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

by David King

  The answer seemed so clear, so obvious, that he wondered why no one had proposed it before: the real pillars must have been the Öresund, the strategic waterway that separated the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, and one of the most perilous straits in Europe. Dutch and English traders knew the spot well, and had long been forced to pay hefty tolls to the Crown that controlled this enviable gateway to the Baltic. The narrow strip of sea was where, incidentally, Hamlet’s castle was supposedly located, and where the lumbering Kronborg stands guard today.

  Although he had no small confidence in his own mapmaking abilities, Rudbeck’s proposal that the Pillars of Hercules lay in Scandinavia was radical to say the least. Why should one make recourse to a Nordic location, in the face of such widespread, almost unanimous, opinion that the pillars were found at the conjunction of Spain and northern Africa?

  Reading through texts widely and energetically, in his customary fashion, Rudbeck must have been thrilled to come across the words of one of the most esteemed geographers of antiquity, Strabo. In the first book of his encyclopedic geography of the world, this first-century authority counted no less than seven different interpretations of the meaning and location of the Pillars of Hercules. One of them, actually, was the mythic “Crashing Rocks,” the dangerous straits the Argonauts encountered on the quest for the Golden Fleece—and a location that must have been particularly appealing in light of Rudbeck’s own unconventional ideas about Jason’s voyage.

  Another stimulating clue had, incidentally, come from the Roman historian Tacitus. In Germania, his account of the northern barbarian tribes, Tacitus records an observation from a Roman commander, Drusus Germanicus, exploring the north: “We have even ventured upon the Northern Ocean itself, and rumor has it that there are Pillars of Hercules in the far north.”

  Suddenly Rudbeck’s suspicion that the location of the “Pillars of Hercules” was actually more complicated than usually presented seemed possible, hinted at by the historian and confirmed by the geographer. And once his mind got started on the matter, Rudbeck believed that the Swedish solution actually fulfilled the criteria more satisfactorily than the conventional site of Gibraltar.

  After all, if the pillars had been set up to honor the glory of Hercules and mark the so-called limits of human endeavor, then why place them in a location where ancient peoples “sailed past them every year”? The far edge of the Mediterranean was certainly not the end of the world; ask the Phoenicians, ask the Carthaginians, ask anyone who presumably traded for the valuable tin found in Great Britain. This traditional Gibraltar location hardly made sense in either geographical or psychological terms. Sweden, on the other hand, offered another possibility.

  Here rough, frigid, sometimes icy waters made sailing difficult if not impossible at certain times of the year, a fact that made this Scandinavian option a more likely place for the “limits of the ancient world” than Gibraltar. Here, too, right in the very spot that Rudbeck was proposing, were many place-names preserving the memory of a much older name.

  All around the Öresund were small villages whose names, coincidentally, bore the root of Hercules: Herhal, Herhamber, and a host of others, including one as far away as Stockholm called Hercul. Rudbeck was growing so confident that he was on the right track with his new theory about the Pillars of Hercules that he would soon pronounce, in full stride, that the club-toting strongman and antiquity’s greatest warrior had originally been a Swede. His real name, found in many sagas and rune stones, was Härkolle, which meant literally “warrior chief” or perhaps “one dressed in a warrior’s clothes.” (Rudbeck contrasted his theory with one leading etymology that derived the name Hercules from the Greek words meaning “the glory of Hera”—an “unsatisfactory guess,” he said, when Hera hated Hercules’ guts.) Much more would indeed follow about the Swedish Hercules. For now the importance was clear. All these place-names near the Öresund were surviving memories of the original “Pillars of Hercules,” the treacherous northern straits that once marked the entrance to the kingdom of Atlantis.

  With Plato’s distinct words and his own painstaking exploration fueled by a splendid imagination, Rudbeck could only marvel with joy at how well it all seemed to fall into place. For that was now becoming the method, relentlessly marching forward, and if each new discovery unleashed countless additional problems, then Rudbeck would figure it out, somehow, as he always did. He was also growing bolder in the process—more convinced of how little the past had really been understood, and more confident in his own ability to recover the lost truth.

  Indeed, as Rudbeck looked at Atlantis, it seemed as if Plato had personally been to Sweden, and had patiently dictated the dimensions of its countryside in exact detail. The philosopher had mentioned many specific characteristics about its location and the landscape. “Not a single one,” Rudbeck was glad to say, “conflicted with the land of Sweden as it can still be seen today.”

  Swept away by elation, Rudbeck described the adventure:

  This island of Atlantis, which no one for some thousands of years has dared to try and find, because of the heavy mud, numerous pirates, infinite islets and rocks, and moving drift-ice that have troubled its Atlantic sea, making for the voyager a dark way and difficult to find, I have now by God’s help dared to pass with a boat equipped with 102 Platonic oars, and found her.

  This map, drawn by one of Rudbeck’s talented students, Philip Thelott, shows the locations of Atlantis, Hades, and some of the many other discoveries about ancient Sweden.

  AS RUDBECK CHASED Atlantis, Sweden was waiting nervously for the imminent foreign invasion. Recent Swedish losses on the battlefield had revived some bitter memories of past insults and humiliations. Just when the performances of Gustavus Adolphus, Queen Christina, and Charles X Gustav seemed to have relegated these painful experiences to the “dustbin of the past,” Danish advances were bringing them disgracefully back to mind.

  In late June 1676, the Danes landed on Swedish soil. Three hundred ships dropped almost fifteen thousand well-armed enemy troops onto a highly exposed Swedish coast. Towns near the present-day Norwegian border, such as Vänersborg, were going up in flames, and stray forces were plundering unopposed in the countryside. Rushed out to the west coast, Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie was hastily assembling some means of defense.

  Occasional victories came to the count, the very first for Sweden in this horrible war. For the most part, however, those successes were small and far too infrequent to have much effect. Most of the early engagements ended instead decidedly in the Danes’ favor, sometimes indeed in simply a rout. Compared with the invaders, the rounded-up makeshift Swedish forces were quite inexperienced. “Naked and barefoot” was how one observer described them.

  In places with better defenses, such as Skåne in the south, the truth was no less harsh. Not only were the people succumbing to the attacks, but a frightening number were even joining the Danish invaders. Many families in this region, which had long been a part of the Danish kingdom, resented the forced changes that came with the union with Sweden, the seemingly never-ending stream of orders from the distant capital. Within a few months it looked as if this rich province of fertile lands, deep forests, and enviable fishing grounds was well on its way to being restored to Denmark.

  The people were, in the meantime, suffering as prices for basic necessities rose to exorbitant heights, and taxes remained at their crushing levels. As the Danes penetrated farther into the Swedish kingdom, confusion was everywhere, and so was the desperation of the people. At one point a band of peasants actually attacked the Swedish king’s personal supplies. Nine of the king’s guards were killed, and the peasants dragged away food, drink, trophies (including the royal tent), and money to the tune of fifty thousand daler silvermynt.

  By the end of autumn 1676, the Danes had burned and pillaged widely in the west, and taken all but one of the strategic fortresses in the south, the fortress at Malmö. If things continued in this way, one historian noted, there was a fear tha
t “the king would not only lose his mind, but also his crown.” The many setbacks severely strained the Swedes, and certainly must have increased Rudbeck’s own anxieties.

  However bleak the prospects looked in the darkest days of the 1670s, Rudbeck could reassure himself and his fellow Swedes that a great, powerful civilization had once flourished in their beleaguered country. Ancient heroes and poets had made pilgrimages to this glorious civilization, and had sought its wisdom. Yet it was not just a matter of seeking solace in a distant, imagined past.

  Rudbeck’s investigations also made him feel that he had found a recipe for surviving this time of crisis. As the country faced its worst emergency in modern history, the Swedes could look back for guidance to their ancestors, who had loved justice, given their sacred oaths of loyalty to the kingdom, and elevated a life of virtue to an art form. The Atlanteans cherished truth, dignity, and goodness, holding honor in the strictest regard.

  This was a clarion call for his fellow Swedes to heed the lessons from their Atlantean ancestors. All the happiness and wisdom that flourished in their society had begun with the individual Atlanteans, who, in their prime, “thought scorn of everything save virtue.” Despite enjoying great riches, they were not so “drunk with pride … that they lost control of themselves and went to ruin.” The problems had only begun when they lost this enlightened perspective. As Plato put it, the old “divinity within them” was gradually extinguished, causing the once mighty civilization to succumb to its worst excesses.

  The same malady was once again threatening the Atlanteans’ descendants. As Sweden was suffering a losing war, a struggling economy, popular unrest, treasonous support of the invaders, and a sense of hopelessness, Rudbeck believed that it was absolutely urgent to rekindle the wisdom of Atlantis. Nothing less would prevent Sweden from sinking for a second time into the decadence that came with too much lusting for power, wealth, and worldly ambition.

  11

  OLYMPUS STORMED

  Now the Olympian magic mountain opens itself before us, showing us its very roots.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

  NO PROPOSED SITE has ever fit Atlantis perfectly, and the challenges of finding a site in Sweden were, to say the least, daunting. Confidence, hope, and determination would be vital, because some of the difficulties were significant indeed.

  No matter how hard Rudbeck and his land-surveying students tried, the exact size of the plain surrounding the legendary capital city could not be found. Very few Atlantis theories have satisfactorily resolved this dilemma—and with the vast dimensions, three thousand by two thousand stadia (approaching some 550 kilometers by 365 kilometers), it is not difficult to see why. The intricate web of canals that encircled the imposing city was also problematic, though Rudbeck’s answer was inventive.

  As he saw it, Atlantis’s complex system of waterways was really the maze of channels formed within the thousands of islands and islets dotting the Stockholm archipelago. “The whole world together,” Rudbeck said, “probably did not have more islands than this peninsula [Sweden].” Later he would add a fascinating discussion of these narrow sea lanes and excellent rocky hideaways, showing how well they had served Swedish raiders and traders for centuries, from Atlantis to the Viking era to the present. Yet, however provocative a solution, these natural formations were still a far cry from Plato’s artificial, geometrically designed network of canals.

  Studying the landscape also helped Rudbeck’s search for Atlantis’s grand royal palace. Although there was clearly no such building in sight, Rudbeck could trace out the bare outlines of its old foundation following Plato’s description of its location near the temple, the grove, and the springs, as well as the encouraging coincidence that the area was in fact known locally as Kungsgård, or royal garden. So Rudbeck marked the likely spot, and then looked on admiringly, imagining how the royal palace of Atlantis once rose out of the middle of Old Uppsala.

  Looking in vain for any surviving physical traces of the magnificent edifice, Rudbeck ventured an explanation for the conspicuous absence. There were good reasons, he thought, why tangible remains were not readily at hand. When the palace was originally constructed, the Atlanteans would have used a combination of materials relying primarily on stone or wood. If they had preferred wood, then it was hardly surprising that the palace had not survived—the Norse sagas had made it perfectly clear that Atle’s great hall had burned. Even without a fire, though, few timber structures could have withstood so many centuries of exposure to the elements.

  If the Atlanteans had opted for stone, as Plato indicated, then the gradually decaying building would have been quarried long ago for construction projects. Certainly Rudbeck knew many elderly gentlemen who remembered hearing tales in their childhood about how desperate the town dwellers had been to obtain all the necessary materials for building the large Vasa castle in Uppsala. Ransacking old monuments was unfortunately a timeless practice (Hadorph’s pioneering law had only recently granted the vulnerable monuments protection, at least legally). In any case the ruins of the Atlantis palace were probably lost for good, either consumed by the flames or recycled within the walls of nearby castles and churches.

  One thing Rudbeck was sure about, though, was that the palace had not been destroyed exactly as Plato had claimed, swept away along with the rest of Atlantis in a massive earthquake and flood. Rudbeck was in fact amazed that anyone could believe that this part of Plato’s story was literally true. For instance, Plato had claimed that the destruction buried the civilization, leaving only “a barrier of impassable mud which prevents those who are sailing out from here to the ocean beyond from proceeding further.”

  How could such a cataclysm produce so much mud that would, centuries later, still be unsettled, and make the nearby ocean an unnavigable graveyard? This, Rudbeck said, was “an explanation for children.” For readers who did not share Rudbeck’s interest or expertise in natural history, he provided another argument.

  Plato’s words, quite simply, conflicted with sacred history. The book of Genesis recorded God’s promise never to flood the world again with another overwhelming deluge: “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

  According to Rudbeck, both sacred and natural history ruled out an actual annihilation of Atlantis. It made much more sense, he argued, to see Plato’s words as describing the figurative destruction of a society sinking into decline and oblivion—a degeneration brought on by their love of war and their tragic slide into corruption.

  Discussing the last days of the old kingdom brought Rudbeck back to another challenge that has long bedeviled Atlantis hunters: the chronology of the events. In Critias, Plato dated the war with Atlantis about nine thousand years in the past, millennia before any advanced civilization is known to have flourished. But unlike many theorists who have attempted to solve this problem by simply dropping a zero to obtain a more workable nine hundred years, Rudbeck actually offered an explanation for his chronological acrobatics. He also, refreshingly, avoided attributing this significant change to a simple error in memory, transcription, or translation, or some other form of carelessness.

  There was no reason to assume that the Atlanteans had used the Gregorian calendar or the older, less accurate Julian calendar, Rudbeck rightly noted. In fact it was highly unlikely. A calendar based on the sun was far from the easiest to discover, or even, for that matter, the most natural to use. Ancient astronomers were much more likely, Rudbeck the stargazer argued correctly, to devise a system of time reckoning based upon the moon. Unlike the sun, the moon passes through easily visible and predictable phases. At such an early time in history, there was no recorded evidence that the solar year had even been discovered.

  As a result, the chronology of the Atlanteans could be much better explained as consisting of periods of time based on the regular movements of the moon. If this was correct, then a quick calculation reduced Plato’s 9400
B.C., at one stroke, to about 1350 B.C. (Plato’s “nine thousand years in the past” divided by twelve converts to 750 solar years, which is then added to the starting point, which Rudbeck traced back to Solon’s discussion with the Egyptian priests, about 600 B.C.). This calculation also inserts neatly into Rudbeck’s reconstructed chronology of ancient Sweden, based on measuring the distinctions in the soil around the oldest ruins. The Atlanteans’ war and destruction would have occurred around 1350 B.C., about one thousand years after Sweden was first settled.

  Despite some manifest difficulties that still needed to be ironed out, Rudbeck believed that Plato’s words described Sweden “as clear as day.” No other place on earth had even a fraction of the evidence for Atlantis that he had found in Sweden. So close was the fit that, Rudbeck said, a Swedish blind man hearing the tale could sense with his cane the very landscape of Atlantis under his feet. Ten years later Rudbeck would still be proclaiming his theory with even more evidence and greater enthusiasm, gladly taking visitors to Uppsala on a guided tour of the lost world of Atlantis. Another ten years into the search, Rudbeck would issue a challenge to any scholar in Europe to come to Sweden and prove him wrong. Rudbeck would, he said, cover the expenses.

  Yet no matter how many tours he would give, or challenges he would offer, some difficulties still remained, as if to taunt him. Rudbeck was virtually incapable of resting as long as any doubt or ambiguity lingered about his Atlantis. Even the slightest hint of uncertainty would be assaulted with an astonishing vigor, as if the search itself were under threat. Such striving for perfection drove Rudbeck deeper into the labyrinths of myth, and further into the realm of obsession.