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  ‘discovered’ in AD 1818. But could it have been mapped thousands of

  years earlier than that by the cartographers of an as yet unidentified

  high civilization of prehistory?

  Is it possible that a human civilization, sufficiently advanced to have

  mapped Antarctica, could have developed by 13,000 BC and later

  disappeared? And, if so, how much later?

  The combined effect of the Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus, Mercator and

  Buache Maps is the strong, though disturbing, impression that Antarctica

  may have been continuously surveyed over a period of several thousands

  of years as the ice-cap gradually spread outwards from the interior,

  increasing its grip with every passing millennium but not engulfing all the

  coasts of the southern continent until around 4000 BC. The original

  sources for the Piri Reis and Mercator Maps must therefore have been

  prepared towards the end of this period, when only the coasts of

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  Antarctica were free of ice; the source for the Oronteus Finaeus Map, on

  the other hand, seems to have been considerably earlier, when the icecap was present only in the deep interior of the continent; and the source

  for the Buache Map appears to originate in even earlier period (around

  13,000 BC), when there may have been no ice in Antarctica at all.

  South America

  Were other parts of the world surveyed and accurately charted at widely

  separated intervals during this same epoch; roughly from 13,000 BC to

  4000 BC? The answer may lie once again in the Piri Reis Map, which

  contains more mysteries than just Antarctica:

  • Drawn in 1513, the map demonstrates an uncanny knowledge of South

  America—and not only of its eastern coast but of the Andes mountains

  on the western side of the continent, which were of course unknown at

  that time. The map correctly shows the Amazon River rising in these

  unexplored mountains and thence flowing eastwards.15

  • Itself compiled from more than twenty different source documents of

  varying antiquity,16 the Piri Reis Map depicts the Amazon not once but

  twice (most probably as a result of the unintentional overlapping of

  two of the source documents used by the Turkish admiral17). In the first

  of these the Amazon’s course is shown down to its Para River mouth,

  but the important island of Marajo does not appear. According to

  Hapgood, this suggests that the relevant source map must have dated

  from a time, perhaps as much as 15,000 years ago, when the Para

  River was the main or only mouth of the Amazon and when Marajo

  Island was part of the mainland on the northern side of the river.18 The

  second depiction of the Amazon, on the other hand, does show Marajo

  (and in fantastically accurate detail) despite the fact that this island was

  not discovered until 1543.19 Again, the possibility is raised of an

  unknown civilization which undertook continuous surveying and

  mapping operations of the changing face of the earth over a period of

  many thousands of years, with Piri Reis making use of earlier and later

  source maps left behind by this civilization.

  • Neither the Orinoco River nor its present delta is represented on the

  Piri Reis Map. Instead, as Hapgood proved, ‘two estuaries extending far

  inland (for a distance of about 100 miles) are shown close to the site of

  the present river. The longitude on the grid would be correct for the

  15 Maps, p. 68.

  16 Ibid., p. 222.

  17 Ibid., pp. 64-5.

  18 Ibid., p. 64.

  19 Ibid., p. 65.

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  Orinoco, and the latitude is also quite accurate. Is it possible that these

  estuaries have been filled in, and the delta extended this much, since

  the source maps were made?’20

  • Although they remained undiscovered until 1592, the Falkland Islands

  appear on the 1513 map at their correct latitude.21

  • The library of ancient sources incorporated in the Piri Reis Map may

  also account for the fact that it convincingly portrays a large island in

  the Atlantic Ocean to the east of the South American coast where no

  such island now exists. Is it pure coincidence that this ‘imaginary’

  island turns out to be located right over the sub-oceanic Mid-Atlantic

  Ridge just north of the equator and 700 miles east of the coast of

  Brazil, where the tiny Rocks of Sts. Peter and Paul now jut above the

  waves?22 Or was the relevant source map drawn deep in the last Ice

  Age, when sea levels were far lower than they are today and a large

  island could indeed have been exposed at this spot?

  Sea levels and ice ages

  Other sixteenth-century maps also look as though they could have been

  based on accurate world surveys conducted during the last Ice Age. One

  was compiled by the Turk Hadji Ahmed in 1559, a cartographer, as

  Hapgood puts it, who must have had access to some ‘most extraordinary’

  source maps.23

  The strangest and most immediately striking feature of Hadji Ahmed’s

  compilation is that it shows quite plainly a strip of territory, almost 1000

  miles wide, connecting Alaska and Siberia. Such a ‘land-bridge’, as

  geologists refer to it, did once exist (where the Bering Strait is now) but

  was submerged beneath the waves by rising sea levels at the end of the

  last Ice Age.24

  The rising sea levels were caused by the tumultuous melting of the icecap which was rapidly retreating everywhere in the northern hemisphere

  by around 10,000 BC.25 It is therefore interesting that at least one ancient

  map appears to show southern Sweden covered with remnant glaciers of

  the kind that must indeed have been prevalent then in these latitudes.

  The remnant glaciers are on Claudius Ptolemy’s famous Map of the North.

  Originally compiled in the second century AD, this remarkable work from

  the last great geographer of classical antiquity was lost for hundreds of

  20 Ibid., p. 69.

  21 Ibid., p. 72.

  22 Ibid., p. 65.

  23 Ibid., p. 99.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Ibid., p. 164.

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  years and rediscovered in the fifteenth century.26

  Ptolemy was custodian of the library at Alexandria, which contained the

  greatest manuscript collection of ancient times,27 and it was there that he

  consulted the archaic source documents that enabled him to compile his

  own map.28 Acceptance of the possibility that the original version of at

  least one of the charts he referred to could have been made around

  10,000 BC helps us to explain why he shows glaciers, characteristic of

  that exact epoch, together with ‘lakes ... suggesting the shapes of

  present-day lakes, and streams very much suggesting glacial streams ...

  flowing from the glaciers into the lakes.’29

  It is probably unnecessary to add that no one on earth in Roman times,

  when Ptolemy drew his map, had the slightest suspicion that ice ages

  could once have existed in northern Europe. Nor did anyone in the

  fifteenth century (when the map was rediscovered) posse
ss such

  knowledge. Indeed, it is impossible to see how the remnant glaciers and

  other features shown on Ptolemy’s map could have been surveyed,

  imagined or invented by any known civilization prior to our own.

  The implications of this are obvious. So, too, are the implications of

  another map, the ‘Portolano’ of Iehudi Ibn Ben Zara, drawn in the year

  1487.30 This chart of Europe and North Africa may have been based on a

  source even earlier than Ptolemy’s, for it seems to show glaciers much

  farther south than Sweden (roughly on the same latitude as England in

  fact)31 and to depict the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Aegean Seas as they

  might have looked before the melting of the European ice-cap.32 Sea level

  would, of course, have been significantly lower than it is today. It is

  therefore interesting, in the case for instance of the Aegean section of the

  map, to note that a great many more islands are shown than currently

  exist.33 At first sight this seems odd. However, if ten or twelve thousand

  years have indeed elapsed since the era when Ibn Ben Zara’s source map

  was made, the discrepancy can be simply explained: the missing islands

  26 Ibid., p. 159.

  27 See Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library, Hutchinson Radius, London, 1989

  28 Maps, p. 159.

  29 Ibid., p. 164.

  30 Ibid., p. 171

  31 Ibid., pp. 171-2.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Ibid., pp. 176-7.

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  must have been submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice

  Age.

  Once again we seem to be looking at the fingerprints of a vanished

  civilization—one capable of drawing impressively accurate maps of widely

  separated parts of the earth.

  What kind of technology, and what state of science and culture, would

  have been required to do a job like that?

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  Chapter 3

  Fingerprints of a Lost Science

  We saw that the Mercator World Map of 1569 included an accurate

  portrayal of the coasts of Antarctica as they would have looked thousands

  of years ago when they were free of ice. Interestingly enough, this same

  map is considerably less accurate in its portrayal of another region, the

  west coast of South America, than an earlier (1538) map also drawn by

  Mercator.1

  The reason for this appears to be that the sixteenth-century geographer

  based the earlier map on the ancient sources which we know he had at

  his disposal, whereas for the later map he relied upon the observations

  and measurements of the first Spanish explorers of western South

  America. Since those explorers had supposedly brought the latest

  information back to Europe, Mercator can hardly be blamed for following

  them. In so doing the accuracy of his work declined: instruments capable

  of finding longitude did not exist in 1569, but appear to have been used

  to prepare the ancient source documents Mercator consulted to produce

  his 1538 map.2

  The mysteries of longitude

  Let us consider the problem of longitude, defined as the distance in

  degrees east or west of the prime meridian. The current internationally

  accepted prime meridian is an imaginary curve drawn from the North Pole

  to the South Pole passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich,

  London. Greenwich therefore stands at o° longitude while New York, for

  example, stands at around 74° west, and Canberra, Australia, at roughly

  150° east.

  1 Maps, p. 107.

  2 Ibid.

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  It would be possible to write an elaborate explanation of longitude and

  of what needs to be done to fix it precisely for any given point on the

  earth’s surface. What we are concerned with here, however, is not so

  much technical detail as the accepted historical facts about humanity’s

  growing knowledge of the mysteries of longitude. Among these facts, this

  is the most important: until a breakthrough invention in the eighteenth

  century, cartographers and navigators were unable to fix longitude with

  any kind of precision. They could only make guesses which were usually

  inaccurate by many hundreds of miles, because the technology had not

  yet been developed to allow them to do the job properly.

  Latitude north or south of the equator did not pose such a problem: it

  could be worked out by means of angular measurements of the sun and

  stars taken with relatively simple instruments. But to find longitude

  equipment of an altogether different and superior calibre was needed,

  which could combine position measurements with time measurements.

  Throughout the span of known history the invention of such equipment

  had remained beyond the capacities of scientists, but by the beginning of

  the eighteenth century, with rapidly increasing sea traffic, a mood of

  impatience and urgency had set in. In the words of an authority on the

  period, ‘The search for longitude overshadowed the life of every man

  afloat, and the safety of every ship and cargo. Accurate measurement

  seemed an impossible dream and “discovering the longitude” had become

  a stock phrase in the press like “pigs might fly”.’3

  3 Simon Bethon and Andrew Robinson, The Shape of the World: The Mapping and

  Discovery of the Earth, Guild Publishing, London, 1991, p. 117.

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  What was needed, above all else, was an instrument that would keep

  the time (at the place of departure) with perfect accuracy during long sea

  journeys despite the motion of the ship and despite the adverse

  conditions of alternating heat and cold, wet and dry. ‘Such a Watch’, as

  Isaac Newton told the members of the British government’s official Board

  of Longitude in 1714, ‘hath not yet been made’.4

  Indeed not. The timepieces of the seventeenth and early eighteenth

  centuries were crude devices which typically lost or gained as much as a

  quarter of an hour per day. By contrast, an effective marine chronometer

  could afford to lose or gain that much only over several years.5

  It was not until the 1720s that the talented English clockmaker John

  Harrison began work on the first of a series of designs which resulted in

  the manufacture of such a chronometer. His objective was to win the

  prize of £20,000 offered by the Board of Longitude ‘for the inventor of

  any means of determining a ship’s longitude within 30 nautical miles at

  the end of a six weeks’ voyage’.6 A chronometer capable of fulfilling this

  condition would have to keep time to within three seconds per day. It

  took almost forty years, during which several prototypes were completed

  and tested, before Harrison was able to meet these standards. Finally, in

  1761, his elegant Chronometer No. 4 left Britain on board HMS Deptford

  bound for Jamaica, accompanied by Harrison’s son William. Nine days

  into the voyage, on the basis of longitude calculations made possible by

  the chronometer, William advised the captain that they would s
ight the

  Madeira Islands the following morning. The captain offered five to one

  that he was wrong but agreed to hold the course. William won the bet.

  Two months later, at Jamaica, the instrument was found to have lost just

  five seconds.7

  Harrison had surpassed the conditions set by the Board of Longitude.

  Thanks to the British government’s bureaucratic dithering, however, he

  was not awarded the £20,000 prize money until three years before his

  death in 1776. Understandably, it was only when he had the funds in his

  hands that he divulged the secrets of his design. As a result of this delay,

  Captain James Cook did not have the benefit of a chronometer when he

  made his first voyage of discovery in 1768.8 By the time of his third

  voyage, however (1778-9), he was able to map the Pacific with impressive

  accuracy, fixing not only the correct latitude but the correct longitude of

  every island and coastline.9 Henceforward, ‘thanks to Cook’s care and

  Harrison’s chronometer ... no navigator could have an excuse for failing

  to find a Pacific island ... or for being wrecked on a coastline appearing

  4 Ibid., p. 121.

  5 Ibid., p. 120.

  6 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:289.

  7 Shape of the World, pp. 123-4.

  8 Ibid., p. 125.

  9 Ibid., p. 131.

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  from nowhere.’10

  Indeed, with their accurate longitudes, Cook’s Pacific maps must be

  ranked among the very first examples of the precise cartography of our

  modern era. They remind us, moreover, that the making of really good

  maps requires at least three key ingredients: great journeys of discovery;

  first-class mathematical and cartographic skills; sophisticated

  chronometers.

  It was not until Harrison’s chronometer became generally available in

  the 1770s that the third of these preconditions was fulfilled. This brilliant

  invention made it possible for cartographers to fix longitude precisely,

  something that the Sumerians, the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the

  Romans, and indeed all other known civilizations before the eighteenth

  century were supposedly unable to do. It is therefore surprising and

  unsettling to come across vastly older maps which give latitudes and

  longitudes with modern precision.

  Precision instruments

  These inexplicably precise latitudes and longitudes are found in the same