Wow! eBook
Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds
Author(s): Gareth E Rees (Author)
- Publisher: Elliott & Thompson
- Publication Date: March 18, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 272 pages
- ISBN-10: 1783967692
- ISBN-13: 9781783967698
Book Description
From Stone Age lands that slipped beneath the English Channel to the rapid inundation of New Orleans, Gareth E. Rees explores stories of flooded places from the past – and those disappearing before our eyes. The places lost to the eternally shifting boundaries between water and land continue to have a powerful emotional resonance today. Their uncertain features emerge to haunt us, briefly, when the moon draws back the tide to reveal a spire or a tree stump. And, imbued with myths and warnings from the past, these underwater worlds can also teach us important lessons about the unavoidability of change, the ebb and flow of Earth’ s natural cycles, and the folly of trying to control them. Sunken Lands peels back the layers of silt, sea and mythology to reveal what our submerged past can tell us about our imminent future as rising sea levels transform our planet once more.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A stunning history of floods, changing climates, and natural disasters that shook human affairs, Sunken Lands connects human history to the realities of rising tides.” —Foreword Reviews
About the Author
Gareth E. Rees is the author of Unofficial Britain, longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and one of the Sunday Times best books of the year 2020. He’s also the author of Car Park Life, The Stone Tide and Marshland. His first short story collection, Terminal Zones, was published in 2022 and examines the strangeness of everyday life in a time of climate change. He lives in Hastings with his wife and children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A long time ago, a spirit named Aba appeared before a North
American people known as the Choctaw. He gave them an urgent
instruction to build a boat made from cypress wood. They were
to fill it with all the local animals, along with enough food to last
them for a week. ‘It must be constructed on that peak over there,’
said Aba, pointing to the highest hill in the land.
Passing strangers were bemused by the sight of the Choctaw
cutting, hammering and chiselling all day and night on the
hilltop. ‘Why build a boat so far from water?’ they wondered
with amusement.
After the work was complete, they searched the forests and
swamps for a male and female of each beast and took them to the
boat, where they all huddled together to wait for whatever was
coming. That day, winds began to howl as a hurricane brewed.
Black clouds billowed and flashes of lightning struck the land.
Roofs were torn from dwellings and a hard rain came down, turn-
ing the ground to mud. Soon floodwaters poured through the land,
forming gullies, which turned into fast-flowing rivers, which soon
became an inland sea that expanded over the whole land, rolling
with high waves.
On the fifth day, the storm abated. The survivors found them-
selves adrift in calm water, surrounded by the floating corpses
of people and animals. Apart from the birds in the sky and the
selected species in the boat, life on Earth had become extinct.
Finally, the waters subsided and the boat settled on the shore
of an island where a single willow tree grew. They cut it down and
rubbed the branches together to kindle a fire. Nearby they found
a strange white grain, which they planted in the ground to create
the first ever cornfield.
And so the world began anew.1
The caged boat drifted through the Louisiana swamp. Slowly,
we passed the submerged trunks of bald cypress trees, their
branches hung with Spanish moss, gnarly roots protruding
from the water like skeleton knees. The riverbank was leafy with
hackberry, water tupelo and Chinese tallow. Racoons gathered
to watch us, wary of predatory eyes that peered from a float-
ing mat of rotten leaves below them. Sitting among a gaggle of
tourists, resting my forehead against the protective metal bars, I
watched the alligators slither alongside, armoured backs glinting
wetly in the sunshine. One lay motionless on a log, legs dangling,
as a soft-shelled turtle floated through fronds of emerald-green
swamp grass like a lost leather baseball glove. Behind the wheel
was our guide, Captain Danny, a portly old man who spoke into
a microphone with a deep southern drawl. Every now and then,
he hurled marshmallows into the river to lure alligators closer
for our entertainment. I wondered how their digestive systems,
evolved to eat raw meat, coped with processed blobs of sugar,
corn syrup and gelatine. When he wasn’t baiting ’gators, he told
stories about the thirty-five species of snake in the Manchac
swamp, the fat bullfrogs he liked to eat, and the ghosts that
haunted this cursed place, where a town had been destroyed by
wind and flood.
After a bend in the waterway, the boat passed an enclave
where an alligator sunned itself on a bank. In front of an iron
railing were five white wooden crosses with alligator skulls leaned
against them. Beneath each cross, explained Captain Danny, were
multiple bodies, victims of a hurricane, in which 200-kilometre-
per-hour winds and a 4-metre tidal wave flattened the logging
town of Frenier over the course of one devastating day in 1915. A
hundred yards downriver, we passed a second burial ground with
only one cross, on which was nailed a human vertebra. Animal
bones jutted from its apex and spherical bells hung on each side.
This was the grave of Julia Brown, said Captain Danny, the voo-
doo priestess blamed for the disaster.
It’s hard to pinpoint where any story truly begins but a good
place to start this tale would be where others in this book have
begun: 20,000 years ago, when great sheets of ice extended over
much of the North American landmass. After the Ice Age ended,
meltwaters coursed down the Mississippi River valley, carrying
massive volumes of rock debris and sediment, gouging its way
south. By 5000 bce, the river snaked through southern Louisiana
to the Gulf of Mexico, where it left silty deposits, creating what
would become one of the largest river deltas in the world. When
the mountain snows in the north melted each spring, the river
flooded, leaving more alluvium to replace that which had set-
tled and compressed, or been eroded by the tides. Layers upon
layers built up, creating barrier islands, estuaries and new lobes
of sand, silt and clay as the river shifted course in its eternal quest
to reach the sea.
One of Louisiana’s native peoples, the Chitimacha, made their
home in the delta. In their oral tradition, the original world was
a flooded place, empty of life. Its creator, the Great Spirit, made
crawfish to live in the waters. He instructed them to dive down
and bring mud up to the surface. As they did so, they created
the land, just as the annual flooding of the Mississippi River cre-
ated a fertile delta for the Chitimacha. Further up the valley, the
Biloxi had their own flood myth in which the waters rose so high
that everyone drowned apart from a woman and her two chil-
dren, who had climbed a tall tree. Another Louisiana people, the
Choctaw, tell a story about how their ancestors escaped a deluge
after a warning from a benevolent spirit. Cataclysmic mega-
floods were at the foundation of many Native American creation
mythologies. But these delta-dwelling peoples were also attuned
to the recurring cycles of flood in their own time, delivered by the
mighty waterway that constantly reshaped their territory, produ-
cing as much as it took away.
A crescent of natural levee on a bend in the Mississippi
River, formed from deposited sediment, became a sea trading
post for the Native Americans. Behind it was a brackish estu-
ary named Okwata – or ‘wide water’. Locals used this bay as a
shortcut from the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, via an adja-
cent lake, Maurepas, which was surrounded by a cypress forest.
The Choctaw gave this land the name Manchac, a word for ‘rear
entrance’. In 1682, the French stole Louisiana from the Native
Americans and constructed a settlement on that crescent of high
ground, naming it New Orleans. They renamed the estuary Lake
Pontchartrain. The nascent city needed supplies and encouraged
migrant farmers to make the most of the alluvial soils. In the late
1700s a group of German immigrants settled in the Manchac
swamp on the western shore of Lake Pontchartrain. They began
logging the cypress forest for its highly prized wood, impervious
to rot and termite infestation. They used swamp water to irri-
gate fields of cabbages, which they turned into sauerkraut. Their
settlement, Schlösser – later renamed Frenier – was isolated until
a railroad connected them directly to New Orleans, and to the
rest of the USA, which had purchased Louisiana in 1803. Now
trains carried the town’s logs and sauerkraut off to market. But
as operations expanded, the removal of the cypress trees eroded
their wetlands and made them more vulnerable to floods.
In the late nineteenth century, an African American woman
named Julia Brown moved from New Orleans to Frenier with
her husband. Local legend has it that she was a voodoo priestess.
This religion was brought to the Americas on slave ships from
Benin in Africa. After the Haitian slave revolt of 1791, many freed
people migrated to New Orleans, where their version of voodoo
merged with Catholicism to create a distinct Louisiana brand,
dominated by voodoo queens. These women became powerful
spiritual and political figures in the nineteenth century, offering
healing, counsel and advice. Julia Brown would have been an
asset in a secluded town such as Frenier, where it was hard to
access medical care. She became a local healer, offering natural
remedies for pain and fever, and was so endeared to the locals
that they called her Aunt Julia. But after the death of her husband,
she became resentful, believing her services were being taken for
granted. She sat on her porch by the edge of the swamp, playing
her guitar and singing songs with cranky lyrics that hinted at
terrible things happening to the residents of Frenier. In the final
weeks of her life, one song had this refrain: ‘Oh, when I die, I’ll
take the whole town with me.’
On the day that Julia Brown passed away, the sky grew dark
and there was an eerie stillness in the air. If the newspapers had
arrived in Fernier that day, instead of languishing in a railway
depot in New Orleans, awaiting transit, people might have real-
ised that a ferocious weather front was approaching. But instead,
they grew fearful that Brown had brought a curse on them. On
the morning of her funeral, 29 September 1915, the waters of
Lake Pontchartrain rose rapidly and a strong wind whipped up.
As the casket was carried towards the grave, the deluge began.
The people ran for cover as rain hammered down. A gale bent the
trees and peeled the rafters from the houses. Many townsfolk
hid in the railroad depot, which collapsed in the wind, killing
twenty-five of them. A wave rolled along Lake Pontchartrain and
struck the town, defenceless on the lowland, no longer protected
by cypress trees. The Burg family – Joseph, Dora and their chil-
dren – took refuge in a schoolhouse behind the railroad tracks.
They frantically clambered onto a table as floodwaters surged
through the building. One of their children, a young man named
Martin, scrambled out of a broken window, his little sister Frieda
clinging to him, and dived into the churning brine. Frieda lost
her grip and was swept away but Martin clung to a tree, listen-
ing in horror to the cries of his loved ones. It was the following
morning before the waters subsided enough for him to clamber
down to safety. By that point, almost everyone had drowned or
been crushed beneath falling timber.
After the storm, there were 300 dead in Louisiana, sixty of
them in Frenier and the neighbouring settlement, Rudduck.
Both places had been wiped out. Corpses lay in piles of debris.
Others vanished into the alligator-infested depths of the Manchac
swamp. It was said that, from time to time, a skeleton would
emerge from the mire. Those bodies that were recovered were
laid in a mass grave. Julia was interred separately, her cross
adorned with bells to warn trespassers that this was an evil place
and they should stay away. According to folklore, the ghosts of
the drowned still roam the swamp, their screams audible from the
cemetery at night, and the voice of Julia Brown forever sings her
prophetic song of doom.
The real story of the voodoo priestess and the cursed town
is uncertain. In some retellings Julia Brown is known as Julia
White or Julia Black. A New Orleans Times-Picayune report on
the storm refers to her funeral as being that of ‘an old negress
who was well known in that section, and was a big property
owner’, with no mention of her religious status. It may have been
that she was a voodoo healer. Such women were often resented
for the threat they represented to white power in Louisiana. To
undermine it, the voodoo religion was mocked and castigated as
savage and evil. Portrayals of voodoo in art, literature and cinema
persistently indulged in stereotypes, insinuating that this was a
sinister religion based on fear, blood sacrifice and black magic,
rather than one that promoted healing, spiritual development and
respect for our ancestors. Equally, Brown might simply have been
a literate, Black female landowner – another reason for white
society to fear her.
Some years after the tragedy, a local sightseeing business
placed railings and crosses in the cemetery to mark the spot,
including a wooden sign with ‘1915’ engraved on it and a col-
lection of alligator skulls. It could be that the annihilation of
Frenier created a terrible absence that locals were compelled to
fill through this act of memorialisation; a way of fixing the story
to the place so that it would endure. Or perhaps everything I’d
seen on the boat trip was simply a prop to help tour operators
tell an appealing horror story, using ghoulish, theatrical scen-
ery to manifest the tragedy in a semi-fictional narrative of their
own making, where a terrified populace suffered the wrath of
an evil voodoo queen. It goes to show how a flood can become
unmoored from its factual foundations, gathering supernat-
ural elements and socio-political meanings as it drifts through
the generations.
Despite having no shared root with the Celtish myths of
sunken kingdoms like Lyonesse, Ys and the Lowland Hundred,
the folkloric telling of Frenier’s destruction has much in common
with them: a town suffers vengeance from the spirits for per-
ceived crimes and slights; it is covered in waves over the course
of a single day; ghost sounds reverberate from the lost place many
years later. As similar flood disasters must have wiped out settle-
ments like this in the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, it is easy to
see how their experiences might also become transformed in
the oral record, taking on a narrative life of their own. The event
becomes a story; then the story becomes the event, retold by the
likes of Captain Danny for paying tourists on his boat, meander-
ing down the river of time.
When another hurricane struck this part of southern
Louisiana ninety years later, it would also attain mythic qualities,
sharing characteristics with many of the fabled ancient disas-
ters in this book. The great city of New Orleans, notorious for
its supposed decadence and sin, was protected from the sea by
embankments, walls and gates, which its arrogant leaders believed
would keep them safe. But it was catastrophically flooded after a
storm and more than a thousand of its citizens were drowned. In
this case, the city survived but the land on which it sits is sinking
faster than anywhere else in the world, while the seas keep on ris-
ing. New Orleans could soon become a contemporary Atlantis,
submerged before our eyes in the twenty-first century. And it
would not be a freak event, but the first among many inundations
of coastal cities around the globe.
American people known as the Choctaw. He gave them an urgent
instruction to build a boat made from cypress wood. They were
to fill it with all the local animals, along with enough food to last
them for a week. ‘It must be constructed on that peak over there,’
said Aba, pointing to the highest hill in the land.
Passing strangers were bemused by the sight of the Choctaw
cutting, hammering and chiselling all day and night on the
hilltop. ‘Why build a boat so far from water?’ they wondered
with amusement.
After the work was complete, they searched the forests and
swamps for a male and female of each beast and took them to the
boat, where they all huddled together to wait for whatever was
coming. That day, winds began to howl as a hurricane brewed.
Black clouds billowed and flashes of lightning struck the land.
Roofs were torn from dwellings and a hard rain came down, turn-
ing the ground to mud. Soon floodwaters poured through the land,
forming gullies, which turned into fast-flowing rivers, which soon
became an inland sea that expanded over the whole land, rolling
with high waves.
On the fifth day, the storm abated. The survivors found them-
selves adrift in calm water, surrounded by the floating corpses
of people and animals. Apart from the birds in the sky and the
selected species in the boat, life on Earth had become extinct.
Finally, the waters subsided and the boat settled on the shore
of an island where a single willow tree grew. They cut it down and
rubbed the branches together to kindle a fire. Nearby they found
a strange white grain, which they planted in the ground to create
the first ever cornfield.
And so the world began anew.1
The caged boat drifted through the Louisiana swamp. Slowly,
we passed the submerged trunks of bald cypress trees, their
branches hung with Spanish moss, gnarly roots protruding
from the water like skeleton knees. The riverbank was leafy with
hackberry, water tupelo and Chinese tallow. Racoons gathered
to watch us, wary of predatory eyes that peered from a float-
ing mat of rotten leaves below them. Sitting among a gaggle of
tourists, resting my forehead against the protective metal bars, I
watched the alligators slither alongside, armoured backs glinting
wetly in the sunshine. One lay motionless on a log, legs dangling,
as a soft-shelled turtle floated through fronds of emerald-green
swamp grass like a lost leather baseball glove. Behind the wheel
was our guide, Captain Danny, a portly old man who spoke into
a microphone with a deep southern drawl. Every now and then,
he hurled marshmallows into the river to lure alligators closer
for our entertainment. I wondered how their digestive systems,
evolved to eat raw meat, coped with processed blobs of sugar,
corn syrup and gelatine. When he wasn’t baiting ’gators, he told
stories about the thirty-five species of snake in the Manchac
swamp, the fat bullfrogs he liked to eat, and the ghosts that
haunted this cursed place, where a town had been destroyed by
wind and flood.
After a bend in the waterway, the boat passed an enclave
where an alligator sunned itself on a bank. In front of an iron
railing were five white wooden crosses with alligator skulls leaned
against them. Beneath each cross, explained Captain Danny, were
multiple bodies, victims of a hurricane, in which 200-kilometre-
per-hour winds and a 4-metre tidal wave flattened the logging
town of Frenier over the course of one devastating day in 1915. A
hundred yards downriver, we passed a second burial ground with
only one cross, on which was nailed a human vertebra. Animal
bones jutted from its apex and spherical bells hung on each side.
This was the grave of Julia Brown, said Captain Danny, the voo-
doo priestess blamed for the disaster.
It’s hard to pinpoint where any story truly begins but a good
place to start this tale would be where others in this book have
begun: 20,000 years ago, when great sheets of ice extended over
much of the North American landmass. After the Ice Age ended,
meltwaters coursed down the Mississippi River valley, carrying
massive volumes of rock debris and sediment, gouging its way
south. By 5000 bce, the river snaked through southern Louisiana
to the Gulf of Mexico, where it left silty deposits, creating what
would become one of the largest river deltas in the world. When
the mountain snows in the north melted each spring, the river
flooded, leaving more alluvium to replace that which had set-
tled and compressed, or been eroded by the tides. Layers upon
layers built up, creating barrier islands, estuaries and new lobes
of sand, silt and clay as the river shifted course in its eternal quest
to reach the sea.
One of Louisiana’s native peoples, the Chitimacha, made their
home in the delta. In their oral tradition, the original world was
a flooded place, empty of life. Its creator, the Great Spirit, made
crawfish to live in the waters. He instructed them to dive down
and bring mud up to the surface. As they did so, they created
the land, just as the annual flooding of the Mississippi River cre-
ated a fertile delta for the Chitimacha. Further up the valley, the
Biloxi had their own flood myth in which the waters rose so high
that everyone drowned apart from a woman and her two chil-
dren, who had climbed a tall tree. Another Louisiana people, the
Choctaw, tell a story about how their ancestors escaped a deluge
after a warning from a benevolent spirit. Cataclysmic mega-
floods were at the foundation of many Native American creation
mythologies. But these delta-dwelling peoples were also attuned
to the recurring cycles of flood in their own time, delivered by the
mighty waterway that constantly reshaped their territory, produ-
cing as much as it took away.
A crescent of natural levee on a bend in the Mississippi
River, formed from deposited sediment, became a sea trading
post for the Native Americans. Behind it was a brackish estu-
ary named Okwata – or ‘wide water’. Locals used this bay as a
shortcut from the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, via an adja-
cent lake, Maurepas, which was surrounded by a cypress forest.
The Choctaw gave this land the name Manchac, a word for ‘rear
entrance’. In 1682, the French stole Louisiana from the Native
Americans and constructed a settlement on that crescent of high
ground, naming it New Orleans. They renamed the estuary Lake
Pontchartrain. The nascent city needed supplies and encouraged
migrant farmers to make the most of the alluvial soils. In the late
1700s a group of German immigrants settled in the Manchac
swamp on the western shore of Lake Pontchartrain. They began
logging the cypress forest for its highly prized wood, impervious
to rot and termite infestation. They used swamp water to irri-
gate fields of cabbages, which they turned into sauerkraut. Their
settlement, Schlösser – later renamed Frenier – was isolated until
a railroad connected them directly to New Orleans, and to the
rest of the USA, which had purchased Louisiana in 1803. Now
trains carried the town’s logs and sauerkraut off to market. But
as operations expanded, the removal of the cypress trees eroded
their wetlands and made them more vulnerable to floods.
In the late nineteenth century, an African American woman
named Julia Brown moved from New Orleans to Frenier with
her husband. Local legend has it that she was a voodoo priestess.
This religion was brought to the Americas on slave ships from
Benin in Africa. After the Haitian slave revolt of 1791, many freed
people migrated to New Orleans, where their version of voodoo
merged with Catholicism to create a distinct Louisiana brand,
dominated by voodoo queens. These women became powerful
spiritual and political figures in the nineteenth century, offering
healing, counsel and advice. Julia Brown would have been an
asset in a secluded town such as Frenier, where it was hard to
access medical care. She became a local healer, offering natural
remedies for pain and fever, and was so endeared to the locals
that they called her Aunt Julia. But after the death of her husband,
she became resentful, believing her services were being taken for
granted. She sat on her porch by the edge of the swamp, playing
her guitar and singing songs with cranky lyrics that hinted at
terrible things happening to the residents of Frenier. In the final
weeks of her life, one song had this refrain: ‘Oh, when I die, I’ll
take the whole town with me.’
On the day that Julia Brown passed away, the sky grew dark
and there was an eerie stillness in the air. If the newspapers had
arrived in Fernier that day, instead of languishing in a railway
depot in New Orleans, awaiting transit, people might have real-
ised that a ferocious weather front was approaching. But instead,
they grew fearful that Brown had brought a curse on them. On
the morning of her funeral, 29 September 1915, the waters of
Lake Pontchartrain rose rapidly and a strong wind whipped up.
As the casket was carried towards the grave, the deluge began.
The people ran for cover as rain hammered down. A gale bent the
trees and peeled the rafters from the houses. Many townsfolk
hid in the railroad depot, which collapsed in the wind, killing
twenty-five of them. A wave rolled along Lake Pontchartrain and
struck the town, defenceless on the lowland, no longer protected
by cypress trees. The Burg family – Joseph, Dora and their chil-
dren – took refuge in a schoolhouse behind the railroad tracks.
They frantically clambered onto a table as floodwaters surged
through the building. One of their children, a young man named
Martin, scrambled out of a broken window, his little sister Frieda
clinging to him, and dived into the churning brine. Frieda lost
her grip and was swept away but Martin clung to a tree, listen-
ing in horror to the cries of his loved ones. It was the following
morning before the waters subsided enough for him to clamber
down to safety. By that point, almost everyone had drowned or
been crushed beneath falling timber.
After the storm, there were 300 dead in Louisiana, sixty of
them in Frenier and the neighbouring settlement, Rudduck.
Both places had been wiped out. Corpses lay in piles of debris.
Others vanished into the alligator-infested depths of the Manchac
swamp. It was said that, from time to time, a skeleton would
emerge from the mire. Those bodies that were recovered were
laid in a mass grave. Julia was interred separately, her cross
adorned with bells to warn trespassers that this was an evil place
and they should stay away. According to folklore, the ghosts of
the drowned still roam the swamp, their screams audible from the
cemetery at night, and the voice of Julia Brown forever sings her
prophetic song of doom.
The real story of the voodoo priestess and the cursed town
is uncertain. In some retellings Julia Brown is known as Julia
White or Julia Black. A New Orleans Times-Picayune report on
the storm refers to her funeral as being that of ‘an old negress
who was well known in that section, and was a big property
owner’, with no mention of her religious status. It may have been
that she was a voodoo healer. Such women were often resented
for the threat they represented to white power in Louisiana. To
undermine it, the voodoo religion was mocked and castigated as
savage and evil. Portrayals of voodoo in art, literature and cinema
persistently indulged in stereotypes, insinuating that this was a
sinister religion based on fear, blood sacrifice and black magic,
rather than one that promoted healing, spiritual development and
respect for our ancestors. Equally, Brown might simply have been
a literate, Black female landowner – another reason for white
society to fear her.
Some years after the tragedy, a local sightseeing business
placed railings and crosses in the cemetery to mark the spot,
including a wooden sign with ‘1915’ engraved on it and a col-
lection of alligator skulls. It could be that the annihilation of
Frenier created a terrible absence that locals were compelled to
fill through this act of memorialisation; a way of fixing the story
to the place so that it would endure. Or perhaps everything I’d
seen on the boat trip was simply a prop to help tour operators
tell an appealing horror story, using ghoulish, theatrical scen-
ery to manifest the tragedy in a semi-fictional narrative of their
own making, where a terrified populace suffered the wrath of
an evil voodoo queen. It goes to show how a flood can become
unmoored from its factual foundations, gathering supernat-
ural elements and socio-political meanings as it drifts through
the generations.
Despite having no shared root with the Celtish myths of
sunken kingdoms like Lyonesse, Ys and the Lowland Hundred,
the folkloric telling of Frenier’s destruction has much in common
with them: a town suffers vengeance from the spirits for per-
ceived crimes and slights; it is covered in waves over the course
of a single day; ghost sounds reverberate from the lost place many
years later. As similar flood disasters must have wiped out settle-
ments like this in the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, it is easy to
see how their experiences might also become transformed in
the oral record, taking on a narrative life of their own. The event
becomes a story; then the story becomes the event, retold by the
likes of Captain Danny for paying tourists on his boat, meander-
ing down the river of time.
When another hurricane struck this part of southern
Louisiana ninety years later, it would also attain mythic qualities,
sharing characteristics with many of the fabled ancient disas-
ters in this book. The great city of New Orleans, notorious for
its supposed decadence and sin, was protected from the sea by
embankments, walls and gates, which its arrogant leaders believed
would keep them safe. But it was catastrophically flooded after a
storm and more than a thousand of its citizens were drowned. In
this case, the city survived but the land on which it sits is sinking
faster than anywhere else in the world, while the seas keep on ris-
ing. New Orleans could soon become a contemporary Atlantis,
submerged before our eyes in the twenty-first century. And it
would not be a freak event, but the first among many inundations
of coastal cities around the globe.
