The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

by Oronteus Finnaeus in 1531, showing Antarctica looking much as it does on a modern map. But it depicted the bays without the ice, rivers flowing to the sea, and even mountains that are now buried under ice. Although the Oronteus map failed to show the Palmer Peninsula, which stretches between north-western Antarctica and the coast of Patagonia, in reality, there is no such peninsula – if the ice melted, there would only be an island. In short, the original map had been made by someone who knew the
whole
of Antarctica – inland, as well as the coast. Thatcould mean either that Antarctica had originally been mapped by sailors who had explored and mapped it inland, or that the original inhabitants of the continent had mapped it for themselves. Whatever the case, it suggested that Antarctica had been mapped more then 6,000 years ago.
    Other portolans were equally significant. The Dulcert Portolano of 1339 shows precise knowledge of an area from Galway to the Don Basin in Russia. A Turkish Hadji Ahmad map of 1559 shows the world from a northern projection, as if hovering over the North Pole, and also seems to show Siberia and Alaska as joined. Since this is a heart-shaped map, with Siberia in one dimple and Alaska in the other, this could simply reflect the fact that the mapmaker did not have space to include the stretch of sea of the Bering Strait between the two. However, if there was no Bering Strait, the original map must have been made more than 12,000 years ago, when Siberia and Alaska were joined by a land bridge at this location. A 12,000-year-old map sounds unlikely, but everything Hapgood was uncovering seemed equally absurd. He began to understand why the portolans had remained unexamined in the Library of Congress for decades – any scholar who had taken a close look at them had probably shuddered and hastily closed the folder.
    The map of Antarctica published by Philip Buache in 1737 showed the Antarctic continent divided into two islands – as we now know, it is below the ice. How did Buache know this? He must have been using maps even older than those used by Oronteus Finnaeus and the creator of the Dulcert Portolano, which had used old maps that showed the inland sea frozen over.
    The map Hapgood found in Joseph Needham’s
Science and Civilisation in China,20
dating from 1137, was carved on stone; it was drawn over a grid of squares. Hapgood had made an interesting discovery about the Piri Reis map and various others that could be traced back to the time of the library at Alexandria. Their degree of latitude was shorter than theirdegree of longitude, because the original mapmaker had used an oblong grid; a later mapmaker had mistakenly changed this into a square grid, causing a ‘longitude error’. Since this same longitude error was also present on the Chinese map, it looked as if its original also dated from a very long time ago. Hapgood came to the conclusion: ‘Perhaps we have here evidence that our lost civilisation of five or ten thousands years ago extended its mapmaking here, as well as to the Americas and Antarctica.’
    Again, Hapgood noted that West Africa, as depicted by Piri Reis, seems to have an ample water supply – for example, lakes that do not now exist are depicted – and other ancient maps cited by Hapgood show lakes in the Sahara. Between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, the mistral - the north wind – was very wet, carrying moisture from the melting glaciers of the Ice Age, so that the Sahara was green and fertile. Since the Piri Reis map shows West Africa with lakes, it would seem that the original map used by Piri Reis dated from that wet period.
    In
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
Hapgood built up his case until it became irresistible. It is impossible to dismiss the book as a work of imaginative speculation, for every page bears the marks of wide and patient scholarship. Yet the conclusions of its final chapter, A Civilisation That Vanished’, would be bound to shock any scholar