The God Culture Philippines Biblical History Library

THE SMOKING QUILL | MAY 2, 2025

Rebranding Ophir: The British Colonial Cartographic Coup

Case Summary:

This exposé reveals how British colonial powers in the 1800s systematically erased the Southeast Asian identity of Ophir and rebranded it in their own image, often in direct contradiction to the research and firsthand discoveries of Columbus, Magellan, and the Portuguese and Spanish explorers. It shows how Samuel Purchas, Sir Francis Bacon, and British cartographers like Robert Wilkinson manipulated sacred geography through a coordinated campaign of renaming, redrawing, and misplacing biblical lands.

1. The 1801 British Renaming of Mount Ledang

Gunung Ledang in Malaysia was renamed Mount Ophir by British colonials in 1801.

✅ The Malaysian Tourism Department and historical sources still refer to Ledang as the proper and original name.

🛑 This was not a local tradition—it was a British imposition, assigning biblical significance without foundation.

2. The Sumatra Attempt and Local Rejection

Around the same period, British forces attempted to designate a mountain in Sumatra as Mount Ophir.

✅ Local populations rejected the renaming, resisting the fictionalization of their geography.

3. The 1822–1823 British Map: Wilkinson’s Atlas Classica

Robert Wilkinson published Atlas Classica (1822–23), placing Ophir in Indonesia from a London-based interpretation.

🧭 This map ignored hundreds of years of Iberian navigation, Magellan’s route, and Columbus' quest—replacing them with speculative British geography.

📜 Map Title: The World as Peopled by the Descendants of Noah... – a narrative map reframing Shem, Ham, and Japheth according to British theological ideology.

4. Sir Francis Bacon’s Propaganda: Ophir as Peru

Bacon, a known Freemason, declared Peru to be Ophir based on weak phonetic similarity.

🌀 This follows the same logic Columbus used in calling Haiti “Feyti” and declaring it Ophir—a desperation to “find gold” by simply renaming it.

5. Samuel Purchas: The Pen-for-Hire Historian

Purchas, known for his Purchas His Pilgrimes, was commissioned to reshape geography through a Protestant-British lens.

🛑 He ignored Columbus, Magellan, the Cabot maps, and Spanish-Portuguese documentation.

✅ Instead, Purchas leaned on secondhand narratives that fit a colonial narrative, denying the Philippines, Luzon, and Southeast Asia as the lands of gold.

6. Pattern of Suppression

Source                                                          Original Claim                                                             Colonial Redirection

Columbus                                                    Ophir = Chryse = Isles of Gold (East)                        Feyti (Haiti) = Ophir

Magellan/Barbosa                                    Lequios = Ophir/Tarshish (Philippines)                    Erased by Purchas & British scholarship

Fra Mauro, Cabot, Behaim                     Ophir/Chryse east of India                                         Moved to Sumatra, then India, then erased

Rodrigues & Santa Cruz                          Philippines as gold-bearing Lequios                        Ignored by British cartography

Conclusion:

The rebranding of Ophir was a cartographic coup. It wasn’t discovery—it was erasure and replacement. The British colonial machine rewrote sacred geography using maps, narratives, and paid historians to replace truth with empire. This exposé restores the record: Ophir was never in Peru, Sumatra, or Haiti—it was in the East, where the gold flowed, and where the explorers first found it—in the Philippines.

Yah Bless.

The God Culture Team