The Atlantis Blueprint Read Online Free Page B

the
Hermocrates.
The likeliest explanation is that his plans were interrupted by illness and death – he died at the age of eighty.
    The story of Atlantis continued to fascinate readers for more than 2,000 years. In the nineteenth century an American congressman named Ignatius Donnelly wrote the first complete study of the legend, concluding that it is almost certainly a record of fact.
Atlantis, The Antediluvian World,9
which has been in print ever since it was first published in 1882, is a work of extraordinary range that argues that the colonies of Atlantis included North and South America, as well as Egypt and Spain, and is inclined to believe that the Azores, in the mid-Atlantic, are the only part of the sunken island that remains visible. Donnelly came close to persuading the British prime minister Gladstone to send a naval vessel to look for Atlantean remains.
    Donnelly – described as ‘the most erudite man ever to sit in Congress’ – seems to have been a remarkable man. He was the author of an influential book proposing that William Shakespeare was in fact Francis Bacon, while a sequel to his text on Atlantis,
Ragnarok, The Age of Fire and Gravel
(1883), 10 set out to explain the origins of the layer of sand, gravel and clay that covers most of our earth, arguing that itwas left behind after a flood caused by the impact of some great comet which vaporised oceans and caused an age of darkness. This happened, Donnelly suggests, when man had already begun to establish civilisation, and the event is reflected in many myths of catastrophe. The area where the comet struck, he thinks, may have been the mid-Atlantic – in short, Atlantis.
    It is an interesting speculation, for a cometary impact is as good an explanation as any for the destruction of Plato’s legendary civilisation. But Donnelly’s belief that Atlantis was located in the mid-Atlantic cannot be sustained. The explanation is summarised in a popular volume on mysteries published in 1961:
    At first sight the configuration of the bed of the Atlantic between Bermuda and Spain appears to confirm the former existence of Atlantis. Depth sounders carried westwards from Spain disclose first a valley three thousand feet in depth, the sea bed then rising perpendicularly to the summits of the Azores which are in effect the tops of a high mountain range which runs under the sea north and south in the Atlantic. The ocean bed then drops to another valley two thousand feet deep and rises steeply again to the island of Bermuda, another mountain top. It appears, therefore, that the Azores represent the last remaining outposts of Atlantis. But geological surveys of the ocean bed have disclosed that, if any subsidences took place, they occurred at a date a hundred thousand years or more before the time of the supposed loss of Atlantis. 11
    This, then, would appear to rule out the existence of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean – at least, if it was the size of North Africa and the Middle East combined.
    As Hapgood reread Plato’s account, he was struck by the fact that this sounded like a description of something that hadactually happened. It seemed to him that the most interesting question was not so much where Atlantis was located, but what could have caused such a catastrophe. No volcanic eruption could be great enough to wreck a whole continent and extend its destructiveness as far as Greece.
    A trivial domestic incident started a new train of thought. Hapgood had put a heavy rug, rolled into a bundle, into the washing machine, and when the drum had begun to spin, the machine shook until it tore the bolts out of the kitchen floor. At roughly the same time as this incident, a friend of Hapgood, Hugh Auchinloss Brown, an engineer, suggested his own theory of how an earth catastrophe could have taken place. The earth’s polar ice caps are huge, Antarctica’s alone being about twice as large as the United States; the northern ice cap is almost entirely floating ice, but