Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (21 page)

Maps and Legends

New York, New York

S
tavros Papamarinopoulos was hardly the first person to suggest that prehistoric sailors had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and returned with news of a distant land. Ancient writers prior to Plato described islands across the boundless sea. The conspiratorial theme “Who
really
discovered America?” had become a staple of pseudohistorical TV shows and controversial bestselling books. Even Spyridon Marinatos had once written coquettishly, “We are apt to underestimate the daring feats of ancient seafarers. Plato’s narrative could be considered as the first reference to the existence of America.”

When I started to hunt through the modern scholarly research concerning what I assumed would be a hot topic, what I found was disciplines collectively holding their fingers in their ears and saying “La la la, can’t hear you.” Part of the resistance is logical—archaeologists and anthropologists depend on “material culture” like midden heaps, burial sites, and pottery sherds, and none exists that proves the occurrence of early transatlantic crossings. (Extraterrestrial landing strips don’t count.) As often as not, charges of hyperdiffusionism, the unforgivable sin committed by Ignatius Donnelly,
would be hurled at anyone who tried to demonstrate that ancient seafarers had ever made round-trip visits.

Reigning scientific paradigms do not shift easily. In 1960, the explorer Helge Ingstad began compiling proof that the Viking Leif Eriksson had not only sailed to Newfoundland around AD 1000 but also established a short-lived colony there. Historians, deeply invested in the romantic story of Christopher Columbus, loudly dismissed Ingstad’s idea until he eventually amassed an overwhelming amount of hard evidence. It didn’t help Ingstad’s case that his original hypothesis was based on interpretations of Norse sagas describing the settlement of Greenland and farther colonies in a place called Vinland.

Should anyone ever compile a list of anthropologists’ least favorite twentieth-century Norwegian explorers, though, Ingstad is unlikely to place higher than second. The clear winner would be Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed west across the Pacific from Peru to French Polynesia in 1947 on the
Kon-Tiki
, a balsa wood raft he’d built. He believed the voyage demonstrated the likelihood that the South Seas had been settled by seafarers from the South American mainland. (This conclusion has not aged well; the overwhelming consensus is that migration occurred in the opposite direction.) In 1970, Heyerdahl crossed from Morocco to Barbados in the
Ra II
, a boat made of reeds. This time he demonstrated the possibility of Egyptian crossings during the Pharaonic period. The first voyage made Heyerdahl famous; his low standing among professional scholars was probably not enhanced by his directing an Oscar-winning documentary in which he also starred, his tanned and shirtless torso a silent rebuke to tenure-track bookworms. The
Ra II
expedition was, if anything, even less popular with mainstream academics, in part because any link between ancient Egypt and the New World—a clear echo of Ignatius Donnelly’s argument—boosted the possible case for hyperdiffusionism.

Alice Beck Kehoe, an emerita professor of anthropology at Marquette University, was one of the few experts I could find who had
an open mind about ancient sea crossings. Kehoe was both an ardent critic of the sort of hyperdiffusionism that Donnelly had promoted (which, in her book
Controversies in Archaeology
, she calls a “grossly racist ideology”) and someone willing to write a textbook that asked the kinds of questions that might make bored undergraduates read ahead on the syllabus, such as this one: “Why did people in Afghanistan and Mexico and Utah make hundreds of little clay statuettes of naked women with fancy hairdos?”

Kehoe had compiled dozens of modern examples of small craft making transoceanic crossings. The British explorer Tim Severin, seeking to prove that an account of the voyage of sixth-century Irish monk Saint Brendan across the Atlantic and back was true, successfully re-created the journey in 1976–77 aboard a thirty-six-foot craft built using only tools and materials available in Brendan’s day, including forty-nine greased oxhides. (Severin was particularly popular among Atlantologists, including Papamarinopoulos, because the only extant source for Brendan’s story is a legend written down centuries after the fact.) Within a few years, a voyage that a century earlier had been considered so dangerous as to be suicidal had entered the realm of stunts
.
Men and women have since crossed the oceans in both directions aboard craft such as rowboats, dinghies, and kayaks. Two Frenchmen windsurfed the Atlantic on an oversize surfboard.

In some fields, such a preponderance of anecdotal evidence would open new areas of inquiry. It seemed to me that if a Japanese sailor could cross the eight thousand miles of the Pacific solo aboard a boat made from beer kegs, propelled by a sail made of recycled plastic bottles, perhaps the notion of experienced Greek or Phoenician sailors bringing back stories from a trip across the Atlantic wasn’t so outlandish. I called Kehoe at her home in Milwaukee and asked if she ever tried to raise the subject of transatlantic crossings at professional conferences.

“Oh, consistently,” she said. “It’s totally taboo. If you bring it up at archaeology meetings, people give you this kind of cold stare and start looking for somebody else to talk to.”

Just because hyperdiffusionism as an explanation for all New World progress is a racist theory, Kehoe argues, doesn’t mean that pre-Viking contact never occurred. She sees in her colleagues’ resistance the lingering influence of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, which supported the conquest of the American frontier by labeling its native occupants “merciless Indian savages.” (The phrase is Thomas Jefferson’s, from the Declaration of Independence.) According to this line of thinking, even if someone
had
managed to reach the shore of North or South America, they’d have been massacred immediately by bloodthirsty primitives. Dead men don’t carry home tales of newly discovered continents.

This convenient theoretical obliteration of possible contacts allows historians to discount or ignore intriguing references in ancient literature. Stavros Papamarinopoulos interprets passages from the first-century-AD historian Plutarch as describing the ancient Greeks possibly founding colonies in America. The fifth-century-AD Neoplatonist scholar Proclus quotes an earlier historian’s claim that “there were seven islands” in the Atlantic, as well as three larger ones. The last of these was inhabited by a people who, according to William Smith’s
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography
, had “preserved from their ancestors the memory of the exceedingly large island of Atlantis, which for many ages had ruled over all the islands of the Atlantic Sea, and which had been itself sacred to Poseidon.” By the sixth century BC, a century before Plato was born, the Greeks had heard reports of a discovery made by the Phoenicians, a large, fertile island with navigable rivers in the ocean outside the Pillars of Heracles. There are no islands between Spain and America with rivers of that size.

Kehoe suggests that the first sea crossings from the Old World
to the New might have taken a longer route. “Mediterranean keel-bottomed boats were capable of crossing the ocean,” she said. “But if you really wanted to get across the ocean in 1000 BC, you should’ve gotten yourself a Chinese junk or a Polynesian double-hulled canoe.” The Polynesians, she pointed out, were able to voyage thousands of miles and locate the tiny speck of Easter Island centuries before Columbus sailed. It hardly seems possible that they never continued on to find the entire west coast of the Americas. Bones of Polynesian chickens have been excavated at a pre-Columbian site in Chile, and a sweet potato native to South America has been shown to have been introduced throughout Polynesia a thousand years ago. (In both places, Kehoe notes, the potato was called by the name
kumara.
) The geographer Carl Johannessen has tallied more than two hundred life forms that seem to predate Columbus’s crossing. Some cultures even share supernatural concepts. Kehoe told me that long before 1492 both Mesoamericans and the Chinese looked at the full moon and saw the same thing: a rabbit pounding some sort of beverage in a mortar and pestle.

Kehoe believes that her colleagues had constructed an imaginary “unsurmountable barrier” of water between the continents. “American archaeologists are incredibly land-bound,” Kehoe said. “They very rarely go out on the seas at all. People who go into archaeology do so because they’re not interested in political science, they’re not interested in mythology—they want to do science. They want to have quantifiable data. Some of us are also comfortable with history, but the majority are not. Like my husband. He didn’t really like to read. He went into archaeology because he liked to go outdoors and dig.”

Kehoe told me she considers the Atlantis story to be “a harmless parable for what Plato wanted to say about the fragility of civilization, that it can be totally overcome by natural forces.” She felt the cocaine mummies are important, that long ago coca leaves had traveled across the Pacific to Egypt, part of the search for elixirs of life that obsessed the early alchemists. Her response when I asked her
opinion of the Lake Superior copper hypothesis was a long chuckle of recognition. “There’s so much copper in Eurasia,” she finally said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
11

•   •   •

I decided to give Papamarinopoulos an incomplete on the transatlantic crossings and turned to the cartographic evidence. Renaissance maps, of course, were popular with Atlantologists as evidence of distant voyages made by ancient sailors. Rand Flem-Ath based his theory largely on the evidence of the 1513 Piri Reis map. Papamarinopoulos cited several others, in particular the Orontius Finaeus (or Oronce Finé) map of 1531. The striking thing about these maps is that they appeared to show accurate depictions of Antarctica many centuries before its first recorded sighting in 1820. “One must conclude that the Antarctic continent was discovered not by whalers and sealers of the nineteenth century,” Papamarinopoulos wrote in an essay coauthored with the geologist John G. Weihaupt, “but by adventurers in or more likely before the sixteenth century.” Moreover, South America appears to be drawn with more precision
before
explorers began making ocean crossings in 1492 than it would be for the century that followed. The implication was that potential blockbuster evidence of Plato’s land across the
panpelagos
had been preserved in these ancient maps.

Gregory McIntosh, a historian who wrote the definitive history of the granddaddy of Atlantis-theory-inspiring maps,
The Piri Reis Map of 1513
, confirmed to me that the map is genuine and an extraordinarily important historical document. (The Oronce Finé map is
also real.) On this side of the Aegean the Piri Reis may be best known as exhibit A in certain Atlantological arguments, but the document is so revered in Turkey that it appears on national currency. McIntosh’s expertise had made him a minor celebrity in Istanbul, and he’d just accepted a position teaching at the city’s Piri Reis University. I asked him about the map’s surprisingly accurate depiction of Antarctica.

“I’ve been looking at this map every single day for the last thirty years,” McIntosh said. He explained that any map that converts the Earth’s three-dimensional globe shape into a two-dimensional version is a projection, or an interpretation of how the world’s geographic features might relate to each other on a planar surface. “There are six aspects of the spherical Earth that can be distorted or preserved when made into a flat map: sizes, shapes, directions, bearings, distances, and ratios. The Piri Reis map, as with
all
flat maps, does not maintain accuracy in all these aspects. In fact, the Piri Reis map, as with most Renaissance maps,
distorts
all of these aspects.”

The world map most commonly used today is the Mercator projection of 1569, which captures geographic shapes accurately at the expense of size; those near the top and bottom appear far larger than they actually are. (Though the two landmasses appear similar in size on paper or Google Maps, Greenland is less than one-eighth the size of South America. In fact, it’s smaller than either Brazil or Argentina.) Prior to Mercator, there was a lot less standardization and a lot more guesswork. “Today we think of maps as highly scientific representations, but five hundred years ago world maps combined actual geography with theoretical geography,” McIntosh said. “Just because a Renaissance map shows a coastline doesn’t mean anybody saw and surveyed that coast. More often, distant lands on early maps included graphic descriptions and visualizations based on written descriptions, ideas, and beliefs.” In the case of Piri Reis, this would include the hypothetical Terra Australis Incognita, a giant southern
landmass first hypothesized by Aristotle. A similar landmass, labeled “Terra Australis,” appears on the Oronce Finé map. “The Piri Reis map is not any more or less accurate than any other map made at the time,” McIntosh told me.

McIntosh got excited talking about the “fringe” that insisted these maps proved ancient knowledge. Many claimed that the Reis and Finé maps resembled Antarctica beneath the polar cap. And yet one can’t even be sure what an ice-free Antarctica would look like, because if what McIntosh called “a quintillion tons of ice” were to melt, the isotonic rebound effect of the weight loss would raise the continent’s elevation significantly, regardless of any resulting rise in sea levels. The process would completely change Antarctica’s size and the shape of its perimeter. In either case, McIntosh stressed each time I cited a supposed similarity between one of the maps and Antarctica, “They don’t look anything alike!”

“Not even a little?” I asked, rotating the copy I had on my desk to try to make a better match. Charles Hapgood had needed to do something similar in
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
to accentuate the similarities. McIntosh was right, of course. On both old maps, the tip of South America bumps against Antarctica, obliterating the chilly six-hundred-mile sea gap of the Drake Passage and the nine-hundred-mile-long crooked finger of the Antarctic Peninsula, either of which would have been hard to miss. There was a small problem of scale, too. On the Finé map, McIntosh pointed out, Terra Australis is nine times the size of the real Antarctica.