Atlantis Beneath the Ice (3 page)

If the Columbus map can now be found we shall learn whether it contained the Antarctic data, or whether Piri Reis used another source map. If the Columbus map did contain the data, then we will know he found the map in Europe, and that therefore he had a good idea of where he was going.

The most important step at the present time is to push the search in Spain for the map that was on the replica of the
Santa Maria
during the summer of 1893. Success in this search will make it possible to rewrite, in a fundamental way, the history of the Discovery of America.

Very sincerely yours,

Charles H. Hapgood

Keene Teachers College
¹

Professor Charles Hapgood’s memo got the president’s attention. Eisenhower authorized the search for the ancient map that Columbus had on board during his historic 1492 voyage across the Atlantic. The American ambassador to Spain was instructed to use his influence to find the map.

Hapgood was seeking the holy grail of ancient maps, the so-called
mappa mundus,
thought to be the original map of the world. He believed the Piri Reis map was but a fragment of this much older, complete, and accurate document that predated the European age of discovery.

We’ll follow Charles Hapgood’s attempt to locate a surviving copy of the mappa mundus and reveal why his quest was frustrated.

THE ROE DEER SKIN

In November 1929, Halil Edhem, the director of Turkey’s National Museum, was hunched over his solitary task of classifying documents.
He pulled toward him a map drawn on roe deer skin. As Halil opened the chart to its full dimensions (about two feet by three feet wide, or sixty by ninety centimeters), he was surprised by how much of the New World was depicted on a map dated 1513.

The document was the legacy of a pirate turned Turkish admiral, Piri Reis (ca. 1470–1554). He was born in Gallipoli, a naval base on the Marmara Sea, and was the nephew of Kemal Reis, a pirate who had reinvented himself as a Turkish admiral adventurer who had made his name in naval warfare. At the time, the distinction between pirate and admiral was more flexible than might be expected looking back through the lens of Hollywood.

Piri Reis began his career as a pirate sailing with his famous uncle from 1487 to 1493. It was during these voyages that he was introduced to the lucrative spoils of piracy. The fleet fought other pirates and captured and plundered enemy ships. In 1495, Kemal Reis’s skill in the art of battle earned him an invitation to join the Imperial Turkish Fleet. His nephew accompanied him to his new assignment.

The pirates had become respectable admirals.

After Kemal Reis was killed during a naval battle in 1502, Piri Reis turned his back on the seafaring life and began a second career as a mapmaker. A perfectionist, Piri Reis would not tolerate the slightest error in his drawings. He authored a careful and detailed study of the Mediterranean titled
Kitabi Bahriye.

Professor Afet Inan’s
Life and Works of the Turkish Admiral: Piri Reis,
with its bold subtitle,
THE OLDEST MAP OF AMERICA, DRAWN BY PIRI REIS,
was translated into English in 1954. Its pages contain a hint of Piri Reis, the man.

The first official acknowledgment of Piri’s deeds is an account of the sea fights in the years 1499–1502. The actual commander-inchief of the fleet belonging to the Supreme Admiral of all Sea-Forces was Kemal Reis. In his fleet Piri was given official command of some of the vessels. His service in the battles (1500–1502)
against the Venetians was remarkable. The great advantages that the Ottoman Empire acquired by the Treaty of Venice in 1502 were made possible mainly by the brave deeds of these seamen.
²

Piri Reis created his famous map in 1513 using older source maps, including charts captured from Christopher Columbus. The Turks had boarded one of Columbus’s ships before the crew had a chance to throw the charts into the sea, which was standard practice in a time when the contours of the planet remained veiled in mystery and maps held precious secrets.

A COLUMBUS CONTROVERSY

The general public first learned of the map’s existence in the February 23, 1932, issue of the
Illustrated London News.
Titled “A Columbus Controversy: America—And Two Atlantic Charts,” the article noted, “Columbus got little further than the mouth of the Orinoco, in Venezuela, in his voyage along the coast of South America in 1498, so that the stretches of the South American coast given in the Piri Reis’s chart must have been copied from other sources.”
³

In the July 23 edition of the same magazine, Akcura Yusuf, president of the Turkish Historical Research Society, wrote a more detailed account:

Piri Reis himself explains, in one of the marginal notes on his map, how he prepared it:

This section explains the way the map was prepared. It is the only chart of its kind existing now. I, personally, drew and prepared it. In preparing the map I used about twenty old charts and eight “Mappa Monde” (i.e., the charts called “Jaferiye” by the Arabs, and prepared at the time of Alexander the Great, in which the whole inhabited world is shown); the charts of the West Indies; and the new maps made by four Portuguese, showing the Sind, Indian, and
Chinese Seas geometrically represented. I also studied the chart that Christopher Columbus drew for the West. By reducing all these charts to a single scale, I compiled the present map. My map is as correct and reliable for the seven seas as are the charts that represent the seas of our countries.

Yusuf pointed out a significant fact: “The map in our possession is a fragment. If the other fragments had not been lost, we should have had in our possession a Turkish chart drawn in 1513 representing the Old and New Worlds together.”
⁴

U.S. NAVY’S HYDROGRAPHIC OFFICE

An amateur scientist by the name of Captain Arlington Mallery made it his mission to determine the age of the source maps used by Piri Reis. So radical were Mallery’s conclusions that he hesitated to reveal them.

In August 1956, Mallery told his story on a radio show sponsored by Georgetown University. He explained how in June 1954 he was working in the map room of the Library of Congress when a friend showed him a map.

The Chief Engineer of the Hydrographic Office handed me a copy of a map, which had been sent to him by a Turkish naval officer. He suggested that I examine it in the light of the information we already had on the ancient maps. After making an analysis of it, I took it back to him and requested that the Officer check both the latitude and longitude and the projection. When they asked why, I said, “There is something in this map that no one is going to believe coming from me, and I don’t know whether they will believe it coming from you.” That was the fact that Columbus had with him a map that showed accurately the Palmer Peninsula in the Antarctic continent.
⁵

The host of the radio show, Matthew Warren, interviewed Mallery and M. I. Walters of the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office:

H
OST
: You say that these maps have been checked by the Hydrographic Office of the U.S. Navy?

W
ALTERS
: Yes.

H
OST
: As far as you are concerned, are they accurate?

W
ALTERS
: Yes, they are.

H
OST
: How old are the maps?

W
ALTERS
: These maps go back 5,000 years and even earlier. But they contain data that go back many thousands of years previous to that.

Walters remarked on the comparisons between the Piri Reis Map and the newly (1954) discovered subglacial features of the Queen Maud region of Antarctica. He stated, “We have taken the old charts and the new charts that the Hydrographic Office produces today and made comparisons of the soundings of salient peaks and mountains. We have found them to be in astounding agreement. In this way we have checked the old work very closely. We put very much confidence in what Captain Mallery has disclosed.” Warren sought one concluding statement.

H
OST
: Mr. Mallery, this must then lead to the conclusion that there were competent explorers and mapmakers along the coast of the Atlantic long before Columbus.

M
ALLERY
: Several thousand years before. Not only explorers, but they must also have had a very competent and far-flung hydrographic organization, because you cannot map as large a continent as Antarctica as we know they did—probably 5,000 years ago. It can’t be done by any single individual or small group of explorers. It means an aggregation of skilled scientists who are familiar with astronomy as well as the methods required for topographic surveying.

HAPGOOD—
THE U.S. AIR FORCE CARTOGRAPHIC OFFICE

One of Charles Hapgood’s students told him about the radio broadcast. Hapgood was immediately fascinated and decided to “investigate the map as thoroughly as I could.”
⁶

Since Mallery had used the U.S. Navy for his investigations, Hapgood decided to get a second opinion from the cartographic staff of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). The U.S. Air Force investigators came to the same conclusions as those of the U.S. Navy. They determined that the southern part of the map did in fact depict portions of
subglacial
Antarctica. However, conventional wisdom dictated that the island continent hadn’t been discovered until 1818.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Harold Z. Ohlmeyer wrote to Hapgood on July 6, 1960.

COPY

RECONNAISSANCE TECHNICAL SQUADRON (SAC)
^a

UNITED STATES AIR FORCE

WESTOVER AIR FORCE BASE

MASSACHUSETTS

6 July 1960

Subject: Admiral Piri Reis World Map

To: Professor Charles H. Hapgood

Keene Teachers College

Keene, New Hampshire

Dear Professor Hapgood:

Your request for evaluating certain unusual features of the Piri Reis World Map of 1513 by this organization has been reviewed.

The claim that the lower part of the map portrays the
Princess Martha coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, and the Palmer Peninsula is reasonable. We find this the most logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map.

The geographic detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice cap by the Swedish-British-Norwegian Expedition of 1949.

This indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice cap.

The ice cap in this region is now about a mile thick. We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographic knowledge in 1513.

(signed)

HAROLD Z. OHLMEYER

Lt. Colonel, USA

Commander
⁷

This letter from Lt. Col. Ohlmeyer was included in Hapgood’s 1960 memo to President Eisenhower. Not included, however, were the salient remarks of U.S. Air Force Capt. Lorenzo W. Burroughs (chief of the Cartographic Section that worked on the Piri Reis map). He wrote, “The agreement of the Piri Reis Map with the seismic profile of this area made by the Norwegian-British-Swedish Expedition of 1949, supported by your solution of the grid, places beyond a reasonable doubt the conclusion that the original source maps must have been made before the present Antarctic ice cap covered the Queen Maud Land coasts.”
⁸

CORRESPONDING WITH HAPGOOD

Our adventure with the study of ancient maps began in the summer of 1977 when Charles Hapgood replied to an article we wrote outlining
our belief that Antarctica was once the site of Atlantis. We’d concluded that Hapgood’s theory of earth crust displacement was the missing link that could unravel the mystery of the lost island continent. Hapgood sent the following letter.

CHARLES H. HAPGOOD

R.F.D. 3

WINCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE 03470

August 3rd, 1977

Dear Rose and Rand,

I am astonished and delighted by your article, which arrived here today. Believe it or not, it is the
first
truly scientific exploration of my work that has ever been done. You have found evidence for crust displacement that I did not find.

However, it would seem that you are not aware of a book I published in 1966 entitled
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.
Since you are considering presenting your article to the Royal Geographical Society (of which I was a member until I stopped paying my dues), you should examine this book, and I am mailing a copy of it to you.

What I found, after long research, was that many maps considered of medieval or Renaissance origin are in fact copies of copies of maps drawn in very remote antiquity, and among them is one showing a deglacial Antarctica. I was able to solve the projections of these maps with the help of a mathematician, and have them confirmed by the Cartographic staff of the Strategic Air Command at Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts. . . . It may be that after examining this book you may decide to reduce somewhat your emphasis on Atlantis, that is on the myths, for the book contains enough hard evidence to stand by itself.