The Nicaraguans believed “that ages ago the world was destroyed by a flood, in which the most part of mankind perished.  Afterward the teotes, or gods, restored the earth as at the beginning.” (Ibid., p. 75.) The wild Apaches, “wild from their natal hour,” have a legend that “the first days of the world were happy and peaceful days;” then came a great flood, from which Montezuma and the coyote alone escaped.  Montezuma became then very wicked, and attempted to build a house that would reach to heaven, but the Great Spirit destroyed it with thunderbolts.  (Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iii., p. 76.)

The Pimas, an Indian tribe allied to the Papagos, have a peculiar flood legend.  The son of the Creator was called Szeu-kha (Ze-us?).  An eagle prophesied the deluge to the prophet of the people three times in succession, but his warning was despised; “then in the twinkling of an eye there came a peal of thunder and an awful crash, and a green mound of water reared itself over the plain.  It seemed to stand upright for a second, then, cut incessantly by the lightning, goaded on like a great beast, it flung itself upon the prophet’s hut.  When the morning broke there was nothing to be seen alive but one man—­if indeed he were a man; Szeu-kha, the son of the Creator, had saved himself by floating on a ball of gum or resin.”  This instantaneous catastrophe reminds one forcibly of the destruction of Atlantis.  Szeu-kha killed the eagle, restored its victims to life, and repeopled the earth with them, as Deucalion repeopled the earth with the stones.

CHAPTER VI.

Some consideration of the deluge legends.

The Fountains of the Great Deep.—­As Atlantis perished in a volcanic convulsion, it must have possessed volcanoes.  This is rendered the more probable when we remember that the ridge of land of which it was a part, stretching from north to south, from Iceland to St. Helena, contains even now great volcanoes—­as in Iceland, the Azores, the Canaries, etc.—­and that the very sea-bed along the line of its original axis is, to this day, as we have shown, the scene of great volcanic disturbances.

If, then, the mountains of Atlantis contained volcanoes, of which the peaks of the Azores are the surviving representatives, it is not improbable that the convulsion which drowned it in the sea was accompanied by great discharges of water.  We have seen that such discharges occurred in the island of Java, when four thousand people perished.  “Immense columns of hot water and boiling mud were thrown out” of the volcano of Galung Gung; the water was projected from the mountain “like a water-spout.”  When a volcanic island was created near Sicily in 1831, it was accompanied by “a waterspout sixty feet high.”

In the island of Dominica, one of the islands constituting the Leeward group of the West Indies, and nearest to the site of Atlantis, on the 4th of January, 1880, occurred a series of convulsions which reminds us forcibly of the destruction of Plato’s island; and the similarity extends to another particular:  Dominica contains, like Atlantis, we are told, numerous hot and sulphur springs.  I abridge the account given by the New York Herald of January 28th, 1880: