Introduction: Political Writer
All things merge into one another – good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics. Thomas Hardy: epigraph, Honorary Consul, 1973
The merging of ‘religion into politics’, as Hardy proposes, is a distinctive characteristic of Greene’s writings.1 The formulating presence of religious issues within his fictions, journalism and correspondence has long been a subject of critical attention. For over 65 years, Greene’s literary creativity and intellectual scepticism frequently depended upon his knowledge of religious matters to fashion dominant narrative and thematic concerns as he insistently wove theological elements into the fabric of his fictions. But his constantly shifting political perspectives, often closely linked with his religious affiliations, have proved much more difficult to categorize. Greene’s writings have been interpreted as offering evidence of earnest political convictions or profound cynicism. Equally, they have been viewed as the expression of a journalist’s dispassionate reportage or a novelist’s creative opportunism in utilizing world events as raw materials to stimulate his imagination. Greene admitted that he rarely committed himself absolutely to any specific cause because he was afraid of having the restrictive label ‘political author’ attached to his work. He supposed, however, that whenever he tackled political subjects, he would still be deemed a political writer, admitting that such a designation was perhaps inevitable since ‘politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God’.2 Nevertheless, broad agreement over the importance of politics to Greene’s literary imagination and creativity remains elusive.
This study proposes that an awareness of Greene’s eclectic political perspectives from the mid-1920s until the late 1980s is crucial to an informed understanding of his literary productivity. For over six decades Greene’s writings, both fictional and factual, were inspired and underpinned by his fascination with the essential human duality of political action and religious belief, coupled with an insistent need as a writer to keep the political personal. In September 1990, six months before his death, Judith Adamson concluded that Greene’s politics had never been associated with any ‘particular ideology’ since he firmly believed
that writers should be ‘free of fixed affiliations’. He did, however, readily espouse some specific causes:
He has been vehemently opposed to American intervention in the affairs of smaller nations and has taken up the causes of Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Chile, Panama and Nicaragua in particular. At the same time his has been one of the major voices raised in defence of human rights in countries like the Soviet Union. Of late he has allowed that he is something of an old-fashioned social democrat, which is consonant with his quick attachment to Omar Torrijos (described in Getting to Know the General) and his vision of what was then a moderately socialist Panama. But just as often he has talked about the ‘virtue of disloyalty’ and the ‘price of faith’, about disinterested observation and the importance of doubt.3
As an internationally acclaimed writer, Greene habitually linked politics and religion within his fictions and public pronouncements. But his political concerns – whether expressed implicitly in his writings or explicitly in lectures, journalism and letters to newspapers – have tended to be utilized by critics primarily as a means of interpreting the morality of his narratives or his choice of geographical contexts. This book, however, will trace how his diverse and often complex political perspectives provided a foundational source of imaginative creativity for a remarkably productive literary career. Also, as Maria Couto notes, our critical understanding of Greene’s moral perspectives as a writer remains incomplete without recognizing the interdependence of his political and religious sensibilities to his creative impulses: ‘Graham Greene’s novels illuminate the moral sense by structuring the narrative within a framework of political consciousness and the religious sense. They illustrate that religion and politics, traditionally seen as antagonistic forces, Church and State, sacred and secular, God and Caesar, are elements of the same reality.’4
This is not to say that Greene’s fictional political contexts should necessarily be associated with his beliefs as a private individual or that the latter can be traced into a coherently developing set of personal adherences. Greene never regarded himself as a political activist or factional polemicist and he rarely offered his total commitment to any cause for fear of being publicly labelled a ‘political’ writer. In The Other Man, his 1979 conversations with Marie-Françoise Allain, he insisted (not entirely accurately) that political action was for him ‘writing and nothing else’ (84) and he admitted that he had only ever voted once
in a general election. He defined himself as a writer and not a political thinker and, asked whether he believed in the power of political literature, he responded that while some books could exert significant political influence, his own did not belong in this category. He only wrote to defend ideas and did not wish to utilize literature for political purposes, insisting that even if his novels incidentally happened to be ‘political books’, they were never written to ‘provoke changes’ (80), just as his so-called ‘Catholic’ novels were not written to convert anyone. Nevertheless, even though Greene did not intentionally write ‘political’ books, politics, like religion, consistently provided him with essential and diverse inspiration for his writings.
The sheer range of Greene’s political perspectives renders them an intriguing element in his fictions. In political matters he frequently combines conservatism and subversion, approval of and hostility towards socialism, a fascination with power (especially as a route to condemning the powerful) and overt sympathy with the underdog while revelling in expensive and decadent pleasures. Like his interests in religious affairs, Greene’s political views were passionately held, multifaceted and readily changeable. Consequently, his fictions and journalism often offer controversial, calculatedly provocative and even paradoxical commentaries and scenarios. The geographical range of his political engagements is also exceptionally broad and, as Anthony Burgess remarked, ‘The politics of Greene are world politics … British politics are too small for Greene’.5 Hence, Maria Couto’s assessment of the importance of politics in Greene’s novels seems indisputable: ‘The politics of his fiction is the politics of life itself.’6
This study offers the first sustained consideration of the interaction of Greene’s writings with contemporary politics and international affairs within the context of his extensive and politically engaged family. Earlier generations of Greenes had distinguished themselves in international commerce, local politics and establishment posts –although Greene preferred to ignore or play down such connections in his autobiographical writings. These included his arch-capitalist great-grandfather, Benjamin Greene (1780–1860), a brewer, West Indian plantation owner and vociferous opponent of the abolition of slavery; his wealthy great-uncle, Benjamin Buck Greene (1808–1902), a prominent member of the Victorian plutocracy and a director and Governor of the Bank of England; and his uncle Sir William Graham Greene (1857–1950), Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty and a close associate of Sir Winston Churchill. Perversely, in his memoirs Greene was more impressed by the sexual antics of his youthful great-uncle, Charles
Greene (1821–40), who reputedly sired 13 illegitimate children before his untimely death on St Kitts. He seems to have been unaware (or chose to ignore) that this fecundity was facilitated by the then endemic raping of female slaves for personal gratification and to enhance a plantation’s labouring stock.
From relatives of his own generations, the youthful Graham observed the post-Great War disillusionment of his father Charles H. Greene (1865–1942) with the politically destabilizing terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He monitored the political activities of his left-wing, half-German cousins Ben Greene (1901–78), a Quaker pacifist and Russophile, and Felix Greene (1909–85), an anti-American peace campaigner and Sinophile, both of whom stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. He also followed (and often shared) the political views of his talented brothers Raymond (1901–82), a distinguished doctor whose mountaineering exploits brought him into contact with, variously, the German military elite, the young Rudolph Hess and British military intelligence; and Hugh (1910–87), an outspoken anti-fascist newspaper correspondent in Berlin during the late 1930s and later propagandist in the Emergency Information Services in Malaya and Director General of the BBC.
Greene’s early political engagements can sometimes appear contradictory in their impulses when matched against the privileged circumstances of his own life. The youthful, upper-middle class Greene viewed himself, like many of his Oxbridge contemporaries, as a committed left-winger and in January 1925 he briefly joined the Communist Party. He later dismissed this student membership as merely the product of his tendency to find temptation in extremes since it then seemed possible to retain faith in the Bolshevik October Revolution.7 Nevertheless, it should still perhaps be asked whether Greene at Oxford (like his friend Claud Cockburn and the double agent Kim Philby at Cambridge) did ever harbour communist sympathies. After all, in The Other Man he admitted that he was often ‘bound by certain ideas, though not by any clear political line. I’ve often felt a strong pull towards the Communist Party (but never towards the extreme Right). I shouldn’t be a good recruit, though, for my loyalty would change with circumstances’ (19–20). Similarly, little attention has been paid, especially in relation to his later involvements in espionage, to his student intelligence-gathering trip to Ireland in June 1923 when he appears to have attempted to act as a double agent for both the British and Irish Free State authorities. In contrast to his outwardly professed egalitarian sympathies, Greene did not hesitate after completing his degree to utilize influential family and university
connections when seeking employment in colonial trading, provincial journalism and, successfully, as sub-editor at The Times where he readily participated in strike-breaking during the 1926 General Strike.
As will be discussed in Chapter 1, Greene’s first published novel, The Man Within (1929), was located in early nineteenth-century England on the Sussex coast during the social upheavals caused by smuggling, class inequalities and legal corruption. Broadening his geographical horizons, Greene’s second novel, The Name of Action (1930), was based upon his German-embassy financed student trip to the Ruhr Valley in spring 1924 and set in the city of Trier, close to the German and Luxembourg borders, a politically liminal region where rival party factions fermented the rise of fascism. His third novel, Rumour at Nightfall (1931), focused upon nineteenth-century Carlist rebels in Spain and was endowed with a melodramatically inflamed political context. It reveals through its stylistic uncertainties and heavy dependence upon a single antiquated source – Thomas Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling (1851) –Greene’s primary need as a still inexperienced novelist to catalyse his fictions with personally experienced political and religious perspectives rather than mere historical reading. These three early novels also merit special attention because the latter two have never been republished. They remain largely inaccessible to the general reader although they occupy a seminal position in the early development of Greene’s selfconscious politicizing of his fictions.
Chapter 2 examines the second phase of Greene’s development as a writer, marked by a broadening of the political contexts of his novels through adopting the thriller genre to encompass domestic and international locations. In Stamboul Train (1932) Dr Richard Czinner, an idealistic Marxist revolutionary from Yugoslavia, leaves England with a socially diverse group of fellow travellers, representing different political and social types. He is heading home to lead a revolution in Belgrade, thereby enabling Greene to explore the tensions between revolutionary Marxism and European Catholicism. It’s a Battlefield (1934) is essentially a politicized tract disguised as a novel, with Greene casting himself as the novelist-advocate of the English working classes. He considered it his first overtly political novel since it was strongly influenced by The Coming Struggle for Power (1932) by the Marxist-Leninist John Strachey and The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos (1932) by the Fabian political theorist G. D. H. Cole whose socialist ideals prompted Greene to join the Independent Labour Party in August 1933.8 It has not previously been noted that the militant politics of It’s a Battlefield may also have been inspired by Greene’s residence in the mid-1920s in Introduction:
Battersea, the seat of the Indian-Parsi MP, Shapurji Saklatvala. He was a former member of the Independent Labour Party and England’s only communist MP, who in 1923 opposed the French occupation of the Ruhr and was imprisoned during the General Strike of 1926. During the 1930s the concept of a ‘battlefield’ became for Greene a dominant metaphor for the dislocated state of English society with its unending class wars and inequalities.
During the early 1930s Greene’s travels and personal contacts were sometimes shrouded in mystery, such as his unexplained trip in 1934 to the Baltic States and his long-sustained contacts with the spy and probable double agent Maria (Moura) Budberg, the mistress of Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, who was somehow involved in this Baltic excursion. In England Made Me (1935), set partly in Stockholm, Kate Farrant is the mistress of Erik Krogh, a Swedish manufacturer and the wealthiest man in Europe. His character was based upon the notorious Swedish match millionaire and fraudster, Ivar Kreuger, whose biography Greene had considered writing. This novel introduces Greene’s preoccupation with corrupted capitalism and extreme wealth, culminating 45 years later in his disturbing novella about a malign Swiss toothpaste magnate, Doctor Fischer of Geneva. Finally, his exploration in 1935 of Liberia with his cousin Barbara was tacitly supported by the Foreign Office and his uncle Sir William Graham Greene. It produced his travelogue Journey Without Maps (1936) and Barbara’s equally informative Land Benighted (1938), thereby initiating his lifelong preoccupation with politically liminal Third World locations.
Chapter 3 traces Greene’s formulation during the 1930s of the figure of the alienated or marginalized Englishman, traumatized by urban wastelands and the political lassitude of the ruling classes. A Gun for Sale (1936), published in the same year as the Jarrow March against unemployment and poverty, parallels the natural savagery of Greene’s experiences in Liberia with the casual violence and social decadence of provincial Nottwich (echoing Greene’s depressing time in Nottingham as a trainee newspaperman). As a telling gesture to contemporary European anxieties, this fast-moving thriller is endowed with an exploitative commercial background set within Balkan politics and international espionage. The blighted landscapes of A Gun for Sale highlight from a strongly left-wing perspective the dehumanizing qualities of English suburban life and directly inspire the degenerate urban decay of Brighton Rock (1938). This most renowned of his ‘entertainments’, set within the gaudy, superficial gaiety of a seaside resort – a previously unnoticed 1937 ‘seaside’ source from Night and Day, a short-lived
journal edited by Greene, will also be discussed – develops into a disturbing moral fable of urban sin and damnation. Indeed, in his ‘entertainments’ Greene tends to be far more explicit in his analysis of poverty and social inequalities than in his later, more theologically oriented works. In both A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock there is clearly something rotten about the state of English provincial cities, as there is in To Beg I Am Ashamed (1938), a fictionalized account of the downwardly spiralling life of a London prostitute, in which Greene had some level of compositional involvement.
Chapter 4 examines Greene’s travelogue, The Lawless Roads (1939), initiated by his first direct contact with South American politics and the clash between revolutionary communism and traditional Catholicism. These tensions enabled him to create powerful fictionalized parallels between man’s infinite capacities for violence and self-destruction in Western Europe (The Confidential Agent and The Ministry of Fear) and South America (The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory). The epigraph of The Lawless Roads ominously quotes Cardinal Newman’s warning, especially resonant for 1939, that ‘either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence … if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity’. Such a view reflects Greene’s mounting anger during the 1930s at the stark contrast between the self-interested motives of politicians and the unanswered needs of their impoverished people. Western Europe and Latin America ultimately coalesce in The Lawless Roads to form a nightmarish duality as images of Belgian First World War battlefields blend with the contemporary political conflicts of Russia, Spain and Mexico.
This travelogue, a landmark text in the politicization of Greene’s writings, traces an insistent movement from the specific to the universal, rendering the political situation in Mexico directly relevant to the impending crisis in Western Europe. News of the Spanish Civil War reaches Mexico as Greene travels back to England, on a German liner with Mexican volunteers for Franco, towards the apocalyptic clash between Christian Western Europe and the rising tide of National Socialism in Germany. On board, a young German farmer idolizes the memory of General Erich Ludendorff, the leader of military strategy during the First World War who in old age had been cynically exploited by the Nazis as an advocate of totaler Krieg (total war). The farmer fanatically debates the clash between Catholicism and fascism in Franco’s Spain before Greene arrives back in England to grim ARP posters, trenches and anti-aircraft guns. The Lawless Roads also prefigures the
comparative political ethics of The Power and the Glory (1940) in which the pervasive social corruption of native villages echoes that of English provincial urban life and the Lehrs’ Eden-like abode recalls illusory socialist Utopias. The idealistic Marxist Lieutenant shadows the aspirations of decent working-class British communists while the Mexican prison cell reflects a hellish microcosm of the fallen capitalist world, prefiguring the impending political catastrophe about to engulf both South America and Western Europe.
The Confidential Agent (1939), with its striking avoidance of full names for its key protagonists, focuses on the encounters of the unworldly scholar ‘D.’ with the aristocratic ‘L.’, reminiscent of Spain’s General Franco. The Spanish Civil War, between the anti-clerical Republicans and Franco’s fascists supported by the Catholic hierarchy, provides the lightly disguised political background for this fast-paced thriller novel. Supposedly, Greene tried to travel to Bilbao, then under siege from the fascists, for the BBC and to seek material for an anti-Franco novel.9 Ultimately, these plans led nowhere but his disreputable eldest brother Herbert (1898–1968) did reach Spain and may have acted as a spy for the fascists. In an unreliable account of his exploits, Secret Agent in Spain (1937), Herbert claimed to have supported the Republicans and also to have cultivated links with Japanese intelligence. This chapter will highlight Greene’s previously unrecorded debts to Herbert’s work, from which he lifted various international espionage elements for The Confidential Agent and the memorable narrative device of naming its key protagonists, ‘D.’ and ‘L.’, only by their initials. Greene eventually supported the Republican Basques of northern Spain whose priests fought alongside them, echoing the Catholic clerical revolutionaries of Mexico. The plot and locations of this fantastic thriller mark another major development in the politicization of Greene’s approaches to the social function of the novel, denoting his increasingly confident absorption of contemporary political contexts into his fictional landscapes.
Chapter 4 also details Greene’s and other family members’ involvements in military and intelligence activities during the Second World War and its impact on his literary career. In 1940 Greene was called up for the Officers’ Emergency Reserve and secured a position at the overstaffed Ministry of Information, later satirized in his short story ‘Men at Work’. In a domestic context, his home at North Side, Clapham Common, was destroyed during the London Blitz of October 1940. This event, simultaneously a personal trauma for Greene’s family and a seminal moment in his fictional depictions of visibly disintegrating Western European civilization, culminated in one of his most disturbing stories,
‘The Destructors’ (1954). Despite its horrors, Greene seemed excited by the wanton destruction of the Blitz, relishing the European disintegration of an ‘old dog-toothed civilisation’.10
In July 1941 Greene was recruited into SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6: Military Intelligence, Section 6) with assistance from his younger sister Elizabeth. She had been working in London since 1938 as a secretary in ‘G’ section (responsible for overseas stations) to SIS’s regional head, Cuthbert Bowlby, whose operations were moved in August 1939 to Bletchley Park. In September 1941 she accompanied Bowlby to Cairo where he ran an SIS office under the cover of the Inter-Services Liaison Department.11 In the following December Greene sailed from Liverpool for a posting in Sierra Leone, a stressful voyage documented in his travelogue, ‘Convoy to West Africa’. Masquerading as a CID officer, he served as a SIS counter-espionage officer, gathering intelligence on industrial diamond smuggling and Vichy airfields in French Guinea. Henceforth, Greene’s writings tended to portray melancholy worlds in which duplicity, deception and betrayal were accepted norms of human politics. This study will also trace, through several chapters, the literary impact of Greene’s still far from fully documented involvements with British intelligence, including the SIS, PID (Political Intelligence Department) and MI5 (Internal Security Service), along with his enduring and complex relationship with Kim Philby, culminating in his centrality to The Human Factor. Returning from West Africa, Greene was posted in March 1943 to SIS headquarters at St Albans where he worked closely with Philby. Unexpectedly, on 9 May 1944 he resigned from SIS – perhaps to distance himself from Philby whose motives he may have begun to suspect – and moved to PID where he edited the cultural anthology Choix, copies of which were quixotically dropped over occupied France.
Although Greene’s literary productivity inevitably dipped during wartime conditions, The Ministry of Fear (1943), focusing on an outlandish conspiracy of fifth-columnists in England, drew directly on a recent trauma for the Greene family by tracing the experiences of his cousin Ben Greene, who was unjustly imprisoned as a fifth columnist. Ben, a dedicated Quaker and pacifist whose mother was German, was a member of the British People’s Party and ran the ‘Peace & Progressive Information Service’. He also compiled various unpublished typescripts on the history and decadence of British politics, which are examined for the first time in this study. A visit to Germany in 1936 led to personal links with the Anglo-German Fellowship (which Philby had recently infiltrated) and his pamphlet, The Truth About the War (1939), was
viewed as crude pro-Hitler propaganda.12 Denounced and imprisoned under the Emergency Powers regulations, Ben spent seven months in Brixton Prison and the brutal incarceration of Major Stone in The Ministry of Fear reflects his treatment there. His half-German sister Barbara (with whom Greene had travelled through Liberia) inspired the novel’s Anna Hilfe and her brother, Willi, was based on her German husband.
Chapter 5 examines two works set during the Second World War, The Third Man (film script 1948, film 1949, novella 1950) and The Tenth Man (c.1937–1944, published 1985); and Greene’s meditation on the suppression of religion by atheist totalitarianism in ‘The Last Pope’ (1948). His two other war novels, The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951), are also considered from perspectives, respectively, on the decline of British colonialism in Africa and the impact of the London Blitz upon contemporary social morality. Danger always attracted Greene and the early 1950s became a period of constant international travel within war zones for the combined purposes of journalism and creative inspiration. As Cates Baldridge notes, ‘secular redemption in the later Greene’, coupled with the attainment of self-knowledge and an ability to love, seemed ‘largely a matter of undertaking a dangerous political commitment’.13 By 1950 Greene’s brother Hugh was head of the Emergency Information Services in Malaya and, through his influence, Greene was commissioned by Life magazine to observe the insurgency there between November 1950 and February 1951. He made four winter trips to Vietnam (1951–55) and his novel The Quiet American (1955) offers an overtly political perspective on the decline of French colonialism and the disturbing growth of American imperialism in the Far East. It also interrogates the dual role of journalism – as either objective reportage or polemical commentary – through its world-weary protagonist Thomas Fowler and another deeply flawed journalist, Bill Grainger. Greene’s often fraught dealings from this period onwards with the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (recorded in his now released but heavily redacted FBI security file) are also reconsidered in relation to his North and South American political contacts and their crucial impact on his literary creativity.
Chapter 6 traces how during the 1950s Greene was increasingly recognized as an informed and often acerbic global commentator. He carefully stage-managed problems with US immigration and, as a journalist and informal intelligence gatherer for SIS, visited Kenya (to cover the Mau Mau Rebellion) and Stalinist Poland. Another important element
in Greene’s political writings was generated in 1957 by his three-week trip to China where he involved himself in opposing the persecution of Catholics and other dissidents. While sustaining its ruthlessly repressive regime, the Chinese Communist Party had adopted a policy, piquantly titled ‘the Blossoms in the Garden’, supposedly allowing freer speech to its citizens and visitors. These injustices lingered in Greene’s mind and almost 30 years later he wrote ‘A Weed Among the Flowers’ (The Times, 27 May 1985), a withering condemnation of Chinese communist oppression.
Greene’s wartime involvements with British intelligence inspired his most successful comic novel, Our Man in Havana (1958). He based the team of fictitious agents run by his hapless protagonist, James Wormold, upon the strategically crucial activities of two real-life double agents: a Lisbon-based Czech businessman, Paul Fidrmuc (code name OSTRO), and a Catalan poultry farmer, Juan Pujol Garcia (GARBO). During the war both had created networks of imaginary informers and agents to support their work for the British Secret Service. While Greene scholars have long known of these two real-life sources, it has not previously been noted that Greene also drew upon similarly fraudulent reports to Japanese intelligence from imaginary field agents made by his brother Herbert and recorded in his Secret Agent in Spain. Greene had already written some ten years earlier a film sketch, ‘Nobody to Blame’, about an English salesman and intelligence agent in the Baltic city of Tallinn. He recalled in The Tenth Man that the British Board of Film Censors had rejected outright this treatment because they could not countenance certificating a film mocking the British Secret Service. Instead, this act of censorship instigated the subversively farcical perspectives on international espionage of Our Man in Havana.
Chapter 7 traces how Greene’s writings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially his (long) short story ‘A Visit to Morin’ (1957; rpt. 1960) and A Burnt Out Case (1961), focused upon alienated figures adrift in callous and uncomprehending societies, reflecting his own growing disillusionment with global politics and international affairs. A Burnt Out Case, based upon his visit to the Belgian Congo in early 1959, revitalized his consideration of the moral function of documentary journalism and creative fiction through the dilemma of the disillusioned architect, Querry, and the itinerant journalist, Montague Parkinson, who regards distinctions between fact and fiction as trivial irrelevances. Greene’s informal involvements in intelligence gathering during the early 1960s and his responses to the defection in 1963 of Kim Philby to Moscow are also examined.
Greene’s most dynamic work of the 1960s, The Comedians (1966), a satirical politico-thriller about the regime of Papa Doc Duvalier on Haiti, is his only fictional piece which seeks to promulgate a specific political point of view by condemning the horrors of Duvalier’s brutal regime. Greene had visited Haiti in 1963 and wrote a powerful article for the Sunday Telegraph (29 September), ‘The Nightmare Republic’, describing the daily lives of the natives who were descended from liberated slaves of Hispaniola. His novel about the island’s social disintegration abounds with dark political paradoxes. The protagonist Brown meets on Haiti Dr Maigot, a Marxist idealist who seeks a co-operative alliance against tyranny between Catholics and communists – a conjunction which became of signal importance to Greene with the rise of liberation theology in Latin America. Brown’s dying mother Yvette is a decorated heroine of the French Resistance while his mistress on the island, Martha Pineda, is the daughter of a Nazi war criminal. Predictably, and to Greene’s delight, the novel provoked an outraged response from Duvalier’s regime. Its Department of Foreign Affairs published a lurid denunciation, Graham Greene démasqué, and the film of the novel had to be shot in Dahomey (Benin). This chapter concludes by examining Greene’s voluminous letter writing to newspapers during this period, through which he vented his anger at US foreign policy in Vietnam and the Caribbean and injustices in the Soviet legal system while still professing an idealized admiration for Russian communism and Castro’s Cuban regime.
Chapter 8 examines how Greene, now permanently based at Antibes in the south of France, continued his work as a political commentator and international journalist, visiting Israel in autumn 1967 during the aftermath of the Six Day War and then Sierra Leone. His sustained interests in international espionage, including his controversial preface to Kim Philby’s memoirs, My Silent War (1968), provided him with a productive framework for implicit but often scathing political commentaries in his fictions. His riotous novel Travels With My Aunt (1969) draws its innocent protagonist, Henry Pulling, into the complex world of South American politics. It satirizes the imperialist tendencies of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via the hippy girl Tooley, whose father works for the agency in General Stroessner’s Paraguay then notorious for sheltering Nazi war criminals. Greene’s unequivocal denunciation of American political censorship, effectively forbidding negative comment on either the President or the United States, led to his temporary exclusion. He also wrote an article for the Telegraph Magazine (3 January 1969), ‘The Worm Inside the Lotus Blossom’,
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outlining the bloody history of Paraguay’s dictators and fostering his fascination with links between Catholic missionary work and Latin American communism. Of special importance in this context is Greene’s lecture, ‘The Virtue of Disloyalty’ (6 June 1969), an address at the University of Hamburg accepting its Shakespeare Prize. It contrasts the heroism of the Elizabethan Catholic martyr Robert Southwell with the subtle pragmatism of Shakespeare (whose works avoided direct religious commentary) to encapsulate Greene’s conception of the writer’s essential role as a devil’s advocate of political and religious commentary.
As his political journalism became more explicit in its judgements, Greene’s memoir, A Sort of Life (1971), strongly reaffirmed his view of the writer’s importance as a social and moral commentator. In an article for the Observer Magazine (2 January 1972), ‘Chile: The Dangerous Edge’, he offered his tempered support for its Marxist-Socialist president, Doctor Salvador Allende, along with an outspoken attack on US and CIA involvements in South America. He was also impressed by the markedly politicized role of the Catholic Church in Chile and the broadly ecumenical nature of Chilean socialism and liberation theology. He hopefully concluded that the Marxist-Communist ideal in Chile might just have a ‘sporting chance’ – an optimism confounded by a military coup in September 1973, leading to a four-man junta led by General Augusto Pinochet who abolished civil liberties, banned union activities and dissolved the National Congress.
The Honorary Consul (1973), set on the Argentinian side of the Paraguayan border, implicitly condemns US support for Stroessner’s right-wing dictatorship. The novel meditates upon the theme of personal commitment and the political duties of a Christian in an unjust society. Greene had travelled to Paraguay in the late summer of 1968 and made a second visit there in March 1970. His focus in the novel on the doomed political activism of the laicised Catholic priest, Father León Rivas, recalls the political activism and heroic death in February 1966 of Father Camilo Torres who had supported the creation of a revolutionary mass movement to seize power from the church and state in order to establish an egalitarian socialist society. Torres’ heroism provided Greene with proof that the concept of a revolutionary socialist and Marxist Christian was a viable model for repressed Third World countries. Ultimately, The Honorary Consul offers an evolutionaryrevolutionary metaphysic, proposing a potential route towards reconciling the past and present sufferings of the world through a politicized desire for a more perfect human world of social and divine interaction.
This chapter also considers one of Greene’s most politically inflected novels, The Human Factor (1978). Kim Philby’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1968 had initially prompted this sombre depiction (written over ten years) of the British security system. Greene’s preface to Philby’s My Silent War was followed by amicable meetings in Russia during the 1980s. Unlike the comic bungling of the British security services in Our Man in Havana, the SIS is now depicted as cynically collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa and its ruthless secret service BOSS. The existential angst of its protagonist, Castle, following the death of his first wife and his colleague Davis (poisoned by the SIS’s house doctor), culminates in the despairing nihilism of Castle being spirited away by the KGB to a life in Moscow (echoing Philby’s) devoid of significance.
As examined in Chapter 9, the political diversity of the aged Greene’s writings during the 1980s is striking and, despite old age and debilitating illness, his creative inventiveness at this period is still underestimated. His generically elusive novella, Doctor Fischer of Geneva (1980), set within the clinical austerity of the super-wealthy of Switzerland, focuses on the corrupting nature of Western European capitalism and how rampant materialism ‘crushes spirituality and dehumanizes individuals and relationships’.14 In the same year his memoir Ways of Escape (1980) expressed his escalating sense of political alienation from contemporary society, also evinced in his angry responses to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In contrast, Greene’s gently picaresque novel, Monsignor Quixote (1982), echoes Cervantes in narrating the exploits of a humble Catholic priest and his loyal friend ‘Sancho’, a communist ex-mayor. Although their discussions cover such controversial topics as the political legacy of General Franco and the heroic activism and oppression of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, critics have tended to view this novel as evidence of the marked diminution of Greene’s political interests as a writer. But this study will also trace how such an apparently innocuous work was drafted in response to what Greene regarded as the most terrifying period of his life, when he courageously stood up to the intimidations of the Nice Milieu (Mafia) in the south of France. In response to their threats, he published his incendiary Dreyfus-echoing pamphlet, J’Accuse (1982) and drafted a previously unknown manuscript denunciation of his chief antagonist (Daniel Guy, the son-in-law of his companion, Yvonne Cloetta), which was secretively buried (in characteristic espionage mode) for later eyes to discover in a proof copy of Doctor Fischer of Geneva.
Introduction: Political Writer xxiii
Between 1975 and 1985 Greene continued to travel widely, visiting Panama, Belize, Costa Rica and Cuba. He twice acted as an intermediary in kidnappings in El Salvador, described in Getting to Know the General (1984), and became embroiled in Panamanian politics through his friendship with its charismatic dictator, General Omar Torrijos Herrera. Greene was a member of the official Panamanian delegation to Washington in 1977 when a Canal Zone treaty was ratified between President Carter and the General. He also sympathized with the Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua, splitting the royalties of Monsignor Quixote between them and the Spanish monastery of Osera. His autobiographical journalism, Getting to Know the General, recounts his intimacy with Torrijos and the latter’s suspicious death in a plane crash in August 1981. Greene was greatly impressed during a trip in 1978 to Belize when he met with its later prime minister, George Cadle Price, who lived humbly like a priest and became for Greene the projection of the ideal model for a dedicated and incorruptible Catholic socialist leader in South America. After almost five decades, Greene had finally found in Price a living expression of his dream for a unified socialist and Catholic guardianship of the rights of all citizens, both rich and poor. Greene’s final published work, The Captain and the Enemy (1988), was partly set in the Panama of General Torrijos and – in a self-reflective act of authorial closure – recalls several plot elements and characters from his first published novel, The Man Within (1929). Its protagonist, Victor ‘Jim’ Baxter, is a failed writer and, like Greene, a humanitarian of conscience, struggling with the callous politics of a threatening world. Greene seems to suggest in this last novel that the concerns of his first novel could only be given moral substance for an audience of the late 1980s by reframing memories of its central relationships within the testing politics of Panama. In this sense, Baxter becomes not only a revitalized version of Andrews, his anxiety-laden counterpart in The Man Within, but also a representative of the kind of disappointed writer that Greene himself might have become if he had not persevered after the failure of his next two novels, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, to ensure that his subsequent writings possessed more meaningful political, social and religious contexts.
1 Fictionalized Politics
Not even Greene’s critics doubt that there is a political dimension to all writing; few of them, however, have considered the political implications of reading his work.
Thomson, Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction, 7
The Greene Family
Greene’s political perspectives as a novelist and commentator on world affairs were partly defined by an insistent psychological need to distance himself from a comfortable Edwardian provincial background. (Henry) Graham Greene was born into an upper-middle class Hertfordshire family on 2 October 1904 at St John’s House, Berkhamsted School, where his father was then housemaster. He was the fourth child of Charles H. Greene and Marion Raymond Greene (1872–1959), who were first cousins once removed and members of an extensive, close-knit family circle based at Berkhamsted.1 During the 1920s Greene prided himself upon his egalitarian socialism but the (largely unacknowledged) memory of some of his ancestors remained problematic because of their prominence as pro-slavery and anti-Catholic Emancipation capitalists. During the eighteenth century the Greenes – dissenters who worshipped at the Howard Congregational Chapel in Bedford – had been industrious tradesmen in the woollen and drapery business. Greene’s great-grandfather, Benjamin Greene, served an apprenticeship in the brewery business and by 1801 was resident in Bury St Edmunds where he set up in partnership with another Suffolk dissenter, William Buck.
Together they traded from the town’s Westgate Brewery where they were neighbours of the childless Sir Patrick Blake (d.1818) who owned a West Indian plantation on St Kitts. Benjamin Greene became one of Sir Patrick’s executors and after his death took over the management of his Suffolk and St Kitts estates. When Sir Patrick’s widow died she left Benjamin, who had acted as her trustee and adviser, one of her own plantations on St Kitts and he significantly expanded his West Indian interests by managing the estates of the Molyneaux family from Norfolk and by acquiring three of his own plantations. In 1829 Benjamin’s dynamic eldest son, Benjamin Buck Greene, travelled to St Kitts and took over the running of the family’s plantations. By the mid-1830s the now very wealthy Greene family was responsible for about one third of the island’s entire sugar exports.
The elder Benjamin Greene became a strident supporter of the commercial interests of West Indian slave proprietors. Marking the Greene family’s first venture into journalism, he purchased in early 1828 the Bury and Suffolk Herald, ensuring that an ultra-Tory line was taken during debates over the Reform Act, Catholic Emancipation and the abolition of slavery. In a series of inflammatory letters published in the spring of 1828 under a pseudonym in his own newspaper, Benjamin Greene argued that slavery was ‘neither productive of misery, nor repugnant to the duties of religion’ and suggested that the lot of West Indian slaves was no worse that the daily drudgery of Yorkshire factory and mill workers. These views were published only six years before an Act of Parliament (August 1834) abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. The naming of Benjamin’s eldest son, Benjamin Buck Greene, honoured his brewing partner William Buck, but even this association seems, in retrospect, ironic. Buck’s daughter Catherine married, in 1796, the renowned anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson.2 His younger brother, John Clarkson, was appointed in 1792/93 the first governor of the ‘province of freedom’ for ex-slaves in Sierra Leone, later the location of Graham Greene’s wartime intelligence work and the setting of The Heart of the Matter (1948).
Following three libel cases generated by Benjamin Greene’s reactionary views in the Bury and Suffolk Herald, in 1836 he decided to move his family to London where he founded, with his entrepreneurial eldest son, a lucrative shipping business, Benjamin Greene & Son, specializing in sugar importation. During the next ten years Benjamin Buck Greene, who returned to London in 1837, established himself as a prominent member of the Victorian plutocracy, residing at a magnificent white stuccoed house in Kensington Palace Gardens. He served as a director of
the Bank of England for 50 years and as an innovative Governor. Such a ruthlessly successful, wealthy and nationally renowned ancestor sits uneasily with the idealistic and non-materialistic socialism of Greene’s youth. Whenever he depicted wealthy capitalists in his fictions, they tended to be cast – despite the entrepreneurial materialism of his ancestors – as disturbingly unattractive types: the heartless industrialist Sir Marcus (A Gun for Sale), the corrupt matchstick millionaire Erik Krogh (England Made Me) and the dehumanized toothpaste magnate, Dr Fischer.
Benjamin Buck’s brother John (1810–67) became a solicitor and mayor of Bury St Edmunds; and another brother, Edward (1815–91), became an MP and transformed the family’s brewery business, merging it in 1887 with that of his neighbour, Frederick William King, to create the Greene King Company. He paid for the building of the huge redbrick Victorian gothic chapel at Berkhamsted School and his only son, Sir (Edward) Walter Greene (1842–1920), became a baronet. In contrast, another brother, Charles, took over, aged only 15, the management of the family’s estates on St Kitts after the return of his eldest brother, Benjamin Buck, to England in 1836. He died there of yellow fever less than four years later, reputedly having sired 13 illegitimate children which, as already noted, was facilitated by the then institutionalized rape of female slaves.
Charles Greene’s youngest brother, William (1824–81) – our author’s grandfather – proved an uncharacteristic family failure in various professions and in 1881, when in his late fifties, he abandoned his large family in Bedford to live under the aptly named ‘Mount Misery’ on St Kitts. But failure and disappointment always attracted Greene far more than success and it seems likely that William became one of the shadowy family models for his grandson’s fascination with unsatisfactory paternal figures (such as the father of Andrews in The Man Within) and unreliable brothers (such as Anthony Farrant in England Made Me, who also echoed Greene’s feckless eldest brother, Herbert). Having metamorphosed into a pathetically downtrodden expatriate comparable to the dentist Mr Tench in The Power and the Glory, William died on St Kitt’s of a fever caught within a couple of months of his arrival and was buried next to his brother Charles.3
In contrast, three of this troublesome William’s sons went on to achieve positions of social distinction and remained of considerable importance to the youthful Graham. Sir William Graham Greene served in the Admiralty’s Foreign Intelligence Department, rising through the ranks as Assistant Private Secretary to the First Sea Lord and Assistant
Secretary to the Admiralty. Knighted in 1911, he served from then until 1917 as Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty and Ministry of Munitions. At the outbreak of the First World War Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, made him one of his inner circle of advisers. Well into his retirement, he continued to serve until 1940 on the Committee of Imperial Defence. He was a model for the Assistant Commissioner in It’s a Battlefield and his rambling gardens at Harston House, Cambridgeshire, appear in The Ministry of Fear and the surreal short story ‘Under the Garden’. His youngest brother, Edward (‘Eppy’) Greene (1866–1938), became a successful coffee merchant in Brazil and owned a grand Georgian hall at Berkhamsted where a lavish Christmas party was held each year for the entire Greene family. Their middle brother – Graham’s father – was Charles Henry Greene who, thwarted in his ambitions to become a barrister, entered the teaching profession and from 1910 until 1927 was headmaster of Berkhamsted School. Thanks to the comparatively modest means of his own family line, Graham was able to evince a half-disappointed pride in being a member of the ‘intellectual’ rather than the ‘rich’ Greenes.4
Charles Greene was a firm believer in Ezra Pound’s concept of a post-First World War ‘botched civilization’.5 The entry of his son Graham into the junior school at Berkhamsted coincided with the outbreak of war and for the next four years school life was tempered by Officers’ Training Corps parades, lectures for senior boys on tactics and armaments, field drills and patriotic songs. The school magazine, the Berkhamstedian, proudly reported in March 1915 that numerous old boys were ‘flocking from all over the world to join the colours and take the place of the fallen’. But Greene grew familiar from his father’s assemblies with the sombre roll call of former pupils killed in action. On Founder’s Day (31 July) 1916, his father announced that some 900 old boys were serving their country but also lamented the loss of 76 killed and 132 wounded (ultimately, 232 Old Berkhamstedians were killed during the First World War).
Charles Greene felt so strongly about the five million dead Allied soldiers that he refused to grant the school a day’s holiday in November 1918 for the Armistice. Instead, he insisted: ‘We simply must go on. Now is the time for effort: now is the time for the coming of the world.’ This contrary stance stirred a spirit of rebellion among the boys – Graham’s first personal encounter with civil revolution – as they unwillingly continued their usual school activities in the face of riotous incursions into the school from motley military groups. Outraged, Charles Greene ordered the temporary expulsion of several boys, including Graham’s
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vegetable mold now cover the altars where sacerdotal processions performed their mysterious rites probably while Cheops was building.
CHAPTER XXIII.
AZTEC COSMOGONY AND THEOGONY.
“By midnight moons o’er moistening dews, In vestments for the chase arrayed, The hunter still the deer pursues, The hunter and the deer a shade ” P F
FROM the foregoing chapter we see that the ancient Aztec civilization had nothing in common with the red Indian. Buildings, customs and religion linked him to a higher civilization, or else prove that he possessed the germs of self-evolution, enabled him to cope with the great unknown, and single-handed to civilize himself. The latter process will be hard to believe, the former will be hard to prove; but for argument we will take a hasty glance at other nations whose history corresponds most closely with the ancient inhabitants of Mexico.
The Chaldeans, according to Berosus, held that the world is periodically destroyed by deluges and conflagrations. They believed that the deluges were caused by the conjunction of the planets in Capricorn, and the conflagrations by conjunction in Cancer. The Chaldean philosophers had also their Annus Magnus or great year, at the end of which the present terrestrial and cosmical order would terminate by fire and afterwards be renewed.
The ancient Scythians believed that the world undergoes revolution both by fire and by water. The Egyptians believed that the earth would flourish through the interval expressed by the Annus Magnus or great year, a cycle, as with the Chaldeans, composed of revolutions of the sun and moon, and terminating when they returned together to the same sign whence they set out. At the end of each cycle the earth was supposed to be destroyed by fire or water, and to be renovated for the abode of man. The Hindoo cosmogony taught the doctrine of secular catastrophes and renovations. Water is then introduced, over which moves Brahma, the creator Brahma then causes dry land to appear and vivifies the earth in succession with plants, animals and man, then he sleeps 4320 millions of years—a day for Brahma, and then the earth is destroyed by fire. The fire is finally quenched by rain which falls a hundred years and inundates heaven and earth. The breath of Vishnu next becomes a strong wind by which the clouds are dispersed, and Deity in the form of Brahma awakes from his serpent couch on the deep and renews the world, and sleeps again another day. The power of Brahma is thus outlined by Emerson:
“If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain thinks he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.
“Far or forgot, to me is near, Shadow and sunshine are the same; The vanished gods to me appear, And one to me are shame and fame
“They reckon ill who leave me out When me they fly I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahman sings.
“The strong god pines for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred seven; But thou, meek lover of the good, Find me and turn thy back on heaven.”
The Jews also hold a prophecy that the world was to endure 2000 years before the flood, 2000 under the law and 2000 under the Messiah, and then to be destroyed by water, and a large part of the Christian world accepts the same today.
Orpheus and Menander, early Greek poets who lived in the twilight of Greek civilization, reproduce the myth of the Annus Magnus, and teach that the earth is to be destroyed at the completion of the cycle. In the Sybilline books, 1300 years before our era, this faith is shadowed and the world is destined to endure ten ages, the first of which is the Golden Age. After a renovation by fire the Golden Age will return, when, according to Virgil, the serpent will perish; the earth will produce her crops spontaneously; the kid will no longer fear the lion; the grape will be borne upon the thorn-bush, and scarlet and yellow and royal purple will become the native colors of the woolly fleece:
“Ipsæ lacte domum referent distenta capellæ Ubera; nec magnos netuent armenta leones. Ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores; Occidet et serpens, et fallax herba veneni Occidet; Assyrium vulgo nascetur amomum * * * * *
Molli paulatim flavescet campus arista, Incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva, Et duræ quercus sudabunt roscida mella ”
According to Winchell, the Stoics got the same doctrine from the Phoenicians, and in speaking of the restoration after the conflagration, use the same term we find in the Scriptures, though written many hundred years earlier. Chrysippus calls it “Apocatastasis”—restitution— as St. Peter does in the Acts. Marcus Antoninus several times calls it “Palingenesia”— regeneration—as our Savior does in Matthew, and Paul in his epistle to Titus. The Pythagoreans, who taught the transmigration of souls, had the same ideas regarding the revolutions as had the Stoics. Plato taught the same, and Aristotle alone of all the ancient
philosophers, taught the immortality of the soul and a continuance of the present order of things.
Among the Arabians, the story of the Phœnix is an allegory of the earth. This bird of fable no sooner crumbles to ashes than she rises again in more than pristine beauty. They have a similar story of the eagle which goes to the sun to renew its strength, and David alludes to the myth in the Psalms where he says: “Thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s,”—a passage which in the Chaldee language reads: “Thou shalt renew thy youth like the eagle in the world to come.” The Persians represent their god, Fire, as the final avenger of the earth. The Aztecs, according to Humboldt, felt the curiosity common to man in every stage of civilization, to lift the veil which covers the mysterious past and the awful future. They sought relief like the nations of the old world, from the oppressive idea of eternity, by breaking it up into distinct periods or cycles of time, each of several thousand years. There were four of these cycles, and at the end of each, by the agency of one of the elements, the human family was swept from the earth, and the sun blotted from the heavens, to be rekindled again by sacred fire.
The great feast of the “renewal of fire” began on the last day of the Sothic period of fiftytwo years, when the last fragment of time lost by leap year had been made up. In the evening the fire was extinguished throughout the valley, and all the earthen vessels were broken in preparation for the end of the world. At this time every one was in terrible suspense, fearing he had seen the sun for the last time. The whole empire was a prey to anxiety, and the people stood on the temples watching the mountain tops, where bonfires would be lighted if the gods showed themselves merciful. Then processions of priests marched to the mountain so as to arrive at midnight, when they solemnly awaited the turn of the night which would assure them that the sun would rise once more and continue fifty-two years to the end of the next cycle. When the critical hour had passed, a priest with two sticks and a rotary motion of the hands produced the sacred fire. Then a funeral pyre was raised and the victims sacrificed. Then an extraordinary activity followed the despondency, and every one lighted his torch from the funeral pile and hastened to his dwelling, and couriers with the sacred fire spread through all the empire and the new blaze was kindled in every hearth and on every temple top, and they were happy for they had fifty-two years more to live. The thirteen days complementary to the cycle—intended to make the solar and civil years agree—were spent in whitewashing and renewing their furniture for the new cycle.
The Aztecs believed in the periodical destruction of the world and had a tradition of the flood, and their idea of the re-peopling of the earth very nearly coincides with Jewish scriptures. The following is a translation of the Popol Vuh, or National Book of the Quiches of Guatemala; “There was not yet a single man; not an animal; neither birds, nor fishes, nor crabs, nor wood, nor stones, nor ravines, nor forests; only the sky existed. The face of the land was not seen; there was only the silent sea and the sky. There was not yet a body, naught to attach itself to another; naught that balanced itself; naught that made a sound in the sky There was nothing that stood upright; naught there was but the peaceful sea—the sea, silent and solitary in its limits; for there was nothing that was. * * * Those who fecundated, those who give life, are upon the waters like a growing light. * * * While they consulted, the day broke, and at the moment of dawn, man appeared. While they consulted, the earth grew Thus verily, took place the creation as the earth came into being.$1‘Earth’ said they; and the earth existed. Like a fog, like a cloud, was the formation; as huge fishes rise in the water, so rose the mountains; and in a moment the high mountains existed.”
This is the account of the first creation, and what follows, refers to the fourth and last creation.—“Hear, now, when it was first thought of man, and of what man should be formed. At that time spake he who gives life, and he who gives form, the Maker and Moulder, named Tepen, Gucumatz;$1‘The day draws near; the work is done; the supporter, the servant is ennobled; he is the sun of light, the child of whiteness; man is honored; the race of man is upon the earth.’ So they spake.” * * * Immediately they began to speak of making our first mother and our father. Only of yellow corn and white corn were they flesh, and the substance of the arms end legs of man. They were called simply beings, formed and fashioned; they had neither mother nor father; we call them simply men.
Woman did not bring them forth, nor were they born of the Builder and Moulder, by Him who fecundates, and Him who gives being. “Thought was in them; they saw; they looked around; their vision took in all things; they perceived the world; they cast their eye from the sky to the earth.” “Then they were asked by the Builder and Moulder$1‘What think you of your being? See ye not? Understand ye not? Your language, your limbs, are they not good? Look around, beneath the heavens; see ye not the mountains and the plains?’
“Then they looked and saw all there was beneath the heavens. And they gave thanks to the Maker and the Moulder, saying;$1‘Truly, twice, and three times thanks! We have being; we have been given a mouth, a face; we speak, we understand, we think, we walk, we feel, and we know that which is far and that which is near. All great things and small on the earth and in the sky do we see. Thanks to thee, O Maker, O Moulder, that we have been created, that we have our being, O our Grandmother, O our Grandfather!’ ”[A]
Is there anything more noble in any language than these sentiments of untutored beings, striving to lift the veil and peer into the beyond? No philosopher in any land ever gave tongue to more lofty sentiments, nor approached nearer the real truth of divination, and we must remember, these sentiments were not borrowed from the Spaniards, but were recorded in the native writing of Guatemala, ages before the coming of Los Conquestadors The Aztec worshipped many gods, but he also believed in one Great God, the “Causer of Causes.” To him was never an image made. He was reverenced under the name of Teotl, but being invisible and infinite, they never attempted to make a likeness of him, either in idols or in painting. They made sacrifice of human beings, but not to Teotl.
I herewith present a prayer, translated from the Aztec language by Lucien Biart, and addressed to the Unseen God:—“Mighty God, thou who givest me life, and whose slave I am, grant me the supreme grace of giving me meat and drink; grant me the enjoyment of thy clemency, that it may support me in my labors and in my wants. Have pity on me who live sad, poor and abandoned, and since I serve thee by sweeping thy temple, open to me the hand of thy mercy.”
What this lacks of being the Lord’s Prayer, is hardly worth mentioning.
All the other ancient nations we have mentioned, had intercourse with one another. The Greeks studied in Egypt, and had dealings with the Phœnicians. The Jews were taken captives to the east and the Hindoos spread to the west, so it is not strange that they should all have an almost identical cosmogony, but here is a people separated by an ocean, having the same belief, a knowledge of the art of building, of sculpture and of writing. Then how shall we account for all this unless we suppose that they had known contact with each other in some past age? Alfred Wallace, the great English scientist, says that none but the unscientific ever
resurrect the Atlantis theory, but with the risk of being declared unscientific, I wish to present some facts of scientific value, and leave the verdict with the reader.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE LOST ATLANTIS.
“Man’s steps are not upon thy paths; thy fields Are not a spoil for him; thou dost arise And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth’s destruction, thou dost all despise, Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send him, shivering in thy playful spray, And howling to his gods, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dash him again to earth there let him lie ”
“THE Story of Atlantis,” recorded by Plato in his Timaeus, as communicated to Solon by the Egyptian priests, has, in the light of modern geography, been generally regarded as a myth, but within a few years has been revived, and there are not wanting investigators of profound learning who regard it as authentic. The following is the translation from the Greek of Plato: “Among the great deeds of Athens, of which the recollection is preserved in our books, there is one which should be placed above all others. Our books tell that the Athenians destroyed an army which came across the Atlantic Sea, and insolently invaded Europe and Asia; for this sea was then navigable, and beyond the strait where you place the Pillars of Hercules, there was an island larger than Asia (Minor) and Lybya combined. From this island one could pass easily to other islands, and from these to the continent which lies around the Interior Sea.
“The sea on this side the strait (Gibraltar) of which we speak, resembles an harbor with a narrow entrance; but there is a genuine sea, and the land which surrounds it is a veritable continent. In the Island of Atlantis lived three kings with great and marvelous power. They had under their dominion the whole of Atlantis, several other islands and some parts of the continent.
“At one time their power extended into Lybya, and into Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Italy), and uniting their whole force, they sought to destroy our whole country at a blow; but their defeat stopped the invasion and gave entire independence to all the countries this side the Pillars of Hercules. Afterwards, in one day and one fatal night, there came earthquakes and inundations which engulfed the warlike people.
“Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea, and then that sea became inaccessible so that navigation on it ceased on account of the quantity of mud the engulfed island left in its place.”
Plutarch, in his life of Solon, relates that when the law-giver was in Egypt “he conferred with the priests and learned the story of Atlantis.”
Diodorus Siculus states that: “Over against Africa lies a very great island, in the vast ocean many days’ sail from Lybya westward. The soil there is very fruitful, a great part whereof is mountainous, but much likewise champaign, which is the most sweet and pleasant part, for it is watered by several navigable streams, and beautiful with many gardens of pleasure, planted
by divers sorts of trees and an abundance of orchards. The towns are adorned with stately buildings and banqueting houses, pleasantly situated in the gardens and orchards.”
Theopompus who wrote in the fourth century B. C. tells substantially the same story, which was given by Silenus to the ancient King Midas, recorded by Aristotle.[B] The Gauls possessed traditions on the subject, which were collected by the Roman historian Timagenes, who lived in the first century, B. C. This record states that three distinct people dwelt in Gaul (France). 1, The Aborigines; 2, The invaders from a distant island, (Atlantis); 8, The Aryan Gauls. Marcellus also, in a book on the Ethiopians speaks of several islands lying on the Atlantic ocean near Europe, which we may undoubtedly identify as the Canaries; but he adds: “The inhabitants of these islands preserve the memory of a much greater island, Atlantis, which had for a long time exercised dominion over the smaller ones.”
Now, all these writers most positively state that an island did exist west of Africa, and was destroyed by a cataclysm. This island could not have been very far from the shores of America, for the tribes of Central America, in Mexico, in Venezuela and in British and Dutch Guiana, distinctly describe these cataclysms, one by water, one by fire and a third by winds.
Catlin, in his “Lifted and Subsided Rocks in America,” describes the traditions of such a cataclysm. The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, in his “Quatre Lettres sur La Mexique,” and his “Sources de l’Histoire Primitive du Mexique,” has translated the “Teo Amoxtli,” which is the Toltecan mythological history of the cataclysm of the Antilles Catlin found the tradition of such a cataclysm among the Indians of North America. The Indians farther south state that the water was seen coming in waves like mountains from the east, and of the tens of thousands who ran for the high ground of the west, only one man, by one authority, and two by another, and seven by another, succeeded in reaching high ground, and from them sprang the present race of Indians. The tribes near the coast distinctly describe three cataclysms, water, fire, and winds, while those inland were sensible only of the flood of waters which ran to the base of the mountains.[C]
“From amidst the thunder and flames which came out of the sea, whilst mountains were sinking and rising, the terror-stricken inhabitants sought every expedient of safety. Some fled to the mountains, and some launched their rafts and canoes upon the turbulent waters, trusting that a favorable current might land them upon a hospitable shore, and thus in the elemental strife the ancient civilized people became widely dispersed.”[D]
“The festival of$1‘Izcalli’ was instituted to commemorate this terrible calamity, in which princes and people humbled themselves before the Divinity and besought Him not to renew the frightful convulsions.”
It is claimed that by this catastrophe, an area larger than the Kingdom of France became engulfed, including the Lesser Antilles, the extensive banks at their eastern base, which at that date were vast fertile plains, the peninsula of Yucatan, Honduras and Guatemala and the great estuaries of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. With the peninsula of Yucatan went down the splendid cities of Palenque, whose sites are now in the ocean bed as well as the bones of the inhabitants, and the continent has since risen sufficiently to restore the sites of a number of the ancient cities, but the people were blotted from the face of the earth. There is nothing more remarkable than the truthfulness of the traditions of North American Indians. For hundreds of years tradition has said that the Enchanted Mesa in New Mexico had been once inhabited, and during the present year, an expedition from the Smithsonian Institution explored the Mesa and verified the tradition.
In proof of the Cataclysm and submergence of Central America, our modern geographies tell us that Old Guatemala was destroyed by a water volcano in the sixteenth century, and again in the eighteenth by an earthquake. The sea shells on both sides the Isthmus of Panama are alike, and according to the law of the geographical distribution of animals, this could only have come about by the Isthmus having at one time been submerged, and remaining so long enough for the intermingling of species and being raised again, and the fossils on both sides support the hypothesis. The situation of Atlantis, west of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean, would be so near to Central America that any disturbance, like the one described by Plato, would be compelled to affect CentralAmerica in the manner described by the traditions of the natives.
The nearest lands west of Africa, where Plato locates Atlantis, are the Canary Islands, the nearest being fifty miles from Africa, and the whole group extending three hundred miles, and are separated from the mainland by a channel more than five thousand feet deep. Of all the oceanic islands (not continental) discovered by Europeans, the Canaries alone were inhabited, Here they found the Guanches, now extinct, who at the time of their discovery were not aware that a continent existed in their neighborhood, for, on being asked by the missionaries how they came to this archipelago, they answered: “God placed us on these islands, and then forsook and forgot us.”
Now who were the Guanches? Their islands had never been connected with Africa, because the channel between them is a mile deep, and Wallace in his “Island Life” has proved that any island surrounded by water more than five thousand feet deep is of volcanic origin. If craniometry is a reliable science the Guanches were not savages, but superior to the Egyptians. According to Prof. Flower’s measurements, the skull of the English of low grade contains one thousand five hundred and forty-two cubic centimeters, the Guanches one thousand four hundred and ninety-eight, Japanese one thousand four hundred and eighty-six, Chinese one thousand four hundred and twenty-four, Italians one thousand four hundred and seventy-five, and the ancient Egyptians one thousand four hundred and sixty-four. That the remnant of a race found in mid-ocean should have a better developed brain than many continental nations, is significant, and if the Guanches were a part of the inhabitants of Atlantis, we can easily understand their ability to make war and subdue their neighbors as related by Plato.
The late Sir Anders Retzius, of Stockholm, the learned authority on craniometry says: “The Dolichocephali of America are nearly related to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and to the Atlantic population of Africa,—Moors, Turaricks, Copts, etc.—and the same kind of skull is found in the Canary Islands in front of the African Coast, and on the Islands in the Caribbean Sea on the opposite coast which faces Africa. The color of the skin in the population on both sides of the Atlantic is reddish brown, resembling tanned leather; the hair is the same; the features of the face and the build of the frame as I am led to believe, presenting the same analogy.”[E]
And now as to their dispersion. When Columbus set sail from Palos in 1492, he steered direct for the Canary Islands for repairs, and when he left the Canaries, without any effort of his own, the trade winds carried his vessels straight to the West Indies, and these winds blow in this direction all the time. In December 1731 a ship started from Teneriffe with a cargo of wine for one of the western Canaries, and having only six men on board the ship became unmanageable, and the trade winds carried them straight to Trinidad on the Island of Cuba. While Atlantis was sinking, some of the inhabitants likely escaped on rafts and boats, and being exactly in the location whence Columbus and the Teneriffe ship were, they had nothing
to do but to wait, and the trade winds would take them to the West Indices and Yucatan and Central America. We can now easily see why the oldest civilization of America is in Central America. Some of the immigrants stopped in the West Indies, for the aborigines Columbus found there spoke the same language as the Mayas and Caribs of Yucatan speak today. Some stopped in South America, for Dr Lund, the Swedish naturalist, found in the bone caves of Minas Geraes, Brazil, human skulls identical with those of Mexico. This may possibly account for the superior civilization of Peru, where the ingrafted population would amalgamate with the native races and produce those wonderful paved roads the Spaniards found there.
Of course there will be objections to this hypothesis, and we will now proceed to answer the objections.
Dr. Waitz, in his “Anthropology of Primitive Peoples” says: “The first elements of civilization as far as history reaches, always appear as communicated from one people to another, and of no people can it be proved how, where and when they have become civilized by their own inherent power.”
If this be true, then the ancient Mexican must have learned civilization from some other people, and we know the red Indian had none to spare. Winchell in his genealogical charts, represents the entire peopling of the Pacific Slope from Alaska to Chili by Mongoloid branches. The world knows that Mongolian civilization has always been fossilized and the race is absolutely devoid of civilizing qualities. Their state is founded upon the worship of their ancestors, and their exalted egotism has for ages resisted every attempt to force advancement among them. To say that the Mongols crossed Behring Strait and gave origin to the Esquimaux is entirely compatible, for the Esquimaux are just about the calibre a Chinese colony of that date would produce. To say that Mongols are the source of Aztec civilization and Inca sun-worship is to propound an anthropological paradox. From Alaska to the ancient confines of Mexico, there is not one stone left to acknowledge the hundreds of years of Esquimo and Indian occupancy, so we cannot expect light from that source.
Separated from Africa by a channel only fifty miles wide, we may with justice assume that the civilization of the continent of Atlantis and that of Egypt was very similar. Egypt is the only land of the ancient world where pyramids are found, and on a direct line with the trade winds we find pyramids in Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. In Egypt we find the temples emblazoned with hieroglyphics chiseled in the solid rock, describing one of the oldest civilizations in the world. In Uxmal, Mexico, Palenque and Copan are tablets, friezes, basreliefs, facades and hieroglyphics, though inferior to the Egyptian in mimetic art, still of the highest order, considering this to be the product of the neolithic age, and the length of time since the separation from the home roof-tree. The Egyptians were the only ones of the ancient people who embalmed their dead. According to the French Historian, Lucien Biart, the Zapotecs and Chicimecs of the Mexican Valley embalmed their chiefs, and if we may believe this same author, the caves of the Cordilleras are vast museums as full of interest us the catacombs of Rome. That the Americans mummified their dead is proved by mummies having been found in Peru and in the northwestern part of Patagonia. Dr Aq. Ried, the discoverer, has deposited one in the museum of Ratisbon, Bavaria, and another was sent to the Smithsonian Institution.[F]
This mummy led to the remark of Professor Alexander Winchell in his “Pre-Adamites.” “The humid atmosphere, unlike that of Peru, leads to the inference that the mummification of the dead was practiced under some controlling motive which must have been inherited from
ancestors dwelling in a more propitious clime, and which even the dripping meteorology of Patagonia was insufficient to eradicate.”
The Egyptians were accurate astrologers and astronomers. They accurately calculated the eclipses and the reappearance of stars whose journey would require over a thousand years, and the pyramids are set to the cardinal points in Egypt and in Mexico. In the City of Mexico is the great calendar stone of solid porphyry weighing fifty tons. It was brought many leagues across a broken country, without beasts of burden, and Bustamente states that a thousand men were employed in its transportation. From it we learn that the Aztecs or Toltecs were astronomers and astrologers and calculated eclipses and knew the solstices of the sun. They divided the year into eighteen months of twenty days each, and, like the Egyptians, had five complementary days to make out the three hundred and sixty-five, and every fifty-two years they added thirteen (twelve and a half) days for a leap year to make the solar and civil years agree. Like the Persians and Egyptians, a cycle of fifty-two years or “An Age,” was represented by a serpent, so prominent in mythology Their astrological year was divided into months of thirteen days each, and there were thirteen years in their indications, which contained each, three hundred and sixty-five periods of thirteen days.
It is also worthy of note that their number of lunar months of thirteen days was contained in a cycle of fifty-two years, with the intercalation of thirteen days (twelve and a half,) should correspond exactly with the number of years in a great Sothic Period of the Egyptians, viz. 1461. Is it reasonable to suppose that this strange affinity with Egyptian civilization was accidental, or that a Turanian people independently evolved itself into a counterpart of Hamitic Berbers? The stone is not modern; it is not written in Aztec characters but in Toltec, a people whom the Aztecs supplanted, and they claimed that the knowledge was not original with them, but acquired from the Mayas who had preceded them in Yucatan. The ideographic paintings of the Aztecs preserve traditions of the creation of the world, a universal flood, the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of man; and that a single man and woman saved themselves in a boat which landed at Mount Colhuacan, and that all their children were born deaf and remained so until a dove, one day, from the top of a tree, taught them each in a different tongue.
All Aztec traditions, without exception, insist that they came from a far-off island called “Azatlan” (probably Atlantis.) Dr. Lapham, in his “Antiquities of Wisconsin,” claims that the Aztecs were identical with the Mound-builders, and locates Azatlan in Wisconsin, on account of the large number of effigy mounds there; and Dr. Foster in his “Prehistoric Races” pictures these mounds called Azatlan; but the Aztec painting published by Gemelle Carera in his Giro del Mondo, has hieroglyphics representing their departure from Azatlan in canoes and on rafts, after their confusion of tongues, and a teocalli, or temple by the side of a palm tree, of which neither condition can be true of Wisconsin.
Max Muller, the greatest authority on philology, says that of all indices to the mysteries of the ancient world, language is the most satisfactory, and the only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante-historic periods. If we class the languages of the world into groups according to cognation, we find the Aryan languages comprising the Indian, Persian (Sanskrit), Hellenic, Latin group (Italian, Wallacian, Provencal, French, Portugese and Spanish), Slavonic (Russian), Teutonic (English), and the Keltic or Welsh, of which the oldest is the Sanskrit and Zend. The Semitic group comprises the Hebrew, Phœnician, Assyrian and Arabic, while the Babylonian and Chinese stand alone. The Aryan and Semitic form a class known as the
inflectional, and are the only languages of the world that are adapted to and possess a literature, and that have advanced the progress of the world in religion, arts or sciences. Though springing from a common center, they have grammatical structures that prevent the one being derived from the other. The Semitic branched southward and westward, and was the language of the Chaldee, Arab, Hebrew and Egyptian, the latter sometimes classed as Hamitic. The Chinese is an organic language, monosyllabic, and destitute of all grammar. The nouns have no number, declension or cases, and the verbs are without conjugation through moods, tenses and persons. All Mongoloid that reached America must have done so by Behring Strait, and all such races, or descendants of such races, would undoubtedly have kept a trace of their parental language. If the Aztecs were derived from Mongoloids, we should expect a monosyllabic language, but on the contrary, the Aztec language has more diminutives and augmentatives than the Italian, and its substantives and verbs are more numerous than in any other language.
Another proof of its wealth is, that when missionaries first went among them, they found no trouble in expressing abstract ideas like religion, virtue, etc. The consonants most used are l, t, x, z; next the sound of tl and tz. L is of most frequent occurrence, but is never found at the beginning of a word. The Aztec language, sweet and harmonious to the ear, has no sharp or nasal sounds; the penultimate of most of its words is long. The language is rich, exact and expressive, as is proven in the “Natural History” by Dr. Hernandez, who describes twelve hundred plants, two hundred birds, many quadrupeds, reptiles, insects, metals, etc., and was able to call each by a separate name, given by the Indians. Poets and orators there were by the hundred, and their written inaugurals make as interesting reading as we hear from many of our legislators, many of which were translated by the French scholar, Lucien Biart, who died since these pages were begun.
If Max Muller is correct, then there can be no kinship between the Mongols and Aztecs, and if they ever had communication with other people, it must have been from the east. The Sanskrit word for God, is Devan; the Latin, Deus; the Greek, Oeoo; and the Aztec, Teotl This similarity of sound and spelling might be purely accidental, and on the other hand, it might have something of a long kinship to identify it. The Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls was a ruling passion with the Aztec. This may have been the fruition of all polytheistic religions, or it might have been the retention of primordial culture, for we know the Egyptian embalmed his dead, lest the dissolution of the body would destroy the soul also.
The greatest desecration that could befall the ancient Greeks and Romans was the refusal of burial, because the soul of him thus uncared for wandered thenceforth as a disembodied ghost.
We read in Homer’s Iliad how the dead Patroclus comes to the sleeping Achilles, and tries in vain to grasp him with loving arms, but the soul, like smoke, flits away below earth. How Hermotimos the seer used to go out of his body, till at last, the soul, coming back from a spirit journey, found that his wife had burnt his body on a funeral pile, and that he had become a bodyless ghost. How Odysseus visits the bloodless ghosts in Hades, and the shadows of the dead in Purgatory wondered to see the body of Dante there, which stopped the sunlight and cast a shadow.
How, in Virgil’s Æneid, the love-maddened Queen Dido could wish no greater curse to befall Æneas, than that his body should lie unburied on the plain, and even the old boatman,
Charon, in Hades, refused to ferry across the River Styx the shades of any who lacked burial while on earth.
This idea of the phantom life of souls as shades and shadows, constitutes the higher philosophy of the transcendental metaphysics of the ancient Greeks, whose exponent was Pythagoras. Religious fervor was strong in the Aztec, and from his devotion to formality, Atlantis must have been the home of ceremonial religion. The words Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language known to Europe. These are not Greek and cannot be referred to any European language, but in the Nahuatl or Toltecan language we find the radical a, atl, which signifies water, man and top of the head. From these come a series of words, such as atlan, on the border of, or amid the water, from which comes the adjective Atlantic. Therefore the Atlantic Ocean must have received its name from the continent Atlantis before the cataclysm. We have also Atlaca, to combat, to be in agony It also means to hurl, to dart from the water, and in the preterit makes Atlaz. From the island of Atlantis, the Atlas mountain in northern Africa would seem to the inhabitants to be hurled out of the water, hence its name was probably given by these same people, as the word occurs in no other language.
On the map of Mexico today are more than a hundred towns with the same combination of letters of atl or lan which shows that the combination is an essential part of the Aztec language. There are many traditions that are receiving light from the nineteenth century that crystalizes them into accepted history. For twenty-six centuries has the siege of Troy stood out in profile as the model epic of the world, but, on account of its antiquity, of doubted veracity. Now Dr Schlieman’s excavations seem destined yet to find the funeral pyre of Patroclus, surrounded by the remains of Trojan captives. And even later, the French archaeologist M. Marcel Dieulafay has brought to light the ancient city of Susa, and we may even now behold the Palace of Artaxerxes Mnemon, whose foundations were laid by Xerxes I. 485 B. C.; and now after twenty-three centuries, the student may take his Bible in his hand, turn to the Book of Esther and read, while the guide in the ancient capital of Persia points to the spot where Mordecai sat, to that corner where Haman was hanged, and to this court where the lovely Esther was crowned queen, and whence the sorrowing Vashti departed, as the unfortunate Hebe, cup-bearer of Jove, before the victorious Ganymede.
Plato records the sad fate of Atlantis nearly five hundred years B. C., and Solom had recorded it in a poem two hundred years earlier. Plato says the expedition against Egypt took place during the reign of the Athenian Kings, Cecrops and Erectheus, and, according to the “Marble of Paros,” these Kings ruled 1582 B. C. and 1409 B. C., which is not a great deal earlier than the siege of Troy Though this is very ancient history, we have as much right to believe Plato’s history as Homer’s, if it can be well established.
The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg is the greatest authority on the translation of Aztec literature, and he maintains that the oldest certain date in the Nahuatl or Toltecan language reaches back to 955 B. C., and as the Toltecs dwelt some time in the country of Zibalba before they dispossessed the Colhuas, their migration must have begun more than a thousand years B. C. The Colhuas were the remnant of those who had escaped the terrible calamity of Atlantis. To those who reject the theory here offered, I would say the field is large and inviting to any whose insight into the past can help solve the problems of the origin of the ancient Mexicans.
CHAPTER
XXV
CONCLUSION.
“And thy request think now fulfilled, that asked How first this world and face of things began, And what before thy memory was done From the beginning ”
THE existence of the Continent of Atlantis is an hypothesis, but so was the existence of Lemuria, and there are scientists today of international repute who firmly believe that a continent once existed in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and India, and the proof is not wanting.
On the island of Madagascar are found thirty-three species of monkeys called Lemurs, which are not found in Africa, nor in any other part of the globe except Ceylon, India, and the Malay Archipelago. Because these Lemurs are found only in that region, Sclater, the English Zoologist, has called the sunken continent “Lemuria.” Between Madagascar and India are a number of submerged banks of less than a thousand fathoms deep, which a slight elevation would make comparatively easy stages of communication between Madagascar and India for all animals. An elevation of three hundred feet would unite Java, Sumatra and Borneo, into one great peninsula of the Asiatic continent.
The island of Madagascar is two hundred and fifty miles wide and a thousand miles long, and is separated from Africa by the Mozambique channel, only two hundred and fifty miles wide. Africa has monkeys, apes and baboons; also lions, leopards, hyenas, zebras, rhinoceri, elephants, buffalo, giraffes, and many species of deer and antelope; but strange to say, not one of these is found in Madagascar, or anything like unto them, and yet Madagascar is only two hundred and fifty miles away. There are in Madagascar, according to Wallace’s “Island Life,” and Dr Hartlaub’s “Birds of Madagascar,” one hundred species of land birds, and only four or five have any kindred in Africa; but in Malaysia and India we find identical species, and on the islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez, Bourbon and the Seychelles group, we find so many curious birds without wings with kindred in Madagascar, we know that the islands at some time have been connected, else how could birds without wings get from one to the other? There are five species of lizards which are found in Mauritius, Bourbon, Rodriguez and Ceylon, and even to the Philippine Islands.
The Mascarine group contains a thousand and fifty-eight species of plants, of which sixtysix are found in Africa but not in Asia, and eighty-six are found in Asia but not in Africa, showing a closer relationship to Asia than to Africa. Milne-Edwards has even surmised a Mascarine continent, to include all the outlaying islands around Madagascar. Beccari, in his work on the distribution of palms, after noting the difficulty of the dispersion of the fruits, reaches the conclusion that, when we find two congeneric species of palms on widely separated lands, it is reasonable to infer that the lands have once been united. On the Mascarine Islands, in Ceylon, the Nicobars, at Singapore, on the Malaccas, New Guinea, in Australia and Polynesia, occur various species of Phycosperma, all very difficult of
dissemination, and hence could only have reached their present habitat by being connected by intervening lands now in the ocean bed.
Winchell in his “Pre-Adamites” states among his principles: 1. The doctrine of PreAdamites is entirely consonant with the fundamental principles of Biblical christianity; 2. A chain of profound relationship runs through the constitution of all races, and they may be genealogically connected; 3. The initial point of the genealogical line may be located in Lemuria. Peschell in his “Races of Man,” says: “This continent which would correspond with the Indian Ethiopia of Claudius Ptolemaus, is required by anthropology, for we can then conceive how the inferior populations of Australia and India, the Papuans of the East Indian Islands, and lastly, the Negroes, would thus be enabled to reach their present abode by dry land. The selection of this spot is far more orthodox than it might at first glance appear, for we here find ourselves in the neighborhood of the four enigmatical rivers of the Scriptural Eden, —in the vicinity of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Indus. By the gradual submergence of Lemuria, the expulsion from Paradise would also be inexorably accomplished.” To this he adds the argument of such ecclesiastical writers as Lactautius, the venerable Bede, Hrabanus Maurus, Cosmos Indiclopleustes, and the anonymous geographer of Ravenna.
I go thus into detail to show that men believe in the submerged continent of Lemuria, though they have never seen it, but cannot explain the presence of plants and animals on widely separated islands except by supposing they were once connected. If we could establish a similar relationship with Atlantis, the matter would explain itself. From the presence of rock salt, sand and sea-shells on the desert of Sahara, we know that it was once the bottom of the ocean, and the cause of its rising might have been the submergence of Lemuria, or vice versa, and the submergence of Atlantis may have had a counter result elsewhere. Charles Martins says that: “By the rules of hydrography and botany, the Azores, the Canaries and Madeira are the remains of a great continent which formerly united Europe to North America.”[G]
However, Atlantis does not have to stand altogether on theory The governments of the world have gone about it in a practical manner, which is worthy of notice.
In 1873, Her Majesty’s ship Challenge made soundings in the Atlantic off the north coast of Africa, and in 1874 the German frigate, Gazelle, made further soundings in the same regions, and in 1877 Commodore Gorringe of the U. S. sloop Gettysburg, discovered, about a hundred miles from the Strait of Gibraltar, an immense bed of pink coral in thirty-two fathoms of water Corals never work in water deeper than two hundred feet, so at last here is proof positive that there are sunken islands there. These various soundings, when located on a map, indicate the existence of an extended bank of comparatively shallow water, in the midst of which the Canaries and the Madeiras rise to the surface.
The location of the newly discovered mountains in the Atlantic, lies within the fifteen thousand fathom line, and here is probably the stump of the ancient Atlantis.
FINIS.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Histoire des nations civilises du Mexique et de l’Amerique centrale, durant les siecles antericurs a Christophe Colomb, ecrite surs des documents originaux et entierement mediis, purises aux anciennes archives des indigenes, par M. l’Abbe Brasseuer de Bourbourg. 4 forts. vol. in-3 raisin avec carte et figures.
[B] Aristotle Consolatio ad Appollonium § 27, P. 137.
[C] Catlin P 145
[D] Foster, Prehistoric Races of the U S
[E] Present State of Ethnology in Relation to the Form of the skull Smithsonian Report 1860 P 264 et seq
[F] Vid Aq Ried, Smithsonian Annual Report, 1862, pp 87, 426
[G] “Revue des Deux Mondes ” March, 1867.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Nuesta Senora=> Nuestra Señora {pg 20}
little peubla=> little puebla {pg 30}
a los pasajeroes=> a los pasajeros {pg 58}
Si Senor=> Sí Señor {pg 60}
him a stack or=> him a stack of {pg 69}
suffered martydom=> suffered martyrdom {pg 76} narrow-guage road=> narrow-gauge road {pg 82} road to Tlacotalpam=> road to Tlacotalpan {pg 99}
altar of the war god=> altar of the war-god {pg 100} dug up the the roots=> dug up the roots {pg 105}
El Segario Metripolitano=> El Sagrario Metropolitano {pg 110}
Viva Hildalgo!=> Viva Hidalgo! {pg 116}
was soon superceded=> was soon superseded {pg 126}
Biano P => Bianco P {pg 126}
Sacret Heart of San Cosme=> Sacred Heart of San Cosme {pg 128}
Gaudalupe Hidalgo is=> Guadalupe Hidalgo is {pg 130} the pedestrains, dressed=> the pedestrians, dressed {pg 158} sport as our base ball=> sport as our base-ball {pg 167} senoritas=> señoritas{pg 168}
Nous avous change tout=> Nous avons change tout {pg 175} For desert a few banana=> For dessert a few banana {pg 177} old ecclesiastial building=> old ecclesiastical building {pg 177} senoras=> señoras {pg 181} an as they pass=> and as they pass {pg 207} get our quoto of=> get our quota of {pg 208}
Viva Idependencia!=> Viva Independencia! {pg 212} gusanas de la maguey=> gusanos de la maguey {pg 227} pulque neuva=> pulque nueva {pg 230} believe that the X ray=> believe that the X-ray {pg 234} northeast of the the plaza=> northeast of the plaza {pg 245}
La Cindad de los=> La Ciudad de los {pg 261} appointed a commision=> appointed a commission {pg 262}
Bert Harte may come=> Bret Harte may come {pg 267}
San Jose de Analco=> San José de Analco {pg 277} road to Tlacotalpam=> road to Tlacotalpan {pg 279}
It somewhat resemble a marmoset=> It somewhat resembles a marmoset {pg 282} Flowers grows so luxuriously=> Flowers grow so luxuriously {pg 286} prepartions of salt=> preparations of salt {pg 287} one of the fedual days=> one of the feudal days {pg 296}
I have met these priest=> I have met these priests {pg 299}
The frijolas are cooked=> The frijoles are cooked {pg 301}
ancient philosopers=> ancient philosophers {pg 325}
Phillipine Islands=> Philippine Islands {pg 349}
Senora=> Señora {4x}
Senor=> Señor {9x}
senor=> señor {9x}
senora=> señora {4x}
senorita=> señorita {2x}
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