ATLANTIS IN HISPANIOLA:

A CONVERGENCE BETWEEN PLATO

AND BARTOLOMÈ DE LAS CASAS

Emilio Spedicato
University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
[Link]@[Link]

ABSTRACT
We have claimed in previous work, see Spedicato (2014), that the island where
Atlantis city was located is the island in the Caribbean called Hispaniola by
Columbus, now divided between Haiti and Santo Domingo. Plato provides a
detailed description of this island. We show that Plato's description is very close to
the one given by Bartolomè de las Casas, a friar who visited the island not long
after it was conquered by Columbus, when the local population was being
destroyed by the Spanish occupants.

1. INTRODUCTION

In two books, Timaeus and Critias, Plato gives the story of a great empire that
existed in very ancient times. The story comes from an Egyptian priest in Sais. He
told it to Solon, when he visited Egypt about 150 years before Plato’s time.
According to the priest, a great city, capital of an empire, had existed 9000 years
before his time, on the other side of the Atlantic. It had been destroyed by a great
tsunami-type catastrophe. The capital of Atlantis was located in an island, about
which geographic details are given. The beautiful capital was endowed by a well
defended port wherefrom ships travelled to other places in the world. The
information collected by Solon, according to Plato, should have produced a poem,
that Solon did not write due to lack of time. The story is told in Plato’s book by an
old man, age 80, named Critias junior. He claims that he received it from his
grandfather, a relative of Solon, during some festival when he was ten years old.
Critias spent a night trying to recollect the details of a story heard seventy years
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before.

Contrary to what many people state, the Atlantis story was known before Plato
wrote his books, since there are references to it in fragments of a lost poem by
Hellanicus of Lesbos apparently written before the books of Plato. Moreover
during the Panathenaic festivals in Athens, whose beginning is before Plato’s time,
paintings were shown on peplum showing parts of the story. If the story was
known in Egypt, it is likely that Pythagoras, who was there around the time of
Solon, knew it. Now the Pythagorean philosophy was secret, with heavy penalty
on those who would violate its secrets (which is still true nowadays in the
Ishmaelite and Druze religions). It was partly transmitted orally, partly in books.
Aulus Gellius claims that two were the books most expensive to his knowledge:
the Sibylline books sold to the Roman king Tarquinius Severus (only three out of
nine; the king initially refused to buy them; the vendor repeated the offer after
destroying three of them and then three more, keeping the price unchanged;
Tarquinius finally bought the three remaining ones) and the three books that
Philolaus, a Pythagorean philosopher, sold to Plato. After buying these books,
Plato started to write Timaeus. If Plato used information from these books, it is
likely that he was bound under penalty not to quote the source. The fact that
Timaeus is not complete might also be explained by a prohibition to write about
certain parts of the Philolaus books. A new explanation for a fact that has always
puzzled scholars.

The Atlantis story has been discussed since antiquity. Hundreds of books and
thousands of papers have been written. The interest is strong even nowadays, as
shown by the conferences organized since 2005 by Greek universities, and
attended by astronomers, geologists, philosophers and so on. The approaches by
the scholars can be classified as follows:

1 – those who claim that the story is a fiction to support Plato’s political ideas
about the best administration of a city state. This position has been till recently the
most common one in academic circles, especially by humanists

2 – those who claim that the story contains information partly true, but referring to
a much closer time (the 9000 years are usually interpreted as 9000 months, since
the Egyptians had also a month calendar), and to a location closer to Egypt,
typically in the Mediterranean, or along the Atlantic coasts of Europe. Thus the
island of Atlantis has been identified with Crete, Sardinia, the interior of Tunisia,
Andalusia, Helgoland, and other places, including some outside the Mediterranean
as Helgoland or the Solovetsky islands. These authors also assume a much less
dramatic catastrophe. In this approach very substantial changes are made to the
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Platonic text

3 – those who accept as essentially correct the statements in Plato, including the
chronology, but differ in the location of Atlantis. Here we recall Barbiero (1999),
who put Atlantis in the part of Antarctica facing Patagonia (he reached this place
by rubber boat from Patagonia! Flavio Barbiero is an admiral, an explorer, and a
great scholars of antiquity). We recall Collins (2000), who proposed Cuba. In
several works (1985, 1991, 1999, 2014) we proposed Hispaniola as the island of
Atlantis, with the capital city possibly in the region of Lake Henriquillo. This is a
very flat plane surrounded by mountains with a rather large lake in a depression
below the sea level, now quite full of caimans.

The first version of my theory appeared almost a quarter of century ago, and I had
the honour that the great physicist and Nobel Prize Abdus Salam gave a positive
evaluation of it. In our opinion our conclusions are still valid, moreover further
elements in favour can be added, see below. But we now consider as more likely
cause of the catastrophe that terminated the Atlantis era, not an oceanic impact by
an asteroid or comet, that was initially considered, but the gravitational effect of a
large body passing close to our planet, see Spedicato (2010).

Elements in favour of our thesis, that have arisen since we wrote our first Bergamo
University report, that was approved by Abdus Salam, are:

A – thanks to research by Collins (2000), our idea that Atlantis capital was in
Hispaniola seems to appear already in a book written in the XVIII-th century by a
Guatemalan nobleman. He states that the people of Guatemala originated from
Hispaniola, after devastation brought by a great catastrophe. Noticed that the Taino
name for Hispaniola was Quisqueya, i.e. mother of the land, the Taino being the
original population of Hispaniola when discovered by Columbus.

B – we accepted the Platonic date of circa 9000 years before Solon time, i.e. about
9500 years BC, on the evidence already available since some years that the last Ice
Age terminated rapidly circa 9450 BC. One important element was that sediments
analysis have shown that the temperature at the bottom of North Atlantic increased
very rapidly, by some 5 degrees in less than 50 years, see Lehman and Kergwa
(1992). This fact has now being reinforced to a heating of some 27 degrees in less
than 5 years, see Petersen at the 2005 Atlantis conference in Milos. Such an
increase is difficult to explain by any terrestrial agent and should therefore be
attributed to an extraterrestrial cause.

C – we suggested that the three stony materials used in Atlantis for the construction
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of the palaces were obtained from coral deposits. Now while in most parts of the
world only red corals are found, in the Caribbean there exist corals of three
colours, red, yellow and grey.

D – we had considered as the likely cause of the Atlantis catastrophe, an asteroid-

comet impact over an ocean. However we now consider more likely the passage of
a large body near Earth, a body of mass comparable with that of our planet. For
reasons presented elsewhere, see Spedicato (2010), we think that this event
provides a better explanation of what happened, including the survival of mankind
in isolated places on high mountain ranges as Caucasus, New Guinea, Ethiopia….
We also claim the possible origin of the Moon by capture from the body that
approached Earth, see our paper in these Proceedings. Within this context we see
Mars as a previous satellite and therefore we can explain the presence of water and
probably of life on Mars until just a few thousand years ago. Part of these ideas
reflect, extend and modify ideas in Velikovsky (1950) and Ackerman (1996).

2. GEOGRAPHIC DATA IN BARTOLOMÈ DE LAS CASAS ABOUT

HISPANIOLA COMPARed WITH PLATO'S DATA ON ATLANTIS

This paper was suggested by the book (2006), a Venetian translation made in 1643,
and called Breve relazione sulla distruzione delle Indie, of a book in Spanish by
Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish Dominican friar, 1484-1566. He spent many
years in Hispaniola, Mexico, Venezuela, Guatemala, just after the conquest,
becoming bishop, a function he gave up after some time. In 1542 he wrote the
quoted book, which is a dramatic description of the crimes committed by the
Spaniards in their exploitation of the Indio, reduced within few years to a small
fraction of their previous number. In the chapter about Hispaniola we were amazed
to find a description of the island that very closely recalls the one of Plato for the
island of Atlantis. In the next section we compare the two descriptions. We
conclude that they support our identification of the island of Atlantis with
Hispaniola.

Here we give the geographic information on Hispaniola in the quoted book, in the
chapter The kingdoms that existed in the island Hispaniola, our translation from
Italian into English.

There were in that island five principal kingdoms, to whom the very many other
chieftains paid obedience…
One of the kingdoms was called Maguà, meaning the kingdom of the plain. This
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plain is one of the most remarkable in the world, extending 80 leagues from the
southern sea to the northern sea. Its width is five leagues, sometimes eight or ten.
On its sides there are very high mountains. More than 30.000 rivers enter this
plain, among them twelve are as large as the Ebro, the Duero and the
Guadalquivir. All rivers that are born in the eastern mountains, about 20.000 or
even 25.000, are very rich in gold. Here is the province of Cibao, with the famous
mine of Cibao, producing high quality gold. The king of this kingdom was called
Guarionex. Many chieftains were under his control, each one able to form an army
of 16.000 persons…another kingdom was named Marien, located at the northern
end of the plain, where is now the royal port. It had a large population, many
mountains and very rich mines of gold and copper….the third kingdom was
Maguana, very fertile with healthy climate….the fourth kingdom was called
Xaragua, being like the court of the island, its people having the best language and
customs….the fifth was called Higuey, being under the power of an old woman….
The population of the island was around three million people, most of them died
due to the harsh treatment of the Spaniards…..to work in the mines later about two
million people were imported from the coast of the Gulf of Venezuela, all of them to
die there again….in the whole of America twelve million, or possibly fifteen million
indigenous people lost their life to the Spaniards.

Some of the above material relates to the Spanish oppression and destruction of the
local people after the conquest, a genocide started by Columbus himself, as we
read in his own diaries, due partly to actual violence, partly to diseases brought
from the Europeans, for which the natives had no immunity. . The following
analogies are interesting in comparing the geographic elements in Bartolomè and
in Plato, using P for Plato, C for Las Casas, H for Hispaniola:

- C quotes very high mountains; the same is stated in P, who claims these
mountains to be higher than those known to Greeks. In H there are indeed
two mountains of about 3000 m, one, the Pico Duarte, about one hundred
meters higher than Mount Olympus in Greece, is located very close to the
coast, hence appears extremely high for someone approaching the island
from the sea

- P claims the existence of a great irrigated plane, protected by a chain of

mountains from the cold winds from the north. C also quotes a very large
plain, more elongated than wide, surrounded by mountains. This plain
corresponds to the flat area in the southern eastern part of H, extremely flat
in the western part, where the Henriquillo lake is found, in a depression
below sea level

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 - P claims the existence of much water in the form of lakes and rivers. C
makes the impressive claim of the existence of 30.000 rivers, which is an
acceptable statement if we add to the rivers flowing into ocean, that are
several hundred due to the many mountains with valleys opening directly
into the sea, the smaller rivers or streams that flow into the main rivers. This
number may have been given because most rivers could provide gold dust
and we know from Columbus that all adults in the island had to pay every
year a certain amount of gold. 30.000 rivers imply possibly that around 50
persons had to work on each of them to collect gold. Those who failed in
their quota were burned alive or given to the dogs, as we read in Columbus
diaries

- P claims the existence of a large population, divided in ten kingdoms. Las

Casas has a division in five kingdoms. This shows that the island was
extremely fertile and easy to cultivate, that tribal wars were probably
uncommon and that irrigation was probably used at C time, albeit he does
not speak of it

- C claims the existence of important gold and copper mines. Copper has been
exploited since remote antiquity. The availability of copper in H suggests
that the mysterious orichalc in the P text might have been pure copper. Or a
form of brass. We should also recall that the Isle Royale in the present
Canadian side of Superior Lake has a large mine of native copper. This
mine was abandoned suddenly, possibly at the time of the last of the three
great catastrophes quoted by Plato, i.e. the Deucalion catastrophe that,
following Orosius, we have associated with Exodus and Phaethon explosion
over northern Germany, see Spedicato (2005, 2006, 2010, 2014), dating it to
1447 BC

- It is a pity that C could see personally people being killed in the most
horrible ways, but could not speak with the elders, collecting information
about their history, religion, traditions. He complains of the loss of the
several languages that were spoken in America, due to the Spanish genocide.
Anyway a full search of the literature of the XVI-th century might give extra
information.. The Taino essentially disappeared very soon, the many Indio
imported from Venezuela also died in the mines and the present population
descends almost completely from white immigrants and African slaves.
However this author some time ago met a woman from the Enriquillo region
who claimed that her grandmother, living in a small village, had been the
last Taino shaman. Recall that the American buffalos, deemed extinct after
their extermination by the white people in the XIX century, were found to
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 exist in the wilderness of northern Canada, a single rather large herd, where
now the Buffalo Park exists.

A 1626 AD text containing the original Spanish version of Bartolomé de Las Casas
is available in the large Civic Library in Milano, under reference numbers Z18134,
[Link].385. It was published in Venice under care of Giacomo Castellani.
Part of this text relating to the data presented above, showing virtual full
correspondence, can be seen in the slightly modified version of this paper that is
due to appear in the Proceedings of the 2011 Atlantis conference in Santorini.

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