After countless rejections from several European heads of state, Columbus finally managed to persuade the rulers of Spain, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, to finance his voyage. So, in October 1492, after a thirty-three- day voyage from the Canaries, the captain and his crew struck land on the Bahamian island of San Salvador (today Guanahani). Three more successful voyages followed, to Cuba, to Jamaica, and along the coast of Central America—all of which, Columbus thought, were the East Indies, the entrance to Japan, China, and the fabulous riches of the East. The navigator went to his death absolutely certain that he had glimpsed these oriental mysteries.
Columbus did not, as we now know, discover the East Indies. As explorers ventured farther inland and mapmakers struggled to incorporate the discoveries on the latest maps, it gradually became clear that he had actually stumbled upon a brand-new continent. Two of them, as a matter of fact (though despite common belief today, Columbus himself never set foot on the continent in the north, i.e., today’s United States). Also, daring seafarers who most probably made the oceanic voyages before him include everyone from adventurous Vikings to Irish monks, though their exploits had faded from memory and were not rediscovered until later scholars started peering into the old manuscripts again. This time, however, with the printing press and rumors promising almost endless opportunities for power, profit, prestige, and preaching, it would be different.
This discovery of a new continent was to have a tremendous impact on the Old World, not least in that it sparked new and lively speculation about the lost civilization of Atlantis. Hadn’t Plato written about a mysterious island somewhere in the far west, beyond the pillars of Hercules? Hadn’t the philosopher also placed it at a “distant point in the Atlantic”? Maybe it had not been destroyed after all, but had only fallen out of common knowledge. Could this “brave new world,” as Shakespeare called the enchanted isle that formed the setting of
In the period immediately after 1492, this seemed a likely option. It was made more so in the 1550s, when Ferdinand Magellan’s daring circumnavigation of the world proved for the first time that this America was an entirely unknown continent. As the old assurance of a three-continent Earth crumbled, Plato’s story about a former powerful island civilization in the far west no longer seemed all that far-fetched.
In fact, Renaissance thinkers were quick to place new discoveries in the context of the old classical traditions, and the New World seemed to have many things in common with Plato’s Atlantis. For one thing, travelers’ reports told of the continent’s overwhelming size. Like Atlantis, it seemed “larger than Libya and Asia together,” enjoying all the natural advantages that the philosopher Plato attributed to Atlas’s isle. Explorers indeed strained their descriptive abilities to paint an accurate portrait of the many new birds, animals, and plants inhabiting this lush
The vibrant culture, too, seemed remarkably Atlantean. One civilization the Spanish encountered, the Aztecs, showed a close resemblance to Plato’s descriptions of the islanders’ great talent for engineering projects. The capital, Tenochtitlan, appeared to rise out of a lake of salt, and bridges looped over a system of canals that crisscrossed the land. Grand structures commanded attention, particularly the stone-terraced pyramids and the temples gilded with offerings and stained with the blood of many human sacrifices. Fountains in the gardens and baths in the palace further suggested the sophistication and luxury that readers had come to expect of old Atlantis.
Most dramatically, the Aztec civilization shared a degree of wealth comparable to the legendary treasures of Atlantis. As Plato described it, the riches of the kingdom were so immense that “the like had never been seen before in any royal house nor will ever easily be seen again.” From the very beginning, European explorers could hardly fail to note the shining ornaments encircling the necks, dangling from the ears, and decorating the bodies of the natives. Main buildings in the Aztec capital glowed with bright white stucco, and gold adorned the lavish temples. Escorted into the palace, the Spanish gaped at the ostentatious display of the Aztec officials’ wealth. Pearls, emeralds, and other precious stones lined the clothes, covered the staffs, and accompanied the “marvelously delicate” featherwork. Even the soles of Montezuma’s sandals were tipped in gold.
A few very bloody years later, the conquistadores had stripped off, melted down, and carried back so much from their native hosts that Spain was virtually swimming in Aztec gold. After Francisco Pizarro’s brutal campaign in Peru, and the discovery of rich mines high in the Andes, the home country would also feast on Incan silver. So much bullion poured in from the New World that it flowed like “rain on a rooftop.” Conservative estimates put the total cargo until 1650 at 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver, and this does not account for the treasure lost to smuggling, piracy, and shipwreck. As one Aztec put it, the strangers “longed and lusted for gold” so much that “their bodies swelled with greed, … [and] they hungered like pigs.”
So moved by the sights, one Spaniard paused from the plundering to put his observations on record. This was Francisco Lopez de Gomara, the priest and private secretary of the “restless, haughty, mischievous and given to quarreling” young man, the infamous conquistador Hernan Cortes. From his vantage point, Gomara wrote our oldest account of the conquest of Mexico and the influential history of the Indies (1553), which remains today an invaluable source for understanding this brutal period of the past. Inside the work was an early statement placing Atlantis firmly in the Americas, a view that would be shared by many others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Not everyone, of course, would find this a sound idea, let alone be convinced that the Spanish had stumbled upon old Atlantis. The famous French thinker Michel de Montaigne, for one, doubted this identification. In one of his essays (1580)—he was one of the first and most influential thinkers to popularize the essay as a literary genre in its own right—Montaigne acknowledged that it was “very probable” that a great flood had in fact destroyed Atlantis as Plato described. But he expressed his skepticism that the newly discovered continent was really Plato’s world. “It is not very probable that the new world we have lately discovered is, in fact, that island.”
Another popular rival theory places Atlantis precisely in the ocean where the island was said to have sunk. Although it sometimes appeared on medieval and early modern maps, such as the one by the learned Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher in the 1660s, it was not until the late nineteenth century that this legendary civilization would be sought in the mid-Atlantic. This search was largely due to the influential work of an American thinker named Ignatius Donnelly. In the early 1880s Donnelly had just lost an agonizing political election, and the fifty-year-old former lieutenant governor of Minnesota and U.S. congressman felt he was beginning a forced retirement. With his political stock, as he put it, at “zero,” Donnelly worked feverishly on a book he called
He believed that Plato’s tale was not a “fable, but veritable history,” detailing the fortunes of the island where “man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization.” From this world center in the middle of the Atlantic, Donnelly saw the civilizing influence of Atlantis pouring out in all directions, particularly affecting the Americas in the west and the nearby coastal regions of Africa and Europe in the east.
Positing the continent of Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic in fact helped explain many “intriguing similarities” between such far-flung continents. Africa and South America, for example, both had pyramids, hieroglyphics, mummies, and similar words for such things as sun, ax, and hawk. (Later historians have determined many differences; not the least of these is that some two thousand years separated the building of the Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, though Donnelly could not have known this fact.) Seeing the many correspondences, Donnelly went on drawing his conclusions, proposing that Atlantis had served as the origin of all our civilization. Ancient gods were originally kings and queens of Atlantis, just as all our arts and sciences came from this brilliant, sun-drenched home. Then Atlantis “perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sank into the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants.”
If Donnelly was correct, then the French novelist Jules Verne’s romantic adventure
[There] before my very eyes, lay the ruins … its temples demolished, its arches in pieces, its columns on the ground, but its proportions were clearly outlined, reminding me of the stately architecture of Tuscany.
