Under the Sargasso Sea, if a few accomplished thinkers, a somewhat
larger number of speculative scientists, and a host of dreamers are
right, lies the lost Atlantis. This legend of a continent beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, which reached a high level of civilization,
extended its rule along both shores of the Mediterranean, sent its
armies to battle with Egypt and Athens, and “in a day and a fatal
night” sank beneath the sea eleven thousand years ago, is the most
haunting and poignant thing that has come down from antiquity.
The story derives from Plato, who attributes it to his relative, Solon,
who had it from a priest of Egypt. It is told briefly and completely
in the _Timæus_ and with much greater detail in the _Critias_;
unfortunately, the latter portion of this work is wanting and the
narrative ends abruptly, before recounting the cataclysm outlined in
the earlier work. Both are built upon the conversation between Solon
and the Egyptian priest. Discoursing on the ignorance of the Greeks
concerning their own history, the priest said that they knew nothing
of a thing which was preserved in the sacred books of the temple at
Sais--that, nine thousand years before, the Athenians had repelled an
invading force which threatened the conquest of Europe and Asia. This
force had come in through the Straits of Gibraltar from the Atlantic
Sea, “which was at that time navigable.”
Beyond the Straits, according to the _Timæus_, lay the island of
Atlantis, greater than Libya and Asia (Minor) together. Other islands
surrounded it, and farther west was a continent. Between Atlantis and
this continent rolled an ocean so great that, compared with it, the
land-locked Mediterranean was merely a harbor. A powerful dynasty of
kings arose on the island, subjugated the surrounding archipelagoes
and a part of the unnamed continent beyond, and in the Old World
swayed Libya up to Egypt and the northern shore of the Mediterranean
as far as Tuscany. They undertook to complete their conquest of the
Mediterranean coasts, but the Athenians, though deserted by their
allies, beat off their ships. While the fleet from beyond the Straits
was still in the Inland Sea, it would seem, the island of Atlantis was
sunk, and the earthquakes that submerged it and the monstrous waves
that followed spread ruin all along the Mediterranean shores.
Here is the passage in which Plato records the concluding words of
the priest of Solon: “But after (the battle) there occurred violent
earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of rain all your
warlike men in a body sunk into the earth, and the island of Atlantis
in like manner disappeared and was sunk beneath the sea. And that is
the reason why the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable,
because there is such a quantity of shallow mud in the way; and this
was caused by the subsidence of the island.... There are remaining in
small islets only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called,
all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the
mere skeleton of the country being left.”
The longer account in the _Critias_ describes the civilization of
Atlantis. It begins, as all chronicles used to do, with the affairs of
the gods, and their amorous interest in the daughters of men (_Gen._
vi: 2). The sea god Poseidon fell in love with Cleito, a mortal island
maiden, and she bore him five sets of twins. The ten sons became kings,
each ruler of a tenth part of Atlantis, but all subject to the eldest
son, Atlas. The capital of the island became his abode, as it had been
his mother’s before him. Poseidon himself had laid out the palace
compound, making alternate zones of sea and land; “there were two of
land and three of water which he turned as with a lathe out of the
center of the island.”
At this point in the account, the divine figures disappear and it
becomes seemingly a straight historical narrative. Its picture of
the capital is more exact in its topographical, architectural, and
engineering detail than many that have come down to us of the older
capitals of Asia, or than any biblical picture of Jerusalem. The laws,
religion, and arts of the people are all adequately noticed.
There was a barrier of lofty mountains around the shores of the
island, their flanks sloping precipitously to the sea. In the upland
valleys were rich and populous villages. The middle of the island was
a great and fertile plain surrounded by a ditch one hundred feet deep.
Abundant rivers coursed the plain and the moisture of the rainy season
was supplemented in the summer by a system of aqueducts. In the center
of the plain was a magnificent city.
Assuming that this is no dream geography, it is necessary to determine
the size of Atlantis, and in doing so to reconcile a conflict of
statements in Plato’s story. He speaks of it as a large island, though
small as compared with a land domain west of it, which “may be most
truly called a continent”; yet he says Atlantis was larger than Libya
and Asia combined. The tale becomes incredible if Libya receives its
common Greek extension as the whole of Africa, and if Asia is taken in
the larger sense; for such an island there would not be room in the
Atlantic. The passage is brought into harmony with the context if other
ancient definitions are followed, so that Libya is made to mean the
district immediately west of Egypt and Asia to mean Asia Minor. This
would give the legendary Atlantis a territory of perhaps three hundred
thousand square miles, or about twice that of the state of California.
There are precise figures for the great central plain and they
harmonize with such an estimate of the island area. The plain was
three hundred and forty miles long by two hundred and thirty wide--in
other words, exactly the size of the state of Washington, but with
its greater dimension from south to north. The topography of the
whole island suggests that of California, although its shape was more
compact. Its central plain lay within its mountain barriers as the San
Joaquin and Sacramento valleys lie between the Sierras and the Coast
Range. And in its mineral riches, its mild climate, its system of
irrigation, and in the products of its fields, orchards, and vineyards
it was very like the Pacific coast state.
“Whatever fragrant things there are in the earth,” says Plato, “whether
roots or herbage or woods, grew and thrived in that land.” He mentions
melons--“fruits with a hard rind”--chestnuts, and “the pleasant kinds
of dessert which console us after dinner when we are full and tired of
eating,” which may mean, among other things, grapes and oranges; and
all these “the sacred island lying beneath the sun brought forth fair
and wondrous in infinite abundance.” In this picture there is but one
unfamiliar figure. Herds of elephants roved there, where California can
show only the fossil remains of the mastodon.
In the account of the capital city it is illuminating to recur to the
Pacific state, for the metropolis of Atlantis lay in the midst of a
mountain-girdled plain, and yet, like Sacramento, had access to the
sea, in this case by a ship canal perhaps connecting with a river.
If one can imagine the buildings and grounds of the Panama-Pacific
Exposition of 1915 with the wharves and commerce of San Francisco
removed to Sacramento, one may glimpse the legendary metropolis. In
the center of the city, on an artificial island, were temples and
palaces like those of the exposition, but of a barbaric splendor.
Greatest of these was the temple to Poseidon, a structure about as
large as one of the palaces surrounding the Court of the Universe at
the exposition, and doubtless of no greater height, for this was a
region of earthquake, and within the temple was one statue that reached
quite to the roof. Its walls were silvered, with gilded pinnacles,
and under the ivory roof the interior blazed with gold and silver and
“orichalcum”--copper, or an alloy of it, and esteemed next to gold.
The wall that encircled this inner island or citadel “flashed with the
red light of orichalcum.” There was a broad canal around it, and then
an encircling zone of land, about which was a wall sheeted with tin.
Around this was still another canal encircled by another land zone, and
here was a wall coated with brass, beside which ran a racecourse two
hundred yards wide where horses contended. Encircling this again was
the outermost canal. Beyond it lay the city.
The buildings of the outer city, as well as those of its sacred
citadel, were of stones in three colors--white, black and red--which,
with all the minerals useful to man, were taken from the bosom of the
island. There were hot and cold springs, with baths and with pools
for horses and cattle; the surplus water was conveyed by aqueducts to
the grove of Poseidon. Around the harbor front were docks, triremes,
and naval stores. Back of them the plain was densely crowded with
habitations. The harbors were full of vessels, and merchants coming
from all parts who from their numbers kept up “a multitudinous sound of
human voices and din of all sorts night and day.”
A copper column stood in the temple of Poseidon, on which the laws of
the land were graven. The chief of these were that the people should
not take up arms against one another, and that they should all come
to the rescue if anyone in any city attempted to overthrow the royal
house. On the plain and in the populous mountain valleys there was
a system of military service by districts and chiefs of districts,
somewhat like that of ancient Peru; and when Atlantis went to war ten
thousand chariots moved in front of its armies, and twelve hundred
vessels swept the sea lanes east and west. It was a powerful nation and
a happy--so long as the divine nature of their founder retained its
force among the people. Says Plato:
“They despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present
state of life and thinking lightly on the possession of gold and
other property which seemed only a burden to them; neither were
they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their
self-control; but they were sober and saw clearly that all these goods
are increased by virtuous friendship with one another, and that by
excessive zeal for them, and honor of them, the good of them is lost
and friendship perishes with them.”
At length, however, the divine nature in the Atlantines became diluted
by mortal admixture. They were filled with avarice, pride, the lusts
of the flesh; and “the fairest of their precious gifts” departed from
them. Base to men of insight, they still appeared to others as glorious
and blessed. In order to effect their chastisement and correction,
says Plato, returning to the mythological vein, a council of the gods
was called, and Zeus “spoke as follows.” What the Olympian said will
never be known, for here the _Critias_ ends, and for the fate of the
Atlantines one must recur to the _Timæus_.
The mythical prologue and epilogue excepted, the whole account
reads as if the author believed it himself. It is singularly free
from fantasy--this is no Cloud-Cuckoo Land of an Aristophanes. The
transcriber of the legend was perhaps the largest mind of antiquity
and a man of unblemished character; and “strange but altogether true”
he calls his own story. He was, however, a constructive dreamer, and
in his _Republic_ he has given a detailed sketch of an ideal state.
Was this another essay of a like nature? Might not the narrative
carry further if it came from a man of less imaginative sweep--from
the contemporary Xenophon, or from Plutarch, both of them vivacious
chroniclers with their eyes on facts? Phædrus had said to Socrates,
“You can easily invent a tale of Egypt.” Has the great disciple of
Socrates done this?
These questions are asked still, and antiquity asked them. Proclus in
his commentary on the _Timæus_ assumed that the legend was a symbol
of the contest between the primeval forces and the spirit of art and
science; he recites that Crantor, the first commentator, accepted it
as literal history and was ridiculed for it. Strabo and Pliny barely
mention the story. Thus Plutarch sets down the circumstances of its
relation: “Solon attempted in verse a large description, or rather
fabulous account of the Atlantic Island, which he had learned from the
wise men of Sais; but by reason of his age he did not go through with
it. Plato laid out magnificent courts and inclosures, and erected a
grand entrance to it, such as no other story, fable, or poem ever had.
But he began it late, he ended his life before the work, so that the
more the reader is delighted with the part that is written, the more
regret he has to find it unfinished.”
There is evidence that at any rate the legend is not an invention
of Plato. It was claimed by Plato himself that the victory of the
Athenians over the Atlantines was depicted on one of the ceremonial
tunics which were borne in the midsummer festival of the Panathenæa.
Diodorus has a reference to this war. Ælian says that Theopompus heard
a similar story in Phrygia, in which, however, the island was called
Meropis. Proclus quotes from the _Æthiopica_ of Marcellus a tale of ten
islands in the outer sea, the inhabitants of which preserved the memory
of a large island that had ruled over the archipelago and was sacred to
Poseidon.
The following are the main explanations, ancient and modern, of the
legend: 1. Atlantis was no island, but a part of either Europe or
Africa--the Iberian peninsula, or Senegal, for example--so remote from
Egypt as to seem an island to mariners who reached it after beating
about beyond the Straits. 2. Atlantis was Minoan Crete, resembling
Plato’s island in its configuration if not in its site; the ancient
Cretan civilization was destroyed about B.C. 1500, almost as completely
as if by a submergence in the sea. 3. “Atlantis is too obviously an
earlier and equally colossal Persia, western instead of eastern.”
4. Atlantis is pure fiction, arising, like the tales of Homer and
Hesiod, in the belief that the abodes of the heroes were in the extreme
west. 5. Atlantis is a variant of the old tradition of a Golden Age.
6. Atlantis and the Fortunate Islands and the Azores are one, but
tradition placed them too near the Straits, and the legend of a great
sunken island arose when no land was found where people thought land
should be. 7. Atlantis is another form of the solar myth--the setting
of the sun in the red ruin of evening, and the coming of dark upon the
deep. 8. Atlantis and the Republic are companion realms, the one no
less imaginary than the other, and each intended to illustrate Plato’s
conception of ideal polity.
These are the conjectures of a skepticism which properly refuses to
believe that so great a thing has happened and left such slight traces
in monuments or in tradition. Yet there are some details in Plato’s
story not so easily disposed of, and they appear more distinctly when
Atlantis itself is erased from it. These are the islands on both sides
of the legendary continent, the impassable sea that covers its site,
the great ocean beyond it, and the continent in the west which hems in
that ocean. None of these things the men of Plato’s time knew of, but,
to give them their modern names, they seem to be Madeira, the Canaries,
the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores on the one side of the Sargasso
Sea, the West Indies on the other, the Sargasso Sea itself, the open
Atlantic, and the American continent.
If the classic world had few and faint traditions of a sunken
continent and ignored them or dismissed them as idle tales, it had one
overmastering feeling that could not be called a superstition because
it never took a tangible form. The feeling was a blind terror of the
Atlantic Ocean, as if something dreadful had happened there, but so
long before that nobody knew what it was.
Nothing has developed in Europe itself that makes Plato’s story of a
lost continent a whit more probable or less plausible than it was when
he wrote it; but there have been contributions to the legend from the
ocean floor and from the New World. The variations, and in a measure
the shifts, of opinion on the Atlantis story in the last hundred years
are represented by three names--Humboldt, Ignatius Donnelly, and
Pierre Termier. Writing in 1826, the German savant noted evidences
of an external influence in the historical monuments of Central
America. In his book, _Atlantis: The Antediluvian World_, Donnelly
boldly contended that a continent had disappeared in the mid-Atlantic,
that this sunken domain had been the cradle of civilization, and
that the widespread traditions of a deluge were race memories of its
disappearance. This writer’s identification with the Baconian cipher
theory, and his espousal of fanciful beliefs and lost causes, political
or other, together with his credulity and his snap judgments, obscured
the industry, the wide range of information, and the real gift of
generalization to which his book bore witness. It came with something
like a shock to the scientific world when the French scholar, Prof.
Pierre Termier, Director of the Geological Survey of France, read his
paper on Atlantis before the Oceanographic Institute of France in
1912. This was published at Monaco in the Bulletin of the Institute of
Oceanography in 1913, and a translation, included in the annual report
of the Smithsonian Institution for 1915, provoked a discussion among
geographers in America that continued for several years.
“It seems more and more evident,” concluded Termier, “that a vast
region, continental or made up of great islands, has collapsed west
of the Pillars of Hercules, and that its collapse occurred in the not
distant past.”
In support of this inference Termier arrays the evidence of the
Atlantic’s surface and of the floor which its waters conceal. A ship
sailing due west from the Straits of Gibraltar four thousand miles
to Cape Hatteras would meet with no land. But if it lengthened its
course a little by making a detour, first toward the southwest, then
toward the northwest, then again toward the southwest, it would bring
in view Madeira, the more southern Azores, and the Bermudas. And if it
took soundings it would discover that, the marine depths over which it
was passing were strangely unequal. If the ocean were drained dry,
what would be seen would be a long elevated region lying between the
Old and New Worlds, separated from both by two enormous valleys, the
wider and deeper one on the American side. This is the revelation of
oceanography--a hidden continent in the Atlantic basin with the islands
named above as its mountain peaks.
Geology adds that the eastern region of the Atlantic over all its
length and probably from pole to pole is a great volcanic zone.
“Everywhere,” says the French geologist, “earthquakes are frequent,
here and there islets may spring up abruptly from the sea, or rocks
long known may disappear.” The ocean may conceal the continuity of
these changes, but to geological science they are incontestable and
they affect a zone which reaches from Iceland to the Cape Verde Islands
and is about 1,875 miles broad.
When a ship was laying the cable between Brest and Cape Cod in 1898,
the cable broke and was recovered by grappling. The grappling irons
encountered various submerged rocks with hard points and sharp edges,
and brought to the surface fragments of the vitreous lava called
tachylyte. These “precious fragments,” as Termier calls them, are
in the Museum of the School of Mines in Paris. The significance of
their structure is that if they had solidified under water they would
have been composed of confused crystals. In the form in which they
were found they must have cooled when they were still above the sea’s
surface. The sharp edges of the marine rocks, whence these fragments
came, argue that the region collapsed suddenly and recently. Had they
remained after the volcanic disturbance a long time above the sea, they
would have been smoothed by atmospheric erosion. Had they been a long
time under the sea, they would have been smoothed by marine abrasion.
The inference is that “the entire region north of the Azores and
perhaps the very region of the Azores, of which they may be only the
visible ruins, was very recently submerged, probably during the epoch
which the geologists call the present, because it is so recent, and
which for us, the living beings of to-day, is the same as yesterday.”
The evidence of zoölogy has been arrayed by another French scholar, M.
Louis Germain, briefly as follows: The present fauna of the Azores,
Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde Islands originated in Africa; the
Quaternary formations of the Canaries resemble those of Mauretania and
inclose the same species of mollusca. Therefore these archipelagoes
were connected with Africa up to an epoch near our own, at the very
least until toward the end of the Tertiary. Among the present mollusca
of the archipelagoes are some species which seem to be survivors of the
European Tertiary. Therefore there was a bond between the islands and
Spain which was severed during the Pliocene. The _Pulmonata mollusca_,
called oleacinidæ, are found only in Central America, the West Indies,
the Mediterranean Basin, and the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores,
and are larger in America than in these other regions. Therefore the
continent which included these islands had extended to the West Indies
at the beginning of the Miocene, but had been separated from them
during the Miocene. Fifteen species of marine mollusca lived at the
same time both in the West Indies and on the coast of Senegal, and
nowhere else. Therefore until very near the present time a maritime
shore extended from the West Indies to Senegal.
The arguments of geology and zoölogy may be combined. Termier is of
those geologists who believe the ancient alignment of continents was
east and west instead of north and south. There was a North Atlantic
continent comprising Russia, Scandinavia, Great Britain, Greenland and
Canada, and later a large part of central and western Europe and of the
United States. There was also a South Atlantic or African-Brazilian
continent extending northward to the Atlas, eastward to the Persian
Gulf, westward to the Andes. Between the two continents was the
Mediterranean depression, the ancient maritime furrow still marked in
the present Mediterranean and Caribbean seas. These continents were
broken up by foldings and collapses and a new design appeared, the
general direction of which is from north to south.
M. Germain, confining himself mainly to the middle region between these
two supposed continental areas, infers the existence of an Atlantic
continent connected with Spain and Morocco and prolonging itself so far
south as to take in regions of desert climate. During the Miocene this
continent reaches the West Indies. It is then broken up and portioned
off, at first in the direction of the West Indies; then in the south,
by the establishment of a marine shore which reaches Senegal; then in
the east, probably during the Pliocene, along the coast of Africa. “The
last great fragment, finally engulfed and no longer having left any
further vestiges than the four archipelagoes, would be the Atlantis of
Plato,” says Termier, himself reviewing the conclusions of Germain.
Thus the geological and zoölogical arguments correspond very closely.
To Termier there is no doubt at all that until an epoch near our own
there was a continental domain in the Atlantic west of the Pillars
of Hercules, and that it was sunk in a cataclysm. There is only one
question left: “Did men then live who could withstand the reaction
and transmit the memory of it?” Geology and zoölogy have perhaps told
all they could tell by way of answer. “It is from anthropology, from
ethnography, and lastly from oceanography,” says Termier, “that I am
now awaiting the final answer.”
Anthropology and ethnography have provided some hints, such as they
are. Men of scientific or of speculative cast have noted cranial and
other correspondences in the subtropics on both sides of the Atlantic,
and what seemed to be African influences in the civilizations of
Central and South America. Quatrefages named five races of American
Indians which seemed to him “true negroes.” Le Plongeon remarked the
thick lips and woolly hair of certain sculptured figures at Chichen
Itza. Retzius thought there were the same form of skull and the same
reddish-brown complexion in the Carib Islands and in the Canaries.
Elephant heads with trunk and tusks have been discovered in the friezes
of ruined temples in Yucatan. Wiener contends, on the evidence of
philology, that yams, manioc, peanuts and tobacco came to America from
Africa before Columbus rather than went out from America afterward.
In ancient times the people of the Old World and the New were in
contact. The belief has been that this was across the Pacific, but the
traditions of Mexico and its neighbors point in a different direction.
Two dominant notes are struck in the legends of the races fronting on
the Caribbean. One is the belief that civilization was brought to them
by white, bearded strangers who came over the sea from the east. The
other is the tradition of a deluge or related cataclysm. And sometimes
the two stories are grouped; the beneficent strangers are refugees from
the disastrous something that had happened upon the sea. Cataclysm has
been called the pivot of Central American myth and the basis of the
Mexican calendar.
The legendary founder of the oldest Mexican civilization, the Toltec,
was Quetzalcoatl, who was worshiped as a god, but was reputed to
have been a bearded white man who came from the east with a band
of colonists and instructed the natives in the arts and sciences;
his symbol was a boat. The story was that he was driven out by the
witch doctors, but promised to return. Aztec belief that the Cortes
expedition was the return visit made easier the Spanish conquest. Among
the Mayas the divine stranger was known as Kukulcan, and his title
was Lord of the Hollow Tree (the ark?). Coming from “Valum Chvim,” he
founded the ancient city of Palenque. His company was described as
wearing black mantles with short sleeves; the Mayas called them “men
with petticoats.”
Native legends of tropic America, some of which Spence has marshaled,
present a panorama of flood, fire, hilltops of refuge, arks, survivors.
According to the Arawaks of Guiana the world was smitten by fire, from
which men hid themselves in caverns; and then by flood, from which
a leader and his followers saved themselves in canoes. In the Carib
deluge myth men escaped to the mountain tops. In the Tupi-Guarani myth
the Creator scourged the world with fire but a great magician put it
out with a rainstorm and men took to trees (boats?). In the Karaya
myth an evil spirit invoked the deluge and sent fish to pull the
survivors down from the hill Tupimare. Various hills in Mexico and the
American southwest are pointed out as the Ararats of flood refugees.
There is even an account in the Nahuatl language of the building of an
ark. According to early Spanish writers there were similar stories of
oceanic upheaval among the natives of the Antilles.
All the New World flood myths, the Chaldean, Aramæan, and Iranian, the
Hebrew story of Noah, and the Greek story of Deucalion, as well as the
indicated ending of Plato’s tale of Atlantis, agree in their main
lines--that a malevolent spirit sought to drown all men, or that an
angered divinity sought by a deluge to punish their lusts and pride,
and that a few righteous or lucky men escaped. One of these stories,
recited in the sacred book of the Quiche Indians of Guatemala, was
believed by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg to be an account of the
disaster to Atlantis. As the briefest of the flood myths, and not the
worst, it may be repeated:
“They did not think or speak of the Creator who had created them, and
who had caused their birth. They were drowned, and thick resin fell
from heaven.
“The bird Xecotcovach tore out their eyes; the bird Camulatz cut
off their heads; the bird Cotzbalam devoured their flesh; the bird
Tecumbalam broke their bones and sinews and ground them into powder.
“Because they had not thought of their mother and father, the Heart of
Heaven whose name is Hurakan, therefore the face of the earth grew dark
and a pouring rain commenced, raining by day, raining by night.
“Then all sorts of beings, little and great, gathered together to abuse
the men to their faces; and all spoke, their millstones, their plates,
their cups, their dogs, their hens,” denouncing them and railing at
them.
These traditions of disaster, survival, and immigration are the
collateral support of native American myth to Plato’s narrative of
Atlantis. The monumental ruins of Central America yield some evidence
which in no wise confirms the traditions, but into which they fit.
The Maya civilization has been described as immigrant from a region
unknown. Its palaces and temples and columns, and the figures and
inscriptions upon them, represent an art that seemingly had reached
its maturity when the earliest of them was made. There are no local
evidences of the slow evolution of skill and taste, such as would be
expected in an indigenous culture. The resemblances to the monuments of
Burmah and Siam are superficial. The evidences of a European influence
are practically _nil_. The indications of a civilization remarkable
along certain lines are convincing; the Mexican calendar, the Maya
astronomy, betray a knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies
which was equal to that of Europe in the Columbian period, and yet
independent of it.
The Maya monuments have one singularity which has challenged
speculation. “It has been found,” says Spence, “that the starting
point of all the dates found on the monuments, save two, is the same.
Thus all Maya reckoning dates from one definite day in the past, a
day 3,000 years prior to the first date in Maya history which can be
described as contemporary with the monument upon which it is found.
Upon this practically all Maya scholars of repute are agreed.” It has
been conjectured that this normal date of the Mayas is the date of a
cataclysm, somewhat as the people of San Francisco, with the memory of
their earthquake and conflagration strong in them, date many events in
their conversation as since the Fire. It has also been conjectured that
this date, and a developed civilization, were brought to the Mayas by
the survivors of the cataclysm.
Such is the case for Atlantis as it has been made up by men with some
rank as students or specialists. The bold guesses of Donnelly, from
whose work several of these citations have been taken, must be added.
His most interesting contention, perhaps, is that the Bronze Age in
Europe must have been preceded by a Copper Age, since bronze is an
alloy of copper and tin; but that there is no evidence of a Copper Age
in Europe. There was, however, a Copper Age in America, from Bolivia to
Lake Superior, and therefore Atlantis was the bridge between the Copper
Age of America and the Bronze Age of Europe.
With a characteristic sweep of statement Donnelly announces his
conclusions. The people of Atlantis “were the founders of nearly
all our arts and sciences; they were the parents of our fundamental
beliefs; they were the first civilizers, the first navigators, the
first merchants, the first colonizers of the earth; their civilization
was old when Egypt was young, and they had passed away thousands of
years before Babylon, Rome, or London was dreamed of. This lost people
were our ancestors, their blood flows in our veins; the words we use
every day were heard, in the primitive form, in their cities, courts,
temples. Every line of race and thought, of blood and belief, leads
back to them.”
For every fact, tradition, or coincidence which seems to point toward
the disappearance of a continent in the Atlantic sea, there are other
explanations with authoritative names behind them. The old dread of the
Western Ocean is attributed to the teaching of primitive religions that
there was the land of shades, and to the colossal trickery of Phœnician
mariners who wanted no competitors beyond the Pillars. The American
legends of bright-faced strangers coming over the water from the east
are declared to be still another form of the sun myth. The world-wide
tradition of a deluge may represent the independent thinking of various
races of men who found fossil shells on their hillsides and reasoned
that at some time a sea had covered them. It is asserted that Termier
assumed too much for his specific evidence of a recent submersion--the
fragments of tachylyte dredged from the ocean floor--when he declared
that vitreous lava could not form under the sea. Accepting, as many
geographers do, that a great land domain has sunk near the coast of
Africa, they say that this was not a historic, nor a prehistoric, but a
geologic event.
The controversy reduces itself, at last, to a question of time: Did
the large island which Plato called Atlantis disappear after men came
upon the earth? Termier does not assert this, but thinks it possible,
and in some measure the wish is father to the thought. As an American
geographer puts it, “It is well known that Professor Termier is not
only a good geologist, but also a great lover of the beautiful and
much given to the poetic in speaking and writing.” This passage in the
Termier address is in point:
“Meanwhile not only will science, most modern science, not make it a
crime for all lovers of beautiful legends to believe in Plato’s story
of Atlantis, but science herself through my voice calls their attention
to it. Science herself, taking them by the hand and leading them
along the wreck-strewn ocean shores, spreads before their eyes, with
thousands of disabled ships, the continents submerged or reduced to
remnants, and the isles without number enshrouded in the abyss.”
Beyond the appeal to poetry the Atlantis legend has another--an appeal
which is also a temptation. It explains much, perhaps too much. There
are gaps in the story of human origins, and in the history of the arts
and sciences, that are as wide as the black voids the astronomer sees
in the skies. Atlantis fills them all. Science has sought to fill
them by assumptions--the origin of man in a drowned continent of the
Pacific called Lemuria, of which Australia is a fragment; the origin of
civilization on the Mediterranean floor when it was dry land. These are
assumptions without a tradition behind them. Paradoxically enough, the
point of attack upon the Atlantis theory is that a legend supports it,
and other legends fit into it. The whole matches into an ingenious and
simple design, and are the affairs of nature and man ever so simple?
It is not for anyone to answer yet, perhaps ever. But one has license
from Termier to speculate, and, if one will, to dream. If in substance
Plato’s tale was true, it needs no effort of imagination to picture the
empire of Atlantis as it was eleven thousand years ago, for all its
drama save the dreadful end has been repeated. The British Isles, with
their sea-borne commerce, their Mediterranean and Caribbean garrisons,
their mines and metal workings, their ancient Druidical religion
and costume, even their addiction to horse-racing, reproduce in the
northern seas the story of this vanished island dominion south and west
of Gibraltar.
The outlines of the crowning calamity of history--if history it
was--have already been drawn by legend, and there are authentic human
experiences on a lesser scale, and in other times and places, to
fill in the canvas. In the European port nearest the supposed site
of Atlantis, on the first day of November, 1775, a sound of thunder
was heard underground, and in an earthquake that shook twelve million
miles of sea and land the city of Lisbon fell in ruins, burying sixty
thousand persons beneath it.
“About one o’clock in the afternoon”--it is Pliny the Younger speaking,
the place is near Pompeii, and the time August 24th, A.D. 79--“a vast
and singular cloud was seen to elevate itself in the atmosphere.
It spread horizontally, in form like the branches of the pine, and
precipitated the burning materials with which it was charged upon the
many lovely but ill-fated villages which stood upon this delightful
coast.... Multitudes crowded toward the beach, but the boisterous
agitation of the sea, alternately rolling on the shore and thrown back
by the convulsive motion of the earth, precluded every possibility of
escape.... Now were heard the shrieks of women, screams of children,
clamors of men, all accursing their fate and imploring death, the
deliverance they feared, with outstretched hands to the gods whom many
thought about to be involved together with themselves in the last
eternal night.”
Let the biblical account of the deluge speak the closing word upon
Atlantis: “And all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were
covered, and the waters prevailed upon the earth.”
One turns from the convulsion and welter of the deep, and the beautiful
and dreadful thing that lay beneath it, and fixes the gaze on archaic
ships, laden with strangely robed men and women, riding the long
billows of the Caribbean toward a quiet shore. There--if the dreamers
are right--they built another civilization, which flourished and in
turn vanished, with its temples and palaces, beneath the green mantle
of the tropic forest. If the dreamers are right.