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request over to an assistant working in the archives department named Cynthia Mathews. She hit on the mother lode and sent us an account of the trip written by the captain himself.
    From this account we discovered that Hapgood’s logical assumption that the “lost map of Columbus” was housed in the Spanish archives was incorrect. In fact, according to Captain Concas, the Columbus maps were kept in an entirely different location. He wrote, “She (Spain) has sent also the original charts of America, but the difficulties attending the proper custody in the Convent of Rabida of this valuable collection of charts, where are also the original documents connected with the discovery of America (also belonging to Spain), has resulted in their being examined by a very limited number of persons.” 16
    It was within the sand-colored walls of the modest La Rábida Monastery that the “lost map of Columbus” could be found. The monastery was originally built by the Knights Templar in 1261. After they fell from power in 1307, the Franciscans chose the monastery as one of their Spanish bases.
    In 1485, Christopher Columbus began lobbying European royalty to finance an unprecedented voyage to India and China. He would sail west across the Atlantic, something that had never been done before. Until then all voyages to India and China had sailed south, hugged the coast of Africa, and then traveled east.
    Frustrated in his attempts to enlist a patron to support his “westward” route to Asia, Columbus decided to join the rich pilgrims who regularly journeyed across Europe. His hope was that one of them would finance his venture or use his or her influence to obtain an audience for Columbus with one of the royal families.
    In 1490, he arrived at La Rábida. Fortunately for Columbus, the prior of La Rábida took a liking to him and intervened on Columbus’s behalf with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The great explorer was at the monastery when he received the exciting news that his ambitious voyage had been approved. It is not surprising that he left his most valuable maps to the prior who made his dream possible.
    Is the lost map still lying in the shadows on some dusty shelf in a quiet Spanish monastery? What could we discover from it if we could see its ancient face? How would our concept of history be changed if Hapgood and Campbell were right about the mappa mundus?
    The path that the two men took together in their quest for the source map of the 1513 Piri Reis map was not the first adventure they had shared. Starting in the late 1940s, the Hapgood/Campbell team had explored an idea central to Atlantis beneath the Ice —the theory of earth crust displacement.
    Like their quest for ancient maps, the exploration of this idea would involve many others, most notably, Albert Einstein.

TWO

    ADAPT, MIGRATE, OR DIE
    On May 8, 1953, an elderly professor with a fondness for the violin sat down at his desk in Princeton, New Jersey, and wrote a letter to Charles Hapgood, an obscure instructor at a small New England college. The professor was Albert Einstein, and the topic of the letter was a theory of Hapgood’s that had “electrified” the great physicist. Einstein wrote, “I find your arguments very impressive and have the impression that your hypothesis is correct. One can hardly doubt that significant shifts of the crust of the earth have taken place repeatedly and within a short time.” 1
    Charles Hutchins Hapgood (1904–1982), a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was born in New York City. After graduating, Hapgood traveled to Germany, where his studies at the University of Freiburg coincided with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. When World War II erupted, he returned to the United States and joined the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA) as a civilian with inside knowledge of Nazi Germany. After the war, Hapgood became a professor of anthropology and the