Atlantis and the Silver City (12 page)

•  The Phoenician administrator Himilco mentioned having to avoid them during his voyage around Iberia to Britain. This is significant,
as he was reported to be sailing specifically “around Iberia.” In other words, he would, as usual, have been keeping close to the coast, and therefore clearly encountered the obstacles not far offshore.
⁴²

•  The Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger referred to sandbanks immediately outside the Pillars of Hercules.
⁴³

•  Plutarch also described the ocean just outside the Pillars of Hercules as “difficult of passage and muddy.”
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These reports are far more recent than 9,600
B
.
C
. and most likely indicate that the whole area did not sink completely at the same time. We know earthquakes of sufficient immensity to cause serious subsidence were repeated every few thousand years or so after 9,600
B
.
C
. and could have accounted for recurring problems.

All these accounts of mud and impediments in the area also confirm that Plato was referring to this region rather than the volcanic ash around Santorini.

Further hard evidence tying in with the use of the word
pelagos
is provided in the area immediately to the north of Cádiz, starting at Puerto Real and El Puerto de Santa María, which initially consists of waterways before giving way to marshy land. An old Roman map shows a large lagoon there, penetrating deep inland. The famous protected Doñana nature reserve, northwest toward Huelva—now one of the few refuges for the almost extinct Iberian lynx—was also once underwater.

As mentioned earlier, it is also accepted that there was once a smattering of small, low-lying islands immediately outside the Straits of Gibraltar, all of which are now submerged. Spartel Island, the best known, has been explored for evidence that it was Atlantis by the team that discovered the
Titanic
. In such a critical position, commanding sea traffic in and out of the Mediterranean, it would inevitably have been part of the Atlantis Empire, but in no way could it have qualified as Atlantis per se. If, however, this and other islands close by sank or were inundated with the rest of Atlantis, they could well have formed very low-lying blockages or shoals of mud and precisely fit with Plato’s use of the word
pelagos
.

In those days, mariners would not have sailed or rowed straight out into the open sea, quickly losing sight of land. They would invariably have kept
a coast in view. Spartel Island and the rest of the cluster of little islands (or their sunken remains) would also have forced navigators up the Iberian coast or south along the African one. If they were under sail, the prevailing southwesterly winds would have made the African coast a hazardous option. It would have been far easier to tack up the Iberian one. But the submerged plain extends right up to the entrance to the Mediterranean; so if it initially just sank a little below the surface, anyone trying to sail northwest up to Cádiz would have encountered mud. Land on the north coast of Morocco would also have sunk or been inundated at the same time as Atlantis disappeared, and that would have caused mud and sediment problems.

So, if the main plain described by Plato was the part that sank and now forms the seabed south of the Algarve and southwest of Andalucía, perhaps it was originally largely separated from the coast by a narrow strip of water, a strait, and the current islands and sandbars are the remnants of what would have been its north coast. Another possibility is that this narrow strait could have only extended partway west in front of the Iberian coast, as far as a great river such as the Arade, which it then joined to wend back out to sea. The result would have been a low-lying island that stretched back to Cádiz and Gibraltar, but which could have had high dunes on its south coast. Judging by Plato’s account, mentioning a swath of protective mountains immediately to the north of the plain, he was referring to the whole area (that is, the submerged part together with the remaining Algarve and Costa de la Luz), whether or not part of it was technically an island by virtue of a narrow strip of water. The mountains are still there today, starting from around three to thirty kilometers inland in the Algarve but farther inland as you travel east into Spain. Plato indicates that they survived by stating that they are not now as numerous or as large as they were, presumably as a result of the original upheaval that destroyed Atlantis with earthquakes, erosion, and subsidence. Clue 89 reads: “The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist.…” (
SEE IMAGES 12A, 12B, 12C, 12D, AND 13 IN THE PHOTO INSERT
.)

If, as others have suggested, Plato was referring here to a comparison of the original Atlantis mountains to any existing in the whole of the then-known world, then the Atlantis mountains would presumably have disappeared together with the rest of the land. That would have meant subsiding the
enormous amount of more than ten thousand feet, as the Greeks were aware of mountains elsewhere of that proportion. There are none on the region’s existing seabed until well out into the Atlantic and the Gorringe Bank, and even then they are nowhere near as deep.

Judging by Plato’s description of the huge area of mud and low bottoms where the land sank, it did not subside to any great depth. This would presumably have applied equally to the mountains, leaving them still visible—evidence again that Plato was not referring to just a large island, as the mountains are on the mainland.

The mysterious land of “Tartessos” is discussed in several parts of this book. It is broadly accepted that this was somewhere in southwest Iberia, but there is no historical account pinpointing it exactly. In Chapter Sixteen, the hypothesis is put forward that it was the whole region from Gibraltar to Cape St. Vincent and therefore mirrored the remnants of Atlantis. Reginald Fessenden pointed out that at some stage in ancient Greek,
Ta
also roughly translated as “the land of.” Combine that with
nesos
to give
Tanesos
, which could credibly have evolved into
Tartessos
. The meaning would then have been “the land of the islands/peninsulas,” which also accords well with Plato’s use of the word
pelagos
to describe that area.

To add to the confusion and uncertainty, there is one other intriguing possibility thrown up by the famous ancient “Piri Reis” map. Controversy rages over claims made by Charles Hapgood who, together with his students, made a prolonged and exhaustive study of it. Turkish admiral Piri Reis, the man who made it, indicated that he used parts of several other much-older maps to make a complete chart of the Western Hemisphere, including Europe and the Americas. Hapgood pointed out that the coast of South America is shown in reasonably accurate detail, apart from an area where two of the source maps for South America overlapped. Amazingly, Antarctica’s ice-bound coast is also shown, plus inland mountain ranges now indistinguishable, buried beneath thick ice.
⁴⁵
Hapgood claims that the mountains shown on the map have been proven to be more or less accurately placed by a survey conducted by a U.S. Navy exploratory team, thus indicating that the original source map was drawn many thousands of years ago when the ranges were last ice-free. This has frequently been cited as an argument for a lost civilization which had the ability to sail the
oceans and produce maritime charts. The professor has a letter from the leader of the team to prove the existence of the mountains and that they concord with the map. This could possibly place the original map
before
Plato’s date for the sinking of Atlantis, yet it shows no large island off Portugal, in the region of the Canary Islands or the Azores.

It does appear to show Cape St. Vincent extending farther out into the sea, but the map’s scale is too small to assess whether the southern Iberian coast is also farther south. It must be remembered that Piri Reis produced it from an amalgam of maps. He was trying to produce a map of the world as it was then and did not know that the ancient source maps he used for Antarctica were rendered out of date by a layer of ice that was many thousands of years old and miles deep. He could, however, have used more recent maps of Europe, including Iberia, drawn by his contemporaries. The map does, though, show two very wide rivers on the Iberian Peninsula. One of these is the Tagus, which flows east to west and out to sea past Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. The other is the Guadalquivir, flowing north to south into the sea by Cádiz. On the Piri Reis map, they are shown to meet up in midwestern Spain at a series of lakes, effectively making all the land to the south and west of them an island, completely surrounded by water.

That it could have been considered as such is not so far-fetched. Today, for instance, just over the border from the Algarve, in Spain at the mouth of another large river, the Guadiana, is an area called Isla Canela. It now boasts golf courses and a marina, as well as kilometers of beaches backed by drifted dunes.
Isla
means “island” in Spanish, and Isla Canela effectively is one, by virtue of a waterway that cuts across it from its west coast and winds south to join the sea again.

Yet one further translation correction is critical, as the original error has led to the search being for an island of huge proportions, thus narrowing the choice of potential sites. The English translation reads
:
“the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together” (clue 6). Even allowing for the fact that, in Plato’s day, the regions referred to as Libya and Asia meant areas somewhat different from the ones we recognize today, it still meant a mighty chunk of land, almost too large to fit in any ocean. For an island, or land, of that vast size to have sunk completely in only twenty-four hours is just not credible.
It is like America disappearing. Imagine boarding a flight headed there and when you arrive there’s nothing—just sea. It would have been a catastrophe that would have had unthinkable effects on the rest of the planet.

Yet the translation into Latin by Chalcidius, one of Plato’s students at his academy who, it must be assumed, was more competent in ancient Greek than any modern-day professor translating from later questionable versions of Plato’s Greek manuscripts, reads: “a peninsula/island, at the same time, of Libya and of Asia, the greater (or hugest) one.”
⁴⁶
In other words, he appears to be intimating that the peninsula/island was “larger than any that existed”
in Libya and Asia at that time
. With that more logical complexion, the Iberian Peninsula accords well with that description.

Other researchers have pointed out that in using the word
meson
, which translates as “greater,” Plato may have meant “of much greater importance
as a power
,” not in size. The word was often used in that context.

Another very plausible theory has been put forward by researcher Georgeos Diaz-Montexano. He translated fragments of the oldest samples of Plato’s works he could find in universities and European libraries. He came to the conclusion that Plato meant that Atlantis was an island/peninsula outside the Straits of Gibraltar, that was bigger than Asia and almost joined to Libya (Morocco).
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Like others, Georgeos pointed out that to the Greeks, “Asia” only referred to Anatolia (Turkey, approximately, also known as Asia Minor), which was not a very large area. If Atlantis was southwest of Iberia and it ruled other islands and lands, northern Morocco would inevitably have been included. It is apparent that large areas of its coast were also inundated and sank, forming part of today’s seabed. Before the disaster, the straits would have been longer and the two shores even closer together, making a hop across to Morocco a routine event.

Let’s pull the evidence together and summarize the conclusions.

•  It indicates that Plato was referring not to an island on its own but, more likely, to a peninsula, possibly with a large flat area to the south being separated—or partially separated—by a narrow strip of water, making only that area an island.

•  The Iberian Peninsula, embodying the southern Costa de la Luz, part of Spanish Andalucía, and the whole of Portugal’s Algarve, starts immediately outside the Straits of Gibraltar in precisely the right position. Stretching south from its coast are large submerged plains.

•   Apart from the probable mistranslation of
nesos
, Plato clearly stated that the country had only one side facing the sea.

•   Plato’s description of “straits” in front of this coast, where navigation was difficult due to many islands, mudbanks, shallow (tidal) waters, marshy areas, and lagoons, even today perfectly matches the area from Cádiz in Spain to beyond Faro in the Algarve. More than two thousand years have passed since he wrote his Dialogues, with the inevitable geographical changes caused by momentous earthquakes and tsunamis. Today the straits between the offshore islands and the coast are navigable, aided by well-marked charts; but because of the shallowness of the water and the strong Atlantic tides, there’s a risk of running aground when venturing into the inner lagoons and the sea around Faro.

•  This area could be the result of the southern part of Atlantis sinking, leaving a few remnants in the sea off the coast or the remains of the northern extremity of a long, flat offshore island that had originally only been separated—or partially separated—from the mainland by a narrow strait.

•  Most of the western half of the Algarve shoreline is different from the east but exactly matches Plato’s description of the original dramatic Atlantis coast, with high cliffs.