Crank's Continent

LOST ATLANTIS -- James Bramwell -- Harper ($2.75).

Ignatius Donnelly was known in his own day as the foremost exponent of the Baconian theory (that Bacon wrote Shakespeare). Author of an emphatic volume that traced civilization's origins to a vanished continent (Atlantis: The Antediluvian World), Donnelly would have been a queer bird in any aviary. But he seemed still queerer against his own hard-working background of Niniger, Minn., and his writings were all the more exceptional in view of his political career. Lieutenant governor of Minnesota when he was 28, Donnelly was a Republican Congressman at 32, held that post throughout the Civil War. A superb orator of the bull-roaring Bryan school, he plumped so hard for railroad land grants that his legislative activities were notorious even in those wide-open times. Then he reversed himself and began attacking the concentration of wealth, led the radical Farmers' Alliance, wrote best-selling books, ran unsuccessfully for many offices, and died Jan. 1, 1901, with a nationwide reputation as the prince of cranks.

His Baconian studies were his greatest efforts in the field of daffy scholarship, but Atlantis: The Antediluvian World was his most sensational book. In Lost Atlantis James Bramwell has placed it in perspective against some 1,700 other works about the sunken continent, acknowledges that for many believers in the Atlantis theory Donnelly's masterpiece is the "beall and end-all of Atlantean studies." Author Bramwell himself takes the Atlantis myth seriously, but his main purpose is to review Atlantean writing from Plato to the findings of contemporary geologists. The result is another literary oddity, a smoothly-written, ironic 288-page essay, partly a compendium of the work of cranks, partly exposition of some unsolved scientific puzzles.

Most surprising information in Lost Atlantis is that believers in the theory are becoming more numerous, more scientific, and crankier. In France an Atlantean society split into two groups on theoretical questions about the make-up of the hypothetical continent, began disrupting each other's meetings with real tear-gas bombs. In Denmark enthusiasts founded a principality of Atlantis, issued coins and stamps and placed Prince Christian on their imaginary throne. In Germany another wrote a book to prove that Atlantis was the original home of the Aryans, that when it was destroyed only three Aryans escaped. "Then comes the unexpected denouement," says Author Bramwell. "It turns out that the whole point of the book is to show that the author is descended from Jupiter." Although Lost Atlantis contains careful expositions of the Atlantean arguments, the main impression it communicates is not that Atlantis ever existed but that Author Bramwell, as a literary sophisticate who has tired of heavier fare, has a tender feeling for the writing of cranks, if only they are cranky enough.

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