The Greek philosopher located it off the shores of North Africa, a little to the southwest of Gibraltar. The Platonian description of the interior of the Atlantis of ancient times is surpassingly beautiful, but not more so than the rare imaginative power with which Plato writes of the country and its people, a most fabulous and engaging history.
All this, of course, is the work of pure fancy, and only important, beyond the fact that it is the work of Plato, as showing how deeply the conviction had taken hold upon the mind of that age that the sea had taken away a land which the ancients knew as the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean, and had left nothing but a boundless waste of waters west of Europe. Speculators have located the lost Atlantis near the Canary Islands, and these islands are, in fact, supposed to be the remnants of the lost continent. There is positively nothing tangible upon which to hang the story of the lost Atlantis.
But, like most traditions which persist in living on after the world has grown too practical to have any more use for them, it has, doubtless, a foundation in some important fact of olden time, the tragedy of which was in that sacrifice of the earth to the waters of the deep, which had become familiar even to the ancients. Byron’s apostrophe to the ocean is so singularly powerful and beautiful because it expresses that awe and fear of man for the sea which is an instinct with us, and which, if it had not been instinct with us at the first, would have become so through the many and heavy afflictions visited upon the race by Neptune, god of the sea.
TIDAL WAVES ON ENGLISH COASTS.
That the coasts of England have been visited by many and disastrous tidal waves there is abundant evidence. In fact, the ocean bar, which surrounds nearly the whole of England and Scotland, is evidence enough that the entire shore line, as it exists to-day, is itself the result of a great submersion, or series of submersions, which ages ago overflowed the old coast, rushed in shore, made new land lines, and, hollowing out between the new line and the old, a new ocean bed, leaving what had been called the coast line to be forever after called the “bar.” The bar is to be found in nearly every port of England, eloquent testimony to the tidal waves of the past. But there is comparatively little of other testimony save such as has been preserved in the records of seaport towns.
One of the greatest cataclysms ever occurring on the British coast was that on the coast of Lincolnshire in 1571. This has been commemorated in verse by Jean Ingelow in the poem entitled “High Tide Off the Coast of Lincolnshire.” The Lincolnshire coast is almost uniformly low and marshy—so low, in fact, at some places that the shore requires the defence of an embankment to save it from the encroachments of the sea.
A sea wall had been built when the great tidal wave of 1571 came, but it appears to have been absolutely useless as a defence of the country and the people of that time.
At the present day the fens of Lincolnshire are defended from the North Sea by some of the finest engineering works in the world, and yet it is much to be doubted whether they would prove effective against such invasions as that which has just overwhelmed Galveston.
GREAT INUNDATION OF 1571.
There are ancient town records in nearly all the seacoast towns of Lincolnshire which tell of the inundation of 1571. There was then as there is now, a chime of bells in the tower of St. Botolph, Boston, and when the tide was seen to be sweeping away the barriers the Mayor of Boston himself mounted the belfry stairs and had played the old love song called “The Brides of Enderby” as an alarm to the country side.