Most of us learned in school that the first interstellar crossing was made by the “New Frontiers”. Our very calendar is based on this; the Galactic calendar starts from the year of her return to Earth after her 74 year journey. But what is not so widely known, is that the “New Frontiers” was not the first human starship.  Another vessel had set out from Earth a century or so earlier.  This vessel was ostensibly lost in space – it was never heard from again.  Until now.

This presentation to the annual seminar of the Ancient History Society of New Rome, brings news of that long-lost earlier vessel. Her name was “Vanguard”. She was discovered about a century ago by an Iskandrian naval vessel, patrolling the depths of space between Iskander and Fatima. Because the fastest means of transmitting information from one place to another is by star ship, it has taken 105 years for the news to reach us here on Secundus.

The presentation is multi-disciplinary in topic and scope. It will cover the strange chance by which the Vanguard was detected at all; it covers the unusual engineering techniques used to slow her down, and it addresses the archaeological issues involved in getting aboard and then accessing her computer records.  Finally, it reveals the exciting discoveries that were made from those records, regarding what happened to the ship and the crew.

For when her route was plotted, it could be shown that the Vanguard had passed a planet centuries before.  When the Iskandrians visited that remote and uncharted world, they discovered it to be inhabited by humans – but not from the Diaspora. They were savage and intractable cannibals, but they were very intelligent savage and intractable cannibals.  They were shown by genetic study to be descendants of the Vanguard’s original crew.

(After a short passge in R.A Heinlein’s “Time enough for love“, where Galahad, over dinner, recounts to the table the story of this discovery,  causing something of a shock to Lazarus.)