Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City Read online

  In 2009, the team conducted an ERT test of what Freund describes in Digging Through History as “a distinctive marking in the ground in the places where the concentric circles of the inner city of Atlantis would have been located.” Such gaps often indicate a chemical “shadow” of old building materials that have since disintegrated. The ERT results showed that the rings seen on the satellite photos were real. “It took us all by surprise,” Freund recounts in his book. “The intermittent breaks in the ERT layer were the remnants of the ancient walls of a Bronze Age city that had been there thousands of years before.”

  “We got very excited,” Villarias told me as we sat down again. He didn’t sound especially excited. “The trouble is, when we finally obtained all the carbon 14 dates, from even deeper samples, the age of those anomalies cannot be more than two thousand years old.” In other words, at least four hundred years younger than Plato himself. Villarias’s best guess was that the shapes were caused by animal enclosures made of degradable materials like wood or mud brick, that had held horses or cattle belonging to the caliph of Córdoba. “When the Christian reconquest took place in the thirteenth century, we know there was a very dramatic depopulation of the area,” he said.

  “But what about the ancient figurines?” I asked of the Astarte statues whose discovery might rewrite ancient history.

  “That’s a funny story,” Villarias said. The corners of his mouth turned slightly upward beneath his mustache. The figurines were found while the documentary was filming, one by historian Ángel León and one by Sebastián Celestino, one of Spain’s leading archaeologists and an authority on Tartessian culture. “Richard Freund and the camera people got very excited. Freund came up with this interpretation that these figurines were representations of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who is the Roman goddess Venus more or less. Astarte was probably very important in the time of Tartessos. So while you saw Freund making the point that these were representations of Astarte, Sebastián, who is an expert and knows much more than Freund, was touching the figurines and telling me in Spanish, ‘I don’t think so. These figures are too round.’ Whereas Phoenician statuettes have more straight lines. The figures are broken, so we don’t have the complete features, but similar statuettes have been found in Andalusia. These could be late Roman or even later, from the baroque.” That would mean they had been created about two thousand years after Plato died.

  “Did you mention this to Freund?”

  “We couldn’t reach the producers before the documentary was released to warn them. And he didn’t bother to check with us.”

  “Let me guess—the Cancho Roano stuff doesn’t hold up, either,” I said. This was Freund’s “most compelling evidence” that Tartessos had been Atlantis.

  “Cancho Roano is a Tartessian site—no question about it. Sebastián has been working there for like twenty years. It was begun in about 600 BC, which is late in the history of Tartessos. We know from Avienus and from Greek sources that Tartessos was on an island, and so of course surrounded by water. Freund came up with the idea—which I think is bright—that Cancho Roano is a replica or a microcosmic representation of a city surrounded by water. But it’s very, very, very far-fetched to bring Atlantis there.” The three concentric rings bisected by a line weren’t a symbol for Plato’s lost city but for a warrior’s shield. Similar symbols had been found throughout Europe.

  One thing that the Hinojos Project had been able to confirm is that some sort of cataclysm struck the southwest coast of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 BC and repeatedly over the years. The model is the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755: earthquakes followed by floods. “Our geologist doesn’t like to call it a tsunami because he might be labeled a sensationalist, but to me it’s a tsunami,” Villarias said.

  “We checked the records and it so happens that a big disaster like the Lisbon one took place exactly 400 years earlier in 1356. The previous one was in 881. And before that in the fourth century. So every 350 to 450 years there is a big one. People forget until it happens to them. If that rule is accurate, and I think it is, the next one will be around the year 2150.”

  As for Freund’s hiring divers to search for stones in the Bay of Cádiz outside the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, Villarias agreed that it was a great idea. But the CSIC team had determined that after a series of seismic events, the loose, wet ground in the Hinojos Marsh had subsided, dropping like a failed soufflé. Water, as well as any debris such as stones and dead bodies, would have been trapped in the estuary rather than being flushed into the ocean. This entombment of organic material might have caused the methane they found, but they couldn’t be certain. Each year during the rainy season, the Guadalquivir floods the plain and leaves behind a layer of sediment. Any traces of Tartessos—or, why not? Atlantis—were likely buried under many meters of silt and clay, probably forever. Schulten and Bonsor had given up when they hit the water table in the 1920s. Nowadays, no sane bureaucrat was going to authorize massive excavations in the middle of a nature sanctuary.

  • • •

  After crushing my hopes of having found Atlantis, Villarias suggested we grab a bite to eat. We walked over to Madrid’s busy Calle de Alcalá and sat down in the empty dining room of the sort of classic Castilian restaurant that hasn’t changed its menu since the Spanish Civil War. (It was two fifteen, extremely early to be lunching in Madrid.) We each had a glass of wine and ordered paella. I asked Villarias why he thought it was that only amateurs seemed to be interested in searching for Atlantis.

  “That wasn’t always the case. Going backward from the ’60s you have a long line of serious scholars going back to the Renaissance, people like Schulten.” He cracked a piece of bread in two. “I’m curious. I may do it on my own.”

  “Really?” I hadn’t gotten the impression that he took Atlantis seriously.

  “Plato deserves an anthropological analysis. Is it a myth? It’s intriguing that he names his sources. Why mention Solon? Stuff like the nine thousand years, you can’t take that literally.” He dismissed the notion with a wave of his butter knife. “Anthropologists have a long history of being able to pull out the contaminants like that. They have used the same approach with some of the Genesis Bible stories, with Sodom and Gomorrah, with the Great Flood.”

  A recent interpretation of an ancient cuneiform tablet posits that the fire and brimstone that an angry god hurled down on the Sodomites was actually deadly debris from a comet that hit the earth in 3123 BC. The hunt for Noah’s ark has almost certainly consumed more money and hours than the search for Atlantis, with one team after another picking the faint clues out of Genesis and ascending the slopes of Mount Ararat in hopes of finding proof that the biblical deluge was real. The astronaut James Irwin, whose Christian faith was bolstered by his walk on the moon, led two well-publicized but unsuccessful expeditions in the 1980s. Certainly, there was no shortage of ancient flood myths.

  Villarias explained how an anthropological approach would work: “Analyze Plato’s narrative in order to see if that narrative actually has a nucleus, an original core of historical information.”

  To search for that nucleus, Villarias said, you’d first look for the elements in the Atlantis tale that are consistent with Plato’s other writings, and those of his predecessors, such as Herodotus. If anything remained that couldn’t be explained by either of those sources, “one could safely assume that the story echoes, or encodes, some historical truth.” That core remnant would then be compared to the other literatures and philosophies of the ancient world, starting with Egypt. “Supposing a consistency is then found, the results of the quest would be that at least the information in the narrative regarding Egypt is true.” Assuming that Plato was telling the truth and that Solon didn’t mistake Egyptian mythology for history, we’d be a long way toward “supposing that the land of Atlantis really existed after all.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Washed Away

/>   Doñana National Park, Andalusia, Spain

  Eighteen hours later, having caught the high-speed train to Seville; having driven my rented Fiat Panda nose-first against a wall before realizing that I did not know how to shift its manual transmission into reverse; having found a kind stranger to show me how to back up my car and locate the highway; having driven through the departures area of the Seville airport three times while trying to find my hotel; and having slept fitfully for a few hours before rising in the dark to drive seventy miles southwest, I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of a Toyota Land Cruiser and plowing through the Atlantic surf as if I were headed to a clambake in a light beer commercial. At the wheel was naturalist José María Galán. His short-sleeve PARQUE NACIONAL DE DOÑANA shirt was nattily accessorized with a scarf and a Yellowstone baseball cap. He was comparing the regularity of the Old Faithful geyser (or high-zer, as he pronounced it), which he had recently visited, to the predictability of earthquakes and tsunamis on the Spanish coast. “Look at those waves coming in,” he said, pointing at the incoming whitecaps. “Now imagine one of them sixty meters tall.”

  Though it’s not usually associated with seismic activity today, the Iberian Peninsula has a history of geological instability of the sort that might destroy an island empire in a matter of hours. At 9:40 A.M. on November 1, 1755, two tectonic plates 120 miles west of Doñana Park faulted, resulting in an earthquake whose magnitude has been estimated at between 8.5 and 9.0 on the Richter scale. (The 2010 Haiti earthquake, which leveled Port-au-Prince and left more than two hundred thousand dead, registered a 7.0. A 9.0 quake would be a hundred times as powerful.) In Portugal, much of Lisbon, including thirty churches celebrating All Saints’ Day, collapsed from the shock. Fire swept through the city. Two-yard-wide cracks split the ground. Thousands of terrified citizens flocked to the port city’s newly built marble quay to escape the inferno; some boarded ships in hope of escaping. Thirty minutes after the first shock, the mob that had swarmed the harbor witnessed an amazing sight: The sea withdrew, leaving the bed of the Tejo River exposed, strewn with lopsided boats and flopping fish stuck in the muck.

  The Reverend Charles Davy recorded what happened next: “In an instant there appeared, at some small distance, a large body of water, rising as it were like a mountain. It came on foaming and roaring, and rushed towards the shore with such impetuosity, that we all immediately ran for our lives as fast as possible.” Thousands were dragged into the sea, and boats loaded with refugees “were all swallowed up, as in a whirlpool, and nevermore appeared.” Candles lighted for All Saints’ Day celebrations started fires that burned through most of Lisbon’s remaining structures. As has so often happened with floods throughout history, the catastrophe was explained as the vengeful act of a god angered by the impiety of mortals.

  Doñana today is a peaceful oasis on Spain’s heavily developed coast. For nature lovers, there’s a lot to see. Galán pointed out deer and foxes (Doñana had once been a royal hunting ground) and the subtle switchbacking sand trail of a viper. For seekers of lost cities, a little more imagination is necessary. A lot of trade had obviously come through here long ago. “The only rocks we have here are small piles that ships dumped after using them for ballast,” Galán told me. Pieces of broken pottery in all shapes and sizes were visible everywhere. Avienus’s description of “tiny, deserted heaps of ruined mounds” was still accurate. Small, identical hills of sand turned out to be the remains of ovens used to make ceramics. Buried in each mound was a cornucopia of pottery shards: Phoenician, Roman, Muslim, all mixed together. Only when we were driving away did I notice that the mounds were evenly spaced apart. “Archaeology is very subtle,” Galán said. “You have to be very close to something or very far away.”

  We drove a few miles inland to the Cerro del Trigo, the spot where Adolf Schulten had hoped to find Atlantis. A few ancient Roman walls remained exposed in half-filled trenches. “It looks like you should be able to excavate here easily, but there’s water half a meter down,” Galán said, anticipating my next question. There’s also the aboveground water problem. We got back in the Land Cruiser and drove through a bone-dry stretch of sand and scrub. When the autumn rains arrive in October, the Guadalquivir River floods the lowest areas of the park, bringing the tons of sediment that Juan Villarias-Robles described and creating a massive bog that lasts until May. This desertlike area would be transformed in a few weeks by rains into an inland sea. I asked Galán how deep the water would get here once the rains began. “By February, up to here,” he said, holding his hand out the window. Almost five feet high.

  We stopped at the Marisma de Hinojos, where Wickboldt and Kühne’s circles and rectangles had appeared on satellite photos. It looked like nothing more than a dry floodplain. I felt an odd sensation, knowing that Atlantis might be a hundred feet below me, packed under layers of sand and clay. My doubts that this habitat would ever be disturbed in the name of Atlantology were confirmed when we met two of Galán’s colleagues crawling up dunes on their hands and knees picking century-old shotgun pellets out of the sand so that endangered birds wouldn’t eat them.

  On the way back to the park’s headquarters, Galán stopped to examine some tiny scorpion tracks in the sand. A gust blew up, and the trail vanished in the cloud. “See, in the end nature erases everything,” Galán said, holding his scarf over his mouth. “I think that’s the real story of Atlantis. No matter how big and powerful you get, you can disappear like that.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Truth Is out There

  All over the Map

  At this point in the story I should confess something. Atlantis has already been found. Right off the coast of Cadíz, in fact, almost exactly where I’d been driving with José María Galán. I know this because I read a brief 1973 news item about it in The Boston Globe. An instructor at Pepperdine University, Maxine Asher, had used her psychic powers to zero in on signals that told her where the island empire had sunk. Incredibly, divers from her expedition (which also included students who’d paid their own way, expecting to earn college credit) were able to locate compelling evidence of the lost city on the very first day out—roads and columns decorated with concentric-circle designs. Asher was careful not to overstate the importance of her findings. “This is probably the greatest discovery in world history,” she told a reporter, “and will begin a new era of research in anthropology, archaeology, and underwater sciences.”

  Asher was chased out of the country by Spanish officials shortly thereafter—one of her students, Tony O’Connell informed me, claimed to have seen a draft of her triumphant press release two days prior to the actual discovery, and the alleged roads and columns were never seen again. But she was by no means the first person—or the last—to put forth an Atlantis discovery divined solely by extrasensory means. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Kentucky-born psychic Edgar Cayce, known as “the sleeping prophet.” Cayce believed that he could lie down and enter a “superconscious” meditative state. Once plugged into the collective wisdom of the universe, he could answer questions both personal and profound. From 1901 to 1945 Cayce gave more than fourteen thousand of these readings, as he called them. Though he considered himself to be primarily an alternative healer, about seven hundred of his psychic bulletins dealt with Atlantis in some way. According to his supporters, Cayce never read Plato or Ignatius Donnelly, so any similarities on the subject must be either coincidental or evidence of great minds thinking alike.

  Today the impressive headquarters for Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), located in Virginia Beach, houses a sort of extrasensory institute, complete with museum, day spa, and holistic healing school. Yoga classes and tai chi are offered. There is also a library that holds typescripts of Cayce’s original readings and a separate room for Atlantis-related materials, including maps.

  “A lot of people had readings done, and they had past lives in Atlantis,” a helpful research libraria
n named Laura explained cheerily when I called to ask about Cayce’s insights on Atlantis. “There were three destructions. The Atlanteans had the Tuaoi Stone”—a massive crystal that Cayce said provided them with healing powers as well as energy to operate sophisticated aircraft and submarines—“but they powered the stone too high.” This act of arrogance set off geological turbulence worldwide. Prior to the final destruction of Atlantis, which Cayce dated to 10,500 BC, important artifacts and stone tablets containing the recorded history of humanity were secreted away to three Halls of Record located in the Yucatán, Egypt (“under the Sphinx’s paw,” Laura the librarian specified), and, per a 1933 Cayce reading, “under the slime of ages of sea water—near what is known as Bimini, off the coast of Florida.”

  Cayce claimed to be able to see the future as well as the past. “Poseidia will be among the first portions of Atlantis to rise again,” he exclaimed during one reading. “Expect it in ’68 and ’69; not so far away!”

  A large binder of psychic readings given while diagnosing cases of asthma and kidney stones might not be enough evidence for conventional archaeologists to start writing grant proposals, but Cayce’s predictions about Bimini—an island chain that’s part of the Bahamas—have resulted in what is probably the most concentrated effort to find Atlantis. Starting in the late 1960s, several large-scale underwater explorations have been undertaken in the area of the islands, many of them sponsored by the ARE. The most famous discovery was the so-called Bimini Road, located in 1968, conveniently confirming the prophet’s predicted date. Initially believed to be a J-shaped, man-made limestone path about a third of a mile long, it turned out to be a natural formation. This evidence has not diminished the zeal of ARE-supported projects, and searches for Cayce’s three Halls of Record are ongoing. In 2011, the group announced that it had carbon-dated a rock from an underwater foundation wall near Bimini to 20,000 BC. Cayce’s channeling also provided information regarding Atlantis’s fellow mythical sunken continent of Mu, a name that he used interchangeably with Lemuria.7 The ARE website posits that recent gene research may prove a mass diaspora from Mu between 50,000 BC and 28,000 BC. This opinion is not widely shared.