Henriette Mertz (1898-1982) During World War II she worked as a code-breaker in the U.S. government’s cryptography department, while later she became an American patent lawyer in Chicago. Her interest in archaeology led her to be the first[396][397] to propose that Odysseus, after wandering about the Atlantic, was the earliest European to set foot in America: an idea now taken up by others including Enrico
Mattievich[400].

Mertz recognised that ancient America was host to guests if not residents from both east and west and has written[398] on the evidence for the existence of persistent pre-Columbian Chinese contacts. Her book The Mystic Symbol[621] argues that some early Christians fled to America to escape persecution in the Roman Empire.

Her reputation as a serial heretic also forced her to privately publish a volume[399] on Atlantis following rejection by twenty publishers. She gave a lecture on her views in London in 1964 and enjoyed extensive coverage in the Greek press including the
serialisation of her book.

Mertz’s contention is that Atlantis was located in the southeast of the United States. She begins with the legend of the Seven Cities of Antillia and its depiction on the 1436 map of Andrea Bianco. A comparison of this map with a modern map of Florida convinced her that they referred to the same region. She discusses many aspects of Plato’s story and their compatibility with the archaeology, geography and legends of her chosen location. She also offers a map of Atlantis that encompasses the land bound by the Mississippi, Ohio and Potomac rivers as well as the Atlantic giving us the ‘island’ of Atlantis. To support this possibility she ingeniously suggests that Plato used the word
‘sea’ in the sense of being navigable and so applicable to rivers.