Content 1959 Begins

"Where was I? Where was I? I wanted to know this at any cost, I wanted to speak, I wanted to tear off the sphere of copper which imprisoned my head. But Captain Nemo came to me and stopped me with a gesture. Then picking up a fragment of chalky stone, he moved towards a rock of basalt on which he wrote this word:

'Atlantis'.

"With a flash it all came to me . Atlantis, the ancient Meropidae of Thermopomus, the Atlantis of Plato, this continent denied by Origen, Porphry, Jamblichus, d'Anville, Malte-Brun, Humboldt, who put its disappearence as a legend, admitted Posidenous, Pliny, Ammianus, Marcellinus, Tertullian, Engel, Sherer, Tournefort, Buffon, d' Avezac, and I had it before my eyes, still bearing irrefutable proofs of the catastrophe! This was the drowned region which was outside of Europe, of Asia, of Lybia, past the columns of Hercules, where had lived this powerful Atlantean race, against which had been made the first wars of ancient Greece."

"I was touching with my hand these ruins aged by a thousand centuries and contemporary with the geological epochs! I was walking where had walked the contemporaries of earliest man! I was crushing with my boots the skeletons of the animals of this fabulous time, which had once enjoyed the shade of these fossilised trees!" "Why was time so short! I would have liked to go down the steep slopes of this mountain, to cover the whole vast continent, which had doubtless linked Africa and America, and to have visited its great pre diluvial cities. There, perhaps, before my eyes, lay stretched Machimos the warlike; Eusebius the peaceful, whose gigantic inhabitants lived for centuries, and who had the strenght to pile up these huge blocks of stone which still resist the force of the waters. One day, perhaps some submarine eruption would throw these sunken ruins to the surface."

E. Sykes- Bearing in mind that this was written when modern submarines had scarcely made their appearance, this episode of the Nautilus resting on the upper flanks of one of the submarine mountains of the Atlantic, and seeing the ruins of Atlantis may happen any day from now. At the moment it is not possible for human beings to actually leave the submarines to inspect soil, but this can be done equally well by television cameras. I have always maintained that anywhere on the slopes of the Azores or the canaries would be a most suitable spot to discover the remains of Atlantean culture. Submarine or bathosphere or just a television camera lowered down into the sea, it matters little which means is employed, only let it be soon!

Thirty five years of research into the problem have convinced me that the Dolphin Ridge, of which the Azores form the northern most point, must once have been the mountainous backbone of Atlantis and that it will be found any traces that still remain after 13,000 years. Just ten years ago on a golden autum morning, the Swedish schooner Albatross nosed her way up the muddy waters of the Thames Estuary and docked in london on her way to Gothenburg. There were no brass bands and waving flags to welcome and her decks were cluttered with modern scientific instruments. Instead of rich trophies of newly conquered lands, but Albatross was returning from a triumphant from a modern voyage of discovery that may well prove as dramatic in its world-wide implications as Columbus' discovery of the New World. For in the hundreds of samples of sand and rock deposits carefully raised from the bed of the Atlantic during her 15 months voyage lay answers to a secret that has baffled enquiring minds since the time of Plato. Shortly afterwards, Prof. Hans Pettersson, the Leader of the Expedition stated in the "Times" of London, that the Atlantic Ridge, from the Azores down to Ascension island, was mainly above water 15,000 years ago, in other words at the time of the existence of Atlantis. The publication of the full results of the Albatross Expedition, which are now about due, should both confirm and extend the pioneer work of the German expedition ship, Gauss, which in 1901 sounded the Romanche Deep and brought up a sediment core showing that between 20,000-10,000 years ago, the bottom suddenly subsided some 3,000 fathoms to its present depth, and of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey of 1936, which revealed a change of 12,000 feet down and then up again along strip between the north eastern Atlantic Coast and the Congo.

Dr. Rene Malaise believed that the mid atlantic ridge in many sections was above water before the last great ice age and that this land sank due to the cooling influence of the ocean.

Captain Hans Hain, who commanded the German Naval research ship 'Meteor' in the North Atlantic Expedition of 1938, described the discovery of the great meteor bank in a letter to me: "Hitherto the charts of area had indicated depths of nearly 5,000 meters. Within two hours the soundings showed a rise from a depth of almost 4,000 meters to 262 meters. On the bank itself, the soundings indicated an even flat surface." In the Porto Rico Channel Captain Hain reports the greatest depth yet discovered in the whole Atlantic Ocean- 8,530 meters. From Captain R. Dahl I received some some years ago a description of sunken lands which he actually observed from a ship between Fayal (Azores) and Abaco. "The sun was high, the sea calm and very clear and I could see very deep down", writes Captain Dahl. Suddenly I noticed a dark flat area passing slowly by and then several more patches, some larger and some smaller, and all about the same depth under the surface of the ocean. I estimated that they were about 90-100 meters distant and I am convinced that what I saw was the ocean bed and that these were beds of weed on light colored ground." Though the Hydrographic Institute have assured Captain Dahl that it is highly improbable he could have seen the ocean bed, this report is of particular interest. When the Portuguese Prince Henry discovered the Azores in 1413, they were uninhabited, although they showed traces of several previous cultures and were well known to the mariners. The classical islands of Pluvalia and Capraria known to Statius Sebosius the Classical Geographer have been identified as Santa Maria and San Miguel islands of the Azores.

It may well be the Azores were the mountaintops of Atlantis.

Webmasters Notes- Charles Berlitz notes in his 'Eight Continent' book the Mt. Meteor location on a map inside lining sleeve of the book and the dolphin ridge if one needed to see what the area roughly looks like around the Azores in a topographical layout. Also as of 2002 A. D. the recent reporting of the Azores region southward rising from the Ocean, and along with the recent splitting and melting of Polar Ice caps is alarming it would seem Atlantis is not only rising, but she wants some of the land on her edges now above

water to begin to sink while she begins to rise? The U.S. gov. should note this observation of mine now in advance.

Guyots are flat topped submarine peaks (can be volcanic extinct atolls), first detected in the Pacific by Hess, and subsequently noted in the Atlantic. They are volcanic cones the tops of which have been erroded by waves from shallo seas. At the base of the cone there is a ring shaped trench some hundreds of meters in depth and several kilometers in width. These volcanic cones rise to a height of 2,000 meters above the sea bottom and probably maintained this height for a long period of time, after which there were successive subsidences as many of the guyots have abrased terraces and all of them have flat tops. The final subsidence put the summits some 1000 to 1500 meters below the surface of the sea. As Miocene Limestone has been found on some of the Azore Islands, this demonstrates that at this period there was a shallow sea in the area and that the origin of the mid Atlantic Ridge and of the Atlantis could have occurred later, probably at the end of the Miocene and well into the Pliocene, as this geologically short period of the intermediary time the volcanoes in a shallow sea, a base for future guyots, could not create the high cones and great ring shaped trenches required. Instead hill-like elevations alone were formed which continued in existence after the formation of the Atlantean Continent and on one of them was sited the capital city of Atlantis. This opinion is supported by the obvious volcanic origin of the hill on which the capital stood with fountains of hot and cold water, and by the existence of trenches, terraces, and small hills. In the Platonic account of the fall of Atlantis, it is stated that these were created by the gods, i.e. Poseidon (Sea), not by men, which presupposes a natural and not an artificial origin for the ring canals of the city.

A curious figure from the past which falls under this heading is Quetzacoatl, the 'Plumed Snake', of Mexico. This Toltec, Aztec, God, has been named after a non-existent animal or reptile. It is possible that the name originally meant the 'Man from the Country of the Plumed Snake', and that he came from a land in the Eastern or Atlantic Ocean. Some of the Indian Tribes in America had a tradition of a 'Snake Island' in this ocean. The Lenape tribe record in one of their songs that the land of Kusuaki which was destroyed by fire was cloven in two by the earth snake: ' Akemenaki'