{"product_id":"finding-atlantis-isbn-9781400047536","title":"Finding Atlantis","description":"The Untold Story of One Man's Quest for a Lost World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1679, Renaissance man Olof Rudbeck stunned the world. He proposed that an ancient lost civilization once thrived in the far north of his native Sweden: the fabled Atlantis. Rudbeck would spend the last thirty years of his life hunting for the evidence that would prove this extraordinary theory.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChasing down clues to that lost golden age, Rudbeck combined the reasoning of Sherlock Holmes with the daring of Indiana Jones. He excavated what he thought was the acropolis of Atlantis, retraced the journeys of classical heroes, opened countless burial mounds, and consulted rich collections of manuscripts and artifacts. He eventually published his findings in a 2,500-page tome titled \u003ci\u003eAtlantica\u003c\/i\u003e, a remarkable work replete with heroic quests, exotic lands, and fabulous creatures.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThree hundred years later, the story of Rudbeck’s adventures appears in English for the first time. It is a thrilling narrative of discovery as well as a cautionary tale about the dangerous dance of genius and madness.“If you’d never heard of Olof Rudbeck before you read David King’s excellent \u003ci\u003eFinding Atlantis\u003c\/i\u003e, you’ll never forget him after.”—Jake Morrissey, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Genius in the Design\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“King is marvelous at elaborating Rudbeck’s theories . . . [and] tells his tale with the pace and appeal of a classic whodunit.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003eDavid King teaches European history at the University of Kentucky. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife and their daughter.\u003cb\u003eChapter 1: Promises\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eMy dear fellow, life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. —Arthur Conan Doyle, \u003c\/i\u003eThe Hound of the Baskervilles\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome fifty years before the great fire, Olof Rudbeck had arrived as a  young student at Uppsala University. This was in the cold and dark  winter of 1648, just in time for the enthusiastic celebrations that  would soon erupt on the Continent, marking the signing of the Peace of  Westphalia and an end, it was hoped, to thirty years of the most  vicious fighting that Europe had ever known. War, famine, plague, and  plunder had decimated the populations, spreading misery everywhere the  armies marched. Now the clang of church bells and the clatter of court  banquets might replace the roar of cannon and the cries of suffering.  Musketeers fired joyous salvoes into the air, and soaring bonfires were  lit to commemorate the news. The festivities were especially lively in  Sweden, already “drunk with victory and bloated with booty.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUppsala University was at this time the jewel in the crown of the  Swedish kingdom. Although the university had fallen into disuse a few  years after its establishment in 1477, the state had realized its  enormous potential as a training ground for the new Protestant  Reformation and reopened it with royal flair. Young people came from  all corners of the realm to learn the theology and acquire the  intellectual rigor required to enter the Church. The university also  attracted the scions of the great aristocratic houses, sons of the  landed and titled families who waged Sweden’s wars, administered the  empire, and served the Crown in countless other capacities. King  Gustavus Adolphus, the famed “Lion of the North,” had envisioned just  such a role for Uppsala University. He had endowed it with the means to  realize it as well, even filling its empty bookshelves with many  magnificent collections looted from an almost unbroken string of  victories on the battlefield.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRudbeck was neither a nobleman nor an aspirant to a career in the  Church, though he was thrilled all the same to enter the halls of  Scandinavia’s oldest university. This was understandably an exciting  place for a young man. Despite repeated efforts of the authorities,  students flocked to the taverns as much as to the lecture halls.  Entertainment options ranged from dice to duels. It was already  becoming common for students to carry swords, and sometimes even  pistols. New brothels opened to meet the increasing demand, and other  institutions emerged to serve the changing times, such as the  university prison. Housed in the cellars of the main university  building, the prison was rarely unoccupied.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRudbeck’s interests, however, lay elsewhere. Ever since he was a boy,  he had enjoyed finding his own way. He sang, he drew, he played the  lute, he even made his own toys, including a wooden clock with a bell  to strike the hour. Adventurous and independent, Rudbeck yearned to  experience the world for himself. In fact, as a ten-year-old, Rudbeck  had eagerly tried to follow his older brothers to Uppsala. His father,  however, would not allow it, convinced that he was not mature enough to  handle the freedom of the university.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStanding tall and giving the impression of no small confidence, Rudbeck  was a spirited, highly impressionable youth with short dark hair, broad  shoulders, and a barrel chest. He walked, or rather strode, with the  air of someone who fearlessly plunged into his latest passion. His  imagination, at this time, was fired by the study of anatomy. This was  an especially attractive subject for bright, ambitious students. Kings  and queens had showered favors on the talented few they chose as royal  physicians, and indeed the newly established post of court physician  had raised the status of the doctor from its previously undistinguished  connotations. Enthusiasm for medicine as an intellectual pursuit peaked  when an Englishman named William Harvey published a small Latin  treatise in 1628.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHarvey was one of those elite court physicians, serving King James I of  England. In his classic \u003ci\u003eDe Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (Dissertation on  the Movement of the Heart and Blood)\u003c\/i\u003e, Harvey claimed that the heart was  a muscle that pumped the blood at regular intervals, or pulses. The  vital fluid circulated throughout the body, with the arteries carrying  it away from the heart and the veins returning it there. With these  propositions, Harvey had revolutionized the study of medicine. One  Oxford doctor and fellow of the Royal Society claimed that these  findings were more significant than the discovery of America because  they threw centuries of medical belief into uncertainty. Great  physicians everywhere now wanted to confirm, refute, or refine Harvey’s  propositions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was in this climate that Olof Rudbeck entered the medical school at  Uppsala. His head was full of ideas, his curiosity almost boundless. He  could not wait to be turned loose to investigate for himself the  mysterious invisible world underneath the skin. But unfortunately the  university had very little to offer. Rudbeck’s supervisor was too busy  for him, preferring instead to spend time in the alchemy lab, trying to  change various substances into gold. More challenging still, it was  difficult to gain access to the necessary equipment. When acquiring  human bodies for observation and dissection was a difficult task even  for a professor, what could a student do?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne crisp autumn day in 1650, Rudbeck strolled down to the market, a  bustling square jammed with carts, stalls, and stands. There were  stacks of cheese, slabs of butter, and fish, gutted and stretched out.  Gloves of fine goat-hair and warm wolfskin coats also competed for  attention. Rudbeck’s eye, however, fell on two women, rough and  splattered with blood, as they butchered a calf. There, in the raw dead  flesh, Rudbeck saw something peculiar. There was a milklike substance  that seemed to emanate from somewhere in the chest, not so delicately  split open on the old bench. His curiosity was piqued, and an idea  suddenly struck him. With the enthusiasm of someone who had long  enjoyed taking things apart and tinkering to see how they worked,  Rudbeck asked if he could cut on the carcass.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe women must have been surprised, to say the least, at this young  man’s request. With their permission granted, Rudbeck borrowed the  knife, forced the thick, lifeless aorta to the side, and then separated  it from the surrounding red mess of muscle and tissue. He followed that  curious milk-like substance along, finding a sort of vessel or duct  that carried a colorless liquid. By the time he traced it back to the  liver, the dark purplish brown organ undoubtedly destined for dinner  fare, he knew he was onto something big.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRudbeck had discovered nothing less than the lymphatic system. The  colorless liquid was lymph, a tissue-cleansing fluid vital to the  functioning of the body’s immune system. Among other things, it absorbs  nutrients, collects fats, and prevents harmful substances from entering  the bloodstream. He not only discovered this system but also correctly  explained its functions in the body.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis episode clearly shows a resourcefulness that would long be a  hallmark of Rudbeck’s approach to problem-solving. As William Harvey  improved his knowledge of anatomy by investigating the deer bagged by  King James and the royal hunting parties, Rudbeck the student relied on  the successful meat trade of Uppsala’s butchers. Over the next two  years, probably working in a dingy makeshift shed by the river, Rudbeck  set his dissection table with a veritable smorgasbord of discarded  delicacies. He cut, nipped, hacked, and examined, performing hundreds  of dissections and vivisections to refine his practical understanding  of the body’s cleansing mechanisms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRudbeck’s explanation of the lymphatic system was indeed a major  discovery in the annals of modern medicine—the first, in fact, to come  from a Swedish scientist. It was also a fulfillment of William Harvey’s  theories of the circulation of the blood, which were then still  fiercely contested. In distant Uppsala, the young Rudbeck, not even  twenty years old, had confirmed one of the greatest medical discoveries  of the day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWord of this remarkable student spread quickly through the Swedish  kingdom, and soon reached its colorful queen. Like Greta Garbo, who  played her in the film, Queen Christina has intrigued historians just  as she fascinated her contemporaries. She was young, barely twenty-six  years old, and somewhat shorter than medium height, with thick, curly,  dark brown hair often tied with a simple black ribbon. Her voice was  soft but deep, and her eyes piercing. Whenever she was displeased, it  soon became abundantly clear, the queen’s face darkened like a “thunder  cloud.” Eight years of power had accustomed her to doing exactly as she  wished. Controversy, though, was never far away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRumors had long circulated that the Swedish queen was a nymphomaniac, a  lesbian, a man in disguise, or perhaps a hermaphrodite. After all, when  she was born, the midwife first took her for a boy, and even told the  king that he had a new son. The hermaphrodite belief was dispelled only  when a team of international experts, restoring her grave in the 1920s,  decided to take a look. The queen, they confirmed, had indeed been a  woman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite all differences of opinion, her admirers and critics agreed on  one point: Queen Christina attracted some of the best and brightest of  the day. During her short reign, a motley collection of cavaliers,  ladies, libertines, and scholars streamed to her court. Perhaps the  most famous of these was René Descartes. There was probably no thinker  of the day more idolized than this French philosopher.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIndeed, when he arrived in Stockholm, Descartes soon found himself  taxed by Queen Christina’s enthusiasm for early-morning lessons in the  new thought, and equally burdensome demands to compose ballets for  entertainment in the evening. The Frenchman, overworked and exhausted,  succumbed to an unusually cold winter in Christina’s unusually cold  castle. He died in February 1650, after shivering through five  miserable months at court (though his skull, it turned out, stayed in  the country almost two hundred years longer; it had been secretly  removed and replaced with a substitute, and was not reunited with his  body in France until 1821).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was now Olof Rudbeck’s turn to come to Queen Christina’s court. She  was much impressed by his anatomical work and sent an invitation for  the student to present his discoveries to her in person. On a beautiful  spring day in 1652, Rudbeck arrived at the royal castle in Uppsala.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSet majestically on the highest hilltop, the castle overlooked the town  barely a stone’s cast away from the cathedral. Construction of the  castle, begun by King Gustav Vasa in the 1540s, was still unfinished.  Only two sides of the desired square had been completed, and the  surrounding hillside was overgrown with weeds. On the inside, though,  the castle was decorated with treasures including paintings,  tapestries, statues, and almost anything else of value that Swedish  armies could pack up in chests and carry back to the north.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike many distinguished guests before him, Rudbeck marched up to the  castle, climbed the stone steps, and entered the great hall. As the  court looked on, the twenty-one-year-old demonstrated his medical  discovery. Queen Christina was dazzled. She never had to tap her fan in  impatience, or play distractedly with her spaniels. She just sat  transfixed on her crimson velvet cushion with eyes aglow at the  spectacle. The courtiers saw a new rising star, and the queen did too.  By the end of the day she had offered Rudbeck a royal scholarship to  continue his studies at Leiden University. He left the castle, his ears  ringing with praise and head spinning with anticipation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSweden was, at this time, one of the most powerful countries in the  world. Despite its small population, thinly scattered throughout the  kingdom, Sweden had burst upon the scene in 1630, the year of Rudbeck’s  birth, with some dazzling victories in the Thirty Years’ War. King  Gustavus Adolphus’s army was praised as the best in the world, and his  advanced, modernized bureaucracy was, as one observer put it, the envy  of France. By the end of the war in 1648, and Rudbeck’s eighteenth  birthday, Sweden had emerged with France as the guarantor of Europe’s  peace.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSwedish territory then encircled the Baltic Sea and its sweet-smelling  pine forests, its flat, marshy heaths, and its foggy pebble beaches.  The blue and gold Swedish flag was raised in Finland, northern Germany,  the modern Baltic states, and as far away as Cabo Corso on the African  Gold Coast. There was even a “New Sweden” confidently planted in  America on the Delaware River, including today’s Trenton and  Philadelphia.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRudbeck’s country had never been more powerful or more influential.  Exports boomed, and its merchants, at first mostly Dutch immigrants,  dominated some of the most lucrative trades of the day. Sweden was  Europe’s unrivaled producer of copper and iron, and of the manufactured  products that relied on these materials, such as cannon, cannonballs,  and lightweight, quick-loading muskets. Lands in its Baltic dominion  produced timber, hemp, flax, pitch, and tar, no small advantage in a  warlike world just coming to appreciate the advantages of sea power.  One Danish historian has compared the Baltic Sea in the seventeenth  century to the Persian Gulf in the twentieth: though much of the region  was undeveloped and remote, it was the source of scarce raw materials  absolutely central to the functioning of the world at the time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe capital of the kingdom, Stockholm, had grown rich controlling this  trade, already boasting a stunning panorama of buildings, bridges, and  water that would later earn it the name “Venice of the North.” The  docks were bustling, too, with men unloading crates into the warehouses  along the seafront. Horses drawing carriages clip-clopped down the  cobblestone lanes, passing the fine buildings, the noble estates, and  the brick churches with copper spires. Down in the center of the  capital, tucked away in the Old Town, stood the Stockholm Banco,  preparing, in just a few years, to issue the world’s first modern paper  currency. All told, diligence and decadence went together in creating  the period Swedish historians call the “age of greatness.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the small wooden huts clustering in the shadows of the towering  mansions were reminders of another side to Sweden’s imperial age. For  every laced-up, velvet-clad courtier enjoying Italian perfumes, there  were many others who toiled under brutal conditions. As many as 90  percent of the population were peasants, squeezing out a tenuous  existence on small homesteads, or bound under steep feudal obligations  on large manors. Less fortunate still were the many victims of the  recent wars. Armless veterans begged in the streets, and legions of  orphans roamed in search of food. In desperation, many women became  prostitutes, and some people joined the rogues hiding out in forests,  preying upon the secluded roadways.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOlof Rudbeck had grown up in this environment of power and poverty. His  home was Västerås, then one of the largest towns in the country, and  visibly prospering from the “great quantities of copper and iron,  digged [sic] out of the mines.” At the very center stood the cathedral,  a restored Gothic structure with a long, tapering spire rising high  above its surroundings, and in fact, at that time, the tallest in  Sweden. The town also had a castle and even its own curious “wizard”  who once, it was said, “made wings and flew, but broke one of his  legs.”","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304327729381,"sku":"NP9781400047536","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400047536.jpg?v=1767726889","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/finding-atlantis-isbn-9781400047536","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}