Atlantis: The Mystery of the Vanishing Continent
(9800 BCE)
Atlantis has been described as the greatest of all historical mysteries. Plato, writing about 350 BCE, was the first to speak of the great island that had vanished “in a day and a night,” sinking beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
Plato’s account in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias has the absorbing quality of good science fiction. The story, as recounted in Timaeus by poet and historian Critias, tells how Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver, went to Sais in Egypt about 590 BCE and heard the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest.
Map of Atlantis, showing mid-Atlantic
Beyond the Pillars
According to the priest, Atlantis was already a great civilization when the Greeks founded Athens, which Plato dates to about 9600 BCE. Atlantis was then “a mighty power that was aggressing wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city [Athens] put an end.” Atlantis, said the priest, lay “beyond the pillars of Hercules” (the Strait of Gibraltar) and was larger than Libya and Turkey put together. Deserted by their allies, the Athenians fought alone against the Atlantians and finally conquered them. But at this point violent floods and earthquakes destroyed both the Athenians and the Atlantians, and Atlantis sank beneath the waves in a single day and night.
The Legend
In the second dialogue, the Critias, Plato goes into great detail about the history and geography of the lost continent. The Atlantians were great engineers and architects; their capital city was built on a hill, surrounded by concentric bands of land and water, joined by immense tunnels large enough for a ship to sail through. The city was about 11 miles in diameter. A huge canal connected the outermost of these rings of water to the sea. Behind the city farmers worked on a plain 230 by 340 miles. Behind the plain were mountains with many wealthy villages, fertile meadows, and all kinds of crops and livestock.
The Rock of Gibraltar, one of the pillars of Hercules, in foreground, with North Africa in the distance
Eventually the Atlantians began to lose their wisdom and virtue, and became greedy, corrupt, and domineering. Then Zeus decided to teach them a lesson. So he called all the gods together . . .
And there, frustratingly, Plato’s story breaks off. He never completed the Critias or wrote the third dialogue of the trilogy, the Hermocrates.
Most scholars have assumed that Atlantis was a folktale; even Plato’s pupil Aristotle is on record as disbelieving it. Yet this seems unlikely. The Timaeus dialogue was one of Plato’s most ambitious works; his translator Jowett called it “the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has bequeathed to us.” So it seems less likely that Plato decided to insert a fairy tale into the middle of it and more likely that he wanted to preserve the story for future generations.
In the late nineteenth century, U.S. congressman Ignatius Donnelly became fascinated by Atlantis, and the result was the book Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882), which became a best-seller and has remained in print ever since. Donnelly asks whether Plato was recording a real catastrophe and concludes that he was. He points out that modern earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have caused tremendous damage that equals the kind Plato describes.
Donnelly also studied flood legends from Egypt to Mexico, pointing out similarities, and indicated all kinds of affinities connecting artifacts from both sides of the Atlantic. British prime minister William Gladstone was so impressed by the book that he tried to persuade the cabinet to fund a ship to trace the outlines of Atlantis. (He failed.)
Artist’s impression of the mythological city-state of Atlantis
Was Atlantis Santorini?
In the late 1960s archaeologist Angelos Galanopoulos propounded what is perhaps the most credible theory of the destruction of Atlantis, which he based upon the discoveries of Professor Spyridon Marinatos about the island of Santorini, or Thera, in the Mediterranean. Around the year 1500 BCE a tremendous volcanic explosion ripped apart Santorini and probably destroyed most of the civilization of the Greek islands, the coastal regions of eastern Greece, and northern Crete. This, Galanopoulos suggests, was the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis. But surely the date is wrong? The destruction of Santorini took place a mere 900 years before Solon, not nine thousand.
This is the essence of Galanopoulos’s argument—he believes that a scribe accidentally multiplied all of the figures in Plato’s dialogue by 10. Galanopoulos points out that all of Plato’s measurements seem far too large. The 10,000-stadia ditch around the plain would stretch around modern London 20 times. The width and depth of the plain behind the city, 23 by 34 miles, would be a more reasonable size than 230 by 340 miles. If all of Plato’s figures are reduced in this way, then Santorini begins to sound altogether more like Atlantis—although Galanopoulos suggests that the Atlantian civilization stretched all over the Mediterranean and that Crete itself was probably the Royal City. And how could such a mistake come about? Galanopoulos suggests that the Greek copyist mistook the Egyptian symbol for 100—a coiled rope—for the symbol for 1,000—a lotus flower.
There is only one major objection to all this: Plato states clearly that Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules. But Galanopoulos argues that the Pillars of Hercules could well refer to the two extreme southern promontories of Greece, Cape Matapan and Cape Malea, rather than the Strait of Gibraltar.
And this, on the whole, seems one of the most compelling theories of Atlantis so far.
Aerial view of Santorini
What Happened to the Roanoke Colony?
(1590)
In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh sent an expedition to North America to choose a likely location to establish a permanent settlement. The expedition leaders chose what is now the Outer Banks of North Carolina as an ideal spot. The short history of Roanoke, the first English colony in the New World, was marred by savagery, xenophobic fear, and bigotry—almost all being displayed by the “civilized” Englishmen and not by the “primitive” local Algonquian Indians.
The subsequent mysterious disappearance of all of the Roanoke colonists was a grim start to European colonization of North America.
A contemporary map of the Roanoke area
Pirate Nation
The gentleman-explorer Sir Walter Raleigh established the Roanoke colony. Queen Elizabeth I gave Raleigh a commission to create a colony in the New World, but she gave him only 10 years to do so. Considering the difficulties involved—the stormy 3,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean, the danger of possibly hostile American Indians, and the threat of the definitely hostile Spanish conquistadores, who were already established in the Caribbean and South America—this was a huge task.
By the early 1580s England was all but at war with Spain: the Spanish Catholics regarded the English Protestants as foul heretics, while the comparatively poor English viewed the wealth of gold and silver that Spain was shipping from the Americas with considerable envy. English sailors were just waiting for war to be declared to begin officially sanctioned privateer raids against the Spanish treasure fleets. And a port colony in what would later be named North Carolina would be an ideal base.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Savage Attacks
In spring 1585, 75 men, mostly veteran soldiers, landed on what they named Roanoke Island to start building the fledgling colony. Unfortunately these men took a military attitude toward local American Indians. The Carolina Algonquian tribes were initially very welcoming, but matters soured after some of the English colonists visited a local settlement, departed amicably, and then discovered that a silver cup had gone missing. Believing that the Algonquians had stolen the cup and determined to send a firm message to “primitive savages,” the English marched back, burned the tribal leader at the stake, and then sacked and burned the village. The silver cup was not found in the ravaged settlement.
After an uncomfortable year on Roanoke—with no sign of promised supply ships and angry natives all around them—the soldier-colonists hitched a ride home with the passing pirate fleet of Sir Francis Drake. On arriving a month later to discover the colony abandoned, Raleigh’s supply ships left a 15-man holding force and then sailed away.
The next batch of colonists, 117 in all, arrived the following year. This group discovered that the 15 men left by the previous year’s expedition had vanished; the newcomers found only the buried bones of one man. The friendly Croatan tribe, from nearby Hatteras Island, reported that unknown natives had attacked the men and that nine survivors had set off up the coast in an open boat, never to be seen again. It was with this ominous beginning that the Roanoke Colony was settled in earnest on July 22, 1587.
On August 18, 1587, colonist Eleanor Dare gave birth to a daughter she called Virginia: the first English child to be born in the Americas. Shortly thereafter Indians killed a man called George Howe as he fished for crab in Albemarle Sound. Convinced that this was the first salvo of an impending attack, the colonists sent their governor, John White (Virginia Dare’s maternal grandfather), back to England to recruit additional soldiers. He necessarily took their only ship with him, leaving the remaining 116 Roanoke colonists stranded.
But the start of the Anglo-Spanish War and the attack of the Spanish Armada on the British navy, delayed Governor White’s return by almost three years. When he finally returned on August 18, 1590—his granddaughter’s third birthday—he found the colony completely abandoned.
The Roanoke colony’s only ship departs for England as the colonists bid their governor, John White, farewell. White was the last Englishman to see the Roanoke colonists alive.
Lost
Few clues remain about what happened to the Roanoke colonists, but we can make some assumptions.
John White found no bodies or graves in the abandoned colony, making it unlikely that local tribes had massacred the inhabitants; why would raiders carry away the bodies of their victims? The then-common European prejudice that American Indians were all cannibals was certainly untrue of the Carolina Algonquian peoples.
Another possibility is that Spanish conquistadores captured and enslaved the colonists—as they had every right to do during wartime. But Spanish records indicate that Spain didn’t even know that the Roanoke colony existed.
John White did find two words carved into trees at the colony site: CROATAN and CRO. This might suggest that the isolated colonists had either been kidnapped by or taken under the protection of the Croatan tribe. The Croatan had been the only friendly tribe left in the area in 1587, so one might hope that it was the latter. But the Croatans had moved inland by 1590, beyond the reach of the grieving White and his crew.
Later English colonists reported an oddly “white” strain in some Carolina Algonquians, but any hope of solving the Roanoke mystery with modern DNA studies is all but lost. The Carolina Algonquian tribes were largely obliterated within a few generations by European diseases and weapons, brought to the New World by subsequent waves of colonists.
The site of the mysterious Roanoke colony as it appears today. The scant ruins of the colony are now a popular tourist attraction.
Modern climatological studies indicate that the period between 1587 and 1589 was one of severe drought, the worst in North America for 800 years. Perhaps the starving Roanoke colonists threw themselves on the mercy and charity of local natives?
(1795 to present)
Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, contains 365 islands. In summer 1795, a youth named Daniel McGinnis decided to explore one of them. Soon he came upon an oak tree with a ship’s tackle block hanging from one of its lower branches. Sure that he had stumbled upon the trail of some buccaneer’s treasure hoard, he decided to investigate further.
McGinnis rushed home, seeking the aid of two close friends, John Smith and Anthony Vaughan. The next day, he led the group, shovels in hand, to the marked oak tree. The diggers soon hit rock. Clearing the dirt, they found themselves in a 13-foot-wide flagstone-covered circle.
Oak Island
Peeling the Layers
Rather than finding buried treasure under the flagstone layer, McGinnis and his companions merely found another layer. At a depth of 10 feet they came upon a platform of oak logs. They dragged them out and at 20 feet came upon another layer of logs, and then another at 30 feet. Finally they decided to give up and dejectedly paddled home.
Frustration
McGinnis married and moved to the island, which he christened Oak Island. Soon after a new friend of his, Simeon Lynds, became intrigued by the find. Lynds raised some capital and in 1803 formed the Onslow Company, which included the original diggers, McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan. They began work on what they now called the Money Pit.
In digging its two tunnels, the Onslow Company came upon a new barrier of oak logs every 10 feet, a layer of charcoal at 40 feet, a layer of hard putty at 50 feet, and a layer of coconut fiber at 60 feet. At 90 feet they discovered a stone inscribed with mysterious hieroglyphic-type writing. Only a few feet below that, they struck a hard surface that seemed to stretch right across the shaft. Was it a treasure chest? The men made this discovery late on a Saturday evening. They did not work on Sunday. Smith later said that they spent that day deciding how many shares each man was to receive.
The sight that met their eyes as they arrived on the Monday morning must have seemed to them like a nightmare: all but about 30 feet of the 90-foot shaft was filled with muddy water. Distraught, the treasure hunters again decided to give up.
In 1849 a new syndicate, the Truro Company, tried again. Digging to a depth of 86 feet, workers were glad to find no sign of flooding. But on Sunday after church, they returned only to find the pit filled with water.
A horse-driven drill managed to descend to 106 feet but brought up only mud and stones. The company decided to dig yet another shaft and try to tunnel a way in from underneath. The excavators reached a depth of 109 feet without encountering water, but as they started to dig toward the main pit, a deluge poured in on them, and once again a group of treasure hunters barely escaped with their lives.
From the Sea
One of the drenched men observed that the water tasted salty. Watching the water level in the pit over a 12-hour period, the group saw that it rose and fell with the tide in the bay—the water was coming from the sea.
Now they shifted their attention to the nearest beach, Smith’s Cove, 500 feet to the northeast. And as the tide went out they observed that the sand “gulched water like a sponge being squeezed.” They realized that the Truro Company’s second tunnel had inadvertently unplugged a waterway, which the pit’s designers had dug from the main pit to Smith’s Cove. As quickly as the treasure hunters pumped water out of the tunnel, the sea would refill it.
Digging revealed a huge human-made sponge of coconut fiber that stretched for 150 feet. The company found five box drains that led to a funnel-shaped sump just above the high-water mark. The water passed along a downward-sloping passage for the 500 feet to the Money Pit, reaching it just below the 90-foot level.
The searchers were elated; such elaborate precautions suggested an immense treasure. Now all that remained was to block the passage . . .
They built a dam, but the tide destroyed it. Another attempt to block the tunnel failed as the familiar rush of water flooded in. After this most recent blow, the Truro Company gave up the search.
In 1859 history repeated itself. Even with a workforce of 63 men, the newly formed Oak Island Association was unable to stem the flood. In 1861 steam pumps replaced manual pumps. The boiler promptly burst, scalding a worker to death. Work was again suspended.
In the ensuing years searchers made many more attempts, most of them digging additional shafts around the Money Pit. In 1866 a new syndicate attempted to dam up Smith’s Cove, but unusually high tides defeated it. At one point workers actually discovered the site where the flood tunnel entered the Money Pit. This new discovery should have solved the problems. Workers need only block the tunnel to prevent more seawater from entering. Unfortunately shafts so honeycombed the entire area that the water could now enter from several other directions.
Yet Another Attempt
In 1891 a group calling itself the Oak Island Treasure Company tried again. It intended to “use the best modern appliances for cutting off the flow of water through the tunnel.” Unfortunately their modern equipment made no difference because the treasure hunters once again attempted to cut off the flow of water at the Money Pit end.
Finally the company did what it should have done at the start: dig at the Smith’s Cove end. At about 15 feet below the surface the diggers encountered a tunnel. They placed a charge of dynamite in the hole. When it detonated, a sudden rush of turbulence erupted in the water of the Money Pit, 450 feet away. The flood tunnel had almost certainly collapsed. Yet when the group attempted to pump out the pit, the water rushed back in just as quickly. The group surmised that there was a second flood tunnel, a great deal lower than the first.
The company did make significant finds during its search: between 130 and 151 feet and between 160 and 171 feet it found blue clay consisting of clay, sand, and water. The clay, forming a watertight seal, appeared to be the same “putty” encountered at the 50-foot level of the pit. What was even more intriguing was what lay hidden in the gap between the putty layers: a cement vault, 7 feet high with 7-inch thick walls. Drilling into the vault revealed a layer of wood, followed by a void of several inches, and then an unknown substance. Next came layers of soft metal, a few feet of metal pieces, and then more soft metal. Most perplexing was what the searchers found attached to the drill auger—a fragment of sheepskin parchment with the letters “vi,” or “ri” in handwritten script.
Encouraged, the company sank six more shafts in its attempt to block off the newly suspected second flood tunnel; it abandoned each in turn as water gushed in. It was pointless to continue. The company had spent more than $225,000 on the operations; even if it finally recovered the treasure, there would be no guarantee that it would reimburse all the members for such enormous costs.
More Dead Ends
During the next 30 years various parties made several more attempts to excavate the Money Pit. Each attempt made it less likely that anyone would ever recover the treasure. The original site was little more than a quagmire.
In 1937 a wealthy New Jersey business owner, Gilbert D. Hedden, spent two seasons digging and drilling and reached the discouraging conclusion that the treasure chests had broken up in the waterlogged soil. He decided that if he could block off the second flood tunnel, the quagmire would slowly dry out.
Hedden decided against searching between the Money Pit and the sea. Instead he tried logic. Why had the pirates never returned for their treasure? The likeliest possibility was that the pirates had died at the end of a rope, and the vital clue might be contained in court transcripts. Hedden soon found the man who seemed to fit his theories: Captain Kidd.
Aerial view of Oak Island. Smith’s Cove is an inlet on the southeast end of the small island. The cove supplies the water that fills at least one of the tunnels that were added to flood the main pit 500 feet northeast.
In fact William Kidd had not been a pirate but a privateer, a sailor whose government pays him to attack enemy ships. In 1696 King William III of England had commissioned Kidd to suppress piracy and confiscate pirate loot. But Kidd was a weak and ambitious man who found attacking merchant ships easier than pursuing pirates. Authorities sent him back to England, where he was tried and executed.
On the eve of his execution Kidd was said to have made the speaker of the House of Commons an offer: Kidd would lead the authorities to his buried treasure worth 100,000 pounds.
In a 1935 book by Harold Wilkins, Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island, Hedden came upon a map purporting to be Kidd’s treasure island. It had an obvious similarity to Oak Island. In high spirits Hedden set off for England to interview Wilkins, who said that he’d drawn the map from memory after seeing the original in a private collection. Like all of his predecessors, Hedden had reached a dead end.
Illustration of Captain Kidd and his crew burying their loot. In the late 1930s treasure hunter Gilbert D. Hedden thought that he’d stumbled upon evidence that the Money Pit stored Kidd’s hoard.
Wild Goose Chase
Next came Edwin H. Hamilton, a machine engineer who drilled down to 180 feet, deeper than anyone before him. He made an interesting discovery: the mouth of the second flood tunnel joined the Money Pit from the same side as the first one.
After Hamilton abandoned his excavations, Robert Restall, an ex-circus stunt rider, met his death in the Money Pit when exhaust gas from a pump filled the shaft. His 22-year-old son and two other men died trying to save him.
Then, in 1965, Robert Dunfield, an American petroleum geologist, once again tried the brute-force approach and brought in a gigantic clam digger and bulldozers. He could not keep the tunnels from flooding.
In 1970 Daniel Blankenship formed the Triton Alliance to explore the Money Pit. In 1976 it dug Borehole 10-X, a 237-foot tube of steel sunk 180 feet northeast of the pit. The digging uncovered several artificial cavities. A camera lowered to 230 feet revealed completely unexpected images: a severed hand floating in the water, three chests, an assortment of tools—and a human body. Divers sent to investigate these amazing finds met strong currents and such poor visibility that they had to turn back. Not long after, the hole collapsed, obliterating the Money Pit.
So the mystery remains: who built the Money Pit?
Rupert Furneaux’s book The Money Pit suggests that British army engineers at the end of the Revolutionary War constructed it to hide the garrison’s war chests, which contained money to pay the British army. If that’s the case, the army retrieved the money and took it back to England. This seems to be the likeliest explanation for the total failure of all the syndicates to find the slightest sign of treasure. Still the Triton Alliance continues the quest.
(1812–1820)
On August 9, 1812, pallbearers carried the coffin of the Hon. Thomas Chase, a slave owner on the Caribbean island of Barbados, down the steps of the family vault in the Christ Church cemetery in the town of Oistin. As they moved aside the heavy slab and the lamplight illuminated the interior, it became clear that something strange had happened. One of the three coffins already occupying the vault lay on its side. Another lay head-downward in a corner. But no sign of forced entry supported the obvious theory of desecration. Even so, the local white population had no doubt that black laborers were responsible for the violation; Thomas Chase had been a ruthless man. In fact the last coffin laid in the vault—only a month before Chase’s—was that of his daughter, Dorcas Chase. According to rumor, she starved herself to death because of her father’s brutality.
Christ Church, Oistin, Barbados
The Unquiet Grave
Four years went by; then two members of the Chase family were buried within seven weeks of each other, both of them in lead coffins. Each time, the burial party found the coffins tumbled, but there was no evidence of human entry. Even the heavy lead-encased coffin of Thomas Chase, which took eight men to lift, had moved. A wooden coffin—that of Thomasina Goddard, the first occupant of the vault—had disintegrated into planks, apparently as a result of its rough treatment. The planks were tied together roughly with wire, and the coffin was placed against the wall. After each burial, the coffins were carefully lined up and the vault firmly sealed.
The story had now become something of a sensation in the islands. A local magistrate and Rev. Thomas Orderson of Christ Church made a careful search of the vault, trying to figure out how the vandals had got in. There was undoubtedly no secret door; the stone floor, walls, and ceiling were solid and uncracked. Orderson also exonerated floods as the culprit. Although the vault lay two feet below ground level, it had been excavated out of solid limestone; floods would have marked the stone. Besides, it was unlikely that heavy lead-encased coffins would float. Orderson dismissed the theory held by the local black population that the tomb had been cursed.
The positions of the coffins before and after the vault was opened for Thomas Chase’s internment. When his daughter, Dorcas, died in 1812 her coffin was placed beside the other occupants: the wooden coffin of Thomasina Goddard, interred in 1808, and a child’s lead coffin interred in the same year. The child’s coffin was standing head downward in a corner and Dorcas’s was on its side.
By the time the next burial took place, there was a great deal of public interest. In July 1819 when pallbearers carried the cedar coffin of Thomazina Clarke into the vault, an audience of nearly 100 had gathered to watch. The cement took a long time to remove from the door—it had been used in abundance to reseal the vault—and even when it had been chipped away, the door refused to yield. Considerable effort revealed that the coffin of Thomas Chase was now jammed against it, 6 feet from where it had been placed. All the other coffins were disturbed, with the exception of the wire-bound coffin of Thomasina Goddard. This seemed to underscore the notion that flooding was not the answer—would lead-encased coffins float while wooden planks lay unmoved?
The governor, Lord Combermere, now ordered an exhaustive search. But it only verified what Orderson proclaimed: vandals could not have forced their way in, there was no hidden trapdoor, and no entrances for floodwater. Before the tomb was resealed, the governor ordered that the floor be sprinkled with sand, which would show footprints. Then once again laborers cemented the door shut. Combermere then pressed his private seal into the wet cement.
Interior of the Chase Vault today
An inscription still identifies the Chase vault, although the coffins left it in 1820.
Abandoned
Eight months later, the governor decided to investigate whether their precautions had been effective. A party of nine, including the governor, the rector, and two masons made their way to the vault. They verified that the cement was undisturbed and the seals intact. Yet, once again, the place was in chaos. The child’s coffin lay on the steps that led down into the chamber, while Thomas Chase’s coffin was upside down. Only Thomasina Goddard’s bundle of planks remained undisturbed. The sand on the floor was still unmarked. Once again the masons struck the walls with their hammers, looking for a secret entrance. And finally, when it seemed obvious that the mystery was insoluble, Lord Combermere ordered that the coffins be removed and buried elsewhere. After that the tomb remained empty.
The Mystery Remains
None of the many writers on the case have been able to supply a plausible explanation. Flooding would have disarranged Thomasina Goddard’s coffin and moved the sand on the floor. No earthquakes during the period were reported. And vandals could not have broken in without leaving any traces.
Yet a “supernatural” explanation is just as implausible. It has been suggested that the disturbances began after the burial of a woman believed to have committed suicide; the suggestion is that the other “spirits” refused to rest at ease with a suicide. Moving coffins might suggest such a poltergeist, but all investigators agree that a poltergeist needs some kind of “energy source”—often an emotionally disturbed adolescent living on the premises. And an empty tomb can provide no such energy source.
Many locals believed there was some kind of voodoo at work—some magical force deliberately conjured by a witch seeking revenge on hated slave owners. It sounds unlikely, but it is the best explanation ever offered.
The Secrets of Rennes-le-Château
(1885)
Rennes-le-Château is a tiny village on the French side of the Pyrenees in the region of Languedoc. In the first millennium BCE it was a prosperous town, known to the Phoenicians and the Romans, who called it Reddae. For more than 1,000 years it thrived in relative obscurity. In the fourteenth century CE half the town was destroyed in a siege; the plague carried off most of the rest of the inhabitants. Since then Rennes-le-Château has been a mere village.
In 1885 a new priest arrived in the village: 33-year-old Bérenger Saunière, known as a rebel. His superiors had sent Saunière to Rennes-le-Château, pretty well the end of the world, as a kind of punishment. He was a pauper when he arrived, but a strange discovery inside the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine sent him to Paris—and Saunière returned, mysteriously, showered in wealth.
Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine
The Discovery
For the first three years of Saunière’s stay in Rennes-le-Château, as his account books show, he was very poor indeed. In 1888 he started some repairs on the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine. Workers lifted the top of the high altar and discovered that one of the two pillars on which it rested was hollow. Hidden inside were three wooden tubes, each containing a roll of parchment. The parchments seemed to be in some kind of code. Saunière showed them to the bishop of Carcassonne, who sent him to Paris to consult experts at the church of Saint Sulpice.
When Saunière returned to Rennes-le-Château he was a rich man. He built the villagers a mountain road and a water tower, and had the church elaborately but strangely decorated with such oddities as an enormous lame demon carrying the font of holy water. Over the door he had inscribed, TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE (“Dreadful is this place”).
Encoded Treasure
Where had Saunière’s sudden wealth come from? The only clue is that the code on the parchments contained the words, “Teniers and Poussin hold the key.” And while in Paris, Saunière had purchased for himself reproductions of two pictures: The Temptation of Saint Antony by David Teniers the Younger and The Shepherds of Arcadia by Nicolas Poussin.
The lame demon has been identified as Asmodeus, guardian of King Solomon’s legendary treasure. And so it has been speculated that the coded manuscript led Saunière to a treasure—possibly the treasure of the Cathars, a heretical sect associated with this region, whose last adherents were burned alive in 1243 after a siege at the mountain of Montségur. It is said that three men escaped the siege and that they carried with them the “treasure of the Cathars.” Others believe, however, that the treasure was a group of holy books.
The Asmodeus font
In recent years Henry Lincoln, an English scholar, has thrown new light on the mystery. With the use of a computer, he claims to have decoded Saunière’s manuscript and discovered the hidden secrets of the paintings by Teniers and Poussin, particularly the latter, which pictures a tomb close to the village of Rennes-le-Château.
Lincoln is convinced that Saunière’s secret was simple. Rennes-le-Château was once called Aereda and was an important center of the Knights Templar, the order dedicated to guarding the Temple of Jerusalem. Lincoln has uncovered evidence that the Templars were connected with another secret order known as the Priory of Sion, also connected with the Temple of Jerusalem. There seems to be strong evidence that this secret society continued down the ages, and that the Rosicrucians, a fellowship of mystic-philosopher-doctors dedicated to studying nature, the physical universe, and the spiritual realm, which formed in seventeenth-century Germany, were actually the Priory of Sion, who were simply using a new name.
In short, it looks as if Saunière stumbled upon some secret of the Rosicrucians and that the money he received came from them.
One of the two versions of the Shepherds of Arcadia that Nicolas Poussin painted in the 1630s, which may hold important clues to the secret of Rennes-le-Château
Heresy in Rennes-le-Château
There is still a great deal of mystery involved. In 1910 Saunière’s bishop suspended him as a priest, but Saunière continued to say Mass in the chapel he built himself. When Saunière died of a stroke in 1917, he made a confession that deeply shocked the priest who heard it. Some say Saunière confided that he’d found evidence to prove that Jesus did not die on the cross, but instead escaped to France; in fact to Rennes-le-Château. This would imply that the whole foundation of Christianity is unsound: no crucifixion, no vicarious atonement for the human race.
Perhaps it is just as well that the ultimate mystery of Rennes-le-Château remains unsolved.
Engraved memorial stone on the tomb of Father Saunière
The Mystery of Eilean Mòr—the Island of Disappearing Men
(December 15, 1900)
In the empty Atlantic, 17 miles to the west of the Hebrides, lie the Flannan Islands, the largest and most northerly of which is called Eilean Mòr. Its name has become synonymous with an apparently insoluble mystery of the sea.
Although Hebridean shepherds often ferried their sheep over to the islands to graze on the rich grass, they themselves never spent a night there, claiming that the islands were haunted. The waters of the area are dangerous, and in 1895 the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB), the lighthouse authority for Scotland and the Isle of Man, announced plans to erect a lighthouse on Eilean Mòr. The lighthouse finally opened in December 1899 and for the next year its beam could be seen reflected on the rough seas between the Isle of Lewis and the Flannans.
Then, 11 days before Christmas in 1900, the light went out.
Flannan Lighthouse today
Tidy House
The weather was too stormy for the NLB steamer Hesperus to investigate immediately, though everyone voiced concern for the three men tending the lighthouse: James Ducat, Donald McArthur, and Thomas Marshall. Finally, on December 26, Hesperus could make her way to the island. In the heavy swell she had to make three approaches before she was able to moor by the lighthouse’s eastern jetty. No flags had answered the steamer’s signals, and her crew saw no sign of life.
Harbormaster Joseph Moore rushed to investigate. He found doors closed, the clock in the main room stopped, and the ashes in the fireplace cold. Afraid, Moore waited for two seamen to join him before venturing upstairs. All they found, however, were neatly made beds in the tidy sleeping quarters.
The Hesperus returned to the Isle of Lewis with the mystery unsolved. Two days later investigators landed on Eilean Mòr, and tried to reconstruct what had happened. An investigation proved that the light had not failed for lack of oil; the wicks were trimmed and the lights were all ready to be lit. The last entry in the record of James Ducat, the chief lighthouse keeper, was dated December 15 at 9:00 AM, the day the light went out. Everything was in order; clearly, the men had completed their basic duties for the day. Whatever happened to the men occurred, therefore, between the time they finished their daytime duties and darkness, when they regularly lit the lamp.
At first it looked as if the solution was straightforward. On the western jetty they found a number of ropes entangled around a crane that was 65 feet above sea level. A tool chest kept in a crevice 45 feet above this was missing. It looked as if the gale had sent a 100-foot wave crashing into the island, sweeping the tool chest—as well as the three men—away. Also missing were Ducat’s and Marshall’s oilskin raincoats, water-resistant garments worn only when they visited the jetties. So the investigators had a plausible theory. Ducat and Marshall had feared that the crane was damaged in the storm; they had struggled to the jetty in their oilskins, then been caught by a sudden huge wave. But in that case, what had happened to the third man, Donald McArthur, whose oilskins remained in the lighthouse?
The windswept island of Eilean Mòr, shown at the top right of the map, left, is part of the Flannan Isles, also known as the Seven Hunters Isles. Today, only seabirds, such as the northern gannet, shown below, inhabit the remote and rocky island.
Unsuitable Theories
All of these theories were dashed when someone pointed out that the 15th had been a calm day; the storms had not started until the following day. Perhaps Ducat had simply entered the wrong date by mistake? Investigators had to abandon that hypothesis, too, when Captain Holman of the steamship Archer reported that he had passed close to the islands on the night of December 15, and that the light was already out.
Other hypotheses, too, have been suggested and discarded. If one man were in danger of drowning, the other two might have also drowned saving him—but surely they would not have taken the time to don oilskins first. Moreover, if someone had fallen in, the rescuers would have thrown him a lifebelt and rope (provided on the jetties for just such an emergency), instead of jumping in themselves.
One last theory was that one of the three men had gone insane and pushed the others to their deaths, then thrown himself into the sea. It is just possible—but there is little evidence to support it.
Vanished
The British broadcaster Valentine Dyall suggested the most plausible explanation in his book Unsolved Mysteries (1954). He recounts the experience of Scottish journalist Iain Campbell, who witnessed a freak wave some 70 feet above the jetty on Eilean Mòr in 1947. It lingered for a minute, then subsided. The lighthouse keeper told him that this curious “upheaval” occurs periodically and that several men had barely avoided being dragged into the sea. Such an eruption could certainly have caught off-guard the three lighthouse keepers in 1900.
But it is still hard to understand how all three men could be involved in such an accident. McArthur was not wearing his oilskins, so it is highly unlikely that he was on the jetty (and he was probably in the tower itself). Even if his companions were swept away, would he have been foolish enough to rush to the jetty and fling himself in to save them?
One thing is clear: on a calm December day at the turn of the century, a tragedy snatched three men off Eilean Mòr and left few clues to the mystery.
(1918 to present)
On the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five Avenger torpedo bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a routine two-hour patrol over the Atlantic. By 2:15 PM the planes of Flight 19 were well over the Atlantic, following their usual patrol route. The weather was warm and clear. At 3:45 PM the control tower received a message from Lt. Charles Taylor: “This is an emergency. We seem to be off course. We cannot see land . . . repeat . . . we cannot see land.”
Despite the setting sun, the men couldn’t identify their direction and could only say that everything looked strange, including the ocean. The situation grew desperate. Unless the planes could return to land quickly, they would run out of fuel. A giant Martin Mariner flying boat, with a crew of 13, took off at 6:27 PM on a rescue mission. Twenty-three minutes later, observers watched a bright orange flash light up the eastern sky. Neither the Martin Mariner nor the Avengers ever returned. Six airplanes vanished completely, as other planes and ships have vanished in the area that has become known as the Devil’s Triangle, or the Bermuda Triangle.
The Bermuda Triangle
Vincent Gaddis Sounds the Alarm
The disappearance of Flight 19 was not the first such event in the area, nor would it be the last. Over the next two decades, at least 15 additional disappearances in the 50-mile region between Florida and the Bahamas cost more than 200 lives.
One of the first people to realize that all this amounted to a frightening mystery was journalist Vincent Gaddis. In February 1964 his article “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” appeared in Argosy magazine, and bestowed the now familiar name on that mysterious stretch of ocean. A year later, in a book about sea mysteries called Invisible Horizon, Gaddis included a long list of ships that had vanished in the area, beginning with the Rosalie, which vanished in 1840, and ending with the yacht Connemara IV in 1956. In the final chapter Gaddis entered the realm of science fiction and speculated on a space-time continuum, implying that some of the missing planes and ships had vanished down a kind of fourth-dimensional plughole.
U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers—the ill-fated planes of Flight 19
Flight 19 vanished just after World War II, but the closing months of World War I saw an even more spectacular disappearance. In January 1918, the USS Cyclops—a navy cargo ship—sailed to Brazilian waters to fuel British ships in aid of the war effort. On February 16 the Cyclops and her 306 crewmen left from Rio de Janeiro for the return voyage home. After having been last seen at Barbados on March 3 and 4, she disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. No trace of the ship nor any of her crew was ever found, and the Cyclops remains the single most devastating noncombat loss in U.S. naval history.
The U.S. Navy launched the Cyclops in 1910. The ship, which carried a cargo of heavy manganese, was lost at sea in 1918. No wreckage nor any trace of the crew were ever found.
Ivan Sanderson Makes a Map
Scottish naturalist and writer Ivan Sanderson felt that Robert Gaddis’s spacetime theory was going to too fat into the realm of science fiction to adequately explain what was happening in the Bermuda Triangle. Relying on his scientific training, Sanderson marked a number of areas where disappearances had occurred on a map of the world. There was, for example, another “Devil’s Triangle” south of the Japanese island of Honshu where ships and planes had vanished.
Below are various versions of the triangle’s boundaries. Since Sanderson first drew a map of the Bermuda Triangle, other writers and researchers have redrawn its boundaries.
Always the Innovator
Christopher Columbus may have been the first person to record an encounter with the forces of the Bermuda Triangle. During a 1492 journey in the area, he wrote in his log that his compass acted strangely, and he described seeing weird lights in the sky.
Sporadic attempts to investigate the Bermuda Triangle and explain its peculiar effects occurred for the next three years, but the general public remained largely in the dark. That changed in 1974, when Charles Berlitz, a well-regarded linguist and creator of a successful language-learning course, once again rehashed the story of the Bermuda Triangle in a new book. Berlitz persuaded a commercial publisher, Doubleday, to publish it, and the book promptly jumped to the top of the best-seller lists. Berlitz was the first man to turn the mystery into a worldwide sensation, and to become rich on the proceeds.
Skeptics were roused to a fury, blasting the public with articles, books, and television programs debunking the Bermuda Triangle. They adopted the commonsense approach: the disappearances were all due to natural causes, particularly to freak storms. Yet the sheer quantity of disappearances in the area, most of them never even yielding a body or a trace of wreckage, somewhat disputes this explanation.
The overwhelming success of Charles Berlitz’s book The Bermuda Triangle set off a popular-culture craze. Whether one was a believer or a skeptic, consumers in the mid-1970s could find plenty of new material on the mystery. There were also products that exploited the phenomenon for fun, such as the Milton Bradley board game The Bermuda Triangle, introduced in 1976. It came complete with a magnetic cloud that could move or destroy a player’s “ship” as it made its way from port to port.
Those Who Escaped
Is there, then, an alternative which appeals to common sense? One such theory rests on the evidence of some of those who have escaped the Bermuda Triangle. In November 1964 charter pilot Chuck Wakely was returning from Nassau to Miami, Florida. He had climbed up to 8,000 feet when he noticed a faint glow around the wings of his plane. This increased steadily, and all his electronic equipment began to fail. Then slowly the glow faded, and his instruments once again functioned normally.
In 1966 Captain Don Henry was steering his tug from Puerto Rico to Fort Lauderdale on a clear afternoon. He heard shouting, and hurried to the bridge. There he saw that the compass was spinning clockwise. A strange darkness came down, and the horizon disappeared. A later report stated that, “The water seemed to be coming from all directions.” And although the electric generators were still running, all electric power faded away. An auxiliary generator refused to start. The boat seemed to be surrounded by fog. Fortunately the engines were still working, and suddenly the boat emerged from the fog. To Henry’s amazement, the fog was concentrated into a single solid bank, and only within this area was the sea turbulent; outside the area the sea remained calm. Henry remarked that the compass behaved as it did when a large deposit of iron affects the needle.
Divine Retribution?
In December 2008 a plane carrying 11 passengers disappeared en route to Mayaguana Island in the Bahamas. The twin-engine plane took off from the Dominican Republic on December 15. The pilot, Adriano Jimenez, was flying with only a student licence. In addition there were reports that he had stolen the plane.
Jimenez sent out an emergency signal approximately 35 minutes after taking off and then disappeared from radar. The U.S. Coast Guard scoured an area of about 5,300 square miles but turned up nothing before suspending its search.
Earth is, of course, a gigantic magnet, and magnetic lines of force run around its surface in strange patterns. Birds and animals use these lines of force for migrating, or “homing” behavior. But there are areas of the earth’s surface where birds lose their way because the lines form a magnetic anomaly or vortex. The Marine Observer for 1930 warns sailors about a magnetic disturbance in the neighborhood of the Tambora volcano, near Sumbawa, which deflected a ship’s compass by six points. Dr. John de Laurier of Ottawa camped on the ice floes of northern Canada in 1974 in search of an enormous magnetic anomaly 43 miles long, which he believed originated about 18 miles below the surface of the earth. De Laurier’s theory is that such anomalies occur where the earth’s tectonic plates rub together—an occurrence that also causes earthquakes.
A Disturbance in the Force
The central point is that our earth is not like an ordinary bar magnet, whose field is symmetrical and precise; it is full of magnetic “pitfalls” and anomalies, possibly due to movements in its molten iron core. Such movements would in fact produce shifting patterns in the earth’s field and bursts of magnetic activity. If they are related to fault zones, then we would expect them to occur in definitive areas, just as earthquakes do. A magnetic disturbance would cause compasses to spin, rather like a huge magnetic meteor roaring up from the center of the earth. On the sea it would produce violent turbulence, affecting the water in the same way the moon affects the tides, but in an irregular pattern, so that the water would appear to be coming “from all directions.” Clouds and mist would be sucked into the vortex, forming a “bank” in its immediate area. And electronic gadgetry would probably go haywire.
All this reminds us why simplistic explanations of the Bermuda Triangle—books contending that the mystery is a journalistic invention—are not only superficial but dangerous. They discourage the investigation of one of the most interesting scientific enigmas of our time.
The magnetic force emanating from the earth’s molten iron core may explain the strange disturbances in the Bermuda Triangle.