Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  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 appea
l to have a Royal Navy vessel make further soundings in the Atlantic. Gladstone politely declined his request.

  Donnelly also sent a copy to Darwin, who replied with a note saying he’d read the book “with interest, though I must confess in a very skeptical spirit.” His tepid response was typical of the scientific establishment and inaugurated the pattern of condescension and contempt for amateur Atlantis scholarship that has thrived ever since. Donnelly’s theory directly contradicted Darwin’s own ideas of evolution. The Antediluvian World, with its thesis that “Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature,” was horribly out of scientific fashion.

  No modern denunciation of Atlantology is complete without a section vilifying Donnelly. Not without reason, he is frequently cited as a cautionary tale in the uses and abuses of euhemerism, and his faith in the instant gratification of catastrophism—the school of thought that natural history had been a series of cataclysms, such as Noah’s flood—is often contrasted with Darwin’s saintly gradualism (i.e., the earth was many millions of years old and had experienced geological change at an imperceptibly slow pace). But experts also single him out for having committed the much more grave offense of “diffusionism,” sometimes upgraded to the more evil-sounding “hyperdiffusionism.” In his book Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, the anthropologist Kenneth Feder defines diffusionism as the presumption that “cultures are basically uninventive and that new ideas are developed in very few or single places. They then move out or ‘diffuse’ from these source areas.”

  Donnelly’s faith that all great cultures and most advances in human history can be traced back to a large continent that sank midway between Europe and North America is the spine of his argument. It is also the element that is most likely to drive historians nuts. In his otherwise evenhanded account of Donnelly’s Atlantis theory, Feder calls his diffusion argument “a confusing morass of disconnected claims and ostensible proofs.” And yet for more than a century The Antediluvian World had been the most influential work, outside of the Timaeus and Critias, in the Atlantological universe. This seemed like something that deserved a closer look.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lost City Meets Twin Cities

  Saint Paul, Minnesota

  When I arrived at the Minnesota Historical Society in downtown Saint Paul, I was slightly alarmed to be greeted by Ignatius Donnelly himself. Actually, it was a two-dimensional Donnelly, a slightly larger-than-life cardboard cutout of the former congressman sporting a top hat and resembling Babe Ruth out on the town. Tracing the trail of Donnelly’s theory had led me to the office of Patrick Coleman, the acquisitions librarian for the historical society. Coleman looked like a Broadway casting director’s idea of a state librarian—tall, white-haired, tie askew. His office was as comically perfect as a stage set, too: precarious piles of ancient hardbound books, sepia maps of Minnesota on the walls, a large framed photo of Walter Mondale atop his desk. I’d come across a recent newspaper article in which Coleman had been asked who the most interesting person in Minnesota history was, and without hesitation he’d answered Ignatius Donnelly. Surely there was a good reason to pass over Bob Dylan and F. Scott Fitzgerald?

  “Donnelly has gotten a reputation as a kook,” Coleman told me, his head framed by two stacks of leather-bound books on his desk like a priest hearing confession. “That’s really a misrepresentation of his ideas. He had the best private library in Minnesota, maybe the best library in the state, period.” Some of the remnants of that collection were in the piles in front of Coleman. Shortly before his death at age sixty-three in 1901, Donnelly had married his twenty-year-old secretary, who outlived him by sixty-three years. “I was a teenager when she died,” Coleman told me. “She had some books from his library that had his corrections in them. I paid $75 for those over there.” He pointed to a two-volume collected works of Shakespeare that Donnelly had used to write The Great Cryptogram, his magnum opus of Shakespeare scholarship. “I was living in a really sleazy apartment in Minneapolis and had them on top of my $2 black-and-white TV with a tinfoil antenna,” Coleman said. “Some thieves broke in, removed the two volumes, and took the TV instead.” Coleman later had them appraised at $1,600.

  Coleman grew up in a politically active family—his brother is the mayor of Saint Paul—and he originally admired Donnelly for his liberal views. Donnelly was a radical progressive during America’s Gilded Age, a time “much like today, when money and power were concentrated in the hands of a few people,” Coleman said. Over time, Coleman came to admire Donnelly for the breadth of his knowledge. “In the nineteenth century you didn’t need a geology degree or an astronomy degree to write about those things,” he said. This was true. Polymath politicians like Thomas Jefferson are celebrated for their wide interests. Donnelly, because his Atlantis theories have not aged well, is now mocked for his. “It was the end of an era when you could be a Renaissance man. Now you have to specialize.”

  To demonstrate, Coleman offered to show me what remained of the library from Donnelly’s own prairie Monticello. Actually, he clarified as we strolled through the sunny atrium, “the Minnesota Historical Society has his library in storage.” The actual room, that is. When Donnelly’s abandoned house at Nininger was being demolished, a team “went out and took the paneling off the walls and sent it here.” Coleman said that for years, clever booksellers would go hunting on Donnelly’s abandoned estate, stop to eat lunch, and fill their empty knapsacks with volumes from the once-great collection. What the historical society owns of Donnelly’s books, still hundreds on almost as many topics, is whatever was left behind.

  We cut through an administrative area and descended two flights of stairs. Coleman pulled out a key card and swiped it to open a locked steel door. Inside was a sterile-looking storage room filled with metal shelves. “Some people’s libraries you can’t tell whether the books have ever been opened,” Coleman said, reaching for a volume of Irish history. “These books have been read.”

  Inhaling the scent of nineteenth-century paper and glue, I gathered up an armful of books and took them upstairs for a closer look. What became obvious over two days of reading Donnelly’s tiny marginalia confirmed the opinion of a Minnesota historian who’d written that Donnelly “wrote with the impulsive force of a man defending a cause rather than the caution of a scientist seeking the truth.” Donnelly wasn’t merely attempting to sew up a bag of winds; he was a bag of winds. He knew the result he wanted and rummaged through his sources searching for only those facts that fit his needs, without pausing to note any reasonable doubts. In his hands, pyramids stretching from Egypt to Peru to India to Mesoamerica indisputably share an Atlantean source despite their having been built in hugely different styles over thousands of years. The use of bronze, mummification of the dead, similarities in language—Donnelly assembled every available scrap of evidence to support his diffusionist idea of a benevolent ur-Atlantis spreading its wisdom to the far corners of the globe.

  With his tendency to pile up page after page of proof without ever stopping to ask if there was a reasonable explanation as to why he might be wrong, Donnelly set the pace for much of future Atlantology. Too often, coincidence is transformed into evidence, which is taken as proof. A typical example: Circumcision was common among the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, so they must have inherited the practice from their wise common ancestors in Atlantis. How do we know? Because the Atlantean king Uranus, noting the horrors of “one of the most dreadful scourges of the human race”—syphilis, presumably—“compelled his whole army and the armies of his allies to undergo the rite.” Modern life insurance statistics show that Jews are healthier than average. Ergo, Atlantis was real.

  Donnelly probably hoped that he was writing a book that would draw comparisons to Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. Reading The Antediluvian World reminded me more of a book I’d once purchased at a yard sale that amassed hundreds of tiny clues to prove that Paul McCartney h
ad died at the height of the Beatles’ fame and had been secretly replaced by an exact double.

  • • •

  After two days with Donnelly I badly needed a drink. As luck would have it, Coleman was giving a “History Happy Hour” talk in downtown Saint Paul on the topic of Donnelly’s life. I offered to help him carry his visual aids. The Minnesota sky, playing along with the deluge theme, was dark hours before sundown. Coleman grabbed a box of Donnelly’s old books, I picked up the congressman’s cardboard doppelgänger, and we ran through the downpour to Coleman’s Subaru. The location of the talk was the sumptuous Victorian home of Donnelly’s onetime boss, Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey. As a roomful of damp people sipped beers and munched on mini hamburgers, Coleman stood in front of a gigantic fireplace and talked about Donnelly’s political adventures in Minnesota. Then he turned to Atlantis. “I’ve been fighting this idea my whole life that Donnelly was a kook,” he said with more resignation than the first time I’d heard him use the slur. “He had this weird, wonderful, and creative mind that couldn’t be curtailed. And I’ll bet anyone here right now that someone’s on a boat in the Mediterranean with a copy of Donnelly’s Atlantis, looking for the lost city.”

  Most of the happy hour attendees seemed to be hearing about Donnelly for the first time, but there were some devotees in the crowd. When Coleman quoted Donnelly’s famous line from the Populist Party platform of 1892—“From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes: tramps and millionaires”—I noticed at least two people mouthing the words along with Coleman, as if reciting a prayer. No one snickered when Coleman talked about Donnelly’s progressively less successful literary works, including Caesar’s Column, a dystopian science fiction novel that takes place in 1988, and Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, a sort of sequel to his Atlantis book, in which he amped up the catastrophism to propose that ancient myths had been inspired by a comet striking the earth.