The Atlantis Blueprint (6 page)

The map Hapgood found in Joseph Needham’s
Science and Civilisation in China,20
dating from 1137, was carved on stone; it was drawn over a grid of squares. Hapgood had made an interesting discovery about the Piri Reis map and various others that could be traced back to the time of the library at Alexandria. Their degree of latitude was shorter than their
degree of longitude, because the original mapmaker had used an oblong grid; a later mapmaker had mistakenly changed this into a square grid, causing a ‘longitude error’. Since this same longitude error was also present on the Chinese map, it looked as if its original also dated from a very long time ago. Hapgood came to the conclusion: ‘Perhaps we have here evidence that our lost civilisation of five or ten thousands years ago extended its mapmaking here, as well as to the Americas and Antarctica.’

Again, Hapgood noted that West Africa, as depicted by Piri Reis, seems to have an ample water supply – for example, lakes that do not now exist are depicted – and other ancient maps cited by Hapgood show lakes in the Sahara. Between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, the mistral - the north wind – was very wet, carrying moisture from the melting glaciers of the Ice Age, so that the Sahara was green and fertile. Since the Piri Reis map shows West Africa with lakes, it would seem that the original map used by Piri Reis dated from that wet period.

In
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
Hapgood built up his case until it became irresistible. It is impossible to dismiss the book as a work of imaginative speculation, for every page bears the marks of wide and patient scholarship. Yet the conclusions of its final chapter, A Civilisation That Vanished’, would be bound to shock any scholar who took it seriously, for it sounds like the raw material of a novel by H. Rider Haggard or Jules Verne:

Asking how a great civilisation can vanish without trace, Hapgood enunciated a basic principle of exploration:
that we find what we look for.
The portolans had been known for centuries. The Piri Reis map, discovered in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1929, had been discussed in the Library of Congress as early as the 1930s, before interest suddenly revived in 1956. But no one had seen its significance – or, if anyone saw it, was courageous enough to raise the questions that Hapgood asked.

Then why did the publication of
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
not cause a major academic controversy in 1966? The answer must be, partly, that academia was already a little suspicious of Hapgood. In 1958, when
Earth’s Shifting Crust
finally appeared in print, it was accepted for abridgement by one of America’s most popular weeklies,
The Saturday Evening Post,
which alone was enough to arouse the irritation – and envy – of academics. In his foreword to the later edition,
The Path of the Pole,
in 1970, the geologist F. N. Earll tells how, after reading this abridgement, he looked for reviews in technical and academic journals but found none. When the reaction finally came, says Earll, it ‘could hardly be described as rational – hysterical would be a better description’. One academic declared indignantly that Hapgood was not a geologist, while another cited an authority who disagreed with the authorities Hapgood quoted and used that as a basis for condemning the whole book. In short, Hapgood
was treated with fury and contempt for daring to write about geology.

As a result, none of these professors were going to enter into discussion of a book that claimed to have discovered evidence for a civilisation predating anything known to history. It was easier to ignore Hapgood.

There was another reason that no one was prepared to take Hapgood seriously. In 1960, a book called
Le Matin des Magiciens,
by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, broke all bestseller records in France, and was translated into dozens of languages. Pauwels was a journalist, while Bergier was a physicist who was also interested in alchemy. Their book was a flamboyant and dazzling hotchpotch of alchemy, archaeology, magic, hermeticism and literary speculation, with chapters on Lovecraft, the Great Pyramid, Gurdjieff and Nazi occultism. One of its major exhibits was the Piri Reis map, among other portolans. ‘Had they been traced,’ asked the authors, ‘from observations made on board a flying machine or space vessel of some kind? Notes taken by visitors from Beyond?’ As
The Morning of the Magicians
made its triumphal progress all over the world, the Piri Reis map became more widely associated with evidence for ‘ancient astronauts’.
²²
Hapgood, who had spent ten years working on
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
could hardly have had worse luck.

In 1966, a Swiss hotel manager named Erich von Däniken, whose passion for travel had been satisfied mainly in the world of books, devoted his nights to writing a work arguing that our earth has been visited by spacemen in the remote past. The idea had been suggested four years earlier by a Russian astronomer called Joseph Shklovkii, in a book entitled
Universe, Life, Mind,
which was issued in America in 1966, with additional material by astronomer Carl Sagan, under the title
Intelligent Life in the Universe
.
²³
Däniken’s book consisted mainly of assertions that monuments such as the pyramids, the statues of Easter Island and the Mayan temples of Mexico were built by – or with the aid of – ancient astronauts.

Published in Switzerland under the title
Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (Memories of the Future)
in March 1968, it quickly became a bestseller, as did the English and American editions, entitled
Chariots of the Gods?.

Scholars pointed out that the book was full of absurdities and inaccuracies. Däniken had managed to multiply the weight of the Great Pyramid by five, and his assertion that the Egyptians did not possess ropes or wood for rollers was easily contradicted by paintings on the walls of tombs and pyramids. His claim that the statues of Easter Island could not have been carved out of ‘steel-hard volcanic rock’ by stone tools was also disputed – Thor Heyerdahl did it in the 1950s with a few natives of the island, using stone tools found in the quarries. Däniken asserted that Easter Island also lacked wood for rollers, apparently unaware that trees once grew there, before all the timber was used up. Of the Nazca lines in Peru, Däniken claimed they were intended as runways for spaceships, ignoring the fact that they are merely scratched in the loose rocks of the surface. Whole books – and television documentaries – have been devoted to attacks on Däniken’s ‘evidence’, demonstrating that most of it is based on ignorance of what the inhabitants of Egypt, Easter Island, Peru and other lands could actually have achieved.

Early in the book, Däniken (like Pauwels and Bergier) introduced the Piri Reis map: ‘The latest studies of Professor Charles H. Hapgood… give us some more shattering information. Comparisons with modern photographs of our globe taken from satellites showed that the originals of Piri Reis’s maps must have been aerial photographs taken from a very great height. How can that be explained?’

Hapgood, of course, had never said anything of the sort. The fact that Piri Reis failed to feature a 900-mile stretch of South American coastline and repeated another stretch suggests that the map was not taken from an aerial photograph. Nevertheless, millions of people were left with the impression
that Hapgood was a supporter of von Däniken, and that he also believed the maps had been drawn by ‘ancient astronauts’.

Hapgood was less concerned than he might have been – he had more important things to occupy his mind. For several years he had been convinced that he had found the actual whereabouts of Atlantis, and that this might even lead him to abandon the academic world for the more active life of an explorer. On 5 December 1958, he had written to his friend Ivan Sanderson to announce what he termed ‘the most sensational discovery of our time’.

In studying the Piri Reis map, Hapgood had, as we have seen, noted a mysterious island about 1,000 miles off the coast of Venezuela and the mouth of the Orinoco River. Hapgood had also found two more ancient maps showing the island24 and testifying to its existence. There is no such land mass now, only two very small islands known as the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul. Each about a quarter of a mile long, they are located above the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and are the tips of mountains that are now submerged. This, Hapgood was convinced, was all that remained above the surface of Plato’s Atlantis – just where Plato hinted it was, in the mid-Atlantic. The size of this mysterious island – about 350 by 250 miles – sounded about correct. Plato also claimed that Atlantis had a great central mountain, a holy mountain, which Hapgood was convinced was now the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul.

Sanderson had advised Hapgood to avoid mentioning the word Atlantis’ in
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
in case he was labelled a crank, but the warning was hardly necessary – Hapgood was too aware of the hostility of his critics to lay his head on the chopping block. Besides, the evidence should soon be available for everyone to see. All that was now needed, Hapgood assured Sanderson, was a rich benefactor who would lend them a yacht and pay for underwater cameras that would survey the slopes of the mountain – where, according to Plato, there should be about $500 million worth of gold.

In
Atlantis: The Eighth Continent
(1984),25 Charles Berlitz says that in 1963 Hapgood approached the White House, hoping he could persuade President Kennedy to lend him an aircraft carrier to investigate the seabed under the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul. He quotes from Hapgood’s unpublished memoirs: ‘It was fortunate that I had had previous contacts with the White House when I did some errands for President Roosevelt during World War II… It was no problem to find someone close to the Kennedys in Massachusetts who could arrange a meeting for me with the President… We had mutual friends in the Democratic Party in Boston.’ Hapgood worked out a scheme whereby planes would fly in increasingly wide circles over the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul; if anything was seen on the sea bottom, it would be investigated with underwater cameras. He recognised the danger: if the newspapers got hold of the story, it would become front-page news and his own reputation would suffer; he therefore suggested that the search should be disguised as ‘just another oceanographic expedition’.

By October 1963 the meeting with Kennedy was arranged – only to be frustrated by Kennedy’s assassination in November. Undeterred, Hapgood went on to suggest that Nelson Rockefeller – who was a friend of Sanderson – might be interested. Since Sanderson had once met Walt Disney at a party, he might also be worth approaching; the search for Atlantis would have made a marvellous live-action film.

But again, Hapgood was to be disappointed. For a decade he continued to concentrate on writing and teaching. His friend Sanderson died in 1973, and in that year Hapgood told a correspondent named Henriette Mertz that although he knew that the site of Atlantis ‘lay around the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul’, he was abandoning the quest and could only hope that others would follow up the trail he had so laboriously laid.

In October 1982, Hapgood wrote to a young correspondent called Rand Flem-Ath,
²⁶
adding an amazing postscript to his
life’s work on ancient civilisations. After telling him that he was now preparing a third edition of
Earth’s Shifting Crust,
to be published in 1983, he went on to speak of his latest discoveries: ‘Furthermore, there is evidence that the last displacement of the crust moved both American continents southward about 30 degrees, and absolutely devastated life and civilisation on them, while climatic change was much less drastic in the Old World, and more avenues of escape existed.’

A shift of 30 degrees represented about 2,000 miles, a vast distance. If there had been a great catastrophe that devastated life and civilisation, then surely it must have happened more quickly than in the 5,000 years that Hapgood had previously supposed?

The next paragraph of the letter offered an even greater revelation: ‘Furthermore, in recent exciting discoveries I believe I have convincing evidence of a whole cycle of civilisation in America and in
Antarctica,
suggesting advanced levels of science that may go back 100,000 years…’

One hundred thousand years? Could that have been a mistake for 10,000 years? No – the rest of the long letter was typed immaculately, without even a minor error. Hapgood obviously read it through carefully before putting it in the envelope. But at that time the ancestor of modern man, Cro-Magnon man, was not believed to have appeared on earth until about 40,000 years ago (although the date has since been pushed back beyond 200,000 years). Besides, Hapgood was not talking about cavemen with clubs, but a ‘whole cycle’ of civilisation, which included ‘advanced levels of science’.

And in the next sentence he told Rand: A good deal of the evidence I have on this will be included in the new edition of ESC
[Earth’s Shifting Crust].’
Hapgood was, admittedly, a maverick, but he would not have placed his whole reputation in jeopardy with some crank theory. He evidently felt that he had found evidence of
science
dating back 100,000 years, at a
time when, according to 1982 palaeontology,
*
the most advanced human being on earth was Neanderthal man.