Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet (7 page)

Churchward held that the first humans had appeared two million years ago on Mu. Modern humans were, he believed, all descended from the survivors of Mu’s cataclysmic destruction, brought about by the explosion of the ‘gas belts’ on which it rested. Churchward
followed
his first book with four more:
The Children of Mu, The Sacred Symbols of Mu, The Cosmic Forces of Mu and The Second Book of the Cosmic Forces of Mu.

One would think that after five volumes of elaboration (all of which are now back in print in America) Churchward’s might have proved the last written words on the subject. But as recently as 1970 yet another book appeared,
Mu Revealed
by Tony Earll. This claimed
to be the diary of a boy called Kland who, according to Earll, moved to Mexico in 21,000 BC but was unlucky enough to meet with an earthquake and get his scrolls trapped in a collapsing temple. Then in 1959, so the story goes, archaeologist Reedson Hurdlop excavated the temple. He found the scrolls and discovered that they not only
supported
Churchward’s Mu hypothesis but provided even more information about the lost continent and its people.

Except all this was also fiction. Crossword enthusiasts may have noticed in passing that ‘Tony Earll’ is an anagram of ‘not really’ and ‘Reedson Hurdlop’ of ‘Rudolph Rednose’.
Mu Revealed
was, in fact, the first novel by another émigré Englishman, the TV scriptwriter, self-styled witch and occult author Raymond Buckland (b. 1934). In the same year that he published
Mu Revealed,
Buckland also released (under his own name)
Witchcraft Ancient and Modern and Practical Candleburning Rituals.

It is probably true to say that there is no stretch of land too
miserable
, too mean, or even too imaginary, that someone will not wish to be the king of it. For twenty years or so, beginning in 1933, the Office of the Geographer of the US State Department carried on a correspondence with a number of people concerning some alleged islands off Panama. One Mrs Gertrude Norris Meeker wrote in 1954 (on headed notepaper declaring her to be the Governor General of the Government of Atlantis and Lemuria) to point out that since 1943 a group of islands 200 miles south-west of Florida and just eight degrees north of the Equator had been the ‘Private Dynasty or Principality … named “Atlantis Kaj Lemuria”’. ‘Any trespassing on these islands or Island Empire is a prison offense,’ the letter ended darkly.

The Department’s geographical adviser, Sophia A. Saucerman, responded that the USA did not recognize such a state. In reply Mrs Meeker presented a detailed history of the Principality, involving a
Danish seaman called John Mott who in 1917, not wishing to return to a war-torn Europe, took possession of the place and founded the dynasty to which Mrs Meeker belonged.

In 1957 an official inquiry was set up ‘to make a determination as to the reality of the Mu Group in the Pacific Ocean’, as a result of which the Office replied that it did not believe these islands existed – and nor did it believe that anyone else believed it either. But the persistent Mrs Meeker then succeeded in persuading a US Congressman, Craig Hosmer, to take a hand in her affairs. In 1958 he wrote to the Geographer pointing out that, if her plans worked out, Queen Meeker of Mu might be a good source of trade. The Congressman’s letter stimulated a swift reply. Three days later the Department
pronounced
itself definitively unaware of the existence of any such island empire: ‘However, the Geographer of this Department is most willing to make a geographical study of this matter …’

‘The file ends with this letter,’ writes Sumathi Ramaswamy. The Geographer’s kind offer to conduct research in the South Pacific was not taken up.

By the end of the nineteenth century geologists and biogeographers had found out much about the rocks, fossils, animals and plants of the world, notably on the previously little-known southern continents. They had found sequences of rocks that looked so similar, it was incredible that they were now so far apart. Equally improbable was the fact that these rock sequences began with boulder beds, which suggested there had been a massive glaciation that had spanned the Equator and had apparently emanated from the middle of what is now the Indian Ocean. Biogeographers meanwhile had found similar evidence of widely separated animals that could not possibly have
migrated across the waters that now separated them. The obvious explanation at the time was that the intervening ocean had not always been there. Where was that land now? The only reasonable
explanation
seemed to be that it had sunk.

As the persistence of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu myths attest, ‘sunken lands’ tap into something deep in the human psyche, and many theories have been advanced as to why this should be. One has it that, after the last Ice Age, sea levels rose 125 metres in a relatively short time. The sea reclaimed vast areas of coastal land that had been exposed during the great freeze. We know that this happened and we know that humans must have witnessed it. Perhaps this event really did leave deep scars and give rise to ancient legends of drowned land, legends that informed early geological speculations.

On the other hand, if you throw a stone into the sea it sinks. Sinking is what rock does. Land subsides. Things fall into holes. It’s the sort of movement that seems
natural
for rocks, acting under the influence of gravity.

But although one could explain many troubling facts by
supposing
that former land (‘land bridges’ was the somewhat misleading term) had fallen away to become the bed of the sea (
separating
things that seem too similar to be so far apart), this did not help to explain Wallace’s line, across which very different creatures live in such inexplicably close proximity. Nor did it help much in explaining why the southern continents had all been glaciated at more or less the same time, and on opposite sides of the (present) Equator.

The great British geophysicist Arthur Holmes, an early convert to continental drift, who first suggested convection in the Earth’s mantle as a plausible mechanism for it as early as the 1920s, wrote in the 1965 edition of his great book
Principles of Physical Geology:

To see a thing, first you must believe it to be possible. As it was for the Blanford brothers with their bold interpretation of the Talchir boulder bed, the simple act of believing your eyes is very often an act of considerable mental courage. The same went for the faunal zones and the Wallace line. The simplest explanation, such as William of Occam always urges upon scientists, was that the continents had moved
sideways
across the surface of the Earth. But in the late
nineteenth
century (and for much of the twentieth) that remained too wild a surmise to be accepted.  

Nevertheless, after all this confusion and speculation about a lost continent that had never actually existed, the first
genuine
lost
continent
to be freed from oblivion by the human mind was emerging into the gaze of a new breed of time traveller. A vanished geography, that had begun its disappearing act 250 million years ago, was backing slowly into the light.

Fixed to number five, at the end of the street nearest to Angel tube station in Islington, north London, is a rectangular green plaque put there by the Geological Society of London, announcing it as the birthplace of Eduard Suess (1831–1914), ‘Statesman and Geologist’. Sadly, today almost nobody remembers who Eduard Suess was. But he was recognized in his lifetime as one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century; one who, in the course of a long and busy life, manned the barricades in a revolution; brought a new fresh water supply from the Alps to another great European capital, Vienna; and tamed that city’s floods. He also wrote a wholly remarkable book which made him the first human being to conceive of a long-vanished giant landmass uniting the southern continents. This land still bears the name he gave it: ‘Gondwanaland’.

Suess spent most of his student life in Vienna; but three years after he settled there the city was caught in the liberal revolution that swept Europe in 1848, the momentous year in which Karl Marx published
The Communist Manifesto.
Suess might have come from a bourgeois mercantile background but he didn’t let it hold him back; and for all his politeness to his English friends, he was no Englishman. He was a young, liberal activist mingling with others who, like him, were soon to take a decisive role in their country’s affairs, and who were of an age (and disposition) to man barricades. Suess learnt, in 1848, that the world could change, suddenly and permanently. What is more, sudden revolutions were not only possible: they could do you good. Not that it did him much good at first.

Like many things revolutionary, it started in France. The 1848 Paris revolution, which eventually led to the short-lived Second Republic, caused a run on the Vienna stock market. There was revolution in Austria-Hungary as the rising middle classes demanded change. Reformers roamed Vienna’s streets demanding the resignation of Prince Metternich, the widely hated conservative Chancellor, who ruled the Empire in place of the feeble-minded Habsburg Emperor, Ferdinand I (1793–1875). The protesters wanted such things as a free press, freedom of assembly and a national German parliament.

After trying to placate the populace with half measures, Metternich and the Emperor fled to Innsbruck. Barricades, Paris-style, were set up in Vienna’s streets – and the young Eduard Suess was on them.

As in other countries, the 1848 revolution in Austria was
inconclusive
. By August the Imperial family had returned. Sentiment among the ruling elite swung back, hankering after stability. The
government
camp rallied with the aristocracy and others keen to see the Habsburgs back in power. On 23 October 70,000 troops besieged and bombarded Vienna, against at most 40,000 rebels who included
students
and academics. They were doomed. No help arrived, and after three days’ fighting 2000 of them lay dead. The leaders of the
uprising
were rounded up and court-martialled. Nineteen were sentenced to death.

Suess who had been sent away for his own safety, now returned to Vienna and continued his studies, yet remained under suspicion, because in December 1851 he and a number of others at the
Polytechnikum
suspected of allegiance to the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth (1802–94) were arrested, subjected to court martial and imprisoned.

Suess was now in trouble. He might have remained at the Emperor’s pleasure for much longer than he did had it not been (if we are to believe some sources) for the intervention of a powerful mentor, Wilhelm von Haidinger (1795–1871), founding director of the Austrian Geological Survey, who used his influence to get his protégé freed in 1852 without indictment.

The great old geological surveys of the world mostly date from this phase of the Industrial Revolution, when governments began to
realize
that everything society needs that cannot be grown has to be found by a geologist. The Austrian Survey was founded in 1849 at the former Mining Museum in Heumarkt, making it one of the oldest in the world. In 1851 the geologists removed to a more prestigious address, Vienna’s Rasumovsky Palace. This gigantic pile, on what were then the outskirts of Vienna, had been built, accidentally burned down and then rebuilt, by the former Russian ambassador to the Austrian Court, Andrei Kirillovich Rasumovsky (1752–1836), now chiefly remembered as a patron of Beethoven.

Suess had published his first scientific paper in 1850 (on the
mineral
waters of Karlsbad) and another in 1851, the same year that Haidinger commissioned him to map sections across the Dachstein region of the eastern Alps. This work sparked Suess’s lifelong
interest
in the structure of mountain ranges and was to lead to one of his most lasting contributions to science. But that lay far in the future. For the time being he needed gainful employment and finally, in 1852, he secured it. It didn’t sound like much – clerk in the Imperial
Geological Museum – but Suess was launched. In 1857, still only twenty-six, he completed a spectacular feat of counter-jumping by being made the first ‘extraordinary professor’ of geology at the University of Vienna. Promoted to full professor ten years later, Suess remained in post for his entire career, retiring in 1901: ‘88 semesters later’, as he was to say in his valedictory lecture.

Suess was no prisoner of the ivory tower. Five years after joining the professoriate he published a pamphlet lambasting the typhoid-ridden water that the Austrian capital’s citizens were forced to drink, and proposing a dramatic solution. As he later wrote in his
Erinnerungen
(
Memories
): ‘The basic principle [is] that drinking water is to be looked for outside settlements.’ Suess joined Vienna’s City Council in 1862, the year his pamphlet hit the streets. From this position he pushed forward the first
Wiener Hochquellenwasserleitung
– Vienna Mountain Spring Water Pipeline – which eventually solved the city’s drinking-water problem in 1873 (and is still used today).

Suess was made an honorary Burgess, Vienna’s highest civic honour. Soon afterwards he was chosen as a parliamentary
representative
and subsequently sat for more than thirty years in the Austrian Parliament, for three of them as leader of the Liberals,
raising
hackles with his forthright anticlericalism and strident denunciation of political privilege. In many ways he became the Austrian version of Britain’s Thomas Henry Huxley: a very public
scientist
indeed, doughty, rebellious, controversial, yet fully engaged in public works and showered with more honours than he ever accepted.

Perhaps because of his political commitments, Suess’s scientific life was not filled with the sort of relentless travelling that geologists
usually
indulge in. Instead he used his academic resources to survey the
world from his study, with his almost unbelievably wide command of literature: from the latest research reports from the far-flung corners of the world’s great empires to the
Epic of Gilgamesh.
It was soon
recognized
across the world that no man alive could match his knowledge of the globe. Between 1885 and 1909 he distilled this unrivalled
worldview
in a monumental four-volume book called
The Face of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde)
. Even before it was completed the Scottish
geologist
Sir Archibald Geikie was writing of this ‘noble philosophical poem in which the story of the continents and oceans is told by a seer gifted with rare power of insight into the past’ and of its ‘firm hold of detail combined with singularly vivid powers of generalisation’.

Oddly to modern eyes, Geikie’s long tribute to Suess (published in 1905 as the third volume was in preparation) does not mention the book’s biggest claim on history, the greatest tribute to those very vivid powers of generalization; for as early as volume one, Suess discovered and named his lost supercontinent.

In 1913, a year after Captain Robert Falcon Scott had frozen to death returning from their failed attempt to be first to walk to the South Pole, his second in command, Edward Evans, was returning to New Zealand aboard the
Terra Nova
and composing a letter to his
secretary
and immediate family. Scott’s legend had yet to be printed, and Evans’s letter, written before the myth of the Great British Hero stifled all criticism of the man, was frank. ‘It seems to me
extraordinary
that in the face of such obstacles
they stuck to all their records and specimens
… We dumped ours at the first big check. I must say I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records and extra stores – not eatable.’

To find out why Scott of the Antarctic died lying beside thirty-five
pounds of rock, you have to go back to 1905 and a dinner he ate in Manchester in the company of a young lecturer in the University’s Department of Botany. That woman, the first female ever to be employed as an academic by the University, was Dr Marie Stopes (1880–1958).

The world knows Marie Stopes today for her later pioneering work on birth control, just as in her day the readers of
Married Love
or
Enduring Passion
assumed that she was a doctor of medicine. In fact, she held a DSc from London University and had already had a
distinguished
career as a palaeontologist specializing in fossil plants. Much of the research for which that degree was awarded had
concerned
the evolution of the seed. According to her biographer Keith Briant, Stopes, having met Scott at this dinner dance, quizzed him during the waltzes about his Antarctic ambitions and urged him to take both her and his own wife to the frozen continent. At the end of the dinner, following Scott’s persistent polite refusal, she is then said to have urged him, as second best, to find for her the fossils she most wanted.

Seven years later, on 20 March 1912, the exhausted Scott, Henry Bowers and chief scientist Dr Edward Adrian Wilson put up their tent against the blizzards for the last time. Their frozen bodies had to wait until 12 November to be found. The leader of the relief party, Edward Atkinson RN, wrote: ‘We recovered all their gear and dug out the sledge with their belongings on it. Amongst these were 35lb of very important geological specimens which had been collected on the moraines of the Beardmore Glacier … they had stuck to these up to the very end, even when disaster stared them in the face and they knew that the specimens were so much weight added to what they had to pull.’

However, Scott was not deceived about the importance of the
geological
specimens. In all, 1919 samples from the 1911–12 Antarctic
adventure are now housed at the Natural History Museum in London. Most were collected by expedition geologists Raymond Priestley, Frank Debenham and T. Griffith Taylor, and come from McMurdo Sound and Terra Nova Bay. However, the ones you pick up with most trembling of the hands are those that lay for eight months beside the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers just 12.66 miles south of One Ton Depot. There are samples of coal and fossil plants, and among them is the first find from the Antarctic of
Glossopteris
.

French geologist Adolphe Théodore Brongniart (1801–76) coined the name
Glossopteris
for a fossil leaf in 1828. At the time he thought he was describing part of an extinct fern.
Glossopteris
means ‘tongue fern’ in Greek, and its leaves are very like those of
Asplenium
, the familiar houseplant Hart’s Tongue Fern. However, the
Glossopteris
plant held quite a few surprises. First it turned out to have been a tree which grew to about eight metres; and, despite its fern-like
appearance
, it produced
seeds
. Such ‘seed ferns’ became extinct in the Triassic Period, well over 200 million years ago. Today they are
studied
by a few dedicated palaeobotanists, modern inheritors of Marie Stopes’s scientific interest, as they provide fascinating insights into how reproduction by seed evolved.
Glossopteris
, on the other hand, is a name famous among all geologists because it planted, in the mind of Eduard Suess, the first idea of Gondwanaland.

Suess painstakingly pieces together the evidence for his
supercontinent
. He notes in volume one that India and South Africa have many things in common. Each supported very similar sequences of rocks: ‘a mighty series of non-marine deposits which extend from the Permian to the Rhaetic … a series of similar terrestrial [fossil] floras flourished in both regions …’ Madagascar, too, shared this
similarity
. Finally, near the end of the first volume, Suess utters the sentence: ‘We call this mass Gondwana-Land, after the ancient Gondwana flora which is common to all its parts.’ And so the first
true
supercontinent was born –
reborn
– in the mind of Man.

A reconstruction of the
Glossopteris
tree.