Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

by David King

  As for the temptation to see Jason’s voyage as “only a poem or a dream,” Rudbeck was ready with a response:

  I would rather believe the dreams of this harper than the great mathematician Ptolemy, who, for all his mathematical art, was not able to find Sweden’s mountains, provinces, darkness, and Ice Sea, nor even its length, but made it a small island thirty Swedish miles long.

  “So I would rather keep to the true dreamers than the untruthful writers.”

  And for this dreamer in the middle of the 1670s, still wounded by the previous humiliations and insults, it was fairly clear that his beloved Sweden had also had a glorious past, one that was much better known among the ancients than had ever been imagined before.

  RUDBECK’S DESCENT INTO the world of mythology was in many ways an addictive and fanciful escape. Following Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece was helping Rudbeck forget about his enemies, all their hateful accusations, and also some painful misfortunes at home.

  Vendela had given birth to seven children, but alas not all had survived. In the past year, their oldest son, Johannes Caesar, had died at age sixteen. This tragic loss followed the death of their two-year-old daughter Magdalena, six years earlier. Unfortunately, within a couple of years, the family would also bury their toddler Karl. Although child mortality was high in the seventeenth century, and few parents at that time escaped its trauma, the death of a child was not necessarily any less heartbreaking than it is today. Olof and Vendela Rudbeck coped as best they could.

  The other children in the household happily seemed to be healthy and prospering. The precocious fourteen-year-old Olof junior, tall, thin, and multifaceted in his abilities, was taking more after his father every day. Johanna Kristina, the oldest daughter, was showing her talents as well, especially in painting, drawing, and singing. Their son Gustaf, however, was more of a problem child. Less willing than the other children to please his parents, he was earning a reputation as a downright troublemaker. The youngest surviving child was their adorable six-year-old daughter, Vendela, who, like her older sister, was impressing others with her beautiful voice. Rudbeck must have been proud of his talented children, and pleased with the interest they had begun to show in his activities.

  Reading the preliminary notes as soon as Rudbeck wrote them, Olaus Verelius was ecstatic. However, he also sensed the inherent risks and came again with a request. Verelius strongly encouraged Rudbeck to begin printing the book at once; he did not wish to see such an extraordinary work collapse under the weight of its own success. Rudbeck, too, knew the dangers of delay.

  After presenting his discovery of the lymphatic system at Queen Christina’s court, Rudbeck had dragged his feet in writing up this great medical achievement. By the time he finally did, in the summer of 1653, another physician, Professor Thomas Bartholin at Copenhagen University, had managed to publish his account first, sparking the priority dispute of the early 1650s.

  Not wanting to see his historical work suffer the same fate, Rudbeck took Verelius’s advice, and planned to publish as soon as possible. He would take his manuscript, as soon as it was ready, to the Uppsala University press, located in a little red building in the court around the Gustavianum. For the last twenty years this press had been in these cramped quarters. The offices were in one room, with another holding enormous stacks of paper, and a third serving as an attic or storehouse. The man in the middle of the mess was the printer Henrik Curio.

  Apparently a learned man, the forty-four-year-old Curio spoke Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and Swedish, in addition to his native German. According to Rudbeck, he could also read Hebrew and Greek, a combination of ancient and modern languages that was certainly valuable in the growing international book trade of the seventeenth century. It was Rudbeck, in fact, who in 1661, after almost two years of attempts, had persuaded Curio to leave his work in a successful Stockholm printing house and open up shop at Uppsala University—a decision for which Rudbeck would later feel responsible, and eventually guilty.

  Although the two men were different in many ways—Rudbeck alert, obsessive, and unrelenting, while Curio was more aloof and lackadaisical in his pursuits—they had become good friends over the years. Their relationship had grown closer after 1671, when Curio married Rudbeck’s cousin Disa. With these ties of family and friendship, it was important to Rudbeck that Curio would be the printer of his work.

  But Curio was no angel. Since the early 1670s he had often been described as a slacker. His irregular habits, the critics complained, were undeniably affecting the quality of his work. He was careless, was a bit of a drunk, and did no proofreading whatsoever. The products were terrible and getting worse. Such negligence was also, people thought, bringing the press into chaos, and the university into disrepute. Soon “no one will be able to read [the books] at all.” Even observers uninvolved in the matter said his work was “unusually lousy.”

  Complaints were getting louder, with demands for official inquiries and inventories of the press. Some professors were heard calling for Curio’s resignation. Overjoyed by his successes in finding the Hyperboreans and in his quest for the Golden Fleece, however, Rudbeck clearly did not realize how serious a threat was posed to Henrik Curio.

  For the more Rudbeck looked, the more evidence he found of ancient Sweden, and the more his imagination helped him overcome the many difficulties that arose. Once he was on the trail of ancient heroes, it was apparent to Rudbeck that Jason and the Argonauts were not the only classical figures who had reached the far north.

  ACCORDING TO ANCIENT MYTHS, many heroes had made the long, arduous journey to a land of “shadowy mists.” Retracing the path of these classical wanderers and examining what they had seen along the way, Rudbeck became convinced that these journeys to the kingdom of Hades were in fact trips to ancient Sweden.

  The main clues for this startling, indeed mind-boggling, conclusion came from the oldest surviving descriptions of the dreaded Underworld. In Homer’s Odyssey, the Greek warrior Odysseus made the daring voyage. The crafty king of Ithaca described what he saw as he approached its distant shores:

  By night, our ship ran onward toward the Ocean’s bourne,

  the realm and region of the Men of the Winter,

  hidden in mist and cloud. Never the flaming

  eye of Helios lights on those men

  at morning, when he climbs the sky of stars,

  nor in descending earthward out of heaven;

  ruinous night being rove over those wretches.

  Few would disagree that the “Helios [that] lights on those men at morning, when he climbs the sky of stars” refers to the Sun. Helios was literally the Greek word for “sun,” with the “flaming eye” one of its common representations. The Greek root helio- is seen in our language, too, in the heliocentric theory, which places the sun at the center of our solar system, and helium, the element named after its discovery on the sun. So when the Odyssey notes that “Never the flaming eye of Helios lights on those men,” Rudbeck believed that the poet’s words needed very little commentary. This was not fantasy, but rather a clear description of actual phenomena that take place in the far north, above the Arctic Circle.

  For three long months at that high latitude, Sweden indeed looked like what Homer called the “sunless Underworld.” Scandinavians living near and around the Arctic have long adjusted to the harsh environment. As Rudbeck saw it, they skated and skied, rode sleighs and pulled sledges, and even held markets on the thick winter ice. Cold weather provided natural refrigeration that kept fish fresh for four, five, and sometimes six months with no need of salt. The same ice also created spectacular vistas, hanging down from roofs of houses and heated cabins “like tallow candles or lances, with different colors and in various positions, as though the pipes of an organ were placed vertically next to the walls.”

  As for the “mist and cloud” predominating at the entrance to the Underworld, this was another well-known feature of Rudbeck’s far north
ern location. Frost, snow, and mist created a dreadful concoction that inspired Homer’s Hades, or what he called “the realm and region of the Men of the Winter.” Pools and lakes emerged on the high ground, and the cold weather in turn hardened them into ice. When additional water came from nearby caves and channels, the traveler saw “the waters throw up a steamy mist into the heights and in their descent form inverted pyramids of ice at the sea.”

  One of the big objections to Rudbeck’s emerging theory of Hades was of course the fact that classical mythology presented the Underworld as the abode of the dead. But under the sway of his imagination, Rudbeck cast this problem aside without much ado. Indeed, his reading of the ancient myths made him question that part of the tale. As Odysseus himself showed, the Underworld was not literally a home of the dead. Not only did he and his crew sail there, but, even more remarkably, they returned! Many other ancient heroes sailed to the Underworld—Hercules, Perseus, Theseus, Orpheus, and so on—and they, too, returned from the voyage. With so many arrivals and departures, the halls of Hades did not exist in the classical imagination as only a place for departed souls.

  In fact, Rudbeck believed that Homer had made it absolutely clear that the kingdom of the Underworld was located not only aboveground, but also in the far north. When Odysseus arrived at the abyss, for instance, some of the shades showed surprise at how far he had traveled. But it was not a surprise, as Odysseus’s guide, the beautiful witch Circe, had given him unmistakable sailing instructions for reaching this kingdom at the world’s end:

  Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways,

  feel no dismay because you lack a pilot;

  only set your mast and haul your canvas

  to the fresh blowing North.

  Then she added, just “sit down and steer, and hold the wind.”

  What clearer words, Rudbeck thought, on the need to sail north to reach the Underworld, “the gloom at the world’s end.” There Homer’s “region of winter” seemed to correspond well with the deep, dark winters known to prevail in the Arctic. The poet had also given another possible name for “the Men of the Winter”: the Cimmerii, or Cimmerians. This name survives in many modern translations of the Odyssey. To Rudbeck, though, the name raised even more questions, for if you pull out a map of the north, you will find this name of the Cimmerii, remarkably, almost verbatim.

  More exactly the name was Kimmi or Kimmerii, and it was found all over the north. There was a region called Kimme-Lapmarck, located on a peninsula called Kimmer-näs. There was also the Kemi River, which flowed through northern Finland, not to mention Kimmi town and Nort-Kimm and Kimmi marsh, bordering on the White Sea. So many other examples were also close at hand. By Rudbeck’s derivation, the Kimmi or Kimmerii drew their name literally from the Old Swedish for “darkness”—no surprise, as Homer’s Cimmerii were said to live in perpetual darkness somewhere near the entrance to the Underworld.

  But why had the ancient mariner pointed his rudder north? Because he needed to know the future, and according to Rudbeck, there was no better place to consult seers, soothsayers, and sorcerers than northern Sweden.

  Indeed, many branches of fortune-telling and superstition thrived particularly well in the small villages around the Arctic Circle. Some of the dwellers excelled in predicting the future, reading everything from the flights of birds to the movements of vapors rising from the distant mountains. Some knew spells to enchant victims, and to summon the good, favorable winds for distressed ship captains. There were others who claimed to be adept in shape-changing, and there were even some who could “put out the stars, melt the mountains, solidify springs,” and perform striking feats of wind magic. With its soothsayers and magicians, the northernmost lands were still, as one observer put it, “as learned in witchcraft as if it had had Zoroaster the Persian for its instructor in this damnable science.”

  On his visit to Sweden, Magalotti had also noted how deeply rooted witchcraft was during the 1670s: “Never does one hear anything else spoken about in the northern provinces, Boshuslän, Dalarne, and Lappland, than witchcraft.”

  There was not enough ink and paper, Rudbeck said, to record all the stories about this art of magic, prophecy, and dream interpretation that flourished in the bubbling witches’ pot he was finding in the far north. Most spectacularly, Rudbeck believed that he had found a connection between the seer Odysseus sought in the Underworld and a traditional authority among the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Tiresias, the blind seer who foretold Odysseus’s future, was a Saami shaman, a Tyreas, who went into ecstatic trances and claimed to tell the future.

  Hyperborean Mountains surveyed by Rudbeck’s students in an expedition to the far north of Sweden.

  Odysseus’s perilous voyage to the Underworld was not simply a good story told for entertainment as the minstrel strummed the harp and the wine went around the warrior’s halls of Bronze Age Greece. The very details of Odysseus’s journey could be seen in the far north of Sweden. The Cimmerians, the darkness, the mists, the seer Tiresias, and the reputation for wisdom were all there, around the Arctic Circle. Before long, Rudbeck would also have proposals for other missing elements. The name of Charon, the boatman who ferried souls to the Underworld, was derived from baron, a funeral barge used among the indigenous peoples in the largely unexplored regions of the far north. Cerberus, too, the three-headed guard dog of Hades, was originally Garm, the fierce hound of Hel remembered in the Old Norse sagas, and probably, Rudbeck thought, a survival of an ancient bodyguard force stationed at the entrance to the kingdom.

  So, full of excitement, Rudbeck was amazed at how closely Homer’s vision of Hades fit his proposed Arctic home. He made plans to send some of his mathematical students on a scientific expedition to survey the mountains and rivers of what he now claimed was the original kingdom of Hades. As thrilling as it was tantalizing, every clue suggested a new understanding about the forgotten golden age of the north.

  Rudbeck pledged to continue writing “as long as God gives me health, and the moon continues to become full.” What he found next would lead into the tangled web of one of the greatest and most enduring enigmas of all time—and cause his sharpest critics to think it was really a result of moonstruck lunacy.

  8

  MOUNTAINS DON’T DANCE

  Your theory is crazy. The question is, is it crazy enough?

  —NIELS BOHR, DANISH PHYSICIST AND NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATE

  SOMEWHERE BEYOND the “Pillars of Hercules” lay the fabled island of Atlantis, home of an advanced civilization that once exerted a profound influence over the known world. After rising to a peak of power, refinement, and grace, this virtual paradise soon succumbed to vice and folly. Then, in a single “day and night of misfortune,” earthquakes shook the island to its foundation, and sent the formerly unrivaled civilization to the bottom of the sea.

  This was the story according to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose fourth-century-B.C. dialogues Timaeus and Critias unleashed this fantastic vision onto the world. After a series of marathon discussions about the nature of justice, a wealthy old man named Critias was reminded of the story of Atlantis, which he had heard as a child. His grandfather, also named Critias, had heard it from his father, who in turn had gotten it from the distinguished Athenian Solon. This politician-poet had allegedly come across the old tradition on his journey to Egypt in about 600 B.C., when he met some priests who lived in the town of Sais on the Nile delta.

  “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children,” one of the elder priests dismissed the traveler, marveling at how little the Athenians remembered the past. The Egyptian records, by contrast, he was told, preserved the bewildering tale, fully developed in hieroglyphics carved on stone pillars in the temple. When Solon returned to his native Athens, he hoped to give the island of Atlantis its own full-length epic poem, one that he thought would surpass the masterpieces of Homer.

  Having heard the tale as a ten-year-old boy, Critias did not think a single detail had escaped him
over the years. The image of Atlantis, he said, had been “stamped firmly on my mind like the encaustic designs of an indelible painting.” With this assertion, Critias proceeded to tell the remarkable story of the world’s greatest lost civilization: its rise to power, its immense glory, and then its violent destruction, which left only a “barrier of impassable mud”—a formidable obstacle that still blocked access to this golden age, supposedly vanished since 9400 B.C.

  Plato certainly knew how to capture the imagination. But could it really have happened? Could there have been such an idyllic civilization that was once destroyed by an earthquake and swallowed by the sea?

  It is easy to dismiss the whole narrative as the product of an active imagination, and indeed you would be in good company. For just as the story of Atlantis is at least as old as Plato, debate about its existence has been lively since his own student, Aristotle, openly voiced his doubts. After all, with Aristotle’s mastery of ancient knowledge, which prompted the Roman natural philosopher Pliny to label him “a man of supreme eminence in every branch of science,” it is striking that he had not even heard of Atlantis before Plato outlined it in his famous dialogues.

  Surely such a tale would not have escaped the attention of every previous chronicler. Not even the colorful historian Herodotus mentioned Atlantis. Like Solon, he had also visited Egypt, had spoken at length with the priests, and had a flair for the sensational and the mysterious. For Aristotle and the many critics who followed after him, Atlantis had of course never existed. Plato had conjured the whole thing out of his head, and then, as if to cover up for an embarrassing lack of corroborating evidence, conveniently made it all disappear.