In 1868 M. Brasseur de Bourbourg published Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique at Paris with Maisonneuve et Cie, and at London with Trübner and Co. He reads the Mexican books as one text with two senses. The surface is a Toltec history. The other sense is geological: a crescent of land over the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean went under in one day and one fatal night, which he sets beside Plato’s Atlantis, some six or seven thousand years ago.
Quetzalcoatl, in that reading, is the swallowed land, and Tollan is the Gulf and the Caribbean, not a kingdom he will keep. He puts the first metals at Guadeloupe and Haiti, a temporary ice over the new Caribbean, and the Maya signs of Landa as the oldest writing. These four letters are not his edition of the Manuscript Troano. Here he only describes that manuscript as seventy-two bark pages, perhaps a thousand years before our era.