Cuba's Gateway
To Atlantis P.1
The search for
Atlantis will never end. And not all its searchers will wind up in outer space.
The attempt will always be made, again and again, to find Atlantis on earth. A
book called Atlantis in America revived in 1998 the sixteenth-century
speculations of men like Fracastoro and Dee, with our
old friend the comet as the agent of destruction in 10, 513 BC: wonderful the
precision these Atlantologists go in for.
Another book
published in 2000 illustrates what a weight of erudition can still be brought
to bear in an effort to find some clue to the terrestrial whereabouts of the
lost civilization.
Andrew Collins
(who recently co-wrote: "The Exodus Conspiracy") starts his story in
"Gateway to Atlantis" in a cave, on some as yet unnamed tropical
island, where he "almost" feels he is being called to delve into its
deposits by "some unseen gemus loci."
He soon spots
some concentric markings on the rocks which he says resemble lines to be seen
in certain megalithic constructions of western Europe. In that characteristic
way in which these researchers struggle to retain their objectivity. Plato, Theopompus, Pseudo-Aristotle and Strabo are cited by Andrew
Collins in "Gateway To Atlantis" to indicate that the ancient world
had knowledge of another continent beyond the ocean; their work can, of course,
with at least as much plausibility, be seen simply as evidence that they
speculated about other lands overseas very much as we speculate about other
worlds in space.
For Collins
"it seems certain" that Plato was somehow aware of America and the
West Indies: the general lack of references to these lands (and complete lack
of details) in classical literature he is inclined to attribute to a situation
in which only "a select few" knew about these things. So the secrecy
theme makes an early appearance in Collins: "Information . . .
deliberately withheld from the outside world." Collins thinks Plato might
have got knowledge of the transatlantic world through Solon from those priests
of Saite Egypt. No sooner is this possibility
articulated than it is thereafter taken for granted that he did. But Collins
himself is rather stumped by Plato's assertion that the kings of Atlantis (over
in the Americas) controlled areas within the Mediterranean, so he does at least
entertain the thought that Plato might have made it all up out of family
stories of Solon's sojourn in Egypt and various remarks of Herodotus, as
we noted earlier on. Collins clings to the possibility that Plato himself may
have visited Egypt (though we recall that Plato never says so - only much later
anecdotes suggest it): "It is conceivable that Plato learned of the
Atlantis story - or at least found confirmation of it - during his own stay in
Egypt." Many things are conceivable without being demonstrable.
Collins works
hard to substantiate the conceivability of Atlantis beyond the Sargasso Sea,
despite Plato's claim that its easterly part was next door to Gibraltar. He
makes much of Plato's mud shoal in the aftermath of Atlantis, Aristotle's
shallows beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the shoals and seaweed mentioned by
Pseudo-Scylax (at about the same time as Plato and
Aristotle) as blocking navigation beyond a certain Phoenician-occupied island
off the African coast. Only in the compilation called Pseudo-Scylax (posing as the work of a much earlier navigator)
does seaweed appear in addition to the mud shallows, but it is enough to remind
Collins of the floating weeds (actually quite without mud and shallows) of the
Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso is, of course, much further to the west than
Gibraltar or the coast of Africa, beyond the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Only by
putting together Plato and Aristotle (who was Just following his teacher in the
matter of mud) with Pseudo-Scylax can Collins come up
with what we might call his Pseudo-Sargasso of shallow mud and weeds. (The real
Sargasso is between 1,500 and 7,000 metres
deep.)
Collins would
like to think the Carthaginians had already seen the Sargasso before Plato's
time, and it is just possible that they had, though quoting the remarks of a
writer of the fourth century AD about a Carthaginian voyage of the fifth century
BC is hardly very persuasive. It seems unlikely, moreover, that the
square-rigged ships of the Phoenicians and Greeks, with one or two sails and no
central rudder, unable to tack against the wind, could ever have reached the
Sargasso Sea "in the teeth of the prevailing westerlies," as L.
Sprague de Camp points out. Collins further speculates that the shoals might be
a reference to the shallow waters off the Bahamas - Bimini country, in fact.
And, "in accepting the supposition that Plato was alluding ... to the
Sargasso Sea, and perhaps even the Bahamas, we are left with one inescapable
conclusion," he says. It is difficult to see how an inescapable conclusion
follows from a supposition about one thing and perhaps another, The conclusion
is that "whether by accident or design, Plato located his sunken island
somewhere on the western Atlantic seaboard." Which plainly, he did not,
since it came up practically to Gibraltar in the east.
For Collins
the considerable distance between the Sargasso and the Bahamas is accommodated
by the suggestion that "in singling out the Sargasso Sea" (which is a
huge assumption on Collins' part since there is nothing at all to suggest Plato
was talking about the Sargasso) Plato was just trying to indicate the general
location of his sunken island. This cannot be said to be a very rigorous way of
arguing. The attempt to add some associating Atlantis with the Bahamas by means
of the coconut is just as weak. A passage in Plato's account of the wonderful
fruits of Atlantis, which Collins takes to refer to coconuts, has been
interpreted by other translators as a poetic reference to olive trees. Collins
is aware that coconuts were not introduced to the West Indies till colonial
times - he adopts an unorthodox view of the diffusion of coconut cropping and
invokes a Haitian folk-tale about coconuts thrown down to become men and women
after a flood to suggest a further antique, Atlantean connection. Ah, there are
always the folk-tales! (Collins makes nothing much either way of Plato's assertion
of elephants on Atlantis.)
Collins can
see as well as most of us that Plato drew on Athens, on Syracuse, on Babylon
and Ecbatana and the rest to supply details for his city of Atlantis, but he is
determined to believe that none the less some real knowledge of old Atlantis
and its topography came through to Plato from maritime sources available at the
time merchants' maps, in fact. Collins wants to strip Plato's Atlantis material
of "its political and fantastic overtones" to show how the story
"preserves knowledge of an island kingdom or empire that thrived in the
Atlantic thousands of years before recorded history." But Plato's
political and moral purposes are not overtones, they are his central theme, and
the colourful details of his story are the disposable
bits, not gems of accurate information brought back across the Atlantic to the
ancient world of the Mediterranean by seafarers to the Americas. In the matter
of the contentious dimensions of Plato's Atlantis, Collins is content to arrive
at a much smaller island than something "bigger than Libya and Asia
together," as Plato puts it. If Plato is not to be taken literally about
his lost island's size, why take any of the rest of his details seriously? The
attempt to reinterpret Plato as meaning that the sphere of maritime influence
of Atlantis was equal in size to that of Libya and Asia is doomed by the simple
fact that that is not what Plato says. He says in plain Greek, as we have had
occasion to note before, that Atlantis was bigger than Libya and Asia.
See also:
Cuba's Gateway
To Atlantis P. 2: Cocaine
Gateway to
Atlantis P.3: Seven Cities, El Dorado
Gateway to
Atlantis P.4: Urheimat der Arier
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