far too big to sink in the ocean without a trace: “What sea could be great
enough to swallow such a vast extent of land... so completely that not a trace
has remained?”^118 Acosta’s blunt, authoritative manner did not put the debate
to an end, however. Perhaps it even further promulgated the notion that the ten
tribes had passed through Atlantis, since it is only after and in response to his
angry dismissal of Atlantis that the first study of the subject saw light.
A Dominican friar, Gregorio Garcı ́a(c. 1540 – 1627 ), took on Acosta in his
1607 Origen de los Indios del Nuevo Mundo.Garcı ́a’s main concern was the
question of how America had been populated, but he also dedicated time to the
derivative questions of the ten tribes and Atlantis. Garcı ́a insinuated that Acosta’s
Greek was poor and that his erroneous conclusions stemmed from having read
Plato in Latin. He offered a systematic set of refutations of Acosta’s statements
against Atlantis. The result is a learned assembly and discussion of all sources
relating to Atlantis from Greek and Roman times onward. Its most interesting
feature is a form of ethnolinguistics. “In the Mexican language the word for
‘water’ has the letters ‘Atl’... which are at the very least the first three letters of the
word ‘Atlantis.’” Atlantis is closely associated with water since it gave the Atlantic
Ocean its name. Having established this connection (ignoring the fact that
“Atlantic” is a European word), Garcı ́a points out that the combination “atl” occurs
frequently in the Mexican language, particularly in important words denoting
gods (as in Quetzalcoatl), place names, etc. “It is certain that the combination of
the letters T.L. does not occur in all the nations of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and in
[other languages] in the New World... more than in the Mexican language.”^119
The Mexicans thus were shown as uniquely and intimately connected to Atlantis.
(Two centuries later, when the great German scientist Alexander von Humboldt
[ 1769 – 1859 ] traveled to Latin America, he commented in his diary, “I am rather
disposed to think that the grammatical system of the American idioms has
confirmed the missionaries of the sixteenth century in their ideas respecting
the Asiatic origins of the nations of the New World. The tedious compilation of
Father Garcı ́a,Tratado del origen de los Indios,is a proof of this.”)^120
However, Garcı ́a’s main question was who had populated the Americas,
and how. He was convinced that the earliest ancestors of the American Indians
were in fact Hebrews. To be sure, Garcı ́a mentioned other ancient peoples who
also came to the Americas, such as the Egyptians and the Phoenicians who, he
said, had first populated Atlantis and then the Americas. Each, by their own
right, could be considered the original Americans.^121 Yet, Garcı ́a insisted, the
Hebrews had arrived there first. Garcı ́a, it seems, was more interested in
establishing the ten tribes theory than in proving the validity of the Atlantis
theory itself, and therefore was careful to also cite the theory that the tribes
actually migrated to the Americas through North Asia—as science would one
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