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

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 Cristóbal Colón, 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.

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 Guanahaní). 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 The Tempest, actually be the lost continent of Atlantis?

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 novus mundus. For those who refused to believe the stories about the Americas—and those tales were often outlandish—the goods that flowed into European harbors provided a more tangible confirmation: potatoes for the tables, chocolate for the cups, tobacco for the pipes, and sugar for almost everything else.

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, Tenochtitlán, 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 López de Gomara, the priest and private secretary of the “restless, haughty, mischievous and given to quarreling” young man, the infamous conquistador Hernán Cortés. 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 Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882).

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 Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) evoked an image of what lay waiting to be discovered. As Captain Nemo and the crew of the double-hulled, iron-plated, and “truly marvelous” submarine Nautilus cruise through the Atlantic off the shores of Morocco, they chance upon a sight that is certainly no less marvelous. One of the observers, the cantankerous professor Arronax, describes what he saw:

[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.

Other relics of the sunken civilization emerge: underwater aqueducts, “floating forms of a Parthenon,” and “crumbled walls and long lines of wide, deserted streets.” Here was Atlantis, an “ancient Pompeii, buried beneath the sea.”

This was a vivid portrait of a lost world that prepared the way for the largely enthusiastic reception of Donnelly’s vision of Atlantis. In the grand perspective, too, Verne’s fictional account helped many late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers visualize the implications of the adventurous search. “Who shall say,” Donnelly wrote in 1882, “that one hundred years from now the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of our day?”

Donnelly’s Atlantis—like Verne’s classic science-fiction novel—was an instant smash hit. The author was inducted into the American Association of Science, and the city of New Orleans chose Atlantis as the theme for its Mardi Gras celebration in 1883. Besides that, Great Britain’s prime minister William Gladstone wrote an enthusiastic four-page letter to the acclaimed American author. In his humble home in the small town of Niringer, Minnesota, Donnelly was overjoyed, and wrote:

I looked down at myself and could not but smile at the appearance of the man, who in this little, snow-bound hamlet, was corresponding with the man whose word was fate anywhere in the British Empire.

The prime minister also spoke of seeking parliamentary funds for a naval expedition to find the legendary island. “I could have uttered a war hoop of exultation,” said Donnelly, the man who was soon to be widely heralded as the “father of Atlantis studies,” that is, after Plato himself.

Atlantis would, however, have a long fascinating life beyond these classic formulations. Later intriguing theories would place this lost civilization on the islands of Crete and Santorini, as well as in the desert (Sahara), high atop mountains (the Andes), underneath the ice (the Antarctic or Spitzbergen), or even in outer space. Not to mention the occult and mystical interpretations that have also flourished.

One last theory that did appear in Rudbeck’s day looked for Atlantis not in America or at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, or anywhere else other than Plato’s head. There was a sense that the philosopher had made it up, either for the sake of creating an imaginative fictional account or, more likely, as a philosophical discourse that set up a vision of an idealized world to portray the problems of humanity in general, or his Athens in particular. Such a view of Atlantis as fiction or fable continues to flourish in our day, though sometimes the creator of the story is said to be someone else: Solon, Egyptian priests, Egyptian tradition, and so on.

But Rudbeck was not convinced. After reading Plato’s dialogues, he could not accept a theory that placed the lost civilization anywhere outside Sweden.

LOOKING FOR ATLANTIS in the Americas was, Rudbeck boldly proclaimed, pure vanity. The entire theory was predicated on a fundamental misreading of Plato.

One of the main arguments for locating Atlantis on a continent in the New World stemmed from the philosopher’s description of the kingdom as “larger than Libya and Asia together.” Rudbeck, however, cautioned that Plato did not necessarily mean the same things by the terms Libya and Asia that later generations did. The meanings of words change over time, and the duty of a historian is to capture the meaning of the word that prevailed when the philosopher used it.

In Plato’s day, the name Asia did not refer to the entire continent that runs through the territories of Russia to the far reaches of Siberia, China, and Korea. Rather, “Asia was taken by the old writers to mean only the little Asia, which stretches from the Mediterranean Sea in the south to the Black Sea in the north.” Relying on his love of maps, Rudbeck supported his hypothesis with a slew of ancient geographers. Each authority confirmed that the ancient word Asia meant only the much smaller, far western part of the continent, or the area historians call “Asia Minor.” Likewise, Plato’s word Libya did not mean all of the continent of Africa, as many had assumed. The word in the philosopher’s time referred only to the far northern coast, basically the fertile regions and immediate outlying deserts surrounding ancient Egypt.

With this refreshingly historical effort to put Plato’s vocabulary in the context of fourth-century-B.C. conventions of the Greek language, Rudbeck had uncovered a serious problem at the heart of understanding Atlantis. It was no longer necessary to seek this lost civilization in a land larger than the combined continents of Asia and Libya. Instead it should be sought in a place that corresponded to the meaning of the words in Plato’s day, that is, a land larger than Asia Minor and northern Africa. In this one bold stroke, Rudbeck shattered one of the powerful arguments for placing the vanished continent in the New World, previously one of the very few places that could have satisfied the stringent conditions.

Besides that, drawing on his own experiences on tempestuous waters, with his commercial yacht and postal service, Rudbeck raised the eminently practical question that many theorists overlooked in their haste to place Atlantis somewhere in the Americas. This was directed less to the “learned, the wise, and the elite in the world” than to the common sailor:

If such a great navy should cross from America, and attack all of Europe, Asia, and Libya some thousands of years ago, when no one knew how to sail with a compass, no one dared far from the coast with a little ship, and no big ships were built which could withstand the waves of the great ocean, how well would they have held up?

“If I asked such a thing,” Rudbeck said, “I fear that the boatmen would laugh at me.”

For skeptics who questioned the testimony of a “common boatman,” Rudbeck issued a further challenge. Read the explorer’s accounts of the New World, take a look at the types of boats the natives used, and try to figure out how they would have fared in such a difficult transatlantic voyage. Plato was after all speaking not of a single isolated venture over the Atlantic, but a war of conquest that would mean moving massive fleets across the hazardous waters of the high seas. In an age before the invention of the compass or at least systematic knowledge of the use of stars for navigation, America was hardly a realistic prospect for the home of the Atlanteans.

Taking the offensive on yet another front, assuming for the moment that the Atlanteans had somehow managed to make the perilous crossing from America, Rudbeck raised another embarrassing point: “And should they have conquered Europe, Asia, and Libya in the old days just as Plato speaks about, then there should reasonably be some evidence of this Atlantis in their language, customs, laws, worship, and such things.”

The current war between Sweden and Denmark, for example, was leaving many signs, not the least the “thousands” of independent accounts of its progress. Few wars in history occur without leaving any trace, and it was thus not unreasonable to expect some survivals of such a catastrophic war as Plato described. Yet in the many centuries that had passed, Rudbeck reminded, no one had come up with any real evidence of ancient American influence in any of the places where the Atlanteans supposedly attacked.

So if Rudbeck was correct in his interpretation of Plato’s words, the existing knowledge of American boats, and the overwhelming lack of evidence of any surviving influence anywhere they allegedly conquered, scholars were clearly looking in the wrong place. “Either Plato’s Atlantis is a poem,” Rudbeck said, “or it is true, in which case it must be understood as some other land or island” than the Americas.

While he was on the subject, there was another matter that needed to be cleared up. Plato spoke of Atlantis as an “island,” but Rudbeck believed it was not quite so simple. Going back to the original language of the philosopher, Rudbeck noted that Plato used the Greek word (pronounced NAY-sos) to describe Atlantis. Scholars almost invariably translated this word as “island,” though, he noted, this did not have to be the case. could also mean “peninsula,” and for support, he simply pointed to the Peloponnesus in southern Greece.

This landmass was named using the Greek words Pelops, the wild chariot driver of classical mythology, and , the word in question. The Peloponnesus was, literally, “Pelop’s island,” and as anyone with a map knew, this was a peninsula. Clearly the term applied to islands as well as peninsulas—and as long as only one possible translation of was accepted, it was easy to miss many opportunities for finding Atlantis.

SIZE, SHAPE, TOPOGRAPHY, and even the blood-drenched ceremonies had all apparently agreed with Rudbeck’s unusual solution to the timeless mystery. No less exciting, Rudbeck had found the symbolic leader of the sacrifices, the king of Atlantis himself.

According to the Critias dialogue, the first king of this powerful civilization had been a man named Atlas, whose name in fact lived on in the word Atlantis and in the name of its nearby ocean, the Atlantic (both derived from the genitive form, meaning, appropriately, “of Atlas”). For Rudbeck, this was a no-brainer. Atlas was none other than the Swedish king Atle!

Now Rudbeck was proposing to compare figures from different historic periods and vastly different cultural traditions, and, many sober critics would say, figures with almost nothing in common besides a vague similarity in their names. But that had never stopped him before. Like Atlas, Atle was a powerful king, as clearly seen in the Norse poems and Atla-mál, and other slight references in the eddas. Atle controlled a large empire and a flourishing civilization, and as Plato had said, he had been easily corrupted, falling victim to his love of treasure. Atle’s kingdom was also utterly destroyed. His majestic halls with the “high-builded towers” and the “far-famed temples” disappeared forever, swept away in the “roaring flames.”

An ancient king of Atlantis with the honorary title Atlas.

This curious, shadowy figure of the Norse eddas was, again like Plato’s Atlas, only dimly known (for Plato’s Atlas is not Homer’s Atlas, the Titan who was forced to hold the world on his shoulders; the two are often confused). Yet Rudbeck believed Atle must have made quite an impression. Pulling out a map of Sweden, he rattled off a long list of places where the name of the Atlantean king was supposedly enshrined. There was Atle’s island (Atlesöö) on the beautiful lake Mälaren, just outside Stockholm and also in one of the country’s oldest settlements. There were also Atle’s lake (Atlesjö), Atle’s village (Atleby or Alby), and a string of other places running throughout the kingdom. Sweden even had its own Atlas Mountains (Atlefjäll). Indeed, just as Plato had said, King Atlas had left his name all over the country. Most dramatic, of course, was an old name for Sweden: Atland, which Rudbeck immediately translated as “Atlantis” (and incorporated into the Swedish title of the book, Atland eller Manheim).

Even if the differences between the ancient Greek and Norse figures were many, and the similarities vague at best, Rudbeck was overflowing with excitement. Consumed by his theory, he was determined to make it work. When a solution did not immediately present itself, Rudbeck was unwavering, laboring passionately and compulsively. Fears for his own “sickly constitution” evaporated in the whirlwind of enthusiasm.

As he saw it, the task was to hammer out the small details of the larger, grand vision of Atlantis that, in his frenzy, seemed more accurate with each passing day. Rudbeck had an explanation, for instance, as to why Plato had used the name Atlas and all he himself could find was the Swedish Atle. His answer was lifted straight from Plato’s own words:

Since Solon was planning to make use of the story for his own poetry, he had found, on investigating the meaning of the names, that those Egyptians who had first written them down had translated them into their own tongue. So he himself in turn recovered the original sense of each name and, rendering it into our tongue, wrote it down so.

In other words, by the time the story was recorded in the 380s B.C., the name of King Atle had been transformed from the language of Atlantis (Swedish) to Egyptian and then to Greek. After that, it was at the mercy of Solon’s discretionary interpretation and the whims of Critias’s childhood memory. No wonder, Rudbeck said, the name had been somewhat garbled over time.

Meanwhile, other distinguishing features of Atlantis were starting to cause more problems. For one, Plato was pretty clear that Atlantis was situated near the famous Pillars of Hercules, traditionally located at the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow waterway separating southern Spain from northern Africa. According to ancient myth, the hero Hercules had set them up as the “far-famed witnesses of the farthest limit of voyaging.” Given such a position, it is no surprise that many had looked for the lost world in the mid-Atlantic or the Americas.

But Rudbeck soon had a proposal of his own. Forced back to the drawing board, he started repositioning his map of Atlantis. Placing the capital at Old Uppsala, with the kingdom stretching northward to the Arctic Kimmernes, the home of the Cimmerians at the halls of Hades and down to the southern tip of Skåne, Rudbeck must have watched with amazement. Right in front of his eyes, he saw the Pillars of Hercules.

The answer seemed so clear, so obvious, that he wondered why no one had proposed it before: the real pillars must have been the Öresund, the strategic waterway that separated the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, and one of the most perilous straits in Europe. Dutch and English traders knew the spot well, and had long been forced to pay hefty tolls to the Crown that controlled this enviable gateway to the Baltic. The narrow strip of sea was where, incidentally, Hamlet’s castle was supposedly located, and where the lumbering Kronborg stands guard today.

Although he had no small confidence in his own mapmaking abilities, Rudbeck’s proposal that the Pillars of Hercules lay in Scandinavia was radical to say the least. Why should one make recourse to a Nordic location, in the face of such widespread, almost unanimous, opinion that the pillars were found at the conjunction of Spain and northern Africa?

Reading through texts widely and energetically, in his customary fashion, Rudbeck must have been thrilled to come across the words of one of the most esteemed geographers of antiquity, Strabo. In the first book of his encyclopedic geography of the world, this first-century authority counted no less than seven different interpretations of the meaning and location of the Pillars of Hercules. One of them, actually, was the mythic “Crashing Rocks,” the dangerous straits the Argonauts encountered on the quest for the Golden Fleece—and a location that must have been particularly appealing in light of Rudbeck’s own unconventional ideas about Jason’s voyage.

Another stimulating clue had, incidentally, come from the Roman historian Tacitus. In Germania, his account of the northern barbarian tribes, Tacitus records an observation from a Roman commander, Drusus Germanicus, exploring the north: “We have even ventured upon the Northern Ocean itself, and rumor has it that there are Pillars of Hercules in the far north.”

Suddenly Rudbeck’s suspicion that the location of the “Pillars of Hercules” was actually more complicated than usually presented seemed possible, hinted at by the historian and confirmed by the geographer. And once his mind got started on the matter, Rudbeck believed that the Swedish solution actually fulfilled the criteria more satisfactorily than the conventional site of Gibraltar.

After all, if the pillars had been set up to honor the glory of Hercules and mark the so-called limits of human endeavor, then why place them in a location where ancient peoples “sailed past them every year”? The far edge of the Mediterranean was certainly not the end of the world; ask the Phoenicians, ask the Carthaginians, ask anyone who presumably traded for the valuable tin found in Great Britain. This traditional Gibraltar location hardly made sense in either geographical or psychological terms. Sweden, on the other hand, offered another possibility.

Here rough, frigid, sometimes icy waters made sailing difficult if not impossible at certain times of the year, a fact that made this Scandinavian option a more likely place for the “limits of the ancient world” than Gibraltar. Here, too, right in the very spot that Rudbeck was proposing, were many place-names preserving the memory of a much older name.

All around the Öresund were small villages whose names, coincidentally, bore the root of Hercules: Herhal, Herhamber, and a host of others, including one as far away as Stockholm called Hercul. Rudbeck was growing so confident that he was on the right track with his new theory about the Pillars of Hercules that he would soon pronounce, in full stride, that the club-toting strongman and antiquity’s greatest warrior had originally been a Swede. His real name, found in many sagas and rune stones, was Härkolle, which meant literally “warrior chief” or perhaps “one dressed in a warrior’s clothes.” (Rudbeck contrasted his theory with one leading etymology that derived the name Hercules from the Greek words meaning “the glory of Hera”—an “unsatisfactory guess,” he said, when Hera hated Hercules’ guts.) Much more would indeed follow about the Swedish Hercules. For now the importance was clear. All these place-names near the Öresund were surviving memories of the original “Pillars of Hercules,” the treacherous northern straits that once marked the entrance to the kingdom of Atlantis.

With Plato’s distinct words and his own painstaking exploration fueled by a splendid imagination, Rudbeck could only marvel with joy at how well it all seemed to fall into place. For that was now becoming the method, relentlessly marching forward, and if each new discovery unleashed countless additional problems, then Rudbeck would figure it out, somehow, as he always did. He was also growing bolder in the process—more convinced of how little the past had really been understood, and more confident in his own ability to recover the lost truth.

Indeed, as Rudbeck looked at Atlantis, it seemed as if Plato had personally been to Sweden, and had patiently dictated the dimensions of its countryside in exact detail. The philosopher had mentioned many specific characteristics about its location and the landscape. “Not a single one,” Rudbeck was glad to say, “conflicted with the land of Sweden as it can still be seen today.”

Swept away by elation, Rudbeck described the adventure:

This island of Atlantis, which no one for some thousands of years has dared to try and find, because of the heavy mud, numerous pirates, infinite islets and rocks, and moving drift-ice that have troubled its Atlantic sea, making for the voyager a dark way and difficult to find, I have now by God’s help dared to pass with a boat equipped with 102 Platonic oars, and found her.

This map, drawn by one of Rudbeck’s talented students, Philip Thelott, shows the locations of Atlantis, Hades, and some of the many other discoveries about ancient Sweden.

AS RUDBECK CHASED Atlantis, Sweden was waiting nervously for the imminent foreign invasion. Recent Swedish losses on the battlefield had revived some bitter memories of past insults and humiliations. Just when the performances of Gustavus Adolphus, Queen Christina, and Charles X Gustav seemed to have relegated these painful experiences to the “dustbin of the past,” Danish advances were bringing them disgracefully back to mind.

In late June 1676, the Danes landed on Swedish soil. Three hundred ships dropped almost fifteen thousand well-armed enemy troops onto a highly exposed Swedish coast. Towns near the present-day Norwegian border, such as Vänersborg, were going up in flames, and stray forces were plundering unopposed in the countryside. Rushed out to the west coast, Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie was hastily assembling some means of defense.

Occasional victories came to the count, the very first for Sweden in this horrible war. For the most part, however, those successes were small and far too infrequent to have much effect. Most of the early engagements ended instead decidedly in the Danes’ favor, sometimes indeed in simply a rout. Compared with the invaders, the rounded-up makeshift Swedish forces were quite inexperienced. “Naked and barefoot” was how one observer described them.

In places with better defenses, such as Skåne in the south, the truth was no less harsh. Not only were the people succumbing to the attacks, but a frightening number were even joining the Danish invaders. Many families in this region, which had long been a part of the Danish kingdom, resented the forced changes that came with the union with Sweden, the seemingly never-ending stream of orders from the distant capital. Within a few months it looked as if this rich province of fertile lands, deep forests, and enviable fishing grounds was well on its way to being restored to Denmark.

The people were, in the meantime, suffering as prices for basic necessities rose to exorbitant heights, and taxes remained at their crushing levels. As the Danes penetrated farther into the Swedish kingdom, confusion was everywhere, and so was the desperation of the people. At one point a band of peasants actually attacked the Swedish king’s personal supplies. Nine of the king’s guards were killed, and the peasants dragged away food, drink, trophies (including the royal tent), and money to the tune of fifty thousand daler silvermynt.

By the end of autumn 1676, the Danes had burned and pillaged widely in the west, and taken all but one of the strategic fortresses in the south, the fortress at Malmö. If things continued in this way, one historian noted, there was a fear that “the king would not only lose his mind, but also his crown.” The many setbacks severely strained the Swedes, and certainly must have increased Rudbeck’s own anxieties.

However bleak the prospects looked in the darkest days of the 1670s, Rudbeck could reassure himself and his fellow Swedes that a great, powerful civilization had once flourished in their beleaguered country. Ancient heroes and poets had made pilgrimages to this glorious civilization, and had sought its wisdom. Yet it was not just a matter of seeking solace in a distant, imagined past.

Rudbeck’s investigations also made him feel that he had found a recipe for surviving this time of crisis. As the country faced its worst emergency in modern history, the Swedes could look back for guidance to their ancestors, who had loved justice, given their sacred oaths of loyalty to the kingdom, and elevated a life of virtue to an art form. The Atlanteans cherished truth, dignity, and goodness, holding honor in the strictest regard.

This was a clarion call for his fellow Swedes to heed the lessons from their Atlantean ancestors. All the happiness and wisdom that flourished in their society had begun with the individual Atlanteans, who, in their prime, “thought scorn of everything save virtue.” Despite enjoying great riches, they were not so “drunk with pride … that they lost control of themselves and went to ruin.” The problems had only begun when they lost this enlightened perspective. As Plato put it, the old “divinity within them” was gradually extinguished, causing the once mighty civilization to succumb to its worst excesses.

The same malady was once again threatening the Atlanteans’ descendants. As Sweden was suffering a losing war, a struggling economy, popular unrest, treasonous support of the invaders, and a sense of hopelessness, Rudbeck believed that it was absolutely urgent to rekindle the wisdom of Atlantis. Nothing less would prevent Sweden from sinking for a second time into the decadence that came with too much lusting for power, wealth, and worldly ambition.