The Ninety-Foot Plum Tree, Filling Some Gaps

Years before I started writing a book about mammoths, I invented a game I called "Find the Mammoth" with any new catastrophist author I came across. Frozen mammoths are found everywhere in catastrophist literature. It doesn't matter what the writer's preferred catastrophe is—the Biblical flood, Atlantis, Lemuria, rogue planets, or a sudden relocation of the poles—the discovery of frozen mammoth corpses in Siberia conclusively proves their theory. The logic behind the claim is simple: elephants are tropical animals, mammoths are elephants, therefore Siberia used to be tropical; intact, frozen mammoths prove the shift from tropical to Arctic happened in matter of hours. Once the mammoth has been established as evidence, the writers usually follow up by listing a few instances of tropical or temperate flora being discovered above the Arctic Circle.

Eight or ten years ago, while playing a round of Find the Mammoth, I came across one of these flora claims: the ninety-foot plum tree. I discovered the claim on the old Talk Origins site in a piece by E.T. Babibski. Babinski first ran into the claim that such a tree had been found above the Arctic Circle from the creationist "Dr." Kent Hovind. The ninety-foot plum tree was apparently a standard bit of evidence that Hovind tossed out in his presentations. Hovind described the tree as being frozen with green leaves and ripe fruit. The details fit nicely with the idea that Siberia was suddenly and catastrophically frozen. He credited the discovery to Baron von Toll who found the tree in the New Siberia Islands, six hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. Babibski did a very good job of debunking the claim by tracking it to its original source.

Unfortunately, most of Hovind's web presence disappeared after he went to jail for tax evasion, so I cannot find a good quote. Babinski was able to find out from Hovind that the tree anecdote was something he had read in a newsletter called "Bible-Science News" about ten years earlier. After some searching, Babinski was able to find the source, "The Mystery of the Frozen Giants" by Lee Grady (vol. 23, no. 4, April 1985). Grady credited the book The Waters Above (1981) by young-earth creationist Joseph Dillow. I haven't been able to lay my hands on a copy of Dillow's book for a price I'm willing to pay, but the exact quote can be found in dozens of creationist sites on the internet and I was able to find a Croatian translation of the entire chapter. This is the quote, which Babinski tells us appears on page 316: 

Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found remains of a saber-toothed tiger and a 90-foot plum tree with green leaves and ripe fruit on its branches over 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the New Siberian Islands. Today, the only vegetation that grows there is a one-inch high willow.

 Grady copied this almost word-for-word. Dillow cited as his sources, the book The Mammoth and Mammoth Hunting in North-East Siberia (1926) by Bassett Digby and the journal article "The Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros Found in the Frozen Ground of Siberia" (1929) by I.P. Tolmachoff. I do have my own copies of both of these. Neither writer was a flake. Digby was a naturalist who had traveled extensively in Siberia and written several enjoyable books about his experiences there. Tolmachoff was a well-respected academic and curator of the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum. Tolmachoff cites four different works by Baron Toll in his article and mentions evidence of Pleistocene alder trees (Alnus fruticosa) on the New Siberia Islands four separate times without, however, specifically describing that one find. The description of the tree is in Digby. 

It was along the south coast [of Great Lyakhovski Island] that Toll found his extraordinary layers of what he called "fossil ice [permafrost]." They were as much as 70 ft. thick. On the top of them lay the post-Tertiary deposits in which were remains of wooly rhinoceros and mammoth, American stag, reindeer, a horse (apparently the Mongolian wild horse, which still exists), saiga, antelope, ovibos, and sabre-toothed tiger. There was lying among them, too, a 90 ft. alder-tree (Alnus fructicosa), with even its roots and seeds preserved. 

Digby with mammoth tusks in Siberia. source

Babinski's eagle eyes noticed something that I would have completely missed had he not pointed it out. The botanical name is misspelled in Digby's account. The correct name for that variety of alder, which Tolmachoff uses, is Alnus fruticosa. Digby wrote Alnus fructicosa with an extra "c" in the second word. Fruticosa means bushy; fructicosa means fruiting. There is no plant called Alnus fructicosa.

 Alnus fructicosa. This tree is not ninety feet tall. source

Since Digby has a description of that one find and Tolmachoff does not, it looks like Dillow based his paragraph just on Digby and not on Digby and Tolmachoff. I suspect Dillow footnoted Tolmachoff just to add authority to the story. Digby mentions the ninety-foot height, so Dillow can be forgiven that one detail. Digby and Tolmachoff both are specific on the point that the tree was an alder. Even if they had called it the non-existent fruiting alder, that would not have made it a plum tree. The genus for plum trees is Prunus, not Alnus. Digby describes "roots and seeds preserved," not "green leaves and ripe fruit." And plum trees do not grow to be ninety feet tall. At this point, it looks bad for Dillow.

Babinski thinks Digby made an honest mistake in saying Toll found a ninety-foot tree. I agree that the giant tree was the result of an honest mistake but, as I have discovered, the mistake was not Digby's. Let's go back to Baron Toll and what he really wrote. Baron Eduard Gustav von Toll (1858-1902) was a Baltic German geologist who conducted three expeditions into Siberia for the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. On his first expedition he investigated two mammoth sites. On the second, he mapped a large area west of the Lena River. On the third, he traveled out onto the ice of the Arctic Ocean and was never seen again. Toll's tree was found during the second expedition. I have not been able to lay my hands on the final report of the expedition; the nearest copy is apparently at Yale. Fortunately, Babinski was able to get a translation of the relevant passage (the original is in German). In it, Toll describes the exposed strata of a bluff on Great Lyakhovsky Island:

And the layers from top to bottom as follows: 

1. a peat covering composed of water mosses among other things.
 2. a frozen, sandy clay layer with Alnus fruticosa, Salix sp., a scapula of Lepus sp. [i.e., a shoulder bone of a saber-toothed tiger—Babinski’s note]
 3. similar layers with Pisidium sp. and Valvata sp. The reclining nature of this layer is covered here. In figure 1 these same layers 1 and 2 form the upper horizon, only the deposit of the sea basin with Pisidium and Alvata is missing there.
 The surprising thing in this instance is the discovery of Alnus fruticosa which is so wonderfully preserved that the leaves hold fast on the twigs of the boughs–indeed even whole clusters of blossom casings are preserved. The bark of the twigs and stems is fully intact, all the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots, in the length of 15-20 feet, jut out of the profile as can be seen in both figures of the table. With a magnifying glass, one can even recognize in figure 2 the blossom casings of the Alnus fruticosa.

 Babinski comes to a reasonable conclusion that Digby somehow added the twenty foot height of the tree to the seventy feet of the permafrost layer to come up with a total height of ninety feet. The sentence, he says, is not entirely clear in the original. Digby might have read that the tree jutted out and took the 15-20 feet to mean that much of the tree protruded from the ice while the rest of the tree extended the full length of the seventy-foot deep layer of permafrost.

This is where Babinski ends his search. I think Babinski did an excellent job at slapping down Dillow's plum tree. Digby's book was more in the tone of a popular travel narrative than an academic monograph and has no bibliography or source notes. Babinski had no reason to look for additional sources between Toll's formal report and Digby. However, in my own mammoth research over the years, I have come across a few more links in the chain from Toll to Digby and Digby to Dillow.

First, let's examine the gap between Toll and Digby. Look at what's missing from the excerpt of Toll that Babinski gives us. There is no mention of the seventy-foot thick permafrost layer. Maybe, it's mentioned in another part of the report. If it is, it's not in close enough proximity to the 15-20 foot figure to make the mistake that probable. Also missing is the long list of animals that Digby gave.

Toll, the Arctic explorer. source

Toll returned from his expedition in January 1894. The May issue of the journal of the (British) Royal Geographical Society published a brief summary of the expedition that mentioned "complete trees of Alnus fruticosa with leaves and cones." No thickness was given for the permafrost. This article was based on a brief report Toll sent to the Russian Academy right after his return. Toll gave a somewhat more detailed version of the discovery in a public lecture in St. Petersburg the following April, but no transcript of the talk was published until the end of the year, and then only in Russian. Finally, in April 1895, over a year after Toll's return, the Royal Geographical Society published an English translation of the talk for their readers.

 It is well known how widely spread mammoth tusks are over North Siberia, and how fabulously numerous they are in the New Siberia islands. And it is also well known that, besides the tusks and the bones of the mammoth, whole skeletons of this animal and of the rhinoceros, as well as of the Bison friecus and the Oviboa motchatus, are found.
 [...]
 The cliffs of the Great Liakhoff island also proved to be very instructive, as it appeared that the fresh-water sandy clay, which covers the underground layers of ice, contains, together with shells of molluscs (Cyclas and Valvata), remains of insects, and bones of Post-Tertiary mammals, which prove that this clay belongs to the mammoth bed; also whole trees of alder (Alnus fruticosa), willow, and birch, 15 feet high, and with perfectly well-preserved leaves, and even cones.

 Here we have four of the nine animals that Digby mentioned and the alder mentioned as one of three species of preserved trees fifteen feet high. Five animals are missing as is the seventy foot number for the permafrost layer. Later in 1895, Toll's full report was published by the Russian Academy. This is the source Babinski quoted above. The question remains, where did Digby get his information? It’s most likely that it came from the most famous anarchist in the world, Prince Peter Kropotkin.

Kropotkin was and is a fascinating figure. The anarchist prince was pacifist who rejected violent, revolutionary confrontation in favor of a philosophy based on cooperation and mutual aid. His philosophy did not come from a traumatic experience, such as Lenin's whose brother was executed as a radical; it was based his reading of Darwin and his scientific observations of insect and animal communities. As a political exile, Kropotkin, like so many others, often supported himself as a journalist. Unlike the other political exiles, Kropotkin was a popular science journalist as well as a revolutionary journalist. He was also an expert on the geology of Siberia.

 The Anarchist Prince. source

The July 1900 issue of the journal of the Royal Geographical Society carried an article by the Prince entitled "Baron Toll on New Siberia and Circumpolar Flora." The article was a review a new article by Toll that had been published in Russian the previous year. Kropotkin's review contains this passage: 

The glacial formations are represented on the southern coast of the Great Lyakhovski island by a lower bed, about 70 feet high, of ice, and an upper bed of clayey fresh-water deposits, always frozen, and containing tusks and pieces of the skin of the mammoth, as well as full frozen carcases of Ovibos and rhinoceros. Remains of horses, stags (the noble American stag), antelopes, saigas, and even of a tiger, were found in this bed. To prove that these animals lived and fed on the spot, a complete tree of Alnus fruticosa, 90 feet long, with all its roots, leaves, and fruits, was found.

 This is very close to Digby's description. The seventy-foot thick deposit of permafrost is mentioned, followed by the list of animals, and, most importantly, the ninety-foot alder. There are only slight differences. Kropotkin only lists eight animals, Digby has nine. Reindeer is the missing animal. Digby describes the tree as with "its roots and seeds preserved." Kropotkin gives a little more description by saying the tree was preserved "with all its roots, leaves, and fruits."

Is this the end of the line? Can we definitively say that Digby's source for the ninety-foot tree was Kropotkin's 1900 review article? Is it safe to say the last few differences between Digby and Kropotkin are small enough to ignore? We could do that, but we would be wrong.

Since 1883, Kropotkin had been earning a small income writing articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The most famous of these is his long entry on anarchism that appeared in the famous 1911 edition. In that edition he also wrote a number of smaller pieces relating to Siberia, including one for the New Siberian Archipelago. In it we find the now familiar passage: 

Along the southern coast of Bolshoy Baron Toll found immense layers of fossil ice, 70 ft. thick, evidently relics from the Ice Age, covered by an upper layer of Post-Tertiary deposits containing numbers of perfectly well preserved mammoth remains, rhinoceros, Ovibos, and bones of the horse, reindeer, American stag, antelope, saiga and even the tiger. The proof that these animals lived and fed in this latitude (73 20' N), at a time when the islands were not yet separated from the continent, is given by the relics of forest vegetation which are found in the same deposits. A stem of Alnus fruticosa, 90 ft. high, was found with all its roots and even fruits. 

Here it is, all three parts in the same order—permafrost, animals, tree—the reindeer has been added to the animal list, and the leaves of the tree are no longer mentioned. At this point, I do think we can say with confidence that Digby's source for the ninety-foot alder was Kropotkin's article in the 1911 Britannica.

There is now only one gap in the informational chain from Toll to Digby. That is Toll's 1899 article in the journal of the Russian Academy. I have been unable to lay my hands on a copy of that particular issue. It seems unlikely that Toll made an error reporting his own research, especially since he had made that particular point at least twice before in print venues. However, it seems equally unlikely that Kropotkin, a trained scientist, would have made such a mistake translating from his native language into a language that he was fully fluent in. If neither scientist was in error, who does that leave?

The words fifteen (пятнадцать) and ninety (девяносто) are as different in Russian as they are in English. However, the style in both Russian and English journals at the time was to print numbers as numerals, not words. Thus, it would only take a typesetting error of one character to change 20 into 90. This could have happened either at the Russian printers or at the English ones. Like Babinski's theory that Digby added seventy to twenty to get ninety, this is only speculation on my part. Predictably, I think my speculation is the more likely solution.

To my knowledge, in the quarter century after Kropotkin first published the error (whose ever it was), it was only repeated once—by Digby in 1926. I cannot find any additional mention of the tree until after WWII. In the post-war years, the first mentions I can find are not from creationist sources but from the godfathers of postwar, American, secular catastrophism, Immanuel Velikovsky and Charles Hapgood.

Velikovsky published first. In 1950, MacMillan published his book Worlds in Collision which postulated a revised chronology for ancient Egyptian history (he removed a couple centuries) and explained various Old Testament miracles as the effects of Venus and Mars pinballing around the solar system for a thousand years before settling into their current orbits. Due to a ham-handed reaction by the scientific community, Velikovsky became a fringe martyr and his books remained in print for the rest of life. Velikovsky touched on Toll's tree in his third book, Earth in Upheaval (1955). This book was intended to present the geological evidence for his theories. The tree appears in chapter two, the one about the frozen mammoths.

 Eduard von Toll repeatedly visited the New Siberian Islands from 1885 to 1902, when he perished in the Arctic Ocean. … On Maloi, one of the group of Liakhov Islands, Toll found the bones of mammoths and other animals together with the trunks of fossil trees with trunks and cones.

 This is an interesting version. Velikovsky does not mention any length for the tree. In fact, he mentions only "trees," not any specific tree. He also makes the curious mistake of putting the find on the wrong island. Maloi is Little Lyakhovsky, not Great Lyakhovsky as stated by Toll, Kropotkin, and Digby. Velikovsky is the first of our writers not to trace his information through Digby. Instead he gives as his source Rev. D. Gath Whitley, "The Ivory Island of the Arctic Ocean," in the Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute (1910), an organization founded to defend "the great truths revealed in Holy Scripture ... against the opposition of Science falsely so called." Velikovsky's description is faithful to Whitleys', including the island mistake.

 They first went to Maloi, which is one of the Liakoff Islands, and the second island that Liakoff discovered. In this island they discovered the bones of mammoths and other animals, and they also found the trunks of fossil trees, with leaves and cones.

 Did Whitley introduce this mistake into the chain of information? No, as it turns out. Whitley based his version on the first report published in The Geographical Journal in 1894, the short summary. In it they wrote:

 On May 1, MM. Toll and Shileiko, accompanied by one Cossack and three Lamutes, left the mainland and landed on the south coast of the Malyi Lyakhov island. Exploration was begun at once, and at the very start M. Toll came across the interesting fact that under the perpetual ice, in a sweet-water deposit, which contained pieces of willow and bones of post-tertiary mammals (the mammoth layer), were complete trees of Alnus fruticosa, 15 feet long, with leaves and cones.

 Why would I go on this long about the Velikovsky strain if he had nothing to do with the ninety-foot plum tree? He would, indeed, be nothing more than an interesting footnote except for the fact that he has had his own influence on creationist and Biblical catastrophist thought. Velikovsky had a certain appeal to Biblical literalists because he attacked mainstream geology and seemed to provide a scientific veneer to some of the greater miracles of the Old Testament. John Whitcomb’s 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, co-authored by Henry Morris, is one of the founding documents of modern creationist geology. Whitcomb's original version, considerable credit was given to Velikovsky, though this was almost eliminated by the time the book saw print. Donald Wesley Patten was more open and honest about his debt to Velikovsky. In his 1966 book The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, he gives a brief overview of Velikovsky as one of his predecessors. In private, he spent years unsuccessfully trying to cozy up to Velikovsky and be recognized as his peer. Velikovsky absolutely did not want to be associated with creationists and other Biblical literalists. He physically ran away from Patten once when they met at conference (he later apologized).

Patten had his own ideas on how the planets ricocheted around the solar system and, like Velikovsky and almost every catastrophist of the Twentieth Century, he presented frozen mammoths as proof of his version. But when he mentioned Toll's tree, he described it in a way that was different from Velikovsky, but familiar to us.

 Baron Edward Toll, the explorer, reported finding a fallen 90-foot fruit tree with ripe fruit and green leaves still on its branches, in the frozen ground of the New Siberian Islands. The only tree vegetation that grows there now is a one-inch high willow.

 Here are the most important elements of Dillow’s version—a ninety-foot fruit tree with ripe fruit, and green leaves. There is no mystery about Patten’s source. It’s a direct quote and he cites the author. It is Charles Hapgood, Velikovsky’s only equal among post-war secular catastrophists. Hapgood was a New England based professor of history whose main contribution to catastrophism was to popularize an idea he called Earth Crustal Displacement (he borrowed the idea from a privately published book by Hugh Auchincloss Brown). The idea that he put forth was a variation on the much older idea that the Earth’s axial tilt had abruptly changed in the past. In the original version, The Earth’s axis had once been perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun. This gave the Earth an Edenic temperate climate from pole to pole. Some cosmic catastrophe in ancient times had tipped the Earth’s axis to its present 23.4° off perpendicular. Naturally, the catastrophe was recorded in the usual ancient legends of floods, fire from the sky, and days when the sun refused to rise and frozen mammoths are proof of this. For both Velikovsky and Patten, this was a centerpiece of their catastrophic narratives.

In the variation the Hapgood promoted, the Earth itself was not knocked off its axis; it had always had more or less the same axial tilt. Instead, it was only the crust that moved. Rather than some passing rogue planet whacking the entire Earth out of line, it was some Earth-born imbalance that caused the crust to suddenly slip in relation to the mantle and core, which kept the same alignment. One moment, the mammoths were calmly munching on giant alders and the next, both mammoths and trees had been thrown into the Arctic where they instantaneously froze. Hapgood published his theory as a book in 1958, Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. Patten took his quote from a magazine abridgment of the mammoth chapter published two years later. The book version is a little more detailed than the magazine version.

 Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found remains of a sabertooth tiger, and a fruit tree that had been ninety feet tall when it was standing. The tree was well preserved in the permafrost, with its roots and seeds. Toll claimed that green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to its branches. Yet, at the present time, the only representative of tree vegetation on the islands is a willow that grows one inch high.

 Hapgood cited Digby as his source. If he had stopped after his first two sentences, he would have been faithful to Digby. Digby only mentioned roots and seeds; he did not mention leaves or fruit. The words "leaves" and "fruit" do appear in some of the accounts before Digby. In chronological order they are:

• The original 1894 short notice of Toll's return in The Geographical Journal read: "complete trees of Alnus fruticosa with leaves and cones."
• The 1895 translation of his lecture published a year later read: "perfectly well-preserved leaves, and even cones."
• Toll's 1895 formal report read: "the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots… one can even recognize… the blossom casings."
• Kropotkin's 1900 review of Toll’s later article read: "roots, leaves, and fruits."
• Kropotkin's 1911 Britannica entry read: "roots and even fruits."

Nowhere does Toll claim that that green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to the tree’s branches. Leaves are mentioned in Toll’s notice of return, in his lecture, and in Kropotkin's review article. Toll refers to the alder's seed clusters as cones the first two times he mentions them and as blossoms the third. Kropotkin refers to them as fruit in both of his pieces. The only place both leaves and fruits are both mentioned are in Kropotkin's review article. I don't believe Hapgood read any of those sources. Hapgood was a trained historian. If he had read any of the first four on the list—three journal articles and a scholarly monograph—he would have preferred to cite them over Digby's popular travel narrative. As a source, Digby only outranks the encyclopedia article, which does not mention leaves. Did Hapgood make those details up? Unless some other mention of fruit and leaves comes to light, it appears he did. Even if he did read one or more of the earlier sources and simply forgot to cite them, he is guilty of exaggeration for making the leaves and fruit green and ripe. At this point, it also appears that it was Hapgood who seized on Digby's misspelled fructicosa to make the tree a fruit tree rather than an alder as Digby clearly stated.

This finally brings us back to Dillow. I can say with certainty that Dillow took his version of the tree directly from Hapgood with no middle-men involved. I’ll go farther and say he took it from the second, revised edition of Hapgood's book published in 1968 under the title The Path of the Pole. I can be this certain because Dillow cites that edition of Hapgood several times in the same chapter as Toll’s tree, he places the details in the same order as Hapgood, and the first fourteen words of his passage are exactly the same as in Hapgood's passage. As to why Dillow would cite different sources than those he really used, I think the answer is simple; he relied on tricks known to every lazy student since the invention of the term paper. Dillow copied Hapgood's source notes to make it look like he did more research than he really did. Adding Tolmachoff to the note, even though he was of questionable relevance, made the note more substantial and impressive. Having a series of source notes that move from author to author is more substantial and impressive than repeating the same source over and over.

In the final measure, it appears that Dillow's only crime, with regards to Toll's tree, was lazy scholarship and making it a plum tree. That’s not to say he isn’t guilty of other intellectual crimes. The parts of Dillow's book that I've been able to read are filled with embellishment, exaggeration, misrepresentation, and outright dishonesty. One example will suffice to demonstrate. This "fact" has been widely distributed on the internet, usually side-by-side with the ninety-foot plum tree.

 Dr. Jack A. Wolfe in a U. S. Geological Survey Report (1978) told that Alaska once teemed with tropical plants. He found evidence of mangroves, palm trees, Burmese lacquer trees, and groups of trees that now produce nutmeg and Macassar oil. 

Dr. Wolfe did indeed say that tropical plants once grew in Alaska... during the Eocene 34-50 million years ago. This compressing of the prehistoric past into one event is not uncommon among catastrophists. Some catastrophist writers, at least on the internet, might genuinely have trouble grasping geological timescales. I don't think Dillow is one of them.

Even though Babinski wrote his debunking almost twenty years ago, the myth of the ninety-foot fruit tree is still alive and well. As a plum tree, Toll's tree continues to appear in creationist literature usually as evidence of the Noachian Deluge. Among secular catastrophists, the tree usually appears among supporters of Hapgood's crustal displacement, such as Graham Hancock and Rand Flem-Ath (yes, that's his real name). Babinski's debunking gets linked to and copy/pasted into online fora again and again to no avail. Cut the tree down in one place and it pops up in another. Recycling is an essential part of fringe writing. The writers comb through each other's works for anecdotes to use as evidence for their pet theories. Many writers never leave the echo chamber nor look for any new information that might challenge their anecdotes or even add a couple of interesting new details. Leaving the echo chamber would expose them to actual authorities and those are to be avoided at all costs; they're out to suppress the truth. For fringe writers, other fringe writers, even those with competing theories are better sources than actual experts. For that reason, we can expect to see Baron von Toll's giant fruit tree again and again into the future.

Beware the Season

This is a rerun of a post I wrote around this time a few years ago. I think it's still relevant.

*********

The men in black (MIB) entered UFO lore in 1956 in a book entitled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The author was one Gray Barker who had been a member of one of the first American UFO groups, the rather ambitiously named International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Though Barker's book dealt with a number of paranormal topics, the largest part of it dealt with his former boss, IFSB founder Albert Bender.

In 1953 the IFSB was about two years old with a few hundred dues paying members (called "investigators") who all received the Bureau's newsletter Space Review. The group was doing well enough when, in October 1953, Bender suddenly stopped publication of Space Review, and dissolved the IFSB. The last issue of the news letter gave only this explanation.

STATEMENT OF IMPORTANCE: The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by order from a higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are very sorry that we have been advised in the negative.

According to Barker, the reason Bender had so abruptly ended the group was that three mysterious men in black had visited Bender and warned him off. But before they did, the MIBs were good enough to explain at least part of the true secret of the flying saucers. UFOs, they said, actually come from Antarctica. They have bases in both polar regions and regularly fly between them. Bender told a different story in his own book in 1963.

Enough UFO stories end with the craft departing due north or south that Barker's version of Bender's visitors has been adopted by conspiracy theorists who believe in a decidedly terrestrial origin for saucers. My personal favorite version is that saucers and MIBs are Atlanteans from within the hollow earth, but the theory that they are Nazi refugees from super-scientific bases beneath the ice cap has its devotees, too.

The MIBs are the key to the mystery. The most mundane explanation that has been offered is that they work for the American government and that they are trying to hide the truth about the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs. But that could itself be disinformation. No government has the ability to do what the MIBs do. Think for a moment about the men in black. They have appeared all over the world. They have a special interest in unidentified flying objects and in protecting the polar regions. They seem to actually know what is in the minds of the people they visit. Who has the ability to manage an intelligence network like that? Ask yourself: Who has the ability to travel everywhere, at any time, and even seemingly to appear in two places at once? Who has a special interest in protecting the polar regions? Who knows when you are sleeping? Who knows when you are awake? Who knows if you've been good or bad?

I think you know the answer.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and be good for goodness sake.

Atlantis and the Mayan Apocalypse

It has been estimated, by those anonymous people who make passive voice estimates, that Friday will be the most annoying day ever on Facebook and Twitter. Friday, of course, is 12/21/12 (21/12/12 to our European friends), the Mayan apocalypse. Except it's not really, but we'll get to that in a moment. Friday is the end of the longest cycle of the very complex Mayan calendar. I'm sure you've heard about it. You're going to hear about it today and you'll hear a lot about over the next couple days. Gun control, fiscal cliffs, and Mayans will dominate the news until Saturday morning when the news cycle will switch over to last minute holiday shopping, dieting, party tips, and something some Kardashian was seen wearing. The news cycle is much shorter than even the shortest cycle on the Mayan calendar. Anyway, here's my contribution to the annoyingness.

Everyone is talking about the end of the Mayan calendar (which it's not), but not many are talking about the beginning. The Mayan calendar is made up of cycles within cycles overlapping other cycles. The equivalent in our Gregorian calendar is the cycle called months. This cycle has an irregular size of 28, 29, 30, or 31 days. Twelve months make up a year. Ten years make a decade, ten decades a century, ten centuries a millennium, and so on. While the days reset to one at the end of every month and the months reset to January at the end of each year, the years never reset to one; we simply add a new digit to the left-hand side of the year figure (e.g. year 99 became year 100, not year 0). Overlapping this set of cycles is the cycle of weeks. Seven days make a week, but neither months nor years sync up with an even number of weeks. The week cycle only matches up with the month/year cycle after fourteen years. That's how the Mayan calendar works with two exceptions. First, the Mayan system is much more complex than the Gregorian. Second, the Mayan has a largest cycle after which the whole thing resets. Anthropologists call that cycle "the Long Count" and it is 5125.366 years long. On Friday, the current Long Count will end. Friday night, the Mayans will have quiet celebrations of thanksgiving for the departure of the annoying American tourists.

The start date of the Mayan calendar was 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u. On the Gregorian calender, that day was Sunday, August 11, 3114 BCE. That was the day of the creation of the current world. To the Mayans and their successors, the Aztecs, the Long Counts were distinct creations. The Western equivalents were the Greco-Roman ages of mankind. According Hesiod, the Classical Greek, the ages were the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the present Iron Age. Ovid, the Roman, eliminated the heroic age. To Ovid, things had been going straight downhill since the beginning of time. If we wise moderns were to continue the pattern, the most recent periods would be the Industrial Age, Steampunk, Space Opera, Cyberpunk, and Reality Television. Or something like that. The Mayans, like Ovid, believed we are living in the fourth creation. The Aztecs, like Hesiod, believed we are in the fifth. We don't know a lot about how the Mayans perceived the previous creations. One interesting clue is that we have found inscriptions referring to dates before August 11, 3114 BCE. This would seem to imply that there is continuity between the creations, not complete destruction followed by a completely new creation. We'll find out if that interpretation is correct on Saturday.

The end date of the Mayan calendar is not the only date that has attracted the attention of Western fringe thinkers.

Otto Muck (1892-1956) was a German engineer. During World War II, he invented the schnorkel, which allowed U-boats to stay underwater for long periods of time, and worked on the V-2 rocket, which allowed them to bomb London and Amsterdam. Whatever we might think of the immediate uses to which those two inventions were put, we have to admit that they were the products of solid engineering; they worked. If that was all we knew about Muck, it would be easy to form an image of him as a sober, practical thinker not inclined to wild flights of fancy. In speaking of Hitler, Hermann Rauschning wrote, "In the depths of his subconscious every German has one foot in Atlantis." Muck was that kind of German.

The general stereotype of fringe writers is that they are bitter outsiders and sloppy thinkers. Quite often, that's true. However, there is another type of fringe writer. These people are usually well educated and successful in some field that requires strict intellectual discipline. Because of that success, they feel confident challenging the experts in fields unrelated to their own. For some reason, engineers are particularly vulnerable to this kind of hubris. Engineers figure prominently among the ranks of evolution and climate deniers.

Back to Muck's Atlantean foot. After the war, Muck wrote his own Atlantis book, Atlantis: Die Welt vor der Sintflut (Atlantis: The world before the Flood), which was published just before his death in 1956. Muck was that rare Atlantis writer, someone who added something new to the same old recycled stuff. Usually, the only novelty in each year's batch of new Atlantis books is if someone has found a new location for the island. Frankly, we're running out of places. Muck took his tips from the father of Atlanteology, Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901). He took Plato literally. In Muck’s book, Atlantis was a big island directly opposite Gibraltar, it housed a bronze age empire, and it sank in one day and one night. Donnelly believed that a near collision between the Earth and a planet-sized comet (an idea Immanuel Velikovsky later borrowed with barely a nod to Donnelly). Muck modified the comet into a direct hit by and asteroid. Muck's asteroid broke up over the Southeastern United States, peppering the Carolinas with thousands of small meteors that created tiny lake formations called the Carolina Bays. The main core of the asteroid plowed into the sea west of Atlantis puncturing the oceanic crust, deflating it like a leaky waterbed, causing Atlantis to sink beneath the waves. The usual catastrophes followed. Volcanoes erupted. Dark clouds blotted out the sun. Mammoths froze. Mile-high tidal waves and earthquakes destroyed civilization. Puzzled Sargasso eels wandered around, wondering what happened to their favorite rivers. Fire fell from the sky. Some guy in Iraq loaded his family and farm animals into a big boat and survived it all.

In a new touch, Muck explained that the sinking of Atlantis freed the Gulf Stream to warm Northwestern Europe, ending the Ice Age. This, he explained, was a vital piece in his reconstruction. Another original piece in his version was that most of the dust from the volcanic eruptions gathered over Northern Europe, lingering for 2000 years, cooling things so the Fennoscanian ice sheet didn't melt too fast (he isn’t clear why the much larger North American ice sheets didn’t melt too fast). Even though nothing except some hardy moss could grow under the dust cloud, tens of thousands of former Atlanteans followed the retreating, gradually growing paler in their gloomy, new homes.

Muck's method will be familiar to students of catastrophism and fringe history. He combs through geology and mythology, cherry-picking mysteries that need solving and evidence that might be interpreted to support his grand unified theory of the past. He ignores any suggestion that the mysteries or the evidence might not relate to the same time. He leans on hyperdiffusionism to explain similarities between human cultures. Just as you can't have catastophism without frozen mammoths, you can't have Atlantis without pyramids. Muck has both. This is where the Mayans enter the story.

Naturally, Muck has pictures comparing Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican step-pyramids. Naturally, he tries to relate the Mayan language to Basque. Naturally, he cherry picks Mayan mythology for any mention of a catastrophe in the distant past. However, this is another place where he manages to introduce something new into the Altlantean canon. Muck uses the Mayan calendar to date the sinking of Atlantis. First, Muck slices a thousand years off Plato's plain statement that Atlantis sank 9000 years before Solon heard the story in Egypt, to come up with a date of 8560 BCE. Next he crunches some numbers from the Mayan calendar to come up with a real starting date of June 8, 8498 BCE, which is close enough to Plato. Muck came up with his starting date for the Mayan calendar by rationalizing that, since the current age actually began on the last day of the previous Long Count, we must actually say their world began on the first day of that Long Count. According to the current best reading of the calendar, that would have been in 8239 BCE, not 8498. We should cut him some slack on this; we've made great strides in reading Mayan since he wrote. Channeling his best Bishop Ussher, he puts the catastrophe at 8:00 PM, Mayan time. As far as we know, the Mayans did not use Daylight Savings Time. This alone proves the superiority of their ancient wisdom.

Muck's book wasn't translated into English until the 1970s. By then, his geology was painfully out of date due to the plate tectonics revolution of the sixties. Since then his science has fallen even further out of date. According to his calculations, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere quadrupled in the catastrophe, (making things comfy after the ice age) and the ozone was almost completely eliminated (which let in just enough radiation to mutate the northern Atlanteans into white folk). According to computer simulations of the Chicxulub meteor (the dinosaur killer), Muck's impact wouldn't merely have ended a Bronze Age civilization, it would have exterminated most life on Earth. The geology of most Atlantis theories is just as ridiculous, but for some reason his book never really caught hold in the Atlantis community. After first editions of the English edition appeared in the major English speaking countries, it wasn't reprinted.

Even though his theory was nonsense, Muck deserves credit for one thing: he treated the Mayans with far more dignity and respect than earlier Atlantis writers. Most of his predecessors dismissed the modern Mayans as dumb savages who had nothing to do with Atlantis or the builders of the great Mayan ruins. If they had any part at all in the Atlantis story, it was as brutal invaders who destroyed the beautiful civilization bequeathed to America by the Atlanteans. Muck wrote nothing of the sort. To him, the American Indians were one and the same as the Atlanteans. It was they who brought civilization to Europe, displacing the inferior types who had been there before, and not the reverse. There is an echo of the "noble savage" romanticism of Karl May, whose adventure stories were popular in Muck's youth, rather than the vicious racism of the Third Reich of his mature years.

Here's to Mayans! They survived the sinking of Atlantis; they'll survive Friday.

Lost Islands and Pygmies of the Far North

NOTE: This post is a digression from another post I'm working on that got out of hand.

In 1569, Gerhard Mercator published the great world map that introduced his innovative map projection. Although he intended his projection as an aid to navigation, this particular map was not practical for that purpose. It was too large (1.24 x 2 meters), many parts of the oceans were covered by text boxes in Latin, and the instructions for using his method made up only small part of the text. The map, with its beautiful cartouche, colorful illustrations, interesting stories, and careful attention to the latest land discoveries, was better suited to be wall decoration or reference for educated patrons that as an aid for mariners.

Mercator's projection was wasn't the only innovation on the map. Mercator recognized the main limitation on his map. It was useless at the very highest latitudes. To reach the North Pole, the map would have had to be infinite in height. To also reach the South Pole, it had to be two infinities in height! Because making a sheet of paper that size was beyond the technology of his time, he came up with an elegant work-around. In the lower, left-hand corner of the map, he placed an inset with a polar view of the North down to 70°. This provided enough overlap with the main map that viewers could easily picture how the two maps fit together. Previous map projections of the world, such as the double cordiform projection that he and Oronce Fine had experimented with in the 1530's, had provided polar views, but this had not been their primary purpose. In dealing with a flaw in his new projection, Mercator unintentionally produced the first map devoted specifically to portraying one of the polar regions.

Detail of Mercator's 1569 world map showing the north polar regions. Source.

Mercator's 1538 double cordiform world map showing both polar regions. Source.
Mercator died in 1594 leaving his last great project, a six volume atlas and history of the world, unfinished. His only surviving son, Rumhold and the men of his workshop, which included three of his grandsons, gathered up his completed materials and published them as a third volume to accompany the two already published. These materials included twenty-eight maps and the first chapter of his history. One of those maps was an enlargement and update of his north polar projection. As with the 1569 map, the most distinctive feature of the map is four large islands where the Arctic Ocean should be. In the text on the map, Mercator explains that the waters of the oceans rush inward, between the islands, to the pole, where they plunge deep into the Earth. At the pole is a black island thirty-three leagues in circumference. A magnetic island lies just north of the Streto de Anian (Bering Straits). On one of the large islands is the legend: "Pygmae hic habitant 4 ad summum pedes longi, quaemadmodum illi quos in Gronlandia Screlingers vocant (Here live Pygmies, at most 4 feet tall, who are like those called Scraelings in Greenland)."

Mercator's 1595 map of the Arctic. Source. High-res version.
As strange as these islands look, they were not products of Mercator's imagination. He had a source. It's pretty remarkable that we know anything about the source. Mercator read the story in a now lost Fourteenth Century book, the Itinerarium of Jacobus Cnoyen. Cnoyen had two sources. He learned the main part of the story from an unnamed traveler who heard it from another unnamed traveler. The earlier unnamed traveler is supposed to have written the story in another now lost book, Inventio Fortunatae. Cnoyden's other source was--you guessed it-- another now lost book, the Gestae Arthuri. Mercator gave a brief explanation of these sources in a text box on the 1569 world map.

Meanwhile, in England, Dr. John Dee was looking for ways to expand the British Empire (a phrase he coined) over the entire Arctic. It was a bit of a hard sell. In 1553, a chartered company, the delightfully named Mystery, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown, had sent three ships to open up a Northeast Passage around Russia and Siberia to the Indies. The captains and crews of two of the ships died in the cold and dark, while the third made to a Russian port and brought back a trade agreement from the court of Ivan the Terrible. The Russian trade was profitable enough that very few in places of influence were willing to finance additional expeditions to die in the cold and the dark on mere speculation. This wasn't enough to stop Dee who argued that British merchants should turn their attention to the Northwest. Dee argued that, not only was there a Northwest Passage waiting to be discovered, but that the British were entitled to own the passage and the lands around it through the right of prior discovery and occupation by expeditions in the time of King Arthur.

In 1577, Dee wrote to Mercator asking for more information about Cnoyen's account. Mercator copied an extensive part of Cnoyen's book and sent it to Dee. Unfortunately, that letter has since been lost. Fortunately, Dee copied the letter into one of his secret notebooks. Unfortunately, the notebook was damaged when an angry mob, believing Dee to be an evil enchanter, set fire to his house. I'm not making this up. Most of what we know about Cnoyen's Itinerarium and the anonymous Inventio Fortunatae come from Dee's damaged notebook. Mercator explained that, while he no longer had access to Cnoyen's book, he had copied the relevant parts and had translated them from "Belgic" into Dutch. He assured Dee that Cnoyen was a trustworthy source.

John Dee. Probably not a wizard. Source.
Cnoyen explained that in the far North there is a mountain range that completely surrounds the North Pole at about 78°. The mountains are penetrated by nineteen ocean channels with currents so strong that any ship entering the channels will be dragged north with no hope of escape. The nineteen channels combine to form four Indrawing Seas. One of the lands between the seas is fairly nice, two are completely uninhabited, and one has Pygmies. The province of Dusky Norway (Greenland) is attached to one of the Arctic islands by a narrow isthmus. West of Dusky Norway is the easternmost extension of Asia, the charmingly named Province of Darkness. Above these two provinces is a large island called Grocland which shields them from the Indrawing Seas. Some giants live on Grocland. The weather is misty and dull in the Far North, there are no trees, and the wind is too weak to turn a corn mill, let alone prevent ships from being pulled to their doom. Naturally, King Arthur thought this gloomy, barren land where the rivers sucked was just what he needed to add to his realm. In 530, he sent out armies and colonists and conquered the whole thing. This much comes from the lost Gestae Arthuri.

In 1364, eight people came to the court of the king of Norway from the islands. They were descendents of some settlers who had been sucked into the Indrawing Seas. Or maybe their fathers were from Belgium. Cnoyen was unclear on this point, to Dee's frustration. One of the eight was a priest carrying an astrolabe that he said he had received from an English Minorite (Franciscan) monk whom he met in the islands. This monk, he said, had spent years traveling the islands and making geographic observations with his astrolabe. The monk's description of the North confirmed that in the Gestae Arthuri and added details about the arrangement of the channels and islands. He had journeyed as close to the pole as possible. At the top of the world, the four Indrawing Seas come together and circle round before disappearing into the Earth beneath a black, magnetic island. The only people the monk met in his travels were a band of Pygmies, mostly women. The monk later wrote up his observations as a report for King Edward III of England. This is the Inventio Fortunatae.

The priest from who Cnoyen presumably heard the monk's story never laid eyes on the Inventio Fortunatae. Mercator doesn't make clear whether he heard the story from the priest or from additional middlemen. However, Cnoyen must have had independent knowledge of the report. If the priest met the English monk on his way back from the North, he wouldn't have written the report yet. And, Cnoyen mentions that the monk made five more voyages for Edward after writing the Inventio Fortunatae. We, too, have independent confirmation that the report existed. Both Martin Beheim's 1492 globe and Johannes Ruysch's 1507 world map mention using information from it and we three separate references to Columbus trying to locate a copy (he failed).

Detail from Johannes Ruysch's 1507 world map. Ruysch interpreted the nineteen channels and four lands differently than Mercator. He also ignored the Pygmies and populated two of the islands with legendary tribes out of Herodotus.Source. High-res version.
The popular impression that mapmakers of the time simply made things up to fill empty space on their maps is not true. The best mapmakers combed through all the sources at their disposal hunting for nuggets of information. Even the sea monsters were based on mariners' reports. The worst mapmakers copied the best. On Mercator's 1595 map, he based the Far North on Cnoyen's book. The north coast of European Russia he based on reports from the English merchants allowed in under the agreement with Ivan the Terrible. For Asia, he used Marco Polo and Pliny the Elder. Around Greenland he included information from Martin Frobisher's three voyages, one of the projects that Dee had been lobbying for when he wrote to Mercator. The large, nonexistent island of Frisland below Iceland and in the upper left-hand inset was based on a widely believed book about the voyages of a Venician family in the 1380s. The real crime of Renaissance mapmakers was, that they were so eager for information they ended up being credulous and uncritical. In the next century, additional information allowed cartographers the luxury of choosing between competing sources.

POSTSCRIPT: And what of the Arctic Pygmies? Pygmies, in Ancient and Medieval lore, were not merely small people; they were one of the monstrous races said to inhabit the far parts of the world. In the case of the Pygmies, "monstrous" was not a moral judgment. Pygmies were said to be brave and organized in their age old war with the cranes (the birds, not the construction equipment or the guy on "Hogan's Heroes").

On his map, Mercator said that the Pygmies of the Far North were like the Scraelings of Greenland. "Scraeling" is the word the Norse used for the various natives of the New World--mainland Indians, the Dorset people of the islands and the Eskimos who replaced the Dorsets in the early Second Millennium. Kristin Seaver writes that, although its exact etymology is obscure, the word Scraeling was almost certainly intended as a translation of Pygmy. The Norse believed that Greenland and the lands to the west were either part of Asia or islands near Asia. The geography of the time had pushed the Pygmies far into Asia. When they Norse met small people in, what they believed to be Asia, it made sense for them to believe they had discovered the homeland of the legendary Pygmies.

Olaus Magnus described the Pygmies of Greenland as small in stature but big of heart and able to kick butt many times their size. Source.
John Dee and Richard Hakluyt were certain that the traveling monk was one Nicholas of Lynne. There are records of a Nicholas of Lynn who was a mathematician active in the second half of the Fourteenth Century. At first glance, a mathematician would be a good match for a man who traveled the world making measurements with an astrolabe. What little is known of the biography of this Nicholas excludes him. He was probably too young, he was a Carmelite brother, not a Minorite, and there is no mention of him ever traveling, let alone spending years away on various missions for the king.

But there is another possibility. In Lynn at that time, there was also a Minorite house. Is it possible that there were two Nicholas' of Lynn? If there was a Minorite Nicholas of Lynn, what became of him? Cnoyen write that the monk went on five more missions for King Edward III, though he doesn't say what or where those missions. Perhaps Nicholas engaged in regular mission work among the little people he found near the pole. Perhaps he eventually stayed with them and taught them reindeer herding and toymaking...

Dear 1962

Fifty years ago, Seattle was the host of the Century 21 World Exposition, better known simply as the Seattle World's Fair. Century 21 was one of those quaint imperial propaganda exercises during which one of the Great Powers tried to dazzle the rest of the world with its technology and vision of the future. When Dad loaded Mom, my sisters, and me into our 1957 Volkswagon Microbus to go to the World's Fair, I didn't care about any of that; all I knew was that John Glenn's space capsule was there and that I was going to see it.

Source.
Unless your name is Jules Verne, predicting the future is a thankless business. Prognosticators almost always expect too much in the short term and not enough in the long term. Whatever else they get right, they never, ever manage to see what's happening to social and cultural mores. Again, like most of these imperial exercises, the Seattle World's Fair depended on its sponsors--civic boosters, corporations, and the government--to create its vision of the future. They made a conscious decision to ignore the people who had spent the most time thinking about the future, science fiction writers. Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were both approached to pitch projects for the fair and both were rejected. Not that they would have done a lot better; despite Bob's most earnest hopes, hot young women still do not cluster around smart guys to form polygamous communities.

Still, the Fair boosters and magazine writers of 1962 did their best at envisioning The Future. It's only fair (get it?) that The Future send back a score card.

Dear 1962,

This is The Future speaking. You spent a lot of time thinking about me lately. I'm touched. Let me tell you what's happened:

We never got jet packs, flying cars, or a four day work week.

Most women have jobs outside the home and they wear pants.

The Cold War ended without a Third World War. Our side won.

Monorails never caught on.

The president is a black man named Barak Hussein Obama. The governor of Louisiana is an East Indian man named Piyush Jindal.

Rock and Roll is still not dead.

You know that disposable future you looked forward to? You know, never wash you clothes. They're paper! Throw them away when they get dirty! Don't wash your dishes. Throw them away and use cheap, attractive, disposable dishes! Ever wonder where all that disposable stuff goes?

We still haven't cured the common cold, cancer, or almost any disease you expected us to. We even have some new diseases.

We say "fuck" a lot.

The last pope was Polish. The current one was a Hitler Youth.

In most cities you can choose between 500 television channels to watch on your pocket sized, color teevee.

It's common for men to wear earings and women to have tatoos.

The Americans were the first to put a man on the moon. We were also the last. It's been almost fifty years since anyone has been further than about two hundred miles from Earth.

If we had another race to the moon, China might win.

The Solid South is solidly Republican.

Turbine engines in cars never worked out.

The most popular cars in America are made by Japanese companies.

Middle aged people still complain about the music of teenagers.

Computers are everywhere and they are like nothing you expected. In many ways, they are far cooler.

Literate adults use phrases like "far cooler."

The air quality in our cities has improved.

House cats wear laser collars that vaporize mice on sight. OK, I made that one up. We could probably do it, but think about what would happen to your apolstery.

Homosexuals--we call them "gay" now--can get married in eight states.

The tallest building in the world is in Arabia in a country you've never heard of.

Americans are still really bad at geography and history.

Atomic energy had some unforseen problems. It's never going to replace other kinds of power.

We finished the Interstate Highway system and now we're letting it fall apart.

We have not made contact with aliens, yet.

The latest generation of Americans is not much taller than you, but they are much fatter.

You know all that talk about the inexhaustable food resources of the ocean? We exhausted it.

My car has more computing power than your Pentagon.

The bald eagle and the California condor did not go extinct, but the rhinoceros and the tiger might.

We have lots of robots, but most of them look more like table-saws than people.

We can't control the weather.

Pills instead of food was a stupid idea. People like food.

The Space Needle is still there. We're quite fond of it.

Life still goes on.

Sincerely,

The Future

The Monsters of Islandia

Last fall while researching my article on images of walruses and possible mammoths on Renaissance maps, I looked at dozens of maps before finding the five I finally used. This was more fun than anyone deserves to have. I wasn't able to find excuses to use all of my research at the time. During the next few months, I'll put together a couple of less polished pieces so that I can share some off the more interesting tidbits that I found. One of the most fun maps that I found was Abraham Ortelius' Islandia, Iceland.

Ortelius is an important figure in the history of cartography. He is regarded as the father of the modern atlas. His Theatrum Orbis Terrarum was a bound volume of maps, with descriptive text, intended to sytematically cover the entire world. It came out in many editions and languages between 1570 and 1612 and was generously plagiarised then and later. The map Islandia first appeared in the edition of Theatrum in 1587. Islandia was the first detailed and accurate (by the standards of the time) map of Iceland. The information for the map itself originated with Bishop Gudbrandur Thorlaksson who sent it to a Danish historian, Anders Sörensen Vedel. Vedel sent the notes and a map of his own creation to Ortelius who used them used when preparing the copperplates for Islandia. The Vedel map has not survived. Many of the placenames on the map were badly mangled by Ortelius when he converted the Icelandic script (Latin letters with additional characters) into the Latin script common in Holland.


Islandia, printed in Antwerp, 1603.
I don't intend to write a detailed article about the map as a whole, today. I just want to make some comments about the animals surrounding the island in the sea, especially his sources for the animals. The auction site of Barry Lawrence Ruderman (my source for the Ortelius images) says:

Some of the more purely fanciful images may derive from tales of St. Brendan, a sixth century Irish missionary who, according to legend, journeyed to Iceland and whose name is associated with a mythical island of the same name. Others are traceable to Olaus Magnus's Carta Marina of 1539, although they were probably derived directly from Munster's Cosmographia of 1545 and most notably Munster's chart of the Sea and Land Creatures[Meerwunder und seltzame Thier].

Olaus Magnus' Carta Marina, printed in Venice, 1539.

Münster's Meerwunder und seltzame Thier, printed in Basel, 1552.
As far as I can tell, this is true, though I have identified some of the other sources. I believe Ortelius relied more directly on Olaus that on the intermediary of Münster. Only a few of the beasts on Islandia were portrayed in Cosmographia, while several more can be found on Olaus' map and, more importantly, in his book Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, first published in 1555 and many times thereafter. Another source that Ortelius used was Konrad Gesner (De Piscibus Orbiculatis 1558), who commented on and, in some places, corrected Olaus. One of those corrections appears on Islandia. Finally, he might have used Ambroise Paré's Des Monstres. Although there is nothing in this that he couldn't have found in any of the other sources, Des Monstres first published in 1573, is one of the greatest monster bestiaries of all time.

On to the illustrations. Ortelius marked the animals on the map with capital letters. These were described in text on the back of the map. For each animal, I'll start with the image and description, follow with some possible sources for the image, and end with any other comments that wander into my mind.

A. is a fish, commonly called NAHVAL. If anyone eats of this fish, he will die immediately. It has a tooth in the front part of its head standing out seven cubits. Divers have sold it as the Unicorn's horn. It is thought to be a good antidote and powerful medicine against poison. This monster is forty ells in length.

From the description, it's quite clear that he intends a narwhal. I've written before about the European belief in unicorn horn. By the time that Ortelius wrote the text for this map, the belief in an actual unicorn animal was fading. However, belief in the horn itself, whatever its true source, and its anti-poison properties hung on for another century. Curiously, although there were plenty of images of sea unicorns that Ortelius might have drawn on, he chose to use something that resembles a swordfish to represent the narwhal. I haven't been able to locate a source for this image.

The ell is a highly flexible measure. It most commonly means, either a cubit (half yard, finger tips to elbow, or roughly eighteen inches) or a three-quarter yard (finger tips to arm pit, or roughly twenty-seven inches). Just to keep things confusing, it was also used for any foreign measure of the same order of magnitude.

Since I can't find anything to match his narwhal, we'll move on to B and C.

B. the Roider is a fish of one hundred and thirty ells in length, which has no teeth. The flesh of it is very good meat, wholesome and tasty. Its fat is good against many diseases.

C. The BURCHVALUR has a head bigger than its entire body. It has many very strong teeth, of which they make chess pieces [some editions say bricks]. It is 60 cubits long.

I don't have anything to offer for the images of B or C either. Their basic forms, with the wide open mouthes, vaguely matche standard artistic representations of fish going back to Minoan Greece. One thing I can say about the Burchvalur is that the description of a long head and teeth used for carving sounds like a sperm whale. In fact, several of the monsters on the charts of Ortelius, Olaus, and Münster are based on different stories about sperm whales.

On a linguistic note: Roider or reydur or reidr is an old Icelandic name for baleen whales, which have no teeth. The suffix -valur, in Burchvalur, comes from the root as "whale." It shows up as hvalur, wal, ual, hval and other forms hidden in the names of many northern sea mammals.

For D, I do have some meat. Ortelius points to Olaus as his source for the sea hog. Olaus bases his pig-like monster of the German Sea on a specific sighting in 1537. Between Olaus' first representation in 1539 and Ortelius' image in 1587, the beast has undergone some evolution.

D. The Hyena or sea hog is a monstrous kind of fish about which you may read in the 21st book of Olaus Magnus.

This first is from Olaus' 1539 map. The sea hog has a boar's head, a very scaly body, webbed feet, what might be a row of uneven spines or bristles on its back, horns like a cow's over its shoulders, and, strangest of all, what appear to be three eyes on its side.


Münster's version from six years later has fewer details. The webbed feet now look more like fins and the side eyes are gone. Where Olaus' sea hog faced right, Münster's faces left. This reversal was common when prints were copied. The engraver set the original work next to his plate and copied what he saw, forgetting, or not caring, that when his plate was printed, the image would become reversed.


The version printed in Olaus' book in 1555, faces left again. My guess is that Olaus' engraver worked from the map plates rather than a print. The image is a little more detailed and has a new background but it is otherwise unchanged.


In Gesner, three years later, the image is reversed, it's slightly more detailed (beautifully so), and lacks a background. In case there was any question about where he got the image, he directly quotes Olaus' book and comments on it.


Finally, we have Paré in 1573. The image face left and lacks any background, so I think it's safe to say it was copied from Gesner.


Looking back at Ortelius' image, I think it's clear that he did not get it from Münster. The most important in my making this judgement is the three side eyes. Münster did not have them, and does not mention them in his accompanying text. He merely calls it a "monstrous fish that resembles pig." In Ortelius, they look more like bullet holes that eyes, but they are there and in the same arrangement (two above one below). My principle of reversals would seem to argue that Ortelius worked from Olaus and not Gesner, but I think one other point argues in Gesner's favor. Ortelius' image is not a simple copy; it has been completely reworked. The scales are gone and the beast looks furry. The feet are no longer webbed; they look like those of a dog or some other terrestrial carnivore. In fact, he calls it a hyena. Gesner was the only previous writer to use the word hyena to describe the monster. I'm not sure where he picked up that reference. It's possible that there is another source that I'm not aware of that had an image of a furry sea hog, but until I hear of it, I'm going to say Ortelius was the one who improved the sea hog based on Gesner's description.

E. Ziphius, a horrible sea monster that swallows a black seal in one bite.

Various sources I've looked at claim that the Ziphius is a goose-beaked whale, a sperm whale, or an orca. Olaus, who first used the image was very clear that Ziphius is a swordfish (xiphia). He wrote that is had horrible eyes, a sharp beak like a sword, a triangular back (a fin), and that it was a stranger in the North that only occasionally showed up as a robber. However, he also said it had a head like an owl's and he drew it that way. Here are the images of Olaus, 1539; Münster, 1545; Olaus, 1555; and Gesner, 1558.





Three things stand out when comparing Ortelius' Ziphius with Olaus' first image. First, the second attacking monster is missing from the scene. Second, Ortelius' Ziphius has no dorsal fin. Third, it looks like Vincent van Gogh. I think the last one is a coincidence. Ortelius' Ziphius most closely matches Münster's. Of the four earlier images, only Münster's lacks the dramatic staging and it has the smallest dorsal fin. These make it the most likely source for Ortelius' Ziphius.

F. The English whale, thirty ells long. It has no teeth, but its tongue is seven ells in length.

Several things stand out taking this image and description together. First, it appears to have teeth, contrary to the description. Second, it has arms. Third, is that a giant penis? All of these details come from Olaus and are repeated in Gesner and partially in Paré.

Olaus' illustration is not based on a species called the English whale. It is, rather, an illustration for a report of a particular whale that beached itself near the mouth of the Thames on August 27, 1532. He describes the proportions of the whale, commenting on the fact that its mouth was long in proportion to its body. He says that is had long "wings," half the length of its body. He says it had no teeth but, instead, hairy blades on the roof of its mouth and a long tongue. He says that its genitals were of monstrous magnitude. I think most modern people would have no problem recognising this as a male baleen whale of some sort. Olaus' illustration shows workers chopping up the stinking carcass to dispose of it. Olaus appears to have had some trouble translating the report into an image. The "wings" turned into dragon's feet and he drew the baleen plates as a series triangles that looked a lot like teeth.


Gesner's English whale is essentially a copy of Olaus' with the people removed, possibly to give us a better look at the giant penis. His one significant change is that he has added some teeth in the lower jaw.


Paré started from scratch and created a new image. In his, the front of the whale has been reworked to have a profile like a sperm whale and the "wings" have been changed from arms into cute little bat wings. Its lower jaw has teeth that again resemble a sperm whale and it appears to have no teeth at all in its upper jaw, only some curious holes.


There is one hint in Olaus' drawing that he might have had some experience with whale bones. This is in the strange arms of the whale. The arms look flabby and are made up mostly of wrist and fingers, which is exactly the bone structure of a whale's fins. Like the wings of its fellow mammal, the bat, a whale's fins have kept most of their fingers, as opposed to birds whose fingers are all fused into one structure. Ortelius was apparently not familiar with these bones as he has rendered the fingers more paw-like. The bones are well displayed in this Nineteenth Century German illustration.

G. HROSHUALUR, that is to say as much as Sea horse, with manes hanging down from its neck like a horse. It often causes great hurt and scare to fishermen.

There's really nothing special about the sea horse. Both the legend and image had been well known since classical antiquity and, by the Medieval times, it was used in heraldry. The pose is a common one. Ortelius could have taken his image from a fountain, mural, coat of arms, or book illustration. It's very similar to Gesner's sea horse, but not enough so that I would say it was based on Gesner.


Ortelius' sea horse is really quite beautiful. Today, it would be easy to imagine his horse showing up as an airbrushed poster full of rainbows and unicorns. But, such a treatment obscures the legend, which was that the sea horse was a horrible monster that hunted and killed fishermen. Then again, the unicorn was often portrayed a a horrible monster that hunted and killed men in the forest.

H. The largest kind of Whale, which seldom shows itself. It is more like a small island than like a fish. It cannot follow or chase smaller fish because of its huge size and the weight of its body, yet it preys on many, which it catches by natural cunning and subtlety which it applies to get its food.

Like the sea horse, the island fish has a long heritage in mythology. It appears in the Arabian Nights, Icelandic mythology, and in the Voyage of St. Brendan. In most legends, a ship comes across the island fish sleeping on the surface (a basking shark?). Thinking it is an island, the sailors land and build a fire to cook their dinner, waking the monster. The island fish is not usually malicious, it is merely dangerous because of its size. Olaus had an image of the island fish on his 1539 map but not in his book.Olaus' image shows the episode of the sailors starting a fire. Münster had a variation of it without the sailors. Gesner has the sailors and so must have copied it from Olaus' map.




Both Olaus' and Gesner's fish have a row of small fins running along its spine, while Münster's and Ortelius' do not. This, and the sailors, make me believe that Ortelius was more inspired by Münster than by the others for this image.

I. SKAUTUHVALUR. This fish is fully covered with bristles or bones. It is somewhat like a shark or skate [thorn-back in the German edition], but infinitely bigger. When it appears, it is like an island, and with its fins it overturns boats and ships.

According to the Icelandic Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture only two species of rays or skates are native to their waters and neither one is big enough to capsize a ship. Ortelius' image could owe something to Olaus and Gesner. The fish in its mouth resmbles Olaus, but the spininess does not.




While there is some resemblance in the images, the descriptions are completely different. The ray described by Olaus is presented as a model of virtue. In the image, the ray is rescuing a fisherman who has fallen into the water and is being eaten by hungry fish. Later on, Olaus describes a different giant ray that uses its stinger to pluck sailors off of ships.

K. SEENAUT, sea cow of grey colour. They sometimes come out of the sea and feed on the land in groups. They have a small bag hanging by their nose with the help of which they live in the water. If it is broken, they live altogether on the land, accompanied by other cows.

Notice the three cows on the shore behind the Seenauts. They are labled vacca marina, which is Latin for "sea cows." Olaus, Münster, and Gesner all had sea cows in their presentations, but none of their illustations resemble Ortelius'. Still, I like the sea cow enough that I'm going to show them anyway.





Münster's and Gesner's sea cows are descended from Olaus' map illustration and not from his book illustration, which is completely different. I think it might be the ancestor of the cow in Guernica.

L. STEIPEREIDUR, a most gentle and tame kind of whale, which for the defence of fishermen fights against other kinds of whales. It is forbidden by Proclamation that any man should kill or hurt this kind of Whale. It has a length of at least 100 cubits.

The image of the Steipereidur nearly matches the island fish above. Olaus, on his map, has several whales that all basically fit this image. Besides the one shown above as the island fish is this one illustrating a battle between a whale and an orca. That scene was a standard piece in natural histories dating back, at least, to Pliny in the first century. This might be what Ortelius was referring to when he described Steipereidur.


On a less happy note for the Steipereidur, the royal proclamation must not have lasted long. In a history of Greenland published in 1705, Thormodus Torfæus wrote that Steipereidur was the tastiest kind of whale.

M. STAUKUL. The Dutch call it Springual. It has been observed to stand for a whole day long upright on its tail. It derives its name from its leaping or skipping. It is a very dangerous enemy of seamen and fishermen, and greedily goes after human flesh.

The springing whale is another name for the orca. The presence of two so different orcas in the literature of the time shows how confused information arriving from different sources could become. Ortelius should have been aware of the orca, under that name, as portrayed by Olaus and numerous other artists, but the springing whale description was so different that he never made a connection of them being the same animal.

N. ROSTUNGER (also called Rosmar) is somewhat like a sea calf. It goes to the bottom of the sea on all four of its feet, which are very short. Its skin can hardly be penetrated by any weapon. It sleeps for twelve hours on end, hanging on some rock or cliff by its two long teeth. Each of its teeth are at least one ell long and the length of its whole body is fourteen ells.

And here we are with my friend the walrus. In my Ruscheni article, I gave some history of European knowledge of the walrus. Some other day, I'll do a complete data dump of everything I found in my research. For now, I'll just give a short version of that which is relevant to Ortelius' map.

The description of the walrus spending its time hanging by its teeth to sleep dates back to the thirteenth century and a bestiary written by St. Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus). It is part of a bizzare description of hunting walruses by sneking up on them while the slept, cutting slits in their skin, running a rope through the slits, tying the rope to a tree and then waking the walruses (as if all this cutting and tying didn't) and stampeding them into the sea during which they were supposed to literally run out of their skin Like some Tex Avery cartoon character. The description was repeated by many writers including Olaus and Gesner. Olaus' illustrations show the walrus as a legged monster with tusks in its lower jaw.



The first edition of Gesner's book copied Olaus' illustration and repeated the Albertus story.


None of these images resemble the one that Ortelius used. Münster's chart of the Sea and Land Creatures does not include a walrus. But Ortelius' walrus does have a source and that is the second edition of of Gesner's De Piscibus. between 1558 and 1560, Gesner learned of a drawing of a walrus in the wall of the Strasbourg city hall. Around 1520, Bishop Erik Valkendorf of Trondheim sent the head of a walrus, preserved with salt, to pope Leo X. On the way to Rome, it was displayed at the Strasbourg Rathaus. Someone made a drawing of it on the wall, imagining a seal-like body with a fish tail, four chubby arms, and wing-like structures behind the fore-arms. Gesner was skeptical about the body, but faithfully reproduced it.



In the thirty years between Gesner and Ortelius, Western Europeans began to penetrate the Arctic in significant numbers looking for shortcuts to China and trade with Russia. Many of these travelers saw walruses and brought back ivory and more realistic stories of walrus hunting, but I cannot locate any images during that time.

O. Spermaceti parmacitty or a simple kind of amber, commonly called HUALAMBUR.

This is ambergris or whale barf. Aged ambergris is used as a fixative in perfume and was, and still is, extremely valuable. On the map, the ambergris is represented as two blobs flanking the walrus. We don't need to look for a source for shapeless blobs.

P. Blocks and trunks of trees, by force of winds and violent tempests torn off by their roots from the cliffs of Norway, tossed to and fro, and surviving many storms, finally cast upon and coming to rest at this shore.

The significance of the driftwood is that, by Ortelius' time, Iceland had almost no trees big enough to use for ship building or construction. For the same reason, Olaus made a point of showing driftwood around Greenland. Like the ambergris, we don't really need to look for sources for driftwood.

Q. Huge and marvellously big heaps of ice, brought here by the tide from the frozen sea, making loud and terrible noises. Some pieces are often as big as forty cubits. On some of these, white bears sit together, watching the innocent fish play about in exercise.

I don't think there is a specific source for this illustration. Bears were a familiar animal to European artists. In Ortelius' time, they still lurked in forests across most of the continent. Bears were used in heraldry, so most artists would have been able to draw them. I find these bears especially charming. Rather than the fierce animals of reputation, they are shown playfully.

Olaus also showed ice floes and polar bears on the northeast coast of Iceland. One of them is eating an innocent fish.


An interesting detail is that the polar bears on Olaus' map are brown. Renaissance maps were printed in black and white and later hand colored. Color printing did not come into being until the nineteenth century. Quite often, the maps were colored by their owners and not by the publishers, meaning different copies of the same map can quite different color schemes. Though Olaus clearly labeled the bears "white bears" (ursi albi)whoever colored his map colored the bears a more familiar brown.

And now we've come all the way around the island. By my count, most of the identifiable sources for Ortelius' sea animal images are either Gesner or Olaus, though he was also aware of Münster. Sea horses and bears were common enough in European art that they could easily have been original creations. As to the descriptions, most of these are also Gesner or Olaus (Münster's descriptions are very short). Finally, the inclusion animals not in any of those sources and the use of Icelandic names makes me think that he got most of the rest of his information from Bishop Thorlaksson and Anders Vedel. Whatever his sources, the map is a beautiful glimpse into the state of knowledge during the age of discovery.