as Montezinos envisions it, is not only a restoration with the rest of the Israelite
people, but a promise of punishment and even revenge for Spanish crimes in
the New World. Recall that in the account, just before he leaves the secret
location of the ten tribes, one of the mysterious men gives Montezinos a
promise with a threatening message to the Spanish. It seems to be a reversed
echo of Dura ́n’s logic: instead of the Spanish punishing the ten tribes, the ten
tribes will punish the Iberian colonizers.^111
But if the Indians were the ten tribes, how did they get to the Americas? Let
us first look at Atlantis.
Atlantis is mentioned in Plato’sTimaeus and Critiasas “an island that
disappeared in the depths of the sea.” “The island was larger than Libya
and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these
you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded
the true ocean.”^112 Plato comments that, in “those days,” before Atlantis
sank, “the Atlantic was navigable.” The newly acquired European navigability
of the Atlantic brought to the fore the issue of the sunken continent as a
cosmographical problem.^113 Where (if at all) was Atlantis, and what was its
relationship to the New World? The new interest in Atlantis was a derivative of
the big question concerning the populating of the Americas. Already in 1535 ,
Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes ( 1478 – 1557 ), one of the earliest histor-
ians of the New World, suggested that the people and culture of the New World
originated in Atlantis.^114 Shortly thereafter, Atlantis attached itself to the lost
tribes. Atlantis is similar to the unknown land that Ge ́nebrard invented in the
north in order to bridge North Asia and Greenland. We do not know who
was the first to make this move. As in the cases of the Canaries and the torture
of the American Indians, it is an opponent who first brings the theory to light
in a coherent manner.
The great Jesuit scholar Jose ́de Acosta ( 1540 – 1600 ), the “Pliny of the New
World,” was hugely resistant to the Indians/ten tribes theory: “The opinion of
many, who believe that the Amerindians come from the lineage of the Jews, is
false.”^115 A “heavy man, of uncertain, melancholic temper, a Jew by de-
scent,”^116 Acosta had spent almost two decades in Peru, during which time
he wrote theHistoria Natural y Moral de las Indias( 1590 ), an impressive work
on the natural history of South America that won him the comparison to Pliny,
whom he referenced frequently. For Acosta, the story of Atlantis was just plain
nonsense, but it had to be refuted since proponents of the ten tribes theory
claimed that the tribes got to the Americas through that continent. “I have no
reverence for Plato [the source for the Atlantis myth] no matter how divine they
may call him.” In fact, Acosta had no reverence for several legends, among
them, Ophir and Prester John, which he also rejected.^117 Atlantis simply was
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