I Pointed AI at 400 Years of Historical Archives. It Found a Forgotten Meteorite, Lost Rhinos, and Unrecorded Volcanic Eruptions.

It came back with thirteen candidates, ranked by how complete and accessible the data was, how much AI could help, whether anyone had already done it, and, most importantly, whether an answer could be checked against an original page. That last one matters more than it sounds. AI models can be confidently wrong, so every claim had to end at a real document: a scan of the actual handwritten letter or the actual printed newspaper, with an archive reference that anyone can look up and read for themselves. The list included animals in the Dutch East India Company archives, a giant volcanic eruption from 1808 that nobody has ever located, felt earthquakes in old Dutch newspapers, unrecorded meteorite falls, and ships that completely vanished. Then I teamed up with Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI tool, and we invented this research pipeline together. First came the reading material: the GLOBALISE transcriptions of the Dutch East India Company archive (4.35 million pages, from the 1600s to the 1790s), the Dutch national library’s digitized newspapers, two centuries of American newspapers, and a few ship logbooks for good measure. If I sat down to read just the Dutch East India Company pages myself, at two minutes a page, eight hours a day, five days a week, it would take me about 70 years. And that’s before the newspapers. My homebrew AI lab got through the entire archive in a single twelve-hour overnight run. The trouble with old documents is that nobody spelled anything the same way twice. Handwriting and old print come out of text recognition full of errors, and 17th-century Dutch spells “rhinoceros” about fifteen different ways. A plain keyword search would miss most of what I was looking for. That overnight run was my graphics card turning every passage into a mathematical fingerprint of its meaning, 5.7 million passages from the Dutch East India Company archive alone. That let me search for what a passage was about, not just which words it happened to use. Even then, a single search could return tens of thousands of hits, far too many for a person, or even a big AI model, to read affordably. Instead, the first read went to a tiny, fast “System One” decision model called Jev, which answers only narrow questions: Is this a real animal? Is it wild? Where is it? It costs a few cents per million words. Having it read 59,000 mentions of elephants cost me about three dollars. That’s the part of this project I’m proudest of, and it was my idea, not the AI’s. When I proposed using Jev as a filtering mechanism, Claude Code’s Fable model didn’t yet know what a System One type decision model was; I had to explain the idea before we could build the pipeline around it. In most research like this, the bottleneck is a person reading candidate passages one by one and deciding which are worth a closer look. Putting a cheap, fast judge in that seat automated the initial screening and freed me to focus on the strongest candidates and the direction of the investigation. The pages I examined closely had already survived two rounds of machine reading. Only the passages Jev flagged moved on. Claude Haiku, a bigger model, read those few dozen closely, translated them and pulled out the dates and places. Then the Claude Code agent opened the scan of each original handwritten page to check the transcription against the original. Before calling anything new, I checked it against the catalogues the specialists themselves use. A quick note on how AI was used in this project: I stayed actively involved in the process throughout and piloted the AI through the course of the entire project. I steered the investigation toward new questions and sources, decided which leads were worth pursuing, and recognized when I was grasping at straws and needed to move on. The systems could search and read at a scale I couldn’t, but deciding where to go next, or when to stop, still took my judgment. This was AI-assisted research, not a completely autonomous investigation. There was one more rule, and it mattered most. Before you trust a search that finds nothing, you have to prove it can find something you already know is there. So before I went looking for anything new, the pipeline had to find Breen’s dodo, the Laki eruption of 1783, Tambora in 1815 and a dozen other known events. It’s like testing a metal detector by burying your own wristwatch in the front yard. You know it’s there. If the detector can’t find it, you know you have a problem with your detector to address before sweeping elsewhere for real treasure. These known historical events were my buried wristwatch: a way to check that the pipeline could find something before taking its failures to find anything seriously.