Atlantis Beneath the Ice (17 page)

At Sagres, on the Portuguese coast, Henry created a refuge for scholars. There he voraciously collected all the maps, globes, and accounts of exploration that could be bought. In 1428, his older brother Pedro had been greeted with great respect when he traveled to Venice. He returned with two precious gifts for Henry. The first was a copy of the account of Marco Polo’s travels. Henry was delighted with the book, but even more thrilled by the second gift: “a collection of world maps.”
¹⁰

It seems probable that some of these maps were once housed in the sacred cartography room of Constantinople and before that the library at Alexandria. These outlines of distant lands sketched across crumbling parchments became Henry’s obsession. In his mind the maps were more than lifeless lines drawn by people long dead. He had to know where they led.

The problem wasn’t simple. There were plenty of maps on offer that were the work of charlatans more than willing to sell “secrets” to the young prince. To address discrepancies between the various maps, Henry gathered together as many scholars as he could afford, and sometimes more than he could afford.

Finally, Henry concluded that the mystery of the maps’ veracity could only be solved by launching a voyage into the void. He equipped vessels and crew for a vast project of exploration. Convinced that the Torrid Zone was passable and that navigation of a southern route to India was possible, Henry instructed his captain, Eannes, to set sail for the south. The crew didn’t share Henry’s confidence in his secret maps. As the temperature climbed they were convinced that it was only a matter of time before the very seas would be boiling. They returned to Portugal pleading that the voyage was doomed.

Henry decided to speak to the sailors himself. He told them that they would have to sail farther than ever before, but that their fears were unfounded. Tales of boiling waters were fabrications. He appealed to their pride of seamanship and, more pragmatically, their interest in
material reward, saying “If there were any authority for them, I could find an excuse for you. But indeed the stories are spread by men of little repute: the type of seamen who know only the coast of Flanders and how to enter well-known ports, and are too ignorant to navigate by compass and chart. Go forth, then, and heed none of their words; but make your journey straightaway. For the grace of God you can gain from this voyage nothing but profit and honour.”
¹¹

The sailors were inspired, and Captain Eannes’s voyage to the south dispelled once and for all the notion of an impassable Torrid Zone. A vast door had swung open. The world seemed to shrink.

In 1432, Henry sent Goncalo Velho into the western sea to claim the islands that his maps revealed were there. Velho returned without sighting the Azores and insisted that they didn’t exist. The prince ordered the reluctant Velho to retrace his steps, telling him, “There is an island there, go back and find it.”
¹²
Henry’s persistence paid off. The Azores were found, and the doorway to the West and the South was open.

In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the last scholars fled west. Their arrival in Italy is now considered one of the important incentives for the Italian Renaissance. Others heard with relief that a prince of Portugal would welcome scholars. Intellectual refugees poured into the city of Sagres, and Henry was overwhelmed with plans for potential discoveries. Because of Prince Henry the Navigator’s influence, Portugal became the new world center for ancient maps.

In later centuries, several researchers, including Charles Hapgood, claimed that the Portuguese had early knowledge of undiscovered sections of America
¹³
and Antarctica.
¹⁴
It seems that they held accurate maps of undiscovered lands long before Columbus and the rest of the famous explorers set sail. Through a long, treacherous route carved by persecution and barbarism, Atlantean maps had fallen into Henry’s hands. He not only saw their value and significance, but was also in a privileged position to act on them.

Sixteen years after Henry’s death, a young Italian adventurer was
shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal. Having been wounded in a sea battle, Christopher Columbus clung desperately to broken fragments of his ship and swam for ten kilometers until he was washed up on the Portuguese shore. It was 1476, and he was welcomed and nursed back to health by a colony of Italian countrymen from his home city of Genoa. Columbus began a new career in the service of Portugal and settled down in Lisbon to become a mapmaker with his younger brother, Bartholomew. Eventually, Christopher married into one of the most respected families of Portugal. His star began to rise.

Columbus’s father-in-law had been a close friend of the now dead Prince Henry, and his mother-in-law was said to have given Columbus some greatly valued maps that her husband had left upon his death.
¹⁵
Nowhere on Earth could the young Columbus have been better situated to begin his famous voyage westward. What secret maps he saw and how many of them we don’t know (see
chapter 1
). But despite this great advantage, he never achieved his quest to find a westerly route to India.

The man who did discover the route and who proved the stunning fact that the world was round was a Portuguese seaman who, like Columbus, sailed in the service of Spain after having learned his trade in Lisbon. Ferdinand Magellan was born of a noble Portuguese family in 1480. Magellan became a page to the queen of Portugal and was required, as part of his education, to study all the arts of sailing, including cartography. In 1496, he became a clerical worker in the king of Portugal’s marine department. He, even more than Columbus, had access to Prince Henry’s wonderful collection of secret Atlantean maps.

Before he left for Spain, Magellan gained entry to the royal chartroom. There he found a globe that showed a strait at the tip of the still
unexplored
edge of South America. When he arrived at the Spanish court Magellan proposed his plan to sail to India via a westerly route. A witness recorded his pitch to the royals: “Magellan had a well-painted globe in which the whole world was depicted, and on it he indicated the route he proposed to take, saving that the straight was left purposely blank so that no one should anticipate him.”
¹⁶

Magellan set sail in 1519 with five ships. Crossing the Atlantic he followed the coast of South America to “discover” the straits that now bear his name. He named the Pacific Ocean but did not complete his journey around the globe. He was killed by natives in the Philippines. In 1522, one of his ships made a triumphant return to Spain, the first vessel since the fall of Atlantis to have circumnavigated the globe.

AN EGYPTIAN MAP OF ATLANTIS

In 1976, we came across another Atlantean map. It had been originally discovered by a meticulous researcher, Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), who claimed that it was an accurate Egyptian map of the lost continent of Atlantis. It may have been stolen by the Romans during the occupation of Egypt and rediscovered by Kircher.

Kircher was born to Anna Gansek and Johannes Kircher, a bailiff of the Abbey of Fulda in Germany. His father was very concerned about the fate of his sixth son, who, it seemed, wouldn’t amount to much. Kircher was lazy and showed no special talent, except for getting into trouble. His first application to join the Jesuits was refused on the grounds of “insufficient mental ability.” But a series of near fatal accidents brought focus to the boy’s life. “One was the near escape from drowning when Athanasius, while swimming in a forbidden pool, was swept down a mill-race and under a mill wheel; another time it was an almost miraculous escape from being trampled to death, when, having worked his way to the front of a great crowd of onlookers, he was pushed out into the path of racing horses; finally there was the severe accident, resulting in a hernia, which came from an abortive attempt to show his skill in ice skating.”
¹⁷

Kircher’s father impressed on the boy his great fortune in surviving so many near misses, and finally, the man who would come to be known as the “universal genius” settled down to serious study. Eventually, in 1618, he was accepted by the Jesuits. The order demanded physical fitness. Kircher was afraid that his skating injury would jeopardize his
position and tried to keep it secret. His limp, however, was noticed by the fathers. He recounted, “The ills from which I was suffering forced me to walk with tottering steps. My superiors immediately noticed this, and I was obliged to tell the whole story. A surgeon was called in. He was horrified at the state of my legs . . . and pronounced me incurable. . . . I was told that since no medical attention could do me any good, I would be sent home from the Novitiate if I did not get better within a month.”
¹⁸

For the first time in his life, Kircher prayed for a miracle. Within a few days he could walk with a steady gait. His place within the order was secured.

The Jesuit scientists were among the most educated men in Europe, and Kircher’s admission to their ranks ensured him as fine an education as was possible in the seventeenth century. Eventually he would rise “to hold the most honourable place among these scientists of the Society of Jesus.”
¹⁹
But the road would be a long one. He was showing great promise when the Thirty Years War erupted over Germany. Kircher and his fellow Jesuits were forced to flee from the invading armies in the dead of winter with insufficient clothing and no food. His biographer, Conor Reilly, wrote:

He would never forget the sufferings of that journey. Snow was deep on the roads, and in the devastated countryside the young Jesuits could find little food or shelter. Exhausted and hungry they finally reached the Rhine. The river was frozen over. On the advice of the local people, who took them for deserters from one of the warring armies, they began to cross the ice. It seemed quite solid but Kircher, who was leading the way, suddenly saw open water before him. He turned back, but a gap had opened between him and his companions; he was trapped on an island of ice. The river current caught the floe on which he stood and swung it out into midstream. His companions could do nothing to help: they implored God and his Blessed Mother to save him; they watched as he was swept along,
until he was out of sight; then they crossed the river at another point and made their way to a Jesuit College on the west bank of the Rhine.

Hours later, stiff and blue and bruised and bleeding, Kircher struggled up to the door of the college. To the joy of his companions, who had been praying for the repose of his soul, he told how his ice-flow had been jammed among others down stream, permitting him to clamber along toward the further shore. He had had to swim a wide gap before he finally reached dry land.
²⁰

Kircher’s legend was already being forged. He resumed his studies with even greater enthusiasm. Astronomy fascinated him, and through the concentrated use of a telescope, he announced the rather startling idea, at the time, that the sun was made of the same material as the earth. He was the
first
to propose that the sun was an evolving star.

In 1628, Kircher was ordained as a priest. Soon a new interest began to draw his attention—archaeology. One day, while browsing in a Jesuit library, he came upon illustrations of Egyptian obelisks. The hieroglyphic inscriptions fascinated him. Later, he was appointed by successive popes to study and restore the obelisks. Egypt’s intimate connection with the Bible made the deciphering of these figures of critical interest to the church, and the popes had chosen a man more than well qualified for the task.

Kircher’s other pursuits followed not only the explosive macroworlds of astronomy and geology but also the silent microworld beneath the lens of a microscope. From these early explorations he introduced the then-revolutionary idea that microbes were the cause of disease. A true Renaissance man, he sought knowledge wherever it led him. After an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, he went so far as to lower himself into the steaming crater to view its violent upheavals firsthand. He also taught physics, mathematics, and Oriental languages at the prestigious College of Rome. In 1643, Kircher resigned his post to devote himself fully to the study of his true love, archaeology.

By 1665, he had produced the first volume of his encyclopedic work,
Mundus Subterraneus.
It was a massive book, brimming with ideas, illustrations, and the results of his intricate research into the mysteries of alchemy.

For a brief time, we owned one of the few copies of this marvelous book.

After selling the contents of our apartment in British Columbia, we’d arrived in London with one trunk and enough money to live out our dream of exploring the city while we studied at the British Museum library. The first catch in our impetuous plan was that the money was only enough to last for three months. The second catch was that in the first flush of excitement, we’d spent a big chunk of that cash on
Mundus Subterraneus.
(Perhaps this was understandable for a couple of writer/librarian characters, but it was more than risky for writer/librarians unemployed in a foreign country!)

We had tracked our prize to a narrow alley near Trafalgar Square that disappeared into some nether land of the city. The location was so far off the beaten track that we were convinced there would be less chance of anyone finding us if anything were to go awry than if we vanished in the transcendent wilds of Canada. As we neared our destination the sounds of London trailed away behind us, and the soot of centuries brushed against our coats. A set of steps built for a dwarf led us into a dank basement. The sound of a cheerful bell belied the mold crawling up the wall as we pushed open a door that begged for a coat of fresh paint.

Inside was a scene worthy of Dickens. Patches of a grubby Persian carpet could be glimpsed between the hundreds of books tilting from floor to ceiling, blocking most of the light from the narrow window—a bounty to delight any bibliophile. Hunched over a cluttered desk in the center of his empire was a man of indeterminate age who obviously didn’t have a style or hair salon high on his list of priorities. One look and he probably figured we didn’t either. His welcome and firm handshake indicated that if we’d made the effort to get there, not to mention actually find the place, we must be worth helping.