ferro meridian" (20 degrees west of Paris) which is made in the Tintin at Sea book actually matters.

Haddock's island was found by using the Paris meridian (2 degrees east of Greenwich) and the treasure was found inside the globe at Marlinspike by pressing on the point given by the coordinates. So whether the island/treasure (or something else?) could have been 'somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico' or 'some special place in the Mexican province of Yucatan' (as yamilah attests) becomes irrelevant.
yamilah
Member
#23 · Posted: 8 Apr 2005 14:18
Thanks Harrock n roll for your remark.
Imho, as Chichen-itza pyramid (Yucatan, Mexico) was chosen by Herge to illustrate the 'Picaros' cover, Calculus' funny 'westwards' could 'stand for' the true Castillo-named pyramid, just like Marlinspike 'stands for' the real Cheverny castle (near Blois, France)...

Please see this Maya site location according to the Unicorn parchments' data and Ferro's meridian used in 1698 here (current latitude and longitude), as well as the 'Picaros' chapter in 'Tintin - The Complete Companion' or 'Tintin - le reve et la realite' by Michael Farr...

see 'Chichen-itza' pyramid colour photo here, and see the same with its equinoctial visible 'snake' running downstairs here and see 'Picaros' cover here.

*****************

Is it just an irrelevant and non-sensical coincidence?
What do you reckon?

Two consecutive posts merged - Moderator
jock123
Moderator
#24 · Posted: 11 Apr 2005 12:49
Moderator note:

yamilah, please don’t keep posting consecutively to the thread! Multiple posts to the same thread look like thread-bumping, and can be deleted.

If you aren’t getting a response, maybe no one has anything to say...
yamilah
Member
#25 · Posted: 11 Apr 2005 13:11
Thanks joke123 for merging my last message's demands, that I omitted to transcribe at the time...
Let's hope these last questions are not going to prevent people from thinking as well...

yamilah note: 2 days is sometimes short a time to edit...
mct16
Member
#26 · Posted: 19 Nov 2014 23:07
I was about to start a new thread on the subject of "Red Rackham's Treasure: East or West?" when I thought of searching the forum and came across the above debate.

It's fascinating, but returning to the original issue: why does Calculus' pendulum point westwards when the shortest route from the island to the treasure would have been eastwards?

Surely Herge would have known the difference between east and west?

There is the humour between Haddock the sceptic and Calculus the believer, but I think that Herge is suggesting that the latter is right all along! In the last page, after the treasure is found, Calculus does point out "Just as I always said: more to the west!"

There is also evidence that Herge took the issue of dowsing seriously. In his book, "Radiesthésie et Téléradiesthésie, Phénomènes Hyperphysiques", dowser Victor Mertens includes a letter written to him in 1939 by Herge who had requested his help in finding a ring that had been mislaid in his house in Boitsfort. On a plan of the house, Mertens had marked a cross showing where the ring was. X marks the spot!

Sadly it seems that the X marked the location of the loo! and Herge concluded that the "person in question would have, while cleaning, dropped her ring into a bucket... and that bucket was emptied into the W.C." (The person's name is not specified by either Herge or Mertens, but it is assumed to have been Herge's wife Germaine.)

Nevertheless, Herge does state in his letter that Mertens did help "reconstruct the crime" and that it "further strengthened my trust in your methods."

There are other examples of Herge taking the matter of psychic energies quite seriously, such as in "Tibet" where Tintin strongly believes in a telepathic call for help from Tchang.

So the question remains: why does Calculus keep stressing "west" instead of "east"?

(For French readers, Victor Mertens' book is available as an ebook from eBook Esotérique. Here is a link to extracts from the book, and Herge's letter can be found on page 45.)
jock123
Moderator
#27 · Posted: 21 Nov 2014 11:51
mct16:
Calculus does point out "Just as I always said: more to the west!"

And as I pointed out way back in the thread - on a globe, anywhere is "further" East or West, provided you travel long enough. Calculus was always going to be right, after a fashion...

The Mertens example is interesting, but hardly a marvelous vindication of dowsing. Statistically, the chances of someone losing a ring in a toilet is probably pretty high (especially when people remove jewelery to wash their hands). If someone sent me a plan of their house and asked me to indicate a good place to look, the loo would be a prime target. Add to this any other corroboration that the dowser might have been given which isn't repeated in the book (so, if Hergé had said, "My wife noticed she lost her ring just before she went in for dinner", there's a good chance that the lady had washed her hands first...), and the whole thing is far less miraculous.
And of course he has chosen a "prediction" he got right - had he said it was up a tree in the garden in a magpie's nest, and it had been in the lavatory pan, then we'd have heard nothing more about it!
mct16
Member
#28 · Posted: 23 Nov 2014 19:59
jock123:
on a globe, anywhere is "further" East or West, provided you travel long enough

You'd think though that a pendulum would indicate the shortest route, as in re-crossing the Atlantic eastwards, rather then going westwards through America, across the Pacific through much of Asia and Europe!

Even though there are some ways of explaining how "dowsing" works in the manner of a stage magician, I think that the consensus is that Herge genuinely believed in it and that Calculus' faith in it was shared by the artist.
jock123
Moderator
#29 · Posted: 23 Nov 2014 20:33
mct16:
You'd think though that a pendulum would indicate the shortest route

Why? I don't think a pendulum would indicate any route, so I can't see that "shortest" is an automatic given...!

mct16:
I think that the consensus is that Hergé genuinely believed in it

Based on what? I've seen that Hergé showed interest in esoteric matters, but that isn't the same as belief in them - I mean, I've watched Uri Geller, and read Erich von Däniken, they are interesting as social phenomena, and perhaps were I to be gathering ideas for stories I'd take an even greater interest, but it doesn't actually mean I believe in any of it...
I still think that Hergé just found it funny to give the man who put man on the Moon and developed rocket-powered roller-skates a wholly unscientific thing like a dowsing habit.
BlackIsland
Member
#30 · Posted: 19 Jan 2015 14:51
Funny this thread got me to thinking about some treasure hunters on one of the Pawn shows on TV. They were selling off gold Spanish coins. There was an expert on the show that said unless the ship was lost buried treasure at sea really hardly exists at all. Maybe Herge putting the treasure in the closed up basement was true to form whether he intended it or not.

Page  Page 3 of 3:  « Previous  1  2  3 

Please be sure to familiarize yourself with the Forum Posting Guidelines.

Disclaimer: Tintinologist.org assumes no responsibility for any content you post to the forums/web site. Staff reserve the right to remove any submitted content which they deem in breach of Tintinologist.org's Terms of Use. If you spot anything on Tintinologist.org that you think is inappropriate, please alert the moderation team. Sometimes things slip through, but we will always act swiftly to remove unauthorised material.

Reply

 Forgot password
Please log in to post. No account? Create one!