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

snatched the Golden Fleece and escaped with the king’s daughter, her “maiden’s heart racked by love-cares.”

As they left Colchis with the king in hot pursuit, the Argonauts were blown off course. The events that followed were never agreed upon in the ancient tales of the myth, or in the many later efforts to penetrate this mystery. In fact, wildly different suggestions have been put forward for the exact path of their disoriented return home by those who have looked for some historical basis for the voyage.

Some have claimed that Jason came out of the Black Sea into the Caspian Sea, and then into the Indian Ocean, beating a return to the Mediterranean via Lake Tritonis in the Egyptian territories. Others see the Argo continuing along the shores of the Black Sea until it reaches the outlet on the Danube, then following the river down until it empties into the river Po in northern Italy. From here they entered familiar waters either on the Adriatic or the Rhone. Another favorite option was that the Argonauts simply returned the same way that they came, retracing their steps through the Hellespont back to their home in northern Greece. A look at the perils they saw and experienced afterwards, however, made Rudbeck offer a different proposal.

They did not return the same way they came, Rudbeck claimed, because that contradicted the words of the blind seer Phineus, who predicted a different route. He had been right with his predictions regarding just about everything else, and there was nothing in the text to show that he had been wrong in this case. For another thing, as Rudbeck might also have added, the westward sailing required to return home clashed with the natural system of winds and currents—so this route was hardly a likely possibility at a time when they were desperate to escape from the king’s fleet.

As for deciding among the other possible return routes, Rudbeck immediately recognized that the widely differing options were mainly a function of the plethora of surviving accounts of the adventure. Besides the short references in Herodotus’s histories and elsewhere, the most influential versions were the fifth-century-B.C. lyric poet Pindar, particularly his fourth Pythian ode. Encyclopedists from Apollodorus to Diodorus Siculus also recounted the tale in summary form. Even more comprehensive was the third-century-B.C. Apollonius of Rhodes, who gave a stirring treatment in his epic Argonautica. Latin authors came in force as well, with Ovid’s eloquent Metamorphoses and the first-century Roman Valerius Flaccus’s somewhat artificial though never finished Argonautica. The fact that these authorities often contradicted each other made the story even more entangled and difficult to unravel.

All things being equal, Rudbeck believed that the oldest texts were most likely to capture the truth. Coming nearest in time to the events they purported to describe, the primary accounts had had the least opportunity for errors, envy, and other distortions to intervene. The case of the Argonauts was a classic example of this principle, and Rudbeck proposed going back to the very beginning, before the popular, though late, Hellenistic and Roman versions to the oldest source available.

With only a few exceptions, classical scholars at the time deemed the so-called Argonautica Orphica vastly older than all other accounts of the quest. According to the standard interpretation, this short, fourteen-hundred-line poem was viewed as part of the secret traditions of the ancient Orphic cult, written by an initiate into those mysteries, probably even by the leader, the legendary guru-shaman Orpheus himself. Although this poem is known today as a much later work, unlikely to be placed earlier than the fourth century A.D. and probably coming even later, Rudbeck was in good company when he traced it back to the mystic leader Orpheus, whose “beautiful music charmed the stubborn rocks upon the mountains and the course of rivers.”

Relying mainly on the Argonautica Orphica, believed then even to predate Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Rudbeck retraced the steps of the Argonauts’ voyage. Moving north from the Black Sea, they would have passed the swampy marshes and sailed on some rivers through the forests of southern Russia. “Orpheus does not mention the names of the rivers,” Rudbeck acknowledged, and neither did any surviving account. Nevertheless, the terrain of the narrative fit perfectly with the area north of the Black Sea. It was “pure vanity,” Rudbeck thought, to seek the rivers, portages, and immense forests or other topographical features along the Danube, the Caspian, or anywhere other than this likely choice.

The desire to know if Jason and the Argonauts had in fact reached the Arctic north led to yet another remarkable chapter in Rudbeck’s adventure. For the crux of this theory rested on the assumption that the Argonauts would have sailed from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and then into the Baltic Sea by navigating on the Russian rivers. This would mean that the heroes would have followed the river Tanais, today called the Don, all the way to its sources, where they must have disembarked and pulled their ship over a stretch of land (from Lake Fronovo to the Lovat River) until they reached the mighty Volga. From here they would have passed along other Russian rivers and waterways (the Volshova River, Lake Ladoga) until finally they came out in the “northern sea,” or the Baltic. At this point Jason and the crew would have sailed to the edge of Rudbeck’s lost world.

This proposed journey would have been daunting but, according to Rudbeck, not far-fetched. Actually this path had been used many times, he said, by Viking raiders in the Norse sagas that he was reading (and that his printing press would soon start publishing, in many cases for the very first time). Besides, the Vikings had a much more difficult challenge than the Argonauts, that is, pulling a small fleet as opposed to only one vessel. The tradition of dragging a ship was very important in that region, still a common feature of daily life for many Russian peasants, Rudbeck added, with plenty of examples of this practice.

The dotted lines show possible routes of Jason and the Argonauts after they had retrieved the Golden Fleece. Rudbeck believed that the voyagers had sailed from the Black Sea to Sweden, following along the Russian rivers.

So, in short, Rudbeck asked himself: If the Vikings had taken this route to the south, could the Argonauts not have taken it to the north? With three boats that he intended to use for his own postal service and commercial passenger transport system (the first in Sweden), and with the help of some faithful volunteers, Rudbeck set out to test the possibility of the heroic voyagers’ visit to the ancient golden age under the North Star.

RUDBECK AND HIS men would have to perform this feat, dragging the ship along at top speeds, in accordance with the time constraints recorded in the epic. One of the great authorities, the seventeenth-century historian Georgius Hornius, had calculated that Jason and his fellow Argonauts would have to have covered a distance of some four hundred Greek stades, or some forty-five (American) miles, and completed the task in only twelve days. This made for an exhausting but, Rudbeck ventured, imminently possible advance of just under four miles per day.

The boats were fifty-foot yachts built in Rudbeck’s shipyard, and normally they would have been used to transport passengers, for a small fee of two mark silvermynt, between Uppsala and Stockholm. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during the prime sailing season, Rudbeck’s ships departed from the harbors of the capital city and the university town at precisely 8:00 and 11:00 a.m. Space was even provided for passengers who wished to smoke tobacco, though Rudbeck insisted that this be done in a special, restricted area on deck, “in the fresh air.”

The first of the ships, constructed “about the size of the Argo,” was carried from Rudbeck’s shipyard down to the water, a distance of some 2,400 feet. This attempt was not very successful. It took a full eighty men, straining with all their might, to transport the fifty-footer, and the pace was excruciatingly slow, far too slow to cover the distance in the specified time. The exhausted volunteers must have been relieved when the day was over—Rudbeck did not exactly have a reputation for being the easiest man to work for. As demanding of others as he was of himself, Rudbeck had little patience for the work ethic of the contemporary boatsman, who preferred, he huffed, to stretch out on deck in the warm sun, porridge ladle in one hand and pipe in the other.

Undeterred by the disappointing first effort, Rudbeck tried again, this time dragging the boat over poles. Much more successfully, they moved at approximately three times the speed of the men who had tried to carry the ship. Then, in another attempt, Rudbeck had the crew smear grease on the well-rounded logs and drag the ship to the harbor—moving at the fastest time yet, and requiring the work of only fifty men! Allowing for eating, sleeping, and resting, and assuming ten hours of labor a day, “so long as it is believed that they could have worked,” Rudbeck concluded, Jason and the Argonauts could easily have covered the required distance in the twelve-day period.

This rather quixotic episode was an early attempt at what we now call experimental archaeology, the effort to test a hypothesis by re-creating its conditions, put to such dramatic effect in our time by the late Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. Until his death in 2002, Heyerdahl made many pioneering voyages to show how the ancients could have accomplished some very difficult deeds that he had suggested, namely sailing the oceans in