It was amazing enough that a sixteenth-century map should show Antarctica, which had not been discovered until 1818, but that it should show Antarctica as it had been in prehistoric times seemed preposterous. Indignant scholars had said as much, which is why the panel of experts had gathered at Georgetown University, in Washington DC, to defend Mallery. All this excited Hapgood, for he had been arguing that the polar ice caps had built up fairly quickly—over thousands rather than millions of years—and that they caused the earth to wobble and the continents to move around. He had gone on to suggest that great masses of dislodged ice caused major catastrophes, and that the last of these catastrophes had occurred about fifteen thousand years ago, when Antarctica was 2,500 miles closer to the equator.
Hapgood contacted Captain Mallery, who impressed him as sincere and honest. He learned from him that the Library of Congress had already possessed facsimiles of the Piri Re’is map even before the officer brought a copy to the Hydrographic Office, and that it possessed many more such maps. They were called portolans—meaning ‘from port to port’—and were used by mariners in the Middle Ages. And Hapgood was startled to learn that these maps had been known to scholars for centuries, but that no one had paid much attention to them. He thereupon decided to involve his students at Keene State College, New Hampshire, in a full-scale study of the maps.
Why had no one paid much attention to them? To begin with, because they had been made by medieval mariners, and were assumed to be full of errors and inaccuracies. Why take the trouble to compare them with more modern maps?
But at least one scholar—E. E. Nordenskiold, who compiled an atlas of portolans in 1889—was convinced that they were based on charts that were far more ancient than the Middle Ages. They were too accurate to have been drawn by medieval sailors. Moreover, charts dating from the sixteenth century showed no sign of development from those of the fourteenth century, which sounded as if both were based on older maps. Moreover, Nordenskiold also noted that the portolans were more accurate than the maps of the great geographer and astronomer Ptolemy, who was active in Alexandria around AD 150. Was it likely that ordinary seamen could surpass Ptolemy, unless they had ancient maps to guide them?
Hapgood’s students decided that the simplest way of attacking the problem would be to put themselves in the position of the original mapmakers (or, in some cases, mapmaker—for it often looked as if many later maps had been based on the same original chart). As everyone knows, the first problem in creating a map is that the world is a globe, and a flat piece of paper is bound to distort its proportions. In 1569, Gerald Mercator solved the problem by ‘projecting’ the globe on to a flat surface, and dividing it up into latitude and longitude, the method we still use. But this is because we know the whole globe. How would an ancient mapmaker, who knew perhaps only his own country, go about it?
The sensible way, the students decided, would be to choose some centre for the map, draw a circle around it, then subdivide this circle into various segments, like a cake—sixteen seemed to make sense. Then if they had to extend beyond the circle, they would probably stick squares on the edge of every ‘slice’.
Piri Re’is had admitted that he had combined twenty maps together, and he had often allowed them to overlap—or fail to overlap. So he had shown the Amazon river twice, but left out a 900-mile stretch of the coastline of South America. Hapgood and his students had—so to speak—to reason their way back to the original twenty maps.
The first question was: where was the original ‘centre’? Long study left them to, conclude that it was off the map, but that it was probably in Egypt. Alexandria seemed the obvious choice. Hapgood involved a friend who was a mathematician, to try to find the answer by trigonometry (fortunately, he had not been told that experts thought the charts were not based on trigonometry). It took three years to find the solution. When it finally became clear that the place they were looking for had to be situated on the Tropic of Cancer, they realised that only one ancient city seemed to fit the requirements—Syene, now known as Aswan, the site of the modern dam.
Syene, in upper Egypt, has one interesting distinction; it was the place from which the Greek scholar Eratosthenes, head of the Library of Alexandria, had worked out the size of the earth around 200 BC.
Eratosthenes happened to hear that on 21 June every year, the sun was reflected at the bottom of a certain deep well in Syene—that is, it was directly overhead, so towers did not cast a shadow. But in Alexandria they did. All he had to do was to measure the length of a shadow in Alexandria at midday on 21 June, and work out from that the angle at which the sun’s rays were striking the tower. This proved to be 7½ degrees. And since the earth is a globe, then the distance from Syene to Alexandria must be 7½ degrees of the earth’s circumference. Since he knew the distance from Syene to Alexandria was 5000 stadia (or 500 miles), the rest was easy: 7½ goes into 360 forty-eight times, so the circumference of the earth must be 500 times 48—24,000 miles. (As we have seen, it is actually closer to 25,000, but Eratosthenes was amazingly close.)
Now, Eratosthenes had made a small error, and increased the circumference of the earth by 4½ degrees. Hapgood discovered that if he allowed for this error, Piri Re’is’s map became even more accurate. This made it virtually certain that the map was based on ancient Greek models after Eratosthenes.
But, reasoned Hapgood, when the geographers of Alexandria made their maps, it is unlikely that they sailed off to look at the various places they were mapping. They almost certainly used older maps—and then introduced the error. So the older maps must have been even more accurate than those of Alexandria.
As we saw in the last chapter, a tutor of one of the late Ptolemies, Agatharchides of Cnidus, was told that the base of the Great Pyramid was an eighth of a minute of a degree in length. And from this it is possible to work out that the pyramid builders knew that the circumference of the earth was just under 25,000 miles, which is even more accurate than the estimate of Eratosthenes. This evidence leaves us in no doubt that the ancient Egyptians not only knew that the earth was a globe, but knew its size to within a few miles.
Clearly, this would seem to indicate one of two things: either the Egyptians had a navy capable of circumnavigating the globe, or they had access to information from someone who did possess such a navy. (The third possibility—astronauts from the stars—seems, on the whole, rather lower on the scale of probability than the other two.) But we have already seen that one of the first pharaohs to possess a navy was Snofru, father of Cheops, and there would hardly have been time for his ships to sail around the earth and map it in detail before the Pyramid (with its boat pits) was built. Margaret Murray points out that some of the pre-dynastic people of Egypt, the Gerzeans (around 3500 BC) represented ships in their pottery decorations; but these ships have banks of oarsmen, and it seems unlikely that the Gerzeans (possibly Cretans) rowed around the world. So we are left with the possibility that there were seafarers who crossed the oceans long before dynastic Egypt.
How long before? The Piri Re’is map of Queen Maud Land, at the South Pole, shows bays before they were covered with ice, and Hapgood estimated that the last time Antarctica was free of ice was some time before 4000 BC. (Core samples taken by the Byrd Antarctic Expedition of 1949 showed that the last warm period in the Antarctic ended then; the indications are that it began about 13,000 BC.) Someone had mapped Antarctica at least six thousand years ago, and possibly long before that. But a map is no use without some kind of writing on it, and the official date for the invention of writing is about 3500 BC (in Sumeria). Moreover, mapmaking is a sophisticated art, requiring some knowledge of trigonometry and geometry. Again, we seem to be positing a highly developed civilisation existing before 4000 BC. And since civilisations take a long time to develop, it seems possible that we are speaking of thousands of years before this date.
In November 1959, Hapgood made an appointment to look at other portolans at the Library of Congress. When he got into the conference room,
he was embarrassed to find literally hundreds of maps. He passed days looking over them, and discovered that many of them showed a southern continent. (In fact, Mercator had shown it—but that was only because he believed it was there, not because he knew of it.) When he saw a map drawn by a man called Oronteus Finaeus in 1531, he was suddenly transfixed. This not only showed the complete South Pole, as if seen from the air, but looked startlingly like the South Polar continent on modern maps. It showed the same bays without the ice, rivers flowing to the sea, and even mountains that are now buried under the ice.
There was only one problem. Oronteus Finaeus had made Antarctica far too large. Then Hapgood discovered what seemed to be the explanation. For some odd reason, Oronteus Finaeus had drawn a small circle in the middle of his Antarctica and labelled it ‘Antarctic Circle’. The real Antarctic Circle goes around Antarctica, in the sea. Then Hapgood realised that the circle he had drawn on his own map to represent the 80th parallel was in the centre of his normal-sized version of the Antarctic, just about where Oronteus had drawn his own Antarctic Circle. Obviously, some earlier copyist of the original map had mistaken the 80th parallel for the Antarctic Circle and mis-labelled it; the result of such a mistake would be to make Antarctica about four times its proper size—just as Oronteus Finaeus had done. Hapgood also concluded that the errors in the map showed that Oronteus Finaeus had constructed it out of many smaller overlapping maps. Again, his reasoning pointed to far earlier—and more accurate—maps.
The conclusion seemed to be inescapable. Some mapmaker had drawn Antarctica in the days when it was free of ice. Moreover, the thoroughness of the map showed that the mapmaker had spent some time there. The logical conclusion seemed to be that he was, in fact, an inhabitant of Antarctica in the days when it was warm and habitable—and possibly had a navy capable of sailing round the world.
Now this fitted in comfortably with a theory Hapgood had been developing since the early 1950s, and had put forward in a book called Earth’s Shifting Crust (1959), whose evidence so impressed Einstein that he wrote a preface to it. The purpose of the book had been to explain abrupt changes in the earth’s climate—what one palaeontologist called ‘sudden and inexplicable climatic revolutions’, often involving great extinctions of creatures like mammoths. The Beresovka mammoth, found in Siberia in 1901, had frozen in an upright position with food in its mouth, and spring plants—including buttercups—in its stomach. Hapgood devotes a whole chapter to such ‘great extinctions’.
Hapgood’s theory was that the crust of the earth is rather like the skin that forms on cold gravy, and can be literally pulled around by great masses of ice at the poles. It was not until the 1960s that scientists became aware of the earth’s tectonic plates, and Hapgood took these into account in a later edition of his book called The Path of the Pole. His argument was still that ice could cause the whole crust—tectonic plates and all—to move as one. He cites scientific evidence that Hudson Bay was once at the North Pole, and quotes a study of magnetism in British rocks made in 1954 that shows that the British Isles were once more than two thousand miles further south. Soviet scientists have stated that the North Pole was as far south as 55 degrees latitude sixty million years ago, and that it was in the Pacific, to the south-west of southern California, three hundred million years ago. Moreover, India and Africa were once covered with a sheet of ice, while—incomprehensibly—Siberia escaped. Is it not possible, Hapgood suggested, that an Ice Age does not cover the whole earth simultaneously, but only those parts that move into polar regions? He goes on to argue that, before the last ‘catastrophic event’ of 15,000 years ago, the Antarctic continent was 2,500 miles further north.
So it did not surprise Hapgood to find in the Oronteus Finaeus map evidence that the South Pole was once free of ice, and probably contained cities and ports.
A Turkish map of 1559, five years before the birth of Shakespeare, shows the world from a northern ‘projection’, as if hovering over the North Pole. Again, the accuracy is incredible. But what may be its most interesting feature is that Alaska and Siberia seem to be joined. Since this projection shows a heart-shaped globe, with Alaska on one side of the ‘dimple’ and Siberia on the other, this could merely indicate that the mapmaker did not have space to show the Bering Strait which divides the continents. If this is not so, the consequences are staggering; a land-bridge did exist in the remote past—but it may have been as long as 12,000 years ago.
Other early ‘portolans’ were equally remarkable for their accuracy—the Dulcert Portolano of 1339 shows that the cartographer had precise knowledge of an area from Galway to the Don basin in Russia. Others showed the Aegean dotted with islands that do not now exist—presumably drowned by melting ice—an accurately drawn map of southern Great Britain, but without Scotland, and with indications of glaciers, and a Sweden still partially glaciated.
A map of Antarctica published by the eighteenth-century French cartographer Philippe Buache in 1737 shows it as divided into two islands, one large, one small, with a considerable area of water between them. The 1958 survey showed that this is correct. On modern maps, Antarctica is shown as one solid mass. Even Oronteus Finaeus showed it as a solid mass. The implication is that Buache used maps that were far older than those used by Oronteus Finaeus—possibly thousands of years older.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of evidence uncovered by Hapgood is a map of China which he found in Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, dating from 1137, and carved on stone. Hapgood’s studies of Piri Re’is and other European portolans had made him familiar with the ‘longitude error’ mentioned above; now he was astonished to find it on this map of China. If he was correct, then the Chinese had also known the ‘original’ maps on which Piri Re’is was based.
All this explains why Hapgood reached the startling conclusion that there was a flourishing worldwide maritime civilisation on earth before 4000 BC, and that its centre was probably the Antarctic continent, then free of ice. He says in the final chapter of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: ‘When I was a youth I had a plain simple faith in progress. It seemed to me impossible that once man had passed a milestone of progress in one way that he could ever pass the same milestone again the other way. Once the telephone was invented, it would stay invented. If past civilisations had faded away it was just because they had not learned the secret of progress. But Science meant permanent progress, with no going back...’ And now the evidence of his ‘vanished civilisation’ seemed to contradict that conclusion. He quotes the historian S. R. K. Glanville as saying (in The Legacy of Egypt): ‘It may be, as some indeed suspect, that the science we see as the dawn of recorded history was not science at its dawn, but represents the remnants of the science of some great and as yet untraced civilisation.’
Hapgood, of course, does not mention Atlantis—it would have been more than his academic reputation was worth. Yet the story of Atlantis can hardly fail to occur to the minds of his readers—after all, his great catastrophe of fifteen thousand years ago sounds as if it might have been the beginning of the disaster that, according to Plato, engulfed the continent.
The problem, as we have seen, is that Plato’s account of Atlantis is—to put it mildly—hard to accept. In the Timaeus he tells us that Atlanteans were warring aggressively against Europe in 9600 BC, and conquered Europe as far as Italy and North Africa as far as Libya. It was the Athenians who, according to Plato, fought on alone, and finally conquered the Atlanteans—after which both Atlantis and Athens were engulfed by floods. But since archaeological investigation shows no sign of occupation of the site of Athens before 3000 BC (when there seems to have been a fairly sophisticated Neolithic settlement on the site of the Acropolis), this must be regarded as myth rather than history (although some of the surprises we have encountered in ancient Egyptian history suggest we should keep an open mind).
In his fragmentary dialogue Critias, of which only a few pages exist, Plato tells us that the Atlanteans were great engineers and architects; th
eir capital city was built on a hill, surrounded by concentric bands of land and water, joined by tunnels large enough for a ship to sail through. The city, eleven miles in diameter, contained temples (to the sea god Poseidon—or Neptune) and palaces, and there were extensive harbours and docks. A canal, a hundred yards wide and a hundred feet deep, connected the outermost ring of water to the sea. Behind the city was an oblong plain, three hundred by two hundred miles, on which farmers grew the city’s food supply; this was surrounded by mountains that came down to the sea, and which were full of villages, lakes and rivers. Plato goes into considerable detail about the architecture—even to the colour of the stones of the buildings—and the communal dining halls with hot and cold fountains make it sound like some Utopian fantasy of H. G. Wells.
But as a result of interbreeding—presumably with immigrants—the Atlanteans gradually began to fall away from their god-like origins, and to behave badly. At this point Zeus decided they needed a lesson to ‘bring them back into tune’, and called a meeting of the gods... At which point, the fragment breaks off, and the rest of the history of Atlantis—which once continued in a third dialogue—is lost.
The editors of the Bollingen edition of Plato explain that Plato was ‘resting his mind ... making up a fairy tale, the most wonderful island that could be imagined.’ But if it was intended as a fable or fairy tale, the motive is obscure; it seems far more likely that it is an old story that was told to Plato by Socrates. And if it was fiction, why did Plato insert his first brief account of Atlantis in the Timaeus, his account of the creation of the universe, which Benjamin Jowett called ‘the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the world as a whole...’ if it was merely a fairy tale?
In the second half of the nineteenth century, ships of the British, French, German and American navies began soundings of the floor of the Atlantic, and discovered the ‘Mid-Atlantic Ridge’, a mountain range running from Iceland almost to the Antarctic Circle, which is at one point 600 miles wide. This has proved to be an area of great volcanic activity. Understandably, the discovery caused considerable excitement, and drew the attention of an American congressman named Ignatius Donnelly, whom L. Sprague de Camp has described as ‘perhaps the most erudite man ever to sit in the House of Representatives’. On losing his seat in 1870, when he was 39, Donnelly retired to write Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, based upon extensive studies in the Library of Congress; it appeared twelve years later, and became an instant bestseller. The success was deserved; the book shows considerable learning, and even today is as readable as when it was written. Donnelly shows a wide knowledge of mythology and anthropology, and quotes in Greek and Hebrew. He studies flood legends from Egypt to Mexico, pointing out their similarities, and argues that ancient South American civilisations like the Incas and the Maya bear interesting resemblance to early European civilisations. His suggestion that the Azores may be the mountain tops of the sunken continent so impressed the British Prime Minister Gladstone that he tried—unsuccessfully—to persuade the British Cabinet to allot funds to send a ship to search for Atlantis.