Just because much human history is invisible does not mean it was never there or that its existence was unimportant. In order to properly understand ourselves and our journey as a species, our challenge is to acknowledge the existence of this hidden history and try, iteratively and painstakingly, to piece it together from the fragments we can see.
I thought from its description that Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth would be primarily about those eerily lost places that seem to persist only in a nearby people’s folklore — and to a degree, those stories are here: from a Polynesian tale of a guardian shark who thrashed its tail against an island’s underwater support pillar, causing it to topple over, to the Breton conteurs of North-West France who still travel village to village telling of the fabulous lost city of Ys, long submerged in the ocean — but as much as researcher and author Patrick Nunn refers to such tales as jumping off points, this is really about the science of how islands do, sometimes, suddenly appear and disappear, and moreso, how humans throughout history have dealt with ever-changing coastlines; an issue pressing for our times as a warming Earth threatens coastal dwellers all over our “drowning world”. I am personally more interested in people's stories than the geological science that could get a little dry here (even if so much of the cataclysmic processes were shockingly new to me; I did naively think that the ground beneath my feet was more solid and enduring than it is), but I can’t fault a book for not being what I expected. Thorough, ultimately interesting and credible, Worlds in Shadow taught me much. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In a world where we are confronted by global change that is as contemptuous of human endeavour and individual aspiration as it is dismissive of political borders and agendas, understanding how our ancestors were affected by comparable changes and how they overcame these is at once a lesson in coping as well as a beacon of hope.
Wherever Nunn cites traditional peoples’ legends — the Tlingit of British Columbia tell of a monster who lives in the bay and periodically shakes the surface of the water like a sheet, Narungga (Aboriginal) stories describe a giant kangaroo that once dragged a bone through the Spencer Gulf, carving a channel that let the ocean in — he then describes the evidence in the geological record that proves these stories are actually describing known events. Nunn encourages us to regard these legends as science from the past and to marvel at the endurance of tales that were passed down orally for countless generations. And I learned some things about famous lost worlds that I didn’t know: Nunn flatly insists that Atlantis didn’t exist, “There are numerous clues in the writings of Plato, who manufactured the story of Atlantis in about 350 BC, that it is allegorical not factual...a fiction created to illustrate the principles explained in The Republic.” (I always assumed that because it was first described by Plato that that was pretty firm evidence that Atlantis did exist, even if I didn’t think that it was populated by some super-advanced technological society.) And I guess I never critically examined the difference between the supercontinents that are said to have once existed (Pangea and Gondwana were real, Lemuria is a fiction; I always thought they were pretty much different names for the same thing.) And I was challenged by Nunn’s dismissal of the deep ocean as our final unexplored frontier:
While scientists may not have explored every square metre of the ocean floor, there is little mystery about what is there. Imagine you have a back garden of 30m2. You may dig a few holes here and there to plant fruit trees, but would you really expect to find anything wildly different by digging elsewhere?
(Is that analogy actually self-evident?) I did appreciate the thorough descriptions of the science behind submergence (whether from sea-level changes, tectonic changes, gravity collapse, giant waves, or volcanoes), and especially as it relates to the threatened places where people live today. (Bottom line: there’s nothing we can do to prevent island and coastline submergence — processes are happening beneath our feet that we can’t control and melting glaciers are only adding to these natural phenomena — and our focus should be on relocation.) Yet, if I had a complaint about this book it would be the condescending tone that Nunn uses when arguing against the beliefs of pseudoscientists; they who would use the universally compelling idea of lost lands to advance their own (nefarious?) agendas:
Consider the end of the supposed lost continent of Mu, claimed to have once stretched across most of the Pacific Ocean (it didn’t), described in a 1931 book by James Churchward.Cataclysmic earthquakes rent Mu asunder…she became a fiery vortex, and the waters of the Pacific rushed in making a watery grave for a vast civilisation and sixty million people.
Pure flapdoodle, of course. But we can trace self- styled ‘Colonel’ Churchward’s description back to a time a few years after the 1883 Krakatau eruption when Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, was composing her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine. In it she described a ‘huge land’ named Rutas allegedly described in (conveniently unspecified) ‘Brahminical traditions’. One day, Rutas was abruptly destroyed in a volcanic cataclysm and ‘sent to the ocean depths’ leaving behind only the islands of Indonesia to mark the place where it once stood. No one has uncovered Brahminical or any other traditions to support Blavatsky’s ludicrous claims about Rutas, but it is almost certain that reports about the Krakatau eruption greatly influenced her thinking at this point in her life as she scratched out her specious legacy in a cramped South London tenement.
There is a preponderance of really interesting information in Worlds in Shadow — if sometimes a little dry, if sometimes a little patronising — and even if the takeaway message is that the habitable Earth has always been dropping away beneath humanity’s feet and we’ve managed to survive as a species to tell the tale, I ultimately found that more frightening than hopeful. Rounding up to four stars.
