It is claimed that, by this catastrophe, an area larger than France became engulfed, including the Lesser Antilles, the extensive banks at their eastern extremity, the peninsulas of Yucatan, Honduras and Guatemala, and the great estuaries of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. With Yucatan and Guatemala went down the splendid cities of Palenque and Uxmal, and others whose sites and inhabitants are now in the ocean bed.
In verification of these ancient traditions, our modern geographies tell us that Old Guatemala was destroyed by a water volcano in the sixteenth century, and again in the eighteenth by an earthquake. The sea-shells on both sides of the Isthmus of Panama are alike, and according to geographical distribution of animals, this could only come about by the Isthmus having been once submerged, and after remaining so long enough for the intermixture of species, being raised; and the submarine fossils found on the Isthmus prove the hypothesis.
According to Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, the oldest Mexican records date back to nine hundred and twenty-five years before Christ, when a strange people came among them. In opposition to Winchell’s hypothesis of a northwest Mongolian migration to Mexico, I wish to prove that the Mound-builders were the people who came after the cataclysms, and that they came from the continent of Atlantis.
And what hope have I to establish such affinity? “Dans les pays les plus différent,” says Benjamin Constant, “chez les peuples de moeurs les plus opposées, le sacerdoce a dû aû culte dés éléments et des astres, un pouvoir dont audjour d’hui nous concevons à peine l’idée.”
The nearest lands west of Africa, where Plato located the continent of Atlantis, are the Canary Islands, the nearest being about fifty miles from Africa, and the whole group extending about three hundred miles, and separated from the continent by a channel more than five thousand feet deep. Of all oceanic islands (not continental) discovered by Europeans, the Canaries alone were inhabited. Here were found the Guanches, now extinct, who, at the time of their discovery, were not aware that a continent existed in their neighborhood, for, on being asked by the Spanish missionaries how they had come to their archipelago, they answered: “God placed us on these islands, and then forsook and forgot us.” Now who were these Guanches? Their islands have never been connected with Africa, because the channel between them is a mile deep, and Wallace, in his “Island Life,” has proved that any island surrounded by water over five thousand feet deep is of volcanic origin, and that is just the clue we are seeking. If craniometry is a reliable science, the Guanches were not savages, but superior to the Egyptians! According to Prof. Flower’s measurements, the skull of the English of low grade contains 1,542 cubic centimeters, the Guanches 1,498, Japanese 1,486, Chinese 1,424, Italians 1,475, and the Ancient Egyptians 1,464. That a remnant of a race found on an island in mid-ocean should have a better developed brain than many continental nations who have made history, is significant. We should expect such a people to conquer their neighbors, just as is recorded by Plato. And now as to their dispersion. When Columbus set sail from Palos in 1492, he steered directly for the Canary Islands for repairs. When he left the Canaries, without any effort of his own the trade winds carried his vessels straight to the West Indies. These winds blow in this direction all the time. In December, 1731, a ship started from Teneriffe with a cargo of wine for one of the Western Canaries, and, having only six men on board, they were unable to manage the ship, and the trade winds carried them straight to Trinidad, on the Island of Cuba, of course. While Atlantis was sinking, some of the inhabitants escaped on rafts and boats, and, being exactly at the same point at which Columbus and the ship’s crew started in the path of the trade winds, there was nothing to do but wait, and they were carried to the West Indies, through the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, to Yucatan and Mexico. We can easily see now why the oldest civilization of the New World is in Central America. Some of these emigrants stopped in the West Indies, for the aborigines spoke the same language as the Mayas of Yucatan to-day. Some stopped in South America, for Dr. Lund, the eminent Swedish naturalist, in the bone caves of Minas Gerais, Brazil, found human skulls exactly like those of the Mound-builders.
The sudden destruction of these people recalls the beautiful lines from Richardson’s Geology, on “The Nautilus and the Ammorite:”
“They sailed all day, through creek and bay,
And traversed the ocean deep;
And at night they sank on a coral bed,