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

by David King

  Undismayed on the surface, but not known for taking criticism well, Rudbeck responded by announcing his upcoming lecture series at the university; he would teach the greatest, most profound subject, and his self-proclaimed specialty: nothing.

  So imagine the surprise of students, not to mention the officials, when they read the formal lecture catalog for Uppsala University for the fall term 1679. Next to botany, anatomy, theology, and the familiar academic subjects, there was the following offering:

  Olof Rudbeck is going to treat his listeners to a very useful, very intricate, and very subtle subject that is never praised enough: Nothing.

  Surprise, laughter, and probably some cheers for one of Uppsala’s perennially favorite teachers. Rudbeck was once again having fun at his enemies’ expense. As the university catalog went on to describe the course, Rudbeck kept playing with his rivals’ own Aristotelian terms in a mocking fashion. “He is going to show how Nothing arose and fell, and trace its unending affections, virtues, and deficiencies as well as its multifaceted uses in theology, law, medicine, philosophy, all mechanical arts, and daily life.”

  Needless to say, few of his Uppsala colleagues were amused by this prank. University officials were upset at this “tasteless gesture,” with one professor saying, “Each and every person who tastelessly cracks jokes about a serious matter knows nothing about good manners and culture; but Olof Rudbeck does this in the Uppsala professors’ lecture catalog; therefore he knows nothing about education.”

  Some professors evidently worried about the effects on young people. Would this not bring the educational mission into disrepute, or perhaps give the impression that there was no such thing as knowledge? Even the archbishop, Johannes Baazius the Younger, agreed that this prank was insulting and went a little too far.

  Again Rudbeck was forced to explain himself, both at the council meeting and to the university chancellor. No, he said, this lecture series “On Nothing” was not meant to insult his colleagues or deny the existence of knowledge. He had only intended to offer some reflections on the many uses of “nothing” in the sciences. From medicine to pharmacy to physics, he saw nothing, and nothing everywhere. This was, as he put it, an attempt at a “true science of nothing.”

  Was Rudbeck speaking of experiments with vacuum, then in vogue among some natural philosophers? Was he hinting at a sharper mystical turn? Or was this just another attempt to get out of trouble? That is hard to say, though it was probably a little bit of each. De la Gardie, at any rate, accepted Rudbeck’s explanation. The count also acknowledged that Rudbeck had behaved somewhat inconsiderately with his announced program.

  For Rudbeck, the critiques—just like the words of encouragement—acted like powerful stimulants, urging him forward, a man driven and not exactly known for his sense of moderation. When the objections moved beyond the realm of personal attacks, they could be even more beneficial. Sometimes they helped him identify unforeseen problems with his theory about Atlantis, or pinpoint areas that needed more fiddling. And Rudbeck would almost invariably proceed to solve them, at least to his own satisfaction.

  Spurred on by encouragement and criticism in equal measure, not to mention his own inner drive to perfect the theory, Rudbeck made so many advances that he dreamed of publishing “a small addition” to Atlantica. The problem, however, was that he was deep in debt, and despite the many positive reviews, the sales of the book had been unexpectedly slow.

  “Wish what Your Excellence said had been true,” Rudbeck wrote to De la Gardie, referring to the count’s prediction that there would soon not be enough copies to satisfy the demand. Most of the initial print run of some five hundred copies, with one hundred special, lavishly produced copies, was still available for purchase.

  Frustratingly, after two weeks on the market, only sixty copies of the special presentation copies had been sold. He had set aside forty of them for the high-ranking figures at court, or leaders in the king’s government, but not a single volume was sold until the fourth of April, when the governor of the province of Geflve bought his copy.

  Sales were so slow, in fact, that it is almost possible to count them as they occurred. In the first weeks, only about one dozen of the regular copies of Atlantica were sold anywhere in the kingdom. Rudbeck’s brother-in-law Professor Carl Lundius bought one of the first copies to come off the press. So did the professor of medicine Petrus Hoffvenius, his longtime friend, as well as the classical scholar Anders Norcopensis, who had translated the volume. Several noblemen and officials had also bought their own copies of Atlantica, but somewhat disappointingly they tended to opt for the cheaper volumes. Also, as Rudbeck complained, “when one person buys it, he loans it to everyone.”

  None of these trends boded well for narrowing the gulf between the glowing praise and the glaring lack of sales. Over the summer of 1679, the number of copies sold was, according to his own testimony, a grand total of one. Weary from worry, Rudbeck reported a few months later that, despite all his efforts, he had not managed to sell more than 120 copies. Given the huge debts he had assumed to print the work, Rudbeck hoped and prayed that the dismal slump would come to a speedy end. At this rate he was inching closer to financial disaster.

  Sadly, one of the great sources of inspiration in his life, his dear friend Olaus Verelius, had fallen gravely ill. He had shown signs of deterioration for a while now. Rudbeck noted how his colleague would come over to his house and stand there in the doorway, nearly out of breath from the walk up the flight of stairs. The day Rudbeck had long dreaded came in early January 1682, and Rudbeck took a break from his own sorrows to write his friend’s epitaph, Corona virtutis (“crown of virtue”):

  … the one who knows what has happened in the oldest times

  He is as aged as the times

  And has a big trace of God’s image;

  Whose foremost property is

  An unfathomable wisdom

  Such words reveal a great amount about Rudbeck and his relationship with Verelius, not to mention his appreciation of the wisdom that was to be mined from the past. And every bit of this wisdom would be needed for what awaited him.

  BETWEEN THE TIME Atlantica was published and when it reached the Royal Society two years later, Rudbeck’s country had undergone some dramatic changes in the dramatic century that many historians call the “Swedish Age of Greatness.”

  The young king Charles XI, so uncertain when he first sat on the throne, had matured considerably during the last four years, which he had spent almost completely on mud-soaked battlefields. In 1680, now that the war was over and Sweden had finally repulsed the Danish invaders, he was back in his royal palace in Stockholm. Coaxed by his new associates, the twenty-five-year-old king declared himself absolute ruler of Sweden.

  No longer would he promise to seek the advice of the council before making decisions of consequence. The old council had in fact been disgraced by the poor showing in the war, deemed irrelevant, and, eventually, denounced as dangerously incompetent. Other traditional limitations on royal power were likewise to be swept away, at least in theory. Although the king had assumed many more powers during the humiliations and crises of the recent war, keeping real decision-making within his small circle of favorites in the camp, Charles XI was now, by law, answerable only to God in heaven.

  For the vast majority of Swedes laboring under the severe strains of the state military machine, the king’s assumption of absolute power would not make all that much difference. They would continue to toil away on the farms and fields, struggling desperately with harsh winters, crushing taxes, and the ever-present threat of famine. For the small middle class, growing steadily though still much smaller than that in Britain, the Netherlands, or France, there would be more opportunities for joining the growing administration and serving the state. But the impact of the new system would be felt most by the high aristocracy, and for some the experience would be catastrophic.

  With the Swedish navy annihilated and the countryside devastated, th
e setbacks of the last war had shown the sorry state to which the country had fallen. Sweden was, in the words of the king, like a poorly equipped ship that had just managed to survive the stormy waters to creep back into harbor. It was vastly in need of repairs, though there was no money available to make them, let alone repay all its enormous debts. There wasn’t even money to pay the crew, the loyal state employees who were keeping the creaking ship afloat.

  “We know that the country is in desperate straits, and that everyone serves without wages,” one government official expressed his concern in one of the lively debates in Parliament held during the turbulent fall of 1680. Meanwhile, “a handful of persons,” he added, “own all the land in the kingdom.” At this cue, another member chimed in, “And what happens is that the poor among us have to pay up, but the rich and the powerful, who own the nation’s land, have done nothing; this is something that ought to be looked into.”

  The new absolute power planned to do exactly that, and the result was radical, to say the least. The king’s men would examine every undertaking of the regency government—every single decision, expense, or gift bestowed in the last few decades would be scrutinized with the aim of discovering the “source of all the disorder.” And that source, it was added ominously, would be held accountable.

  What had long been murmured was now written as the law of the realm. The members of the regency, the old elite who steered the country, were officially blamed for the “miserable condition of the finances” and the great disasters of the 1670s that nearly destroyed the kingdom. Now they would have to pay—and the price, it was decided, would be their own property.

  Along with this punishment, the king decided to establish a “Chamber of Liquidation.” Far too many gifts and donations had been awarded to court favorites, seriously eroding the government’s sources of income. The king’s chamber was to make sure that all such grants were returned to the Crown. This was known as the reduction. With remarkably few exceptions, any major royal gift provided for any reason since 1632 was now judged to have been illegal and ordered to be returned immediately, with interest.

  Such a sweeping plan was necessary, its proponents argued, to rescue Sweden from a state of emergency. To the high aristocracy targeted, however, reduction was just a fancy word for vengeful robbery perpetrated by the king and his advisers.

  Unfortunately for Rudbeck and his hopes of continuing his search for Atlantis, one of the hardest hit was Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. After steadily losing his influence with the king and his position of power, the count was nevertheless still unprepared for the nightmare that followed.

  The king’s men finalized the scrutiny of De la Gardie’s actions as Chancellor of the Realm, and judged that he owed the state a total of some 352,159 daler silvermynt, a sum that could pay the annual salary of no fewer than eight hundred officials in the state bureaucracy.

  Considering the extent of the count’s property and assets, this fine might not have been so devastating. The problem was that the vast majority of his wealth consisted of land, not cash, and many of his transferable valuables, such as jewels, had already been mortgaged in an effort to maintain his lavish lifestyle and patronage. In one case, the count had even pawned an entire castle, Makalös, which stood just across the water from the royal palace and one of the most impressive in all of Stockholm. Far worse than all this, however, was the verdict of the Liquidation Chamber.

  De la Gardie would watch helplessly as castle after castle, estate after estate, and jewel after jewel disappeared from his grasp. By the time the chamber finished its work, roughly three dozen castles, two hundred estates, and one thousand farms were lost, leaving the count literally with only one single castle, Venngarn.

  In this bitter turn of events, De la Gardie turned to his last source of consolation: religious faith. One of the spiritual poems he composed at this time, when he was subjected to such wild extremes of fortune, is still a part of Sweden’s Lutheran hymnal.

  I from life’s stormy ocean come

  Home to a friendly strand.

  What though my flesh lie in the tomb?

  My soul is in God’s hand.

  From darkness into light I move,

  From poverty to wealth of love,

  From strife to rest eternal.

  By the end of the reduction, many other aristocratic families had also been plundered and devastated. The Brahes, the Oxenstiernas, and the De la Gardies, who together once owned about one-twentieth of all land in Sweden, saw much of their wealth depleted. Others left the country in 1680 for good, moving to the Netherlands, Britain, the Hapsburg lands, or anywhere away from the Liquidation Chamber of Charles XI’s Sweden.

  Although some families would bounce back to prominence, many would never recover from such an unprecedented transfer of castles and properties. The winners in the royal lottery would be the growing state, its new civil servants, and the emerging businessmen with money to buy the new, relatively cheap castles that temporarily flooded the market. And ultimately, it was said, the country at large would benefit. Land ownership in Sweden would never be the same; a transformation had begun that would gradually allow this Scandinavian country to have one of the most equal distributions of land ownership anywhere in the world.

  At the time, though, chaos prevailed, and De la Gardie was not one of those who would live to see their families reemerge after the upheaval. From the depths of an unofficial political exile, he had fallen straight into the abyss. Very disillusioned by the cruel swings of fortune, the count was further embittered when he saw many of his former friends forget the services he had previously rendered them. Time after time, he was abandoned by those he had promoted into power.

  But Rudbeck would never forget the count’s past favors. There is no change in the tone of his letters, or in the volume of pages that he sent to his friend. In fact, if anything, it seems that Rudbeck was trying to overcompensate. For De la Gardie, Atlantica’s greatest supporter and Sweden’s greatest patron of the arts in that century, was on his way to a poor, almost penniless, and, with a few exceptions, pretty much unmourned death.

  15

  AND THEN THE SNAKE THAWED

  Just as I never cease to be vain in seeking something new to ponder, I am now trying to figure out how, with a good mind, I can learn patience… . I hope to find this invention, then I would have found the greatest treasure on earth.

  —OLOF RUDBECK

  CONFRONTED WITH SLOW sales, crushing debts, the passing of Verelius, and the attacks on Count de la Gardie, Rudbeck saw no signs of improvement. In fact, the prospects looked worse when he learned of the contender vying for Verelius’s influential position as librarian of Uppsala University.

  This was Henrik Schütz, a professor who was quickly emerging as a powerful force in the coalition against Rudbeck. As a trained theologian, Schütz had heard many horror stories about the Rudbeck ogre: his stance as a wicked Cartesian, the scandalous behavior in the Curio lawsuit, and the shameless critiques of the Aristotelian principles enshrined at the heart of the university training.

  Schütz was not exactly bred to take this blatant opposition silently. As one leading cultural historian described him, he was a “quarrelsome person and a game cock, who was unparalleled even in this time [for being] vindictive, possessing good memory, and quick to his guns.” His personality was indeed volcanic. Professor Schütz was known, as Count de la Gardie put it, for “scouring the neighborhood farms with a pistol to silence the horses and pigs just because they bothered him.”

  Domineering and uncompromising, Schütz was also one of the most unpopular professors in town. He cursed, swore, and scolded in almost equal measure. When he was supposed to preach sermons, they were often given behind closed doors. The reason, De la Gardie suggested, was to hide his incompetence. Although this assessment was rather harsh, many did in fact seem to agree with the count’s portrait of a difficult man who wanted things done in only one particular way. Some absolutely abhorred him and his sever
ity. Once when he lay sick, unsympathetic students assembled in the night to play funeral music outside his window.

  And when Verelius was lying on his deathbed in early January 1682, Schütz had hurried off to Stockholm to seek the influential and presumably soon to be vacant position as librarian of Uppsala University. The rival candidate for this powerful post, the university soon learned, was Olof Rudbeck.

  For some time, Rudbeck had been tiring of all the medical duties. Not that he had been actively engaged the last few years—indeed, since his search for Atlantis had become a full-blown obsession, Rudbeck’s disregard of his lecturing duties had reached almost legendary proportions. Such anatomy lessons, which had once been his love, were now just frustratingly inconvenient and distracting. Besides, referring to the sometimes macabre spectacle of dissecting bodies, Rudbeck said that his stomach no longer tolerated “the fresh steaks.”

  Taking charge of the library would be much more amenable to his antiquarian pursuits, which he regarded as his truly important work. The position of librarian, moreover, traditionally went to an older professor as an unofficial reward for long and beneficial service to the university. Loccenius, Schefferus, and Verelius had all in turn been appointed, and Rudbeck wanted to be next.

  None of the authorities dragged his feet in making the decision, and the announcement was ready the day after Verelius died on January 3, 1682. Much to the surprise of university insiders, the king announced that the new director of the library would be Professor Henrik Schütz.

  Only thirty-three years old, Schütz did not have much experience with manuscripts. He did not seem to have the literary achievements, either, that would command respect when he was showing visitors around the halls. Far from having given long service to the university, Schütz had graduated just one or two years before. Why the king took such a liking to this professor is puzzling. Perhaps it was Schütz’s strong personality, or, as some have suggested, his influential friends and relatives at court.