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

by David King

  A few very bloody years later, the conquistadores had stripped off, melted down, and carried back so much from their native hosts that Spain was virtually swimming in Aztec gold. After Francisco Pizarro’s brutal campaign in Peru, and the discovery of rich mines high in the Andes, the home country would also feast on Incan silver. So much bullion poured in from the New World that it flowed like “rain on a rooftop.” Conservative estimates put the total cargo until 1650 at 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver, and this does not account for the treasure lost to smuggling, piracy, and shipwreck. As one Aztec put it, the strangers “longed and lusted for gold” so much that “their bodies swelled with greed, … [and] they hungered like pigs.”

  So moved by the sights, one Spaniard paused from the plundering to put his observations on record. This was Francisco López de Gomara, the priest and private secretary of the “restless, haughty, mischievous and given to quarreling” young man, the infamous conquistador Hernán Cortés. From his vantage point, Gomara wrote our oldest account of the conquest of Mexico and the influential history of the Indies (1553), which remains today an invaluable source for understanding this brutal period of the past. Inside the work was an early statement placing Atlantis firmly in the Americas, a view that would be shared by many others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Not everyone, of course, would find this a sound idea, let alone be convinced that the Spanish had stumbled upon old Atlantis. The famous French thinker Michel de Montaigne, for one, doubted this identification. In one of his essays (1580)—he was one of the first and most influential thinkers to popularize the essay as a literary genre in its own right—Montaigne acknowledged that it was “very probable” that a great flood had in fact destroyed Atlantis as Plato described. But he expressed his skepticism that the newly discovered continent was really Plato’s world. “It is not very probable that the new world we have lately discovered is, in fact, that island.”

  Another popular rival theory places Atlantis precisely in the ocean where the island was said to have sunk. Although it sometimes appeared on medieval and early modern maps, such as the one by the learned Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher in the 1660s, it was not until the late nineteenth century that this legendary civilization would be sought in the mid-Atlantic. This search was largely due to the influential work of an American thinker named Ignatius Donnelly. In the early 1880s Donnelly had just lost an agonizing political election, and the fifty-year-old former lieutenant governor of Minnesota and U.S. congressman felt he was beginning a forced retirement. With his political stock, as he put it, at “zero,” Donnelly worked feverishly on a book he called Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882).

  He believed that Plato’s tale was not a “fable, but veritable history,” detailing the fortunes of the island where “man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization.” From this world center in the middle of the Atlantic, Donnelly saw the civilizing influence of Atlantis pouring out in all directions, particularly affecting the Americas in the west and the nearby coastal regions of Africa and Europe in the east.

  Positing the continent of Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic in fact helped explain many “intriguing similarities” between such far-flung continents. Africa and South America, for example, both had pyramids, hieroglyphics, mummies, and similar words for such things as sun, ax, and hawk. (Later historians have determined many differences; not the least of these is that some two thousand years separated the building of the Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, though Donnelly could not have known this fact.) Seeing the many correspondences, Donnelly went on drawing his conclusions, proposing that Atlantis had served as the origin of all our civilization. Ancient gods were originally kings and queens of Atlantis, just as all our arts and sciences came from this brilliant, sun-drenched home. Then Atlantis “perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sank into the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants.”

  If Donnelly was correct, then the French novelist Jules Verne’s romantic adventure Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) evoked an image of what lay waiting to be discovered. As Captain Nemo and the crew of the double-hulled, iron-plated, and “truly marvelous” submarine Nautilus cruise through the Atlantic off the shores of Morocco, they chance upon a sight that is certainly no less marvelous. One of the observers, the cantankerous professor Arronax, describes what he saw:

  [There] before my very eyes, lay the ruins … its temples demolished, its arches in pieces, its columns on the ground, but its proportions were clearly outlined, reminding me of the stately architecture of Tuscany.

  Other relics of the sunken civilization emerge: underwater aqueducts, “floating forms of a Parthenon,” and “crumbled walls and long lines of wide, deserted streets.” Here was Atlantis, an “ancient Pompeii, buried beneath the sea.”

  This was a vivid portrait of a lost world that prepared the way for the largely enthusiastic reception of Donnelly’s vision of Atlantis. In the grand perspective, too, Verne’s fictional account helped many late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers visualize the implications of the adventurous search. “Who shall say,” Donnelly wrote in 1882, “that one hundred years from now the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of our day?”

  Donnelly’s Atlantis—like Verne’s classic science-fiction novel—was an instant smash hit. The author was inducted into the American Association of Science, and the city of New Orleans chose Atlantis as the theme for its Mardi Gras celebration in 1883. Besides that, Great Britain’s prime minister William Gladstone wrote an enthusiastic four-page letter to the acclaimed American author. In his humble home in the small town of Niringer, Minnesota, Donnelly was overjoyed, and wrote:

  I looked down at myself and could not but smile at the appearance of the man, who in this little, snow-bound hamlet, was corresponding with the man whose word was fate anywhere in the British Empire.

  The prime minister also spoke of seeking parliamentary funds for a naval expedition to find the legendary island. “I could have uttered a war hoop of exultation,” said Donnelly, the man who was soon to be widely heralded as the “father of Atlantis studies,” that is, after Plato himself.

  Atlantis would, however, have a long fascinating life beyond these classic formulations. Later intriguing theories would place this lost civilization on the islands of Crete and Santorini, as well as in the desert (Sahara), high atop mountains (the Andes), underneath the ice (the Antarctic or Spitzbergen), or even in outer space. Not to mention the occult and mystical interpretations that have also flourished.

  One last theory that did appear in Rudbeck’s day looked for Atlantis not in America or at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, or anywhere else other than Plato’s head. There was a sense that the philosopher had made it up, either for the sake of creating an imaginative fictional account or, more likely, as a philosophical discourse that set up a vision of an idealized world to portray the problems of humanity in general, or his Athens in particular. Such a view of Atlantis as fiction or fable continues to flourish in our day, though sometimes the creator of the story is said to be someone else: Solon, Egyptian priests, Egyptian tradition, and so on.

  But Rudbeck was not convinced. After reading Plato’s dialogues, he could not accept a theory that placed the lost civilization anywhere outside Sweden.

  LOOKING FOR ATLANTIS in the Americas was, Rudbeck boldly proclaimed, pure vanity. The entire theory was predicated on a fundamental misreading of Plato.

  One of the main arguments for locating Atlantis on a continent in the New World stemmed from the philosopher’s description of the kingdom as “larger than Libya and Asia together.” Rudbeck, however, cautioned that Plato did not necessarily mean the same things by the terms Libya and Asia that later generations di
d. The meanings of words change over time, and the duty of a historian is to capture the meaning of the word that prevailed when the philosopher used it.

  In Plato’s day, the name Asia did not refer to the entire continent that runs through the territories of Russia to the far reaches of Siberia, China, and Korea. Rather, “Asia was taken by the old writers to mean only the little Asia, which stretches from the Mediterranean Sea in the south to the Black Sea in the north.” Relying on his love of maps, Rudbeck supported his hypothesis with a slew of ancient geographers. Each authority confirmed that the ancient word Asia meant only the much smaller, far western part of the continent, or the area historians call “Asia Minor.” Likewise, Plato’s word Libya did not mean all of the continent of Africa, as many had assumed. The word in the philosopher’s time referred only to the far northern coast, basically the fertile regions and immediate outlying deserts surrounding ancient Egypt.

  With this refreshingly historical effort to put Plato’s vocabulary in the context of fourth-century-B.C. conventions of the Greek language, Rudbeck had uncovered a serious problem at the heart of understanding Atlantis. It was no longer necessary to seek this lost civilization in a land larger than the combined continents of Asia and Libya. Instead it should be sought in a place that corresponded to the meaning of the words in Plato’s day, that is, a land larger than Asia Minor and northern Africa. In this one bold stroke, Rudbeck shattered one of the powerful arguments for placing the vanished continent in the New World, previously one of the very few places that could have satisfied the stringent conditions.

  Besides that, drawing on his own experiences on tempestuous waters, with his commercial yacht and postal service, Rudbeck raised the eminently practical question that many theorists overlooked in their haste to place Atlantis somewhere in the Americas. This was directed less to the “learned, the wise, and the elite in the world” than to the common sailor:

  If such a great navy should cross from America, and attack all of Europe, Asia, and Libya some thousands of years ago, when no one knew how to sail with a compass, no one dared far from the coast with a little ship, and no big ships were built which could withstand the waves of the great ocean, how well would they have held up?

  “If I asked such a thing,” Rudbeck said, “I fear that the boatmen would laugh at me.”

  For skeptics who questioned the testimony of a “common boatman,” Rudbeck issued a further challenge. Read the explorer’s accounts of the New World, take a look at the types of boats the natives used, and try to figure out how they would have fared in such a difficult transatlantic voyage. Plato was after all speaking not of a single isolated venture over the Atlantic, but a war of conquest that would mean moving massive fleets across the hazardous waters of the high seas. In an age before the invention of the compass or at least systematic knowledge of the use of stars for navigation, America was hardly a realistic prospect for the home of the Atlanteans.

  Taking the offensive on yet another front, assuming for the moment that the Atlanteans had somehow managed to make the perilous crossing from America, Rudbeck raised another embarrassing point: “And should they have conquered Europe, Asia, and Libya in the old days just as Plato speaks about, then there should reasonably be some evidence of this Atlantis in their language, customs, laws, worship, and such things.”

  The current war between Sweden and Denmark, for example, was leaving many signs, not the least the “thousands” of independent accounts of its progress. Few wars in history occur without leaving any trace, and it was thus not unreasonable to expect some survivals of such a catastrophic war as Plato described. Yet in the many centuries that had passed, Rudbeck reminded, no one had come up with any real evidence of ancient American influence in any of the places where the Atlanteans supposedly attacked.

  So if Rudbeck was correct in his interpretation of Plato’s words, the existing knowledge of American boats, and the overwhelming lack of evidence of any surviving influence anywhere they allegedly conquered, scholars were clearly looking in the wrong place. “Either Plato’s Atlantis is a poem,” Rudbeck said, “or it is true, in which case it must be understood as some other land or island” than the Americas.

  While he was on the subject, there was another matter that needed to be cleared up. Plato spoke of Atlantis as an “island,” but Rudbeck believed it was not quite so simple. Going back to the original language of the philosopher, Rudbeck noted that Plato used the Greek word (pronounced NAY-sos) to describe Atlantis. Scholars almost invariably translated this word as “island,” though, he noted, this did not have to be the case. could also mean “peninsula,” and for support, he simply pointed to the Peloponnesus in southern Greece.

  This landmass was named using the Greek words Pelops, the wild chariot driver of classical mythology, and , the word in question. The Peloponnesus was, literally, “Pelop’s island,” and as anyone with a map knew, this was a peninsula. Clearly the term applied to islands as well as peninsulas—and as long as only one possible translation of was accepted, it was easy to miss many opportunities for finding Atlantis.

  SIZE, SHAPE, TOPOGRAPHY, and even the blood-drenched ceremonies had all apparently agreed with Rudbeck’s unusual solution to the timeless mystery. No less exciting, Rudbeck had found the symbolic leader of the sacrifices, the king of Atlantis himself.

  According to the Critias dialogue, the first king of this powerful civilization had been a man named Atlas, whose name in fact lived on in the word Atlantis and in the name of its nearby ocean, the Atlantic (both derived from the genitive form, meaning, appropriately, “of Atlas”). For Rudbeck, this was a no-brainer. Atlas was none other than the Swedish king Atle!

  Now Rudbeck was proposing to compare figures from different historic periods and vastly different cultural traditions, and, many sober critics would say, figures with almost nothing in common besides a vague similarity in their names. But that had never stopped him before. Like Atlas, Atle was a powerful king, as clearly seen in the Norse poems and Atla-mál, and other slight references in the eddas. Atle controlled a large empire and a flourishing civilization, and as Plato had said, he had been easily corrupted, falling victim to his love of treasure. Atle’s kingdom was also utterly destroyed. His majestic halls with the “high-builded towers” and the “far-famed temples” disappeared forever, swept away in the “roaring flames.”

  An ancient king of Atlantis with the honorary title Atlas.

  This curious, shadowy figure of the Norse eddas was, again like Plato’s Atlas, only dimly known (for Plato’s Atlas is not Homer’s Atlas, the Titan who was forced to hold the world on his shoulders; the two are often confused). Yet Rudbeck believed Atle must have made quite an impression. Pulling out a map of Sweden, he rattled off a long list of places where the name of the Atlantean king was supposedly enshrined. There was Atle’s island (Atlesöö) on the beautiful lake Mälaren, just outside Stockholm and also in one of the country’s oldest settlements. There were also Atle’s lake (Atlesjö), Atle’s village (Atleby or Alby), and a string of other places running throughout the kingdom. Sweden even had its own Atlas Mountains (Atlefjäll). Indeed, just as Plato had said, King Atlas had left his name all over the country. Most dramatic, of course, was an old name for Sweden: Atland, which Rudbeck immediately translated as “Atlantis” (and incorporated into the Swedish title of the book, Atland eller Manheim).

  Even if the differences between the ancient Greek and Norse figures were many, and the similarities vague at best, Rudbeck was overflowing with excitement. Consumed by his theory, he was determined to make it work. When a solution did not immediately present itself, Rudbeck was unwavering, laboring passionately and compulsively. Fears for his own “sickly constitution” evaporated in the whirlwind of enthusiasm.

  As he saw it, the task was to hammer out the small details of the larger, grand vision of Atlantis that, in his frenzy, seemed more accurate with each passing day. Rudbeck had an explanation, for instance, as to why Plato had used the name Atlas and all h
e himself could find was the Swedish Atle. His answer was lifted straight from Plato’s own words:

  Since Solon was planning to make use of the story for his own poetry, he had found, on investigating the meaning of the names, that those Egyptians who had first written them down had translated them into their own tongue. So he himself in turn recovered the original sense of each name and, rendering it into our tongue, wrote it down so.

  In other words, by the time the story was recorded in the 380s B.C., the name of King Atle had been transformed from the language of Atlantis (Swedish) to Egyptian and then to Greek. After that, it was at the mercy of Solon’s discretionary interpretation and the whims of Critias’s childhood memory. No wonder, Rudbeck said, the name had been somewhat garbled over time.

  Meanwhile, other distinguishing features of Atlantis were starting to cause more problems. For one, Plato was pretty clear that Atlantis was situated near the famous Pillars of Hercules, traditionally located at the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow waterway separating southern Spain from northern Africa. According to ancient myth, the hero Hercules had set them up as the “far-famed witnesses of the farthest limit of voyaging.” Given such a position, it is no surprise that many had looked for the lost world in the mid-Atlantic or the Americas.

  But Rudbeck soon had a proposal of his own. Forced back to the drawing board, he started repositioning his map of Atlantis. Placing the capital at Old Uppsala, with the kingdom stretching northward to the Arctic Kimmernes, the home of the Cimmerians at the halls of Hades and down to the southern tip of Skåne, Rudbeck must have watched with amazement. Right in front of his eyes, he saw the Pillars of Hercules.