Career
During World World War II, she worked as a code-breaker for the United States. government"s cryptography department. She published multiple controversial works during the 1960s and 1970s. She died in 1985.
In 1964, Mertz suggested that a photograph of the Bat Creek inscription had been published upside down.
Later Cyrus H. Gordon suggested that the inscriptions were derived from a Hebrew alphabet from the 1st century AD but today main-stream archaeologists consider it to be a fraud.
In her work entitled The Wine Dark Sea, Mertz argued that Odysseus sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the North Atlantic. Moreover, Mertz believed that Odysseus faced Scylla and Charybdis when he arrived at the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.
Mertz also proposed that the Argonauts travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, down the east coast of South America, past the mouth of the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro to the Rio Plata of Argentina. From Rio Plata, Jason went to the altiplano of Bolivia and to Tihuanaco where the Golden Fleece was located.
As supporting evidence she proposed that the Milk River inscriptions were Chinese glyphs made by one of the exploration parties.
According to David Hatcher Childress, Mertz also interpreted Fusang as meaning "fir trees" in Chinese, and ruminated that they might refer to the fir trees of British Columbia. The hypothesis had long been rejected by academic sinologists having been first advocated in English by Charles Godfrey Leland in 1875, but apparently Mertz was unaware of these facts. About Mertz"s hypotheses, Joseph Needham writes in a footnote that "the proposed identities in general require a heroic suspension of disbelief".
Mertz used as proof a 1436 map belonging to Andrea Bianco that showed the Atlantic island of Antillia.
However, her theory was ultimately rejected on account of Plato"s dates, the fact that sank, and the fact that "Antilla" was most likely a cartographic depiction of either Hispaniola or Cuba.