Science: Sunken City

The Lost Atlantis so lavishly described by Plato has been “found” all over the world—from Ceylon to Sweden. Last week a German clergyman was writing a report on how he had found it again—this time in the North Sea.

Late this summer a fishing boat set out from the German port of Husum. On board was scholarly Jürgen Spanuth, pastor of the Lutheran church in Ost Bordelum, a little village behind the North Sea dikes. Also on board were a diver, a public stenographer and assorted scientific equipment. The trip was costing Pastor Spanuth 150 marks a day and would use up most of his savings, but he thought the expense would be justified. He was after the biggest treasure of all, the glittering undersea remains of Atlantis, which he was convinced from his readings of Greek and Egyptian lay just beyond the dikes of his own village.

“I See a Wall.” The boat circled Helgoland, the rocky island and former fortress 28 miles off the Schleswig-Holstein coast. Guided by Pastor Spanuth, it moved toward shore and anchored 50 stadia (5.7 miles) from Helgoland. The diver dropped overboard and walked along the sandy bottom 30 feet below the surface.

“What do you see?” Pastor Spanuth asked him over the telephone.

“I see a wall,” said the diver.

While the stenographer wrote it down, Pastor Spanuth leaned against the gunwale, breathing hard. Plato, he was sure now, had guided him to the right spot.

In four more days of diving and note-taking, Spanuth found that his wall encircled an oval area 1,012 yards long and 328 yards across. Inside were irregularities that might very well be the ruins of buildings long covered by the sand. One of these buildings, Spanuth is convinced, will prove to be the palace of the Kings of Atlantis.

Not many serious scholars will accept Spanuth’s theory without some questions. Most believe that when Plato described Atlantis (in the Dialogues Timaeus and Critias), he was merely writing a political pamphlet about an imaginary state. His contemporaries did not take him literally, but during the Middle Ages Plato gained such enormous authority that his political fantasy was accepted as sober fact. An Atlantis cult grew, and still flourishes. The myth has even multiplied, begetting Mu (sunk in the Pacific) and Lemuria (sunk in the Indian Ocean).*

“It Is Possible.” As described by Plato, Atlantis does not sound very much like what Pastor Spanuth found. Atlantis was a very large island, as big as North Africa and Asia Minor put together, and Plato located it outside the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). The land had high mountains, level plains and a network of wide canals. Its great temples were encrusted with silver and gold. Nine thousand years before Plato’s time, it sank into the sea (the Atlantic).

But Pastor Spanuth has ways to explain away such minor difficulties. Plato, he says, was not infallible. After all, he got his information in a very indirect manner through Egyptian priests, never noted for scientific precision.

Pastor Spanuth plans no more diving trips soon, because he has run out of money. He is already satisfied that he has found Atlantis. What about the gold that encrusted the lost city? He is a scholar, replies the pastor, not a treasure hunter. But the golden idols and buildings probably still lie under the North Sea sands. “It is possible,” says Pastor Spanuth, “quite possible.”

* Mu was invented out of whole cloth by James Churchward, who wrote several detailed, popular books about its inhabitants and their alleged “secrets.” Lemuria, originally a geologists’ land mass that sank 60 million years ago, was appropriated and modernized by Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society. She used it as a home for her “Third Race” of apelike, four-armed men who came to a bad end after discovering sex.