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

by David King

  If this book can be a success, then I refer to the blind reverence for such a highly regarded and learned man. But I cannot however avoid making the observation that the Swedes are gullible in the highest degree, perhaps even more than the Germans.

  So Rudbeck’s renegade pursuit was already raising eyebrows among expert antiquarians in the college, and rumors of De la Gardie’s enthusiasm were causing concerns. But at the same time there was a strong tendency to underestimate what this passionate physician was capable of accomplishing.

  IT WAS BECOMING increasingly clear, at least to Olof Rudbeck, that the Scandinavian past had been known among the ancients. He was working with the “greatest energy” to find surviving memories of this lost world in ancient texts, in peasant villages, and anywhere else they might be found. Soon he came across a story that truly caught his imagination.

  This was the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, the skin of a flying ram that had been sacrificed to the gods and was hanging in an oak grove somewhere among the barbarians. Surviving accounts of the journey tell how Jason and his band of heroes, named after their well-crafted ship the Argo, sailed from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. According to Greek tradition, this was nothing less than the oldest sailing venture of all classical mythology. Some even thought that their mighty ship, the fifty-oared Argo, was the first large sailing vessel to ride “the wine-dark sea.”

  When Rudbeck read the accounts, however, he became convinced that the Argonauts had, in their quest, sailed to Sweden. And his efforts to learn about this adventure would lead to what one seventeenth-century English gentleman called the “Heroik undertaking of incomparable Rudbeck,” indeed a “second Argonautick Expedition.”

  A complex figure of classical mythology, Jason did not always show the proper behavior of a hero, and in some portraits he acted like a heartless scoundrel. His adventurous life had begun in great turmoil. As a newborn baby, son of King Aeson of Iolcus in northern Greece, Jason had been smuggled out of his hometown when his ambitious half-uncle Pelias seized the throne. This usurper imprisoned Jason’s father, the rightful king, and then proceeded to carry out a campaign of slaughter, putting to death any of Aeson’s relatives whom he could capture. Amid this bloodbath, the infant Jason was hurried out to the lonely mountain wilds around Mount Pelion.

  There Jason would be raised by the half-man, half-horse centaur Chiron, a wise barbarian who incidentally would teach many future heroes, including the champion Achilles and the Trojan prince Aeneas. After years of training in the arts of life, Jason made his return to the city of Iolcus. With “locks of glorious hair … rippling down in gleaming streams unshorn upon his back,” and sporting a distinctive leopard skin, the young stranger was a sight to behold as he strolled in the town’s marketplace.

  But it was not the hair or the leopard skin that caught his uncle’s attention. “Terror seized him when his glancing eye fell on the clear sign of the single sandal on the man’s right foot.” An ancient oracle had warned Pelias long ago to beware the stranger with the single sandal. Sure enough, there was an unrecognized man with one shoe, as the other had stuck in the mud immediately before his arrival when Jason helped an old woman across a river. That old woman, it turned out, had been the goddess Hera in disguise, and she was so impressed by Jason’s courtesy that she made him one of the few mortals ever to receive her patronage.

  Recalling the warning and fearing its dire consequences, King Pelias saw an opportunity to get rid of this potential threat to his power. He agreed to allow Jason to succeed him on the throne, claiming that his old age was better suited to retirement than kingship. The catch, however, was that Jason would have to travel to the distant shores of Colchis, located on “the unfriendly sea,” to retrieve the famous Golden Fleece. This trophy was needed, the king said, to put a stop to the nasty famine that raged in the town of Iolcus. Pelias was effectively sending Jason on a wild-goose chase.

  Despite his suspicions about his uncle’s motivations, Jason eagerly took up the challenge. He recruited some of the best adventurers in Greece, legendary leaders who figure prominently in the oldest classical stories. The hot-tempered warrior Heracles, the talented harpist Orpheus, and, in some accounts, the beautiful hunter maiden Atalanta, all agreed to come along. Spurred on by the helpful prodding of Jason’s new patron goddess, Hera, the “flower of sailor-men” joined in this quest for the fleece of “gleaming gold.”

  Understandably, many scholars were skeptical about this tale, believing it only a matter of myth or fiction. Over the course of their travels, the crew encountered fire-breathing bulls, men springing up from sown dragon teeth, and of course the giant dragon who guarded the prized Golden Fleece. When the Argo had sailed past the Hellespont into the Black Sea, it seemed that its heroes had entered a world of fantasy and marvels on the fringes of civilization. Yet when Rudbeck reread the oldest, most authoritative accounts of the myth, he became convinced that the voyage contained kernels of historical fact.

  The deep streams, stormy lakes, and crashing rocks all along the way to the ends of the earth, where the shadowy mists prevailed, were not myth, but a somewhat accurate depiction of an actual voyage into the Arctic north.

  THE FIRST TASK was to establish that there were genuine historical elements underlying the many fantastic adventures. In this regard, Rudbeck belonged to a solid historiographical tradition. The majority of ancient authors and some modern scholars had believed that the quest, in some form, had actually occurred.

  Rudbeck, too, sensed the realistic undertones of the story. The ports of call, the amounts of time that passed between their stops, and the overall course of the expedition did not seem particularly strange for an ancient Mediterranean voyage. As Rudbeck’s notes showed, with his calculations still preserved in the archives of the Swedish National Library, the Argonauts made their way from the home port of Iolcus along the Magnesian coast with stops on the islands of Lemnos and Samothrace, as they headed toward the famed city of Troy. This was in line with the ancient way of sailing, which favored, as one modern expert put it, a strategy of “coastal navigation and island-hopping” to facing the open sea.

  The Argonauts passed the difficult straits of the Hellespont (today called Bosporus) that bridged Europe and Asia; they then entered the Black Sea. Next, “hugging the right side of the coast,” they sailed on, overcoming challenges, until they reached the city of Colchis, situated in today’s Georgia. In this land of towering peaks and sweeping plains, the Argonauts accomplished their mission. They gained the renowned Golden Fleece, largely with the aid of the king’s daughter, the sorceress Medea, who had fallen madly in love with the Argo’s captain, Jason.

  What interested Rudbeck most, however, was the journey after the Argonauts had snatched the Golden Fleece and escaped with the king’s daughter, her “maiden’s heart racked by love-cares.”

  As they left Colchis with the king in hot pursuit, the Argonauts were blown off course. The events that followed were never agreed upon in the ancient tales of the myth, or in the many later efforts to penetrate this mystery. In fact, wildly different suggestions have been put forward for the exact path of their disoriented return home by those who have looked for some historical basis for the voyage.

  Some have claimed that Jason came out of the Black Sea into the Caspian Sea, and then into the Indian Ocean, beating a return to the Mediterranean via Lake Tritonis in the Egyptian territories. Others see the Argo continuing along the shores of the Black Sea until it reaches the outlet on the Danube, then following the river down until it empties into the river Po in northern Italy. From here they entered familiar waters either on the Adriatic or the Rhone. Another favorite option was that the Argonauts simply returned the same way that they came, retracing their steps through the Hellespont back to their home in northern Greece. A look at the perils they saw and experienced afterwards, however, made Rudbeck offer a different proposal.

  They did not return the same way they came,
Rudbeck claimed, because that contradicted the words of the blind seer Phineus, who predicted a different route. He had been right with his predictions regarding just about everything else, and there was nothing in the text to show that he had been wrong in this case. For another thing, as Rudbeck might also have added, the westward sailing required to return home clashed with the natural system of winds and currents—so this route was hardly a likely possibility at a time when they were desperate to escape from the king’s fleet.

  As for deciding among the other possible return routes, Rudbeck immediately recognized that the widely differing options were mainly a function of the plethora of surviving accounts of the adventure. Besides the short references in Herodotus’s histories and elsewhere, the most influential versions were the fifth-century-B.C. lyric poet Pindar, particularly his fourth Pythian ode. Encyclopedists from Apollodorus to Diodorus Siculus also recounted the tale in summary form. Even more comprehensive was the third-century-B.C. Apollonius of Rhodes, who gave a stirring treatment in his epic Argonautica. Latin authors came in force as well, with Ovid’s eloquent Metamorphoses and the first-century Roman Valerius Flaccus’s somewhat artificial though never finished Argonautica. The fact that these authorities often contradicted each other made the story even more entangled and difficult to unravel.

  All things being equal, Rudbeck believed that the oldest texts were most likely to capture the truth. Coming nearest in time to the events they purported to describe, the primary accounts had had the least opportunity for errors, envy, and other distortions to intervene. The case of the Argonauts was a classic example of this principle, and Rudbeck proposed going back to the very beginning, before the popular, though late, Hellenistic and Roman versions to the oldest source available.

  With only a few exceptions, classical scholars at the time deemed the so-called Argonautica Orphica vastly older than all other accounts of the quest. According to the standard interpretation, this short, fourteen-hundred-line poem was viewed as part of the secret traditions of the ancient Orphic cult, written by an initiate into those mysteries, probably even by the leader, the legendary guru-shaman Orpheus himself. Although this poem is known today as a much later work, unlikely to be placed earlier than the fourth century A.D. and probably coming even later, Rudbeck was in good company when he traced it back to the mystic leader Orpheus, whose “beautiful music charmed the stubborn rocks upon the mountains and the course of rivers.”

  Relying mainly on the Argonautica Orphica, believed then even to predate Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Rudbeck retraced the steps of the Argonauts’ voyage. Moving north from the Black Sea, they would have passed the swampy marshes and sailed on some rivers through the forests of southern Russia. “Orpheus does not mention the names of the rivers,” Rudbeck acknowledged, and neither did any surviving account. Nevertheless, the terrain of the narrative fit perfectly with the area north of the Black Sea. It was “pure vanity,” Rudbeck thought, to seek the rivers, portages, and immense forests or other topographical features along the Danube, the Caspian, or anywhere other than this likely choice.

  The desire to know if Jason and the Argonauts had in fact reached the Arctic north led to yet another remarkable chapter in Rudbeck’s adventure. For the crux of this theory rested on the assumption that the Argonauts would have sailed from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and then into the Baltic Sea by navigating on the Russian rivers. This would mean that the heroes would have followed the river Tanais, today called the Don, all the way to its sources, where they must have disembarked and pulled their ship over a stretch of land (from Lake Fronovo to the Lovat River) until they reached the mighty Volga. From here they would have passed along other Russian rivers and waterways (the Volshova River, Lake Ladoga) until finally they came out in the “northern sea,” or the Baltic. At this point Jason and the crew would have sailed to the edge of Rudbeck’s lost world.

  This proposed journey would have been daunting but, according to Rudbeck, not far-fetched. Actually this path had been used many times, he said, by Viking raiders in the Norse sagas that he was reading (and that his printing press would soon start publishing, in many cases for the very first time). Besides, the Vikings had a much more difficult challenge than the Argonauts, that is, pulling a small fleet as opposed to only one vessel. The tradition of dragging a ship was very important in that region, still a common feature of daily life for many Russian peasants, Rudbeck added, with plenty of examples of this practice.

  The dotted lines show possible routes of Jason and the Argonauts after they had retrieved the Golden Fleece. Rudbeck believed that the voyagers had sailed from the Black Sea to Sweden, following along the Russian rivers.

  So, in short, Rudbeck asked himself: If the Vikings had taken this route to the south, could the Argonauts not have taken it to the north? With three boats that he intended to use for his own postal service and commercial passenger transport system (the first in Sweden), and with the help of some faithful volunteers, Rudbeck set out to test the possibility of the heroic voyagers’ visit to the ancient golden age under the North Star.

  RUDBECK AND HIS men would have to perform this feat, dragging the ship along at top speeds, in accordance with the time constraints recorded in the epic. One of the great authorities, the seventeenth-century historian Georgius Hornius, had calculated that Jason and his fellow Argonauts would have to have covered a distance of some four hundred Greek stades, or some forty-five (American) miles, and completed the task in only twelve days. This made for an exhausting but, Rudbeck ventured, imminently possible advance of just under four miles per day.

  The boats were fifty-foot yachts built in Rudbeck’s shipyard, and normally they would have been used to transport passengers, for a small fee of two mark silvermynt, between Uppsala and Stockholm. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during the prime sailing season, Rudbeck’s ships departed from the harbors of the capital city and the university town at precisely 8:00 and 11:00 a.m. Space was even provided for passengers who wished to smoke tobacco, though Rudbeck insisted that this be done in a special, restricted area on deck, “in the fresh air.”

  The first of the ships, constructed “about the size of the Argo,” was carried from Rudbeck’s shipyard down to the water, a distance of some 2,400 feet. This attempt was not very successful. It took a full eighty men, straining with all their might, to transport the fifty-footer, and the pace was excruciatingly slow, far too slow to cover the distance in the specified time. The exhausted volunteers must have been relieved when the day was over—Rudbeck did not exactly have a reputation for being the easiest man to work for. As demanding of others as he was of himself, Rudbeck had little patience for the work ethic of the contemporary boatsman, who preferred, he huffed, to stretch out on deck in the warm sun, porridge ladle in one hand and pipe in the other.

  Undeterred by the disappointing first effort, Rudbeck tried again, this time dragging the boat over poles. Much more successfully, they moved at approximately three times the speed of the men who had tried to carry the ship. Then, in another attempt, Rudbeck had the crew smear grease on the well-rounded logs and drag the ship to the harbor—moving at the fastest time yet, and requiring the work of only fifty men! Allowing for eating, sleeping, and resting, and assuming ten hours of labor a day, “so long as it is believed that they could have worked,” Rudbeck concluded, Jason and the Argonauts could easily have covered the required distance in the twelve-day period.

  This rather quixotic episode was an early attempt at what we now call experimental archaeology, the effort to test a hypothesis by re-creating its conditions, put to such dramatic effect in our time by the late Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. Until his death in 2002, Heyerdahl made many pioneering voyages to show how the ancients could have accomplished some very difficult deeds that he had suggested, namely sailing the oceans in rafts made of papyrus and balsa. His Kon-Tiki, most famously, crossed from Callao, Peru, a full 4,300 nautical miles to the Polynesian island of Tuamotu in the South Pacific.
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  Although a controversial method, still met with derision in some academic circles, this can be an effective way to learn about the past. And Rudbeck was one of the first to put it to use, albeit in a rudimentary fashion, and far from drifting 101 days on a balsa raft in the Pacific. The principle, however, was not completely alien. Rudbeck wanted to see if what he believed could in fact have been possible.

  As his experiment with the passenger boat in his yacht service showed, the Argonauts could have dragged the ship the required distance in the given time, and thus overcome what he saw as the main obstacle to the voyage actually reaching the north. Interestingly, too, the names of the places that the Argonauts saw after they emerged from their ship-dragging hike through the unknown forests sounded strikingly familiar. Orpheus, for instance, sang about Leulo—and right in the very spot where the Argonauts would have come out in Rudbeck’s proposed course was the Swedish town called Luleå (pronounced loo-le-oh). Orpheus described the town of Pacto, and Rudbeck connected it with the Swedish town Piteå, while Orpheus’s Casby showed up in the Swedish Kassaby, or perhaps the smaller village Kasby. Rudbeck marveled at how well it all fell into place; if Orpheus had not lived almost “three thousand years ago,” he would have concluded that the poet had read a book about Swedish geography.

  The quest for the Golden Fleece was yet another spectacular confirmation that such Swedish place-names had in fact existed in the most ancient times accessible to historians. Just as his archaeological dating method had shown to his satisfaction that the great antiquity of Sweden far preceded the Trojan War, here were Swedish towns already flourishing in the Arctic north in the earliest recorded sailing voyage, and observed at least one generation before that epic conflict. After all, when the Argo first rowed away on its mission, the future Trojan War hero Achilles was still a baby. He had been carried down by his guardians, the centaurs Chiron and his wife, who galloped down to see the Argonauts off, with Chiron’s “great forehoof waving them on their way.”