Atlantis Beneath the Ice (5 page)

The mention of the chart being “four feet square” intrigued Hapgood since the Piri Reis map was about two by three feet. Might the map that Campbell saw actually depict the entire world and not just the Piri Reis fragment?

Hapgood was also curious about the senior Campbell’s reaction to the map. Campbell’s father had written geography texts, and the fact that he “pored over the chart with his nose almost touching the paper” was suggestive. We know that the senior Campbell was not puzzled by the inscriptions since he was a “‘Spanish scholar.’” So what was it that fascinated him? We suggest it was the unusual equidistant projection—uncommon in 1893.

THE WHITE HOUSE ACTS

When we reviewed Hapgood’s correspondence contained in President Eisenhower’s archives, we discovered that the White House did in fact follow through on the memorandum. The U.S. State Department, on orders from Eisenhower, directed the American ambassador in Spain, John David Lodge, to pursue the matter.

Ambassador Lodge’s younger brother, Henry Cabot Lodge (1902– 1985), was Richard Nixon’s vice presidential running mate during the 1960 campaign. Despite the obvious distractions, Lodge followed through on the presidential order. Unfortunately, the Spanish authorities came up empty-handed.

With the election of President John Kennedy in 1960, the dynamics in Washington changed. The new administration never found time to pursue Hapgood’s quest. Hapgood never knew what happened. Instead he devoted a decade to writing
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age.
The preface begins:

This book contains the story of the discovery of the first hard evidence that advanced peoples preceded all the peoples now known to history. In one field, ancient sea charts, it appears that accurate information has been passed down from people to people. . . . It becomes clear that the ancient voyagers traveled from pole to pole. Unbelievable as it may appear, the evidence nevertheless indicates
that some ancient people explored the coasts of Antarctica when its coasts were free of ice.
¹⁵

WE TAKE UP THE HUNT

As librarians, we were challenged by the problem of finding this most important of documents. We began by contacting a friend in Toronto, Shawn Montgomery, to see if he could follow up on Campbell’s suggestion that the Royal Canadian Yacht Club might have log entries concerning the visit of the
Santa Maria
replica. Unfortunately the logs from 1893 no longer existed.

We then turned to the Chicago side of the mystery and contacted Ray Grasse, an author and friend living in Chicago. He suggested that we contact the Chicago Historical Society. The librarian at the society, Emily Clark, told us that the captain who sailed the replica of the
Santa Maria
in 1893 was named V. M. Concas. Clark turned our request over to an assistant working in the archives department named Cynthia Mathews. She hit on the mother lode and sent us an account of the trip written by the captain himself.

From this account we discovered that Hapgood’s logical assumption that the “lost map of Columbus” was housed in the Spanish archives was incorrect. In fact, according to Captain Concas, the Columbus maps were kept in an entirely different location. He wrote, “She (Spain) has sent also the original charts of America, but the difficulties attending the proper custody in the Convent of Rabida of this valuable collection of charts, where are also the original documents connected with the discovery of America (also belonging to Spain), has resulted in their being examined by a very limited number of persons.”
¹⁶

It was within the sand-colored walls of the modest La Rábida Monastery that the “lost map of Columbus” could be found. The monastery was originally built by the Knights Templar in 1261. After they fell from power in 1307, the Franciscans chose the monastery as one of their Spanish bases.

In 1485, Christopher Columbus began lobbying European royalty to finance an unprecedented voyage to India and China. He would sail west across the Atlantic, something that had never been done before. Until then all voyages to India and China had sailed south, hugged the coast of Africa, and then traveled east.

Frustrated in his attempts to enlist a patron to support his “westward” route to Asia, Columbus decided to join the rich pilgrims who regularly journeyed across Europe. His hope was that one of them would finance his venture or use his or her influence to obtain an audience for Columbus with one of the royal families.

In 1490, he arrived at La Rábida. Fortunately for Columbus, the prior of La Rábida took a liking to him and intervened on Columbus’s behalf with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The great explorer was at the monastery when he received the exciting news that his ambitious voyage had been approved. It is not surprising that he left his most valuable maps to the prior who made his dream possible.

Is the lost map still lying in the shadows on some dusty shelf in a quiet Spanish monastery? What could we discover from it if we could see its ancient face? How would our concept of history be changed if Hapgood and Campbell were right about the mappa mundus?

The path that the two men took together in their quest for the source map of the 1513 Piri Reis map was not the first adventure they had shared. Starting in the late 1940s, the Hapgood/Campbell team had explored an idea central to
Atlantis beneath the Ice
—the theory of earth crust displacement.

Like their quest for ancient maps, the exploration of this idea would involve many others, most notably, Albert Einstein.

TWO

ADAPT, MIGRATE,
OR DIE

On May 8, 1953, an elderly professor with a fondness for the violin sat down at his desk in Princeton, New Jersey, and wrote a letter to Charles Hapgood, an obscure instructor at a small New England college. The professor was Albert Einstein, and the topic of the letter was a theory of Hapgood’s that had “electrified” the great physicist. Einstein wrote, “I find your arguments very impressive and have the impression that your hypothesis is correct. One can hardly doubt that significant shifts of the crust of the earth have taken place repeatedly and within a short time.”
¹

Charles Hutchins Hapgood (1904–1982), a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was born in New York City. After graduating, Hapgood traveled to Germany, where his studies at the University of Freiburg coincided with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. When World War II erupted, he returned to the United States and joined the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA) as a civilian with inside knowledge of Nazi Germany. After the war, Hapgood became a professor of anthropology and the history of science at Keene State College in New Hampshire. In the early 1950s, he began formulating his theory of earth crust displacement, a project that would occupy him for nearly twenty years.

Einstein’s correspondence with Hapgood began in November 1952 and lasted until Einstein’s death in April 1955.
²
Einstein wrote at least ten
letters to Hapgood and conducted scientific correspondence with other interested parties about Hapgood’s theory. In 1954, Einstein approached the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in support of Hapgood’s application. Einstein wrote that Hapgood’s idea of earth crust displacement was: “fascinating, justified, promising, and important.”
³

Einstein recommended Hapgood as one who had the “energy and patience” to pursue the theory. However, despite the support of one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, Hapgood did not receive a fellowship.

One of Hapgood’s most rewarding experiences came in January 1955 when he and his friend and co-theorist James Hunter Campbell met with Einstein. Hapgood explained that his own contribution lay mainly in the fields of geology and paleontology. He left to Campbell the issues of mechanics and geophysics. The conversation ranged over a number of topics, from the “elastic limit of the crustal rocks” to the value of the new tool of radiocarbon dating. As the men were about to leave, Einstein offered two pieces of advice.

1. He said that it was not “necessary to take the present state of knowledge very seriously,” adding that “what we regard as knowledge today may someday be regarded as error.”
   
2. He added that the “gradualist notions common in geology were . . . merely a habit of mind, and were not necessarily justified by the empirical data.”
   ⁴
   

Earlier, in May 1954, Einstein had written a foreword to Hapgood’s book,
The Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science.
⁵
Part of that foreword reads, “A great many empirical data indicates that at each point of the earth’s surface that has been carefully studied, many climatic changes have taken place, apparently quite suddenly. This, according to Mr. Hapgood, is explicable if the virtually rigid outer crust of the earth undergoes, from time to time, extensive displacement.”
⁶

Einstein’s enthusiasm was tempered by one concern: “The only doubtful assumption is that the earth’s crust can be moved easily enough over the inner layers.”
⁷

The bulk of the earth’s mass lies at its center and is believed to consist of an iron-nickel alloy core surrounded by an outer liquid core. The outer core is encircled by the thickest part of the earth, a lower and upper mantle of solid rock. Above the upper mantle lies the asthenosphere, or “weak zone” (see
figure 2.1
). It is the mobility of the asthenosphere
that makes it possible for the earth’s lithosphere (crust) to shift.

This crust of lithosphere, which cradles the continents and ocean basins, is the thinnest layer and is the one upon which all life depends. It is divided into a series of plates that shift periodically, provoking earthquakes and volcanoes. Over millions of years, the inch-by-inch movement of these plates, explained by a theory known as “plate tectonics,” can separate continents and create mountain ranges.

Plate tectonics and earth crust displacement both share the assumption of a mobile crust. The ideas are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. Plate tectonics explains long-term, slow changes like mountain building, volcanic activity, and local earthquakes. Earth crust displacement accepts that these processes are gradual but posits a much more dramatic and abrupt movement of the crust that can explain different problems such as mass extinctions, glaciation patterns, and the sudden rise of agriculture. In stark contrast to plate tectonics’ slow motion of individual plates, an “earth crust displacement,” as postulated by Hapgood, abruptly shifts all the plates
as a single unit
. During this motion the core (the heavy bull’s eye of the planet) doesn’t change, leaving the earth’s axis unaltered.

The consequences of a crustal displacement are monumental. As the earth’s crust ripples over its interior, the world is shaken by incredible earthquakes and floods. The sky appears to fall. Of course, the sky remains in place. It was the crust that shifted. We still speak of sunrises and sunsets even though it is the earth’s spin that creates the illusion of movement. During a displacement the sun appears to rise and set over an altered horizon until finally the crust grinds to a halt. Beneath the ocean, earthquakes generate massive tidal waves that crash against the coastlines, flooding them. Some lands are shifted to warmer climates. Others, propelled into the polar zones, suffer the direst of winters. Melting ice caps, released from the polar areas, raise the ocean’s level ever higher. All living creatures must adapt, migrate, or die.

Roughly 11,600 years ago (9600 BCE), vast climatic changes are known to have swept over our planet. Massive ice sheets melted, forcing the ocean level to rise. Huge mammals perished in enormous numbers. There was a sudden influx of people to the Americas, and throughout the world men and women began to experiment with agriculture. Each of these critical events has become a subject of intense scientific scrutiny.