Jay,

I posted the following extract from Barry Cunliffe's The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (2001) over at GHMB about three years ago, but have decided to dust it off and post it again here seeing as it should go some way towards answering a couple of your questions. For the record, Cunliffe is Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

From Barry Cunliffe's The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (2001):

"[...] The question of the Outer Ocean had intrigued people for centuries and the Straits of Gibraltar were no significant physical barrier to passage so long as one was prepared to wait for the correct combination of wind and current. Indeed as early as the beginning of the eighth century BC the Phoenicians had established a trading post on an island off the Iberian coast well on the Atlantic side of the Pillars of Hercules. They called the place Gadir. To the Romans it was Gades and to us Cadiz. From here Phoenician ships regularly sailed north up the Atlantic coast of Iberia and south down the coast of what is now Morocco but the journeys were usually limited, probably lasting not more than a few days from the home base at Gadir.

"There were, however, exceptions. Herodotus records one remarkable event which took place during the reign of the Pharaoh Necho II (609-593) – at just about the time that Massalia [ie. Marseille] was founded. Necho, it appears, was curious about the existence of a Southern Ocean so he ordered a flotilla of Phoenician ships to assemble at the head of the Arabian Gulf to circumnavigate Africa. Herodotus’ description of this staggering expedition is commendably terse:

The Phoenicians took their departure from Egypt by way of the Erythraean Sea, and so sailed into the Southern Ocean. When autumn came they went ashore wherever they might happen to be and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited until the grain was fit to cut. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not until the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules and made good their voyage home. On their return they declared – I for my part do not believe them but others may – that in sailing round Libya [Africa] they had the sun on their right hand. In this way was the extent of Libya first discovered.

"That last observation, which stretched Herodotus’ credulity, in fact provides strong evidence of the veracity of the account because the sun would lie to the right once the travellers were south of the equator. Incredible though it seems, we must accept that these anonymous travellers made what must surely be the first circumnavigation of the African continent. The next occasion such a feat was achieved, this time from west to east, was two thousand years later. It was the journey of Necho’s mariners that provided the evidence for the continuous Southern Ocean that featured on the early Ionian maps.

"That the journey was planned from east to west may not have been entirely fortuitous. For at least two centuries the Phoenicians from Gadir had been exploring the west coast of Africa. Staying close to the coast, as was usual at the time, they would have had considerable difficulty forcing a passage southwards in the face of adverse winds and currents. Some progress could be made but they would quickly have realized that serious exploration southwards was not a realistic prospect. Even so we learn, again from Herodotus, of regular trade with natives, Carthaginian goods being exchanged for gold in a system which required each of the partners to lay out their wares and retreat. Only when one partner felt that the offered goods displayed were fair exchange for what they had laid out would they take them. Trade of this kind – silent trade as it is called – required the trust and honesty that would come only if both partners benefited and wanted the exchanges to continue.

"There were occasional attempts to push the frontiers of exploration further south beyond the coastal Sahara. Some time, probably towards the end of the fifth century, a Carthaginian entrepreneur named Hanno seems to have made major advances into the unknown though, as is so often the case, our source of information is far from satisfactory. It appears that after his safe return Hanno set up an inscription in the temple of Baal at Carthage giving a detailed account of his travels. The inscription, which no longer survives, was copied by a Greek and after much recopying, with all the opportunity of introducing error that that entails, eventually comes down to us as a manuscript written in the tenth century AD. How much derives from the original inscription, how much is added from other stories and how much is fabrication we shall never know, but there is a certain consistency about the account and most scholars are prepared to accept it as a tolerably accurate transcription of the inscription recording an actual voyage.

"The essentials of the story are easily told. The travellers set up trading bases, they were driven off by savages clad in skins, saw rivers teeming with crocodiles and hippopotamuses, watched lava from a great volcano stream into the sea and hunted creatures ‘with shaggy bodies, which our interpreters called Gorillas’. Having caught and skinned three they decided it was time to return home. How far down the African coast they had penetrated it is difficult to be sure. On a conservative estimate they must have reached Sierra Leone but it is quite conceivable that they may have got as far as Cameroon.

"Another Carthaginian who, at about the same time, ventured into the Atlantic was Himilco. Pliny the Elder simply tells us that he was sent to explore ‘the parts beyond Europe’ but a little more information is to be found embedded in a late Roman poem called Ora Maritima, written at the end of the fourth century by a North African official, Rufus Festus Avienus.

"Before we consider what Avienus tells us of Himilco’s travels it is necessary to look at the poem itself in more detail. Ora Maritima is a ponderous and sometimes repetitive account of the sea coast, starting at some point on the Atlantic seaboard and ending at Massalia. It is generally believed to have been based on an ancient ‘periplus’ – that is, an account used by sailors as a guide to coastal landmarks. If so, the document was probably written by a Massaliot mariner since it ends at his home port, which he accurately describes. But to create his over-plush fabric Avienus patched on to this basic framework other scraps of information which took his fancy, snipped out of a variety of archaic sources. To impress the reader with his erudition and deep knowledge of the obscure classics the poet lists, in a rambling prologue, the eleven ancient writers whose work he claims to have used. The result is a jumbled scissors-and-paste compilation obscure in its geography and very mediocre in its poetry. The inelegance of the work should not, however, detract from its fascination: it is a unique collection of ancient sea lore.

"There is much amusement to be hard in trying to pull the text apart into its constituent elements, so as to reconstruct the separate pieces of original source material that Avienus used. Given that he seems to have been quite careless and to have imposed his own overblown style on the composition in an attempt to give it some cohesion, the task is difficult and is made the more so by the fact that his original manuscript was no doubt copied many times, introducing untold errors, before the final version, in 714 lines, was published in Venice in 1488.

"One source that can fairly simply be separated out is a text of unknown authorship which describes the journey of Himilco into the Atlantic. It occurs in three separate places, lines 117-29, 380-89 and 406-15. The sample will give some flavour of the whole:

Himilco of Carthage reported that he had investigated the matter [the nature of the Atlantic] on a voyage, and he asserts that it can scarcely be crossed in four months. No breezes propel a craft, the sluggish liquid of the lazy sea is so at a standstill. He also adds this: a lot of seaweed floats in the water and often after the manner of a thicket holds the prow back. He says that here nonetheless the depth of the water does not extend much and the bottom is barely covered over with a little water. They always meet here and there monsters of the deep, and beasts swim amid the slow and sluggishly crawling ships. (lines 117-29)

To the west of these Pillars, Himilco reports that the swell is boundless, the sea extends widely, the salt water stretches forth. No one has approached these waters, no one has brought his keel into the sea because there are no propelling breezes at sea and no breath of heaven’s air aids the ship. Hence because a mist cloaks the air with a kind of garment, a cloud always holds the swell and persists throughout a rather humid air. (lines 380-89)

But often the salt water extends so shallowly that it scarcely covers the underlying sands. Thick seaweed often tops the sea and the tide is hindered by marshy wrack. Many a beast swims through all the sea and great fear of monsters stalks the deep. Himilco the Carthaginian reported that he had once seen and tested these things on the Ocean. These things [were] published long ago in the secret annals of the Carthaginians. (lines 406-15)

"I have quoted the texts in full to give some idea of the way that Avienus uses his sources, yet below all the verbosity it is possible to sense the substance of Himilco’s report – a four-month journey, shoals, monsters, mists, floating masses of seaweed and long days without a breath of wind. Taken at its face value it sounds as though Himilco sailed far westwards. This would make sense of Pliny’s phrase ‘to explore the parts beyond Europe’. All he found was an empty ocean bereft of anything but danger. Did he really spend four months trying to cross the Atlantic? Is he describing the Sargasso Sea with its tangle of weed and the Doldrums beyond the trade winds where a ship can become becalmed for weeks? It is certainly tempting to believe so – then what an astonishing adventure. Was it an attempt, perhaps, to discover the mythical Hesperides – the ‘islands of the blest by deep eddying Ocean’ – about which Hesiod wrote? We shall never know but our tantalizingly inadequate texts encourage the speculation [...]" (pp. 39-44).

If you found that interesting, an article by Barry Cunliffe from the February 2002 issue of British Archaeology is available on-line:

[www.britarch.ac.uk]

Regards,
Damian