Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth

Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series

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Our Only Home by His Holiness The Dalai Lama

First Light by Emma Chapman

Ouch! by Margee Kerr & Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

Models of the Mind by Grace Lindsay

The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales

Overloaded by Ginny Smith

Handmade by Anna Ploszajski

Beasts Before Us by Elsa Panciroli

Our Biggest Experiment by Alice Bell

To Gerard Walshe and Shelagh Gordon –

one for the saddlebags as you head down the Elbe Valley

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Worlds in Shadow

Chapter 3: Recently Drowned Lands

Chapter 4: At the Nexus of Science and Memory

Chapter 5: Red Herrings

Chapter 6: Hidden Depths

Chapter 7: Deep in Shadow

Chapter 8: Earth’s Watery Shroud

Chapter 9: ‘The Island Tilts … the Tourists Go Mad’

Chapter 10: Falling Apart

Chapter 11: ‘Huge and Mighty Hilles of Water’

Chapter 12: Volcanic Islands

Chapter 13: Slipping into the Shadows

Chapter 14: Out of the Shadows

Further Reading

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

Plates

‘Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice’

Will Durant, ‘What is Civilization’ (1946)

Chapter One

Introduction: Hearing the Past

It was 12 March 1947 and a blustery Wednesday afternoon in Skidegate off the west coast of mainland Canada. Marius Barbeau from the National Museum, distinguished anthropologist and folklorist just one year away from retirement, had not especially enjoyed the steamer journey from Victoria to the heartland of indigenous carving in the Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands). But Barbeau, celebrated for his dogged quest to understand First Nations’ cultures, was not easily distracted.

One of the main reasons for his visit to Skidegate was to collect Haida oral traditions using a new Ediphone Master Wax Voice Writer. One of his principal informants was 75-year-old Chief Gyitadzlius, more commonly remembered as Henry Young, ‘a tall spare man … with a dry and dignified manner’, quite a contrast to the ‘short … stout’ and undeniably vital Barbeau.¹ Young was an accomplished carver of totem poles and, being from a chiefly line, was steeped in his tribe’s lore. He told Barbeau an extraordinary story.

Long ago, Young recalled, his people lived in north-west Haida Gwaii in a large village across from Frederick Island. One day, a group of children playing on the beach noticed a stranger some distance away, wearing a fur cape of a kind never before seen in Haida lands. Running up to her, one cheeky boy lifted the cape to expose the stranger’s back, the sight of which made the children laugh and jeer. After the adults called their children away, the woman went to sit alone on the sand near the ocean’s edge. The water rose to her feet, so she got up and moved a little distance up the beach. The water again reached her feet and so it went on until the ocean had climbed higher than ever before. It became clear to the Haida that their homes would shortly be flooded, so in panic they tied logs together to make rafts and, taking to the ocean, were able to save themselves. Young explained that because these crude rafts could not be steered, each drifted to a different place, a story that could be a distant memory of the time – thousands of years ago – when the first Haida peoples are known to have been dispersed by the rising of the ocean level here.

Young’s story can be read as myth, especially the detail about the stranger and the unfamiliar fur cape she wore, as well as the implied power she had to raise the ocean level and punish the insensitive Haida by drowning the lands they occupied. But the story can also be read as memory, carefully passed on orally as part of Haida traditions for thousands of years, contributing to the history not only of modern Haida people but also of Haida lands and the changes these have undergone since they were first populated. But it is also science, a distant echo of ancient people’s explanations of what happened to them. For this story is likely to recall a time when Haida people were affected and scattered by rising sea level, something that happened as much as 12,700 years ago here and on other ice-free islands west of the Canadian mainland.²

Like Young’s narrative, ancient stories that may be memories of times when the sea surface was lower than it is today are found in other parts of the world. Some of the more numerous and compelling are from Australia where indigenous people have stories about times – at least 7,000 years ago – when the ocean surface was lower, when coastlines were further seawards and when what are now offshore islands were part of the mainland. Some stories from the Great Barrier Reef coasts, for example, may conceivably recall times when this great reef was all dry land and date from an incredible 13,310 years ago, requiring them to have been passed down coherently by word of mouth across more than 500 generations.

Another Australian example is Spencer Gulf, a sizeable isosceles-shaped inlet on the southern fringe of the continent that was dry land, occupied by people during the coldest time of the last ice age around 20,000 years ago. After the ice age ended and the ocean surface began to rise, Spencer Gulf gradually drowned. Local people still tell stories about this. These include the lagoons once being strung like a necklace of pearls along the axis of the Gulf, the types of creatures that could be found and hunted in particular places, even the tribal conflicts arising from competition for the rich resources found there. But all this came to an end after the sea level rose and flooded the area. The lagoons were submerged, the ecosystems disrupted and rival tribes forced to the sides of Spencer Gulf by the encroachment of the ocean. People’s ways of life were irreversibly altered, yet their memories of how things had once been were kept alive – not just as part of a rich history defining the journeys through time taken by particular peoples but also, more pragmatically, to alert subsequent generations to what had happened and how people had survived the associated challenges that might occur again.

In Narungga (Aboriginal) stories recalling the inundation of Spencer Gulf, it is said this began when a giant kangaroo dragged a magic bone behind it as it walked along the axis of the Gulf, carving a channel into which the ocean poured. It is said ‘the sea broke through, and came tumbling and rolling along in the track cut by the kangaroo bone. It flowed into the lagoons and marshes, which completely disappeared.’ Aside from the existence and the role of a giant kangaroo, the details are all plausible, an effect of storm waves superimposed on rising post-glacial sea level off the lip of Spencer Gulf that shredded the dune barrier protecting the lowlands behind, allowing sea water in and drowning them. An event that modern science tells us probably occurred 9,330 or more years ago.

But do not dismiss the giant kangaroo too hastily for, as manifestly improbable as this detail may strike us today, it may well have represented the state of scientific explanation at the time these memorable events took place. Maybe there really was an enormous kangaroo, a physiological outlier, ascribed super powers. Maybe such a creature was imagined in the sky or under the sea. Maybe such a creature was part of the people’s spiritual belief system at the time. Whatever it was, it is possible that it was blamed for the drowning of Spencer Gulf because people at the time determined this the most likely explanation for this life-changing event. And before we rush to deride such ideas, consider what many people do today when they are confronted by potentially life-altering events. They pray to deities that may be as real to them as a giant kangaroo was to the Aboriginal people of Spencer Gulf nearly 10,000 years ago.

The human need to identify a cause for a life-altering event is equally evident in the Haida story about the drowning of inhabited islands. The ancient Haida people simply could not fathom how their gods might permit something as terrible as the submergence of an entire island to happen. They needed to blame something for this aberration, so they attributed it to some children’s unthinking teasing of a stranger, the mischievous lifting of her cape, and rationalised the events that followed as punishment for this. So far back in time did the drowning of this island and the dispersal of the Haida nation probably occur, that it is as challenging to explain the role of the stranger and her cape in ancient Haida world views as it is to understand the role of a giant kangaroo in millennia-old Narungga thought. But I would argue that we should not rush to dismiss these details as fanciful or discard them in the belief they are mere narrative embellishments until we can impartially assess whether they might have meaning.

The stories from Haida Gwaii and Aboriginal Australia neatly illustrate the three main sources of information from which we can today discover details about once-inhabited, now-underwater lands: science, memory and myth. Each can be complementary, meaning that when they are read correctly they may yield information that is unique. But, of course, if we are biased, even subconsciously, and demean or dismiss things like memory and myth because we do not know how to interrogate them, then we are likely to end up with an incomplete picture of the past. The purpose of this book is to try to rectify the situation, to demonstrate that each of these three information sources is potentially valid, something that gives a roundness to the past, a multi-dimensionality to history that personalises it and makes it more relevant to us today. For now, perhaps more than ever before, the past is relevant to the future. In a world where we are confronted by global change that is as contemptuous of human endeavour and individual aspiration as it is dismissive of political borders and agendas, understanding how our ancestors were affected by comparable changes and how they overcame these is at once a lesson in coping as well as a beacon of hope.

Chapter Two

Worlds in Shadow

Some 20,000 years ago, the Earth was in the grip of an ice age. Vast tracts of now-inhabited land, mostly in the northern hemisphere, were buried under ice, much as the continent of Antarctica is today. To form these ice sheets, water had been sucked from the world ocean, the surface of which had dropped some 120m, almost 400ft, as a result. After the ice age ended and the world started warming a few millennia later, this land-grounded ice began melting, water pouring into the sea and raising its level within 10,000 years or so by the same 120m.

As a result of this sea level rise, entire landmasses disappeared, including many inhabited by people. Larger higher landmasses shrank, forcing people from their margins towards their interiors – or offshore. This loss of land, the loss of the opportunities it once represented and the histories it once embodied, have shaped human history to an extent that most of us underestimate.¹

Consider if something similar happened today – see the map in Figure 2.1. It looks familiar yet strangely incomplete. It represents the conterminous United States as it is today except with a proportion of land removed equivalent to that lost as a result of sea level rise following the last ice age.²

Figure 2.1 The conterminous United States with an area of land removed equivalent to that submerged by sea level rise after the last ice age.

This map measures the profundity of the land loss felt by people after the last ice age, especially in the period 7,000–15,000 years ago when most of this sea level rise occurred. Imagine how the lives of people in the United States might change if the same thing started happening today. What would be the implications of a 1,000km-wide gulf opening up between the eastern and the western parts of the country? Where would residents of the 11 affected states move to? Would people become anxious as rising seas began drowning the land on which they lived? Might there be conflict? Of course. All of these things surely happened at the end of the last ice age when rising seas drowned coastal lands across the planet.

Perhaps the least appreciated consequence of post-glacial coastal drowning is the erosion of human history, our history, a loss that inevitably renders the understanding of our contemporary situation incomplete. For most people on Earth today, history reaches only the coast of the lands they occupy; it does not stretch into times when that coast lay far from its present location, when the sea level was lower. For after the last ice age when sea level stopped rising, landmasses became essentially fixed in the minds of their human occupants, an empty yet bounded canvas on which society could develop. A place to civilise, freed from the threat of land loss. A place to tame.

The exciting prospect of uncovering within cultural traditions memories about actual lands, now underwater, is just part of this book, which presents a more complete account of submerged lands than most. Some of these lands we know about only because science has found them, reconstructed their forms and written their histories. But much of what science sometimes claims to have discovered was actually already known, preserved in cultural memories once dismissed as fantasies, but which we now recognise as preserving observations – eyewitness accounts if you like – of once-inhabited lands beneath the ocean. Observations that described the nature of these lands as well as the processes by which they became drowned.

This book focuses on lands that now lie beneath the ocean surface. Many writers refer to these lands as lost, vanished, disappeared, underlining the point that without a tangible connection to place, memories generally dissipate unless – as with the stories from the Haida and Aboriginal Australians recounted previously – there are special circum­stances, especially cultural isolation and a pragmatic desire to pass on wisdom, that allow them to endure.

Over time the gradual loss of knowledge about drowned lands commonly leads to fragments of memory being incorporated into what many term folklore, a loose term for narrative expressions of apparent cultural inventiveness. Folklore has been studied mostly to gain insights into culture, but I would argue that it is also often history. For what is culture but the contemporary cumulative expression of people’s pasts, whence they have come, what experiences and interactions they had along the way, and how they explained these?

We may not be able to readily detect an historical element in stories such as those about bigfoot, the yeti or the Australian bunyip, or indeed supposed folk tales like those in Greek or Norse cultures, but that does not mean that it was never there. This argument holds in other contexts besides stories. Some who study ancient Australian or South African rock art, for instance, have come to favour the idea that this was created for practical reasons, typically as memory aids, rather than being some indeterminate expression of creativity deep-rooted in human nature, which then evolved into modern art. We must be wary of superimposing our own beliefs and values on those of our distant ancestors who occupied quite different worlds and rationalised their existence in quite different ways from us.

The conteurs of north-west France – storytellers and custodians of Breton tradition – still travel as they have for thousands of years from town to town, village to village, even farm to farm, regaling eager audiences with ancient tales about the land. One of the most popular is that about the fabulous city of Ys, seat of King Gradlon, said to have been submerged by the ocean in Douarnenez Bay. No one today is quite sure where Ys was as its remains have never been found, but one story about why it was submerged is widely known. It concerns Dahut, the king’s perfidious daughter, who one night opened the floodgates in the city walls at high tide, allowing the ocean in. Ys was flooded, abandoned, overwhelmed by the sea, and eventually slipped from history into the realm of myth.³

Or did it? Is the story of Ys – like that of Cantre’r Gwaelod in Wales (see Chapter 4) or Lyonesse off the coast of south-west England (see Chapter 8) – truly the myth most people suppose it must be? For if that is so, it seems a really strange subject for invention. Surely it is far more plausible to suppose (as science unequivocally shows) that the Atlantic coasts of north-west Europe, including Brittany, have been affected by a rise of sea level for thousands of years, a process that would unquestionably have drowned many inhabited places. Even perhaps one named Ys.

This is grounds for bringing stories about Ys out from the shadowy world of myth and back into the light of memory. We can regard them as distant echoes from a time long ago when a coastal community situated on the coast of Brittany was overwhelmed by the rising ocean, its surviving inhabitants forced to shift to less exposed places elsewhere. The memory of this tumultuous event stayed alive in the memories of the affected people, passed on to their descendants with increasing amounts of outrage and embellishment until the day arrived when the story came to be regarded as something less than factual. Perhaps 10 or 20 generations after all traces of Ys disappeared beneath the surface of the Atlantic, people started to regard the story of this as being so implausible that it could not be true. Yet this story remained cherished, told over and over again to ensuing generations, but without the burden of it being claimed as memory, just a good story that grew to be considered culture-defining.

While there are likely to be thousands of such stories – memories reclassified as myth – in all the world’s longest- standing cultures, there are also instances of real myth masquerading as memory. Consider the nineteenth-century American seafarer Benjamin Morrell whose four lengthy voyages resulted in the apparent discovery of many new oceanic islands. With the benefit of scrupulous research, all these are now known to be mythical, invented. Morrell’s motivation for inventing islands had to do with sealing, the main purpose of his voyages. His financial backers demanded not just full cargoes of fur-seal pelts and elephant-seal oil, but also information, concealed from their rivals, about islands where unexploited seal colonies might be found. Not really that keen on sealing it seems, Morrell realised the importance of reporting new islands (naturally overrun with seals) to sustain his backers’ appetite for profit.

The first island he invented was in July 1825 in the north-west of the Hawaii group. He named it Morrell Island and devoted three and a half pages of his logbook to a description of it, including the mouth-watering detail that its shore was ‘lined with sea-elephants’.⁴ The same month he claimed to have discovered Byers Island, likewise awash with ‘seabirds, green turtles and sea-elephants’. In the South Atlantic Ocean, Morrell claimed to have located Saxenburgh Island – likely to have been an ocean mirage that deceived voyagers crossing the region a century earlier – and much more.

The likelihood that Morrell wrote the story of his four voyages only during the last of these and ‘largely from a fertile memory’ suggests that his wife Abigail, who often accompanied him, may have played some role in this. While little is known about her specifically, Mrs Morrell was dogged in her desire to sail with her husband, to the extent that she hid in his ship’s bread locker when it left port on the third voyage so that the ship’s owners, who had expressly forbidden her to sail with him, would not know she was on board. Whatever the true situation, Morrell’s invention of places and his imaginative accounts of their economic potential place him among the least scrupulous of the voyagers in this age of nascent globalisation. Probably he was habitually deceitful, although some suggest he became mad after one of his ships was wrecked, while elsewhere his actions have been dismissed as those of an alarmingly incompetent navigator (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Abigail and Benjamin Morrell: mad, bad or clueless?

Having been created and fashioned in ocean-dominated worlds, the myths of Pacific Island peoples are quite different to those from other places. Take the stories explaining how islands formed. Some stories recall it was the larrikin demigod Maui, thrust on to the world stage in the 2016 Disney movie Moana, who repeatedly threw out his magic fishing line to hook an island on the ocean floor and pull it to the surface. These islands did not always rise from their watery abodes without resistance. In some accounts, the fish-island thrashed violently as it was being pulled up; sometimes ‘the waters rose bubbling and foaming … and smoke came from [the depths] with a thunderous rumble and roar’. It is tempting to regard such details as embellishments to an original narrative, intended to enhance its memorability, to show how Maui had to strain to pull these huge islands up to the ocean surface, much as someone trying to land a large fish might do.

That interpretation is likely to be wrong, something given away by the bubbling and foaming and smoke and subterranean noises, all of which characterise shallow underwater volcanic eruptions. Often such eruptions lead to islands being formed, as we shall see in Chapter 12. And given that the ancestors of today’s Pacific Island peoples traversed this vast ocean for 3,000 years or more, it is likely that they witnessed islands forming in this way on many occasions and rationalised their observations through stories about Maui, the legendary fisher of islands.⁵

Maui myths are also told about the Pacific island of Niue, a high limestone island showing no signs of a volcanic origin. Niue is actually a raised atoll, whose progress of emergence from the ocean is etched into its singular landscape. The central basin on the island is the former atoll lagoon, now 70m above where it formed. The rim around this basin is the ancient atoll reef, now spectacularly fossilised, below which lies a series of coral-reef terraces each representing periods of reef formation within the last 500,000 years. Ancient Pacific Islander voyagers, intimately familiar with coral reefs, would have instantly recognised high limestone islands like Niue as emergent, pieces of land raised from below the ocean surface. This is reflected in Niuean stories about the island’s formation. One recalls a time when Maui lived here in a cave on the ocean floor, a time when ‘the ocean rolled unbroken’ over the site of the island. Then one day, flexing his mighty muscles, Maui pushed up the cave roof until Niue became ‘a reef awash at low water’, then with another great heave Maui ‘sent it higher than the spray can reach’. And so, Niue was created.

Dismissing the Maui stories about Niue as myth misses the astonishing scientific insights they contain. For only in the past few decades have geologists understood how the landscapes of raised limestone islands like that of Niue must have developed – by the progressive, apparently staggered, upheaval of reef-fringed islands from beneath the ocean surface. Which is exactly what the Niuean stories tell us. The inescapable conclusion is that ancestral Niueans, 1,000 years ago or more, understood the geological origins of their island long before it fell under the gaze of modern science. Had scientists only known, they could have built on these ancient insights rather than going to the trouble of deducing them anew.⁶

Of course, myths may not always be grounded in fact. Throughout the ages, across thousands of years, storytellers keen to engage their audiences and retain their attention have embellished the bare bones of their narratives. The challenge for people today seeking to analyse potentially meaningful myths is to peel away the layers of embellishment to expose an empirical core. This is not always a straight­forward task; indeed some myths may not have such a core. Like a modern work of fiction, they may be wholly imagi­nary, something that can sometimes be exposed through knowledge about their creators and their motivations.

Take Atlantis. The name resonates across time and place. For many people, it is pregnant with hidden meaning. A key to the great mysteries about the history of the planet Earth, the origins of its peoples, and perhaps the proof that in the dim and distant past our ancestors had advanced well beyond what is generally believed. But for all the speculation, Atlantis never actually existed.

There is no escaping this. There are numerous clues in the writings of Plato, who manufactured the story of Atlantis in about 350 BC, that it is allegorical not factual. And there is simply no possible means by which anything the size of Atlantis, claimed by Plato to be around 240,000km² in area, could abruptly and violently have sunk beneath the ocean surface as he described.⁷ So why do so many people insist otherwise? Why are they convinced that Atlantis was a real place? The short answer is because they want to believe it. Nothing more. Many people seek mystery to enliven their existence; their minds are soothed by imagining places like Atlantis, which are mysterious, malleable and thus full of promise; their details have not been soured by scientific revelation.

While Plato is today revered for a range of philosophical insights, it was in two of his later works – Timaeus and Critias, written when he was in his 70s – that ‘a very strange story’ is recounted. Timaeus is a book of largely cosmological speculations, as part of which the character Critias tells how his great-grandfather Solon, while travelling through Egypt between 593–583 BC, discussed ancient history with a group of priests. In recounting the ancient history of Athens, one priest told Solon that around 9600 BC there was a great Athenian empire rivalled only by that on an island west of the Pillars of Heracles (the modern Strait of Gibraltar) named Atlantis, which was the centre of a great empire. The island was larger ‘than Libya and Asia taken together’ and was surrounded by smaller islands. At one time, the Atlanteans extended their empire well into the Mediterranean, but were finally defeated by the Athenians. Later there were ‘violent earthquakes and floods’ that affected both Athens and Atlantis, the latter disappearing in one day and night ‘beneath the sea’, making the Strait of Gibraltar impassable to ships thereafter.

One of the reasons Plato cited for the success of the state of Atlantis was the way it was organised and run, precisely along the lines proposed by him in perhaps his most famous utopian work, The Republic. This remains key to understanding why both Atlantis and the contemporary Athens are fabri­cations. Plato intended them to illustrate the practicability of the systems of government and social organisation proposed in The Republic, which he had unsuccessfully lobbied the rulers of the city-states of Athens and Syracuse to adopt.

More details about Atlantis appear in Plato’s unfinished Critias. Like other stories about fictional lands, the civilisation centred on Atlantis was advanced compared with its neigh­bours. From its beginnings, when it was the fiefdom of Poseidon, the Greek god of both the ocean and of earthquakes, Atlantis was well endowed with natural resources. Poseidon surrounded the hill (where his mistress resided) in the centre of the circular island with concentric rings of water and land. But as time wore on and the bloodline of Poseidon became ever more diluted, moral decline spread within Atlantis. The last part of Critias describes how the people of Atlantis changed from ‘law-abiding, gentle and virtuous’ citizens to being in a state of ‘ugliness, unhappiness, and uncurbed ambition’. Critias ends abruptly as Zeus is about to address the assembled gods on the subject of punishing Atlantis.

Plato’s Timaeus was intended as a sequel to The Republic and it is clear that the story of Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias is allegory, a fiction created to illustrate the principles explained in The Republic. ⁸ There are people who will read all this and still insist that Atlantis was a real place, just one that Plato found to be a convenient vehicle for his messages about politics and society. Yet had a wondrously advanced civilisation of the kind Plato described really existed 12,000 years ago or more, it would have certainly been recorded in many other sources besides that of a single book, written nearly 9,000 years later by a writer renowned for literary artifice. Had a massive island-continent like Atlantis disappeared beneath the ocean, abruptly or not, the traces of it would have been found long ago by geologists, but they have not.⁹ Today we have good maps of every part of the ocean floor; Atlantis is simply not there.

Yet Plato saw nothing wrong in incorporating details of actual events into his Atlantis story, especially its dramatic end, to enhance its believability and thus its memorability. Far easier, especially in the oratorial academy of which Plato was part, to remember stories involving divinely instigated catastrophe than absorb dry details of competing models of statehood. Some of the events likely to have influenced Plato’s stories of Atlantis include the island-destroying eruption of Stronghyle-Santorini about 1600 BC (described in Chapter 12) and the massive earthquake in 464 BC, 37 years before Plato was born, which flattened the city of Sparta, reconfiguring the power balance in this region almost overnight.¹⁰

This book takes up the challenge of finding a way through the myriad accounts of vanished lands recognisable through science,