Atlantis in the Caribbean: And the Comet That Changed the World

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

CLUE TO THE GREAT CATASTROPHE

The date is September 29, 2014. It is beginning to rain as I cross a sparse, sandy wasteland under threat of commercial development. I am in Lommel, Belgium, close to the border with the Netherlands. With me is a TV camera crew, a local archaeologist, and an elderly gentleman in his eighties. He is wheelchair bound, partially deaf, and can barely speak due to the scars left behind by throat cancer twenty years earlier. Yet Johan (Han) Kloosterman, a Dutch geologist and mineralogist, has no intention of giving up on life any time soon. He is one of the world’s acknowledged experts on what has become known as the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event, which, as we shall see, now becomes the most likely mechanism behind the destruction of Atlantis. His sheer determination to continue to learn, and deliver his findings to those who will listen, makes him one of the most inspirational people I am ever likely to meet in my life.

The Younger Dryas impact event is thought to have occurred approximately 12,800 years ago. At this time, scientists now believe, a comet appeared in the night sky, most likely entering the firmament somewhere in the vicinity of the Pleiades constellation (see chapter 20). After passing through the inner solar system this heavenly harbinger most likely entered perihelion, its close approach to the sun. All the indications are that, like Icarus in Greek mythology, it came too close to the solar orb. This caused its breakup into a freight train of fragments, some as much as a kilometer in size. These fiery projectiles, some of them hundreds of times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, were sent on a collision course with the Earth.

Here, on the surface of the planet, the Upper Paleolithic populations in the American Northwest would have had a rude awakening that day, as multiple fragments of the comet entered into low orbit. Contact with the atmosphere would have caused these intensely bright fireballs to break up still further, many splitting apart and exploding as terrifying air blasts even before they reached the ground.

The result of this torrent of impacts, which carved a path of destruction across the North American continent, and beyond as far as the Atlantic Ocean and Eurasian landmass, would have triggered uncontrollable wildfires consuming everything in their path in a mass conflagration. As the fires raged, great volumes of toxic smoke and burned debris would have risen into the upper atmosphere, very rapidly creating a thick black layer, blotting out the sun and moon for an extended period of time. How long exactly, no one knows.

Some large fragments of the comet crashed into the North American ice sheets, instantly vaporizing the water locked within. This resulted in torrential rain full of toxic chemicals that would have continued for weeks on end, flooding many areas of the planet. In addition to this, torrents of water freed up from the ice sheets would have torn through the hills and valleys, consuming everything in their path and changing the face of the landscape forever. The final outpouring of this melt water into the oceans would have risen the sea level almost immediately, drowning low-lying regions of the planet in just a matter of weeks.

The total blackout of the sun and moon, combined with the sudden release of fresh water into the oceans, would have triggered a rapid plunge in global temperatures, which in just a single human generation brought about a new Ice Age that lasted for approximately 1,200 years. This is known to scientists in Europe as the Younger Dryas event, and to those in North America as the Valders readvance.

THE USSELO HORIZON

When this book was originally published in 2000 under the title Gateway to Atlantis, very little scientific evidence was available on this catastrophic event, which took place in relatively recent human history. Despite this, I used what data I could find to demonstrate that the mechanism responsible for the destruction of Plato’s fabled island empire was the Younger Dryas comet, which I referred to as the Carolina Bays impact. The Carolina Bays is the name given to the countless elliptical craters that litter North America’s eastern Atlantic seaboard, from New Jersey all the way down to Florida. Almost certainly, they were created as a direct result of the catastrophic events of 12,800 years ago.

Among the evidence I presented was the scientific work of Han Kloosterman. He had determined that the impact left behind a distinctive, carbon-rich layer of burned debris between one and a half centimeters and thirteen centimeters in thickness. To date this has been detected in countries on six continents, including France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, White Russia, India, South Africa, Syria, Egypt, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Australia, Great Britain, and here in Belgium, where just over the border in the Netherlands, at a place named Usselo, the significance of this ominous black layer was first recognized by Kloosterman in the 1980s.

Archaeologists originally attributed the existence of this carbon-rich layer to localized conflagrations, caused by lightning strikes, erupting volcanoes, or human deforestation. What they had not anticipated, however, was the sheer extent and uniformity of the layer, something only realized after Han’s findings were announced in 1999.

Today this burned layer (known everywhere as the Usselo horizon, except in the United States, where it is referred to as the black mat) is being examined in countries all over the world. Its existence has now become the unique signature of a comet impact that very nearly destroyed the habitable world. Recently, it has been found to contain telltale microscopic impact debris, such as nanodiamonds, magnetic spherules, and tiny glass-like objects made of silica produced only at temperatures in the range of two thousand degrees centigrade.

Aside from myself, Han’s extraordinary discoveries have come to the attention of other scientists in the field of catastrophism, the study of catastrophes in world history. They include Richard Firestone, a nuclear chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who with his own colleagues, including geologist James P. Kennett and geological consultant Allen West, has been independently working on the idea of an impact event having taken place coincident to the Younger Dryas mini–Ice Age. It is the subject of his essential book The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, published by Inner Traditions in 2006. In his book Firestone provides brand new evidence to suggest that the Carolina Bays are, as I propose in this book (see chapter 21), the result of massive air blasts caused by disintegrating comet fragments impacting with the Earth.

Since the publication of Firestone’s book dozens of scientific papers have appeared on the subject of the Younger Dryas impact event. Even though their conclusions are fiercely contested by a group of skeptical scientists who vehemently deny that any such event ever took place, more and more evidence emerges each year to tell us very firmly that something terrible did befall the world around 12,800 years ago.

HUMAN CASUALTIES

What also seems apparent is that the effect of the impact event on human populations living at this time must have been catastrophic. In North America the Clovis people, with their highly sophisticated tool-making tradition, vanished completely during the Younger Dryas period. Advanced populations throughout the Northern Hemisphere most likely suffered similar fates. Any survivors would have been forced to migrate to warmer climes due to the sudden drop in temperature and the gradually worsening conditions of the 1,200-year mini–Ice Age.

In the Low Countries of Europe, and even in southeast England, it was the Federmesser culture that took the full force of the impact. This we know from the beautifully worked flint tools these people left behind at Lommel in Belgium. They are found with frequency in the occupational levels directly beneath the Usselo horizon, yet they disappear completely in the sandy layers immediately above it. So what happened to the Federmesser communities in the wake of the Younger Dryas impact event around 12,800 years ago? This is what I was here in Belgium to find out.

WHITE SANDS

In a huge trench cut out of the thick layers of pale yellow loess by a mechanical digger earlier that day, Han Kloosterman is desperately attempting to communicate something of importance to me. From the confines of his wheelchair he points toward a black wavy band about halfway up the 2.5-meter wall of compacted sand. This, I realize, is the Usselo horizon, the slightly unnerving signature of the Younger Dryas impact event. Removing some of the soft, black material with a trowel, I roll it around in my fingers. It feels greasy, like the oily waste left behind in the soil after an intense garden bonfire. Yet, as I knew only too well, this carbon-rich layer was laid down as much as 12,800 years ago.

Han, however, is not pointing toward the Usselo horizon. He is drawing my attention to the layer of white sand just below the wavy black line. It is about 25 centimeters in thickness and is not present above the carbon-rich layer. As I am unable to understand what Han is trying to say, the Dutch geochemist resorts to scribbling notes on scraps of paper. A scientific analysis of the white sand, he now writes, has shown that its chemical composition is slightly different to the sand immediately below and above it. It is a revelation that has led Han to a startling, and rather disturbing, conclusion. Either the highly toxic acid rain that fell in the wake of the impact event caused the bleaching of the sand or it is the result of a heat flash, caused by a close proximity air blast that whitened the sandy loess in an instant.

So were the local Federmesser communities wiped out by an air blast from a disintegrating comet fragment? Or did they die as a consequence of the acid rain poisoning the local water supplies, killing flora and fauna alike? Whatever the answer, these must have been chilling times indeed.

Clearly, this would have been a horrific epoch to live in, and even if you did survive the impact and its aftereffects, there was always going to be the lingering fear that it was all going to happen again every time a comet appeared in the sky. In addition to this, there is no way that this unimaginable event was ever going to be forgotten. It will have remained at the forefront of people’s minds, being preserved in catastrophe myths and legends handed down across countless generations through to the modern age.

Such legends exist all over the world, and undoubtedly they influenced Plato’s account of Atlantis, destroyed, he says, in one terrible day and night of earthquakes and floods. This catastrophic event, we are informed, occurred sometime around 9600 BCE, and whether Plato realized it or not, his famous account of the destruction of Atlantis was almost certainly inspired by the events that befell the world at the time of the Younger Dryas impact event.

FINDING ATLANTIS

Atlantis is a subject that has spawned a thousand books and articles. Generally they argue either that it never existed or—if it did exist—that Plato’s island empire is the memory of some lost island civilization that thrived fairly recently in human history. The most popular scholarly approach, promoted even today by one of the world’s largest and most influential TV channels, is that the story of Atlantis is a memory of the destruction of Minoan Crete in the wake of a massive volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Santorini (ancient Thera), sometime around the middle of the second millennium BCE.

Yet to substantiate such claims, some major fudging of the evidence is necessary. This includes the moving of Atlantis from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean and assuming that when Plato wrote solar years he in fact meant lunar months, reducing Atlantis’s date of destruction from the stated 9600 BCE down to a more workable date around 3,500 years ago. Such research, biased toward the belief that civilization began in the Bible lands in the centuries following the Great Flood, circa 2350 BCE, has long stilted our understanding of this age-old enigma of the past.

Many other authors use the evidence of Atlantis presented by Plato to promote personal theories on the island’s geographical location. The mid-Atlantic Rift, the Arctic Circle, Antarctica, the Bolivian Altiplano, Crete, Gibraltar, Spain, Morocco, and even, more recently, Indonesia, have all been proposed as the true location of lost Atlantis. It seems that every few years a new book comes along claiming to have solved the mystery of Atlantis. As compelling as these theories might seem many of them conveniently ignore Plato’s clear statement that his lost island empire existed in the Atlantic Sea, the whereabouts of which has never been in doubt.

THE CUBAN CONNECTION

Back in 1998, when Gateway to Atlantis was being written, I wanted to explore the possibility that Antarctica was the true location of Atlantis. New books from the likes of Graham Hancock and Canadian researchers Rose and Rand Flem-Ath had reignited the debate over whether this frozen continent might once have been home to a lost civilization. Yet an unexpected turn of events at the end of that year guided me on to a quite different path of discovery. It was Cuba, the largest of the Caribbean islands, I now surmised, that had been the role model for Plato’s fabled Atlantic Island, and not Antarctica. It was a conclusion reached, not only from Cuba’s great similarity to the description Plato gives of Atlantis, but also from the knowledge that the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, so horrifically annihilated by the Spanish in the wake of Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492, had for countless generations preserved legends of a devastating cataclysm. This was said to have split apart and drowned a former landmass that had once united the thousands of islands and cays that today make up the Bahamian and Caribbean archipelagos.

It was information that had been conveyed to the first Spanish explorers to reach the West Indies in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. I wondered whether it was possible that similar stories had been told to more ancient voyagers, most likely Phoenician or Carthaginian traders, who had visited these islands prior to the age of Plato. Did they carry these age-old legends back to the Mediterranean, where they eventually reached the ears of philosophers like Plato? Did these stories speak of the greatest of all the Atlantic islands being destroyed in one terrible day and night of earthquakes and floods? Did Plato go on to use these stories, which came originally from indigenous peoples on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean, to construct his detailed account of Atlantis?

To me the answer was yes. So I embarked on a major research project to prove that maritime exploration and even highly secretive trade routes extended all the way from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean islands, then known as the Hesperides, prior to the age of Plato. I also sought out a suitable scientific mechanism to explain the stories told by the indigenous peoples of the Bahamas and Caribbean regarding the breaking up of a former landmass that left behind the thousands of islands and cays seen today. This led me eventually to the slowly mounting evidence for the Younger Dryas impact event, which took place close to the time frame offered by Plato for the destruction of Atlantis, that is, 9600 BCE.

It was confirmation of this catastrophic event that I was now witnessing here in Lommel, Belgium, in the company of Han Kloosterman, one of the pioneers in this field. We were here to do some filming for Ancient Aliens, the ever-popular TV show on ancient mysteries that had also come to realize the importance of these catastrophic events on popular myth and legend, including the Bible’s account of the Great Flood.

The Younger Dryas impact would have devastated the Bahamian and Caribbean archipelagos. Any existing populations that inhabited these island groups would have been decimated. Although no obvious trace of their forgotten world remains on land, it could very well exist beneath the shallow waters of the Bahamas. Ever since the 1950s strange architectural features, as well as rock mounds, cave art, and human burials located in submerged caves, have been found off the coasts of several Bahamian islands. Clearly, the archipelago was occupied long before the Lucayans, the first recognized inhabitants of the Bahamas, arrived by boat from Cuba and Hispaniola, circa 600–700 CE.

How long ago the Bahamian archipelago was first settled remains unclear. Yet enough tantalizing evidence exists to demonstrate that a human population existed both in the Caribbean and on the former Bahamian landmass when fragments of the Younger Dryas comet are suspected to have struck the western Atlantic basin some 12,800 years ago. If so, then it is the survivors of this impact event that are to be credited with the inception of the Atlantis myth, their stories being passed down by word of mouth until they were told to the first Phoenician and Carthaginian traders to reach the Bahamian and Caribbean islands in the centuries before Plato wrote his famous dialogues, circa 350 BCE.

This was the bold theory outlined in Gateway to Atlantis. Its writing involved an extraordinary quest of discovery that had led me, early in my investigations, to explore a painted cave located on a remote island off the southwest coast of Cuba. What I discovered here provided the first clues regarding the ultimate fate of Atlantis and the symbolic manner in which knowledge of its destruction had been passed down across countless generations. It is a story introduced in the book’s prologue and resumed in chapter 19.

The myth of Atlantis is like the conundrum of Schrödinger’s nebulous cat. We can speculate, argue, or present our case, but ultimately there are no real answers—no box we can open or sign we can read that will tell us exactly where Atlantis was located. And perhaps—like the eternal quest for the Holy Grail—we are not supposed to know all the answers. Yet this should not stop us searching for lost Atlantis, and presented in this book is one of the most comprehensive reviews of all the evidence left to the world since Plato wrote his famous account some 2,350 years ago. Read it and make up your own minds. When you have done this why not pick up the gauntlet yourself and continue the quest for Atlantis in the manner that, as we shall see in the epilogue, others have done, making some quite extraordinary discoveries in the process.

These new discoveries tell us very clearly that Plato was not wrong. Moreover, that the destruction of Atlantis was brutal in every manner, the evidence of which is being uncovered now in every part of the world. It is even here at Lommel in Belgium, close to my own home in Essex, southeast England. It exists as a constant reminder of the terrible fate that befell the world during an epoch that we can be thankful we never lived through ourselves.

PROLOGUE

THE QUEST BEGINS

THE ISLE OF YOUTH, CUBA

Thursday, September 2, 1998. It had taken me nearly twenty years of research to get this far. Having reached this mosquito-infested isle, following a nail-biting flight as the sun rose slowly above the eastern horizon, I now found myself amid a crowd of well-meaning local people. Each one seemed intent on offering advice and services.

In pidgin Spanish my traveling companion and I were able to convey to them the purpose for our visit, which was to reach the Punta del Este caves located in the southwest corner of this subtropical island. We had hoped to persuade a taxi driver to take us the forty or so kilometers to our destination, but this appeared to be out of the question. Not one was willing to drive us that far. It was clear that our only option was to hire a vehicle in nearby Nueva Gerona, the only town, which we reached quickly in a bashed-up taxi that would have been illegal on the streets of Europe.

With some idea of the complexity of the road journey ahead, we decided to secure the services of not only a four-wheel-drive vehicle with driver, but also an archaeologist from the local museum. Johnny Rodriguez, a stocky, ponytailed man in his twenties, could speak almost no English but was familiar at least with the caves in question.

Where we were going, no tourist ever ventured. This military-controlled zone contained some remarkable archaeological sites, but access was denied to anyone not in possession of the correct papers. Unfortunately, our guidebooks had neglected to mention this fact, so the whole success of the visit now rested in the hands of Johnny and the driver, who insisted that they could get us past the armed guards at the checkpoint. They said there would be no problem, and they were right. After just a brief conversation with the two cigar-smoking soldiers, the barrier was raised and we were through. From here on in it was a single unmade track across hostile terrain notorious for its crocodiles and poisonous flora.

It was one of the bumpiest, most nerve-racking journeys I have ever experienced. Yet eventually, after several kilometers of hard driving, we quite literally reached the end of the road.

With the harsh late-morning sun now beating down on our exposed skin, and black-and-white vultures gliding ominously overhead, the party left the vehicle on the edge of the tangled swamp. In front of us was a group of abandoned concrete buildings, erected during the cold war as a telecommunications center. Despite their dilapidated state, one building still appeared to be home to a small contingent of men who may or may not have been soldiers, for they wore no uniforms. Why these individuals should have had to remain in this unbearable climate was not made clear. Yet by default they had become the guardians of Punta del Este’s sacred caves, and without their consent we would be going nowhere. So we offered bottled water and cigarettes as Johnny and the driver, whom they seemed to know, laughed and joked with them.

I had been told that this was the worst spot in the entire country for insects, and so there was no way on Earth I was going to spend even one night in this godforsaken place. We needed to be back at the local airport by dusk to catch the plane out, and no other option would be considered.

Yet for so many months I had yearned to be here. I had even visited the caves in my dreams. I almost felt as if some unseen genius loci was calling me to its lair. However, my reasons for coming to this place were based on sound historical and archaeological fact, which had led me to conclude that the answer to one of the world’s greatest mysteries might lie inside one of the caves.

Very little was known about the cavern in question. Even though various Hispanic archaeologists had visited the site, very few articles had ever been written on the subject. Despite this lack of background information, I knew instinctively it was important. The cave’s walls and ceilings were covered with strange petroglyphs, which perhaps expressed the indigenous people’s myths and legends concerning the emergence of humanity at the beginning of time. I needed to see them and understand their meaning.

We kept to the narrow path, which was infested by large sand crabs that did not seem pleased by our intrusion into their territory. The uneasy nature of the place made me question my motives for coming here, but there was no turning back now.

Finally we entered a clearing, and in front of us lay the gaping mouth of a large open cave. A metal plaque on the wall announced that we had reached the goal of our quest—Punta del Este’s Cueva #1 (Cave no. 1). Unexpectedly, my stomach churned. What if I was wrong and there was nothing here of any significance?

No supernatural guardian stood before us as we passed into the cave’s unwelcoming interior, home only to bats and countless mosquitoes.

Instantly we were confronted by the sight of faded red-and-black petroglyphs, composed in the main of whole series of rings and other geometric forms. Overhead were two roughly circular skylights cut out of the soft rock by ancient hands, allowing sunlight to penetrate inside the cave. On the ground I could see broken pieces of conch shell discarded hundreds of years ago by American Indian occupants.

In Spanish, Johnny explained that beneath the skylight there would originally have been a stone dais, around which tribal ceremonies would perhaps have taken place. In its place today was a crude concrete copy, which ably allowed us to visualize what the setting might have been like in prehistoric times. He also told us that the rear skylight, now obscured by a small mountain of earth, was thought by some archaeologists to have been used to mark the transit of the planet Venus. However, he shook his head when we asked him if any academic paper had been written on the subject.

Johnny drew our attention now to the central feature of the cave, a huge multifaceted petroglyph consisting of a series of concentric rings, some sets overlapping each other, giving the impression of falling raindrops making ever-widening ripples on a surface of water. Piercing its target-like rings was the drawing of a long arrow-like dart.

While trying to translate Johnny’s views on the symbolic meaning of the cave art, I carefully examined individual petroglyphs. Some seemed very familiar indeed. They were like the megalithic art found carved at certain Neolithic and early Bronze Age sites in Brittany and the British Isles, and curiously enough these examples are thought to date from a very similar time period. It was also difficult not to see them in terms of either the orbit of planets or the revolution of stars.

Once I became accustomed to the low light and persistent mosquitoes, I began to realize something important. Preserved on the walls and ceilings of this prehistoric Sistine Chapel was what appeared to be a symbolic language conveyed in abstract picture form. It seemed to tell of archaic events that had occurred in the Western Hemisphere before the dawn of history. More than this, I began to realize that here might be the key to understanding the final fate of lost Atlantis. Yet before sharing the excitement and exhilaration I experienced in the wake of my visit to Punta del Este on Cuba’s Isle of Youth, we must go back to the beginning—to ancient Athens, where the legend of Atlantis was born around 2,350 years ago.

Part One

DISCOVERY

1

THE OLD PRIEST SPEAKS

Sometime around the year 355 BCE, the celebrated Athenian philosopher Plato (429–347 BCE) evoked the inspiration of the Muses before writing what is arguably one of classical literature’s most enigmatic works. Already he had completed a book titled The Republic, which set out his vision of Athens as an ideal state. This was based to some degree on the philosophical teachings of Pythagoras (born circa 570 BCE), who was a major influence on Plato’s life. His new work would be called Timaeus, and, like its predecessor, it would take the form of a drama, or dialogue, enacted by four historical figures in the year 421 BCE, when Plato would have been just eight years old. The participants, the same as those who featured in The Republic, were Socrates, Plato’s great mentor and friend, who died of poison by his own hand as ordered by a jury circa 399 BCE; Timaeus, an astronomer of Locri in Italy; Hermocrates, an exiled Syracusan general; and Critias, who was either Plato’s great-grandfather or his maternal uncle (see chapter 3).

This style of writing, common in Plato’s day, was intended to establish, in an informative and readable manner, the principal themes of the book. In this new dialogue, which was meant as a sequel to The Republic, matters to be discussed included the mechanics of the universe and the nature of the physical world. Yet instead of Socrates assuming the role of chairman as he had done in The Republic this honor would go to Critias.

It is almost at the beginning of the Timaeus that Plato introduces the world to the subject of Atlantis. Critias (styled the Younger) relates to Socrates and those present how, when only a child, his elderly grandfather, also named Critias (styled the Elder), had told him a fascinating story. This he had gained from Dropides, his father, who in turn had learned it from a friend and relative named Solon. Like the participants in the dialogue, Solon (ca. 638–558 BCE) is also a historical character—a celebrated Athenian legislator spoken of by Plato as one of Athens’s seven great sages.

HOARY WITH AGE

The Timaeus informs us that Solon obtained what he knew of the story while at Sais, the city [in Egypt] from which King Amasis came. This Amasis, who is more correctly identified as Aahmes II, ruled Egypt from his seat at Sais from circa 570 BCE onward for a duration of forty-four years.¹ Although Solon was alive at this time, the text does not specify that Solon was in Egypt during his reign. Indeed, Plato’s pupil, the philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE), tells us that Solon visited Egypt at the beginning of a ten-year sojourn overseas, following his time as the archon, or chief magistrate, of Athens. Since this is believed to have occurred circa 594–593 BCE, some twenty-two or twenty-three years before Amasis’s reign, there is a possible discrepancy here. Yet we know that Solon did indeed visit Egypt around this time because the Greek historian Herodotus (484–408 BCE) in his History informs us, It was this king Amasis who established the law that every Egyptian should appear once a year before the governor of his canton, and show his means of living. . . . Solon the Athenian borrowed this law from the Egyptians and imposed it on his countrymen, who have observed it ever since.²

It implies therefore that Solon must have visited Egypt toward the end of his life and thus after Amasis had become pharaoh, circa 570 BCE (see also chapter 2).

Critias tells us that upon entering the temple dedicated to the worship of Minerva (the Greek name for Neith, the patron goddess of Sais), Solon engaged in conversation one of the priests, who was said to have been a very old man.³ He spoke about the destruction of the human race in former ages, a matter the Athenian statesman felt he knew something about from his own education in these subjects. Yet in response the priestly elder chastised Solon for knowing so little about the true history of mankind, saying, You Greeks are always children; in Greece there is no such thing as an old man. . . . You are all young in your minds . . . which hold no store of old belief based on long tradition, no knowledge hoary with age.⁴

After enlightening Solon in respect to the many and divers destructions of mankind, the greatest by fire and water,⁵ the priest went on to explain the nature of those catastrophes that destroy everything memorable of the past. These traditions were, he said, preserved only in the registers belonging to the temple, for they are the oldest on record.⁶

Solon is told that the history and genealogies of Athens, which he has recited, are little better than nursery tales.⁷ It is also explained how your people [i.e., the Athenians of Solon’s age] remember only one deluge [of the Greek flood hero Deucalian], though there were many earlier; and moreover you do not know that the bravest and noblest race in the world once lived in your country. It was apparently from this race that the Athenians of Plato’s day were descended.⁸

The elderly priest—identified by the Greek biographer Plutarch (50–120 CE) as Senchis the Saite⁹—then spoke of how before the greatest of all destructions by water, the citizens of Athens were the most valiant in war, their exploits and government being the noblest under heaven.¹⁰

Solon is informed that the great exploits of the noble race of Athens are recorded in the temple’s sacred registers and that perhaps they should reconvene to go through the whole story in detail another time at our leisure, with the records before us.¹¹ Yet one great exploit that Solon does learn from his conversations with the old man is how the Athenian nation once brought to an end an almighty power that "insolently advanced against all Europe and Asia, starting from the Atlantic ocean outside."¹² (current author’s emphasis)

Needless to say, it is at this juncture in the dialogue that the priest of Sais reveals to Solon the story lying behind the destruction of Atlantis, the homeland of this almighty power. In most English translations of the Timaeus this all-important textual account takes up about fifty lines. However, each one is loaded with compelling facts regarding this sunken kingdom. Plato goes on to recount further details of his Atlantean nation in the unfinished sequel to the Timaeus titled the Critias. We must, however, never forget that although the Timaeus actually contains a wealth of astronomical and scientific knowledge, more or less unparalleled in its day, the whole thing was written as a fictional narrative, a kind of X-Files of its day.

AN ALMIGHTY LANDMASS

The priest of Sais relates next how the great force that rose up to oppose the mighty nation of Athens came from an island situated in front of—in other words, beyond—the Pillars of Hercules.¹³ This was the name given in antiquity to the pillarlike rocks that stood on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar and marked the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean. The old man justifies the placement of this island in the Atlantic by revealing that in those days the "ocean could be crossed."¹⁴ (current author’s emphasis)

What might Plato have meant by crossed? It implies that the Atlantic island from which this aggressor stemmed was not only accessible in past ages, but that it was also visited by ocean-going vessels able to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

So where did Plato have in mind when he first considered the idea of an Atlantic island on which lived a warlike race that opposed the might of earliest Athens? Could it have been based on early maritime knowledge of the Madeiras? One of the Canary Islands perhaps, or even the Azores? All these island groups are located on the eastern Atlantic seaboard and were unquestionably known to ancient mariners during the first millennium BCE (see chapter 5).

Yet Plato does not seem to be referring specifically to any of these islands, for the old priest informs Solon that the Atlantic island was larger than Libya and Asia put together.¹⁵ This is a quite fantastic statement. In Plato’s day, Libya was seen as the entire North African continent west of Egypt—a landmass comparable in size to Europe today. Asia, on the other hand, was considered to stretch between Egypt in the west, the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia in the north, Arabia in the south, and India in the east. The Asia of Plato’s day might be compared in size with North America. This therefore suggested the former existence of an almighty landmass of gigantic proportions, too big even to fit in the North Atlantic Ocean!

Since an island continent of the extent implied by Plato in his Timaeus could not possibly have existed in the manner he describes, scholars understandably dismiss Plato’s account of his colossal island as mere fiction. Most Atlantologists—those who seek answers to the Atlantis mystery—are very much aware of this problem and often attempt to shrink down the size of Plato’s Atlantic island by proposing that by Asia the author in fact meant only Asia Minor, that is, Asiatic Turkey. Yet there is no reason to make this assumption based on Plato’s existing text. He does not imply this in any way. Indeed, it would appear that in comparing the size of Atlantis with that of Libya and Asia when placed together, he was simply attempting to convey the immense size of Atlantis in the absence of any true geographical knowledge.

Other scholars have assumed that if Plato really was alluding to a landmass of the size suggested in the Timaeus, then he must have been referring to the North or South American continents. The Americas do match the proportions of his Atlantic island. Indeed, the idea that either North or South America could be Atlantis was first proposed by Spanish explorers and scholars, such as Francesco Lopez de Gomara, shortly after the discovery of the New World.¹⁶

If Atlantis did once exist, and it really was of the immense size proposed in the Timaeus, there is no better solution. So when referring to his Atlantic island, had Plato been alluding to the American mainland—an opinion that has received considerable attention again in recent years?¹⁷

In actuality, this solution has a significant drawback, for after relating the size of the Atlantic island, the old priest of Sais tells Solon that "from it [i.e., Atlantis] the voyagers of those days could reach the other islands, and from these islands the whole of the opposite continent."¹⁸ (current author’s emphasis)

This last statement should be seen in the context of the age in which it was written. To put it bluntly, there was no opposite continent in the classical age! According to the official history of the world, the North American mainland was not discovered until Christopher Columbus’s third voyage to the New World in 1498. This is, of course, if we ignore the Viking settlements established in Newfoundland around the year 1000 CE, or indeed the indigenous peoples that have inhabited the continent for the past twenty thousand years (see fig. 1.1 below).

Yet Plato seems, quite clearly, to be referring to the Americas, suggesting that he was somehow aware of the existence of these continents on the other side of the Western Ocean. Oddly enough, there is evidence that by 300 BCE other classical writers were also aware of a separate landmass beyond Oceanus, the ocean river once thought to encircle the ancient world. A work titled De Mundo, written around 300 BCE and falsely attributed to the philosopher Aristotle, talks about the known world as being a single island round which the sea that is called Atlantic flows.¹⁹ The text’s author—who was very possibly a pupil of Aristotle²⁰—goes on to speculate in the following, quite revealing manner: But it is probable that there are many other continents separated from ours by a sea that we must cross to reach them, some larger and others smaller than it, but all, save our own, invisible to us.²¹

Figure 1.1. The ancient world according to Hecataeus of Miletus, circa 500 BCE. Notice the absence of any opposite continent beyond Oceanus, the Ocean River—a topic that became the subject of rumor and speculation in the age of Plato and Aristotle.

Pseudo-Aristotle ends his musings by stating poetically, As our islands are in relation to our seas [i.e., the Mediterranean], so is the inhabited world in relation to the Atlantic, and so are many other continents in relation to the whole sea; for they are as it were immense islands surrounded by immense seas.²²

LAND OF THE MEROPES

Further evidence in support of the view that early classical writers were very much aware of the American continent comes from the writings of a younger contemporary of Plato named Theopompus of Chios—a Greek historian born around 378 BCE. Only fragments of his writings survive today, and these are found in a work titled Various Anecdotes, written by a second-century Roman naturalist and historian named Aelian.

Theopompus relates how during one fateful journey through Phrygia, a country of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Silenus, a satyr and teacher of the god Bacchus, became drunk and fell asleep in the rose gardens belonging to the legendary King Midas. Upon waking he found himself under the charge of the king’s gardeners, who promptly marched him off to the royal palace. Having been placed under guard, Silenus was given his freedom only after suitably amusing his host with various anecdotes.

One of the tales told by Silenus is of particular interest, for he informs the king that surrounding the outside of this world is a continent that is infinitely big.²³ Here you could find men twice the size of those who live here. Their lives are not the same length as ours, but in fact twice as long, and they possess various styles of life.²⁴ There are also two very big cities; one called Machimus, or Warlike, and the other Eusebes, or Pious.²⁵ In addition to those who lived in these cities, Silenus tells Midas that on the continent is a race called Meropes, who live among them in numerous large cities.²⁶ At the edge of their territories is a place named Point of No Return [Anostus], which looks like a chasm [gulf] and is filled neither by light nor darkness, but is overlaid by a haze of a murky red colour,²⁷ It is said that two rivers run past this locality, one named Pleasure and the other Grief. Along the banks of both stand trees the size of a large plane.²⁸

According to Theopompus, the peoples of the distant continent once planned a voyage to these islands of ours. No fewer than ten million of them are said to have sailed the ocean (thus supposing that they had seafaring capabilities), and they came upon Hyperborea, an unknown island usually identified as the British Isles (see chapter 7). Upon coming ashore, the visitors from another continent felt that the Hyperboreans were inferior beings of lowly fortunes, and for that reason dismissed the idea of travelling further.²⁹

LUCKY GUESSES

In addition to the accounts presented above, the Greek geographer Strabo (60 BCE–20 CE) makes reference to an unknown continent that can only have been the Americas. It comes during a discussion on the opinions of a Greek geometer and astronomer named Eratosthenes (276–196 BCE), who claimed that if the immensity of the Atlantic Sea did not prevent, we could sail from Iberia [ancient Spain] to India along one and the same parallel.³⁰ In response to this statement, Strabo voiced the opinion that we call ‘inhabited’ the world which we inhabit and know; though it may be that in this same temperate zone there are actually two inhabited worlds, or even more, and particularly in the proximity of the parallel through Athens that is drawn across the Atlantic Sea.³¹

It would be easy to dismiss these apparent references to the American continents as either misconceptions on the part of authors like myself or lucky guesses on the part of well-informed classical figures such as Plato, Pseudo-Aristotle, Theopompus, and Strabo. Yet if we can accept that knowledge of the existence of an opposite continent was available to a select few during Plato’s age, might this information have been deliberately withheld from the outside world? Perhaps there were stories and rumors circulating in Greece and/or Egypt regarding the existence far beyond the Pillars of Hercules of another continent. Yet beyond maritime circles no one was aware of the full picture, leading to the sort of speculations voiced by Plato in his Timaeus.

It seems certain that Plato was somehow aware of either North or South America, the so-called opposite continent, and so incorporated this idea into a dialogue on the nature of the universe. Where exactly this knowledge might have come from need not detain us here. What seems more important is that this theory is strengthened considerably if we now consider Plato’s assertion in the Timaeus that from the Atlantic island, that is, Atlantis, the voyagers of those days could reach the other islands, and from these islands the whole of the opposite continent.³²

ATLANTIC VOYAGERS

This all-important statement should be read again and again until it sinks in as to what Plato is implying. He is suggesting that Atlantis was located in front of, or before, other islands that acted like stepping-stones for maritime voyagers wishing to reach the opposite continent, which we will take to be the Americas.

Does this information make sense in geographical terms? From the time of Columbus’s first landing on the island of San Salvador in 1492, the Bahamian and Caribbean archipelagos have been used in precisely this manner—as stepping-stones for seagoing vessels journeying to the American mainland, either via the coast of Florida or the Gulf of Mexico. Moreover, the chain of islands known as the Lesser Antilles that connect Puerto Rico—the most easterly of the three main Caribbean islands—with the northern coast of South America might also be viewed in a similar manner.

Was it this island-hopping process to and from the American mainland that Plato is alluding to in his account of the Atlantic island? It seems as good a solution as any put forward by Atlantologists and scholars alike. Yet how might a Greek philosopher like Plato have come across such precious nautical information, which was supposedly unavailable during his own day? Plato himself seems to supply us with the answer, for his account suggests that this knowledge was derived from Atlantic voyagers, who in ancient times crossed the Atlantic Ocean and visited these islands en route to the American continent.

In itself this is a startling revelation—one that has often been overlooked by scholars simply because it is considered inconceivable that mariners might have reached the Americas prior to the age of Columbus. So if Plato really had become aware of journeys made by transatlantic voyagers before his own time, how might this information affect our understanding of Atlantis? Did it really exist as an Atlantic island, and if so where exactly might it have been located?

Although the Timaeus does not say exactly where Atlantis was to be found, there seems little doubt that the island lay in the outer ocean. Repeatedly we find references in classical literature to similar island paradises under a variety of names, the most important being the islands of the Hesperides (see chapter 6). Almost without exception they are said to have lain either in or beyond the Western Ocean, the domain of the hero-god Atlas, and so this is where we must start our own search for Plato’s Atlantic island.

Turning back to the account given in the Timaeus, the old priest tells Solon, Now on this Atlantic island there had grown up an extraordinary power under kings who ruled not only the whole island but many of the other islands and parts of the [opposite] continent.³³

There seems to be no vagueness in this statement. Atlantis, we are told, was ruled by a monarchy that Plato insisted held dominion over other islands, seemingly those placed in front of the opposite continent. These kings would also seem to have held sway over parts of the [opposite] continent itself. What sort of kingdom might we be dealing with here? Was the Atlantean nation really an island-based culture with seafaring capabilities that