by Colin Wilson
Einstein read Hapgood’s material and replied within five days: ‘I find your arguments very impressive and have the impression that your hypothesis is correct. One can hardly doubt that significant shifts of the earth’s crust have taken place repeatedly and within a short time.’14 His encouragement led Hapgood to send him more of the typescript. In spring 1954, Einstein supported Hapgood’s application for a grant or research appointment at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, where Einstein was based.15 Unfortunately, Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atom bomb’, who was an influential member of the committee, opposed Hapgood, and the request was turned down. On 18 May 1954, Einstein wrote to express his sympathy, and, perhaps as a consolation prize, sent Hapgood a short introduction to the book that would become Earth’s Shifting Crust, probably recognising that, in the long run, this would be worth more than a grant.
Again, in November 1954, Einstein supported Hapgood’s request for a research grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Once again, it was turned down. The following January, Hapgood and Campbell called on Einstein at Princeton and held a long discussion which Hapgood wrote up into an account that he later sent to Einstein, who agreed that it was accurate, although he asked not to be quoted, since his remarks had been made without preparation. Hapgood later reprinted the notes in Earth’s Shifting Crust. Campbell was trying to work out the mathematics of how the Antarctic ice cap could cause the earth’s crust to fracture. Einstein was totally convinced by Hapgood’s geological evidence that the earth’s crust could fracture and slide; what he doubted was whether the polar ice cap had anything to do with it, a view that Hapgood had come to share by the time he issued the second edition, The Path of the Pole, in 1970. He simply doubted whether the mass of ice – even when contained in an irregular shape like Antarctica – could cause the crust to slip.
On 16 April, at the age of seventy-six, Einstein died in hospital. Hapgood had lost his most influential champion, but at last Earth’s Shifting Crust was now almost completed. What had once seemed a wild theory was steadily gathering support from other sources. Professor George W. Bain realised that the chemical composition of soil is altered by sunlight, and discovered that, for example, tropical soil is quite different from soil in a cool zone. His studies of very early geological periods led him to conclude that in the Carboniferous Period, the equator ran through the New Siberian Islands – or, to put it another way, that Siberia was located closer to the equator.
Bain published his results in 1953. For twenty years before that, the Chinese professor Ting Ying H. Ma, of the University of Fukien,16 had been studying corals and had reached similar conclusions: ancient coral seas were not in the same position as at present, but in fact changed their position from age to age. At first Ma tried to explain this by Wegener’s theory of drifting continents, but by 1949, when Hapgood started working on the problem, he had concluded that only shifts in the earth’s crust itself could account for the patterns of change. Ma suspected that the movement went deeper than the crust, into the mantle, the layer below the crust.
For Hapgood, five years’ work was drawing to a close; all that remained now was to find a publisher. And at this juncture, another fascinating investigation fell into his lap.
On 26 August 1956, a radio broadcast from Georgetown University, in Washington, DC,17 featured a panel discussion in which the leading speaker was a scholar of Viking maps, Captain Arlington H. Mallery. The panel was arguing about a map, dating from 1513, that bore an inscription stating that it had been pieced together from a number of other old maps by a Turkish seafarer and one-time pirate named Piri Reis (‘piri’ means admiral); Reis was apparently eventually beheaded through the machinations of an enemy in 1554. His map showed South America, a portion of West Africa and, at the bottom, what appeared to be part of the coast of Antarctica. Earlier that year, Mallery had been reading an article in the Geographical Journal about discoveries made in Antarctica during an international exploration in 1949, including sonar soundings under the ice that surrounded the coast.18 At that moment his friend M.I. Walters dropped on his desk a copy of the Piri Reis map, which had recently been presented to the Library of Congress by a Turkish officer. A single glance showed Mallery that there appeared to be an amazing correspondence between the bays shown on the Piri Reis map and the bays recently revealed by the sonar. Piri Reis himself had stated that some of the twenty maps he had used dated back to the time of Alexander the Great, who was born in 356 BC.Since Antarctica was undoubtedly by that time covered with a sheet of ice – much of it 2 miles deep – these original maps must have been made long before Alexander – at a conservative estimate, around 4,000 BC.
But a map is no use without something written on it, and writing was not supposed to have been developed until the Sumerians began to use it for tax demands around 3,500 BC.It looked very much as if the Piri Reis map proved that writing had been in use long before 4,000 BC.Furthermore, Antarctica itself was not officially discovered until 1818. The Piri Reis map suggested the existence of a sophisticated seafaring civilisation at a time when, according to historians, civilisation was only just evolving in the Middle East.
Understandably, in view of his interest in Antarctica, Hapgood was tremendously excited by the new discovery. He had already concluded that, before the last great crust slippage, Lesser Antarctica – the smaller half of the divided continent, directly south of Patagonia – was located outside the Antarctic Circle, and had later moved inside it, so it would quite probably have been free of ice in 9,600 BC,when, according to Plato, Atlantis had vanished. Although Hapgood had no intention of breathing a word about it to anyone – he had no desire to be dismissed as a member of the lunatic fringe – it looked as if the Piri Reis map confirmed his suspicion that Plato had been right about an ancient civilisation that predated known historical records.
Hapgood was by then an assistant professor at Keene State College, part of the University of New Hampshire. He again enlisted the aid of his students in his latest enterprise. Their business was simply to study the Piri Reis map without preconceptions and compare it with other early maps. One of the first things they discovered was that the land maps of the period were extremely crude; one showed Italy joined to Spain, another showed England shaped like a teapot. Yet the maps used by mariners – known as ‘portolans’, which means ‘port to port’ – were often incredibly accurate. According to Piri Reis, his map had been based partly on a map possessed by Columbus, although no one had succeeded in locating this. But perhaps he had used maps from the ancient library of Alexandria; Hapgood was inclined to believe that these had found their way to the great library in Constantinople, which then fell into the hands of the Turks when the city was captured in 1453.
As long ago as 1889, Adolf Erik Nordenskiold (1832–1901), another leading expert on early maps, had also been convinced that the portolans were based on maps that dated back centuries before Christ. After ten Arctic expeditions, Nordenskiold became aware of the deplorable state of polar cartography. He undertook a systematic reappraisal of all ancient maps, culminating in the Facsimile-Atlas (Stockholm, 1889), which is commonly regarded as an impetus for the modern study of cartography. The great geographer and astronomer Ptolemy, who had been a librarian in Alexandria around 150 BC,had made maps that were less accurate than the medieval portolans despite having the greatest library in the world at his disposal. Was it likely that ordinary seamen could surpass the work of Ptolemy, unless they had other maps to guide them?
In fact, the Piri Reis maps contained a number of errors – for example, he had allowed the twenty maps he used to overlap, so that he had shown the Amazon River twice, although he had also left out a 900-mile stretch of coastline. One error could be pinned down to the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes, who was born about 275 BC.He knew that in Syene, in Upper Egypt (close to the present Aswan), the sun was reflected in a certain deep well on the solstice, 21 June, so towers there did not cast a shadow at that time. But in Alexandria, 500 m
iles due north, they did. He measured the length of the shadow of a tower in Alexandria at midday on 21 June, and used this to calculate the angle of the sun’s rays. This was about 7 degrees, which is approximately one-fiftieth of 360. Since he knew the distance to Syene, this meant that 500 miles represented 7 degrees of the earth’s polar circumference, so it was easy to work out that 360 degrees would be represented by 25,000 miles. The actual circumference around the poles is 24,821 miles, so this was an amazingly accurate calculation for 240 BC,when most people were not even aware the earth was round.
Through a slight error, Eratosthenes had increased the diameter of the earth by 4.5 degrees. If Hapgood allowed for that 4.5 degrees error, the Piri Reis map became even more accurate, suggesting that it had been based on ancient Greek (and Egyptian) source maps.
When Piri Reis made his map, the famous mapmaker Gerardus Mercator was only one year old, so his work predated
Mercator’s method of ‘projecting’ the earth on to a flat surface and marking it with latitude and longitude. Mapmakers used a simpler method, choosing some town as a centre, then drawing a circle round it that they divided into sixteen slices, like a cake. Then they drew squares inside the circle, and went on extending these outward, creating a kind of crude latitude and longitude – a complicated method, but one that worked well enough. When Hapgood’s students studied the Piri Reis map, they soon realised that its original ‘centre’ lay somewhere off the chart, to the east. Most of them guessed it would be Alexandria, but careful calculation revealed that the actual centre seemed to be Syene, the sacred centre of Upper Egypt, further support that they might have been dealing with an ancient map.
When the mapmakers of Alexandria made their own maps, we may presume that they did not sail off to look at South America and Antarctica but based them on other older maps. But how old were they?
An interesting piece of evidence offers us one clue. Towards the end of the second century BC,the Greek grammarian Agatharchides of Cnidus, a tutor to one of the Ptolemy kings of Egypt, was told that, according to ancient tradition, one side of the base of the Great Pyramid was precisely one-eighth of a minute of a degree of the earth’s polar circumference19 (a minute is one-sixtieth of a degree). Each side of the Great Pyramid’s base is 756 feet, or just over 230 metres, and if this is multiplied by 8, then by 60, then by 360, the result is just under 40,000 kilometres, or just under 25,000 miles (in fact, 24,933 miles) – again, an amazingly accurate assessment of the polar circumference of the earth. In fact the height of the Great Pyramid, in addition to its base, is also in exact proportion to the size of the earth – that is, its apex is where the North Pole should be.
The Great Pyramid was built by the pharaoh Cheops (Khufu) around 2,500 BC,so how can the ancient Egyptians possibly have known the size of the earth? It is possible that they might have understood that it was a sphere, for example, by noting that the shadow of the earth on the moon during eclipses is curved, or by observing that a ship gradually vanishes below the horizon as it sails away.
What impressed Hapgood so much was the astonishing accuracy of the Piri Reis map, once the 4.5-degree error had been allowed for. He noted that, in 1541, savants in Mexico City set out to decide its exact longitude by timing two eclipses of the moon, one in Mexico City and one in Toledo in Spain. Their calculations were off by miles. The ancient maps, on the other hand, were frequently accurate to within one half-degree of longitude – something Europeans didn’t achieve until John Harrison invented the marine chronometer in the eighteenth century.
Hapgood was also intrigued by a large island shown off the coast of South America. Located at 5 degrees north on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it seems to be about 300 miles in diameter, yet it is certainly not there today. Moreover, the island is also shown on the Reinel Chart of 1510, and on a map of 1737 by the French cartographer Philip Buache.
Hapgood was naturally interested in other portolans, and in 1959 he wrote to ask the Library of Congress if they had any more. He was invited to come and see for himself – when he arrived there at Thanksgiving, he was slightly embarrassed to find hundreds of them laid out for his inspection. He spent several days looking through the maps, and then, as he describes it, ‘I turned a page and sat transfixed.’ What he was looking at was a map made by Oronteus Finnaeus in 1531, showing Antarctica looking much as it does on a modern map. But it depicted the bays without the ice, rivers flowing to the sea, and even mountains that are now buried under ice. Although the Oronteus map failed to show the Palmer Peninsula, which stretches between north-western Antarctica and the coast of Patagonia, in reality, there is no such peninsula – if the ice melted, there would only be an island. In short, the original map had been made by someone who knew the whole of Antarctica – inland, as well as the coast. That could mean either that Antarctica had originally been mapped by sailors who had explored and mapped it inland, or that the original inhabitants of the continent had mapped it for themselves. Whatever the case, it suggested that Antarctica had been mapped more then 6,000 years ago.
Other portolans were equally significant. The Dulcert Portolano of 1339 shows precise knowledge of an area from Galway to the Don Basin in Russia. A Turkish Hadji Ahmad map of 1559 shows the world from a northern projection, as if hovering over the North Pole, and also seems to show Siberia and Alaska as joined. Since this is a heart-shaped map, with Siberia in one dimple and Alaska in the other, this could simply reflect the fact that the mapmaker did not have space to include the stretch of sea of the Bering Strait between the two. However, if there was no Bering Strait, the original map must have been made more than 12,000 years ago, when Siberia and Alaska were joined by a land bridge at this location. A 12,000-year-old map sounds unlikely, but everything Hapgood was uncovering seemed equally absurd. He began to understand why the portolans had remained unexamined in the Library of Congress for decades – any scholar who had taken a close look at them had probably shuddered and hastily closed the folder.
The map of Antarctica published by Philip Buache in 1737 showed the Antarctic continent divided into two islands – as we now know, it is below the ice. How did Buache know this? He must have been using maps even older than those used by Oronteus Finnaeus and the creator of the Dulcert Portolano, which had used old maps that showed the inland sea frozen over.
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:
The evidence presented by ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilisation, of an advanced kind, which either was localised in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilisations of Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking, it was more advanced than any known culture before the 18th century of the Christian era. It was only in the 18th century that we first developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th century did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas and only then did we begin the exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. These maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.21
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.