Lettres américaines (1788)

I read Tome II of Lettres américaines by M. le Comte J. R. Carli, the copy whose title page is dated M. DCC. LXXXVIII. A leaf before the title says the book was presented to the University of California by Prof. Charles A. Kofoid and Mrs. Prudence W. Kofoid. The title page names no translator. It says the volume is printed with the observations and additions of the translator. Those notes are signed T. This French text refers to an Italian edition when one of those notes is placed differently from the Italian. I use the French print, and I use the name the title page prints.

The title page places the book at Boston, and on sale at Paris, at Buisson, bookseller, rue Haute-Feuille, Hôtel de Coëtlosquet, No. 20. It is a sequel to the Mémoires of D. Ulloa. Carli is styled president emeritus of the Supreme Council of Public Economy, and privy councillor of state to His Imperial and Royal Majesty. The year 1788 is before 1929, so I treat this volume as public domain for the review and set his own sentence under a date or a place. Where a running head could be read, the printed page is eight less than the scan leaf. I cite the printed page. This scan has 548 leaves. The numbered letters begin at page 1. The table of contents, headed as the contents of this second volume, follows Letter XLIX and lists Letters XXIX through XLIX. The errata follow the table.

This file is only Tome II. It opens in Letter XXIX. I do not review Letters I to XXVIII, because they are not in this copy. I do not bring in another writer’s site, date, or race for Atlantis. For Plato’s own dialogue, see Timaeus & Critias. A later Atlantic book on this site is Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.

The book at a glance

• Title: Lettres américaines. The title page continues: an examination of the origin and of the civil, political, military, and religious state, the arts, industry, sciences, manners, and usages of the ancient inhabitants of America; the great epochs of nature; the ancient communication of the two hemispheres; and the last revolution that made Atlantis disappear.
• Edition I read: Tome II. Boston, and Paris, Buisson, 1788. French, with the translator’s notes. The letters in this volume are XXIX to XLIX.
• Length: the letters are numbered from page 1. Letter XLIX is listed as beginning at page 519. A table and errata follow.
• What he claims: Americans are not a new race, unknown until the Spanish conquest. Mexico matches ancient Egypt, and Peru matches China, in customs that belong to a time before iron, alphabetic writing, and coin. The peoples could meet because a very large land, the Atlantis of the Egyptian story Plato reports, stood in the Atlantic between the continents. A later revolution, which he separates from Noah’s flood and identifies with the flood of Ogyges in the time of the Egyptian Hercules, drowned that land and opened the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. He puts the separation about 4000 years before our era, between an astronomical date of 4600 and the arrival of iron, writing, and coin about 3000.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The name he uses. He writes Atlantides for Plato’s people, from a land west of Africa. The translator’s note on p. 27 refuses Bailly’s Atlantes for them. In that note the Atlantes were settled in Ethiopia, according to Diodorus, and the Ethiopian Atlantes of Herodotus, Mela, and Pliny descended from the Atlantides. Proclus, on the Timaeus, writes Atlantins for Plato’s people.
• Plato’s island, as this volume reports it. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, an island larger than Asia and Libya together, named Atlantide from Atlas, eldest son of Neptune. His brother was Gadir. Gadir took the islands near the Pillars, and the conquered country was called Gadiriqque, hence Gaditan. The Atlantides invaded Africa as far as Egypt and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. Athens, from whom the people of Sais claimed descent, drove them out after a long war (pp. 27, 28).
• American names he sets beside those heroes. A city Atlan near the province of Méchoacan, and Guat-atlan, Iz-atlan, and Cin-atlan, between Méchoacan and Lélisco. The inhabitants were called Atlantides. One of the four fine streets of Tlascala was still Tiz-atlan. Any inhabitant of the Cordilleras was called Antée. Ante was the forty-third nome of Egypt, and Anteopolis took its name from it. Tangier, or Tingi, was the city of Antée. He asks why the Antilles should not be joined to that name (p. 19). A note cites Clavigero, volume I, p. 151: seven nations came, in the time of the Chichimeches, from a province called Aztlan into Anahuac, afterwards called Mexico.
• How old the story is, in his count. Hesiod lived 933 years before the vulgar era, so the tradition of the Atlantide expedition is at least 1000 years before the age of Augustus, or 700 years before Plato (p. 29). Clement of Alexandria thought Atlas the first man to build a ship and put to sea.
• Mexico’s own memory of a departure east. Cortes wrote Charles V that he had the tradition from Montezuma himself. Ancestors had embarked for the east. Montezuma received the Spaniards as fellow citizens in their old country. The speech Herrera and Solis report names an ancient prince, printed here as Quézécoal or Quetzalcoatl, lord of the seven caves of the Navatlaches and lawful king of the nations who founded the Mexican empire. He left to conquer lands in the east, and his descendants were to return and correct the laws. Herrera also says the emperors of Mexico descended from a prince who had come from the east and gone back there (pp. 29, 30).
• What the two sides shared, and the date he will not go below. Open-air worship before temples, knotted cords, a lunar year, festivals at the solstices and equinoxes, and the sovereign as son of the sun, on the Peru and China side. Hieroglyphs and a solar year of 360 days, on the Mexico and Egypt side. No iron tools, no coin, no alphabetic writing, and vines without wine, in America at the conquest. Communication, if it happened, was before those arts. He puts that limit at 3000 years before our era, from Chinese dates: iron under Fou-hi, 2953 before our era, and writing and coin under Hoang-ti, 2611 (pp. 54, 55, 63).
• Atlas as the first astronomer. Son of Saturn, son of Uranus, king of Atlantis. He taught the sphere, the Pleiades and the Hyades, and the zodiac, and he taught them to the Egyptian Hercules, not the later Greek son of Alcmene. Cicero, Vitruvius, Virgil, and Pliny are the witnesses he uses (Letter XXXII).
• The sky date. If the spring equinox met the last degree of Taurus and the horns, that can only have been 4600 years before J. C. (p. 146). With Bailly, an equinox fixed at the first degree of Gemini in the time of Atlas and Hercules would rise to the same 4600 (p. 296).
• The land. Islands in the Atlantic are peaks. He draws one vast country, perhaps more than 6000 years ago, from the islands of Alvares and Tristan de Cougne through the Picos, Martin de Vaz, Saint Helena, Great Ascension, Saint Matthew, the Canaries, and the Azores. Larger than Africa and a great part of Europe together, eighty degrees of latitude, half south and half north, not less than 4800 marine miles at sixty to a degree (pp. 177, 178).
• The sea floor. Buache’s section from Rio Grande, or the banks of Saint Roch, to Cape Tagrin, cutting the equator at about thirty-five degrees, approved at the Academy of Sciences under Fontenelle. Drop the Atlantic by 500 fathoms, or even less, and a belt some 5000 miles (8046 kilometers) by about 840 appears. Plato’s great continent opposite the island can only be America (pp. 227 to 229).
• Not Noah’s flood. The dove brought an olive branch, so the trees were still standing, and the waters went back. The Atlantic inundation stayed. He identifies it with the flood of Ogyges, in the time of the Egyptian Hercules and of Phoroneus, son of the first Inachus. The Greek Deucalion is later and local: about 1573 or 1538 before our era, near the fiftieth year of Moses, and perhaps only Thessaly (pp. 268, 269, 292, 296).
• The separation. Between the astronomical date of 4600 and the iron, writing, and coin of about 3000. The flood of Ogyges, 4000 years before J. C., is the date he gives for the revolution that separated the hemispheres. The comet that returned in 1759, counted back seventy-six revolutions, comes out a few years more than 4000 before our era. He also tries the comet of 1680 and gets about 4070. Egyptian tradition, as he reads Herodotus and Sophocles in Strabo, said the sun had changed its course and rose in the west (pp. 320, 334, 335).
• Peru and China, Mexico and Egypt, and the north. Direct likenesses, in his later summary to Fontana: Mexicans with Egyptians, Peruvians with Chinese, the north of America with Scythians and Tartars, before iron, literary writing, and coin (p. 362).
• Italy. Saturn, leader of the Atlantides, found people already in Italy. The Atlantides have priority over every later people who entered Italy. Oenotrus and the Arcadians, seventeen ages before Troy, found the Aborigines, and on his arithmetic arrived 1774 years before the Christian era (pp. 383, 384, 391).
• A map before Columbus. Villoison’s extract: Andreas Biancho of Venice made a sea chart in 1436, and the same hand drew the Antilles and wrote Isola Antillia. Villoison sent a tracing to the Comte de Vergennes in 1781.

Letter XXIX. Customs, and the names Atlas, Antée, and Pallas

He opens on Paw. To find the original character of a nation, compare primitive customs and usages, and what belongs to religion, not the fine arts. The fine arts appear only after a civil government, and once that government exists people rarely leave in numbers except to found colonies, as the Tyrians, Greeks, and Romans did. Paw had meant to degrade the old empires, so he could find no relation between the parts of the globe.

The comparison he wants is Peru with China. He asks the reader to allow the Chinese dates for the moment. Hoang-ti, who lived 2611 years before our era, built the first temple. Until then people sacrificed to Chang-ti, that is to the divinity, in the open field. The Peruvians built temples to their divinity Pachacamac, or the creator of the universe, only under the Inca he names Tupac Yupanqui. Both empires sacrificed in the open, without a temple and without a material image. The cult of the divinity differed from the cult of the sun or the sky. The Chinese called that Tien. The Peruvians called it Ynti. He sets Ynti beside Chin-ti or Hinti, and says Hinti also designated the divinity, as Tien did, and in a figurative sense as we say heaven.

The first traces of government among the Chinese go back to the year 2953 before our era, under Fou-hi. Fou-hi made the laws of marriage, divided the people into one hundred classes or families each with its own name, and made marriage indissoluble. He says China still has only one hundred family names, called Pe-sing. Hoang-ti made the more detailed constitution: cities, villages, provinces, and six nested classes of families in each place. The first held eight families and was named Lin. The second held twenty-four, under the name Pong. The third held seventy-two. The fourth, named Ye, held three hundred and sixty. The fifth, Tou, held three thousand six hundred. The sixth held thirty-six thousand. The provinces were called Tcheou, and each contained thirty-six thousand families. Commissioners rose in order to the governors, who accounted only to the court.

Under those emperors, according to some man of letters of that state, astronomers saw that the solar year and the lunar year did not agree, and that seven moons had to be intercalated in nineteen solar years. He says this opinion would need stronger proofs. Siling-chi, wife of that emperor, is credited with spinning silk and cotton, making cloth and embroidery, and teaching the women of China.

The emperor Yao, 2285 years before our era, regulated tribute in kind: salt, cloth, a plant whose use is unknown, silks, lead, precious stones, varnish, pearls, feathers, rare woods, silver, copper, elephant teeth, skins, iron, steel, grain, proportioned to each province. Iron was found in China under Fou-hi, and use of it began under Chin-nong, 2748 years before our era. Coin is attributed to Hoang-ti, under whom some trials of a coarse writing were made, about 2611 years before our era. Until then, and even after, the Chinese used cords with different knots and different colors to mark events, keep accounts, and regulate time. He recognizes that use in China before Fou-hi, that is at least 3000 years before Jesus Christ.

He then asks whether one does not recognize the greatest conformity between the Peruvians and the Chinese. Sovereigns established and kept the same religion in both empires. Priesthood was joined to sovereignty, which distinguishes them from Egypt and from Mexico. Emperors in Peru and China taught cultivation of the earth, and their wives taught spinning and weaving. Both called themselves sons of the sun and set the example of field work by driving a plow themselves. Both followed the lunar year first, whereas the Egyptians and the Mexicans followed a solar year of three hundred and sixty days. The most sacred feasts, in China as in Peru, were kept at the solstices and the equinoxes. Both empires used knotted cords for counting and for memory, while Egypt and Mexico had adopted hieroglyphs.

He will not treat the nested classes, or the tribute, as proof of one primitive people. Circumstances could invent the same order among peoples who had nothing civil in common at the origin. Alfred’s distribution in England comes near it in some respects. Tribute in kind was also paid at Rome, at Athens, and under the early Frankish kings. The translator’s note says the kings of Egypt were ordinarily taken from the priests or the soldiers, and a soldier-king had to be initiated into the priesthood.

If the certain epoch of a common origin cannot be found, he still holds that Peru and China, and ancient Egypt and Mexico, show the same analogy that has been remarked between the Scythians or Tartars and the peoples of North America, and between South America and Africa. La Condamine thought the only way to discover the origin of the Americans was to compare languages. Carli thinks the idea just and the project impossible. Who can show how the ancient Scythians, the Chinese, and the Egyptians spoke four or five thousand years ago? La Condamine observed more than 300 mother tongues on one traverse. Several nations with different languages occupied Mexico in succession. At Cuzco the language was continually polished, and conquered peoples kept their own speech, so the result was mixed, as Italian is the result of Latin, Lombard, and other idioms.

He rejects Hornius, who found in America, by etymology, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Massagetae, Mauritanians, Greeks, and Syrians. He himself can gather words that look alike, ome for man, ayna for soul, ara for air, and others, and asks where that leads. The terms that last are those for things whose use continued. Chang-ti in China and Hin-ti or Ynti in Peru, for the sun, are a direct relation, the more so because Garcilasso says the Peruvians articulated aspirates and gutturals in a way our letters cannot write. The emperor he calls Cham-hi gave that Chinese word the sense of God, but the Congregation of Propaganda at Rome decided that it designated only the material heaven.

Plato, in the Philebus, says the god to whom the invention of letters was attributed was named Theut in Egypt. Carli takes Theut, Theos, and Deus as possibly one name, interpreted as Hermes or Mercury, and originally the sun. The Mexicans had the idea of the divinity but confused it with the sun, because they called the sun Theut, as the Egyptians did. Theut-Calli was for them the house of God. The Betoyes, according to Gumilla, call God Theos. He sets beside these the Hebrew name he writes Ichova, and Iohauna, the name Peter Martyr gives for the divinity among the ancient peoples of Hispaniola. Spanish ears may have changed the word, as they said Atabaliba for Atahualpa.

Papa and Mama, father and mother, are kept almost everywhere. A priest in Mexico was called Papa. Mama was by excellence the name of the moon. La Condamine found the words the whole length of the Amazon, and asked why, in every American language where they occur, Papa is father and Mama is mother, and never the reverse. Carli says that observation would by itself prove some communication between the hemispheres.

The oldest hero to whom the sphere is attributed is Atlas. He postpones the person and keeps the name. At the same epoch the Egyptian Hercules fights Antée.

Il y avoit, près de la province de Méchoacan, une ville qui se nommoit Atlan.

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 19

Other cities in that district ended the same way: Guat-atlan, Iz-atlan, Cin-atlan, all between Méchoacan and Lélisco. Their inhabitants were called Atlantides. One of the four fine streets of Tlascala still has the name Tiz-atlan. The translator’s note, from Clavigero, says seven nations came from a province called Aztlan into Anahuac, afterwards Mexico. Antée was the name for any inhabitant of the Cordilleras, the chain that crosses all America. Ante was the forty-third nome of Egypt. Anteopolis took its name from it. Tangier, or Tingi, on the west coast of Africa, was also the city of Antée. He asks why the Antilles should not be added.

Uranus, or Uran, is a name kept to his own day in America as in Ethiopia, for what is luminous, piercing, high, and burning. Gumilla says Uruana means, in some American countries, the civil point of a rock. The daughters of the royal blood, or those regarded as daughters of the sun, were called Pallas, or Pallades, in Peru. If Jupiter was only the sun, the Egyptians and the Greeks had no other idea of the mysterious birth of Pallas.

The Canaries probably had that name long before the Romans and Greeks knew them under it. Pliny mentions them. The same word is in Canar, a city and province of the Inca dominion, whose ruins Spanish and French astronomers went to visit. History also knows Guanches a hundred leagues from Paraguay, and the Anches, neighbors of Peru, besides the Guanches of Tenerife. Heights were called Khaka among the Peruvians, so many mountain places end in that syllable. The mountain of the famous lake, cradle of Manco-Capac, was called Titi-caka. Titi means lead, and caka an eminence, so it was the mountain of lead. The Chinese say chakia, and the Japanese chaka, for an eminence. In Peruvian and in Chinese the letters B and D are unknown, and F and T supply them. The translator corrects him: those peoples lack the sounds, not the signs of a writing they did not have.

He has, by the end of the letter, enough likeness in usages, customs, religious cults, and some word origins to conclude that at unknown epochs there was reciprocal communication, and that the Americans are not new men, merely unknown before the Spanish conquest. The question he leaves open is until what time the link lasted, by what means it crossed the sea, and how it ceased.

Letter XXX. Plato’s Atlantis, and why later voyages do not explain America

Likeness of usage, custom, language, and cult is the only ground on which he will presume a real communication. Memory of great events has to be added. He knows Plato’s Atlantis has been taken for a fable. He will not call Plato an impostor. Plato, he says, always gives as fable what really is fable, but the expedition of the Atlantides in the Timaeus and the Critias is not offered that way. One mediocre man, a note says, pretended the story was only an allegory of the government of Athens. The translator adds that the Spanish Feijoo had preceded Bailly in putting the story in the north, in a very different place.

Il y avoit au-de-là des colonnes d'Hercule une très-grande Ile, plus étendue que l'Asie & la Libye.

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 27

According to the details Solon said he had from an Egyptian priest, that island was named Atlantide from Atlas, eldest son of Neptune, and the name became common to the intervening sea. Atlas had a brother named Gadir. These peoples invaded our continent. Gadir conquered the islands near the Pillars of Hercules, and the conquered country was named Gadiriqque, from which comes the name Gaditan. Plato then describes the vast country of the Atlantides, their essential usages, their commerce, and some laws. Carli thinks that on those points the Egyptian priests followed imagination more than truth. The rest of the Critias is lost, so he returns to the Timaeus. The Atlantides invaded Africa as far as Egypt on one side and Tyrrhenia on the other. The peoples of Athens, from whom those of Sais said they were descended, at last drove the Atlantides out after a long war. The translator’s note says the Critias alone was the text to follow, and that the detached piece in the Timaeus misled ancients and moderns. Strabo, who believes the fact without following the dimensions, was content to say Atlantis was larger than a continent, a vague word.

Hesiod alludes to the war in the Theogony. Atlas, son of Japetus and Clymene, daughter of Ocean, joined with Menoetius, Prometheus, and Epimetheus to make war on Jupiter, and was condemned to bear the sky, standing opposite the Hesperides. Poets called children of Ocean all those whom tradition said had come from the side of the sea. Hesiod lived 933 years before the vulgar era, so the tradition goes back at least a thousand years before the age of Augustus, or 700 years before Plato. The fable of the Titans, men of gigantic stature who made war in Egypt, confirms it, though the Greeks represented them as making war on Jupiter. Clement of Alexandria thought Atlas the first to build a ship. Stromata, book I.

Selon cet Empereur, on croyoit, parmi les Mexicains, que plusieurs de leurs Ancêtres, s'étoient embarqués pour se rendre vers l'Orient.

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 29

Cortes, writing to Charles V, reports that tradition as held from Montezuma himself. Montezuma, supposing the Spaniards descended from those emigrants, received them as fellow citizens and asked them to regard themselves as in their old country. Herrera and Solis reported the whole speech. The passage he produces says the great prince they serve is sprung from their ancient Quézécoal, or Quetzalcoatl, lord of the seven caves of the Navatlaches, and lawful king of the nations who founded the empire of Mexico. A prophecy deposited in their annals said he left the country to conquer lands in the east, and that his descendants would return to correct the abuses of the government and the laws. Herrera adds that the emperors of Mexico descended from a prince who came from the east, and who had even returned there. The prophecy was not found just. Instead of reformed laws, the Mexicans saw in a short time the total subversion of the empire.

So Egypt and Greece keep a constant tradition of a warlike nation from the ocean, thrown on Spain, Italy, and a great part of Africa. America keeps the memory of an emigration at whose head was a great prince, who came to conquer several states in our hemisphere.

Europeans, taking themselves for the center, have assigned the epoch the other way, as a passage from our hemisphere into America. Oviedo tries to prove that Atlas was Italian, that his brother Hesperus reigned in Spain after Hercules and was its twelfth king, and that the kings of Spain, as successors of Hesperus, justly mastered America, the Great Hesperia. Oviedo puts the Hesperides there, not in the Fortunate Isles or west of Africa. Grotius said the peoples of the north of America came from Norway by Iceland, Frisland, Greenland, and Estotiland, following Niccolo Zeno. The translator inserts a long extract from Buache’s memoir of 1784: Nicolas Zeno sailed in 1380, was wrecked on Frisland, served a lord named Zichini, and the voyage reached Greenland and Estotiland or the land of Labrador. Buache identifies Frisland with the Faroes, and concludes that America would have been known and inhabited by Europeans before Columbus, and that the Welsh voyage of Madoc in 1170 might be well enough founded. For the south of America, Grotius does not hesitate to derive the peoples from the Chinese, the Ethiopians, and the Africans in general. De Laet and Hornius saw passages from Asia, the object of the Muscovite attempts in Carli’s day, so Scythians, Mogols, Tartars, and Chinese could arrive, and Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Canaanites by the Atlantic. Acosta, Gumilla, and others bring the Americans from Ham, from the Tartars, and from the Carthaginians.

He grants some probability to these transmigrations and still asks how emigrants put to sea in small boats, without knowing where they were going, and without a compass, leaving a known fertile country only from desire of a better one. The difficulty is greater because in every known age some men were so little struck by the revolutions of the planets that they denied the antipodes. Did the adventurers also bring private and wild animals, lions, tigers, bears, and reptiles twenty to thirty feet long? Gumilla observes that America has animals, even tameable ones, whose species are unknown in our hemisphere: vicunas, alpacas, llamas, and others of which Europe had not even the idea. Miracles are outside physics. Huet recalls Phoenician and Carthaginian voyages, driven by the winds. Carli answers that they would then have transported terrible serpents, with their wives and children. Augustine himself found an absurdity in supposing that some individuals ever passed from our hemisphere beyond the ocean.

He does not deny that antiquity, and the middle ages, risked far on the ocean and found islands that were not found again, for want of the compass. Aristotle, or the author of the treatise On the World, and Theophrastus, tell of a Carthaginian ship carried to a delightful island shortly before their time. Part of the crew stayed. On the return to Carthage the senate had the rest put to death so the discovery would not be published. Carli thinks it more likely they were bound to secrecy. Diodorus describes the great island the Phoenicians found at a very great distance beyond Libya, to the west. Aristotle says several times that beyond the ocean there may be other islands, and continents of greater extent than ours, but unknown. Pliny names the Hesperides, Gorgades, and Atlantides, all in the Atlantic, on the testimony of Ephorus, Eudoxus, Timosthenes, and others. From Statius Sebosus, it takes forty days to pass from the Gorgades to the Hesperides. Carli says that is the time to pass from the Canaries, or from the Cape Verde islands, to America. The next chapter of Pliny describes the Canaries and distinguishes them: Ombrion, Junonia, Capraria, Nivaria, Canaria.

Aelian says Silenus told Midas that Europe, Asia, and Libya were an island surrounded by the sea, and that the true continent was beyond the ocean. The men of that continent are of a higher stature, live longer, and have a great quantity of gold and silver. He names the city Machimos, and, on Theopompus, says the inhabitants of that continent once passed into our hemisphere. The translator’s note says the whole passage of Aelian has relations so striking with Mexico and Peru that one would almost yield to the illusion, and that if Aelian had written Machikos instead of Machimos one would think oneself in Mexico. Virgil has Dido’s magician come from the western extremity, and places the Hesperides there. Seneca the tragedian’s prediction of new lands is too well known and proves nothing. The ancients placed the Hesperides, the dwelling of the blessed, and Elysium in those unknown countries, on vague traditions. Strabo, Tzetzes, and others prove it. Carli says we should take no account of Hanno’s voyage along the coasts of Africa. At most he anchored at some Cape Verde island and forged the fable of rivers of fire and drums. The translator disagrees at length and defends the periplus.

Diogenes Laertius says the school of Pythagoras regarded the earth as a spheroid, with antipodes. Solinus says the same. That opinion made a martyr of Galileo. The rotation of the earth on its axis and its annual course were a doctrine particular to Philolaus, according to Plutarch, but Aristotle attributes it to Pythagoras.

Pliny tells a singular fact. Q. Metellus Celer, proconsul in Gaul, received from the king of the Suevi, as a rare present, three Indians thrown by a storm into a port of that German nation. Pomponius Mela cites the same fact, which Pliny took from Cornelius Nepos. Carli thinks these supposed Indians were at most from Greenland, of one race with the people of Labrador or the Eskimos. Huet thinks they may have been Lapps blown onto the coast of Germany, which seems more probable to Carli.

One may conjecture, with enough likelihood, that people passed from the north of Europe into North America at later epochs. The relation of the Zeni, though mixed with fabulous details, gives reason to believe such passages happened. Madoc, son of Owen Gwynedd, prince of Wales, sailed in 1170 to seek new lands, went west, reached a country abundant in gold and provisions, left one hundred and twenty men, returned to England, sailed again, and was not heard of. Powell cites four Welsh verses of one Maredudd, who lived in 1477. If the privilege cited as granted on 16 May 834 by Louis the Pious to the church of Hamburg is not supposed, some northern islands, Iceland and Greenland, were known then, which would give a new degree of truth to the Zeni voyage. Ruins of buildings thought to have been seen in Greenland seem to show that Europeans stayed there in the middle ages. Mallet, in the introduction to his history of Denmark, says that a century after the discovery of Iceland a Norwegian lord, Thorwald, retired there after a duel. His son Eric fled for a similar reason. Both embarked in 982 and reached a country they named Greenland, that is green land, and established an Icelandic colony. Eric’s son Leif reported favorably in Norway. King Olaf Tryggvason, already baptized, sent colonists who founded the town of Gardar, called Alba. Greenland was tributary to Norway until 1348. A pest, or some other misfortune, ruined the colony. The translator says this was the Black Death. In 1446 a great inundation submerged three hundred villages in Frisia alone, and may have swallowed some islands mentioned in the Zeno narrative. Passages from that country to the American continent are not yet proved.

The Spaniards, jealous of Columbus, say a navigator blown from the Canaries to the continent had instructed him. They have made that navigator Andalusian, Biscayan, or Portuguese, and have never proved it. The difficulty Columbus had in persuading sovereigns shows the glory is entirely his. Nobody then suspected he had the least notice of America. Yet about thirty years before Carli writes, he saw in the hands of the Procurator Foscarini, afterwards Doge of Venice, a geographical chart referred to the year 1436. An island was marked in the same position as Santo Domingo. The monk Mauro seems also to indicate it on his great planisphere of 1449, kept in the library of San Michele di Murano. Carli was told the chart was then, by some chance, in the library of Parma, and it may be another Venetian chart. Venice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made charts and rutters that indicate the last islands of the ocean toward the coasts of America. He asks whether they were made from the tradition of the ancient Hesperides rather than from real knowledge of the place. The translator calls the reflection singular and contrary to the proofs Carli brings, and promises to convince the incredulous at the end of the work.

All these facts prove at least a constant tradition of a great continent beyond the Atlantic, and of peoples from those distant countries who spread into our hemisphere. That is the people whose memory the Egyptian priests kept, transmitted by Solon in Plato’s Critias and Timaeus. The same tradition was kept in Mexico.

The epoch of a real communication seems to him very remote. Paw claims the countries of America are new on the surface of the globe. Carli believes them free of the waters, and inhabited from the most ancient date, by a cultivated nation, but partly absorbed by the ocean in a much later age. Pliny, book VI, chapter XXXII, before any other known historian, says that in his time one saw remains of abandoned buildings in the Canaries. The translator’s note gives the Guanche tradition that Tenerife was once infinitely larger, that an earthquake collapsed the greater part, and that a volcanic eruption raised the Peak. In America, remains of great buildings are earlier than the nations who inhabited it. Garcilasso, book III, describes the vast mass of the country of Tiahuanacu, a man-made mountain of the largest stones, divided into stages. The use was unknown in the country. Carli takes it for an ancient pyramid. Colossal stone statues of two enormous giants were seen, draped to the ground, the head under a sort of cap damaged by time. A long thick wall of great stones, remains of extraordinary buildings, statues of men and women of ordinary size, some with a vase, some seated or standing, some with a child at the breast or by the hand. Nothing astonished more than a house hollowed in a single enormous rock. The inhabitants said strangers made these buildings in a single night, and that the statues of women had been real women whom their sins changed to stone. Such fables prove the high antiquity of the works. The pyramids of Mexico and of Yucatan are certainly not the work of the nations existing at the time of the conquest.

The observation that pushes the antiquity highest, and stops him thinking of Phoenician, Hebrew, or Chinese voyages to America, is this. Vines loaded with grapes were found on the continent and the islands, uncultivated, and no wine. Iron mines were known, and no instrument of that metal, old or new. They used an immense quantity of gold and silver for various works and made no coin of it, and had not even the idea. The Mexicans kept the memory of events by hieroglyphs, and the Peruvians by quipos, cords furnished with knots. No indication of writing appeared.

He concludes that if these peoples had any communication with our hemisphere, it was before the discovery of iron, the invention of coin, wine, and literary writing, and consequently at the most remote epoch. A people from our hemisphere who had passed into America would have carried one or another of those usages, and the rapid change in arts and tools after the conquest, above all in iron and coin, would have happened then.

Letter XXXI. The epoch, Chinese astronomy, and the Egyptian period

He is embarrassed to fix the epoch at which the old hemisphere had some communication with America or the islands. Just relations would be needed between the present state of the globe, chronology, and astronomy. These letters are a familiar commerce. He asks that the hypotheses be taken as Fontenelle’s romance on the plurality of worlds. The friends will still find reflections worth attention.

Thousands of centuries are, before God and beside eternity, only as the day that has passed. There is no inconsistency in forming the idea of a time infinitely more remote than the first epoch Scaliger, Petau, and Ussher assign to the celestial globes. Moses said in general that God had created heaven and earth, without saying when, at the moment he wrote his cosmogony. Augustine says he does not know how many ages passed before mankind existed. City of God, book XIII, chapter XVI. Men less reflective than that doctor were alarmed when Buffon published volume IV of the supplement to his Natural History. Carli treats the cooling of metals, and the voyage of forty thousand years or so over the globe, as a romance worthy of Buffon’s celebrity. The Academy of Philadelphia denied him the hypothesis, as it had been denied to Newton. The Egyptians counted thirty-six thousand five hundred and twenty-five years up to the reign of Nectanebo. Were they better founded than the Phrygians, who counted twenty thousand and ninety in the time of Herodotus? The Indians counted millions, beginning at the first of four ages, each of one million seven hundred and twenty-eight thousand years.

The word year was only the expression of a revolution or a period. Among different peoples it was taken sometimes for six months, sometimes for three, or for a lunation, even for half of one, sometimes for a day or an hour. Bailly made several of these reductions with much success in his history of ancient astronomy. Dates of some thousands of years, which would make the deluge older than the vulgarly received date, must not be confused. Too much and too little prove nothing. He thinks it very probable that nature has more sensible epochs than the written memoirs present, and that the intervals have been longer than is commonly thought.

If there was a communication between the peoples of the two continents, it must have been before literary writing, and before the use of iron and of coin. The preceding letters put iron in use in China only under Fou-hi, 2953 years before our era. Writing and coin are of the reign of Hoang-ti, 2611 before the same era. The use of cords goes back 3000 years before J. C., an epoch enough earlier than Fou-hi. So this communication must have preceded our era by 3000 years.

Chinese chronology is open to several objections, above all the archives that consign a date of three million sixty-six thousand years, from the book he calls Jchun-tsiou-hod, and other epochs of millions. Nevertheless the attempts of able astronomers to verify the observations the Chinese consigned no longer permit doubt of any epoch, once reduced to its true term, as the translator adds.

In the Chou-king, under Tchoung-Kang, on the first day of the moon, at the autumn equinox, at seven in the morning, outside the constellation Fang, which is the Scorpion, there was an eclipse of the sun. The astronomers Hi and Ho had not predicted it, and were put to death. Calculated for the latitude of the country, this eclipse really must have arrived there in the year 2159 before J. C. The translator says Gaubil calculated it, at that longitude, for 13 October 2155, and that he left Carli’s and Bailly’s number as they give it, there being no correction in the errata.

Another observation belongs to the emperor Yao. Fixing the calendar, he ruled that the year would begin on the first day of spring. That year five planets were in conjunction on the first day of the first moon. Father Mailla, in his reply to Fréret, proved by the most detailed calculation that the moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury were in conjunction in a space of eleven degrees fifty-eight minutes fifty-five seconds, at seven and a half in the evening, three days after the new moon, on 9 February, 2461 years before our era. These years, deduced from astronomical calculations, correspond to the epochs of Chinese astronomy. If astronomy had made this progress so many years before our era, and if the astronomers held their knowledge from their ancestors, as they said, the first steps of astronomy, considered in its birth and before iron, coin, and writing, lie in ages much more remote.

In the first dissertation of volume I of his work on coins, he says he clearly demonstrated that in the time of Abraham, that is 2140 years before our era, coin was current in Asia and in Egypt. In his Letter III, on the Theogony of Hesiod, he tried to prove that letters were in use in Egypt 2172 years before J. C. Pliny presumed the use of letters went back to an epoch lost in antiquity. The long argument with Bailly, Marsham, Bianchini, and the numbers of Epigenes, Berosus, and Critodemus is mostly the translator’s. Carli’s own point is that hieroglyphs were the first writing of the Egyptians, and that the Ethiopians had the use of them before the Egyptians.

He then takes up the Egyptian period of 36,525 years against Fréret. The letter’s own summary says he proves that this period, consigned in the chronicles of Egypt, indicates twenty-five appearances of Sirius, not a literal run of that many solar years of history. The number of eclipses registered by the Egyptian priests confirms their chronology to a certain point. Astronomical observations are the surest way to fix the epochs of history. I will not turn the reductions of three-month years, lunar years, and days into a second chronology. What he holds is that the word year has been used for periods of very different length, and that a raw total of tens of thousands of years does not by itself date an event.

Diogenes Laertius counts eight hundred and thirty-two lunar eclipses. That observation would give fifteen thousand and eleven solar years, or fifteen thousand four hundred and fifty-one lunar years, an epoch infinitely more remote, and the number does not answer to the forty-eight thousand eight hundred and sixty-three years Diogenes states. The only conclusion Carli draws is that the Egyptians marked eclipses of the moon and of the sun from the highest antiquity, unless Diogenes meant the great jubilee of the fixed stars, regulated at forty-nine thousand years. The great year has been given sometimes as twenty-three thousand seven hundred and sixty years, sometimes twenty-four thousand, sometimes twenty-five thousand five hundred and twenty. Virgil’s Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo may allude to it.

All the sages of Greece who preferred national vanity to love of the truth authorized themselves from these almost unlimited Egyptian epochs. Plato assures that the war of the Atlantides went back 9000 years before Solon, no doubt because their defeat was, according to the same Egyptian priest, a glorious victory for Athens. Speaking of the ancient laws and monuments of Egypt, Plato says formally that some will be found of a date even older than ten thousand years, and that when he says ten thousand years it is not a manner of speaking, it is the truth. The translator’s note says these ten thousand years would be true if taken as periods of three months, reducing to about 3300 or 3400 years, which would re-enter the synchronism of the Septuagint, and then asks whether all these reductions are founded.

After this short exposition, Carli says he can regard as true what he had only indicated. The epoch of the universal deluge, or of the particular deluges that are admitted without hesitation, is much more ancient than the chronologists say. If the considerable number of years supposed by the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Chinese must not be admitted as a demonstrated truth, these astronomical observations are proofs one can bring to fix sure dates for the events history mentions. Those events are almost unrecognizable today. Fable, vanity, and ignorance have altered them too much. This is the way to follow for events that go back to the first ages. One does not meet, in every century, all the observations one would need.

Letter XXXII. Atlas, king of Atlantis, and why the old totals will not date him

Since the epoch at which the peoples of the west communicated with our hemisphere has been supposed to lie at the beginnings of astronomy, and before iron, writing, and coin, that is 3000 years before our era, he must show how the communication could happen.

He stops at what he calls a historical truth: the passage of the Atlantides into our continent. He calls it historical because the ancient traditions all agree that a people came from the ocean, subjected a great portion of Africa and of Europe, and were called Atlantides, either from the country they came from or from their chief Atlas. The translator notes that Clement of Alexandria says Atlas was the first to put to sea in a ship, and that the name Atlas probably came from the mountains. After the revolution it became the name of the men who escaped on the summits. Atlantes can be found in several countries, but the name Atlantides was particular to those of the island in question.

That chief, disfigured by Greek fables, became a mountain, or a chain of mounts in Africa toward the ocean, and was charged with the whole sky on his back, as in Homer and Hesiod. The ancient critics explained the fable by saying this Atlas was an astronomer who first carried into Egypt the knowledge of the sphere and of the motion of the planets. Cicero, in the Tusculans, book V, says Atlas would not have been charged with holding up the sky if knowledge of the phenomena of the sky had not given occasion to make a fable of astronomical observations. Vitruvius, book IX, says history presents Atlas as bearing the sky because he taught men the course of the sun and the moon, the rising and setting of the stars, and the periodic revolutions of the world. Virgil says Iopas sang what the greatest Atlas had taught: the wandering moon, the labors of the sun, Arcturus, the rainy Hyades, and the two Bears. Pliny says Anaximander of Miletus first taught the obliquity of the zodiac, and that Cleostratus had the glory of determining the constellations, but Atlas had taught the sphere long before. He even made it known to Hercules, in recompense for Hercules having taken up the defense of his daughters. The translator says this Hercules is the Egyptian, Sem or Som or Chon, whom the Greeks confuse with their own son of Alcmene, whose date is much later.

The rest of the letter is the attempt of Fréret and of Bailly to determine the epoch of Atlas from Manetho, Dicaearchus, Herodotus, Diodorus, and others, and Carli’s proof that their reductions of the years are uncertain or insufficient. To find the epoch of the Atlantides one must first fix the origin of astronomy. He reports what Diodorus gives for Egypt and says he does not find, in his Amsterdam folio of 1745, the reduction Fréret and Bailly attribute to that historian, a duration of the reigns cut down to 4700 years by taking a period of three months. According to Diodorus the lunations were so many years under the reign of the gods. In the second age they were of four months, not three. Under Vulcan the years had even been a single hour. Under mortal kings they had twelve months. Joined to the period of 36,525 years from Syncellus, the obscurity of these cycles makes it impossible to bring to fixed dates the epochs the ancients present from the memoirs of Egypt. The reductions of Fréret and Bailly no longer have the necessary base for an epoch as important as that of Atlas.

Can it be determined at all? He doubts it. Since Atlas, or from his time, or from the time of Hercules, an overturn arrived on the globe that destroyed the true monuments which could have enlightened us. Posterity had only a vague and obscure tradition of the facts, and fables and supposed dates followed, from the pride of peoples who wanted to seem the first to have reigned and to have known the arts and sciences. He does not yet renounce the search.

Letter XXXIII. Cycles fail, and the sky gives about 4600

The impossibility of reducing with foundation the years of the long periods of antiquity is a legitimate motive to suspect the fidelity of the dates historians report. It is nevertheless true that Plato positively assures, as a certain thing, that the laws had been ten thousand years in force in Egypt at the moment he was writing. He recognizes at least a very true interval of nine thousand years before Solon, in the Critias. In the Timaeus there is a space of nine thousand years since the war of the Atlantides. Herodotus says that if the soil of Egypt had risen in ten thousand years to the point where it was in his time, one must believe it would have risen double in twenty thousand. That reasoning seems to prove that, speaking of solar years of three hundred and sixty-five days, he indicates similar years when he counts eleven thousand three hundred and forty years between Menes and Sennacherib, on the testimony of the priests. The most ancient memoirs Europe had kept, in the time of Strabo, were the verses or poems of Baetica, whose epochs went back six thousand years.

One must not proceed lightly when the value of the millennial number is at stake. Plato adds, in the Critias, that several deluges had arrived, which the testimony of almost all nations confirms. The arbitrary reduction Fréret and Bailly took as the base of their analogies is devoid of all likelihood, however ingenious.

This would perhaps be the place to refute what Newton says on the epoch of Atlas, which he fixes only two generations further than the Trojan war. What Carli has said of the certain and the doubtful is enough to prove the contrary. There would be less uncertainty in stopping at the cycles. He leaves the Persian, Chaldean, Chinese, and Greek cycles, the cycle of Meton of nineteen years, the saros of two hundred and twenty-three lunar months, and the cycle of Oenopides.

He begins with Egypt. The first day of the year had been fixed at the summer solstice, that is at the heliacal rising of Sirius, as in Ptolemy and in Censorinus, De die natali. The first day of the year was the first of the month Thoth. The year being only three hundred and sixty-five days, it was about six hours short of the regular solar year, so every four years a day was missing. Sirius could then reappear only on the second day of Thoth, and returned to its first point only at the end of one thousand four hundred and sixty of our years, or one thousand four hundred and sixty-one Egyptian years. Because there was no intercalation, the months walked backward against the seasons. The first of Thoth answered to 23 July in the first year of the cycle, and a hundred and twenty years later the first of Paoni answered to that July day. The Egyptian months returned to their first point only after the Sothic period of 1460 years. It was called Sothic from Sothis, which in their language meant dog, or Canis, and hence Canicule. The translator says Dupuis is as much at fault as Carli on that etymology, and that the five epagomenal days were added to the vague year of 365 days, not to a lunar year as Fréret and Bailly thought. The Egyptians really intercalated only when they were submitted to the Romans.

If one counts only six such cycles before the epoch Censorinus marks, one has 8760 years. Add 1322 years from the first cycle that preceded our era, and one has 10,082 years. Plato lived about two hundred and eighty years before our era. There, he says, are the nine to ten thousand years Plato gave to the establishment of the laws in Egypt. The point is that counting cycles does not tell you when the first one began.

The Asian cycle, probably common to the Chaldeans, is indicated in a passage of Josephus. It was of six hundred years. Cassini was the first of the moderns to attend to it. They called it the great year. Some writers say the Chaldeans designated it under the name Neros. Cassini produced it as one of the most beautiful discoveries of astronomy: 219,146 and a half days make 7,421 lunar months, which give 600 solar years. Bailly observes that Berosus, Manetho, and Hecataeus, cited in Josephus, recall this period. Carli has well founded doubts on the origin of this period of six hundred years, and says he will give his opinion further on. The actual solar year does not agree rigorously with the year the period supposes.

He also reports Boulanger on the origin of cycles. The letter’s summary says the beginning, or the point from which the cycles departed, is unknown, so the time is undetermined. Several cycles and periods can be proved, and they still do not date Atlas.

The positive attempt is the sky of Atlas’s time. The stars that met the solstices and the equinoxes are the ones antiquity gives him. The Pleiades and the Hyades were the first constellations on which men threw their eyes. Hesiod says one begins to occupy oneself with the work of sowing when the Pleiades set in the morning at sunrise, and one begins the harvest when they rise with the sun, which indicates the beginning of summer. That was the rural year. The bright star of the Pleiades was, in 1750, at sixty-five degrees fifty-five minutes of longitude. If it is supposed to have been at ten degrees at the time of the equinox, it had to be at the twentieth degree of Pisces. Sixty-five degrees fifty-five minutes give 4746 years. Subtract 1750, and 2996 years remain, anterior to the vulgar era. A passage in Job 38 names Kimah. Bailly, with Goguet, conjectures the Pleiades. Sebastian Munster translates the sweet influences of the Pleiades, the attractive force of Orion, Mazzaroth in its time, and Arcturus with his sons. The translator says the Hebrew and Arabic word will not bear a positive pronouncement, and that the importance of the epoch obliges him to say so. If the passage of Job indicates the spring equinox, the age of Job would go back 3000 years before Jesus Christ.

The beautiful star of the Hyades, Aldebaran, could be at the spring equinox, as in fact it was. Antares, the heart of the Scorpion, was at the autumn equinox, Regulus at the summer solstice, and Fomalhaut at the winter solstice. If the Chinese astronomers whom the emperor Yao sent to the four points of the horizon observed these stars, they may be the ones named in the Zend-Avesta under the same point of view. On the position of 1750, their true coincidence with the equinoxes and solstices requires a change of sixty-six degrees, about 4750 years. Subtract 1750, and the observation would have been made 3000 years before J. C.

All antiquity attributes two important observations to Atlas, disguised by fable. The first, that he taught the theory of the Pleiades and the Hyades as two essential points of astronomy. The second, that he invented and made an armillary sphere. To make a sphere and to trace the zodiac are the same thing. Tracing the zodiac supposes the division relative to the seasons, the equinoxes, and the solstices. The beginning of the year having first been fixed at spring, the point of the equinox was also regarded as the point of departure of the zodiac. If it was called the threshold of the Pleiades, that is because he taught men to observe and fix the equinox by means of those stars.

How could the Pleiades announce spring by their heliacal rising without being at least eighteen and a half degrees of Pisces? How could the Hyades indicate the equinox without being at least at the twenty-ninth degree of the same sign? Those constellations were in that position only 4879 years before the moment he is writing. That epoch would then be 3000 years before our era. If on the other hand the equinox met the Hyades, or the last degree of Taurus, namely the horns, that could have happened only about 4600 years before J. C. Virgil’s Georgics still prescribe sowing barley and flax when Libra has made the hours of day and sleep equal, and sowing millet and planting beans in spring, when the white bull opens the year with golden horns and the dog sets. The setting of Sirius at the rising of the Hyades indicates a time well anterior to Virgil. In the poet’s life Libra corresponded to Aries, as today, and not to Taurus. The heliacal setting of Sirius arrives only at the end of April and no longer answers to the equinox. When the eye of the Bull met the spring equinox, it was the heart of the Scorpion, not Libra, that corresponded to autumn. The translator says the verse follows Hesiod and the system of the ancient Boeotians, not Virgil’s own time.

En supposant donc que l'équinoxe du printemps ait concouru avec le dernier degré du Taureau & avec les cornes, ce ne peut avoir été que 4600 ans avant J. C.

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 146

Once the zodiac had been divided into four parts, at the equinoxes and the solstices, it could easily be subdivided into twelve, as in Egypt according to Macrobius, or into twenty-four, as in China. Macrobius details how the Egyptians went about it with the clepsydra. From those operations one determined the annual revolution of the sun, that of the lunar months, the division of the weeks according to the phases of the moon, and at last the accord of the course of the year with that of the sun.

Letter XXXIV. The same sky in America, and two later corrections

Virgil’s lines are the best presentation of the instructions Atlas gave. The first notions of astronomy, already reduced to a sort of system, were limited to measuring the lunar period and that of the sun, knowing the solstitial and equinoctial points, the divisions of the zodiac, and observing the Pleiades, Venus, the Bear, and some other constellations or planets. Those were also the knowledges the Americans had at the time their continent was discovered. They knew the Hyades and called them Tapyra-Kaxouba, that is the head or jaw of the bull. The Peruvians had dedicated a temple to the Pleiades, which they knew under the name Coylur. That Peruvian name for the Pleiades, which indicated spring, is singularly curious. In our hemisphere the name colure has been given to two circles of the sphere that divide it from pole to pole, at the points of Cancer and Capricorn, and of Aries and Libra. Nobody has been able to divine the etymology. Achilles Tatius says it means without a tail, because the circles hide themselves going toward the antarctic pole. The translator says he long sought the origin of the Greek word in vain.

The ancient year was divided into three hundred and sixty days, in both hemispheres. He will not say this was an error of calculation. The first men, having only a mountain, a tree, a tower, or some other gross body between the observer and the horizon, could not exactly determine the same point at which they had fixed the sun before. They seized only very late the interval of five days that had to be added. If the period of three hundred and sixty days was generally adopted for the real course of the sun, one may suspect, with Weidler, that the solar year was truly bounded at that term, and that the force of projection increased in the globe of the earth in consequence of the revolution it underwent. That would have lessened the attractive force the sun exercised, and made the earth run an ellipse whose orbit now requires five days and about six hours more each year. Hence the necessary addition of the five days, and the intercalation of the bissextile every four years. The year of the Persians and of the Greeks was the same. When the Egyptians made their year three hundred and sixty-five days, the Greeks, Strabo says, were absolutely ignorant of that correction.

For a very long time Egypt had three ways of counting the year. The sacred or sacerdotal year, the most ancient, was constantly three hundred and sixty days. The civil year was three hundred and sixty-five after the correction. The astronomical year followed the true course of the sun. The five epagomenal days were added uniformly in Mexico and in Egypt.

The correction of the sidereal year, by the six hours added to the three hundred and sixty-five days, was not made the same way. The Mexicans made their correction after a cycle of fifty-two years, adding thirteen epagomenal days. The Egyptians neglected the error of about six hours during the whole Sothic period of one thousand four hundred and sixty years. The translator says the two procedures differed in length and in the supplement of the bissextile, but the principle was the same, and he does not doubt that the two periods are due to one of the two nations issued from the other.

Carli’s own conclusion is the opposite of a continued contact. The peoples of the two continents no longer communicated with each other at the time of the corrections they made to their solar year, as they had done when their year was three hundred and sixty days among both. At that primitive epoch, instead of iron they used knives of sharp stone, hieroglyphs and cords instead of writing, and, instead of wine, the fermented fluid he calls beer in general. Everything practiced in America was conformable to the ancient usages of our hemisphere. Their calculations were founded on observations and traditions that go back more than three thousand years before our era. The Italian edition, the translator says, placed here a note on Clavigero: the Mexican months did not answer to the lunations, yet Metztli meant both moon and month, so Clavigero supposed religious months and astronomical months. An ancient Egyptian calendar published by Bianchini represents the sun by a man’s head with a rayed crown, and the moon by a woman’s head with a crescent, at the center.

Such was the state of ancient astronomy in both hemispheres. Usages, religious rites, hieroglyphic writing, quipos, and other circumstances present a striking conformity. It would perhaps even be demonstrated that the languages have the primitive words in common, if scholars equally versed in the principal languages of the two continents had analyzed them. Some names of ancient heroes were found the same on both sides of the globe. Shall one believe, after that, that there was no communication? But how was it established, if the hemispheres were always separated by vast seas? That is the essential point he is about to examine.

Letter XXXV. A drowned Atlantic continent, and five objections

All the observations up to this point seem to prove that more than five thousand years ago men occupied themselves with the procedures needed to fix the equinoxes and the solstices and to determine the course of the sun and the moon. That must have been, as he has shown, before iron, writing, and coin. The solar period was then fixed at three hundred and sixty days, that of the moon at three hundred and thirty-six. Each lunation was shared into four phases of seven days, which gave a month of twenty-eight days, and the seventh days were consecrated to religion. The translator says this was far from general. From these divisions came the first idea of a circle to which three hundred and sixty degrees were assigned. The sphere was soon invented. The circles supposed to be described by the celestial bodies were formed on it, and the earth was placed at the center, according to appearances.

All antiquity unites to attest that Atlas gave the first instructions in astronomy, and that he made it known to Hercules. This Hercules is the Egyptian, the one who fought Antée, or the peoples who bore that name. Atlas was, according to tradition, a powerful prince who conquered a great part of Africa, at the same time that his brother Saturn made himself master of a part of Europe, and particularly of Italy. Atlas came into Africa by the ocean, where there was an island larger than Asia and Africa. It was called Atlantide. It was afterwards absorbed by the sea.

The Americans agreed with the Egyptians and the other ancient peoples on the primitive astronomical observations: the position of the Hyades and the Pleiades, the points of the solstices and equinoxes, the annual period of the sun and the moon. The corrections of the sidereal year seemed to him made in Mexico on combinations different from those of Egypt. He concludes that the two continents no longer communicated at the time of those corrections. Writers who have seen in America the traces of different colonies that left our hemisphere at dates more or less remote are useless to stop at. Analogy of a few words and a few usages is not sufficient proof. Attention had to be paid to the essential points, the use of iron, of writing, and of coin. That use did not exist in America. What was found there, hieroglyphs, quipos, and astronomical observations anterior to that use, goes back more than five thousand years, that is to an epoch anterior to the one the Hebrew text gives to the universal deluge. Father Riccioli felt very well the importance of the text of the Septuagint. Paw did not calculate these observations. The Mexican cycle was a combination above his reach. He preferred to take the opposite of good sense. He combats, by strong reasons, those who made the Phoenicians, the Chinese, and the Tartars travel to America, but one does not see what he himself thought of the communication.

While Buffon’s promised demonstration of how the molecules of our globe reached organization and animality is still in his portfolio, Carli will anticipate it. The Americans had the same origin as all men. They did not come out of the earth like mushrooms, according to the opinion of the Corinthians, nor from serpent’s teeth, like the Boeotians, nor from ants, like the Myrmidons.

Il y auroit donc eu entre l'Amérique & notre Continent, une terre de très-grande étendue.

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 177

It is not possible that the ancient peoples of America passed into our hemisphere if their continent was separated from ours, as it is now, by a vast sea. He presumes that the basin which forms this barrier was introduced by some great revolution, and that this is the one whose memory had been preserved in the archives of Egypt. The islands the sea bathes in that interval are certainly the peaks of mountains that rise above its level. The translator points to the map joined to the volume, between Africa and the coasts of Brazil.

Ainsi j'y conçois facilement un vaste pays, comme existant, il y a peut-être plus de six mille ans; & qui, en partant des îles d'Alvares & de Tristan de Cougne, comprenoit les Picos, les îles de Martin de Vaz, de Sainte-Hélène, celle de la Grande-Ascension, les îles de Saint-Matthieu, les Canaries & les Açores.

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 177

This continent would have been larger than Africa and a great part of Europe taken together. It would have had eighty degrees of latitude, half southern, half northern. That space is not less than 4800 marine miles, at sixty to a degree. The peoples of this great continent bordered Africa and Europe as much as America, except a small space of sea on each side, since the ancients represent it as an immense island, around which one saw some other small islands. The peoples the ancients called Atlantides passed in part into Africa and Europe, brought astronomical knowledge and different usages, and returned to America by the same way. That is how the analogy between the knowledges of the two hemispheres is to be explained.

He states the objections he expects, without disguise. First, a number of writers have treated Plato’s narrative as a fable. Second, to prove the reality of the site one would have had to sound the ocean and know the different bottoms, so as to determine the continuation of the submerged mountains whose eminences are the intermediate islands. Third, supposing the sea low enough to leave that vast space dry, the great basin of the Mediterranean, that of the Adriatic, perhaps even the Baltic and others, would likewise have had to be without water. Fourth, the face of the globe would have changed in great part, and no physical reason would authorize placing elsewhere the enormous volume of water now existing in these seas. Fifth, a physical cause would have to be assigned for so great a revolution and so enormous an overturn, independently of the universal deluge, because that catastrophe supposes that on both sides of this vast sea some races of men remained, among whom the memory of earlier times and the primitive knowledges were preserved. Asia would perhaps furnish still other difficulties. And how would this hypothesis establish a communication between China and Peru, separated by a sea still more extended? He will reflect on these articles and explain himself at the next post.

Letter XXXVI. Plato’s island could exist, and the sea has not had only one state

Either declare oneself a Pyrrhonian and deny everything without reason, or agree that what is called human faith can have no base but the combined testimony of the writers of antiquity, who were two thousand years nearer the facts than we are. Ancient history is full of confusion and fable. The instructed man doubts until he has examined. Truth has a certain character that is not so difficult to seize. He asks whether it is so difficult to distinguish simple writers who wanted to flatter from philosophers who sought only the truth. Shall the wise man, who assures positively that what he says is true, be worthy of contempt? Everything we do not understand is not to be rejected because we lack light on the places, the times, the persons, or the things.

Return to Plato. Distinguish in his writings what is pure speculation, literature, criticism, or history, and then consider his discourse on Atlantis. It is easy to distinguish that writing from all the others. It resembles them in nothing. Besides, it is not his work. He held it from Solon, and Carli does not see why he should not be believable in that assertion. The friends to whom he presents it were not people easy to deceive. Solon cannot have imagined it. Solon attributes it to a priest of Sais, who reproaches Solon and the other Greeks with still being children, that is little enlightened by comparison with the Egyptians. The character of the persons and of the writing does not permit us to regard this history of Atlantis as a fable.

Remember the tradition antiquity always preserved of an inhabited land beyond the ocean. Joining by lands the peaks of the mountains that the islands form, spread as he has said through a space of eighty degrees, we have formed an island he will call Atlantis, situated between our continent and that of America. Plato’s description: the island was opposite the mouth distinguished among you by the name of the Pillars of Hercules. This island was larger than Libya and Asia taken together. One passed from this island to other islands, and from those to the opposite continent. The power of the kings who dominated in this island Atlantis was very great. It also extended over many small contiguous islands, and over a great part of the continent. These peoples, having made an irruption into our countries, conquered Libya and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. If Plato had had before his eyes a map of the world representing the ocean with the opposite shores of the two continents, would he ever have designated Atlantis better? Is this not the country so rich in gold that the traditions always placed beyond the ocean? Must one look elsewhere for the origin of the fable of the golden apples of the garden of the Hesperides, situated at the western extremity of the sea? The unanimous testimony of so many writers, who supposed inhabited countries beyond the Atlantic up to the discovery of America, is enough to persuade him that an authentic monument of the ancient revolutions of the globe remained in the most enlightened country on earth, Egypt.

Lucian, in the middle of his jokes, feigns in his True History that he crossed the ocean and found himself in a great continent. Strabo, book II, regarded as a very probable thing the narrative Plato gives of Atlantis. Yet he refuses to add faith to everything Herodotus writes on the Phoenician voyage around Africa. He no more believes what Heraclides of Pontus tells of a Magus who made the same tour. He regards as an imposture what Eudoxus of Cyzicus says of his course to India from the Red Sea and his return along Africa to Spain. But he respects Plato.

The essential point is to know whether this immense island really could exist. If the thing was possible, the tradition recalled by the Egyptian priest acquires a degree of truth that gives it the force of a geometrical demonstration. All the objections that have no foundation but a blind incredulity, and the present state of the globe, vanish at the same time.

Who can show him what the primitive state of this globe was? How many times it has changed form, center, and cardinal points? Ovid lifts a corner of the veil. He has seen what had been the most solid earth changed into sea, and lands uncovered by the retreat of the sea. Marine shells have been left far from the seas. An old anchor has been found in the heart of the highest mountains. What had been a plain became a valley by the flow of the waters, and mountains, carried off by the floods, were borne into the sea. Metamorphoses, book XV. Carli translates the lines. Truths of this kind could be produced in the centuries of ignorance only as so many blasphemies. The history of the globe can be known only by examining the phenomena it presents. Physicists have made known the structure of the immense chains of mountains that run from one extremity of the globe to the other, the different beds of earth, their nature, their character, their respective situation, and the proofs of an antiquity lost in the night of time. The globe is no longer what it first was. It has perhaps changed forms thousands of times, and it will change again after us. Water and fire have visibly worked it. Man, so proud of his stay, seems to be there only as a passing being, fluttering from rock to rock to save himself on the debris.

It takes very little knowledge, and a very foolish presumption, to see in the present state of the globe only one revolution, operated by a universal deluge. The sea has been on the mountains. Everything proves it. That the marks it left are the effect of a general submersion which lasted only a short time, a year at most according to the tradition of the Hebrews, is what experience formally belies. Moses himself presents an objection that cuts the difficulty. The dove Noah released, to assure himself of the retreat of the waters, at last brought him an olive branch. The trees had therefore not been uprooted by the revolution of his deluge. Still less had the surface of the globe been changed to enormous depths. One will perhaps suppose an olive produced by miracle. Scripture does not speak of an olive produced by miracle, and he says only a fool could suppose it.

Marine shells found everywhere, even in the heart of the hardest rocks, as Steno, Woodward, Ray, and Scheuchzer remarked, are proof of the most remote antiquity. Herodotus had observed them on the high mountains of Egypt, and, to leave no equivocation, says a muriatic juice still oozed from them, which even altered the stones where it was found in the pyramids. The mountain near Memphis having seemed to him to contain sand, he concluded that the sea had risen above the mountains. Strato, Xanthus of Lydia, and Eratosthenes also believed the sea had occupied plains where they saw stones resembling different marine shells, as Strabo reports.

Marine bodies drawn from the earth are of different centuries. The most ancient are those that are bituminous, mineralized, petrified, or united to calcareous matter and to argillaceous and muddy schists, on very high mountains, above all when they are of species no longer found in our seas, such as the horns of Ammon, the belemnites, the gryphites, the terebratulae, and others. Those we have only as fossils. A later epoch is that of the shells in lower hills. He cannot determine the extent of the lands the sea had absorbed, and of what it first abandoned. The first state of our hemisphere is the one in which the sea surpassed all the mountains. The second state is that of the volcanoes. It took place when the waters of the sea abandoned the lands they had covered.

Letter XXXVII. The Atlantic and the Mediterranean as a new sea, from the time of Hercules

He leaves the first and second states and observes, with Fortis, that the Mediterranean and the Adriatic gulf are a new sea. Fortis contradicted him on the arrival of the Argonauts in Istria. Carli nevertheless does him justice on this new sea, which submerged a part of the dried lands. Physical observations would be supported if some ancient tradition escaped. An unforeseen irruption of the sea, the submersion of so many thousands of inhabitants, vast countries swallowed, are events that do not easily fade from the memory of the men who escaped.

Egypt had kept the memory of the submersion of a great island called Atlantis, situated in the middle of the ocean. Are there similar traditions concerning the irruption the ocean made by the strait of Gibraltar, and to what epoch can it be referred? Plato, recalling the archives of Egypt in the Critias, adds that Greece once extended as far as the Po and the Lixus. The translator says he should have translated Eridanus, saving the remark that this is the Po, and that the ancients had several Eridanus. Almost all that extent of country was a plain, which offered only a few mountains. In the space of nine thousand years that had elapsed since the epoch of the Atlantides, several deluges had arrived which changed the face of the old continent. When Servius assured that the Aones, or ancient Boeotians, were natives of the place where Venice now is, he alluded to the time when Greece and Italy were not yet separated by the sea. Strabo said the Pontus Euxinus was a true lake, formed of the waters thrown into it by a number of rivers, and that it afterwards made an irruption into the Propontis. He adds that the ocean, stopped by the lands that joined Europe and Africa, at last broke that barrier and threw itself on our countries. Strabo, book I. Valerius Flaccus recalls the same thing in the Argonautica, book I. Because tradition referred this catastrophe to the time of Hercules, fable wanted the event to be the work of that hero. Diodorus says so positively, book IV. Pliny confirms the tradition, book III, proem: Hercules broke this dike, the sea precipitated itself there and changed the face of nature. Tasso presented these traditions in his fifteenth canto.

There was therefore an ancient tradition that Europe once held to Africa, and that the ocean was stopped at the strait of Gibraltar, as one also sees in Solinus. According to this ancient opinion, Asia, Africa, and Europe communicated together by the very points of the seas that have separated them. Justin speaks of this ancient state of the earth. Seneca described the catastrophe itself. Natural Questions, book III, 27. Men saved themselves, with their wives and children, on the highest places, driving their flocks before them. All commerce, all passage was interrupted between these unfortunates, who remained some on one side and some on the other. The wave covered all the sloping places, and the unhappy remains of mankind clung to the highest peaks. That is the epoch of those islands, which are only the point of the mounts that increase the number of the Cyclades. The translator’s note says history mentions wild horses that passed very anciently from Africa into Spain. They could pass only on continuous lands, or on lands separated by water easy to cross.

He then puts under the reader’s eyes the state of Europe before this catastrophe, as he can conceive it, and he says a marine chart is necessary. From the point named Salvore to the opposite shore of Friuli there is a chain of submerged mounts, where the sea has little depth. Istria and Friuli were united on that side and made one continent. The small number of rivers around this present basin, the Isonzo, the Timavo, the Risano, and others, being higher than the submerged hills, had to throw themselves there. Meeting the waters of a greater number of rivers, the Livenza, the Tagliamento, the Piave, the Sile, the Brenta, the Adige, the Po, and on the opposite part the Quetto, the Arsa, and the ancient Istro, with the others of Liburnia, they will have formed a great lake, as all those great masses of water form between mountains.

Observe how the sea pushed itself between the point of Otranto and Valona, or Canina, or even the point of Glossa and the val d’Orso, insinuating itself into the mountains whose continuation it intercepted, and afterwards forming the numerous islands of Dalmatia and the Quarnero. Figure that the strait of Gibraltar has not been opened, and that the Atlantic, certainly higher than the Mediterranean, is not in the basin it has filled. The continent was joined to the islands of Dalmatia and Istria. The mountains of Italy, both on the side of the land of Otranto and on that of Sant’Antonio in the Capitanata, carry themselves across the Adriatic into Dalmatia. From the Capitanata to Curzola a chain reigns, whose peaks, higher than the sea level, form the islands of Agostini Grande, Augustini, Agosta, Cazza, Cazza, the bank of Pelagosa, Pelagosa, Cherso, Caprera, formerly the islands of Diomedes. The sea has only twelve or fourteen feet of depth between these islands and the continent of Manfredonia, the principal town of the Capitanata. Lissa, Busi, Sant’Andrea, and Pomo will have made, with Lesina, another corresponding chain. Perhaps between these mountains flowed the rivers one sees on the opposite shores of Dalmatia and Italy. Perhaps the upper lake had a discharge canal which, united to the other rivers, carried its waters beyond the strait of Otranto into some other lake or sea like the Pontus Euxinus or the Caspian.

Descending toward Cerigo and from there into the Archipelago, the islands of Corfu, Paxos, Antipaxos, Santa Maura, Cephalonia, and Zante are all in the same direction, composed of the same matter, and consequently once formed a single chain of mounts, reunited by the other hills or the intermediate islets to the opposite continent of Epirus and the Morea. Crete, or Candia, was united by Capo Spada with Cerigotto, and Cerigo with the opposite point of Saint Angelo of the Morea, and, by means of Cape Sidero, with the island of Casos and of Scarpanto. The islands of Scarpanto, Astypalaia, Saint John, Stampalia, Amorgos, Naxos, Mykonos, Tinos, and Andros are only a continuation of Negropont, the ancient Euboea, and make a line which on one side belonged to the continent of Greece, the Peloponnese, and Crete.

He had found stalactites in the aqueduct he discovered in 1750 at the amphitheatre of Pola. Those concretions were only a foot long, on three inches of diameter, in the space of fifteen hundred years. On the summit of Mount Servolo he saw several columns of stalactites, twenty to twenty-two feet high, on two or three of diameter. He has not the courage to present the calculation. The translator says he did well not to finish it, because calcareous concretions form more or less quickly according to the opening and the quantity of matter the water holds.

The letter’s own summary is the claim I would set beside the Atlantic one. The Atlantic and the Mediterranean are the effect of a new revolution of the globe. The traditions of antiquity, above all the submersion that followed the rupture of the lands which reunited Africa and Europe at the strait of Gibraltar in the time of Hercules, are the historical side. The topography is the space the Mediterranean submerged, from the strait as far as Illyria and the Black Sea, before that submersion.

Letter XXXVIII. The floor of the Atlantic, and a passage before iron

Pliny reunites, from chapter LXXXVIII to XCII of his second book, all the countries he says were swallowed by the sea. After speaking of the separation of the islands of Sicily, Cyprus, Euboea, and others, he adds that the ocean also submerged the lands that now form the vast basin of the Atlantic sea. He then names Helice and Bura in the gulf of Corinth, a great part of the isle of Ceos, and everything that is missing from Italy, from Boeotia, and from Euboea.

If Atlantis was submerged at the same time that the ocean, raised to a considerable height, introduced itself into our countries, one cannot doubt that it existed when the lands between Gibraltar and Syria, and between Africa and Italy, were dry, except some lakes which had to receive the waters of several rivers and which have now become the deepest places of the Mediterranean.

Does one perceive in the basin of the Atlantic, as in the Mediterranean and the gulf of Venice, indices of submerged countries? The idea of some ancient island in the ocean is not enough to prove everything Plato told of the vast Atlantis. Agree for an instant, and suppose the sea suddenly lowered by five hundred fathoms in the Mediterranean basin. Consider what five hundred fathoms are beside eighteen miles of elevation of the terrestrial semi-diameter under the equator. The surface now occupied by the Adriatic and the Aegean appears as he has represented it, and according to the idea the ancients had of the earlier state of all those submerged lands. The same thing will hold in the Atlantic if we suppose six hundred fathoms of water less. From that instant an immense extent of country appears, which well deserves to be regarded as that of the Atlantides.

He agrees that not all the bottoms of the Atlantic have been sounded. Different navigators have recognized enough bottoms to advance something certain. The precious works of Buache have made known the horizontal plan of the floor of the Atlantic, from Rio Grande, or the banks of Saint Roch, in America, to Cape Tagrin in Africa, on a line that cuts the equator at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. He drew a very exact chart of the horizontal and perpendicular section of the islands and the shoals of that space, and presented it to the Academy of Sciences. Cassini and Le Fuochi were named to examine the work in all its parts. They approved it, and the Academy confirmed their report by a decree under the signature of Fontenelle. The translator sends the reader to the memoirs of the Academy for 1745, 1750, and 1753, and says to follow the map at the end of this volume.

That chart represents the continuation of the Cordilleras as far as the island of Noronha. That island is only the peak of a mountain. The environs have been sounded over an extent of nine thousand feet. Only two hundred fathoms were found in its valleys. There are some small contiguous islands, those of the Ourses, the Foux, and the Rats. Farther on the depth is unknown. America therefore anciently extended that far.

On the African side, the great shoals, the banks of Cape Tagrin, and Cape Sainte-Anne demonstrate the ancient prolongation of that continent. Farther north, Cape Blanc joins the islands of Saint Nicolas, Saint Lucia, Saint Jacques, Fogo, Saint Anthony, Brava, and the rest, at last the islands of Cape Verde, to which they belong. In the interval of this prolongation there are different small islands and sandbanks that occupy a space of fourteen degrees, or eight hundred and forty marine miles, at sixty miles to a degree. All have been sounded. Their shoals prove that, supposing the sea lowered by five hundred fathoms, and even less, there would be immense lands uncovered. If these islands are then considered as joined to those of Los Abrolhos, they followed an oblique direction that cut the equator at an angle of about thirty degrees, and that continued by the islands of Ascension, Saint Matthew, and Saint Helena on one end, and on the other perhaps as far as the Bermudas.

Such is the immense space of lands one would recover by supposing the ocean lowered by five hundred fathoms: a prolongation of five thousand miles on a width of about eight hundred and forty. The translator calculates eighty-three and one third degrees. Supposing these lands and the Mediterranean basin free of the waters that cover them, the vast rivers that flow from Africa and from America must have formed great lakes there, which discharged into the Antarctic sea and made an island of the vast land in question, as the traditions of ancient Egypt supposed.

On these suppositions, founded on the state of the places themselves, the peoples who inhabited them could pass into Africa and into Europe, extend their conquests, dominate on one side as far as Egypt and on the other as far as Spain and Tyrrhenia, and find no more difficulty in going to America and returning at will. Plato says the Atlantides dominated in part over the great continent that was opposite on the other side. That can only be America.

Thus one can realize, without the least contradiction, all the traditions of Egypt and of Greece, and bring from the ocean those first gods who reigned in Africa. We know the kingdom of that Atlas who taught astronomy and the course of the lunar year. The antiquity of these traditions agrees with those of the peoples of Baetica, who are the autochthons, or first inhabitants, of Spain. They are confirmed by the archives that recalled to the Mexicans that their ancestors had come from the east and had passed back, but above all by the conformity of astronomical knowledge, the hieroglyphs, the customs, and the usages that had a common origin and were carried into Egypt by these same peoples.

As soon as the ocean had withdrawn from our hemisphere, which it covered in the first state indicated by the archives of the earth itself, and the volcanoes, which ceased in great part, had left dry the surface that became habitable, a communication was established between the peoples of Atlantis, our continent, and that of America, before the discovery of iron and the invention of writing and of coin, that is at an epoch of more than three thousand years before our era. This epoch is in some accord with the text of the Septuagint, the astronomical observations, and the traditions concerning Hercules, to whose age the submersion that separated the parts of the globe is referred. By these comparisons one explains why the navigators who discovered the Canaries and the other islands west of Africa were so embarrassed. Struck by the relations they perceived between the usages of the inhabitants and those of ancient Egypt, above all in the preservation of corpses, they could only think too much. The facts showed the analogy of the two peoples. The cave of Tenerife, where one finds a number of mummies, respected by the natives as the bodies of the most ancient Guanches, did not permit a doubt.

He expects the objection that, even granting the Atlantides spread their knowledge in Egypt, Spain, and the other countries, one still has to explain the likeness of the Peruvians and the Chinese, and to examine the actual position of Asia and of America to the east. That is the next letter.

Letter XXXIX. The Pacific and the Indian sea, and one language on islands that cannot have been reached by canoe

It is not impossible to conceive that, supposing the Chinese anciently fixed in Siberia, they passed into America, as other Tartar or Scythian peoples did, and carried those usages and manners that seem to bring the two continents so near in the northern parts. These emigrations become still more likely when one reflects that those countries were also partly submerged by the inundation that covered Atlantis and the basin of the Mediterranean.

An equally great inundation must have arrived in the time of Hercules. Cast your eyes on the islands of Africa, Asia, and America. Observe the position of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, and everything called the Indian archipelago, with the suite of the Philippines and the Luzon islands, and deny if you can that they, like the island of Formosa, belonged to the continent of Asia. New Britain is joined to Japan by means of the Mariana islands. There is a suite of islands which, departing from New Britain, divides into two branches. One, above the equator, goes as far as New Mexico and the point of California. The other, below the equator, goes to join New Zealand and from there Chile. New Holland may even have belonged to Africa, with the island of Madagascar and the other islands, namely Bourbon, Amsterdam, Ramiros, and the rest. Buache presented to the Academy of Sciences, in 1744, a chart that indicated the submarine mountains. It is particularly to his works that we owe knowledge of the Atlantic, the other parts of the Indian sea, and those of the Pacific as far as the strait of Anian. This incredible suite of mountains indicates the vast continent the sea absorbed. The position of the present continents proves from which side the sea threw itself on the flooded lands.

These continents all present themselves at an acute angle toward the antarctic pole. One perceives the same form in the narrowest and uppermost gulfs, such as California, Kamchatka, Ceylon, and Comorin, and, on the other side, in the Atlantic, Florida, the bank of Newfoundland, Greenland, and the rest. This position of the lands is enough to show, as one sees by the rivers, what the course of the sea was. The proof becomes still more sensible in the Atlantic if one considers that the re-entrant angles correspond to the salient angles, between the two opposite shores of America and Africa. Observe also all the gulfs the sea formed on that side when it threw itself into these lands: the Vermilion sea at California, those of Kamchatka, Korea, Peking, Tonkin, Martaban, Bengal, and Cambay, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea. All are directed toward the antarctic pole, like the promontories of the continents.

The voyages of the latest navigators, Wallis, Bougainville, Carteret, and Cook, give still stronger proofs in the parallels they present of the languages of several islands that had been unknown before them. These parallels discover the common origin of inhabitants now separated by immense intervals and for a number of centuries. The islands of Tahiti, Bolabola, Maupiti as he prints a form of that name, Ulietea, Huaheine, and others are in the middle of the Pacific, at four thousand eight hundred miles from America and five thousand four hundred from Asia. The translator converts those distances to eighty degrees and ninety degrees. Who will persuade himself that the inhabitants of the two continents went there by sea, at so great a distance, without ships suitable for such routes and without the compass? Europeans have navigated the Pacific for about two hundred and sixty years, and yet these islands had been unknown until 1768.

Cook fully discovered New Zealand. He had taken with him a Tahitian who had offered to accompany him. This man was named Tupia. He was of the sacerdotal order and knew perfectly all the religious rites of Tahiti. Scarcely was he in New Zealand when he perceived that his language was spoken there, and that the same religion was followed, except some principles and certain ceremonies on which he tried to instruct them, as a missionary. New Zealand is two thousand five hundred and eighty miles from those islands, which the translator makes forty-three degrees. The peoples of these two countries have only canoes or small boats that cannot be compared with our ships. One will never be persuaded that they used that means to cross that immense space, or that they had any communication that way. They therefore never passed from one country to the other by sea.

He puts under the reader’s eyes a list of some words of New Zealand and of Tahiti. The sense is the same, and the resemblance so striking that it is impossible to deny that it is one idiom. The columns are French, Zealandish, and Tahitian. On the leaf I could read, man is Taata in both island columns, and eye is Mata in both. Woman is Wahine beside a Tahitian form close to it. Forehead is Erai in both. Other pairs, for cheek, nose, head, mouth, and finger, are printed in the same three columns. The next leaf of this scan did not give me a clean continuation of the list, so I do not complete it from a broken page. Identity of the words he does print becomes, for him, a proof stronger than all the physical and mathematical demonstrations. Since when were these lands separated? By what revolution? Without doubt it was general in these immense spaces of the south. It is no less certain that the inhabitants formed one people.

The letter’s summary is the claim. The Pacific and the Indian sea are in great part new, like the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. From that one succeeds in explaining the common origin of several nations of America and of those of our hemisphere.

Letter XL. This inundation is not Noah’s deluge

He will not add a greater apparatus of erudition to the crowd of observations the naturalists have made. There is too much luxury of that kind among the men of letters of his age. These letters, or this poem if the reader wants to call them so, were begun for one friend and their common friends. He does not pretend to set himself up as a doctor. He exposes his thoughts as they present themselves under his pen. If a name had some reality, men would not be jealous of titles. Cicero, who belonged to all the academies, called himself M. Tullius. Hold to no opinion. Adopt a hypothesis to converse, when one believes one has found it the most probable.

Was the last submersion, which swallowed Atlantis, the Mediterranean, and a part of the East Indies, a consequence of the universal deluge? He answers frankly, no. The reason seems evident. Genesis teaches that in the tenth month one began to see the peaks of the mountains, and that seven days later, Noah having released the dove, it brought an olive branch. Then Noah, seeing that the waters were dried on the earth, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, went out of the ark with his wife, his family, and all the living beings that were with him. The waters had not made the vegetables perish, since the olive trees remained intact. The narrative supposes that the waters had totally withdrawn, to return to the place from which they had come, that the earth promptly resumed its first exterior form, and was soon in a state to make all the plants vegetate. If, on the contrary, after the inundation of which he speaks, the water has not left the lands it had swallowed, it is clear that it was not a consequence of the universal deluge. The translator’s note says the balancing of the axis would have sufficed to explain everything, and that, without departing from the text of the Septuagint, one sees that the narrative of Moses might well be the tradition of the catastrophe in question. The errata later say it was not necessary to recur to a Dutch theologian. Several very Catholic writers had held the same view on the word “all” in some places of Scripture, and on the non-universality of the deluge. The errata cite this only as an object of curiosity for erudite readers, and embrace no opinion.

If, on the other hand, a number of peoples were submerged at the same time as Atlantis, in the four parts of the globe, it is no less evident that a certain number also escaped here and there, in the highest countries, particularly on the peaks of the mounts that today form the islands of the vast seas, and that they preserved the memory of this terrible event. Those escaped peoples prove that this inundation must not be confused with the universal deluge.

Plato assures very positively, from the traditions of Egypt, that several submersions or deluges had arrived during the space of nine thousand years. All historians and all chronologists admit at least two deluges, one in the time of Ogyges, the other in the time of Deucalion. Europe has the date of some similar deluges. There were more than three hundred cities lost in one of them. Bones found piled with those of whales and sea cows, in what were called the mountains of the giants, indicate a catastrophe sudden enough. People first imagined that these bones belonged to a particular race of men, not to animals. They are of different size, that is of animals of different ages.

If the Mediterranean is a new sea, if the opening of the strait of Gibraltar and the irruption of the ocean on Atlantis are facts attested by the constant tradition of all the ancients, and if the observations of the philosopher-geographers of his day and the discoveries of the most enlightened navigators in the Pacific conspire to prove the truth of this catastrophe, he sees no inconsistency in maintaining that the lands now flooded were uncovered thousands of centuries ago and had their inhabitants. Justin is quoted to the same effect. The parts that are found divided on the globe were once united. An extraordinary revolution threw the seas over so vast an extent of country and made the men spread there perish. Happy those who were then nearest the eminences that today form the islands. He closes again on Ovid’s lines.

Letter XLI. Festivals of the floods, two Deucalions, and Ogyges at about 4000

Peoples kept festivals in memory of the deluges and the inundations. He treats the Hydrophoria, and the public festivals and ceremonies of the phallus and of the egg. The Persians and other nations of India or Asia send painted eggs, even gilded with much art, to their friends on that day. Among his own people the eggs are blessed, and then a game is made in which the one who breaks his egg by striking it against another’s loses it and is obliged to give it. Perhaps to this ancient idea one must refer the expression used when a girl ranges herself among women without a husband: she has broken her egg. Enough, he says, on these ceremonies established in memory of the inundation and of the reproduction of men, who were born of those who had saved themselves on the mountains at the time of this cataclysm.

Does he think this submersion of Atlantis is the one the Greeks named the deluge of Deucalion or of Ogyges, which some writers place at epochs different from Noah’s, and of which several others make one and the same catastrophe? The question would soon be decided if he said yes, and he would then have all the chronologists with him. The subject deserves to be examined a little better. The physical state of the earth has to be made to agree with history, without which all history is only a romance.

Lucian mentions two Deucalions, one Scythian, the other born in Greece itself. That ingenious author shows, by his details, that he believes the deluge arrived under the first. Since we know nothing of that Deucalion, Carli says something of the second, under whom others place the deluge that arrived in the time of the first. According to Diodorus, book IV, the deluge under this second Deucalion would go back three centuries before the war or the taking of Troy. Count three generations to a century, and one has, more or less, 330 years. Clement of Alexandria’s calculation reduces to the same. Clement says besides that the deluge of Ogyges arrived under Phoroneus, successor of Inachus.

The marbles of Paros were engraved 263 years before our era, and they comprise the principal epochs of Greece. They bear: since Deucalion reigned at Lycorea, near Mount Parnassus, Cecrops reigning at Athens, 1310 years. Add two hundred and sixty-three, and one has 1573. If the deluge of this Deucalion arrived about the year 330 before the taking of Troy, and if that city was taken 1208 years before J. C., as he has proved in the second book of his work on the Argonauts, the result is a date of 1538 years anterior to our era, and 35 years later than the one Clement admits. The marbles also mark 1318 years since the death of Cecrops. Deucalion having lived at the same time, one can put the deluge a few years higher and reconcile Clement with the marbles. For the rest, the globe being inhabited everywhere at one or the other epoch, which differ very little, one can, with Orosius and Eusebius, place this deluge in the fiftieth year of Moses. It can therefore only be a partial submersion of some cantons of Greece. The sea was then in its basins. This inundation will have swallowed only some islands, or one or another part of the continent, as a similar catastrophe was seen in the low countries of Syria. Justin says an inundation submerged only a great part of Greece. Orosius believes it was only Thessaly. The marbles of Paros make no mention of it.

Herodotus, who formally assures that the Hellenic nation, that is the Athenians, never changed its seat, having inhabited Phthiotis even in the time of Deucalion, and under Dorus, son of Hellen, the country situated between Mounts Ossa and Olympus, proves that this submersion was only particular, or perhaps did not even arrive. The Greeks, who attributed to their nation almost all the revolutions and inventions of other peoples and distant regions, placed at home, at the epoch of their Deucalion, what had arrived long before under a Scythian Deucalion, whose memory Lucian recalled. The inundation of the ocean is, without contradiction, much anterior to the epoch of the Greek Deucalion.

The deluge of Ogyges arrived under Phoroneus, son of Inachus, according to all the writers. It is ordinarily placed 220 years before that of the Greek Deucalion. There were several Inachus, as there were several Jupiter, Mercury, Hercules, and Deucalion. Hygin positively names Inachus, father of Io, son of Triopas and Oreasis. This Triopas was son of Piranthus, son of Argus. He recalls elsewhere an Inachus, son of Ocean, who had Phoroneus by his own sister. The denomination son of Ocean indicates his antiquity well enough. All the ancient conquerors or brigands who fell on Africa and Greece, and who were named gods or heroes, were so many sons of Ocean. The Atlantides were regarded as issued from Ocean because they had come from that side. The epoch of this deluge cannot be referred to the time of the second Inachus, great-grandfather of Danaus, but to the time of the first, who was father of Phoroneus. Apollodorus and Pausanias agree. Inachus passed from Egypt into Greece, and Phoroneus was the first who reigned there, according to Pliny, Pausanias, and the mythologists.

It is under Phoroneus that the deluge of Ogyges arrived. Ogyges reigned in the northern parts of Greece. Eusebius says, from Africanus, that Ogyges lived 1020 years before the institution of the Olympiads. The Olympiads, or the Olympic games, were instituted, one would say better restored, 408 years after the taking of Troy, according to the best chronologists. Troy having been taken 1208 years before our era, the restoration of the Olympic games must be placed 800 years before J. C. The translator says by Coroebus, 776 years before our era. The deluge of Ogyges preceded this restoration by 1020 years, so his deluge arrived 1820 years before J. C., which is not in accord with the truth of history. Bailly, who confuses the first Inachus with the second, places Phoroneus in the year 1937 before J. C. Petau, by a similar mistake, fixes the deluge of Ogyges at the year 1796, saying Phoroneus was son of Inachus and Inachus father of Io, which is false according to all antiquity, since the father of Io is the second Inachus. Bianchini proved it invincibly. The dates other writers have admitted can be regarded as erroneous. Banier says the year 1793, Shuckford 1764, Lenglet 1831, Newton 1080, before our era.

The Greek Deucalion having lived 1573 years before J. C., one must necessarily suppose that the Ogyges who lived 213 or 223 years before this Deucalion is a second Ogyges, and not the one who lived in the time of Phoroneus, son of Inachus. A certain epoch can be established: Phoroneus was contemporary with Hercules, that is he lived in a time near the age of Atlas and of Saturn. If Phoroneus lived in that time, and if the irruption the ocean made on Atlantis goes back to the time of the Egyptian Hercules, it seems to him well demonstrated that this same inundation is the one the ancients called the deluge of Ogyges. The age of the Scythian Deucalion would perhaps even answer to that time. It is not outside likelihood that the ancients confused the times and multiplied the events, supposing them arrived in Greece at the epochs it pleased them to assign.

Nous avons admis que l'âge d'Hercule & cette inondation pouvoient remonter à plus de 3000 ans avant notre ère.

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 296

Diodorus of Sicily assures that the Egyptian Hercules had preceded the Greek Hercules by ten thousand years. Reducing these years of four months to ours, one finds 3333 years, which does not much exceed his calculation. It is true that, admitting the Greek Hercules lived 1360 years before J. C., the Egyptian Hercules, under whom arrived the inundation of the same date as Ogyges, would have lived in the year 4693 before our era. If besides one admits, with Bailly, that Atlas and Hercules fixed, in their time, the spring equinox at the first degree of Gemini, that epoch would go back to 4600 years before our era, in the same way that the meeting of the horns of Taurus and the Hyades also goes back to that year or about it. That is the position at which the year began in the most remote centuries of antiquity, according to the astronomical observations. These observations are bases it is impossible to overturn. The authority of Diodorus is here confirmed by the very aspect of the sky.

Pliny advances, on the authority of Eudoxus and Aristotle, that Zoroaster lived 6000 years before the death of Plato, and 5000 years before the Trojan war, according to Hermippus, who collected two million verses of Zoroaster. Reducing these years to a space of six months each, as Gaza observes, this ancient Zoroaster would have lived 3348 years before our era, according to Aristotle and Eudoxus, or 3708 according to Hermippus. Plato died 308 years before J. C., and Troy was taken 1208 years before that last epoch. Ulrich Brecht makes the ancient Zoroaster contemporary with Ninus, but Albert Men fixes the age of that king of Babylon differently still. Carli does not see how these opinions can be reconciled, nor what could be concluded from them relative to his system. The errata add that Hermippus was a cheat, above all regarding Zoroaster and Pythagoras, and send the reader to Meiners, cited in the first volume.

Newton presents something more direct. He assures that at the epoch of Chiron, that is in the time of the expedition of the Argonauts, the equinox met the fifteenth degree of the constellation of Aries. Carli leaves that as Newton’s claim and does not build the Atlantis date on it.

Letter XLII. Fire and flood of one age, and the comet of 1759

There have soon been ten months and a half that the friend has had the patience to read everything sent at each post, even with precipitation, concerning the ancient state of America. He now wants all the ideas, or the dreams, on the different revolutions of our little planet, so as to judge what can be discovered of the probable on the traditions of Egypt and on the passage of the Atlantides into Africa, Europe, and America. He also wants the facts, true or probable, in a chronological order that agrees with the epochs resulting from the astronomical observations, from cosmogony, and from the history of all nations. Carli asks to be dispensed from literary quarrels, and from a severe march that would perhaps be advantageous, even necessary, to reconcile so delicate a point with physics and astronomy, which seem naturally to refuse it.

The principle to recall is that the great submersion which shared the surface of the globe almost totally into four continents arrived in the time of the Egyptian Hercules, or of Phoroneus, son of the first Inachus. The deluge of Ogyges was only that submersion. Its epoch, confused in later ages with that of the second Inachus, misled all the chronologists. This deluge can therefore be fixed, with enough probability, at the year 4000 before our era, and it was a catastrophe very different from the universal deluge.

There is a tradition of an ancient burning of the globe, of the same age as the inundation of the sea. The cause of this event may have been the approach of a comet. He reflects rapidly on Whiston’s system, on the theory of comets, on their known orbits, and on the possibility of their approach near the terrestrial globe. The effects that can result are the ones Whiston, Halley, Maupertuis, and Gregory indicated. If the comet of 1680 had had the same longitude as the earth, Halley himself says the most horrible catastrophe would have arrived on our globe. What did not arrive in 1680 was at least very possible. Counting back, he gets 5750 years, from which, subtracting the 1680 years elapsed since J. C., one has 4070 years before our era. All history agrees in placing the deluge of Ogyges at about that term. He presumes that this comet, meeting the earth then near the place of its orbit, extremely near us, by some change in the order of its system, operated, as Whiston suspected, a revolution of the axis of the earth, set the globe on fire, and overturned all the seas. The catastrophe could have taken place ten revolutions before the last one that comet completed, that is about 4000 years ago.

The comet and the earth would have brushed and broken, or the comet, absorbing the earth, would have made it its satellite. The earth, displaced from its center, would perhaps even have become a comet. Maupertuis says the least of these movements would go to nothing less than changing the situation of the axis and the poles. Such a part of the globe as had been toward the equator would, after such an event, be toward the poles, and such as had been toward the poles would be toward the equator. The sun would rise on the opposite side, that is at the present west. The extreme heat the comet would have thrown on the earth would have made all animated beings and the vegetables perish, and the tail of this immense body would have considerably increased the volume of the waters, besides the inundation that would have been the necessary result, either of the different situation of the axis or of the attraction. Such would have been the catastrophe our little globe underwent, 4000 years before J. C., if it were demonstrated that this comet had met the earth on its route. The ablest calculators presume that the comet of 1680 cannot approach the earth closer than thirteen or fifteen thousand leagues.

Consider then the periods and the march of the comet of 1705, whose return Halley predicted to within a few months, and which reappeared in 1759. The letter’s own heading says the comet of 1759 appears to be the one that caused this revolution, about 4000 years before our era, and that separated the two continents.

Mais la forme de cet orbite, étant susceptible de l'une ou l'autre altération, ne peut-on pas supposer, avec toute vraisemblance, qu'il survint une plus grande déviation dans cet orbite, il y a 4000 ans environ, & qu'il en résulta les révolutions que toute l'Antiquité atteste, quoique plus ou moins obscurément, selon le souvenir que les différens Peuples en ont conservé?

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 320

Count seventy-six of its revolutions and one finds a few years more than 4000 before our era. The node of this comet was found to have advanced by two and a half degrees, by the attractive force Saturn and Jupiter exercised on its body. The attraction of the sun was so weak, at that enormous distance, that the least action of the planets made itself felt on the comet with more energy, and influenced the moment of its return and the form of its orbit.

L'incendie universel, arrivé du temps d'Hercule, est un événement reconnu pour indubitable: l'inondation ne l'est pas moins.

J. R. Carli. Lettres américaines (1788), p. 320

The most important testimony is that of Egypt, whose traditions teach that the sun had changed its course, and that it rose at our west. Herodotus and Sophocles, cited by Strabo, attest it. Others cite Plato, Pomponius Mela, and Diogenes Laertius. He does not find in them what would authorize him on that point. We must nevertheless regard, as a very astonishing supposition among the ancients, this change in the course of the sun, which they really believed. It is absolutely impossible that this happened unless the axis moved.

The first king of Egypt gave the name Typhon to the frightening comet that appeared under his reign. There is the true cause of the evil, recognized in history and confirmed by the mythology of the Greeks. Tartarus, according to Hygin, produced Typhon, a monstrous figure, who provoked Jupiter, that is the sun, pretending to take the empire from him. Jupiter struck him with thunder and threw him under Mount Etna, whose volcano the monster still maintains. Eudoxus recalls the same epoch, saying in Athenaeus that Hercules was killed by Typhon. It is, as we have seen, in the time of Hercules that the sea covered Atlantis. That is why the Egyptians held in horror not only the name of Typhon but even the sea, and marked no respect for Neptune. The islands of Japan are exposed to frequent storms that overturn houses and trees and push the waves to so considerable a height that they seem about to swallow the whole earth. Guess what they call these hurricanes? Typhon. There was one so violent in 1613 that, in the memory of men, none like it had been seen. Cocks, who was at Firando, where Saris had left him to direct the mercantile operations of the company, describes it. A hurricane, he says, which is called Typhon in these seas.

Have we the historical proof that a comet appeared at the epoch of Ogyges, to which so great a revolution can be attributed? Augustine reports, in the City of God, a passage of Varro which teaches that in the time of Ogyges a prodigy appeared in the sky that changed the aspect and the course of Hesperus, or the planet Venus. Varro cites, on this subject, Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion. What prodigy could that be but a comet? The translator adds that Guzman, who believes the deluge of Ogyges is Noah’s, also cites Castor, Adrastus, and Dion, and thinks the deluge may well have had a comet for its cause. He recalls the Phoenician tradition, which supposed a star fallen from the sky at that epoch.

Saturn was son of Uranus. According to Pezron, Uranus is the same as Ur-en, which divided into its two elements recalls the word man and sky. Ur-en means celestial man. That is how Saturn became son of the sky. Uran or Uruan has almost the same sense in America and in Ethiopia. Fable adds that Saturn chastised the sky and threw the testicles into the sea, which gave birth to Venus Aphrodite. The Egyptians also say that among the evils Typhon did, he cut the virile parts from Osiris and threw them into the Nile, so that Isis could not find them. Hygin speaks of another Syrian Venus and has her born of an egg fallen from the sky into the Euphrates. That was the goddess of Syria, of whom Cybele was afterwards made, or the earth considered as mother of every living being. These castrations assuredly indicate a nature mutilated, altered, overturned. The sea and the rivers, or the virile parts, are the symbol of the inundation that produced this catastrophe. The age of Saturn, of Isis, and of Cybele also fixes the epoch of this submersion, that is of Hercules and of Ogyges. The virile parts thrown into the sea, the egg fallen into the Euphrates, the institution of the feast of the phallus consecrated in Egypt, that of the Priapi established in honor of the goddess of Syria, the feasts of the egg, the Hydrophoria, and the fable of Pyrrha and of Prometheus the regenerator are certainly so many emblems of the reproduction of animated beings after this great catastrophe.

Among the lesser changes this comet operated, he will admit, perhaps with difficulty, a greater distance from the sun and a difference in the ecliptic. If one admits the principle, he does not see why one would refuse the consequences. He even imagines that this is the true cause of the increase, not of ten days, but of five days and some hours, in the length of the sidereal year. See the proofs Weidler gave to decide that the year was only of three hundred and sixty days before the deluge, claiming that this inundation lengthened it by five days and about six hours. The ancient authorities Newton produces in his chronology seem to give reason to conclude that the course of the moon agreed with that of the sun and also reduced to three hundred and sixty days, shared into twelve lunations, or months of thirty days. If the axis of the earth’s orbit was prolonged by this revolution, and the globe was forced to employ these five days and six hours more to finish its annual period, it could well happen that the earth also drew nearer the sun and no longer employed more than three hundred and sixty days exactly. The solar year is now only three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes, forty-eight seconds. Euler also thought, from the observations of Walther, that the orbit of the earth was diminishing. The sensible diminution of the obliquity of the ecliptic, which draws near the plane of the equator and probably tends to re-establish itself at the point where it was when nature suggested to happy mortals the images of the golden age, belongs to the same reflection. Spring was eternal. The orbit of the moon diminishes too. Happy posterity that will see those fine days again.

He cannot help saying a few words of the work du Séjour published in 1775 on comets. It surpassed, by precision, clarity, and solidity, all who had written on the matter. His aim is to reassure people on the fears one might have in the future of a new shock of a comet. He reduces the probability very far. Lalande had reduced it further. These calculations singularly remove the possibility of the event. The combinations of a tern on ninety numbers prove a probability that is small, and yet terns are won. Besides, it is even impossible to suppose what body can meet comets in their immense and incalculable orbits and turn them from their course, so that comets can appear suddenly, as experience proves, cut the orbit of the earth, and even approach it when one least thinks of it. Du Séjour proves, it is true, that a comet which does not approach produces only a very small danger of the second order. If the reader persists in believing, with du Séjour, that no such body, known or unknown, can sensibly harm the order of our system, one will have to conclude that the globe of the earth has always subsisted in the same state since the creation, whatever the extent of the six days of Moses, whether thousands or millions of years or twenty-four hours. But then one must no longer open the breast of the earth, or cast one’s eyes on the witnesses it contains. The sea will no longer have occupied for a long time the highest mountains. A crocodile found five hundred feet in the earth will be regarded as a bizarre game of nature. Indian vegetables petrified in our climates will be a pure effect of a plastic virtue. Beds of marine shells deposited on volcanic lavas will be products of fire. Elephants will be made able to live in Germany, Siberia, and France. Noah’s deluge could not produce these phenomena, since the vegetables had not even suffered enough to perish. Do not forget that the dove brought him an olive branch, symbol of the peace made between the creator and the creatures he had spared. Where had she torn it? No doubt from a tree that was still standing.

The recapitulation fixes the dates he wants kept together. These inventions of iron, writing, and coin having been made only three thousand years before our era, as he has proved, the different peoples of the two hemispheres can have had a free communication with each other only in an age even anterior to those three thousand years. The astronomical observations that once fixed the course of the Pleiades and the Hyades with the spring equinox recall a date of 4600 years before J. C. It was then that the peoples of the diverse parts of the globe communicated with each other, since all, without exception, in the new world as in the old, agree on this astronomical observation. Thus the catastrophe that submerged Atlantis and several other parts of the globe must be fixed between the two epochs of 4600 and of 3000 before our era. But the deluge of Ogyges arrived under Phoroneus, son of the first Inachus, who lived in the time of Hercules, that is 4000 years before J. C. It is therefore at that date that one can place the revolution that separated the two hemispheres, and several islands in the vast extents of the seas where they have since been discovered. There is the date of this comet, which has since made seventy-six revolutions up to 1759, or this Typhon, who raised the sea to six hundred fathoms, who devastated Egypt and even a great part of the globe by separating the two continents. It is this same Typhon whom the poets represented under the emblem of Phaethon, who set the earth on fire while, on the other side, he spread a deluge, without which not an inhabitant would have remained there.

Letter XLIII. Corrections to Robertson’s History of America

This letter is a running criticism of Robertson’s History of America, not a new site for Atlantis. It does bear on American origins where Robertson dates nations, and on the conquest where Carli thinks the civilized character of Mexico and Peru has been denied.

We owe a history of America to the celebrated author of the life of Charles V. On that life, Carli will only observe that the illustrious Robertson omitted interesting facts, part of which he would have found in Gregorio Leti. Robertson indicates in the preface the monuments he used, and regards Ramusio’s collection as a precious deposit. Carli has every reason to believe he did not have the best edition. It is rare to find it complete. Robertson begins with the maritime voyages of the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, and the Hebrews, who went by the Red Sea to Tarshish and Ophir, which according to him were ports of India or of Africa. Carli has already warned, in one of his letters, that Ophir or Offir was the name of the gold mines on the island of Sumatra, not the name of any place. From there Robertson passes to the voyages of the Carthaginians and the Greeks, including those made by order of Alexander when he was in India, and to those of the Romans. He stops to prove how imperfectly the ancients knew geography, maintaining among other errors that the torrid zone was not habitable. He cites Geminus. He does not observe what that ancient writer reports of Polybius, who had made a work on the subject. By that fragment the torrid zone then passed for more habitable in its middle than at its extremities, where the heats were infinitely more considerable. Carli has used this passage in what he wrote on the geography of the ancients. It is astonishing that Robertson, who cites Geminus, did not see it. Carli would believe he had not read it.

He passes to the middle ages, speaks of the commerce and the knowledge kept among the Arabs, arrives at the time of the Crusades, and regards them as the occasion that gave birth, among the Italians, to the desire to go by sea and discover new countries. The voyages of Marco Polo of Venice and of Sir John Mandeville afterwards determined the other nations to similar courses, above all when one had the means of guiding oneself at sea by the compass, of which Flavio Gioia of Amalfi passes for the inventor. The translator says the verses of Guyot de Provins, who lived in the year 1100 and named the compass Marinette, prove that Gioia was not the inventor in 1301. He believes, with Prévost, that it was the Europeans who showed the Chinese the use of the compass at sea.

The Spaniards afterwards discovered the Canary islands, even before 1344. Robertson gives too slight an idea of the commerce of the Italians and of their ships. If Carli’s work on the coins of Italy had reached him, volume III would have given details enough to conceive things on a larger scale. He would also have seen that in 1459 the monk Mauro composed his great planisphere by order of the court of Portugal, and that the Cape of Good Hope, then called the Cape of Diab, the island of Madagascar, and the Indies were places very well known to the Italians. The notices that accompany each sheet give reason to presume that this cape was discovered by an Indian ship. Alfonso IV, king of Portugal, paid the expense. Mauro finished it in 1459, as the expense registers of the monastery of San Michele di Murano indicate. The day the print seemed to give is not clear enough on the leaf I followed for me to state it. Robertson would have convinced himself that the details of this Italian planisphere encouraged the Portuguese to repeat their attempts on the coasts of Africa, to find the route to India. One reads in the voyage of Alvarez, which Ramusio published, that Don Manuel, king of Portugal, in 1487 had a navigating chart given to Pedro de Covilhã and to Afonso de Paiva, copied from a map of the world that was to direct them on the coasts of Africa. That map can only have been Mauro’s. The Portuguese sea voyages began in 1412, under John I, along the coasts of Africa. They discover Porto Santo, the Madeiras, the Cape Verde islands, and at last the Cape of Good Hope by means of Bartolomeu Dias. The Portuguese double it in 1498 under the lead of Gama, arrive on the coast of Malabar, found Goa, and establish an immense commerce in India, fatal to the older trade.

The letter then follows Robertson through the conquest. I did not make a second narrative of every campaign. The points Carli corrects, which a reader would set beside the earlier letters, are these. Robertson’s Mexicans are no longer, in the later books, the weak and pusillanimous savages he presented in the first. He forgets the fact of the Tlascalans, of whom Carli had spoken in the description of the siege of Mexico, and who would have covered with glory our bravest captains. The booty was inconsiderable at the taking of the city, the emperor having had thrown into the lake, as Carli had said, all the riches of the temples, the palaces, and the city. Magellan’s strait is named from the captain who passed it first in 1520. The translator says de Murs has well avenged Magellan’s honor against those who wanted to take from him the glory of having, first of the moderns, crossed the strait that bears his name. Robertson exposes the atrocity with which the emperor of Mexico was treated, to learn what had become of the treasures Cortes did not find in the city, and the barbarity used in all the provinces. The conquest of Peru, the difficulties Pizarro found in re-entering, the siege of Puna, which lasted six months, Pizarro’s arrival at Cajamarca, the horrible project of assassinating Atahualpa, the odious monk Valverde, the carnage of the Peruvians, the prison and the punishment, as barbarous as unjust, of the emperor, the rich booty, the hatred of Almagro and Pizarro, the arms taken up again by the Peruvians, and the general pillage, are the subject of the sixth and last book of volume III.

Carli does not know how the author was inattentive enough to say that the emperor Huayna Capac, against the fundamental laws of the monarchy, which forbade soiling the royal blood by foreign marriages, married the daughter of the king of Quito, of whom he had Atahualpa. The Incas could take as many women as they pleased, besides their own sisters. But those who were not of the royal blood did not become Coya, that is empresses. Their sons could not succeed to the crown, being declared bastards from birth. That was the subject of the war that caught fire between Huascar, the legitimate heir, and Atahualpa, who claimed to succeed to the throne of Quito, either by the last will of his father or by the sole right he arrogated. Huascar was beaten and made prisoner.

Volume IV becomes more interesting because the author examines the institutions and usages of the Mexicans and the Peruvians. Carli sees with a strange surprise that the author excludes these Indians from the number of civilized nations, for the sole reason that the use of useful metals was not known among them, and that one did not see wild animals tamed by the industry of man. He agrees nevertheless that the Mexicans had different species of tamed animals, among others turkeys, and the Peruvians llamas. The original details of Ramusio ought to have shown him, if he had read them, that Montezuma had a menagerie in which he kept tigers, lions, wildcats, eagles, and goshawks. The Peruvians had also tamed the llamas, the vicunas, the alpacas, and other useful animals, which had even become domestic, though naturally wild.

Robertson makes the nation that dominated in Mexico at the time of the conquest go back only to the thirteenth century, and believes it came from California, whereas it is indubitable that it had come from the province of Aztlan, and after the six nations that had lived there. He speaks of hieroglyphs as particular to the Mexicans, but the preceding letters have shown the contrary. He sees the right of landed and movable property, as among all the nations of Europe. Although he does not believe everything the Spaniards said of the size of the cities, he avows that there were considerable cities, such as one sees among cultivated nations. He holds for indubitable what has been told of the multiplicity of the arts, even of luxury, and of the commerce that was done in the public markets. Are these then barbarous peoples? The difference of the classes of society, the serfs of the glebe, like those of the feudal system, and the slaves who formed the lowest stage, are the object of his details. He sees the nobles possess ample territories, distinguished among themselves by different honorific titles. Some of these titles passed to the male children with the lands. Others were attached to employments. The emperor had the sovereign power. The law forbade the people to be dressed like the nobles. The constitution of Mexico seems to him to have been the picture of feudal government in the most rigorous manner. Carli asks what it then lacked to be put among the civilized states.

The letter continues in that vein through Robertson’s remaining books. I did not turn every correction of a campaign or a source into a separate finding. It adds no new Atlantic land, and no new date for the separation. What it adds to the origin question is the refusal of a late, Californian Mexico, the insistence on Aztlan, and the refusal to call Mexico and Peru uncivilized because they lacked iron.

Letter XLIV. To Father Gregorio Fontana, on publishing the hypothesis

This letter is addressed to P. Gregorio Fontana, professor of the Pious Schools in the University of Pavia, on the hypothesis presented in these letters. Fontana is surprised that Carli does not have them printed. Carli has waited for leisure to give the reason, and he dares promise himself some enlightenment on the doubts that still keep him from publishing. The letters are the fruit of a familiar correspondence with a friend who had enough empire over him to engage him to take up the pen again several times, and to make him write a real book on a suite of interesting matters that at first were only a subject of amusement.

If he considered only the historical part, he would dare hope a favorable reception. He has gathered a number of important notices and combined them so as to present, for the first time, the truest and most exact picture anyone has ever seen of the great continent of America, as regards the character of the inhabitants, the usages, the religious rites, the arts, and the knowledge of those nations which the barbarity and avarice of the Europeans have almost totally destroyed.

The analogy between the ancient peoples of that continent and those of ours seems to him a demonstrated thing. He shows the most direct relations between the Mexicans and the Egyptians, between the Peruvians and the Chinese, and between the north of America, the Scythians, and the Tartars, so that one can conclude with confidence that there was a direct communication from one hemisphere to the other, a reciprocal commerce, but before the discovery of iron, of literary writing, and of coin.

When one wants to search for the epoch and assign it a place in the order of our chronologies, one no longer perceives anything but a hypothesis that refers to no known date. One advances only from reef to reef. The objections multiply at every step. One feels what could be, what even ought to be, and one scarcely perceives what is or what could have been. Opinions born of prejudice, party spirit, fanaticism, ignorance, private interest, and pride throw over the truth a veil of which one scarcely dares lift the corner, without hearing people cry error, irreligion, and heresy, as if the history of shells, petrifactions, and volcanoes, and the plants of India found in Europe, interested the true or the false religious systems of the globe. An astronomer who likes to calculate observations of six to seven thousand years, or who in good faith believes the Egyptian period of thirty-six thousand years, because that space of time seems to him a point before the divinity. A naturalist who perceives, on opening the earth, the evident proofs of five or six revolutions of the sea on our globe, and who likes to see the earth pirouette from one pole to the other to explain five or six beds of shells lying between as many beds of lava. A botanist who supposes a perpetual spring in the climates of the north, so as to see the plants of the south vegetate there, with prodigious heaps of enormous bones of animals that could live only in very hot countries. What are these philosophers and their observations to the dogmas of religion, to its morality, to the happiness or unhappiness of society?

He speaks to one of the most enlightened men of Europe, one of those most persuaded of the power of the creator. Most men love better to fear than to know. But the knot he brings to Fontana is not the theologians. It is the mathematicians, decided to maintain that there exists in our system an immutable, unalterable order, and consequently contrary to this hypothesis on which he establishes the ancient communication of the two continents. That is the Gordian knot for which he has recourse to Fontana’s sagacity. The rest of the letter presses the physical possibility of a changed axis, a lengthened year, and a sea that did not return. It does not add a new place or a new year. It restates the hypothesis and asks a geometer whether the order of the heavens forbids it.

Letter XLV. Saturn found Italy already inhabited

The translator says he places before this letter a passage the author inserted, in his last edition, into Letter XL, on the Aborigines of Italy. The following letter is the commentary and presents new proofs of Carli’s system.

Let us stop a little on the first inhabitants of Italy, anterior to the age of Saturn. That chief and conductor of the Atlantides found inhabitants in Italy. The subject is curious enough to merit attention. Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports, book I, that Oenotrus came into Italy seventeen ages before the Trojan war. Taking three ages or generations to a century, one has 566 years. Join 1208 years elapsed from the ruin of Troy to the Christian era, and one has 1774 years. Oenotrus, arriving at the head of the Arcadians, found the country inhabited by the peoples who were called Aborigines. There were besides the Sicules and the Umbrians in that southern part of Italy. Strabo, book VI, names the Cliones, or Cones, who joined the Oenotrians or Arcadians. One can even regard the Cones as more ancient than the Umbrians, if one believes them descendants of those the Egyptian Hercules brought with him, for it has been observed that he was also named Chon. The translator says Strabo recognizes the Oenotrians as a people civilized enough, and that a city named Chone, or Chonia in Lycophron, was attributed to Chon, the Egyptian Hercules. This hero came into Italy, historical fable says, to deliver it from tyranny. Polybius mentions other Chones, in Spain, beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

If we turn to the northern part of Italy, traces of a very remote antiquity appear there too. The river that divides that part is named the Po. The Romans called it Padus. They took this name from the Gauls, who, according to Metrodorus of Scepsis, cited by Pliny, had given the river the name the print gives as Fades. The letter then follows older names and peoples of the valley. It does not move the Atlantic date. Its point for this review is that Italy was inhabited before Saturn and the Atlantides arrived, and that Egyptian Hercules, under the name Chon, is already in the peninsula and beyond the Pillars, in Spain.

Letter XLVI. The Atlantides have priority in Italy

From Cato to his own day, scholars have made the greatest researches on the origin of the primitive peoples of Italy. The obscure veil time has spread over the first ages has not permitted anyone to penetrate to the truth. It is the more hidden because Cato’s book of the Origins is lost. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, after him, occupied himself for twenty-two years, under Julius Caesar, with all the archives of Rome. He consulted the most exact writers. It is enough to read his first book to be convinced that this laborious author knew the first origin of the Italians no better than we do. He is nevertheless the most important author we have on the subject.

He says in one passage that the Sicules were the first barbarians who came into Italy. Speaking afterwards of the union of the Pelasgians with the Aborigines, he gives to understand that the latter are the most ancient. Pliny says the Umbrians were the primitive peoples who escaped the inundation. Elsewhere, placing the ancient peoples in the order of time, he puts at the head the Aborigines, then the Pelasgians, the Arcadians, the Sicules, the Aurunci, and the Rutuli. Strabo also gives the quality of indigenes sometimes to the Sabines, sometimes to the Aborigines. Servius gives it to the Pelasgians. To say the Aborigines were the first is to say the first were the first. Aborigine, indigene, and autochthon mean nothing else than the first inhabitants of a country, who did not come from elsewhere.

What nation was known in history under the name of Aborigines? From which side of the globe had it come into Italy? That has not yet been determined, and probably never will be. Forty years ago one saw only Etruscans in Italy. Then the Lydians and the Canaanites, one after another, were regarded as the ancestors of the Tyrrhenians. Father Bardetti found the Celts among the first inhabitants and had them descend from Gomer. Tonso prefers Magog. Bochart believed Italy was indicated by the name Kittim in the text of Moses. Carli leaves Gomer and Magog. The Jews called Kittim, Cuthim, and Goim all the peoples who did not hold to the body of their nation. It is in the same sense that all other peoples were barbarians for the Greeks. Under the name Kittim some have seen only the Samaritans, others the Greeks, one Media, another Macedonia, another the islands of the Archipelago. Donati thought he could prove that Etruscan writing resembled Samaritan characters as much as possible, by comparison with an ancient Samaritan manuscript of the Vatican.

More researches have been made in recent years. He will not sink into all these discussions, too minute. He leaves them to estimable works, Bardetti, Guarnacci, Ferrari, Capsoni, and Count Filiasi, who occupied himself with the ancient Venetians. He will content himself with giving a precise idea of the opinion of Fréret. That opinion, which seemed new, and had besides the merit of being a foreigner’s, was put in a greater light by two Piedmontese men of letters, the advocate Durandi and Alessandro Tonso.

In examining this hypothesis he has no other aim than to support the one he has proposed on the Atlantides, who have the right of priority over all the peoples who came into Italy. He knows his opinion has not pleased Tonso. His further proofs will be found in the objections themselves that can be made against all possible hypotheses. To determine without reply what the first people of Italy was is, he thinks, for all scholars, a problem as difficult to resolve as to prove which was first, the egg or the hen.

The letter is a long examination of those hypotheses. I did not reproduce every etymology. The close is what he wants left standing. However far Tonso appears from the hypothesis of the Atlantides and from the idea of a comet whose approaches would have caused the revolution Carli has described and fixed at the time of Ogyges, that does not keep him from rendering Tonso’s literary labors the justice they merit. Nothing ought to be freer than thought. Whenever one treats historical points remote enough to dissolve into mythology, each is free to think as he judges proper. He will say, in answer to the bitter digression Tonso made on the Eridanus and on amber, that this question was foreign to the origin of the Ligurians. Tonso observes, as Carli does, that Herodotus wrote that amber came from a river called Eridanus, which flows in the north of Europe. What he says conforms to Diodorus. Turning the fable of Phaethon to ridicule, he gives his opinion. As the Rhone, which was also called Eridanus, has its sources near those of the Rhine, which discharges in the country of the Belgian Veneti, one may believe that the Rhine properly had the name Eridanus, that the amber coming from the country of those Veneti, one country was taken for the other, and that what fitted only the Belgian Veneti was said of the Adriatic Veneti, for which reason the Po was given the name Eridanus, which was never known in those parts, as the gravest authors attest, among others Strabo. Carli then asks whether the Po did not have the name. Strabo writes that the Eridanus exists nowhere on earth. The amber dispute does not, for him, touch the priority of the Atlantides.

Letter XLVII. Deucalion’s flood is the yearly rise in Egypt

The heading states the claim. The deluge of Deucalion, and Prometheus with it, is only the annual inundation of Egypt. The origin of the feast of waters is not the commemoration of any deluge. Joy made its character.

Among the absurdities without number that the author of the Greek and French etymological dictionary has uttered on the deluge of Deucalion, Carli finds a single sensible reflection. A crowd of traits indicate a very great relation between Greek mythology and Egyptian, denied nevertheless by persons whose ability ought to have guided them better. It is particularly against that author that he cites his own reflection. Every time Carli has wanted to reconcile the deluge of Deucalion with chronology and history, he no longer found either Deucalion or his deluge. The reading of what this man of letters wrote only convinced him more that there was no relation between the deluge of Deucalion and that of Noah, far from proving the resemblance the author had proposed. He examined what the other peoples of the two hemispheres say, since the feast of waters seems to have been generally known and practiced. One tradition belies another. The epochs are contrary. He could see only vague ideas. He concluded, with Schütze, that besides all the other circumstances that refuse themselves to the ideas of Court de Gébelin, the chronology, being unable to agree with the epochs so as to prove the identity of the deluge of Deucalion and that of Noah, one had to regard the first deluge as a fable renewed by the Greeks, and agree that Fréret saw very well, whatever Gébelin says, that the ancient Greeks had not known the deluge of Deucalion. Aristotle says two words of it. The idea of the inundation of Egypt and of its circumstances having little by little grown obscure in Greece, among the descendants of the Egyptians who had passed there under the lead of Phoroneus and of Danaus, or having been confused with what one could learn there of a Greek translation of Genesis, which already circulated there in the time of Plato, one will from then on have adapted to Deucalion what fitted only Egypt.

Whether that version existed or not, he believes one must go back beyond the dates known among the Greeks to find the origin of the tradition of this pretended deluge. It was, they say, universal. Only this Scythian escaped, and his wife. It was with stones that they repaired mankind, after having consulted the oracle of Themis. Ovid says the race is hard, and the documents of the house from which origin we were born. He leaves aside the other expositions of this deluge, because they were certainly diversified later on the Bible of the Septuagint. Plutarch, Lucian or the author of the writing that passes under his name, and Apollodorus each embroidered the fact in his own manner, drawing on that source. In vain would one oppose, with Gébelin, the southern constellations, where the circumstances of the ark of Deucalion or of Noah, the altar of Themis, the dove, the crow, and the rest are traced, he says, in the character of the sky. Carli would answer that the event was calked on the relation of those asterisms.

He asks the reader to attend to this manner of reproducing men. Why is it not Deucalion and Pyrrha who repeople the world by the fruit of their legitimate loves? And why, after this production from stones, do they have children? The letter then works the feast of waters back to the yearly inundation, whose character is joy, not mourning for a drowned world. I did not follow every rite he attaches to that feast. The finding he states, and the one the heading prints, is that Deucalion’s deluge is not Noah’s, was not known to the ancient Greeks as a world flood, and is the annual rising of the Nile told again in Greece.

Letter XLVIII. The feast of the phallus, from Egypt after the revolution

He promised, in the preceding letter, his reflections on the origin of this feast, which in its primitive institution had nothing that was not respectable. One would be wrong, from the title, to imagine he is about to enter into all the details of the infamous orgies antiquity knew under the name of phallophories, in ages later than the healthy theories of Egypt. He is going to treat the matter by consulting the language and the usages of the Egyptians.

The feast of the phalli is native to Egypt. This nation, which held directly to the remains of the primitive peoples whom the last revolution of the globe had spared, and whose enlightened priests made of each civil usage and each labor a truly religious object, could not, in the first centuries of its civil constitution, give itself to the dissolutions of the ages that had lost, in great part, the knowledge of the true theories. Among all ancient nations, as in his own day, the people has always respected the priesthood with reason when the priest followed strictly the duties of his state, and has given itself to disorder when the priest’s example proved that the doctrine he preached was false. The Egyptian priest was long wise, and the people happy, during those fine days of the priesthood. A column of the temple of Thebes bore an inscription by which one cursed the priest who, instead of applying himself to the sciences, would have given himself to pleasures and to idleness. Thus every voluptuary, in the pleasures of the table or in his manner of being, incurred public indignation. The word he uses is the one that, according to the present language of the Abyssinians, means a voluptuous man. The feast of the phalli could not therefore be licentious at that epoch.

The words phallus and Priapus are Egyptian. In vain has one wanted to deduce them from other languages. The pretended etymologies no longer relate to the circumstances. He stops at a passage that could be objected both on the origin of the word and on the character of the feast. There are still people for whom Hebrew is a literary Peru. Everything is in Hebrew, everything comes from Hebrew, everything must return to Hebrew, because one can explain nothing without Hebrew. A deplorable blindness. But the Hebrews, and Moses, from whom did they have their knowledge? By the avowal of Scripture itself, it is from Egypt. Hold to that source.

The errata add a physical description he had not room to give in the note. The festival was at first nothing other than the simple phallus of Egypt, on which one figured, in relief, the virile part, in a state of relaxation. The ring that surmounts the cross is seen on several monuments, figured as an oval and even ending in a point at the lower part. Sometimes this ring is replaced on the medals by a man’s head that seems put on a cross. Besides the sickle of Saturn, of Mercury, and of the god of Mexico, which answered to the Egyptian phallus, generation is still figured on a fine medal of Lesbos, by a woman seated astride a man. The active and passive power of nature in general was figured thus. The people were ignorant of the sense of these symbols engraved on the medals. The initiates alone understood them. The Persians carried the emblem of the phallus from Egypt. This letter does not name Atlantis again. It attaches the feast to the peoples the last revolution spared, and it pairs a Mexican god with the Egyptian emblem.

Letter XLIX. Villoison on a chart of Antillia in 1436

What follows is the extract he promised, from a letter written to him by M. d’Ansse de Villoison, of the Academy of Inscriptions, concerning the knowledge one had of the Antilles before Columbus.

The Italian manuscript, number LXXVI of the library of San Marco at Venice, contains a sea chart drawn with much exactness. It is composed of ten sheets. On the first page one reads the name of its author and the date of the year it was made, with these words: Andreas Biancho de Venetiis me fecit, M. CCCC. XXXVI. On this chart the Antilles are traced by the same hand, and one sees written in the same character: Isola Antillia. This is the more remarkable because the discovery of the Antilles is attributed to Christopher Columbus, and fixed at the year 1492. Struck by this singularity, Villoison had this precious chart traced very exactly under his eyes, and he sent it in 1781 to the Comte de Vergennes, who presented it to the king. A friend to whom he had sent this notice in Germany had it printed in the Gazette de Gotha, page 39, of the year 1782. Compare the curious dissertation of Sigismund Hadelich, in the second volume of the memoirs of the Academy of Erfurt. That scholar cites incontestable passages of David Kimchi and of other contemporary rabbis who, four hundred years before Columbus, spoke of the land and the wood of Brazil. See also the two fine dissertations of Johann Philipp Cassel, professor at Bremen. One is entitled on the chance navigation of the Frisians into America in the eleventh century, Magdeburg, 1741. The other is on chance navigations into America before Columbus, same place, 1742.

This chart must not be confused with the one among the Camaldolese of San Michele di Murano, near Venice, which is the one Carli spoke of. That latter chart is the work of Fra Mauro, a religious of that convent. Eastern Ethiopia is represented on it much better than in the tables of Ptolemy, and countries the Portuguese had not yet discovered. Alfonso IV, king of Portugal, knowing the skill of this monk, had a chart like that of Murano made at his expense. Stefano Trevisan sent it to Lisbon in 1459, and it was still in Portugal in 1528, in the Benedictine abbey of Alcobaça. In the library of the Camaldolese of Murano one keeps a statement of the revenues and expenses of that convent. The statement is in the hand of Maffeo Girardi, who was abbot in 1448. He became patriarch of Venice in 1466, and cardinal in 1489. One sees there the note of what this chart cost. Stefano Trevisan was charged with making the advances and paying in the name of Alfonso IV. That great king had copies made of Mauro’s map of the world and distributed them to all his captains of ships and all his pilots. Villoison points to Ramusio, Fortunio’s Italian history of the Camaldolese, Renaudot’s notes on the ancient relations of India and China, the procurator Marco Foscarini, afterwards Doge, in his work on Venetian literature, and Father Abbondio Collina on the origin of the nautical compass in Europe and in Asia, Faenza, 1748. The translator’s note says the Murano chart is the one Carli speaks of.

The same conversation that procured these details made Carli examine what concerned the assertions of the rabbis, and the Hebrew text in which several scholars have thought they found the name of upper and lower Peru in the word Parvaim. Solomon’s fleets made a voyage of three years there. He will print his details separately. Meanwhile he will say that it was not to Peru, but to Brazil, or to Parava, or to the sea of Parava, that they went.

Speaking also to Villoison of the venereal diseases, which Carli maintained were native to our hemisphere and not to America, Villoison communicated two passages of Palladius, who entered the solitude of Nitria in 388. They concern an anchorite named Heron, who, having lived in the debauchery of women and wine, was attacked by a chancre that made the member fall, and another anchorite named Stephen, disciple of the famous Saint Anthony, attacked in the parts by a gnawing ulcer. The other monks, astonished that so holy a man was attacked by so shameful a disease, were told: perhaps these members that are cut off have rendered themselves guilty. Villoison cites the Lausiac History. Carli adds general citations he had promised from the first of these letters, to prove these diseases were known in Europe long before Columbus. Pliny the younger, in one of his letters, tells of a farmer’s wife who, seeing her husband’s parts rotten with ulcers, told him they had no other resource than to throw themselves into the water. This closing matter does not touch Atlantis or a lost Atlantic land. It is his proof that a disease later blamed on America was already described on this side of the ocean.