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Authors: Mark Adams
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Coleman said, reaching for a volume of Irish history. “These books have been
read
.”
Inhaling the scent of nineteenth-century paper and glue, I gathered up an armful of books and took them upstairs for a closer look. What became obvious over two days of reading Donnelly’s tiny marginalia confirmed the opinion of a Minnesota historian who’d written that Donnelly “wrote with the impulsive force of a man defending a cause rather than the caution of a scientist seeking the truth.” Donnelly wasn’t merely attempting to sew up a bag of winds; he was a bag of winds. He knew the result he wanted and rummaged through his sources searching for only those facts that fit his needs, without pausing to note any reasonable doubts. In his hands, pyramids stretching from Egypt to Peru to India to Mesoamerica indisputably share an Atlantean source despite their having been built in hugely different styles over thousands of years. The use of bronze, mummification of the dead, similarities in language—Donnelly assembled every available scrap of evidence to support his diffusionist idea of a benevolent ur-Atlantis spreading its wisdom to the far corners of the globe.
With his tendency to pile up page after page of proof without ever stopping to ask if there was a reasonable explanation as to why he might be wrong, Donnelly set the pace for much of futureAtlantology. Too often, coincidence is transformed into evidence, which is taken as proof. A typical example: Circumcision was common among the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, so they must have inherited the practice from their wise common ancestors in Atlantis. How do we know? Because the Atlantean king Uranus, noting the horrors of “one of the most dreadful scourges of the human race”—syphilis, presumably—“compelled his whole army and the armies of his allies to undergo the rite.” Modern life insurance statistics show that Jews are healthier than average. Ergo, Atlantis was real.
Donnelly probably hoped that he was writing a book that would draw comparisons to Darwin’s
The Voyage of the Beagle
. Reading
The Antediluvian World
reminded me more of a book I’d once purchased at a yard sale that amassed hundreds of tiny clues to prove that Paul McCartney had died at the height of the Beatles’ fame and had been secretly replaced by an exact double.
• • •
After two days with Donnelly I badly needed a drink. As luck would have it, Coleman was giving a “History Happy Hour” talk in downtown Saint Paul on the topic of Donnelly’s life. I offered to help him carry his visual aids. The Minnesota sky, playing along with the deluge theme, was dark hours before sundown. Coleman grabbed a box of Donnelly’s old books, I picked up the congressman’s cardboard doppelgänger, and we ran through the downpour to Coleman’s Subaru. The location of the talk was the sumptuous Victorian home of Donnelly’s onetime boss, Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey. As a roomful of damp people sipped beers and munched on mini hamburgers, Coleman stood in front of a gigantic fireplace and talked about Donnelly’s political adventures in Minnesota. Then he turned to Atlantis. “I’ve been fighting this idea my whole life that Donnelly was a kook,” he said with more resignation than the firsttime I’d heard him use the slur. “He had this weird, wonderful, and creative mind that couldn’t be curtailed. And I’ll bet anyone here right now that someone’s on a boat in the Mediterranean with a copy of Donnelly’s
Atlantis
, looking for the lost city.”
Most of the happy hour attendees seemed to be hearing about Donnelly for the first time, but there were some devotees in the crowd. When Coleman quoted Donnelly’s famous line from the Populist Party platform of 1892—“From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes: tramps and millionaires”—I noticed at least two people mouthing the words along with Coleman, as if
read
.”
Inhaling the scent of nineteenth-century paper and glue, I gathered up an armful of books and took them upstairs for a closer look. What became obvious over two days of reading Donnelly’s tiny marginalia confirmed the opinion of a Minnesota historian who’d written that Donnelly “wrote with the impulsive force of a man defending a cause rather than the caution of a scientist seeking the truth.” Donnelly wasn’t merely attempting to sew up a bag of winds; he was a bag of winds. He knew the result he wanted and rummaged through his sources searching for only those facts that fit his needs, without pausing to note any reasonable doubts. In his hands, pyramids stretching from Egypt to Peru to India to Mesoamerica indisputably share an Atlantean source despite their having been built in hugely different styles over thousands of years. The use of bronze, mummification of the dead, similarities in language—Donnelly assembled every available scrap of evidence to support his diffusionist idea of a benevolent ur-Atlantis spreading its wisdom to the far corners of the globe.
With his tendency to pile up page after page of proof without ever stopping to ask if there was a reasonable explanation as to why he might be wrong, Donnelly set the pace for much of futureAtlantology. Too often, coincidence is transformed into evidence, which is taken as proof. A typical example: Circumcision was common among the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, so they must have inherited the practice from their wise common ancestors in Atlantis. How do we know? Because the Atlantean king Uranus, noting the horrors of “one of the most dreadful scourges of the human race”—syphilis, presumably—“compelled his whole army and the armies of his allies to undergo the rite.” Modern life insurance statistics show that Jews are healthier than average. Ergo, Atlantis was real.
Donnelly probably hoped that he was writing a book that would draw comparisons to Darwin’s
The Voyage of the Beagle
. Reading
The Antediluvian World
reminded me more of a book I’d once purchased at a yard sale that amassed hundreds of tiny clues to prove that Paul McCartney had died at the height of the Beatles’ fame and had been secretly replaced by an exact double.
• • •
After two days with Donnelly I badly needed a drink. As luck would have it, Coleman was giving a “History Happy Hour” talk in downtown Saint Paul on the topic of Donnelly’s life. I offered to help him carry his visual aids. The Minnesota sky, playing along with the deluge theme, was dark hours before sundown. Coleman grabbed a box of Donnelly’s old books, I picked up the congressman’s cardboard doppelgänger, and we ran through the downpour to Coleman’s Subaru. The location of the talk was the sumptuous Victorian home of Donnelly’s onetime boss, Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey. As a roomful of damp people sipped beers and munched on mini hamburgers, Coleman stood in front of a gigantic fireplace and talked about Donnelly’s political adventures in Minnesota. Then he turned to Atlantis. “I’ve been fighting this idea my whole life that Donnelly was a kook,” he said with more resignation than the firsttime I’d heard him use the slur. “He had this weird, wonderful, and creative mind that couldn’t be curtailed. And I’ll bet anyone here right now that someone’s on a boat in the Mediterranean with a copy of Donnelly’s
Atlantis
, looking for the lost city.”
Most of the happy hour attendees seemed to be hearing about Donnelly for the first time, but there were some devotees in the crowd. When Coleman quoted Donnelly’s famous line from the Populist Party platform of 1892—“From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes: tramps and millionaires”—I noticed at least two people mouthing the words along with Coleman, as if
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