The Atlantis Blueprint (13 page)

This story raises doubts: a man with Fawcett’s self-control would not be likely to strike a tribal chief. Izarari also alleged that Jack Fawcett had seduced one of his wives, which sounds more likely. In later years, many travellers claimed to have learned the truth about Fawcett’s death, and one of the more plausible stories is that Jack Fawcett had violated some tribal taboo, and that his crime had to be punished by death else Izarari’s people would themselves become outcasts and killed by other tribes.

Whatever happened, it seems clear that Fawcett never reached the city he called ‘Z’, or the deserted city of Manuscript No. 512.

I finished
Exploration Fawcett
in an odd state of frustration. No one who reads it could doubt that Fawcett knew exactly where he was going and what he was looking for. He had talked to many people – Europeans and Indians – about lost cities, and was quite certain that they existed and knew roughly where they were.
¹⁹
The person I needed to consult was obviously Rand, whose fascination with Fawcett and Brazil had started when he found references to him in the Hapgood archive at Yale in 1995. He was also interested in South America, since he felt that if Atlantis
was
Antarctica, then it was almost certain that many of its inhabitants escaped to South America.

Rand had one site in mind as the location of the deserted city. He had already ascertained that if Giza is used as the post-Atlantis prime meridian, a whole series of sites fall on multiples of 10 degrees: Tiahuanaco is 100 degrees west of the Great Pyramid, Quito is at 110 degrees, and so on. It seemed to Rand that there
ought
to be a major sacred site at 90 degrees from Giza, not merely because it is a multiple of ten but because it is also a quarter of the distance around the world.

Tiahuanaco’s latitude (16 degrees, 38 minutes) had at first seemed disappointing, until Rand realised that it is 10 phi
from the pole. The perfect place for a major religious site in the Matto Grosso would be at 90 degrees west of Giza, and 10 phi south.

I looked up this site in my
Times Atlas,
but saw that this could not have been Fawcett’s objective on that last journey. It was about 50 miles south of Cuiaba – Fawcett’s last major halt – and on the border of Bolivia and Brazil. However, as Rand pointed out to me, it was in an area that Fawcett had explored during his surveying days (the area where he and his companions had almost starved to death). In
Mysteries of Ancient South America,
Harold Wilkins states: ‘Fawcett’s friends speak of other strange tales brought to the Colonel by wandering Indians, whose tribal law he had studied in the Matto Grosso and the borders of Brazil and Bolivia.’20 It seems at least probable that this site is the location of the city that was half covered by jungle, but it was not on Fawcett’s route during that final journey.

Meanwhile I had faxed to Rand Fawcett’s own map of his intended route (from
Exploration Fawcett),
together with his coordinates for the ‘city of 1753’. I was hoping, of course, that Fawcett’s coordinates (11 degrees, 30 minutes south, 42 degrees, 30 minutes west) would fall on one of Rand’s sacred sites, but it was not to be. It turned out to be 73 degrees, 38 minutes west of Giza, and in terms of the ‘blueprint’ that means nothing.

But Rand, far from being disappointed, recognised that it provided an important clue. He noted another possible sacred site within 100 miles of the ‘city of 1753’, at 72 degrees west of Giza, which is one-fifth of the distance around the world, and again 10 degrees south. He wrote to me:

In short, Rand suspected that Fawcett had disguised the location by one and a half degrees east and south.

Rand made another interesting point.
If
Fawcett was disguising the location of the ‘deserted city’ by adding 1 degree 30
minutes to both its co-ordinates, then he was identifying a spot that is one-fifth of the way around the world from the Giza meridian. Is it possible that Fawcett had also stumbled on this notion of the Giza meridian? Fawcett was a youth of seventeen when Smyth was agitating for the prime meridian to run through Giza, arguing that the ancients probably used Giza as their central meridian. Fawcett knew Egypt well, since he was working for British Intelligence in Cairo during the war, and he was also a surveyor. Could he have been using the Giza meridian to locate possible sites for ancient cities in South America?

As I pored over the map of Brazil, I was struck by another matter. Fawcett seems to have chosen a very strange route. Cuiaba is about 1,000 miles west of the site he was aiming at (the deserted city), and 700 miles south. Bahia itself – his ultimate goal – is only about 250 miles east of ‘the deserted city’ (which makes sense; the lost mines of Muribeca cannot possibly have been far from the coast, or it would have taken too long to transport the silver to Bahia). It looks – as G.K. Chesterton put it in one of his poems – as if Fawcett had decided to go to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier. Why would Fawcett have started from Cuiaba, 1,000 miles east of the deserted city? Why not go west from Bahia to the deserted city?

A possible explanation occurred to me, and, as Rand’s next email showed, it had dawned on him at the same time. If sacred longitudes run in tens, then Fawcett would be crossing yet another on his way west – the 80-degree longitude west of Giza (which is about 49 degrees west of Greenwich). Since he would be travelling along the 10th parallel – another sacred latitude – the likeliest location for the city he calls ‘Z’ is where the 80th and the 10th cross.

This crossing point of the two meridians – 80 degrees west of Giza, and 10 degrees south – is only about 200 miles northeast of where Fawcett vanished. If ‘Z’
was
a sacred site, then this, according to the blueprint, is its most likely location. From ‘Z’, Fawcett would have to travel almost 500 miles east to reach the deserted city of 1753.

Which brings us back to the question: why would Fawcett want to disguise its location?

Perhaps Fawcett was hoping to return to England to announce his discovery of three ‘lost cities’. One he already knew – the city covered by jungle. If he could also pinpoint ‘Z’ and the deserted city of 1753, his triumph would be complete. He would have been hailed as one of the greatest explorers of all time, the manuscript of
Exploration Fawcett,
back at his home in Devon, would certainly become a bestseller, and he would have plenty of funds for another expedition. Even if he failed, he would certainly want to return to Brazil, and if anyone had seen the manuscript in the meantime, then he might be beaten to his objective by a rival. It would be a simple, obvious precaution to disguise the location of the deserted city until he had been there.

Whether Rand is correct about the locations of the three lost cities may not be as difficult to establish as one might suppose. Nowadays it is unnecessary for an explorer to equip an expedition and plunge into the Brazilian jungle. A space satellite, using the kind of radar that was used to penetrate the clouds of Venus, would only have to overfly the site – and track it in strips – to locate ruins buried under vegetation.
²¹
Archaeologists have even developed a radar that can penetrate the ground and locate ruins buried under sand.

What they have not yet developed is a method for deciding where to look, and this is what Rand has provided with his Atlantis blueprint.

Rand had already discovered that if you drew a line from the Great Pyramid to the North Pole, and another line from the Great Pyramid to the
old
North Pole, in Hudson Bay, the angle between the two is 28 degrees, and that 28 plays an important part in the Giza site (see Chapter 4).

Intrigued by this discovery, Rand had begun to look for other examples of a relationship between the two poles. From Rosslyn, the site of the Templar church in Scotland, the angle

Two of the sites that Fawcett was interested in were located at 12N during the Hudson Bay Pole. From the Lost Atlantean City the Hudson Bay Pole is 12 degrees west of north. This is a 12/12 site.

12N latitude during Hudson Bay Pole; 12 º

(the line to the left of 90)

between the two poles is 50 degrees. But its latitude is also 50 degrees north. Rand called this a 50/50 site. Again, Stonehenge was at a latitude of 46 degrees, and the angle between the two poles from Stonehenge was also 46 degrees – another ‘double’ site, 46/46. And when he discovered many more of these ‘double’ sites, he became convinced that this was one of the basic factors that led the ancients to regard a certain site as sacred. This is why his suggestion for the location for one of Fawcett’s lost cities (the one covered in vegetation) was at a spot where the angle between the poles was 12 degrees and the latitude was also 12 degrees south – a 12/12 site.

Rand then took an interesting leap in the dark. From the Giza meridian, the only important line of longitude (i.e., a multiple of ten) that runs through England is 30. If the blueprint theory is correct, there
ought
to be a major sacred site on

Canterbury Cathedral may have been built on top of a much more ancient site. During the Hudson Bay Pole it was midway between the pole and the equator at latitude 45N. The angle between Canterbury, the current pole and the former Hudson Bay Pole is 45 degrees. Canterbury is a 45/45 site. It is also 30 degrees west of the Great Pyramid and during the Hudson Bay Pole, when Giza was at 15N, Canterbury was 30 degrees further north at 45N.

this line. Rand ran his finger down a map of England, and found that the line ran through Canterbury, England’s most sacred site.

He drew an imaginary line to the North Pole and to the old North Pole in Hudson Bay. The angle between them was 45 degrees, and Canterbury was at 45 degrees north during the Hudson Bay Pole. So Canterbury is a 45/45 site, and since it was 30 degrees north of Giza,
and also
on the 30-degree longitude, it is a 30/30 site relative to Giza.