B UT when we come to the Ph?nicians we are in touch with a veritable race of seamen who to the south are in just the same relation as the Vikings are to the north. Whether they took to the sea because they longed to become great merchants, or whether they were seamen first and employed their daring to commercial benefit needs no discussion. They had the true vocation for the sea, and it was inevitable that sooner or later they must become mighty explorers and traders.
They had the real ship-love, which is the foundation of all true seamanship; they were in sympathy with the life and work, and they knew how to build a ship well. They furnished themselves with the finest timber from Lebanon and surpassed the Egyptian inland sailors by making their craft stronger, longer, more seaworthy, and more able to endure the long, daring voyages which it delighted the Ph?nicians to undertake. Similarly, their crews were better trained to sea-work, were more daring and skilful than the Nile-dwellers. They minded not to sail out of sight of land, nor lay-to for the darkness to pass away. They were wont to sail the open sea fearlessly direct from19 Tyre or Sidon to Cyprus, and thence to the promontories of Lycia and Rhodes, and so from island to island to the lands of the Acheans, the Daneans, and further yet to Hesperia. How did they do it? What were their means and methods for navigation?
The answer is simply made. They observed the position of the sun by day. They would watch when the sun rose, when it became south, when it set, and then by night there was the Great Bear by which to steer. Their ships they designated “sea-horses,” and the expression is significant as denoting strength, speed, and reliability. By their distant voyages the Ph?nicians began to open out the world, and they contributed to geographical knowledge more than all the Egyptian dynasties put together had ever yielded under this category. Their earliest craft were little more than mere open boats which were partially decked. Made of fir or cedar cut into planks, which were fashioned into craft all too soon before the wood had sufficient time to become seasoned, they were caulked probably with bitumen, a poor substitute for vegetable tar. We know from existing illustrations that the Egyptian influence as to design was obvious in their ships. We know also that the thirty or more oarsmen sat not paddling, but rowing facing aft, and that they used the boomless squaresail and shortened sail by means of brails.
“The first considerable improvement in shipbuilding which can be confidently ascribed to the Ph?nicians,” says Professor Rawlinson,1 “is the construction of biremes. Ph?nician biremes are represented in the Assyrian sculptures as early as the time of Sennacherib (700 B.C.), and had probably then been in use for some considerable period. They were at first comparatively short vessels, but seem to have been decked,20 the rowers working in the hold. They sat at two elevations, one above the other, and worked their oars through holes in the vessel’s side. It was in frail barks of this description, not much better than open boats in the earlier period, that the mariners of Ph?nicia, and especially those of Sidon, as far back as the thirteenth or fourteenth century before our era, affronted the perils of the Mediterranean.”
At first the Ph?nicians confined their voyages to the limits of the western end of the Mediterranean, but even then, notwithstanding their superiority in seamanship and navigation, they suffered many a disaster at sea. Three hundred ships were lost in a storm off Mt. Athos when they first attempted to invade Greece. And on their second attempt six hundred more ships were lost off Magnesia and Eub?a. In addition to this, it must be presumed that the rocks and shoals of the ?gean Sea, the cruel coasts of Greece, Spain, Italy, Crete, and Asia Minor would account for a good many more losses of ships and men. In those days, too, when one ship on meeting another used to ask in perfect candour if the latter were a pirate, and received an equally candid answer, there was thus a further risk to be undergone by all who used the sea for their living. If the ship were in fact piratical and her commander considered himself the stronger of the two, his crew would waste little time, but promptly board the other ship, confiscate her cargo, bind the seamen and sell them off at the nearest slave market. And be it remembered that a Ph?nician ship, inasmuch as she was usually full of goods recently purchased or about to be sold, was something worth capturing. Her cargo of rich merchandise was deserving of a keen struggle and the loss of a number of men.
Nor were the Ph?nicians averse from reckoning slaves among their commodities for barter; indeed,21 this was a great and important feature of their trade. Away they went roaming the untracked seas with their powerful oarsmen and single squaresail and their hulls well filled with valuable commodities, “freighting their vessels,” as Herodotus relates, “with the wares of Egypt and Assyria” for the Greek consumer. Year after year the ships sailed forth from Tyre to traverse the whole length of the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic northwards to the British Isles, through storm and tempest, to embark the cargoes of tin. To be able to perform such a voyage not once but time after time is sufficient proof of the seamanship and navigation of the crews no less than of the seaworthiness of the Ph?nician craft. Even that most wonderful circumnavigation of Africa by the Ph?nicians as given by Herodotus is regarded by Grote, Rawlinson, and other authorities as having actually occurred and being not a mere figment of imagination. The story may be briefly summed up thus. Neco, King of Egypt, was anxious to have a means of connecting the Red Sea and Mediterranean by water, but had failed in his efforts to make a canal between the Nile and the Gulf of Suez, so he resolved that the circumnavigation of Africa should be attempted. For this he needed the world’s finest seamen and navigators with the best ocean-going ships available. Accordingly he chose the Ph?nicians, who, departing from a Red Sea port, coasted round Africa, and after nearly three years arrived safely back in Egypt. The obvious question which the reader will ask is how could such craft possibly carry enough food for three years. The answer is that they did not even attempt such a feat. Instead, they used to make some harbour after part of their voyage was accomplished, land, sow their grain, wait till harvest-time, and then sail off with their food on board all ready for a further instalment of the journey. And22 there is really nothing too wonderful in this long voyage when we remember that in Africa what is to-day called Indian corn can be reaped six weeks after being sown; and that three years is not such an excessively long time for a well-manned craft fitted with mast and squaresail to coast from headland to headland, across all the bays and bights of the African continent. A great achievement it certainly was, not to be attempted (unless history is woefully silent) again until towards the close of the fifteenth century, when Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope.
They had for years been wont in the Mediterranean to make voyages by night. They had steered their course by aid of the Polar star. “They undoubtedly,” remarks Professor Rawlinson, “from an ancient date made themselves charts of the seas which they frequented, calculated distances, and laid down the relative position of place to place. Strabo says that the Sidonians especially cultivated the arts of astronomy and arithmetic as being necessary for reckoning a ship’s course, and particularly needed in sailing by night.” Later on we shall again call attention to the great surprise which confronted the dwellers by the Mediterranean when they voyaged into other seas. The Ph?nicians, so long as they cruised only in the former, had no tide to contend with; but when they set forth into the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic, and the English Channel, they found a factor which, hitherto, they had not been compelled to encounter. But by such a seafaring race it was not long before even this new consideration was dealt with and utilised in the proper manner. “They noted,” says Rawlinson, “the occurrence of spring and neap tides, and were aware of the connection with the position of the sun and moon relatively to the earth, but they made the mistake of supposing that the spring tides were highest23 at the summer solstice, whereas they are really highest in December.”
If we omit the Egyptians from our category as being almost exclusively inland navigators, we must regard these Ph?nicians as historically the first great seamen of the world, and it is nothing short of remarkable that in an age such as theirs, when there were so few accessories to encourage and develop the marine instinct, they should have essayed so much and succeeded so magnificently in their projects. Remember, too, that they had something of the instinct of the engineer as well as of the seaman in their nature. It was the Ph?nicians whom Xerxes employed in 485 B.C. for the purpose of cutting a ship canal through the isthmus which joins Mt. Athos to the mainland. It was they, also, who constructed a double bridge of boats across the Hellespont to form the basis of a solid causeway, and in each of these undertakings they covered themselves with distinction.
They were no amateurs, no mere experimenters. It is certain that, in their own time, they were, even with their primitive ships, very far from primitive in their ideas of seamanship. Read the following exceedingly interesting account of one who went aboard a Ph?nician vessel and has left to posterity his impressions of his visit. The descriptive narrative reads so true and seems so perfectly spontaneous and natural that we almost forget the many centuries which have elapsed since it was set down. Here, then, you have the record of no less a person than Xenophon, a man who was far too discriminating to allow any flow of careless words, far too observant, also, to allow anything worth noting to escape his watchful eye. In “The Economist” he makes one of his characters refer to a Ph?nician trireme, and he is speaking of that nation’s ships when the Ph?nicians were under the Persian system:—
24 “Or2 picture a trireme, crammed choke-ful of mariners; for what reason is she so terror-striking an object to her enemies, and a sight so gladsome to the eyes of friends? Is it not that the gallant ship sails so swiftly? And why is it that, for all their crowding, the ship’s company cause each other no distress? Simply that there, as you see them, they sit in order; in order bend to the oar; in order recover the stroke; in order step on board; in order disembark.”
And again:—
“I must tell you, Socrates, what strikes me as the finest and most accurate arrangement of goods and furniture it was ever my fortune to set eyes on, when I went as a sightseer on board the great Ph?nician merchantman and beheld an endless quantity of goods and gear of all sorts, all separately packed and stowed away within the smallest compass. I need scarce remind you (he said, continuing his narrative) what a vast amount of wooden spars and cables a ship depends on in order to get to moorings; or again, in putting out to sea: you know the host of sails and cordage, rigging as they call it, she requires for sailing; the quantity of engines and machinery of all sorts she is armed with in case she should encounter any hostile craft; the infinitude of arms she carries, with her crew of fighting men aboard. Then all the vessels and utensils, such as people use at home on land, required for the different messes, form a portion of the freight; and besides all this, the hold is heavy laden with a mass of merchandise, the cargo proper, which the master carries with him for the sake of traffic. Well, all these different things that I have named lay packed there in a space but little larger than a fair-sized dining-room.25 The several sorts, moreover, as I noticed, lay so well arranged, there could be no entanglement of one with other, nor were searchers needed; and if all were snugly stowed, all were alike get-at-able, much to the avoidance of delay if anything were wanted on the instant. Then the pilot’s mate—the look-out man at the prow, to give him his proper title—was, I found, so well acquainted with the place for everything that, even off the ship, he could tell you where each set of things was laid and how many there were of each, just as well as anyone who knows his alphabet could tell you how many letters there are in Socrates, and the order in which they stand. I saw this same man (continued Ischomachus) examining at leisure everything which could possibly be needful for the service of the ship. His inspection caused me such surprise, I asked him what he was doing, whereupon he answered, ‘I am looking to see, stranger, in case anything should happen, how everything is arranged in the ship, and whether anything is wanting or not lying handy and shipshape. There is no time left, you know, when God makes a tempest in the great deep, to set about searching for what you want or to be giving out anything which is not snug and shipshape in its place.’”
There was something, then, so excellent in arrangement in these Ph?nician ships which seemed to Xenophon so superior to the vessels of his own countrymen; and the sailor-like neatness and systematic order were to him so striking that even to his disciplined and orderly mind they were most remarkable. It requires but little imagination to picture from this scant reference the ship’s company doing everything according to drill. The seaman-like care for the running gear on the part of the ship’s husband ready for any emergency is, indeed, highly suggestive.
26 The importance of the Ph?nicians is considerable, not merely for their own sake, but because of their permanent influence on the Greeks. But the latter were rather fighters than explorers as compared with the Ph?nicians. At a very early date there was the sea communication between the Mediterranean and the North, and we may date this certainly as far back as the year 2000 B.C., suggests Dr. Nansen, himself an explorer and student of the early voyagers. The only places, excluding China, whence tin-ore was known to be procurable in ancient times, he asserts, were North-West Spain, Cornwall, and probably Brittany. It is significant that in the oldest pyramid-graves of Egypt tin is found, and the inference is that the inhabitants of the Mediterranean from at least this epoch voyaged north to fetch this commodity from Western Europe. And with the tin came also supplies of amber as well. Arch?ological finds, affirms the same authority, prove that as far back as the Scandinavian Bronze Age, or prior to this, there must have been some sort of communication between the Mediterranean and northern lands. One of the earliest trade routes connecting the Mediterranean and the Baltic was from the Black Sea up the Dneiper, then along its tributary the Bug to the Vistula, and down the latter to the coast. By their sea-voyages to distant lands the Ph?nicians contributed for the first time a great deal of geographical knowledge of the world, and in many ways influenced Greek geography. Up till then the learned men who applied themselves to such subjects had but the vaguest idea of the North. But just as in subsequent centuries the Spanish kept their explored regions to themselves and continued most cautious lest other nationalities should learn their sources of wealth, so the Ph?nicians did their best to keep their trade routes secret lest their rivals, the Greeks, should step in and enrich themselves.27 In the absence, therefore, of anything sufficiently definite, there was for a long period a good deal of wild and inaccurate speculation.
But it is when we come to Pytheas of Massilia that we reach the border-line which separates fact from fable. This eminent astronomer and geographer of Marseilles brought together a knowledge of northern countries which was based not on premonition, not on speculation, not on hearsay, but on actual experience. So original, so accurate, and so far-reaching was his work, that for the next fifteen hundred years he dominated all geographical knowledge. We can fix his time if we remember that he flourished probably about the year 330 B.C. He was the first person in history to introduce astronomical measurements for ascertaining the geographical situation of a place, and thus became the founder of the science of navigation—the science which has enabled seas to be crossed in safety and continents to be discovered; which has given to the ship of all species a freedom to employ her speed without sacrificing safety. Indirectly arising from these may be traced the development and civilising and peopling of the world which have so entirely modified history.
By means of a great gnomon, Pytheas determined “with surprising accuracy” the latitude of Marseilles, and in relation to this laid down the latitude of more northerly places. He observed that the Pole of the heavens did not coincide, as the earlier astronomer Eudoxus had supposed, with any star. What Pytheas did find was that it made an almost regular rectangle with three stars lying near it. (At that time the Pole was some distance from the present Pole-star.) And since Pytheas steered by the stars, the Pole of the heavens was obviously of the highest importance to him. A gnomon, it may be explained, was the pillar of projection which cast the shadow on the various Greek28 forms of dial. In the case under discussion the gnomon was a vertical column raised on a plane.
As to the species of ship in which Pytheas sailed we can but speculate. Most probably it was somewhat similar to the Ph?nician type, with oarsmen and one mast with squaresail. But what is known is that he sailed out through the Pillars of Hercules. At that date Cape St. Vincent—then known as the Sacred Promontory—was the furthest of the world’s limit in the minds of the Greeks. He was the first to sail along the coasts of Northern Gaul and Germany. He was the discoverer of at least most of Great Britain, the Shetlands, and Norway as far as the Arctic Circle. And as he voyaged he studied the phenomena of the sea—collected invaluable data as to tides and their origin. Himself a Greek and unaccustomed to tidal movements, he was the first of his race to connect this systematic flowing and ebbing of the sea with the moon. Dr. Nansen, himself the greatest explorer of our times, has not hesitated to describe Pytheas as “one of the most capable and undaunted explorers the world has ever seen.” But as so often happens in the case of a pioneer, Pytheas was ahead of his time, and the description which he brought back of his travels, of the strange lands and unheard-of phenomena, was not believed by his contemporaries. There followed, therefore, a gulf of incredulity for about three hundred years till we come to the time of Julius C?sar, and from that point we shall, in due course, continue to trace the development of navigational science.