Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea

by Lionel

  The question then goes back to where the Atlanteans themselves came from — assuming that they and their doomed continent ever really existed. Persistent legends of highly intelligent and massively powerful amphibian sea gods, going back to the most ancient of prehistoric times, suggest that they may have been extraterrestrials from a planet in another star system, perhaps near Orion. The Atlanteans of Solon’s version were definitely humanoid, although their devotion to Poseidon the Amphibian King of the Sea may be significant in this context. Supposing that aquatic extraterrestrials were involved in founding Atlantis, couldn’t they have taught some of their technology to indigenous terrestrial humanoids, who then founded and populated Atlantis with the help of their mentors, the amphibian extraterrestrials?

  Where else might the Atlanteans have originated? Simple, old-fashioned Darwinism and associated evolutionary theories may have something to offer here. If the great island, or miniature continent, in what is now the Atlantic Ocean, had developed largely in isolation — as Australia did — its flora and fauna (including its humanoid fauna) might have been very different from those in other parts of the world where they were readily accessible to predatory species. Ferocity, big muscles, and fast reflexes were very useful for a hunter-gatherer competing hard to survive. The open and frequently bloodstained arena of mainland Earth didn’t encourage contemplative philosophers, theologians, astronomers, and abstract artists. You fought for your food most of your waking time — or you became food.

  What if things were different on isolated Atlantis? If food was plentiful and your neighbours were peaceful and amiable, you’d have the time to develop your intelligence along abstract paths rather than pragmatic ones. It is pure thought, pure research, and ample time for contemplation that produces the greatest cultural and technological progress for a society. The best survivors in a dangerous hunter-gatherer environment were not likely to be the best thinkers: they were too busy surviving and subsisting. But what if the gentler climate of uncompetitive Atlantis in its earliest days allowed its thinkers, dreamers, poets, and philosophers to survive? Given a few thousand years, they could well have come up with weaponry that would keep their great land safe from aggressive hunter-gatherers. By the time they made contact — long before Atlantis went down in the Great Catastrophe that affected many other parts of the Earth as well — the Atlanteans were more than able to hold their own in battles with the hunter-gatherers. They were far better organized than their opponents — and in early warfare the ability to organize and deploy your warriors scientifically was a very significant plus factor. If this theory is correct, the Atlanteans came from nowhere except the inside of a growing and developing human brain — given a few peaceful millennia to think without constant violent interruptions.

  There are also theories about visitors from other dimensions and time travellers. Neither scenario is impossible — but both have rather low probabilities.

  Second only to the persistent and plausible legends of Atlantis is the legend of Lemuria, another great, water-bounded island or sub-continent that is said to have vanished below the Pacific, much as Atlantis allegedly disappeared beneath the Atlantic — or glided across the Earth’s surface to become present-day Antarctica, as the Flem-Aths argue most convincingly. The name Lemuria seems to have arisen from the efforts of enthusiastic nineteenth-century Darwinian naturalists anxious to find the original homelands of the lemurs, from whom, according to a hypothesis widely accepted by evolutionary theorists at that time, the human race had descended. Ernst Haeckel, an outstanding German naturalist of the time, was convinced that Lemuria not only existed but had been “the cradle of civilization.”

  Is this what Haeckel was looking for?

  Madame Elena Petrovna Blavatsky, born Helena Hahn, lived from 1831 until 1891. She was co-founder of the Theosophical Society, and was convinced by what she described as psychic means that Lemuria had once existed and that it had been the home of one of what she described as “root races” in her book The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888. Madame Blavatsky sited her Lemuria in the Indian Ocean, probably because she was aware of ancient Sanskrit accounts of a sunken land there that had once been called Rutas. Blavatsky’s Lemurians laid eggs and possessed a third eye that was responsible for their great psychic powers. Blavatsky also said that she had learned of the existence of Lemuria after studying the incredibly ancient and mysterious Book of Dzyan.

  Mysterious Madame Blavatsky as drawn by Theo Fanthorpe.

  According to her revelations, the Book of Dzyan had been translated into Ancient Egyptian to become the Book of Thoth, also known as Hermes Trismegistus, the scribe of the Ancient Egyptian pantheon of gods. If this is the case, then the very, very old truths in the Book of Dzyan may also have been inscribed or encoded into the mysterious Emerald Tablets associated with Hermes Trismegistus. At least one of the Book of Dzyan’s mystical teachings is compatible with the higher teachings of all the great world religions: “Sow kindly acts and thou shalt reap their fruition. Inaction when a goodly deed is required is tantamount to an evil act … To reach Nirvana, the seeker needs self-knowledge, and true self-knowledge comes from deeds of love and compassion.”

  Not surprisingly, this vital moral wisdom can not only be found in Ancient Egyptian texts, but with slight variations of syntax and emphasis it appears to underpin many of the other old, sacred writings.

  Rudolf Steiner was another mystic who was certain that he had psychic information about Lemuria. The most plausible of the Lemurian theories is that the Hawaiian archipelago is all that is left of its ancient mountain peaks.

  Citizens of many Pacific Islands have closely allied versions of a lost land that they refer to as either Mu or Lemuria. Where these accounts differ from the accounts of Atlantis is in the strangeness of the Lemurians. They are seen almost as a distinct and separate race, differing qualitatively from other ancient human beings who would be acknowledged and recognized as normal brothers and sisters by twenty-first-century Homo sapiens.

  Another submerged land theory centres on the mysterious Oera Linda Book and its enigmatic references to Atland or Aldland, a large land mass said to have existed in the North Sea between the U.K. and the Netherlands. Published in 1876 by Trubners of London, who were well known and widely respected in the profession, the Oera Linda Book claimed to be a translation of a work originally compiled in the thirteenth century. This early manuscript was written in Frisian and told (among other things) of how a Frisian king named Inka had sailed away towards the setting sun and founded a new kingdom in a great land far to the west of Europe. If this was Atlantis to which Inka sailed, some theorists have wondered whether the word Inca (Peruvian for king) came from there. Was the implication in the Oera Linda Book that King Inka of Frisia was the founder of the Inca Empire? Many scholars regard the Oera Linda Book as a complete fabrication, partly because a prehistoric Frisian would have been thousands of years wrong for the founder of the Inca Empire in South America. But if the supposed — and widely accepted — thirteenth-century date for the rise to power of the Inca Empire inadvertently overlooks a much earlier founding date, then there may be a link between the supposed North Sea kingdom of Atland, Atlantis, and the early civilizations of South America, with their high technology and culture.

  It is postulated by some researchers that the Oera Linda Book was the property of the Oera Linda family for many centuries. A shipwright named Andreas Oera Linda, who worked for the Netherlands Navy in the early 1800s, allegedly had charge of it then. His heir, Cornelius, was still a child when Andreas died around 1820, so the vitally important original manuscript passed into the custody of Andreas’s daughter, Aafje. Years later there was a quarrel between Aafje and Cornelius, and the Oera Linda Book eventually went to Dr. Verwijs of Leeuwarden Library. He translated it into Dutch in the early 1870s, and William Sandbach translated it into English for the Trubner version of 1876. Despite the doubts and controversies hovering around it, the Oera Linda Book may yet be justified by sophist
icated twenty-first-century marine archaeology.

  As recently as September 2003, Dr. Penny Spikins of Newcastle University was examining the seabed near Tynemouth, Northumberland, U.K., when she came across Mesolithic artifacts that were many thousands of years old. David Miles, chief archaeologist for English Heritage, regards Dr. Spikins’s seabed discoveries as highly significant.

  Other submarine explorers, including Viatscheslav Koudriavtsev from Moscow’s prestigious Institute of Metahistory, are very interested in the Lost Land of Lyonesse, said to have been submerged millennia ago off the coast of Cornwall, U.K.

  Many researchers attempt to offer these overlapping — but sometimes contradictory — legends of Atland, Lyonesse, and Lemuria with persistent ancient religious accounts of a great flood that devastated the Earth millennia ago.

  There is no smoke without fire, and there are very few myths and legends that do not have some connection — however tenuous — with historical reality. There are real probabilities that at least one of these great-sunken-land legends will turn out to have a substantial basis in prehistoric fact.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mysteries of the Circumnavigators

  Drake’s great voyage in the Golden Hinde (originally called The Pelican) created almost as many mysteries as his magnificent feat of circumnavigation solved. Born in Devon in 1540, he was the son of a Protestant preacher in what was then Catholic England. Young Drake grew up to become one of the greatest seamen of his day. In 1577 there was a semi-secret negotiation between Drake and Elizabeth I that enabled him to set sail for the Pacific. Ostensibly, Drake and his five ships were looking for the elusive Northwest Passage. In fact, they had a covert commission from the queen to see what they could carve out of the Spanish Empire for her. There were some very secret whispers that Drake had actually met Elizabeth before — in a somewhat clandestine romantic mode — and that might have helped to persuade her to accede to his request in 1577.

  Because of the political necessity to keep Drake’s great adventure camouflaged from Spain, accounts of the circumnavigation are less than accurate in places, while the great secret of Drake’s “missing history” has never been satisfactorily solved. All that can be said with any reasonable certainty is that there are significant, unexplained gaps in the chronicle of his reckless, adventurous, swashbuckling life.

  It is even possible that Drake’s Devonshire lads made it all the way up to Nova Scotia — to give any observant Spanish ships the idea that he really was going off to find the Northwest Passage. If he had, in fact, visited Nova Scotia, it is even possible that he and his sturdy, efficient crewmen from Devon and Cornwall — especially those with unique Cornish tin-mining skills — might have been the creators of the Oak Island Money Pit, just off Chester, a few miles south of Halifax. But if Drake and his men had created that amazing structure — what had they done it for? Had they already taken Spanish treasure to hide there, as a sort of mariners’ pension fund? Or was Drake’s wealth following his buccaneering work up the Pacific coast of America and Canada not entirely from pillaging Spanish settlements and Spanish treasure galleons? Was he, like George Anson — a later circumnavigator who also came home fabulously rich — possibly aware of the ancient secret of the legendary prehistoric Arcadian Treasure?

  Tragically, Drake’s excitingly adventurous career ended far too soon. He died — possibly of dysentery — on January 28, 1596, when he was still only in his mid-fifties and commanding his ship off the coast of Panama.

  The legend of Drake’s drum is another unsolved mystery of the sea. Drums are an integral part of many magical rituals; the beat of a drum links human beings with the rhythms of nature. The sound of waves beating against the shore is the ocean’s own great drum. It’s possible that thoughts of the sea’s drumming passed through the great buccaneer’s mind as he lay dying. He told his men to take the famous drum that had accompanied him all around the world back to his home in Buckland Abbey near Plymouth. His orders were duly obeyed and the drum can still be seen there.

  Legends tend to change over the years. Drake’s original instructions were that the drum should be beaten to call him when England was in danger; he would then come back and defend his homeland until the enemy had been defeated. The modern version is that the drum beats on its own when England is in peril. There are well-authenticated reports that the drum has been heard at least three times over the past century: first in 1914 when World War I started; again aboard the British flagship Royal Oak when the German fleet surrendered at Scapa Flow in 1918; and finally at Dunkirk. There is even a semi-legendary account of a young British soldier floundering in the water between Dunkirk and Dover after his rescue ship had been sunk by German action. Perhaps the exhausted soldier was delirious or hallucinating because of his ordeal, but he claimed afterwards that he had been picked up by an old British warship of the type that had beaten the Armada centuries before, that his rescuers had been dressed in the sailors’ clothes of a bygone age — and had spoken with strong west country accents!

  Whether it was Drake and his men who saved the young soldier from Dunkirk, and whether his drum ever sounded that day, are unsolved mysteries of the sea. What is certain, and fully authenticated, is that Drake’s great feat of circumnavigation was destined to be emulated almost two hundred years later by Admiral George Anson.

  Beautiful but mysterious Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, U.K., birthplace of Admiral Anson, who circumnavigated the world and came back with vast wealth in 1744.

  Baron Anson, Admiral of the Fleet, was born in mysterious Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, U.K., on April 23 (St. George’s Day) in 1697. He joined the navy in 1712, commanded a Pacific Squadron in 1740, circumnavigated the world, and returned safely in 1744. Raised to the peerage in 1747, he became first lord of the admiralty in 1751 and admiral of the fleet in 1761 — a richly deserved promotion for a superb sailor and an expert, humane commander. He lived barely a year to enjoy it; he died on June 6, 1762, at the age of sixty-five.

  The Admiral’s ancestor, William Anson, a successful and prosperous lawyer from Dunston, bought Shugborough Hall in 1624. As a lawyer, Anson, born in the 1580s, was almost certainly an acquaintance, and probably a friend, of his brilliant — but controversial — older contemporary, Sir Francis Bacon, the leading lawyer of his day. Bacon himself was born in 1561 and died in 1626, two years after Anson acquired Shugborough.

  Although Francis was reputedly the son of Sir Nicolas and Lady Bacon, his parents were known to be fanatically devoted to Queen Elizabeth I, and there were politically dangerous rumours at the time suggesting that Francis was, in fact, the queen’s own son, secretly smuggled out of the palace and entrusted to the care of the totally loyal Bacons. If there was any truth in those rumours, then who was the brilliant Francis Bacon’s real biological father?

  One of the most sensational suggestions was that Elizabeth had had a clandestine affair with the dashing young Francis Drake — later to become one of England’s greatest maritime heroes. Drake was a handsome and virile twenty-one-year-old when Francis Bacon was born. Bacon might have been hinting at this hidden truth when he wrote the cryptic phrase “Knowledge is power” — Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est — in his Meditationes Sacrae, de Haeresibus. To what strange and secret knowledge did Francis Bacon have access, and what power did it give him? Was it merely the knowledge of his true parentage — or did it concern a source of enormous hidden wealth and knowledge that lay carefully concealed overseas? If Drake was Francis Bacon’s father, it has to be remembered that he circumnavigated the world long before Admiral Anson achieved that feat. Did Drake pass secrets to his illegitimate royal son, Francis Bacon, that later went to William Anson of Shugborough? The deepest, most important symbolism behind the Arcadian myth may well be that Arcadia represents some distant and remote place where a vast treasure — of secret knowledge, or of actual wealth — lies waiting for the fearless sailor.

  Moving from myth and legend to a scientific and historical
appraisal of the original inhabitants of Arcadia, they seem to have been occupying the wild hills of the Greek Peloponnesus since time immemorial — Curtis N. Runnels, for example, writing in the Scientific American in March 1995, suggested that the ancestors of the Arcadians might have been there fifty thousand years ago. Local tradition speaks of them colourfully as a tribe “older than the Moon.” Might that vivid phrase also hint at their extraterrestrial origin? These ancient and mysterious people were famous for their enviably idyllic, leisurely, and libidinous lifestyle. Were they also guardians of some incomprehensible knowledge? Was their casually simplistic, idyllic, rural lifestyle merely a highly successful cover for their vital duties as keepers of the Arcadian treasure? Was that treasure actual wealth, or was it secret knowledge that produced power and wealth? The knowledge of those arcane Arcadian treasure mysteries is often thought by researchers who specialize in such areas to have been entrusted to very ancient secret societies. Their carefully veiled knowledge may well be close to the heart of the mystery of the circumnavigators and the vast wealth they acquired.

  Bacon was known to be a secretive man, one involved in many mysteries. His great friend and admirer, the dramatist, poet, and academic Ben Jonson (1572–1637), wrote of him in a birthday poem: “The fire, the wine, the men! And in the midst / Thou stand’st as if some Mysterie thou did’st!”

  Some of those mysteries may well have been transmitted and received via the riddle of the secret watermark codes that were apparently circulating among the leading men of his day. The watermark codes themselves could well be strong links with vast unsolved mysteries lying beyond the sea. Were those who knew the secret of the ancient and mysterious Arcadian treasure symbolizing clues to it in their ship and anchor watermarks?