Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (5 page)

Donnelly also sent a copy to Darwin, who replied with a note saying he’d read the book “with interest, though I must confess in a very skeptical spirit.” His tepid response was typical of the scientific establishment and inaugurated the pattern of condescension and contempt for amateur Atlantis scholarship that has thrived ever since. Donnelly’s theory directly contradicted Darwin’s own ideas of evolution.
The
Antediluvian World
, with its thesis that “Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature,” was horribly out of scientific fashion.

No modern denunciation of Atlantology is complete without a section vilifying Donnelly. Not without reason, he is frequently cited as a cautionary tale in the uses and abuses of euhemerism, and his faith in the instant gratification of catastrophism—the school of thought that natural history had been a series of cataclysms, such as Noah’s flood—is often contrasted with Darwin’s saintly gradualism (i.e., the earth was many millions of years old and had experienced geological change at an imperceptibly slow pace). But experts also single him out for having committed the much more grave offense of “diffusionism,” sometimes upgraded to the more evil-sounding “hyperdiffusionism.” In his book
Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology
, the anthropologist Kenneth Feder defines
diffusionism
as the presumption that “cultures are basically uninventive and that new ideas are developed in very few or single places. They then move out or ‘diffuse’ from these source areas.”

Donnelly’s faith that all great cultures and most advances in human history can be traced back to a large continent that sank midway between Europe and North America is the spine of his argument. It is also the element that is most likely to drive historians nuts. In his otherwise evenhanded account of Donnelly’s Atlantis theory, Feder calls his diffusion argument “a confusing morass of disconnected claims and ostensible proofs.” And yet for more than a century
The Antediluvian World
had been the most influential work, outside of the
Timaeus
and
Critias
, in the Atlantological universe. This seemed like something that deserved a closer look.

CHAPTER SIX

Lost City Meets Twin Cities

Saint Paul, Minnesota

W
hen I arrived at the Minnesota Historical Society in downtown Saint Paul, I was slightly alarmed to be greeted by Ignatius Donnelly himself. Actually, it was a two-dimensional Donnelly, a slightly larger-than-life cardboard cutout of the former congressman sporting a top hat and resembling Babe Ruth out on the town. Tracing the trail of Donnelly’s theory had led me to the office of Patrick Coleman, the acquisitions librarian for the historical society. Coleman looked like a Broadway casting director’s idea of a state librarian—tall, white-haired, tie askew. His office was as comically perfect as a stage set, too: precarious piles of ancient hardbound books, sepia maps of Minnesota on the walls, a large framed photo of Walter Mondale atop his desk. I’d come across a recent newspaper article in which Coleman had been asked who the most interesting person in Minnesota history was, and without hesitation he’d answered Ignatius Donnelly. Surely there was a good reason to pass over Bob Dylan and F. Scott Fitzgerald?

“Donnelly has gotten a reputation as a kook,” Coleman told me, his head framed by two stacks of leather-bound books on his desk like a priest hearing confession. “That’s really a misrepresentation of
his ideas. He had the best private library in Minnesota, maybe the best library in the state, period.” Some of the remnants of that collection were in the piles in front of Coleman. Shortly before his death at age sixty-three in 1901, Donnelly had married his twenty-year-old secretary, who outlived him by sixty-three years. “I was a teenager when she died,” Coleman told me. “She had some books from his library that had his corrections in them. I paid $75 for those over there.” He pointed to a two-volume collected works of Shakespeare that Donnelly had used to write
The Great Cryptogram
, his magnum opus of Shakespeare scholarship. “I was living in a really sleazy apartment in Minneapolis and had them on top of my $2 black-and-white TV with a tinfoil antenna,” Coleman said. “Some thieves broke in, removed the two volumes, and took the TV instead.” Coleman later had them appraised at $1,600.

Coleman grew up in a politically active family—his brother is the mayor of Saint Paul—and he originally admired Donnelly for his liberal views. Donnelly was a radical progressive during America’s Gilded Age, a time “much like today, when money and power were concentrated in the hands of a few people,” Coleman said. Over time, Coleman came to admire Donnelly for the breadth of his knowledge. “In the nineteenth century you didn’t need a geology degree or an astronomy degree to write about those things,” he said. This was true. Polymath politicians like Thomas Jefferson are celebrated for their wide interests. Donnelly, because his Atlantis theories have not aged well, is now mocked for his. “It was the end of an era when you could be a Renaissance man. Now you have to specialize.”

To demonstrate, Coleman offered to show me what remained of the library from Donnelly’s own prairie Monticello. Actually, he clarified as we strolled through the sunny atrium, “the Minnesota Historical Society has his
library
in storage.” The actual room, that is. When Donnelly’s abandoned house at Nininger was being
demolished, a team “went out and took the paneling off the walls and sent it here.” Coleman said that for years, clever booksellers would go hunting on Donnelly’s abandoned estate, stop to eat lunch, and fill their empty knapsacks with volumes from the once-great collection. What the historical society owns of Donnelly’s books, still hundreds on almost as many topics, is whatever was left behind.

We cut through an administrative area and descended two flights of stairs. Coleman pulled out a key card and swiped it to open a locked steel door. Inside was a sterile-looking storage room filled with metal shelves. “Some people’s libraries you can’t tell whether the books have ever been opened,” Coleman said, reaching for a volume of Irish history. “These books have been
read
.”

Inhaling the scent of nineteenth-century paper and glue, I gathered up an armful of books and took them upstairs for a closer look. What became obvious over two days of reading Donnelly’s tiny marginalia confirmed the opinion of a Minnesota historian who’d written that Donnelly “wrote with the impulsive force of a man defending a cause rather than the caution of a scientist seeking the truth.” Donnelly wasn’t merely attempting to sew up a bag of winds; he was a bag of winds. He knew the result he wanted and rummaged through his sources searching for only those facts that fit his needs, without pausing to note any reasonable doubts. In his hands, pyramids stretching from Egypt to Peru to India to Mesoamerica indisputably share an Atlantean source despite their having been built in hugely different styles over thousands of years. The use of bronze, mummification of the dead, similarities in language—Donnelly assembled every available scrap of evidence to support his diffusionist idea of a benevolent ur-Atlantis spreading its wisdom to the far corners of the globe.

With his tendency to pile up page after page of proof without ever stopping to ask if there was a reasonable explanation as to why he might be wrong, Donnelly set the pace for much of future
Atlantology. Too often, coincidence is transformed into evidence, which is taken as proof. A typical example: Circumcision was common among the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, so they must have inherited the practice from their wise common ancestors in Atlantis. How do we know? Because the Atlantean king Uranus, noting the horrors of “one of the most dreadful scourges of the human race”—syphilis, presumably—“compelled his whole army and the armies of his allies to undergo the rite.” Modern life insurance statistics show that Jews are healthier than average. Ergo, Atlantis was real.

Donnelly probably hoped that he was writing a book that would draw comparisons to Darwin’s
The Voyage of the Beagle
. Reading
The Antediluvian World
reminded me more of a book I’d once purchased at a yard sale that amassed hundreds of tiny clues to prove that Paul McCartney had died at the height of the Beatles’ fame and had been secretly replaced by an exact double.

•   •   •

After two days with Donnelly I badly needed a drink. As luck would have it, Coleman was giving a “History Happy Hour” talk in downtown Saint Paul on the topic of Donnelly’s life. I offered to help him carry his visual aids. The Minnesota sky, playing along with the deluge theme, was dark hours before sundown. Coleman grabbed a box of Donnelly’s old books, I picked up the congressman’s cardboard doppelgänger, and we ran through the downpour to Coleman’s Subaru. The location of the talk was the sumptuous Victorian home of Donnelly’s onetime boss, Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey. As a roomful of damp people sipped beers and munched on mini hamburgers, Coleman stood in front of a gigantic fireplace and talked about Donnelly’s political adventures in Minnesota. Then he turned to Atlantis. “I’ve been fighting this idea my whole life that Donnelly was a kook,” he said with more resignation than the first
time I’d heard him use the slur. “He had this weird, wonderful, and creative mind that couldn’t be curtailed. And I’ll bet anyone here right now that someone’s on a boat in the Mediterranean with a copy of Donnelly’s
Atlantis
, looking for the lost city.”

Most of the happy hour attendees seemed to be hearing about Donnelly for the first time, but there were some devotees in the crowd. When Coleman quoted Donnelly’s famous line from the Populist Party platform of 1892—“From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes: tramps and millionaires”—I noticed at least two people mouthing the words along with Coleman, as if reciting a prayer. No one snickered when Coleman talked about Donnelly’s progressively less successful literary works, including
Caesar’s Column
, a dystopian science fiction novel that takes place in 1988, and
Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
, a sort of sequel to his Atlantis book, in which he amped up the catastrophism to propose that ancient myths had been inspired by a comet striking the earth.

Finally, Coleman addressed what he called Donnelly’s “black helicopters” opus,
The Great Cryptogram
, presumably the source of much guffawing and drink spilling at humanities department cocktail parties. This book, which followed
The Antediluvian World
by six years, marked Donnelly’s shift from revisionist historian to all-out conspiracy theorist. It was Donnelly’s attempt to decipher the code embedded in what he named “the so-called Shakespeare plays.” His theory posited that Sir Francis Bacon, the English statesman and philosopher whose prodigious career included serving as lord chancellor, helping develop the empirical method in science, and authoring dozens of influential essays and books—including the utopian classic
The New Atlantis
—had also managed to secretly write the collected works of Shakespeare. If composing the greatest dramas ever written in English weren’t enough to occupy a man’s time,
Bacon also, according to Donnelly, embedded them with subtle clues about his true identity.

When Coleman finished his talk, I walked up to the front of the room to take a look at Donnelly’s copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The volume lay open to a pair of annotated pages. Each had dozens of numbers scribbled on it, occult-looking calculations, underlined passages, and chaotic notations in the margin. For all I could tell, these pages demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that 9/11 was an inside job and that Paul McCartney’s secret twin brother really had written “Helter Skelter.”

It was a reminder that if you bent the facts enough, you could convince yourself of anything.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Secrets of the Wine-Dark Sea

On the Mediterranean

I
n 1982, a Turkish sponge diver named Mehmet Çakir surfaced from a plunge near a rocky promontory off Kas, on Turkey’s southern coast, with a confusing bit of information to report. About 150 feet down on the seafloor, he’d spotted a pile of unusual “metal biscuits with ears.” Çakir’s captain, who had recently attended a briefing about the emerging field of underwater archaeology, quickly understood what the objects were: oxhide ingots, slabs of copper cast in uniform shapes for easy sea transport. What Çakir had found was a Bronze Age shipwreck that dated to approximately 1300 BC.
Scientific American
later named the Uluburun wreck one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century.

What made the discovery so extraordinary was the cornucopia of goods the boat had been carrying when it presumably smashed against the rocks. Over the next decade, divers pulled seventeen tons of artifacts from the site. The cargo had originated in ports all around the eastern Mediterranean. The boat was Syro-Palestinian, built of Lebanese cedar and operated by the ancestors of the Phoenicians who lived along the Levant. Its ten tons of copper had been mined in Cyprus. One ton of tin, the other element essential in the
manufacture of bronze, had likely originated in Afghanistan. Elephant ivory and ostrich eggs had journeyed from Africa. Mycenaean pottery had come from the Greek mainland. Gold and silver jewelry, including a gold scarab inscribed with the name of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, dated to the reign of Tutankhamen. Here in one spot was ample evidence of a highly advanced ancient trading network that spread across three continents.

For modern geographers, the Uluburun provided rare material evidence of where people were traveling, and why, in the time before Golden Age Greece. The Uluburun sank around 1300 BC, before the transition from oral transmission to written records took place. At that time the Mycenaeans ruled the Aegean Sea and traded widely in the area between Sardinia, Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Levant before their empire collapsed mysteriously during the late twelfth century BC. Exploration of the western Mediterranean beyond Sicily and Sardinia seems to have been spearheaded by Phoenician traders who passed through the Pillars of Heracles at Gibraltar sometime between 1100 BC (according to legend) and 800 BC (according to archaeological evidence). There they founded the trading colony of Gades mentioned by Plato in the
Critias
, which grew into the Spanish city of Cádiz. It’s probable that sailors from Iberia had met traders from the coast of Sardinia even earlier, exchanging information along with their goods.

Little is known about early Greek attempts to explore the western Mediterranean. This gap is important to the search for Atlantis for two reasons. One, the likeliest spot for the Pillars of Heracles is the Strait of Gibraltar. If the story of Atlantis really was transmitted via Solon’s visit to Egypt, the information could have reached the priests of Saïs through the same trading network that assembled the Uluburun cargo. Two, it’s possible that Plato picked up stories from sailors in Syracuse, one of several distant lands he visited on a long journey after Socrates was sentenced to death in 399 BC for the crime of
corrupting Athens’s youth. In the ancient Mediterranean, Syracuse was a key meeting point for East and West.

As Duane Roller points out in his fascinating book
Through the Pillars of Herakles
, the Greeks had no word for
exploration
. Expeditions were launched to gather intelligence for military or trade purposes. Such valuable proprietary information was likely to be closely guarded; the Carthaginians are reported to have drowned anyone who attempted to locate the Pillars of Heracles. Any information travelers collected came from the residents of foreign lands, whose languages would have been difficult to translate and easy to misunderstand. Information passed along orally was transmitted in the form of stories. Thus accounts of fantastic voyages across the “wine-dark sea” to distant lands such as those in the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
might combine essential geographic data with supernatural elements.

In the
Odyssey
, Odysseus is trying to reach his home city of Ithaca (which, like many of the Greek places Homer names, actually existed) when he is blown for nine days to the land of the lotus-eaters. Here the inhabitants lived on the sweet fruits of a flowering plant “so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home.” Homer may have been describing the Tunisian island of Djerba, where date palms grew plentifully and still do.

The pioneering Greek geographer Pytheas sailed shortly after Plato’s death on a journey that took him to the British Isles and beyond. He reported traveling so far north that the sun never set; claimed to have seen impassable frozen seas; and six days beyond Scotland discovered a mysterious distant island named Thule, which may have been Norway or Iceland. Christopher Columbus later claimed to have stopped in Thule on his way to encountering the New World.

Pytheas was widely disbelieved when he returned home. Later historians cast doubt on his claims, those of Thule especially. The eminent Greek geographer and historian Strabo, who believed that Plato’s Atlantis was a true story, accused Pytheas of having lied
outright about Thule’s existence. More than a century later, the respected historian Pausanias wrote credulously about the satyrs who lived in distant lands. “In modern times it is perhaps easier to be more dismissive of promiscuous red-haired men with tails than a frozen ocean,” Duane Roller notes, “yet in antiquity the former was believed rather than the latter.”

We do have a few snippets of information that indicate some Greek exploration to the west was going on. Homer, who probably composed his works in the eighth century BC, describes Odysseus passing through Scylla and Charybdis—likely the Strait of Messina—sailing for the west until approaching the Oceanus, a deep-flowing river that encircled all the lands of the earth and marked the boundary of the world. Around 630 BC, a sailor named Kolaios from the island of Samos claimed to have been blown by a powerful easterly wind through the Pillars of Heracles and into the great sea beyond. According to Herodotus, Kolaios returned home with a vast fortune in silver from a land called Tartessos. Herodotus also related the story of the pharaoh Necho II (ruler of Egypt from 610 to 595 BC), who dispatched an expedition of Phoenician sailors to circumnavigate the African continent, departing southward through the Red Sea. During their third year at sea, Herodotus wrote, they “rounded the Pillars of Heracles” and sailed for home. “On their return home, they declared—I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing around Libya they had the sun upon their right hand.” Herodotus couldn’t even imagine what had actually happened. They had passed through the unknown Southern Hemisphere and sailed around the Cape of Good Hope.

Plato’s effort in the
Timaeus
to chart the earth’s location in the cosmos seems even bolder when one considers that attempts to map the known world were rudimentary. In the sixth century BC, the Greek philosopher Anaximander drew what may have been the first map of the known world. The Mediterranean was placed at the
center of the world (hence its name in Latin, “middle land”) and was surrounded by the three continents, Europe, Libya, and Asia. The Nile flowed south into the southern part of the outer ocean. The western ocean was named the Atlantic and was linked to the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Heracles. Anaximander believed that the earth was a cylinder with a diameter three times its height, roughly the proportions of a can of tuna. More than a century later, Herodotus agreed that the world was flat. By that time, though, the geometry-mad philosopher Pythagoras had—according to much later histories—deduced that the earth was a sphere. Contrary to the legend of Christopher Columbus, many educated Greeks agreed that the earth was round. In the
Timaeus
Plato himself fixed the earth in the center of the universe and said that the creator had “made the world in the form of a globe . . . having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the center, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures.”

The Greeks began to colonize the western Mediterranean starting around 600 BC, with the founding of Massalia, a trading outpost that has since grown into the French city of Marseilles. Herodotus credits seafaring Greeks who lived in Asia Minor with making the first trips deep into the western Mediterranean. “It was they who made Adria known, and Tyrrhenia, and Iberia and Tartessos,” he writes. Adria is the northeastern coast of Italy, which shares its name with the Adriatic Sea. Tyrrhenia was the land of the Etruscans on Italy’s west coast. Iberia was the Mediterranean shore of what is now the Spanish peninsula.

The fourth place that Herodotus lists, Tartessos, is something of a mystery, even today. Kolaios the Greek was not the only sailor to report back on its mind-blowing riches. While Plato is the only writer known to have written about Atlantis, many ancients mentioned Tartessos by name. Yet it has never been found, either.

The historian Rhys Carpenter explained how the first Greek
sailors would likely have made their way west over time. Rowing their state-of-the-art penteconters, fifty-oared warships, they would have sailed from the Tyrrhenian coast to the isle of Elba and on to Corsica, from whence they would have sailed south to Sardinia. Here they would likely have encountered Iberian sailors who convinced them to sail across three hundred miles of empty sea to the Balearic Islands, from whence they could reach the Iberian Peninsula.

We can only wonder what these Greeks thought as they journeyed south along the coast and passed beneath the fourteen-hundred-foot-high Rock of Gibraltar, the final checkpoint between the known world and the endless sea of the Atlantic. Here the vast water of the Mediterranean narrowed to seven miles across. Duane Roller notes that sailors who crossed through the strait noticed a sudden change in the tides and waves and “would find the water turning from blue to a less benign green.” The rock and its partner across the water must have become familiar sights, however, because to pass through the Pillars of Heracles was the only way to reach Tartessos—a land perched on the lip of the infinite sea, where fortunes in silver were to be found by those brave enough to risk the journey.

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