Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (4 page)

Malta was a perfect candidate for Atlantis. It’s an island, located due south of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Italy, one of the many possible locations for the Pillars of Heracles that Tony identified. Malta is an ancient maritime culture, home to some of the oldest and least understood ruins on Earth, including some extraordinary stone temples older even than those of Egypt and Athens. Many of these were now submerged due to centuries of rising sea levels. Archaeological evidence has shown that Malta’s entire population vanished without explanation long before Plato was born. It’s a generally mysterious place. Malta even has intriguing grids of trenches etched into its rocky surface, which might have inspired Plato’s ancient irrigation canals. But Malta has no mountains and is nowhere near large enough to have contained the enormous plain that Plato described, nor to have launched a million-strong navy.

The final candidate was a dark horse, Morocco. I probably wouldn’t have considered it at all if Tony hadn’t called it the most convincing hypothesis he’d seen to date. Michael Hübner, a computer programmer in Bonn, had made a list of geographical details in the
Timaeus
and
Critias—
fifty-one in all
—
and had used sophisticated statistical analysis to plug them into a mapping program. The result he came up with was indisputable, by the numbers anyway. Virtually every clue that Plato noted—the rings, the earthquakes, the elephants, the location outside the Pillars of Heracles—coincided with the relatively obscure Souss-Massa plain on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, about one hundred miles southwest of Marrakesh. But virtually no archaeology had been done in the area.

“I haven’t been able to satisfy myself about two things,” Tony told
me. “You start with Plato’s description for these mountains.” (From the
Critias
:
“The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist.”) “It was almost as if Plato was writing a travel ad,” Tony said. “The only ones that would count are the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Atlas. You look at those and look at the prevailing winds from the north. You should be able to limit the possibilities to a manageable few, but I keep going in circles on that.”

Tony’s other sticking point, one that I’d noticed most theories glossed over, were the impassable shoals left behind after Atlantis sank. “Let’s take the word
impassable
. It would have to take into account the tides. The draft of triremes I gather was only about a meter. That would make it impassable for part of the day but not all day. It would have to be a place with very little tidal effect—like the Mediterranean.” Tony likened such dangerous shallows to the banks of Syrtis (now Sirte in Libya, best known today as the hometown of Muammar Gaddafi). “The shoals to me sound like liquefaction,” Tony said. Liquefaction is the process by which an earthquake converts wet soil into something like quicksand. Anything built on this suddenly unstable ground is likely to collapse or sink.

Tony believed that clues to the location of Atlantis might even be found outside of the
Timaeus
and
Critias
, a possibility I hadn’t considered. “Plato was talking about serious matters—when the earth was washed away from Greece,” he said. “You should study the deluge stories and look for the common elements.” Most ancient cultures seemed to have a Great Flood myth. The Deucalion flood, which the Saïs priest says came after the greater cataclysm that sank Atlantis, is strikingly similar to the Noah’s ark story and the Mesopotamian flood epic of Gilgamesh; in all three versions pious men are instructed by gods to build floating vessels in order to survive an inundation. Where exactly all of that water might have come from remained one of the great mysteries of antiquity. “One scenario that
does make sense is an asteroid or comet in the ocean—that could’ve sent a giant tsunami around the world,” Tony said, adding quickly, “Obviously strange things have happened.” I sensed that linking the Atlantis story to ancient myths, gigantic flying projectiles from space, and possibly the book of Genesis would not make mainstream academics any more likely to respond to my e-mails, but Tony had been at this game a lot longer than I had. I made a note to look into it.

“In the end, you have to go back and read Plato again,” Tony said. “Be happy that what he’s written has some degree of credibility. From that you can form a theory. The mountains, the plains, and the shoals—those are the challenges.”

“The beginning is the most important part of any work,” Plato wrote in the
Republic
. Spain. Malta. Greece. Morocco. It was a start.

•   •   •

One night Tony and I broke our routine and drove to the village, stopping at both pubs for a pint and a little
craic
,
a term that as far as I could tell referred to the unique Irish gift for free-flowing conversation. (During the span of a single pint with Paul and Dai, a friendly neighbor from down the road, the topics swerved from a famous snooker match in which the champion had worn his spectacles upside down, to the problem of Polish handymen emptying local rivers of fish, to the time Paul dressed up as Cruella De Vil for Halloween, to the debate over whether it was sacrilegious to grill sausages during a pilgrimage up a mountain associated with Saint Patrick.) I had, admittedly, been a little curious what Tony’s neighbors—residents of an overwhelmingly Catholic country that hadn’t legalized divorce until 1995—might think about living near a gay couple whose elder member was a storehouse of information about Atlantis. They had very strong feelings indeed about both topics. Several people told me that we were standing in
the very pub
where the publishing party for the hardcover
Atlantipedia
had been held, evidently a legendary
blowout rivaling Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. Everyone was eager to talk about Tony and Paul’s upcoming civil ceremony. “Tony O’Connell, gettin’ married at your age, are ye?” teased one local matron, who boasted that she owned two signed copies of the
Atlantipedia
. “Paul’s finally making an honest man of ye?” asked another. “A real May-December romance ’tis, just like in the movies.”

By the end of the week, my head was stuffed with Atlantis information and the rest of me with pie, cake, soda bread, full Irish breakfasts, and Guinness. Before dropping me back in Dublin, Tony took me to see Newgrange, one of the world’s great megalithic monuments. Someone had managed to incorporate it, like almost all impressive pre-Hellenic structures, into an Atlantis location theory. “Your man Ulf Erlingsson”—a Swedish geographer who argued that Newgrange and its nearby structures were the temples that inspired Plato’s story—“estimated that it was 99.98 percent likely that Atlantis was in Ireland,” Tony told me. Tony was as proud an Irishman as one could hope to meet, but he wasn’t in the least convinced by Erlingsson’s argument. “He goes on and on about the concentric circles on a stone basin found near here,” Tony told me as we walked through the exhibits at the Newgrange museum. “Ah, there it is.” He pointed at a carved bowl with an image of circles, perhaps the size of an LP record, carved onto its side.

“There’s your 99.98 percent proof of Atlantis,” Tony said. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

Amateur Hour

Nininger City, Minnesota (ca. AD 1882)

F
or someone who professed such deep respect for numbers, Plato certainly used some head-scratching ones in his Atlantis story. The dates don’t match up even remotely with ancient history. Solon likely visited Egypt not long after 600 BC, which means that by the priest’s reckoning, Atlantis and Athens were destroyed around 9600 BC. Historians believe that Athens was first settled sometime in the fourth millennium BC and did not grow to a size anything like that of a city—let alone a city with twenty thousand soldiers—for another two thousand years. The founding of the first Egyptian dynasty has been dated to approximately 3150 BC. Were these exaggerations invented by Plato on purpose, or were they the work of some sleepy Byzantine transcriber?

Plato wrote that the Atlanteans had twelve hundred triremes, or oared warships. Triremes don’t turn up in historical records until the seventh century BC. It’s possible that either Plato or Solon was using a modern term to describe older boats. The Atlantean army’s ten thousand chariots are harder to explain. Chariots seem to have emerged in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC; domesticated horses date to the fifth millennium BC. Plato estimates the combined forces of
Atlantis to include about 1.2 million men, who are improbably defeated by those twenty thousand guardians of Athens. By comparison, Herodotus estimated that the massive army and navy that Xerxes of Persia brought to Greece in 480 BC was more than a million men strong, a number now believed to be greatly inflated. During the D-day sea invasion of Normandy, 156,000 Allied troops crossed the English Channel.

As Tony O’Connell had explained, perhaps the most fantastic figures in the Atlantis story are the dimensions Critias somewhat sheepishly gives for the enormous channel surrounding the plain:

The depth, and width, and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial. Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of a hundred feet, and its breadth was a stade [approximately six hundred feet] everywhere; it was carried round the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stades [more than eleven hundred miles] in length.

Some have argued that the Atlanteans were technologically sophisticated—an argument that has sparked some outlandish theories about their prehistoric airships, radios, and microwave ovens. But no one, to my knowledge, has suggested that the Atlanteans had access to backhoes and bulldozers. The canal described by Plato would require the removal of ten billion cubic meters of earth. The Panama Canal project involved excavating 120 million cubic meters of earth.

In part because these numbers seemed so incredible, speculation about the location of Atlantis remained a pretty low-interest field for almost two thousand years. Then in 1492, Christopher Columbus
sailed west and found a sizable land mass roughly where Plato had said (according to a popular interpretation) one would be. As fleets of European explorers followed, theories soon abounded that the largest and most sophisticated New World cultures, such as the Mayas and Aztecs of Mesoamerica, were descendants of an Atlantean diaspora. Brilliant naturalists such as France’s Comte de Buffon and Prussia’s Alexander von Humboldt seriously considered possible links between Native Americans and the peoples of Atlantis.

These hypotheses were essentially intellectual parlor games, though. No one looked very hard for Atlantis until the late nineteenth century, when an unusually dedicated amateur archaeologist decided to search for Homer’s mythical city of Troy, using the evidence of the original story. And then he found it.

•   •   •

Skepticism from experts about using ancient stories to find lost civilizations isn’t exactly new. As I dug in to the canon of Atlantology, I repeatedly came across instances of historians and classicists condescendingly referring to the idea of a real Atlantis as “euhemerism.” The term comes from the Greek philosopher Euhemerus, who hypothesized that some myths—in particular those of the Greek gods—had been based on historical events. (The residents of Mount Olympus, he believed, had been inspired by ancient Greek kings.) The third-century-BC geographer Eratosthenes—who served as chief librarian of the Library of Alexandria—may have been the first scholar to throw cold water on euhemerism when he quipped that “you will find where Odysseus wandered when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds.”

More than two thousand years later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the relatively new field of archaeological excavation was not yet the sole province of academic professionals when the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann took an interest in it.
Schliemann was a self-made millionaire and self-taught historian who read Homer’s epic myths the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
as history and thus believed that the Greek hero Achilles truly had battled the Trojan Hector and that the beautiful Helen—later famous as “the face that launched a thousand ships”—actually had been kidnapped from Sparta and taken to Troy. When Schliemann read that Achilles had dragged the dead body of Hector around the walls of Troy in revenge for the death of his friend Patroclus, the German was convinced not only that those walls had once existed, but also that they might be found and excavated. As Plato had with Atlantis, Homer had described Troy in enough detail to identify it if located: a prosperous city of temples and fine homes, located near a river and the Hellespont between Greece and Turkey, surrounded by an imposing high wall with a gate that was located near two springs, one warm and one cold.

In his book
Minotaur
, the modern archaeologist Joseph Alexander MacGillivray quotes George Grote’s “universally accepted” twelve-volume
History of Greece
on the subject of Homer as history circa 1850:
“Though literally believed, reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past by the Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern inquiry essentially a legend and nothing more.” Schliemann disagreed. He was convinced that Troy would be found at the village of Hissarlik, farther north than most searches had been conducted. In 1871, he hired a hundred laborers, who tore into the site and uncovered thousands of artifacts. Over three seasons Schliemann claimed to have found a building he identified as the palace of King Priam; the Scaean Gates, the spot where Hector prophesies Achilles’s death in the
Iliad
; and a large cache of gold objects, which Schliemann smuggled out of the country. The headline over a story in the December 29, 1872,
Chicago Daily Tribune
was typical of the enthusiastic press reaction:
HOMER VINDICATED
.

Schliemann followed his work at Troy with another spectacular
success, this time in Greece. Amid the remains of a hilltop fortress at Mycenae, in the northeastern part of the Peloponnesus, Schliemann searched for the palace of King Agamemnon, who according to Homer had led the Greeks into battle against the Trojans to reclaim Helen, his brother’s wife. Here Schliemann found even greater relics, including five skeletons wearing gold death masks.

Schliemann was a gifted promoter but a flawed archaeologist. His accounts of his discoveries were filled with inconsistencies and falsehoods, and some of the most important antiquities he claimed to have found may have been planted by himself and his wife. In his rush to discover what he assumed was the original Troy, Schliemann ordered his workmen to dig and dynamite their way down through several layers of stone building remains. This archaeological refuse turned out to be the evidence of multiple other settlements, including the actual ancient city of which Homer had sung.

Schliemann’s work set a precedent, though. He had poked a hole in the wall between Greek myth and history, so carefully constructed since Plato’s time. Amateur archaeologists around the world realized that they might not even have to leave their desks in order to locate a lost city. All one needed was a familiarity with the classics and a fertile imagination.

•   •   •

One of those most inspired by Schliemann was history’s first great Atlantologist, the progressive Minnesota politician Ignatius Donnelly. To say that Donnelly also left behind a complicated legacy would grossly undervalue the variance in opinions about his work. One account of his life proclaimed him the “greatest uncelebrated man in American history.” Another labeled him “quite possibly the greatest failure who ever lived.”

Born in Philadelphia in 1831, Donnelly moved west at the age of twenty-five with plans to cash in on a speculative land boom in the
go-go Minnesota Territory. The planned community he cofounded, Nininger City, failed when the Panic of 1857 brought on an economic depression. Donnelly rebounded from bankruptcy to become Minnesota’s lieutenant governor at twenty-eight and a US congressman at thirty-one, serving as a radical Republican who supported women’s suffrage, education for newly freed slaves, and immigrants’ rights. By 1880 he was finished politically and back in Nininger City, living in his grand house amid the empty acres of his failed real estate investment. In a diary entry written on his forty-ninth birthday he wrote, “All my hopes are gone, and the future settles down upon me dark and gloomy indeed.”

Just a few weeks later, Donnelly scribbled optimistically in his diary that he’d begun work on a book he was planning to call
Atlantis.
His inspiration is unknown, though it’s possible he was influenced by the success of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
,
in which Captain Nemo leads Professor Aronnax to the very impressive submarine ruins of Plato’s lost city. If one considers the
Timaeus
and
Critias
as a single entity, it would not be an exaggeration to call Donnelly’s book the second most important work in the Atlantis canon. One leading chronicler of the search for Atlantis described the work, eventually titled
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
, as the “New Testament of Atlantism,” companion to Plato’s Old Testament.

In the book’s first sentence, Donnelly explained that he aimed “to demonstrate several distinct and novel propositions.” Chief among them was that Plato’s Atlantis was real, not a myth. Donnelly’s version of Atlantis was a utopia, “the Garden of Eden,” and wellspring of all the world’s great civilizations: Egypt was the oldest Atlantean colony. Technologies that emerged during the Bronze and Iron Ages, and even later—“it is not impossible that even the invention of gunpowder may date back to Atlantis”—had emerged from an original Atlantean source, as had the alphabet, paper, and agriculture. When
Atlantis sank beneath the waves, the victim of a catastrophic global flood, a few of its inhabitants paddled and sailed away to create “the Indo-European family of nations, as well as of the Semitic peoples,” and possibly others.

It would be hard to overstate the impact that this introductory chapter to Donnelly’s book had on future Atlantology; in a sense it created the template for all later location theories. Tony O’Connell writes in the
Atlantipedia
, “It is quite possible that without the impetus created by Donnelly’s book, Atlantis would have remained a relatively obscure subject.” Donnelly was the first great Atlantis fundamentalist, in that he believed that Plato’s story was factually accurate outside of the supernatural elements like Poseidon. Plato said Atlantis was in the ocean opposite the Pillars of Heracles; therefore, it had once existed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, he theorized. (Even more than Plato, Donnelly is responsible for the general belief that Atlantis sank into the Atlantic.) Fantastic-seeming dates and measurements, like the nine thousand years or thousand-mile-long trench, only buttressed Donnelly’s faith that the society of Atlantis had been exceptionally advanced. The story of the inundation of Atlantis had been passed down by escapees, which, Donnelly explained, is why cultures from Europe, Asia, and the Americas all share flood myths.

The early 1880s were a rich era for popular science; some of the very secrets of nature that Plato had tried to imagine in the
Timaeus
were finally revealing themselves to inquisitive, industrious men. Names such as Schliemann, Thomas Edison, and Charles Darwin appeared regularly in newspapers. Donnelly, setting an example for future Atlantologists, was clever enough to salt his tale with the scientific fashions of the day. He even provided a thing rare in Atlantis studies—scientific evidence. In 1860, the US Coast Guard had compiled its first comprehensive charts of the Gulf Stream, the circular current that flows clockwise around the North Atlantic. Why did it
flow in this manner? “The gulf stream flowed around Atlantis, and it still retains the circular motion first imparted to it by the presence of that island,” Donnelly explained. Recent bathymetric surveys had confirmed the existence of a large volcanic mountain range situated beneath the waves running almost straight down the middle of the Atlantic. For Donnelly, this was obvious evidence of a sunken continent. The islands of the Azores archipelago were the only visible remains of mountains that had once loomed above the doomed civilization.

“Portions of the island lie but a few hundred fathoms beneath the sea,” he wrote in his conclusion. “A single engraved tablet dredged up from Plato’s island would be worth more to science, would more strike the imagination of mankind, than all the gold of Peru, all the monuments of Egypt, and all the terra-cotta fragments gathered from the great libraries of Chaldea.”

Reaction to
The Antediluvian World
was rapid and enthusiastic. The local
Saint Paul Dispatch
credited Donnelly with having written “one of the notable books of the decade, nay of the century.” William Gladstone, the prime minister of Great Britain and a renowned classics scholar who had published a massive study of Homer, sent Donnelly a letter of qualified congratulations. “I may not be able to accept all your propositions,” he wrote, “but I am much disposed to believe in an Atlantis.” Donnelly responded with an appeal to have a Royal Navy vessel make further soundings in the Atlantic. Gladstone politely declined his request.