Atlantis Beneath the Ice

by Rand Flem-Ath

  In History of the Byzantine Empire: 324–1453, A. A. Vasiliev summarized the conditions that led to the attack on Constantinople. “Thus, in the preparations for the Fourth Crusade, two men were of first importance: Pope Innocent III, as a representative of the spiritual element in the crusade sincerely wished to take the Holy Land from the hands of the Muhammedans and was absorbed in the idea of union: and the Doge Enrico Dandolo, as a representative of the secular, earthly element, put first material, commercial purposes.”5

  Dandolo had forced the focus of the crusade to the subject of his own wrath until eventually it had nothing to do with the Holy Land. First he unleashed the warriors on the city of Zara, which had recently seceded from the Venetians. Here was a war of Christian versus Christian—a gross pillage.

  This “false crusade” then turned toward the ultimate prize: Constantinople. In June of 1203, the crusaders’ fleet arrived there. A French soldier described the effect the great city had on Dandolo’s troops.

  Now you may imagine that those who had never before seen Constantinople looked upon it very earnestly, for they never thought there could be in all the world so rich a city, when they saw the high walls and magnificent towers that enclosed it round about, the rich palaces and mighty churches, of which there were so many that no one would have believed it who had not seen it with his own eyes—and the height and length of that city which above all others was sovereign. And be it known to you that no man was of such sturdy courage but his flesh trembled: and it was no wonder, for never was so great an enterprise undertaken by anyone since the creation of the world.6

  Constantinople fell on April 13, 1204. Describing the scene, Vasiliev writes, “After taking the city, for three days, the Latins treated the city with appalling cruelty and pillaged everything which had been collected in Constantinople for many centuries. Neither churches, nor relics, nor monuments of art, nor private possessions were spared or respected . . . many libraries were plundered: manuscripts were destroyed.”7

  Dandolo had his revenge.

  Maps, manuscripts, marble statues, and four life-size Alexandrian bronze horses were taken to Venice as the spoils of war. But another treasure, of a different sort, would arrive shortly before the end of the century.

  In the late 1290s, Marco Polo, his father, and his uncle returned to Venice after having spent more than two decades living in the heart of the Mongolian Empire of Kublai Khan. Polo had been fifteen when he left home, and he, his father, and uncle were unrecognizable to their families after their long absence. The travelers arranged a great banquet to celebrate their homecoming. The event provided plenty of gossip, as Polo’s earliest biographer, John Baptist Ramusio, recorded.

  They invited a number of their kindred to an entertainment, which they took care to have prepared with great state and splendor in that house of theirs; and when the hour arrived for sitting down to the table they came forth of their chamber all three clothed in crimson satin, fashioned in long robes reaching down to the ground such as people in those days wore within doors. And when water for the hands had been served, and the guests were set, they took off those robes and put on others of crimson damask, whilst the first were by their orders cut up and divided among the servants. Then after partaking of some of the dishes they went out again and came back in robes of crimson velvet, and when they had again taken their seats, the second suits were divided as before. When dinner was over they did the like with the robes of velvet, after they had put on dresses of the ordinary fashion worn by the rest of the company. These proceedings caused much wonder and amazement among the guests. But when the cloth had been drawn, and all the servants had been ordered to retire from the dining hall, Messer Marco, as the youngest of the three, rose from the table, and, going into another chamber, brought forth the three shabby dresses of coarse stuff which they had worn when they first arrived. Straightaway they took sharp knives and began to rip up some of the seams and welts, and to take out of them jewels of the greatest value in vast quantities, such as rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds and emeralds, which had all been stitched up in those dresses in so artful a fashion that nobody could have suspected the fact. For when they took leave of the Great Khan they had changed all the wealth that he had bestowed upon them into this mass of rubies, emeralds, and other jewels, being well aware of the impossibility of carrying with them so great an amount in gold over a journey of such extreme length and difficulty. Now this exhibition of such a huge treasure of jewels and precious stones, all tumbled out upon the table, threw the guests into fresh amazement, insomuch that they seemed quite bewildered and dumbfounded. And now they recognized that in spite of all former doubts these were in truth those honored and worthy gentlemen of the Ca’Polo that they claimed to be; and as all paid the greatest honor and reverence.8

  Shortly after this marvelous occasion the young Polo became involved in one of the many wars that the Italian cities waged between each other. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for literature and history, Marco Polo found himself a shackled prisoner of war in Genoa. He shared his cell with Rustichello of Pisa, a writer who also had had his freedom sacrificed to war. As they shuffled around the dark jail, Marco reminisced endlessly about his wondrous adventures in the East, where he had been free in body and mind to explore the mysteries of an ancient civilization so strange and incomparable to his own.

  The writer in Rustichello was awakened and fascinated. He urged Polo to allow him to record his adventures for posterity. Excitedly, he scribbled page after page and created a book that would fire the imagination of generations who grew thirsty for the treasures of the Orient, spurred on by the glimpses provided by the tales of Marco Polo.

  Amid the passion that gripped the Europeans for the silk, spices, gold, and precious stones of the East, a gem of a different sort was inadvertently passed over. Marco Polo had brought back, safely tucked away with his precious jewels, a map of the world that showed a great southern island continent. The map depicts two circles inside a vast ocean. The top circle represents the world of Asia, Europe, and Africa. But it also reveals a southern counterpart.

  The notion of another continent located in the far south became, once again, a part of European geographic knowledge. The idea of a great island continent in the Southern Hemisphere had drifted in and out of favor for many centuries. Pythagoras spoke of it in the sixth century BCE, and his tutor, Sonchis, described it in detail to Solon. But during the Dark Ages, knowledge of the island was lost to Western Europe. After the fall of Rome the use of Greek began to decline in the West, and consequently only ancient books written in Latin were consulted.

  The only known work in Latin on ancient geography was written by Mela (ca. 43 CE) the famous Roman geographer. He taught that a climatic belt called the Torrid Zone9 encircled the globe, dividing and separating the northern inhabitable regions from those in the south. He claimed that the Torrid Zone was so hot that the sea boiled. Anyone who attempted to cross from one hemisphere to the other would be swallowed by the scalding waters. These teachings were fully accepted by most Christian priests of the Middle Ages.

  However, it seemed to some that the existence of lands in the south, totally inaccessible because of the impassable Torrid Zone, raised serious questions of faith—questions concerning the salvation of the people who Mela claimed lived on the other side of this impassable barrier. If the word of Jesus could not be transmitted to these poor souls, how would they receive salvation? To answer this complex theological problem the priests came up with a simple solution: they burned all maps depicting any southern land.

  How many maps of Atlantis were destroyed we can never know. We do know that by the time Marco Polo returned from the Orient with his treasured map, the existence of the great island continent in the south had been forgotten.

  The man who first took the terrible risk of exploring this “boiling ocean” was a Portuguese sailor by the name of Gil Eannes. Eannes took the chance, but the inspiration, funding, and will behind the eff
ort originated with Prince Henry of Portugal. The son of King John I and Queen Philippa, Henry had older brothers and so escaped most royal duties. This enabled the prince to pursue his passion for knowledge and discovery. Later generations called him Prince Henry the Navigator, and his name ranks first and foremost in the annals of the modern scientific exploration of the globe.

  At Sagres, on the Portuguese coast, Henry created a refuge for scholars. There he voraciously collected all the maps, globes, and accounts of exploration that could be bought. In 1428, his older brother Pedro had been greeted with great respect when he traveled to Venice. He returned with two precious gifts for Henry. The first was a copy of the account of Marco Polo’s travels. Henry was delighted with the book, but even more thrilled by the second gift: “a collection of world maps.”10

  It seems probable that some of these maps were once housed in the sacred cartography room of Constantinople and before that the library at Alexandria. These outlines of distant lands sketched across crumbling parchments became Henry’s obsession. In his mind the maps were more than lifeless lines drawn by people long dead. He had to know where they led.

  The problem wasn’t simple. There were plenty of maps on offer that were the work of charlatans more than willing to sell “secrets” to the young prince. To address discrepancies between the various maps, Henry gathered together as many scholars as he could afford, and sometimes more than he could afford.

  Finally, Henry concluded that the mystery of the maps’ veracity could only be solved by launching a voyage into the void. He equipped vessels and crew for a vast project of exploration. Convinced that the Torrid Zone was passable and that navigation of a southern route to India was possible, Henry instructed his captain, Eannes, to set sail for the south. The crew didn’t share Henry’s confidence in his secret maps. As the temperature climbed they were convinced that it was only a matter of time before the very seas would be boiling. They returned to Portugal pleading that the voyage was doomed.

  Henry decided to speak to the sailors himself. He told them that they would have to sail farther than ever before, but that their fears were unfounded. Tales of boiling waters were fabrications. He appealed to their pride of seamanship and, more pragmatically, their interest in material reward, saying “If there were any authority for them, I could find an excuse for you. But indeed the stories are spread by men of little repute: the type of seamen who know only the coast of Flanders and how to enter well-known ports, and are too ignorant to navigate by compass and chart. Go forth, then, and heed none of their words; but make your journey straightaway. For the grace of God you can gain from this voyage nothing but profit and honour.”11

  The sailors were inspired, and Captain Eannes’s voyage to the south dispelled once and for all the notion of an impassable Torrid Zone. A vast door had swung open. The world seemed to shrink.

  In 1432, Henry sent Goncalo Velho into the western sea to claim the islands that his maps revealed were there. Velho returned without sighting the Azores and insisted that they didn’t exist. The prince ordered the reluctant Velho to retrace his steps, telling him, “There is an island there, go back and find it.”12 Henry’s persistence paid off. The Azores were found, and the doorway to the West and the South was open.

  In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the last scholars fled west. Their arrival in Italy is now considered one of the important incentives for the Italian Renaissance. Others heard with relief that a prince of Portugal would welcome scholars. Intellectual refugees poured into the city of Sagres, and Henry was overwhelmed with plans for potential discoveries. Because of Prince Henry the Navigator’s influence, Portugal became the new world center for ancient maps.

  In later centuries, several researchers, including Charles Hapgood, claimed that the Portuguese had early knowledge of undiscovered sections of America13 and Antarctica.14 It seems that they held accurate maps of undiscovered lands long before Columbus and the rest of the famous explorers set sail. Through a long, treacherous route carved by persecution and barbarism, Atlantean maps had fallen into Henry’s hands. He not only saw their value and significance, but was also in a privileged position to act on them.

  Sixteen years after Henry’s death, a young Italian adventurer was shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal. Having been wounded in a sea battle, Christopher Columbus clung desperately to broken fragments of his ship and swam for ten kilometers until he was washed up on the Portuguese shore. It was 1476, and he was welcomed and nursed back to health by a colony of Italian countrymen from his home city of Genoa. Columbus began a new career in the service of Portugal and settled down in Lisbon to become a mapmaker with his younger brother, Bartholomew. Eventually, Christopher married into one of the most respected families of Portugal. His star began to rise.

  Columbus’s father-in-law had been a close friend of the now dead Prince Henry, and his mother-in-law was said to have given Columbus some greatly valued maps that her husband had left upon his death.15 Nowhere on Earth could the young Columbus have been better situated to begin his famous voyage westward. What secret maps he saw and how many of them we don’t know (see chapter 1). But despite this great advantage, he never achieved his quest to find a westerly route to India.

  The man who did discover the route and who proved the stunning fact that the world was round was a Portuguese seaman who, like Columbus, sailed in the service of Spain after having learned his trade in Lisbon. Ferdinand Magellan was born of a noble Portuguese family in 1480. Magellan became a page to the queen of Portugal and was required, as part of his education, to study all the arts of sailing, including cartography. In 1496, he became a clerical worker in the king of Portugal’s marine department. He, even more than Columbus, had access to Prince Henry’s wonderful collection of secret Atlantean maps.

  Before he left for Spain, Magellan gained entry to the royal chartroom. There he found a globe that showed a strait at the tip of the still unexplored edge of South America. When he arrived at the Spanish court Magellan proposed his plan to sail to India via a westerly route. A witness recorded his pitch to the royals: “Magellan had a well-painted globe in which the whole world was depicted, and on it he indicated the route he proposed to take, saving that the straight was left purposely blank so that no one should anticipate him.”16

  Magellan set sail in 1519 with five ships. Crossing the Atlantic he followed the coast of South America to “discover” the straits that now bear his name. He named the Pacific Ocean but did not complete his journey around the globe. He was killed by natives in the Philippines. In 1522, one of his ships made a triumphant return to Spain, the first vessel since the fall of Atlantis to have circumnavigated the globe.

  AN EGYPTIAN MAP OF ATLANTIS

  In 1976, we came across another Atlantean map. It had been originally discovered by a meticulous researcher, Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), who claimed that it was an accurate Egyptian map of the lost continent of Atlantis. It may have been stolen by the Romans during the occupation of Egypt and rediscovered by Kircher.

  Kircher was born to Anna Gansek and Johannes Kircher, a bailiff of the Abbey of Fulda in Germany. His father was very concerned about the fate of his sixth son, who, it seemed, wouldn’t amount to much. Kircher was lazy and showed no special talent, except for getting into trouble. His first application to join the Jesuits was refused on the grounds of “insufficient mental ability.” But a series of near fatal accidents brought focus to the boy’s life. “One was the near escape from drowning when Athanasius, while swimming in a forbidden pool, was swept down a mill-race and under a mill wheel; another time it was an almost miraculous escape from being trampled to death, when, having worked his way to the front of a great crowd of onlookers, he was pushed out into the path of racing horses; finally there was the severe accident, resulting in a hernia, which came from an abortive attempt to show his skill in ice skating.”17

  Kircher’s father impressed on the boy his great fortune in surviving so many near misses, and finally,
the man who would come to be known as the “universal genius” settled down to serious study. Eventually, in 1618, he was accepted by the Jesuits. The order demanded physical fitness. Kircher was afraid that his skating injury would jeopardize his position and tried to keep it secret. His limp, however, was noticed by the fathers. He recounted, “The ills from which I was suffering forced me to walk with tottering steps. My superiors immediately noticed this, and I was obliged to tell the whole story. A surgeon was called in. He was horrified at the state of my legs . . . and pronounced me incurable. . . . I was told that since no medical attention could do me any good, I would be sent home from the Novitiate if I did not get better within a month.”18

  For the first time in his life, Kircher prayed for a miracle. Within a few days he could walk with a steady gait. His place within the order was secured.

  The Jesuit scientists were among the most educated men in Europe, and Kircher’s admission to their ranks ensured him as fine an education as was possible in the seventeenth century. Eventually he would rise “to hold the most honourable place among these scientists of the Society of Jesus.”19 But the road would be a long one. He was showing great promise when the Thirty Years War erupted over Germany. Kircher and his fellow Jesuits were forced to flee from the invading armies in the dead of winter with insufficient clothing and no food. His biographer, Conor Reilly, wrote:

  He would never forget the sufferings of that journey. Snow was deep on the roads, and in the devastated countryside the young Jesuits could find little food or shelter. Exhausted and hungry they finally reached the Rhine. The river was frozen over. On the advice of the local people, who took them for deserters from one of the warring armies, they began to cross the ice. It seemed quite solid but Kircher, who was leading the way, suddenly saw open water before him. He turned back, but a gap had opened between him and his companions; he was trapped on an island of ice. The river current caught the floe on which he stood and swung it out into midstream. His companions could do nothing to help: they implored God and his Blessed Mother to save him; they watched as he was swept along, until he was out of sight; then they crossed the river at another point and made their way to a Jesuit College on the west bank of the Rhine.