Читать книгу Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography - William Henry Babcock - Страница 24

Table of Contents

The great final catastrophe of Atlantis would surely write its record on the rocks both of the sea bed and the continental land masses. As to the ocean bottom it would be the natural repository for vitreous and other rocky products of volcanic and seismic action occurring above it. Termier relates what he considers very significant indications at a point 500 miles north of the Azores at a depth of 1,700 fathoms, where the grappling irons of a cable-mending ship dragged for several days over a mountainous surface of peaks and pinnacles, bringing up “little mineral splinters” evidently “detached from a bare rock, an actual outcropping sharp-edged and angular.” These fragments were all of a non-crystalline vitreous lava called tachylyte, which “could solidify into this condition only under atmospheric pressure.” He infers that the territory in question was covered with lava flows while it was still above water and subsequently descended to its present depth; also from the general condition of the rock surface that the caving in followed very closely on the emission of the lavas and that this collapse was sudden. He thinks, therefore, “that the entire region north of the Azores and perhaps the very region of the Azores, of which they may be only the visible ruins, was very recently submerged, probably during the epoch which the geologists call the present.” He believes also that like results would follow a “detailed dredging to the south and the southwest of these islands.”27

It will be observed that the whole of this very tempting edifice is built on the declared impossibility of tachylyte forming on the sea bottom under heavy water pressure. But Professor Schuchert insists that: “It is not pressure so much as it is a quick loss of temperature that brings about the vitreous structure in lava. In other words, vitreous lava apparently can be formed as well in the ocean depths as on the lands. What the cable layers got was probably the superficial glassy crust of probable subterranean lava flows.”28 If that be so, there is, of course, no need to infer a descent of territory into the depths in that region of the mid-Atlantic. This tachylyte matter seems enveloped in uncertainty.

On the other hand, it is well known that volcanic outbursts and earthquakes have been rather frequent and alarming even in modern times among the islands of the eastern Atlantic archipelagoes, especially the Canaries and the lowest and middle groups of the Azores. In some instances the nearest mainland also has suffered, as notably on “Lisbon-earthquake day,” and the various occasions of disturbances cited by Navarro. Also, there is the memorable instance of a small island that was thrust upward from the depths before the eyes of a British naval ship’s crew and remained in sight for several days. Changes of a distinctly non-volcanic character have also occurred, as when an appreciable slice of cliff wall broke away from Flores and sank, raising a great wave which did damage, with loss of life on Corvo, some nine miles away. Moreover, Corvo was once considerably larger than it is now in comparison with this neighbor, Flores (or Li Conigi), if we may trust to the general testimony of fourteenth-century and fifteenth-century maps. But all these shiftings and transformations for a long time past have been local and usually rather narrowly restricted. It does not follow that no depressions or elevations of greater extent have suddenly occurred in times before men regularly made permanent records; yet it must be owned that the belief in any very large sunken Atlantis derives no direct support from what we actually know of volcanic and seismic action in that region in historic centuries.