Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

considerable.

In addition to being one of the leading experts on the study of runes (the symbols carved on stone and wood found across Scandinavia), Hadorph had managed to persuade De la Gardie to push through an unprecedented law that deserves to be better known in the annals of historic preservation. Under his proposal, castles, fortresses, abbeys, manor houses, indeed any significant ruin or relic, including heaps of stone, would be protected against potential looters. Enacted in December 1666, with governors, bishops, and local officers authorized to enforce its stipulations and some two thousand daler silvermynt granted in funding, this was nothing less than Sweden’s first state law passed to care for its monuments—and perhaps the first of its kind in the world.

With his diligence and stamina, not to mention his endless stream of creative ideas, Hadorph was undeniably one of the most valuable members of the College of Antiquities. Yet he had his own ideas about how the fledgling society should develop, and he was not afraid to act on them, even if it meant bypassing the elderly absentee president. By simple force of will and the tacit acceptance of his colleagues, Hadorph had steadily gained in power and influence, until it seemed that he virtually controlled the college.

Helping Hadorph obtain his prominence was a professor of history and one of Rudbeck’s old enemies, Claes Arrhenius. Elected in the second wave of nominations in 1670, Arrhenius had developed a close friendship and collaboration with Hadorph. One thing that bound the two antiquarians together was a vision of the college as the principal and most suitable interpreter of the Swedish past. Another thing they shared was a marked resistance to Olof Rudbeck’s rival antiquarian project. His conclusions were already being dismissed with easy and ruthless skepticism. All of it was pure nonsense, or, as Arrhenius once put it, “a cloud castle of hypotheses.”

Even Magalotti, who knew several members of the College of Antiquities, seemed to share this initial reaction, though tempered with nonchalance and bemusement. The Florentine gave one of our earliest known international verdicts on Rudbeck’s quest, and it is not favorable:

If this book can be a success, then I refer to the blind reverence for such a highly regarded and learned man. But I cannot however avoid making the observation that the Swedes are gullible in the highest degree, perhaps even more than the Germans.

So Rudbeck’s renegade pursuit was already raising eyebrows among expert antiquarians in the college, and rumors of De la Gardie’s enthusiasm were causing concerns. But at the same time there was a strong tendency to underestimate what this passionate physician was capable of accomplishing.

IT WAS BECOMING increasingly clear, at least to Olof Rudbeck, that the Scandinavian past had been known among the ancients. He was working with the “greatest energy” to find surviving memories of this lost world in ancient texts, in peasant villages, and anywhere else they might be found. Soon he came across a story that truly caught his imagination.

This was the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, the skin of a flying ram that had been sacrificed to the gods and was hanging in an oak grove somewhere among the barbarians. Surviving accounts of the journey tell how Jason and his band of heroes, named after their well-crafted ship the Argo, sailed from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. According to Greek tradition, this was nothing less than the oldest sailing venture of all classical mythology. Some even thought that their mighty ship, the fifty-oared Argo, was the first large sailing vessel to ride “the wine-dark sea.”

When Rudbeck read the accounts, however, he became convinced that the Argonauts had, in their quest, sailed to Sweden. And his efforts to learn about this adventure would lead to what one seventeenth-century English gentleman called the “Heroik undertaking of incomparable Rudbeck,” indeed a “second Argonautick Expedition.”

A complex figure of classical mythology, Jason did not always show the proper behavior of a hero, and in some portraits he acted like a heartless scoundrel. His adventurous life had begun in great turmoil. As a newborn baby, son of King Aeson of Iolcus in northern Greece, Jason had been smuggled out of his hometown when his ambitious half-uncle Pelias seized the throne. This usurper imprisoned Jason’s father, the rightful king, and then proceeded to carry out a campaign of slaughter, putting to death any of Aeson’s relatives whom he could capture. Amid this bloodbath, the infant Jason was hurried out to the lonely mountain wilds around Mount Pelion.

There Jason would be raised by the half-man, half-horse centaur Chiron, a wise barbarian who incidentally would teach many future heroes, including the champion Achilles and the Trojan prince Aeneas. After years of training in the arts of life, Jason made his return to the city of Iolcus. With “locks of glorious hair … rippling down in gleaming streams unshorn upon his back,” and sporting a distinctive leopard skin, the young stranger was a sight to behold as he strolled in the town’s marketplace.

But it was not the hair or the leopard skin that caught his uncle’s attention. “Terror seized him when his glancing eye fell on the clear sign of the single sandal on the man’s right foot.” An ancient oracle had warned Pelias long ago to beware the stranger with the single sandal. Sure enough, there was an unrecognized man with one shoe, as the other had stuck in the mud immediately before his arrival when Jason helped an old woman across a river. That old woman, it turned out, had been the goddess Hera in disguise, and she was so impressed by Jason’s courtesy that she made him one of the few mortals ever to receive her patronage.

Recalling the warning and fearing its dire consequences, King Pelias saw an opportunity to get rid of this potential threat to his power. He agreed to allow Jason to succeed him on the throne, claiming that his old age was better suited to retirement than kingship. The catch, however, was that Jason would have to travel to the distant shores of Colchis, located on “the unfriendly sea,” to retrieve the famous Golden Fleece. This trophy was needed, the king said, to put a stop to the nasty famine that raged in the town of Iolcus. Pelias was effectively sending Jason on a wild-goose chase.

Despite his suspicions about his uncle’s motivations, Jason eagerly took up the challenge. He recruited some of the best adventurers in Greece, legendary leaders who figure prominently in the oldest classical stories. The hot- tempered warrior Heracles, the talented harpist Orpheus, and, in some accounts, the beautiful hunter maiden Atalanta, all agreed to come along. Spurred on by the helpful prodding of Jason’s new patron goddess, Hera, the “flower of sailor-men” joined in this quest for the fleece of “gleaming gold.”

Understandably, many scholars were skeptical about this tale, believing it only a matter of myth or fiction. Over the course of their travels, the crew encountered fire-breathing bulls, men springing up from sown dragon teeth, and of course the giant dragon who guarded the prized Golden Fleece. When the Argo had sailed past the Hellespont into the Black Sea, it seemed that its heroes had entered a world of fantasy and marvels on the fringes of civilization. Yet when Rudbeck reread the oldest, most authoritative accounts of the myth, he became convinced that the voyage contained kernels of historical fact.

The deep streams, stormy lakes, and crashing rocks all along the way to the ends of the earth, where the shadowy mists prevailed, were not myth, but a somewhat accurate depiction of an actual voyage into the Arctic north.

THE FIRST TASK was to establish that there were genuine historical elements underlying the many fantastic adventures. In this regard, Rudbeck belonged to a solid historiographical tradition. The majority of ancient authors and some modern scholars had believed that the quest, in some form, had actually occurred.

Rudbeck, too, sensed the realistic undertones of the story. The ports of call, the amounts of time that passed between their stops, and the overall course of the expedition did not seem particularly strange for an ancient Mediterranean voyage. As Rudbeck’s notes showed, with his calculations still preserved in the archives of the Swedish National Library, the Argonauts made their way from the home port of Iolcus along the Magnesian coast with stops on the islands of Lemnos and Samothrace, as they headed toward the famed city of Troy. This was in line with the ancient way of sailing, which favored, as one modern expert put it, a strategy of “coastal navigation and island-hopping” to facing the open sea.

The Argonauts passed the difficult straits of the Hellespont (today called Bosporus) that bridged Europe and Asia; they then entered the Black Sea. Next, “hugging the right side of the coast,” they sailed on, overcoming challenges, until they reached the city of Colchis, situated in today’s Georgia. In this land of towering peaks and sweeping plains, the Argonauts accomplished their mission. They gained the renowned Golden Fleece, largely with the aid of the king’s daughter, the sorceress Medea, who had fallen madly in love with the Argo’s captain, Jason.

What interested Rudbeck most, however, was the journey after the Argonauts had