The Atlantis Blueprint Read online

  In spite of the uncertainty that surrounds the events of its appearance in the twentieth century, the skull is undoubtedly genuine. The rock crystal from which it is carved probably came from Calaveras County, in California. A Californian art conservator named Frank Dorland, who was allowed to examine the skull for a period of six years, concluded that it might well have been over 12,000 years old. Nickell had objected that mechanical grinding of the teeth proved that it was more recent, but a far less perfect crystal skull in the British Museum, also genuine, displays mechanical grinding of the teeth too. The laboratory of the Hewlett-Packard Company, which manufactures crystal oscillators, subjected the skull to laser-beam tests and concluded that it had been manufactured from a single large crystal and polished over about 300 years, doubling Mitchell-Hedges’s estimate. It had peculiar optical qualities, as if lenses had been inserted inside it, although this is obviously impossible. Dorland claimed that, when he kept it in his house overnight instead of returning it to the bank, there were poltergeist disturbances.

  If the skull was not found at Lubaantum, why should all this be relevant? Because Frank Dorland concluded that the skull originated in Mexico, and went on to point out that the native peoples there used a grinding wheel driven by a string stretched across a bow.

  An altogether more credible figure in South American exploration was Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, whose disappearance was one of the most widely publicised mysteries of the 1920s.

  During the last decade of his life, Fawcett was searching for a lost city in the jungles of Brazil. There is strong evidence that this mysterious city really existed. In the National Library in Rio de Janeiro, Manuscript No. 512 gives an account of how, in 1753, a band of Portuguese treasure hunters spent ten years wandering in the vast interior of Brazil, an area that is almost the size of Europe.5 Coming upon a deserted city built of huge blocks of stone, they decided to return to civilisation for reinforcements and sent an account of the city by native runner to the Viceroy in Bahia. What happened to them then is unknown, and the manuscript lay forgotten in the archives for almost eighty years.

  This story actually goes back further, to 1516, twenty-four years after Columbus discovered America, when a Portuguese sailor named Diego Alvarez was the sole survivor of a shipwreck close to the place where Bahia now stands. He was taken captive by a cannibal tribe, the Tupinambas, but for some reason they spared his life and allowed him to live among them. This may have been because of the influence of a local girl named Paraguassu, who became his wife (Fawcett refers to her as ‘the Pocahontas of South America’). More Portuguese arrived, and, through the good offices of Alvarez, they established a colony. Paraguassu’s sister also married a Portuguese, and it was her child, Melchior Dias Moreyra, who became known to the locals as Muribeca. He discovered silver mines and became a wealthy man, but he kept their location in the interior a secret.

  Regrettably his son, Roberio Dias, born to wealth, cherished an ambition to become a member of the aristocracy. In about 1610, Roberio approached the King of Portugal, Dom Pedro II, and offered to sell him the mines of Muribeca in exchange for a title of nobility – the Marquis of the Mines.6 The king agreed, but first he wanted to lay his hands on the silver mines.

  On his way back to Bahia, Dias discovered that the King had no intention of keeping his half of the bargain. When he persuaded an officer to let him see the sealed patent of nobility, he was infuriated to discover that the document would merely confer the rank of captain in the army. Dias knew that he was in a dangerous position. If he refused to hand over the silver mines, he would be imprisoned by the governor, Dom Francisco de Souza, a haughty aristocrat who disliked being frustrated. So Dias played for time, and led the governor’s expedition on a wild-goose chase. The governor, finally realising he had been outwitted, threw Dias into prison, where he remained for two years until he managed to buy his freedom. He died shortly thereafter, and the location of the mines of Muribeca remained a secret.

  Many adventurers set off into the wilderness in search of the lost silver mines, and the government also sponsored expeditions called bandeiras, or ‘flags’, the members of which were known as bandeiristas. In 1753, more than a century after the death of Roberio Dias, a group of six Portuguese bandeiristas set out on a well-equipped expedition with black slaves, native guides, and pack animals. They went inland, into the state of Minas Geraes, then made for the Central Plateau. There they vanished for many years, but Manuscript No. 512 describes their adventures in some detail. A full translation can be found in Mysteries of Ancient South America (1956) by Harold Wilkins.7

  After years of wandering, the party eventually encountered a cordillera (mountain chain) largely composed of a mineral whose crystals glittered in the sun. At close quarters, the mountains were seen to consist of bare rock, with white streams plunging from the heights. They seemed to be practically impenetrable until one of the slaves saw a white deer that fled into a cleft. Pursuing it, he came across a road, which seemed to have been man-made. He fetched the others, and soon they were all ascending it, dazzled by the crystalline splendour of the mountains above them.

  At the summit of the pass, they were able to look down on an open plain, and there, about 3 miles away, they saw a great city, so impressive that they assumed it must be connected with the court of Brazil. Afraid that they had been seen against the skyline and that the inhabitants might be hostile, they descended as quickly as possible to the valley then decided to wait to see what would happen. After two days of silence, they sent one of the natives on a scouting expedition. He returned saying that he had seen no one, not even a footprint. The rest of the scouts then went ahead to investigate, and came back with the same story. The city seemed to be uninhabited.

  At daybreak the next day, the whole party advanced cautiously and prepared for an ambush. The road led them to three great archways; the one in the centre, the tallest, had unknown letters engraved on it far above their heads. Beyond the arches was a wide road, with great houses whose facades were ‘blackened with age’. Everything was silent and deserted. There were broken pillars, with parasitic vegetation growing from the cracks, and the buildings were roofed with stone slabs. When the bandeiristas ventured inside the rooms, they found that the floors were covered with debris and bat droppings to a depth that suggested that these buildings had been abandoned many centuries ago.

  In the middle of the city they came to a vast square, in the centre of which was a black stone column with a statue of a man who pointed towards the north. Carved obelisks of black stone stood at each corner of the square. On one side of the plaza was a magnificent building, whose roof had partly collapsed. Ruined steps ran up to a wide hall, and the walls showed traces of coloured frescoes. This place was also full of bats, and the smell of their droppings made them cough.

  Beyond the main square, the city was a ruin, with mounds of earth and chasms in the ground. It was obvious that this place had been devastated by an earthquake. The city was bounded by a deep and wide river, on the far side of which were green fields with many flowers. They could also see lakes with flocks of geese.

  They decided to follow the river downstream, and after three days came to a huge waterfall, beyond which the river spread so wide that it ‘appeared to be a great ocean’. There were several tree-covered islands and an abundance of game. They also saw big anacondas and poisonous snakes.

  To the east of the river they found great holes that could have been mine shafts, and one was covered with a huge flagstone with certain symbols carved into it. Near the ‘mines’ they found some abandoned bars of silver.

  There was also a ruined temple with more of the strange letters above its portico, as well as the ruins of a ‘country house’. Looking inside, they found a stairway built of coloured stone leading to a large hall, with rooms opening out from it. Each of these rooms contained the remains of a fountain.

  They continued downriver, and the narrator became convinced that they were in the vic
inity of rich mines – perhaps the legendary mines of Muribeca. A scouting party ventured on for nine days, and at a place where the river spread out so wide that it was like ‘a great bay’ they saw a canoe manned by ‘two white persons with long, flowing black hair, dressed like Europeans…’ When they fired a gunshot to attract attention, the canoers paddled off in the opposite direction.

  The narrator mentioned that one of their company, a man called Joao Antonio, found a large gold coin with an image of a kneeling youth on one side. No doubt, he said, there were other such coins to be found under the rubble of the dead city.

  The party decided that they had better make their way back to civilisation. At the Paraguassu River, the narrator wrote their story – and presumably sent an Indian messenger ahead with it. He concluded by begging the governor to keep its contents secret, lest someone else should mount an expedition before they could.

  What happened to the group of Portuguese and their slaves and guides is unknown; all that we know is that the manuscript disappeared into the archives, became partly eaten by insects, and was found eventually by a Brazilian archivist in 1841, almost a century after it had been written.8

  Harold Wilkins, a British author who wrote in a pleasantly old-fashioned style but whose books were excellently researched, obtained his transcript of the document in 1939 with the help of the American consul-general in Rio de

  Janeiro, W. G. Burdett. Colonel Fawcett had seen it at least twenty years earlier, and concluded that it was a truthful and accurate account.

  A reader’s first reaction to the tale of a journey to a lost city is that it is probably fiction, but both Fawcett and Wilkins saw the manuscript, and the travel writer Peter Fleming, who tried to follow in Fawcett’s footsteps (and describes it in Brazilian Adventure, 1933),9 quoted its archive reference, No. 512.

  Percy Harrison Fawcett, born in Devon in 1867, joined the Royal Artillery and in his twenties served at Trincomallee, in Ceylon, where he became interested in Buddhism and spent his leaves in a search for the lost treasure of the Kandyan kings. On the whole Fawcett disliked the army, so when, in 1906, the President of the Royal Geographical Society asked him how he felt about the idea of going to Bolivia to map the north-eastern frontier, Fawcett accepted eagerly on condition that the army would agree to lend him to the Bolivian government. His story of these adventurous years was told in his posthumous book Expedition Fawcett, edited by his son Brian.10 He described encounters with poisonous spiders, snakes, vampire bats, even wild bulls, which they were forced to kill. Searching for the source of the River Verde, the whole party ran out of food and starved for twenty-three days. They were all close to death when a deer suddenly appeared. Fawcett was so weak he could scarcely lift his rifle, but by what he regarded as a miracle he killed it. They ate the whole deer, including the fur and skin.

  It was during this expedition that Fawcett tried to take a short cut over flat-topped hills covered with forest, but he was finally forced to return to the valley. It was his story of this forest-covered plateau that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World. 11

  Fawcett returned to England to serve in Intelligence during the First World War, emerging with a Distinguished Service Order; then he went back to South America, hot on the trail of the lost city of the bandeiristas. In 1920 floods caused him to turn back from an expedition into the Matto Grosso (Great Forest) of Brazil.

  Fawcett had no doubt of the existence of Atlantis. Although he accepted that the continent had sunk beneath the waves, as Plato describes, he was convinced that many of the inhabitants had escaped to South America. He wrote in Exploration Fawcett:

  However much romance may have coloured the tales, the fact remains that the legendary existence of a highly civilised remnant of an ancient people persisted among the indigenes of the continent… There is a remarkable similarity in the accounts, which makes it reasonable to conclude that there is a basis of truth in them.12

  Fawcett stated his belief – remarkable for that time – that ‘the curse of a great cataclysm’13 fell on South America, and he seemed to accept that this was the catastrophe that destroyed Plato’s Atlantis. ‘There can be little doubt that a cataclysm of such dimensions produced tidal waves and minor catastrophes throughout the world.’ It caused ‘the rising of the Andes’ and brought to South America a people who were ‘expert in the arts of civilisation’. Fawcett’s conclusions were remarkably similar to those we have reached in this book.

  The survivors also built cities like the one discovered by the 1743 expedition. ‘The existence of the old cities I do not for a moment doubt,’ says Fawcett. ‘How could I? I myself have seen a portion of one of them – and that is why I observed that it was imperative for me to go again. The remains seemed to be those of an outpost of one of the biggest cities…’14

  This raises an interesting question. Why does he seem unsure? It seems likely that the rest of the city was completely covered by the jungle, like those lost Mayan cities discovered by Stephens and Catherwood in the 1830s. This means, in turn, that Fawcett knew where to look for a lost city, although it emerges from his book that he thought there were many of them.

  He determined to go and find at least one of them, but his objective on that last expedition was not apparently the deserted city of 1753 discovered by the bandeiristas. He had heard of ‘clothed natives of European appearance’, who avoided all contact with the outside world. ‘Our destination on the next expedition – I call it “Z” for the sake of convenience – is a city reputed to be inhabited, possibly by some of these timid people…’ This implies three different cities: the deserted city of 1753, the city whose outskirts he observed, and ‘Z’. No wonder Fawcett was determined to return to Brazil.

  He left England for South America once more, spending the years from 1921 to 1924 raising the money for the expedition. When an American ‘fund-raiser’ squandered most of this on a six-week orgy of drunkenness, Fawcett set to work again, and finally had sufficient funds to continue.

  It was not to be an elaborate expedition; there was only Fawcett, his twenty-one-year-old son Jack and a young Devon friend of Jack called Raleigh Rimell. They had to be prepared to carry their equipment on their backs.

  The greatest danger would be after they had reached Cuyaba (now spelled Cuiaba), the capital of the Matto Grosso, by boat, then made their way north to the unknown region between the rivers Xingu and Araguaya. Fawcett believed ‘Z’ lay to the east of this. In the manuscript later published by his son, Fawcett left fairly exact directions: first of all, he explained, he wanted to visit an ancient stone tower, to solve the mystery of why its doors and windows were lit up at night, terrifying the local Indians.

  Beyond the Xingu we shall take to the forest at a point midway between that river and the Araguaya, and from there cross by an existing trail to the Rio Tocantins at Porto Nacional or ‘Pedro Alfonso’. Our way will lie between latitude 10 degrees 30 minutes and 11 degrees to the high ground between the states of Goyaz and Bahia, a region quite unknown and said to be infested by savages, where I expect to get some trace of uninhabited cities. The mountains there are quite high. We shall then follow the mountains between Bahia and Piauhy to the River Sao Francisco, striking it somewhere near Chique-Chique, and if we are in fit condition to do so, visit the old deserted city [that of 1753] which lies approximately 11 degrees 30 minutes south and 42 degrees 30 minutes west, thus completing the investigations and getting out at a point from which the railway will take us to Bahia City15

  Although Fawcett gave the precise latitude and longitude of the ‘deserted city’ of the bandeiristas, his son Brian, in a footnote, added: ‘I have personally investigated the bearings he gives for the 1753 city, and can state authoritatively that it is not there.’16 It would seem that, for whatever reason, Fawcett gave the wrong co-ordinates – an odd mistake for a man who was so meticulous.

  By 20 May 1925 they had reached the village of the Bacairy, north of Cuiabo.17 They were still experiencing incon
venience rather than danger – the man who had sold them mules had cheated them, and Jack’s leg had swelled with a tick bite, so they had to stay at the farm of a friend to recover. The chief of the Bacairy told them that he had always hoped to make the journey to the ‘great waterfall’.

  Then, after staying in a village of the Nafqua – where Fawcett had in 1920 presented the chief with a uniform case18 – they went by river to a village of the Kalapalo on the River Kuluene. And there, on 29 May 1925, their trail comes to an end. The Kalapalo later claimed that Fawcett’s party had struck out across country to the east, and that the smoke of their camp fires had been visible for five days, but in 1951 the chief of the Kalapalo, Izarari, made a deathbed confession to killing Fawcett and his companions. He claimed that Fawcett had slapped his face when he had refused carriers, and that he had clubbed him to death; the other two, he said, had been killed defending Fawcett.

  This story raises doubts: a man with Fawcett’s self-control would not be likely to strike a tribal chief. Izarari also alleged that Jack Fawcett had seduced one of his wives, which sounds more likely. In later years, many travellers claimed to have learned the truth about Fawcett’s death, and one of the more plausible stories is that Jack Fawcett had violated some tribal taboo, and that his crime had to be punished by death else Izarari’s people would themselves become outcasts and killed by other tribes.