CARTE CONJECTURALE DE L’ATLANTIDE.
From a map in Bory de St. Vincent’s Essais sur les isles Fortunées, Paris [1803]. A map in Anastasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam, 1678), i. 82, shows Atlantis as a large island midway between the pillars of Hercules and America.
CONTOUR CHART OF THE BOTTOM OF THE ATLANTIC.
Sketched from the colored map of the United States Hydrographic office, as given in Alexander Agassiz’s Three Cruises of the Blake (Cambridge, 1888), vol. i. The outline of the continents is shown by an unbroken line. The 500 fathom shore line is a broken one (—— —— —— ——). The 2,000 fathom shore line is made by a dash and dot (——.——.——.——). The large areas in mid-ocean enclosed by this line, have this or lesser depths. Of the small areas marked by this line, the depth of 2,000 fathoms or less is within these areas in all cases except as respects the small areas on the latitude of Newfoundland, where the larger areas of 2,000 fathoms’ depth border on the small areas of greater depth. Depths varying from 1,500 to 1,000 fathoms are shown by horizontal lines; from 1,000 to 500 by perpendicular lines; and the crossed lines show the shallowest spots in mid-ocean of 500 fathoms or less. The areas of greatest depth (over 3,500 fathoms) are marked with crosses.
Such is the tale of Atlantis. Read in Plato, the nature and meaning of the narrative seem clear, but the commentators, ancient and modern, have made wild work. The voyage of Odysseus has grown marvellously in extent since he abandoned the sea; Io has found the pens of the learned more potent goads than Hera’s gadfly; but the travels of Atlantis have been even more extraordinary. No region has been so remote, no land so opposed by location, extent, or history to the words of Plato, but that some acute investigator has found in it the origin of the lost island. It has been identified with Africa, with Spitzbergen, with Palestine. The learned Latreille convinced himself that Persia best fulfilled the conditions of the problem; the more than learned Rudbeck ardently supported the claims of Sweden through three folios. In such a search America could not be overlooked. Gomara, Guillaume de Postel, Wytfliet, are among those who have believed that this continent was Atlantis; Sanson in 1669, and Vaugondy in 1762, ventured to issue a map, upon which the division of that island among the sons of Neptune was applied to America, and the outskirts of the lost continent were extended even to New Zealand. Such work, of course, needs no serious consideration. Plato is our authority, and Plato declares that Atlantis lay not far west from Spain, and that it disappeared some 8,000 years before his day. An inquiry into the truth or meaning of the record as it stands is quite justifiable, and has been several times undertaken, with divergent results. Some, notably Paul Gaffarel[299] and Ignatius Donnelly,[300] are convinced that Plato merely adapted to his purposes a story which Solon had actually brought from Egypt, and which was in all essentials true. Corroboration of the existence of such an island in the Atlantic is found, according to these writers, in the physical conformation of the Atlantic basin, and in marked resemblances between the flora, fauna, civilization, and language of the old and new worlds, which demand for their explanation the prehistoric existence of just such a bridge as Atlantis would have supplied. The Atlantic islands are the loftiest peaks and plateaus of the submerged island. In the widely spread deluge myths Mr. Donnelly finds strong confirmation of the final cataclysm; he places in Atlantis that primitive culture which M. Bailly sought in the highlands of Asia, and President Warren refers to the north pole. Space fails for a proper examination of the matter, but these ingenious arguments remain somewhat top-heavy when all is said. The argument from ethnological resemblances is of all arguments the weakest in the hands of advocates. It is of value only when wielded by men of judicial temperament, who can weigh difference against likeness, and allow for the narrow range of nature’s moulds. The existence of the ocean plateaus revealed by the soundings of the “Dolphin” and the “Challenger” proves nothing as to their having been once raised above the waves; the most of the Atlantic islands are sharply cut off from them. Even granting the prehistoric migration of plants and animals between America and Europe, as we grant it between America and Asia, it does not follow that it took place across the mid-ocean, and it would still be a long step from the botanic “bridge” and elevated “ridge” to the island empire of Plato. In short, the conservative view advocated by Longinus, that the story was designed by Plato as a literary ornament and a philosophic illustration, is no less probable to-day than when it was suggested in the schools of Alexandria. Atlantis is a literary myth, belonging with Utopia, the New Atlantis, and the Orbis alter et idem of Bishop Hall.
Of the same type is a narrative which has come down indirectly, among the flotsam and jetsam of classic literature: it is a fragment from a lost work by Theopompus of Chios, a historian of the fourth century b.c., found in the Varia Historia of Aelian, a compiler of the third century a.d.[301] The story is told by the satyr Silenus to Midas, king of Phrygia, and is, as few commentators have refrained from remarking, worthy the ears of its auditor.[302] “Selenus tolde Midas of certaine Islands, named Europa, Asia, and Libia, which the Ocean Sea circumscribeth and compasseth round about. And that without this worlde there is a continent or percell of dry lande, which in greatnesse (as hee reported) was infinite and unmeasurable, that it nourished and maintained, by the benifite of the greene medowes and pasture plots, sundrye bigge and mighty beastes; that the men which inhabite the same climats, exceede the stature of us twise, and yet the length of there life is not equale to ours.” Many other wonders he related of the two cities, Machimus, the warlike, and Euseues, the city of peace, and how the inhabitants of the former once made an attack upon Europe, and came first upon the Hyperboreans; but learning that they were esteemed the most holy of the dwellers in that island, they “had them in contempte, detesting and abhorring them as naughty people, of preposterous properties, and damnable behauiour, and for that cause interrupted their progresse, supposing it an enterprise of little worthinesse or rather none at al, to trauaile into such a countrey.” The concluding passage relating to the strange country inhabited by the Meropes, from whose name later writers have called the continent Meropian, bears only indirectly upon the subject, as characterizing the whole narrative.[303]