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

president of the Commerce College, the politicians took their information straight to the king.

The count fell on his knees and begged his innocence. Their words were all lies and hearsay, he pleaded, and in turn, he accused the rivals of spreading false rumors. With such prominent people on both sides of the issue, the inexperienced king was uncertain how to proceed. Prudently, though, he steered a middle course. He refused to consider this a matter of state, and suggested that the two sides settle the dispute between themselves.

But as both sides were conscripting allies in the autumn of 1675 for what would certainly have been a vicious struggle, something happened that would sway many of the remaining undecided opinions.

EARLIER THAT SUMMER the king had ordered the Royal Navy to launch a preemptive strike on the Danish and Dutch warships gathering in the south. Three months and countless delays later, the Swedes were still preparing for the attack. By late October, as sailing conditions were rapidly deteriorating, sixty-six large and well- armed vessels sailed out in one of the largest fleets ever assembled on the Baltic. This Swedish armada was to put a stop to the malicious designs of the Danes and their ill-advised declaration of war.

Ten days later the first ships were seen creaking back to shore, sails torn, ropes rotten, and anchors lost. And they had not even met an enemy. A nasty storm had emerged on the choppy Baltic Sea, causing dismal visibility and disrupting established means of communication. Some ships literally crashed into each other. Many supplies, including the stores of food, went overboard. It was an embarrassing performance, and the admiral, Gustaf Otto Stenbock, was fired for his incompetence. Prior to his appointment as admiral, it turned out, he had never even been to sea.

As much as this disaster hurt De la Gardie’s prestige, things did not unfortunately improve. At the next opportunity, the summer of 1676, the Swedes pulled out their greatest weapon, the flagship Kronan (Crown). Drawing on the most advanced naval architecture developed by the great maritime powers England and Holland, Kronan was one of the largest and best-armed ships of its day. About 180 feet in length and forty-three in width, the man-of- war boasted a terrifying 126 cannon, including some highly regarded thirty- and thirty-six-pounders.

As Kronan started to attack near the Baltic island of Oland on the first day of June 1676, one of the Swedish naval officers sent a message to his superior, the admiral Lorentz Creutz. Now, the admiral was new, and he had never fought a battle, with his previous experience consisting mainly of prosecuting witches. In the general confusion of the melee, Creutz misunderstood his officer’s message. Instead of continuing the fight as signaled, he ordered the monstrous ship to set a new course. At the same time, the inexperienced commander seems to have forgotten to give the accompanying order to adjust the sails and close the gunports. The enemy Dutch and Danish commanders looked on in bewilderment at what happened next to Sweden’s most feared warship: “Kronan careened, water poured in through the hatches, the cannons broke loose, a slow match ended up in the gunpowder stocks, and Kronan exploded and sank.” Of a crew of 850, only forty-two were known to have survived.

A tragedy, a disaster, an embarrassment, and a stunning reversal—and it was not over yet. The second- largest ship in the navy, Svardet (Sword), did not last much longer; and a third, Applet (Apple), went down as well. The commander of this ship, too, seems to have known frighteningly little of naval warfare. “He cannot even differentiate the forecastle and the poop,” the minutes of the later trial revealed. Evidently the commander’s previous position had been running a restaurant.

None of this reflected well on De la Gardie’s stewardship. A total of eleven ships, including the three most impressive, went down with some three thousand sailors of the Swedish Royal Navy. In the wake of this overwhelming loss, Swedish defenses lay prostrate. It was only a matter of time before an all-out Danish invasion would begin.

Morale had sunk very low in Stockholm, and the new king seemed manifestly depressed. Although he had long trusted De la Gardie, he was now inclined to listen to the pleas of the furious and the disenchanted who blamed the overall sorry state of the navy on De la Gardie’s government. For twelve years it had concentrated power too much, blocked access to the king, and, some suspected, kept the monarch in a state of ignorance about the true conditions of the kingdom.

Sweden was now paying the price for these faults in the naval fiascoes and criminally ill-prepared forces. Soon it would also have to face a Danish invasion, one certain to be as bold, determined, and set on revenge as had been the Swedes who marched over the ice. Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie watched helplessly as the king reluctantly ordered an investigation into the charges of widespread misrule. Rudbeck, too, was anxious about these developments. Neither the war nor the prosecution of his patron boded well for his hunt for Atlantis.

10

ALL OARS TO ATLANTIS

As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts.

—T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM

TIMES WERE UNCERTAIN indeed, but Rudbeck poured his soul into the search. Soon he had turned up no less than 102 pieces of evidence of why Atlantis had actually been in Sweden. Many prominent landmarks—the rivers, the mountains, the temple, and the racetrack—had already been identified in Old Uppsala. Even the thick forests surrounding the capital were said to be the heavily wooded areas outside of Uppsala. Rudbeck was growing absolutely convinced. His countrymen were walking in the shadows of Plato’s lost world.

The Swedish physician, however, was hardly the first to seek Atlantis. As the fantasy of such an extraordinary discovery tightened its grip, Rudbeck’s search would become a dialogue with rival visions of the vanished world. He would learn from, and at the same time compete with, the many theories that flourished in his day and before.

The modern rediscovery of Atlantis had begun unexpectedly in the fateful and traumatic encounter between the Old and New Worlds in the Age of Discovery. Sixteenth-century Europeans came armed with muskets and portable cannon that roared as if the “dyvels of hell” had been loosed on the world. Mounted on horses, animals never seen before, the Spanish conquistadores must have looked to the indigenous peoples of Central and South America like strange, menacing beasts, perhaps like the half-man, half-horse centaurs who roamed the mythic hills of Arcadia.

Driven by a complex set of motives, the first European explorers had set sail down the uncharted west coast of Africa. Many hoped to tap the ultimate source of gold that crossed the Saharan desert and enriched the coffers of trading cities like Venice or Genoa. Others saw the opportunity to win new converts to the faith, and possibly find the legendary Christian prince Prester John, who ruled somewhere in a sea of the heathen. Still others wanted to earn an honored name, gain eternal fame, or even fathom the “secrets of these parts” that had so long been “hidden from other men.”

The initial gold rush broadened into a veritable spice race—and the frontiers of the search expanded from the coasts of Africa to the distant worlds of India, Ceylon, China, and beyond. Such “grains of paradise” not only preserved meat from spoilage, but also added variety to the diet and made bad meals on European tables less appalling. Spices were a valuable addition to the medicine chest, as well, combating coughs, countering colds, and preventing everything, it was said, from earache to the plague. The Portuguese were yet again the first to take tentative steps in securing this lucrative market. Important ports like Calcutta, strategic straits like Malacca, and waterways like the Bay of Bengal lay in their hands.

Laden with pepper, cinnamon, ginger, mace, cloves, and nutmeg—the last of these literally worth more than its weight in gold—caravel triumphs were unimaginably profitable. They began to attract the attentions of ambitious neighbors. In this context, the Genoese sailor Cristobal Colon, more commonly known as Christopher Columbus, devised a somewhat unconventional plan to reach the riches of the East by sailing in the opposite direction. Medieval legends seemed to confirm the vague possibilities of success in this “foolish mad” venture, and, significantly, learned miscalculations vastly underestimated the actual distances involved. The ancient geographer Ptolemy’s classic maps of the world, for example, which had recently been published, cut over six thousand miles from the journey, and played no small role in strengthening Columbus’s already legendary indomitable will.