While hard science, with its glottochronology, dendrochronology, thermoluminescence and other arcana, continues to describe what ‘really’ happened, at the other end of the spectrum are the descendents of those Victorian mythographers, some of whom, such as Graham Hancock, might be affiliated with the lunatic fringe that includes believers in the Lost Continent of Mu. But others, Stephen Oppenheimer for instance, are heretic scientists themselves, with serious and persuasive points to make. Is the drowned continent of South East Asia a reality? Was there a civilisation in Sundaland and is this the East to which Gilgamesh came looking for immortality? What about Ulimaroa, the alleged account of Australia gathered from Māori in the Marlborough Sounds? And the strange undersea structures off Yonaguni? These and other unsolved enigmas continue to challenge the autonomy of scientific fact.
VII
ULIMAROA, YONAGUNI & OTHER ENIGMAS
DURING AN INLAND CLIMBING EXPEDITION IN 1769 Joseph Banks speculated that the mountains of Tahiti-nui were the tops of a sunken continent – the Great South Land as a kind of Atlantis. He was one of those for whom the disappearance of the continent became an occasion for melancholy. He wanted it to have existed and felt bereft when it was proved beyond all doubt that it did not. This freight of longing for the exotic, the mysterious, the unknown was always part of the constellation of desire that sought the southern continent and proof of its absence did not end speculation about its survival, perhaps in another form. At the same time the orphaned lands that had appeared for centuries on European maps continued a kind of phantom existence in the minds of those for whom the marvellous is always just over the horizon. Imaginary heterotopia would replace those which geographical exploration had failed to discover.
Among these lost or forgotten countries are the Land of Parrots; the Land of Gold; Davis Land; Locach; Luca Antara; Maletur; the Golden Chersonese and many others. The names of the putative countries of Antarctica – Queen Maud Land, Wilkes Land, Victoria Land, Marie Byrd Land, Palmer Land – and their equally shadowy cities – Bernardo O’Higgins, Esperanza, Halley, Progress, Sanae IV, Syowa, Zhong Shan – seem to echo this tradition. But these Antarctic stations and territories do have some sort of tenuous reality while the fabulous lost lands, many of which originate in Marco Polo’s chronicle, haunt us in other less obvious ways.
One of the most curious of these hauntings is Locach, which in Marco Polo’s time was the name for a part of mainland South East Asia, perhaps Cambodia or a kingdom on peninsular Thailand where the descriptive analogue – gold, elephants, unfriendly natives – seems plausible. But Locach is also, by means of a series of scribal misreadings, the source of our word beach; and for a very long time one of the fabled lands sought by European navigators was called Beach. All that is required to turn one word into the other is a misreading of the ‘L’ as a ‘B’; and the first ‘c’ as an ‘e’. The version Boeach is common on early maps; later the ‘o’ drops out. It’s possible, too, that Luca Antara bears some relation to Locach, which name can take a bewildering variety of forms: Bocat, Bocati, Logaz, Jocat, Lucar, Lucach, Logass, Iocat, La Joncade, La Jocquatto, Îles de Jacatte, Lothac …
The Land of Parrots is another evocative location, long identified with Australia, as if some early Arab or even earlier Phoenician ship had landed on western Australian shores: a not entirely fanciful suggestion in the former case, since Timor has been suggested as one of the places visited by Sinbad the Sailor and Timorese ponies were probably brought to the island on Arab ships. From Timor – which means ‘east’ – it is a relatively short sail to the mainland Kimberley coast where flocks of parrots still soar and cry. However persuasive that possibility may be, Psittacorum regio, the region of parrots, was probably the coast of South America as discovered by Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500. Cabral was taking a fleet to India; he sent a supply ship back to Lisbon from Brazil but the actual news of the discovery of the new land was delivered in a letter by one Giovanni Matteo, called the Cretan, though he was in fact a Venetian gentleman: Above the Cape of Good Hope, to the southwest, they have discovered a new land; they call it the Land of Parrots, because they are an arm and a half tall and multicoloured; we have seen two of them; they think this territory is mainland … good-looking, naked people live there …
In somewhat the same way that Locach became Beach, this land seems to have been transferred from the nonsensical location the Cretan gave it (above the Cape … to the southwest is clearly contradictory unless it means southwest of Portugal) into the southern ocean where it appears running along the bottom of the world on Mercator’s 1569 map. Two parrots are shown feeding on a patch of green earth somewhere not too far south, and perhaps a little to the east, of Dante’s Mount Purgatory. Some parrots do, or did, live on sub-antarctic islands south of New Zealand and Australia; there is an alpine parrot, the kea, and a large flightless nocturnal forest-dwelling parrot, the kakapo, in New Zealand and these two, along with the kaka, also a forest bird, are thought to be the most archaic of the species: ur-parrots. Parrots are an old Gondwanaland genus and are typically found in the tropical and sub-tropical regions of Africa, South America, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific. They may well have inhabited Antarctica before it drifted south into the ice and snow.
THE UNDERSTANDING THAT continents do drift is relatively recent, less than a hundred years old. Alfred Wegener’s theory, proposed in 1912, was not generally accepted until the 1950s, long after he had himself disappeared into the ice and snow on Greenland; but the kind of evidence that provoked it had been noted by earlier observers. Land bridges, since submerged, were the usual explanation for fossil anomalies: animals and plants could have migrated in this way between fixed separate continents. One of the most enduring of these alleged land bridges is the lost continent of Lemuria. Philip Sclater, a lawyer and an ornithologist, in 1864 suggested that Madagascar and India had been joined at some time in the past. He named the lost continent Lemuria, after the lemurs that had, he assumed, inhabited it; one of the anomalies he was trying to explain was the presence of lemur fossils in both countries but their absence from Africa and the Middle East. Lemuria was popular among nineteenth-century scientists as an explanation for other mysteries of origin. Ernst Haeckel, the German polymath (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), thought that more than fossil lemurs had been lost with Lemuria: the missing link might be found beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean.
Long before the Lemuria theory disappeared from conventional scientific thought it was picked up by occult writers and thinkers, notably Madame Blavatsky, co-founder in New York in 1875 of the Theosophical Society. A Russian, born Elena van Hahn, she taught that all religions are true in their inner teachings and problematic or imperfect in their external manifestations. Her writings attempt to connect esoterica with science in a way that we now called New Age and were taken seriously in her own time; in some quarters they still are. They emphasise the fact that there has always been an ideological basis to our science and that all claims to scientific objectivity should be treated with caution if not outright skepticism.
Madame Blavatsky claimed to have seen in Tibet an ancient text called the Book of Dzyan; from this and perhaps other sources (Hindu and Taoist influences have also been adduced) she elaborated an origin for humanity dating back millions of years via what she called root races. The first root race was ethereal; the second had something more like the physical bodies we own today and lived in Hyperborea, at the north pole; the third, even more human, inhabited Lemuria. But not too human: the Lemurians were hermaphroditic, egg-laying giants. The fourth root race, less spiritual, more intellectual than the Lemurians, lived on Atlantis; we are ourselves the fifth.
Blavatsky said the Lemurians were black-skinned and further that the Negroid races, including Dravidians, Australoids, Papuans and Melanesians, descended from them. In her thought the Indus Valley people also originated in Lemuria. She further suggested the lost continent was a home of dragon-men whose sophisticated civili
sation unfortunately declined into bestiality and whose use of black magic caused their end. This speculation, which may have been metaphoric, has since been picked up by reptilian conspiracy literature which posits a sunken continent, either Lemuria or Mu, as the native soil of a reptile race, often identified with dragons or nāgas. In some versions they are still with us, malign and immortal inhabitants of our mortal bodies: usually in positions of great power like the papacy or the presidency of the United States.
Blavatsky characterised the twin poles of the earth differently: Hyperborea, at the north pole, was a centre of civilisation where humanity began its degeneration from a spiritual entity to one mired in the physical. We do not descend from apes but have degenerated towards an ape-like condition as we strayed from the north, gradually falling under the influence of the demonic energies of the south pole, the greatest point of materialization. Why the poles should be opposed in this way is a mystery but polar mysticism remained a strong current in twentieth-century thought: some Nazi scientists believed, like Edmond Halley, that the earth was hollow – Hohlweltlehre – and could be entered via portals at both poles. Others subscribed to a related belief that we live on the inside of a hollow sphere and that the stars above are really chunks of ice. In 1942 a Dr Heinz Fischer, armed with powerful telescopic cameras, was sent to the Baltic island of Rügen to spy on the British fleet. Because he thought the surface of the earth was concave, Fischer aimed his cameras up into the sky above the Atlantic Ocean; but all he saw there was clouds.
The Lost Continent of Mu, conventionally located where the Pacific Ocean now is, sounds like a contraction of Lemuria but the origin of the name is different. Augustus Le Plongeon, a Jersey-born antiquarian, writer and traveller, derived it from the mistranslation of a Mayan codex by another Frenchman, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg. For both men the Mayan civilisation was older and more sophisticated than that of either Greece or Rome; and derived from the culture of a sunken continent. Plongeon thought he had identified an actual individual, a Queen M’oo who fled to Egypt; in this cosmogony Mu is ancestral to Egypt as well as to the central American civilisations. These outlandish ideas were picked up by James Churchward, a British-born occult writer, also an inventor, who worked as a tea planter in Ceylon before migrating to the United States in the 1890s, where he met Le Plongeon. Some of Churchward’s inventions were significant: he patented a form of steel armour-plating used to protect Allied ships during World War I.
It was after a generous patent infringement settlement in 1914 that Churchward retired to his estate on Lake Wononskopomuc in Connecticut to write and meditate upon Mu. According to him, it extended from somewhere north of Hawaii to the south as far as the Fijis and Easter Island. It was the site of the Garden of Eden and home to 64 million people of a race called the Naacals. Fifty thousand years ago they were technologically more advanced than the West was in the 1930s. The civilisations of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, India and even the Maya were all remnants of Naacal colonies. This Churchward learned from an Indian priest who taught him to read fragmentary stone tablets written in the almost extinct Naacal language. His speculations recall aspects of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis but with this difference: Churchward apparently believed his nonsense was true.
THERE IS NO SUNKEN continent in the area of the Pacific where Churchward wanted it to be, just as there is no land mass that corresponds with Lemuria. Yet there are drowned continents in both oceans. The Kerguelen Continent, 1,131,000 square kilometres in extent – three times the size of Japan – lies submerged in the southern Indian Ocean southwest of Australia and southeast of Southern Africa. The continent extends more than 2200 kilometres in a northwest–southeast direction but only fragments – the Kerguelen and McDonald Islands, Heard Island – break sea level. The continent, sometimes called the Kerguelen Plateau, began to form after a series of volcanic eruptions dating from 110 million years ago, and much of it was above sea level for three distinct periods between 100 and 20 million years ago. There are soil layers in which charcoal fragments have been found: there might have been tropical flora and fauna there 50 million years ago.
J. R. Mooneyham, an engaging if eccentric researcher, futurologist and science fiction writer, has suggested that Kerguelen was for most of its time above water a low, dry, planar continent, subject to such violent natural catastrophes as tsunami, earthquake and the volcanism that persists on McDonald and Heard Islands. He postulates the existence there of large, ground-dwelling birds like moa and the elephant bird of Madagascar; marsupials after the Australian model; and suggests that primates too might have thrived. Indeed, he goes further and imagines a kind of accelerated evolution of a symbiotic pair of creatures, one reptilian, the other human or humanoid, leading to the triumph of the primates and the founding of an advanced civilisation which, as inundation threatened, preferred to take to the skies rather than colonise other land masses. The previous existence of advanced civilisations on earth is of course a staple of science fiction writers but there are other, perhaps more rational, believers: Frederick Soddy, Ernest Rutherford’s co-worker on his early, epochal experiments with radiation and a Nobel Prize winner (Chemistry, 1921) said: I believe that in the past there were civilisations that understood atomic energy and that they were utterly destroyed by making wrong use of it.
The other submerged continent is Zealandia, at 3,500,000 square kilometres nearly half the size of Australia; but no one has yet suggested there was an advanced civilisation there. Zealandia split from old Gondwanaland, or rather that portion comprising present-day Antarctica and Australia, about 83 million years ago and persisted as a land mass until it sank beneath the waves around 23 million years ago. Like Kerguelen it is thought to have been subdued and flat, with gentle rolling topography rather like much of Australia today. Like Kerguelen too, Zealandia’s crust is thinner than continental crust and thus doesn’t float as high above the earth’s mantle. The putative continent extends from New Caledonia in the north to the Campbell Islands in the south; and west to the Chatham Islands. And like the New Zealand which has succeeded it, Zealandia is disposed along a conjunction of the Pacific and the Australian plates. The volcanism in the North Island and the high alps in the South Island are products of the slow, immensely stressful, opposite interactions of these plates.
Dinosaurs certainly lived on Zealandia because their fossils have been found in northern Hawke’s Bay; but not a great deal is known about other natives. However, at Curio Bay in the southeast of the South Island logs of a fossilised forest lie; the trees are closely related to modern kauri and Norfolk pines and grew on Gondwanaland about 180 million years ago. Yet most of the plants and animals that the first Polynesian explorers found when they sailed over the horizon are not thought to have been descended from Zealandian prototypes, perhaps because, with the exception of a few small islands, the entire continent might once have been, as Kerguelen is now, submerged. Nevertheless it is possible that both land masses were outposts of a lost Antarctican flora and fauna, including araucarias and podocarps where ur-parrots perched and squawked. Global warming and rising seas suggest we will not see the full glory of their mountains and plains for a while yet – unless the current orthodoxy is wrong and we are heading into another Ice Age.
AT SHIP COVE IN THE Marlborough Sounds in the far north of the South Island of New Zealand, Joseph Banks in 1770 gathered a very old tradition … two large canoes which came from Olimaroa, one of the islands he (Topaa) has mentioned to us. Cook also mentions this tradition:
When we were under sail, our old man Topaa came on board to take his leave of us, and as we were still desirous of making farther enquiries whether any memory of Tasman had been preserved among these people, Tupia was directed to ask him whether he had ever heard that such a vessel as ours had before visited the country. To this he replied in the negative, but said, that his ancestors had told him there had once come to this place a small vessel, from a distant country, called ULIMAROA, in which were four men, who,
upon their coming on shore, were all killed: upon being asked where this distant land lay, he pointed to the northward. Of Ulimaroa we had heard something before, from the people about the Bay of Islands, who said that their ancestors had visited it; and Tupia had also talked to us of Ulimaroa, concerning which he had some confused traditionary notions, not very different from those of our old man, so that we could draw no certain conclusion from the accounts of either …
Tupia is Tupaia, the Tahitian Arioi who sailed on the Endeavour from Tahiti to his death at Batavia. He was said to have known the names of, and sailing directions to, 140 islands. The document known as Tupaia’s map shows seventy of these; it was not drawn by Tupaia himself but under his instruction and many identifications are hampered by the bizarre European transcription of Tahitian language. Nevertheless it is clear that Tahitian knowledge in the contact period encompassed a vast stretch of ocean, from Fiji in the west to the Marquesas in the east; and that every major group where Polynesians had settled, with the exception of New Zealand, Hawai‘i and (possibly) Easter Island, was known to them.
Where then was Ulimaroa? The Swedish geographer Daniel Djurberg thought it was Australia. His map of the Pacific, which includes both New Zealand and Australia, calls the latter Ulimaroa. He certainly picked up the word from Cook and/or Banks but exactly why he identified it with Australia is uncertain. His map was published in Stockholm in 1780 and went into further editions there (1790, 1797) and in Vienna (1789, 1795). There remains a tradition among Scandinavian, especially Norwegian, scholars that Māori knew of Australia; while Anglo-Saxons, for example Ernest Beaglehole, tend to dismiss the speculation as absurd. And yet … Polynesian navigators had visited virtually every Pacific island of any size, even places as remote as Rapanui (Easter Island) and Rēkohu (the Chathams), in both of which they established viable communities. The Kermadec Islands, Penrhyn south of the Cooks and Pitcairn supported populations in the past; even Norfolk Island has Polynesian remains.
Zone of the Marvellous Page 21