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

Denied the opportunity to pay with his only available currency, Curio was in serious trouble, and Rudbeck tried once more “to carry his friend on his back.” The plan was somehow to establish Curio as a printer and help him start working again, with the hope of earning enough income to support his family and pay the large fines to the university. The only question was how. If there was any chance of accomplishing this feat, Curio would need to hire some help. A minimum of two assistants would be needed to work the presses, a fraction of the staff at the university offices, when Curio, his wife, Disa, five apprentices, and a servant girl had run the operation. But even here the council balked. The university treasurer, Jacob Arrhenius, flatly refused Curio’s request to hire any assistants until Curio first repaid his debts.

Taking the setbacks personally as usual, Rudbeck now had the added discomfort of feeling partly to blame for the ugly affair. It was mainly his enemies who were taking out their frustrations on his printer, just as they would soon be doing with his translator, Anders Norcopensis, who was also subjected to censorship. Rudbeck wanted desperately to find a way to help Curio and his family.

So one hundred copies of his Atlantica were pawned at twenty daler kopparmynt apiece, raising a total of two thousand daler kopparmynt (almost seven hundred daler silvermynt) for the cause. Curio followed suit, selling some of his stock of books to professors in town, netting an additional fifteen hundred daler kopparmynt (a fraction of their worth). Rudbeck also started selling his musical instruments. Even more generously, Rudbeck invited the printer and his family to move into the little stone house in his yard. There, Curio could hopefully open shop and work as Rudbeck’s personal printer.

To the shock of his enemies, Rudbeck’s grand scheme looked as if it might actually work. On October 6, 1685, King Charles XI did in fact grant Curio the right to publish, no mean feat in an age when royal sanction was a heavily guarded instrument in the Crown’s efforts to control the press. Curio was also granted the right to import any new equipment from the Continent, free of the hefty customs tolls. Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie had after all been able to help, playing a large role in securing Curio the same privileges enjoyed by other printers and booksellers in the kingdom.

And over the next few years, Henrik Curio would again work as a printer in Uppsala. For a time he even rivaled the university press, because finding a successor to him was proving more difficult than the council had originally thought. It took time and intricate negotiations, and in the end the university had to grant a higher salary and better conditions to lure a new printer to town. After ten years of bitter litigation, reaching the highest court of the land and resulting in a heartbreaking loss, Curio’s press had, in the end, only moved a few blocks away.

From this newly sanctioned press in the stone house in Rudbeck’s yard, the two friends would publish many Norse sagas, including Saint Olof’s Saga, Arrow-Odd, Kaetil Haeng, and Egil’s Saga. A very early lexicon of Old Norse, which Verelius was working on until his death, was also published in 1691. In his spare time Rudbeck would often stop by the press, checking on its progress and tinkering with its equipment. He would even devise special blocks for printing the runic script. Rudbeck was indeed enjoying his work, being, as he put it, a “midwife” for the Norse sagas.

Now, with a press in place, Rudbeck was again trying to find a way to raise money for the continuation of his adored Atlantica project. As obsessed as ever with perfecting his theory, Rudbeck had many more clues to chase down, and more evidence to accumulate, about the lost world of Atlantis. Indeed a plethora of discoveries was still to be made, but, as Rudbeck lamented, there was no money to sustain the search. He could not simply rely on De la Gardie’s generosity or his own resources, both of which were severely reduced, if not almost depleted. Frustrated yet not without hope, Rudbeck would be busy seeking alternative ways to pay for his book.

He tried securing loans from the Stockholm city treasury, hoping to repay the sum with copies of his book. When the city politely turned down the offer, claiming that it could not afford such a venture, Rudbeck toyed with publishing the work in the “English way,” by selling subscriptions to gentlemen before publication. Some money came, too, as loans from admiring readers, including four hundred daler kopparmynt from the witch hunter Anders Stiernhook. De la Gardie somehow found some funds, and a student society contributed a five-hundred-daler-kopparmynt loan. There was even talk of trying to make money from a tobacco company, and Rudbeck, always optimistic, still hoped that his passenger boat service might turn enough of a profit to help defray the exorbitant costs of the project.

Then, after wild swings of fortune, Rudbeck received a letter in early October 1685 that would change the nature of his search. King Charles XI had been appalled to learn how relentlessly Rudbeck had been pursued and how ruthlessly he had been treated. Less than half a year after removing him from the authority of the censor, the king now released him from the hounds of the Inquisition. After all the efforts of Schutz, Arrhenius, and the commission, they had not found any misdeed. Rather, it seems that their investigations had backfired, giving Rudbeck the opportunity to show how much he had sacrificed for the university.

During the fall of 1685, King Charles XI also came through with some promised royal subsidies, awarding Rudbeck some eight hundred daler silvermynt. The royal funds would later even be extended to a regular payment to the scholar. No less than two hundred riksdaler (four hundred daler silvermynt) would be given every year to ensure the publication of Atlantica. Following many years of economic hardship and distress, Rudbeck felt that the clang of coins was preferable to the sound of beautiful music. The year that had begun with such frightening omens ended better than he could have possibly hoped.

THE BLOWS FROM his enemies had been parried, and Rudbeck’s hunt for Atlantis was, for the first time in his life, on solid financial footing. Such an unexpected turn of events enabled him to pursue his quest with all the enthusiasm of earlier times, although the recent trials had naturally drained some of his vigor. At least he was now free to investigate the mysteries of the ancient world as he saw fit, no longer forced to stay closely within the limits of monetary constraint. As he neared his fifty-fifth birthday, Rudbeck’s ambitions soared, and his work swelled, and, in the end, the sequel would be even larger than the first volume.

One of the main goals in publishing the second volume was of course informing the world of the latest news about Atlantis. Rudbeck had found the comments and criticisms from readers particularly useful, helping him further refine some of the rough edges of his theories. Louis XIV’s royal geographer offered some additional support for Rudbeck’s vision of Atlantis, pointing to a discussion in Aelianus’s Varia Historia between the satyr Silenus and King Midas that made Atlantis sound even more Swedish. Another scholar, Andreas Muller, a German orientalist in Berlin, had read Atlantica with amazement, and wondered if the Swedes had not in fact reached China.

China was in vogue in the 1680s, the decade that would see the ancient philosopher K’ung-fu Tzu first enter into Western consciousness, his name translated into the Latinate form Confucius. Muller was immersed in the discussions about China, stemming largely from his contacts with pioneering Jesuit missionaries in the forbidden land. When he read Atlantica, Muller was amazed at the many similarities between the Chinese and Swedish civilizations. He sent Rudbeck a list of ten comments and questions including “whether you think navigating through the north to China was an impossibility.”

Rudbeck would take up this question with great enthusiasm. The National Library in Stockholm has one of Rudbeck’s personal maps, full of measurements, calculations, and notes in the margins, showing how seriously he looked into this possibility. He was reading Marco Polo, following along in the medieval Venetian merchant’s travels in the East, and paying close attention to the descriptions of customs, perhaps signs of a surviving Swedish presence. In volumes III and IV of Atlantica, the horizons expanded further, with Rudbeck taking the Swedes all the way to the banks of the Indus River, where the Swedish Buda, a figure in medieval Norse manuscripts, supposedly gave rise to the Buddha. He was also examining travel reports of the New World in the West, convinced that the Swedes had crossed the Atlantic well before Christopher Columbus (and also well before Leif Ericsson and the Viking expeditions). Similarities between words guided him in these days, with etymology rising even higher in the hierarchy of evidence and in his undisciplined speculation based on words.

The highlight of the volume, though, was elaborating on the Swedish legacy still present in the ancient Mediterranean. Worship of Sun, Moon, and Earth were considered, with wild speculations on how Swedish classical mythology really was. In one remarkable chapter, running some three hundred pages, Rudbeck discussed an array of classical myths that he believed could be explained only if they had originated in the far north. The phoenix, the elusive bird of red fire consuming itself only to be reborn of its own ashes, was a representation of the sun—its death in the wintertime, when it did in fact disappear for months, and then its return in the summer, constantly above the horizon.