Niven Sinclair

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Niven Sinclair is an enthusiastic amateur historian and philanthropist and was president of the Scottish NGO Friends of Rosslyn.

[edit] The Voyage of Henry Sinclair

Sinclair is an advocate of the theory that his ancestor, Henry Sinclair, 1st Earl of Orkney, sailed to America in 1398, 100 years before Christopher Columbus.

According to Sinclair, a fleet of the Knights Templar under Prince Henry Sinclair, Lord of Rosslyn, and the renowned Venetian sailors, the brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, sailed from Orkney to Nova Scotia. He claims Templar architecture in Nova Scotia and the oral history of the Mi'kmaq as proof. There is, however, no Templar architecture in Nova Sotia ^{[citation needed]}; furthermore, the Templar Order had been suppressed for the better part of 100 years before Henry Sinclair's voyage and the there is no provenance whatsoever for the existence of a Templar fleet at La Rochelle ^{[citation needed]} - or anywhere else - in 1307 The oral history material he claims to have collected has not been made available to scholars. Without exception, Scottish medieval historians have rejected all of these claims ^{[citation needed]} (other than the possibility that Henry Sinclair did travel to America) many times.

[edit] The Rosslyn Chapel Project

Between 1992 and 1994, Sinclair worked extensively on the Rosslyn Chapel project along with Deborah Benstead, author Stephen Prior, historian Robert Brydon and the then-curator Judith Fiskin, covering the mystical beliefs and practices on the Knights Templar in Rosslyn, Scotland despite the fact that the Templars had been suppressed more than a century before the chapel was built. The connection between the Templars and Roslin (the word 'ROSSLYN') is a modern conceit was invented by Augustin Hay, a Parisian romance-writer, in the 1700s. ^{[citation needed]}

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

This article or section does not cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) This article has been tagged since October 2006.