Lord Arundell of Wardour’s The Secret of Plato’s Atlantis was published in London by Burns and Oates in 1885, and printed by Robson and Sons. He wrote it for the Month because of Donnelly’s Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, then in its seventh edition (1883). The secret, as he tells it, is not a lost Atlantic continent. The backbone of Plato’s story is the Periplus of Hanno, a Carthaginian voyage he dates circa B.C. 500 in the chapter and B.C. 515 in the appendix. Plato was born circa B.C. 430. What is not in Hanno he fills from older tradition, above all the deluge.
Idealised from that voyage, Atlantis would be the Carthaginian empire, including the Canary and Fortunate Islands, and the mainland beyond the Atlas mountains. Thymiaterium, two days past the Pillars, he takes for Mamora on the river Suboe. The palace island of five stadia he matches to the colony of Cerne. He will not take the nine thousand years, about 9600 before the Christian era, as history. Chronologies, he says, run out about 3000 B.C., or about 6000 B.C. if the antediluvian world is counted, and he prints Palmer’s commencement of the world as circa B.C. 5360. The flood he keeps is the universal one, not the subsidence.