Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea

by Lionel

  Early oceanographic theories, and the suggestions of marine biologists in the past, centred on the hypothesis that the massive quantities of weed in the Sargasso had been swept in from distant coastal regions by the powerful ocean currents surrounding it. Later hypotheses, however, tend in the direction of the adaptation and evolution of the weed to adjust and modify itself to survival within its curious environment.

  There were legends and myths — as well as some historically verifiable accounts — of lost ships and weird, derelict craft in the Sargasso, centuries before tales of the Bermuda Triangle began to take the world’s attention. One gruesome example was the sighting of a slaver with skeletons as her only complement. Other strange finds and sightings included the adventure of the Ellen Austin in 1881, which had curious parallels with the Mary Celeste mystery of 1872. The Ellen Austin reportedly found a derelict and sent a prize crew over to it. Just as the Mary Celeste had sailed with the Dei Gratia towards Gibraltar until the storm had separated them, so the Ellen Austin sailed in sight of the rescued derelict they’d found in the Sargasso. Observing that something odd seemed to be happening to the rescued ship, the Ellen Austin drew alongside and re-investigated their supposed salvage prize. It was derelict again, and the prize crew had vanished. It’s interesting to speculate what might have happened had that prize crew been led by the awesomely powerful Oliver Deveau, first mate of the Dei Gratia, who fought against dangerous odds to get the Mary Celeste safely into Gibraltar with a skeleton crew.

  When the derelict James B. Chester was found in the Sargasso in 1857, there were overturned chairs and a meal laid out on the mess-room table. The mysteries of the Sargasso extend into comparatively recent times as well. The Connemara IV was found derelict there, for example, as recently as 1952, and the Poet, all of seventy metres in length, vanished in the Sargasso in 1980.

  Like the Bermuda Triangle, the Sargasso remains one of the great enigmas of the sea.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lost Lands: Slipped and Sunken Continents

  One of the major unsolved mysteries of the sea is the Legend of Lost Atlantis: at its most challenging, the theory suggests that an advanced culture flourished on a large island, or subcontinent, millennia ago and was lost when it sank beneath the Atlantic Ocean — or moved sideways.

  Pioneering researchers Rand and Rose Flem-Ath came up with a thoroughly analyzed and daring new suggestion in their excellent 1995 work When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis. They concluded that rather than submerging, Atlantis had glided across the surface of the Earth to become the present Antarctica, buried beneath the deep ice surrounding the South Pole. In discussing this theory, leading unsolved mysteries investigator Colin Wilson uses the homely but effective analogy of something like the skin on cold soup: it doesn’t require much force to make the skin slide over the liquid soup beneath it. The Flem-Aths have proposed one of the best argued Atlantis theories around, one that’s definitely worth serious consideration.

  The search for Atlantis begins with two of the dialogues of Plato (427–347 BC), Timaeus and Critias. Timaeus gets its name from Timaeus the Pythagorean, and Critias is named after Critias the Younger, who was Plato’s uncle on his mother’s side. In Plato’s most famous work, The Republic, Atlantis is seen neither as a mystery nor an allegory, but a simple piece of historical fact. Plato learned what he knew of Atlantis from Socrates (469–399 BC), who apparently regarded it not only as real, but the site of an ideal community with an exemplary form of government and a high level of culture. The difficulty is to determine whether Socrates “created” Atlantis as a setting, or model, for a utopian society, or whether he was using something he believed to be historical to defend his utopian theories about the nature and function of abstract justice.

  Critias told Socrates, Plato, Glaucus, Adimantus, and Hermocrates that Solon, the great Athenian statesman, had visited Egypt and met a wise old priest at Sais, a city on the Nile delta. (Solon flourished circa 600 BC.) This wise old Egyptian had a great knowledge of history and apparently had access to secret, ancient Egyptian records that told the story of Atlantis and its destruction some ten thousand years before he spoke to Solon of Athens.

  According to this wise old priest from Sais, the proto-Athenians from millennia ago had excelled all other races in the arts of civilization and in military prowess. At that time, there had existed beyond the Pillars of Hercules — the modern Straits of Gibraltar — a huge island called Atlantis, said to be larger than Libya and Asia combined.

  The ancient Egyptian wisdom of Sais would have been recorded in symbols like these.

  Map of possible location of Atlantis drawn by Theo Fanthorpe.

  The Atlanteans were also a very advanced and cultured people with a high level of technology. Their empire contained many North African states and large parts of Europe, but in attempting to conquer the proto-Athenians they met more than their match. The war between them took a terrible toll of both armies, but the valour and military prowess of the Greeks finally beat the Atlanteans, whereupon the magnanimous proto-Athenians liberated the former tributaries of their Atlantean foes and granted them their independence.

  The victory had scarcely been celebrated before a series of unprecedented natural disasters overwhelmed Athens and the area around it. Earthquakes and floods also smashed the Atlanteans, and their entire land mass vanished beneath the mighty waters of the Atlantic in a day and a night.

  Several scholarly experts in both folklore and mythology have tentatively suggested that at least some of the ancient gods in elaborate old pantheons may well have been real, prehistoric kings and war lords. There is evidence to support the notion that this was probably the case for several members of the Greek and Roman pantheons. Assuming that Neptune-Poseidon was once a powerful historical sea king, his traditional connections with Atlantis become significant. One of the earliest Atlantean creation legends featured a man named Euenor and his wife, Leucippe. Their daughter, Cleito, attracted Poseidon’s favours, and, after they became lovers, he built her a wonderfully fortified domain, protected by concentric circles of land and water — the traditional Atlantean layout.

  Very ancient traditional Atlantean design drawn by Theo Fanthorpe.

  Curious old circular labyrinth design carved on the stone of Rocky Valley, Tintagel, Cornwall. Could these ancient labyrinth designs be connected with the layout of Atlantis?

  Having thus made very generous and secure provision for his beautiful and nubile Cleito, the amorous Poseidon fathered five sets of boy twins with her. These all grew up and became kings and governors of the various areas of Atlantis — and of the subsequent Atlantean Empire, which was finally defeated by the determined proto-Athenians before both it and they succumbed to catastrophic earthquakes and floods.

  The old Egyptian priest provided Solon with extensive details of Atlantis. There were rich mineral sources that the inhabitants mined, including orichalc, probably a very high grade copper ore, second only to gold in their scale of values. There was an abundance of timber — Atlantis was as renowned for great quantities of high-quality wood as Lebanon was for its biblical cedars. Atlantis abounded in a rich variety of wildlife — including elephants — that found abundant food supplies on its rich pastures. There were lakes, ponds, and rivers that contained an abundance of fish and other flora and fauna. Atlantis was also rich in spices, aromatic flowers, gums, resins, and many medicinal herbs. The description given by the old Egyptian priest included references to fruit trees, and some others that provided the Atlanteans with oil and highly palatable juice drinks. There were wonderful irrigation systems, and both hot and cold springs supplied excellent water of the highest purity.

  Bridges crossed the great canals and waterways. A resplendent castle and holy place honoured Poseidon and Cleito — within which the holiest place of all, where the ten princes of Atlantis had been born, was encircled with a golden fence. No human being was ever allowed inside that sacred enclosure.

  A formidable army, includi
ng indomitable cavalry and lancers, guarded the princes, and the Atlantean ships filled the busy harbours bringing trade from all over the known world. In addition to these busy mercantile marine vessels, there were hundreds of powerful warships, making invasion of Atlantis next to impossible.

  Taken as a whole, the description given by the old priest of Sais is so detailed and comprehensive that it seems to go beyond fiction. Could all this have been imagined? How much of it was history, and how much of it was embroidery? Stripping his account to Solon to its barest essentials, we are confronted by a high culture with massive civil engineering capabilities, prosperous overseas trade, and huge natural resources of minerals, timber, and agricultural potential. How did such a great empire vanish beneath the Atlantic?

  There are other, stranger records than the words that allegedly passed between the old priest of Sais and Solon of Athens. The rock of Gávea stands on the eight-hundred-metre summit of a steep Brazilian mountain between São Conrado and Barra da Tijuca, not far from Rio de Janeiro. The statue is Sphinx-like, with what looks like a vast human face sculpted at one end. One side of the precipitous monument carries a strange inscription, which some researchers attribute to a Phoenician sea king who lived some three thousand years ago. According to Pedro Lacaz do Amaral, who has climbed in the area many times, this is the memorial to Badezir of Tyre in Phoenicia, the eldest son of Jeth-Baal. This Badezir is reckoned to have succeeded to his father’s throne in 856 BC. If he’s buried in Brazil, it suggests that ancient seafaring men from Phoenicia knew about the New World millennia before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Other ruins in the vicinity look to some expert archaeologists as if they might have been Phoenician in origin. According to local news reports, rare Phoenician pottery was discovered in the 1970s in Guanabara Bay.

  What is of greatest interest to Atlantean theorists in connection with the Gávea rock, however, is the possibility that the ancient Phoenicians knew that sea route so well because they also knew about the destruction of Atlantis.

  Apart from the challenging evidence of the controversial Gàvea rock and its possibly Phoenician inscription to commemorate King Badezir, there is a great deal of additional, and more substantial, American evidence to suggest that people with a high level of culture and technology were there in the remotely distant past. The Aztecs were remarkably capable and sophisticated by the generally accepted standards of their time: they had cities, well-developed systems of properly paved roads, and the administrative skills necessary to control an expanding empire. Their capital city, Tenochtitlan, was almost as big as modern Cardiff and had a population of well over a quarter of a million people.

  Founded in 1325 amid the clear waters of the Lake of the Moon, the Aztec capital was expertly laid out and enriched with palaces, pyramids, and temples. As skilfully as the great civil engineers of the Netherlands battled against the North Sea with the construction of their dikes and polders, so the Aztec civil engineers battled with the water in the Lake of the Moon. Artificial islands were built and turned into small holdings and gardens to supply food for the citizens of Tenochtitlan. Causeways and bridges connected the great central city to the surrounding islands. All of this sounds remarkably similar to Solon’s account of the wisdom he received from the old priest of Sais.

  The Aztec engineering feats were reinforced by their advanced mathematical knowledge, which also underlay their exceptional knowledge of astronomy. Their delight in huge monumental artifacts is shown in one of their gigantic calendars. This consists of a round stone four metres across with a mass of well over twenty tons. Its mathematical accuracy and precision is even more noteworthy than its ponderous size.

  For Atlantean researchers, the crucial question is where the Aztecs came from. Could they once have been Atlantean colonists? Or were they even survivors of the cataclysm that destroyed their original, highly cultured homeland? Most orthodox thought among traditional historians places the Aztec ancestors in northern Mexico. There are, however, no traces there of the kind of work they accomplished later. In their own ancient traditions, the Aztecs maintained that they came in the beginning from Aztlan. They said that this was a land to the east of America. This ties in with Plato’s assertions, based on Solon’s testimony derived from the old priest of Sais, that the Atlantean Empire established colonies to their west as well as making eastward incursions into the lands on the Mediterranean side of the Pillars of Hercules.

  An even more remarkable possible connection linking America with Atlantis is the Great Pyramid of Cuicuilco. American archaeologist Byron Cummins made some strange discoveries when he excavated there in the 1920s. It was found that volcanic Mount Xitli had disgorged lava around the pyramid on numerous occasions for several millennia, and this had hardened to form pedrigal. Seven metres of debris had been covered by these volcanic layers.

  Diagram of section through a volcano.

  Cummins and his colleagues were able to ascertain that these succeeding lava flows had spared the pyramid because it was already covered with protective rock, soil, and pumice when they occurred. The only possible conclusion was that it was very old indeed. By studying the solidified lava and other materials covering the Cuicuilco Pyramid, Cummins and his associates concluded that it dated from at least ten thousand years ago — a date that fitted well with the account of Atlantis given to Solon by the old priest of Sais.

  The riddle of the Pyramid of Cuicuilco is as exciting and intriguing today as it was when the Cummins team revealed it in the 1920s, yet the enigma of Tiahuanaco in Bolivia is, if anything, even more puzzling. There is a great deal of uncertainty and ongoing debate about the age of Tiahuanaco. Many traditional scholars date it to a century or two before Christ. Dr. Rolf Müller, a German astronomer quoted in Herbie Brennan’s brilliantly written and superbly researched work The Atlantis Enigma (Piatkus, 1999), was of the opinion that Tiahuanaco was at least as old as the Atlantis of Solon’s account, and possibly much older. Was Tiahuanaco the centre of a culture contemporary with — and perhaps in regular contact with — Atlantis? Was it possibly an Atlantean colony?

  In essence, its impressive structures surpass the great works of the Aztecs. Some of the vast stone blocks of its huge buildings weigh up to seventy tonnes, and were brought from more than one quarry. Quite how they were cut and put into place remains a mystery; there are no obvious tool marks on them, so how were they excavated? The skill with which they were integrated into buildings of colossal strength — able to withstand earthquakes — remains a mystery today. Most curious of all is that Tiahuanaco is more than four thousand metres above sea level and stands a long, long way from any navigable water — yet it was clearly designed and built as a seaport. In view of the obsessive religious devotion of many ancient peoples, it was often suggested by earlier scholars that Tiahuanaco was a mysterious holy place, a harbour of souls from which the spirits of the dead sailed mystically to the Lands Beyond the Grave. More recent work has revealed that far from being a remote shrine, Tiahuanaco was a thriving city, the headquarters of an empire that ran as far as Argentina, Chile, and Peru. The great harbours that once flourished there were practical rather than mystical.

  The agricultural skills that flourished in Tiahuanaco and in parts of its ancient empire seem to have been as great as their feats of civil engineering and architecture — all of which appear to reflect the accounts of Atlantis originating with the old priest of Sais. The heart of this system was a reticulation of elevated growing areas, irrigated by small water channels. The water channels appear to have served two purposes: irrigation and temperature enhancement. Contemporary Bolivian agriculturalists seem to have seen the value of these dual purpose growing structures and to have employed them with great effect to increase productivity significantly.

  Several of the mysteries of prehistoric America may point in the direction of an Atlantis that existed ten millennia before Christ; an examination of ancient Egyptian prehistory produces similar conclusions. Stranger than the Sphinx and the famous
pyramids in the Valley of the Kings is the curious Well of Abydos, a vast subterranean reservoir that the best modern civil engineers, armed with all our newest twenty-first-century power and technology, would find it very difficult to emulate today. The great ancient Egyptian questions — like the questions from Tiahuanaco and Cuicuilco — are: who built this vast and complex subterranean structure and why?

  If the technology attributed to Atlantis really existed, it apparently included certain advanced manufacturing processes that we don’t seem to be able to duplicate today. There are reports of diorite jars in the mastabas tombs at Saqqara, in Egypt, hollowed out with a technique that seems almost miraculous to our twenty-first-century manufacturing technology. Diorite is an exceptionally hard meta-morphic rock with a typically salt-and-pepper appearance. It is a mixture of hornblende, feldspar, plagioclase, and orthoclase. If quartz is also present in the diorite it is usually referred to as granodiorite. Diorite usually appears in the same geological locations as granite and gabbro, and can frequently be found merged and blended with them. How anything that hard could have been delicately hollowed out using only the limited technology thought to have been available thousands of years BC is yet another enigma contributing to the Atlantean riddle.

  A further technological miracle from ancient Egypt was their apparent ability to manufacture copper coated with a very thin layer of antimony. One professor of chemistry working back in the 1930s suggested that they’d discovered an electro-plating technique — something we thought our society had done for the first time in the 1800s. Egypt’s mysterious, anachronistic, technological wonders, like those of prehistoric America, all suggest that somewhere between the two — and in contact with them — was a highly advanced culture that knew how to build vast stone structures, create impressive subterranean reservoirs, hollow out amazing diorite containers, and plate copper with antimony. Does Atlantis fit that profile?