Free Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet by Ted Nield Page A

correspondence with a number of people concerning some alleged islands off Panama. One Mrs Gertrude Norris Meeker wrote in 1954 (on headed notepaper declaring her to be the Governor General of the Government of Atlantis and Lemuria) to point out that since 1943 a group of islands 200 miles south-west of Florida and just eight degrees north of the Equator had been the ‘Private Dynasty or Principality … named “Atlantis Kaj Lemuria”’. ‘Any trespassing on these islands or Island Empire is a prison offense,’ the letter ended darkly.
    The Department’s geographical adviser, Sophia A. Saucerman, responded that the USA did not recognize such a state. In reply Mrs Meeker presented a detailed history of the Principality, involving aDanish seaman called John Mott who in 1917, not wishing to return to a war-torn Europe, took possession of the place and founded the dynasty to which Mrs Meeker belonged.
    In 1957 an official inquiry was set up ‘to make a determination as to the reality of the Mu Group in the Pacific Ocean’, as a result of which the Office replied that it did not believe these islands existed – and nor did it believe that anyone else believed it either. But the persistent Mrs Meeker then succeeded in persuading a US Congressman, Craig Hosmer, to take a hand in her affairs. In 1958 he wrote to the Geographer pointing out that, if her plans worked out, Queen Meeker of Mu might be a good source of trade. The Congressman’s letter stimulated a swift reply. Three days later the Department pronounced itself definitively unaware of the existence of any such island empire: ‘However, the Geographer of this Department is most willing to make a geographical study of this matter …’
    ‘The file ends with this letter,’ writes Sumathi Ramaswamy. The Geographer’s kind offer to conduct research in the South Pacific was not taken up.
Sunken lands
     
    By the end of the nineteenth century geologists and biogeographers had found out much about the rocks, fossils, animals and plants of the world, notably on the previously little-known southern continents. They had found sequences of rocks that looked so similar, it was incredible that they were now so far apart. Equally improbable was the fact that these rock sequences began with boulder beds, which suggested there had been a massive glaciation that had spanned the Equator and had apparently emanated from the middle of what is now the Indian Ocean. Biogeographers meanwhile had found similar evidence of widely separated animals that could not possibly havemigrated across the waters that now separated them. The obvious explanation at the time was that the intervening ocean had not always been there. Where was that land now? The only reasonable explanation seemed to be that it had sunk.
    As the persistence of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu myths attest, ‘sunken lands’ tap into something deep in the human psyche, and many theories have been advanced as to why this should be. One has it that, after the last Ice Age, sea levels rose 125 metres in a relatively short time. The sea reclaimed vast areas of coastal land that had been exposed during the great freeze. We know that this happened and we know that humans must have witnessed it. Perhaps this event really did leave deep scars and give rise to ancient legends of drowned land, legends that informed early geological speculations.
    On the other hand, if you throw a stone into the sea it sinks. Sinking is what rock does. Land subsides. Things fall into holes. It’s the sort of movement that seems natural for rocks, acting under the influence of gravity.
    But although one could explain many troubling facts by supposing that former land (‘land bridges’ was the somewhat misleading term) had fallen away to become the bed of the sea ( separating things that seem too similar to be so far apart), this did not help to explain Wallace’s line, across which very different creatures live in such inexplicably close proximity.