Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

by David King

  SHOCKED AND DEEPLY HURT, Rudbeck was also angry at the way the professors had behaved. All his hard work had been brushed aside, haughtily dismissed, and answered with little more than “one thousand curses,” hurled from the very center of the university that he had so energetically served. With his reputation stung and his pride wounded, Rudbeck retreated, as one said, like Achilles into his tent.

  Resolved to leave the council to its deserved fate, Rudbeck threw himself into the search for the new world envisioned on the old maps. He worked day and night, chasing many “beautiful things.” One of the first discoveries would not only enlarge his vision of the past, but also transform it beyond all recognition. Rudbeck had reached the astonishing conclusion that Sweden must have been the original cradle of civilization.

  It all started when he was out investigating the old burial mounds and runic stones in the countryside. He brought along a very special instrument that would soon accompany him everywhere he went, and would enable him to invent an extraordinary dating method. To understand Rudbeck’s theory, it is important to understand this method—one of the truly innovative, even pioneering results of his mad adventure.

  Rudbeck had observed that the surface of the earth, whenever it remained undisturbed, was covered by a layer of fertile black soil (Latin humus, or colloquial Swedish matjord). This layer could never be found underground, but rather developed gradually as a result of decayed leaves, vegetation, dust, and other “contamination” deposited by snow, rain, or wind. Rudbeck explained that “no rain or snow is so pure as to be without soil, which I myself as well as other natural philosophers have observed and found out.”

  This is not only an early awareness of the problem of air pollution and one of the first on record in the modern world, but it also offers a wonderful insight into how ordinary soil can help date objects from the distant past.

  First, though, however perceptive this observation seemed, it had to be tested. To verify his hypothesis, Rudbeck placed a container in his garden at the beginning of winter. Several months later, after the snow had melted and the rain had evaporated, there was indeed a thin layer of dirt at the bottom of his vessel. If left untouched over a period of time, Rudbeck further concluded, this soil would, like the specimens he had found, continue to develop everywhere with “distinctions in color, thickness, and layer.” And if these distinctions, presumably a function of time, could be measured, perhaps they would provide clues to the age of any surrounding monuments.

  So Rudbeck hunted down artifacts, stones, buildings, any significant structures, and then put his new device, a skillfully crafted measuring stick, to the test, trying to translate the nearby layers of soil into a more precise number of years. He searched the most distant places he could reach, far away from cultivated land, since regular working of the soil upset his method. He ventured out to remote mountains, cliffs, and crags, where it was “impossible for any human to live” and where he could reach only “with the greatest effort.” Everywhere he examined the soil, and measured the fine distinctions in its layers.

  Rudbeck’s archaeological dating method assumed that the soil offers a key to discovering the age of nearby structures. His measuring stick is depicted on the right side.

  All the while, too, Rudbeck was gradually refining his method. Comparing the data of constructions whose age he knew with those whose age he could reasonably deduce, Rudbeck proceeded to test his method thousands of times. The knowledge of elderly town residents was a valuable complement, Rudbeck thought, to his own rigorous approach. One nearly one-hundred-year-old man, Ingelbrecht Swensson, for instance, offered friendly assistance, pointing Rudbeck in the direction of likely places to find humus that had not been disturbed for a very long time. Varying his samples as much as possible, Rudbeck measured the distinctions, and again marveled at how gradually the humus actually developed.

  Equipped with his measuring stick, Rudbeck hurried to an alluring site outside of the university town: the famous giant burial mounds of Old Uppsala. With the largest one standing twelve meters high and spanning fifty-five meters at the base, these monuments, most certainly tombs of dead kings, dominated the surrounding countryside. Objects of curiosity and romance for centuries, they are still today seen as royal resting places; in one theory enjoying wide currency, these mounds are the tombs of three pagan warrior kings, Aun (Onela), Egil, and Adils, mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.

  By the end of a lengthy process, after some reported 16,000(!) tests, Rudbeck had found a ratio between the depth of the accumulated humus and the time that had passed. Thanks to the Great Flood, some four thousand years ago, which had swept away all existing humus and, as it were, reset the parameters of history, Rudbeck established his formula: one-fifth of a finger corresponded to one hundred years. Each tenth of a quarter on his measuring stick corresponded to five hundred years.

  Later, when he announced this discovery to the world, Rudbeck would add specific instructions for the reader who wished to make his own measuring stick and put it to use reading the layers of the soil. For optimal results, Rudbeck advised choosing a dry day, long after any rain, and looking for surfaces of “red, gray, or white sand, or clay,” which provide much better contrasts to the black humus. One should learn, also, to tell it by touch: humus differed from the other soil, as it felt “like velvet,” a “fine cloth” compared with the coarse and hardy normal fare. Indeed, after applying Rudbeck’s dating method, natural philosophers on the Continent testified to its success in unraveling the secrets from inside the “black coat” that covered the earth.

  As a result of his indefatigable efforts, Rudbeck came to the startling realization that there was “no more certain” way at our disposal to date the events in the past. Historians may make mistakes, and even deliberately mislead, but the dirt showed “clearer than the sun” how old an artifact actually was. Field archaeologists all over the world still rely on studying distinctions in layers of soil to reach an approximate age of surrounding objects, though geologists are commonly credited with inventing this method of stratigraphy. Yet, almost two hundred years before, Rudbeck, too, had measured the layers of the soil to date the ruins, runes, and relics dotting the Swedish countryside.

  What’s more, this truly pioneering method confirmed that the history of Sweden stretched back to 2300 B.C.—some fifteen hundred years before the first Olympic games (776 B.C.). Founded supposedly by the mighty Heracles in honor of the god Zeus, this celebration of the games was traditionally one of the oldest dates in the accepted chronology of ancient history. Even more striking, Rudbeck’s dating method also showed that a civilization had flourished in Sweden well over one thousand years before the Trojan War!

  The implications were immense. In an age still under the spell of the Renaissance, many humanists greatly admired the achievements of classical antiquity and praised its merits for the modern world. Ancient wisdom was found almost everywhere, encapsulated in pithy maxims, hidden in veiled allegories about the gods, and displayed in memorable portraits of great heroes. All of this legacy served to provide perfect models for attaining eloquence and excellence, master keys for unlocking the secret “treasure chest of wisdom.” Now Rudbeck was proudly proclaiming the discovery in the far north of a civilization that threatened to upset established traditions.

  His claim meant that all the leading figures of the grand epics the Iliad and the Odyssey—Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, and Agamemnon, as well as Hector, Paris, and Aeneas—must have lived significantly more recently than the warriors buried in Old Uppsala. Since Homer’s accounts of the Trojan War were the earliest such narratives in European history—so early, indeed, that they were sometimes treated as history and at other times as mythology—this meant that Sweden had been populated well before those famous heroes rushed into the Trojan War, to sing along with Homer, like the “unnumbered flies that swarm round the cowsheds in the spring, when pails are full of milk.” In fact, given standard historical chronologies of the day, this mean
t that Sweden was the oldest known civilization in Europe—and possibly in the world.

  At this time Rudbeck’s true colors shone through: his preference for reading what early natural philosophers often called “the Great Book of Nature”; his reliance on observation and his own experience over the evidence derived from authority, just as when he made his discovery of the lymphatic glands. No less important, Rudbeck was showing his independent spirit, his maverick willingness to go his own way, even when it meant putting more trust in the dirt than in the greatest and most celebrated chronologies of the ancient past.

  SUCH RADICAL—indeed revolutionary—conclusions urged Rudbeck to probe into the history of Sweden, seeking an explanation for its great age. Reasoning like the Cartesian that many suspected he was, Rudbeck began at the beginning, hoping to find something fundamental that he could not doubt. As described in the seventh chapter of the Book of Genesis: “On that day, all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.”

  Given this destruction, Rudbeck reasoned that all evidence of the earliest period of world history had been lost. The oldest period that any historian could possibly reconstruct, according to Rudbeck, was the time immediately after the Great Flood, the postdiluvian world, when Noah; his wife; their three sons, Japheth, Shem, and Ham; and their wives dared to leave the massive ark, and started to rebuild human civilization. This momentous event not only appeared on almost all standard chronologies of the day, usually calculated as anno mundi (“the year of the world”) 1656, or 2400 B.C., but it also became the undoubtable foundation to his own theory.

  Then Rudbeck asked himself two crucial questions: How did the earth get repopulated, and why did the descendants of Noah settle in Sweden? His answer was as logical as it was grounded in biblical evidence.

  The key to these questions lay in what sources of food were available to the survivors of the ark. No cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, or other land-dwelling animals, Rudbeck reasoned, would have possibly survived on an earth flooded for 150 (or 190, counting the first forty of rain) days. Animals of the air would also have died, since they needed food as well as places to rest from flight, both of which would have been underwater.

  It was not necessary to be a botanist to understand that such a state would have eliminated most vegetation, too. This could be inferred, Rudbeck pointed out, by observing the effects of spring floods in Uppsala. These leave so much sand and gravel in their wake that they end up choking any surviving vegetation. Only a few trees such as willows and sallow flourish in such surroundings, and if a simple spring flood causes so much damage, imagine a flood on an enormous scale. In short, no animals, birds, or vegetation would have lived. But fish, on the other hand, were a different matter.

  Creatures of the water would have been better positioned to survive this cataclysm. Nowhere in the sacred text were fish specifically ruled out as destroyed, and reason also suggested that they would have survived, flourishing in their natural environment. In this way, fish provided a central element in Rudbeck’s vision of the past, and a key to a new understanding of the earliest events in history.

  Given the passage of time since the waters of the Flood subsided in 2400 B.C., and the population of the world in Rudbeck’s day, 1670, simple mathematical calculations showed that fish were absolutely necessary in order to repopulate the earth. There was simply no other way for the world’s population to reach the present level in such a short period without this huge and steady supply of food. Rudbeck compiled many tables to work this out, calculating the first eight humans, the number of children recorded in the genealogies, and the rate at which the population must have grown, mathematically, for the descendants of Noah to fulfill the command “be fruitful and multiply.” Rudbeck was more convinced than ever about the role of the fish in rebuilding civilization.

  Looking at ancient peoples, Rudbeck asked: Did they not settle near the water? The Greeks colonized around the Mediterranean, as Plato would say, “like frogs around a pond.” The Chaldeans encircled the Persian Gulf, the Chinese gathered around the East Indian Ocean, and the Scythians colonized the Black Sea area. The eminent Harvard historian Frank Manuel noted that Isaac Newton had proposed an early theory of the riverbed origins of civilization in his Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728). Newton was indeed early, but Rudbeck suggested a similar theory almost fifty years before.

  Relentlessly following the reasoning, Rudbeck further pursued this line of thought. Water not only provided the most secure food supply for early humans, and promoted the growth of old civilizations, but helped in other ways as well. Long before the invention of the compass or the systematic use of stars for traveling, rivers offered the best orientation for early explorers, as well as the most reliable source of food on their perilous journeys. Again Rudbeck looked to ancient texts to see if this rationale corresponded with the accounts of the earliest history.

  Beginning with our oldest surviving historian, he turned to Herodotus, “the father of history,” as Cicero called him. This fifth-century-B.C. historian told the story of how an ancient barbarian tribe, the Cimmerians, fled from the even more barbaric Scythians, making the escape by following along the coasts. Julius Caesar similarly wrote about how the ancient Gauls preferred to march along the rivers, particularly when they were lost in foreign lands. Going back into the realm of myth, and one of the oldest journeys on record, Jason and the Argonauts, too, progressed in their search for the Golden Fleece by following the rivers.

  To persuade remaining skeptics, Rudbeck invited them to read the travel reports of explorers in the New World. Even in the modern age, with the mastery of the compass and the ability to read the stars, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and Swedish travelers made progress inland by following the course of rivers.

  Many places of course had fish in abundance, but according to Rudbeck, there was no place that could rival the north. Here the rivers teemed with fish and the land overflowed with abundance. Herring, salmon, pike, cod, mountain cod, whales, whitefish, and so on, all this variety and wealth was made all the more vital when the animals, birds, and vegetation died in the Flood (and the pairs saved on the ark were too few to prevent starvation, let alone suffice to repopulate the earth). This natural asset was still very much tangible in his own day, Rudbeck ventured, pointing out how wealthy Dutch, Norwegian, and English fishermen had become on their trade. It was impossible to count how many distant lands and peoples were still fed by the reservoirs of fish found in northern waters.

  The significance of Rudbeck’s finding was not lost on his contemporaries. In an oration delivered at the University of Kiel in the 1680s, one professor painted a picture of Sweden in a way highly reminiscent of Rudbeck’s vision of a marvelous land that had once served as the cradle of civilization:

  Sweden is rich in metals, overflows with herds and flocks, and in all places crowded with forests… . Which waters in the world gush forth so many kinds of fish one after the other and in greater abundance than those which flow in Sweden?

  Nature has taught the hearts of people, the professor said, to turn like a magnet in a compass to this original homeland in the north. Such a notion would live on for quite a long time, indeed well after many parts of Rudbeck’s story had been abandoned or forgotten.

  As Rudbeck was beginning to see, survival in the earliest times was a matter of following the fish north to Sweden. With this vision of the ancient past, founded on the sacred history, his archaeological dating method, his wide experiences in natural history, and his own logical deduction, Rudbeck concluded that “it simply could not have happened otherwise.”

  And so the search was on. The remains of the world’s oldest civilization lay just out in the countryside—its dirt, its stones, and its fish had yielded the most astounding and unbelievable conclusions, and who knew what else might be found there. Olof Rudbeck was at the beginning of what would be an extraordinary advent
ure. Ultimately, too, he was taking the first steps in another quest, a personal mission to gain redemption after the day he had been so publicly humiliated and thoroughly discredited.

  Meanwhile, Olaus Verelius and Johannes Loccenius were overjoyed with the potential of this project. Both experts fired off letters of support to a dashing count who was then not only chancellor of Uppsala University but also chancellor of the Swedish Empire. Hoping to interest this gentleman in the quest, everyone waited in heightened expectation.

  6

  GAZING AT THE FACE OF THOR

  Not only I, but the whole world, seemed filled with delight. The animals, the houses, even the weather itself reflected the universal joy and serenity… .

  —LUCIUS APULEIUS, THE GOLDEN ASS

  THE MAN THEY HAD in mind was Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, and he sat in a peculiar position. Called “the most beautiful man in the world,” he was a true cavalier who dazzled the court with his wit and charm. As the Chancellor of the Realm, controlling ambassadors, resident diplomats, and the machinery of foreign policy, De la Gardie effectively stood at the summit of authority at a time when Sweden had reached the zenith of its power.

  Behind all the thundering pomp lay a colossal fortune. The count owned about one thousand farms and a couple of hundred estates spread all over Sweden and the Baltic region. Some of these properties were sizable indeed. His castle straddling the beautiful Lake Vänern in west Sweden, Läckö, for instance, had 248 rooms, and 176 servants caring for his every whim. That is, when the he happened to be there, and not at one of his other castles. There were four others alone just in Stockholm and on its outskirts. Ranging from stony medieval fortresses to sprawling baroque spectacles, at least two dozen castles then belonged to Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie.

  Both Verelius and Loccenius knew that the count could, if he wanted, be of great assistance to Olof Rudbeck. He had the power, the wealth, and the status that they lacked—and, more than that, he was known to spend lavishly on parties as well as projects. One observer, an Italian ambassador writing a few months after the Uppsala scholars, noted De la Gardie’s restless pursuits: