II. ICTIS AND THE BRITISH TRADE IN TIN
Let us now consider the British trade in tin.
I. Diodorus Siculus[2342] states, on the authority of Timaeus, who derived his information on this matter from Pytheas,[2343] that tin was conveyed by the people of Belerium (the Land’s End) in wagons at low tide from the British mainland to an island called Ictis; purchased there by merchants from the natives; carried to Gaul; and transported on pack-horses to the mouth of the Rhône,[2344] the overland journey lasting thirty days. In another chapter[2345] he says, following Posidonius, that tin was carried from Britain to Gaul, and then conveyed on horseback to Massilia and to Narbo. Pliny[2346] states, quoting Timaeus as his authority, that there was an island called Mictis, six days’ sail from Britain, which produced tin, and to which the Britons sailed in coracles. Strabo tells us that Corbilo in the estuary of the Loire[2347] ‘was formerly an emporium’; and, as we learn from Polybius, who couples it with Narbo and Massilia, that in the time of Scipio Aemilianus it was one of the principal towns of Gaul,[2348] it is probable that it was at one period the Gallic port to which British tin, destined for the Mediterranean markets, was conveyed.[2349]
II. Now the first thing to do is to identify Ictis or Mictis; for it is admitted that they were the same.[2350] According to Elton[2351] and Professor Rhys,[2352] Ictis was the Isle of Thanet. ‘The important point’, says Elton, ‘remains that the tin ... was stored at some place, which was supposed to have lain at six days’ voyage from the mineral district; and it seems reasonable to identify it with the Isle of Thanet, at which the marts were established from which the merchants made the shortest passage to Gaul.’ But there is no evidence that ‘the marts were established’ in the Isle of Thanet, or that ‘the merchants made the shortest passage to Gaul’; nor is there one word in Pliny (whose statement shall be considered presently) to justify Elton in stating as a ‘fact’ that the tin was ‘stored at some place which was supposed to have lain at six days’ voyage from the mineral district’.[2353] The view that Ictis was the Isle of Thanet is absolutely untenable. ‘If,’ says Professor Ridgeway,[2354] ‘it was Thanet, it follows that the tin was brought all the way from Devon, which was impossible, as the great forest of Anderida stretched right from Hampshire into Kent.’ Formerly the professor held that ‘the only difficulty in identifying Ictis with the Isle of Wight is the statement of Diodorus ... that the tin was conveyed across to the island at low water’; for ‘geologists maintain that Wight could not have been joined to the mainland in historic times’. Geologists, however, as we shall presently see, have changed their minds; and accordingly Professor Ridgeway has changed his. I shall therefore only take account of those parts of his argument which are not obsolete. ‘Mr. Elton,’ he observes, ‘seems to forget that if the Britons brought the tin a six days’ voyage from Cornwall to Thanet, there would be no need to bring it overland by waggons across the estuary at low water.... Diodorus and Timaeus are substantially agreed that there was an island where the tin came to market, and that its name was Ictis or Mictis.... The tin could not be carried overland on account of the forests, and they certainly would not convey it all round the south and south-east coasts to the Straits, and then round the coast of Gaul to Corbilo, if it was at all possible to get across at a nearer point. The passage from the Isle of Wight to the Channel Islands, and thence to Armorica and Corbilo, would best attain this object.’ Professor Ridgeway then invokes numismatic evidence. He states that Gallic coins of a peculiar type have been found in the southern and western parts of England, in the Channel Islands, and in the territories of the Turones, Pictones, Redones, Namnetes, all the tribes of the Armorican peninsula, and the Volcae Tectosages. ‘Follow the peoples enumerated above on the map,’ he says, ‘and we shall find them all lying in the basins of the Garonne and Loire.... This evidence, then, points unmistakably to a route direct from Armorica to the southern coast of Britain, or, in other words, supports strongly the doctrine that the Isle of Wight was the island called Ictis.’[2355]
Professor Ridgeway’s arguments, as directed against the theory of Elton and Professor Rhys, are conclusive. Ictis was certainly not Thanet. But the argument which he adduces from numismatic evidence in favour of its identification with the Isle of Wight rests upon the assumption that the coins in question could not have found their way to the Channel Islands except in the course of the tin trade. The Dumnonii, in whose country the tin was produced, had no coinage of their own, and apparently made little use of money:[2356] the coins to which Professor Ridgeway alludes were far later than the time of Pytheas; and the professor himself affirms that in the time of Posidonius, whom he wrongly regards as Diodorus’s authority for the description of Ictis, the route from Ictis to Corbilo had been abandoned. Nor is it easy to understand why the traders who conveyed tin from Cornwall to Marseilles should have needlessly added between 300 and 400 miles to the length and a corresponding amount to the expense of the journey. Professor Ridgeway has himself made use of this very argument to prove that Ictis was not the Isle of Thanet: can he not see that it tells with equal force against his own theory, that Ictis was the Isle of Wight?[2357]
Mr. Alfred Tylor[2358] insists that ‘St. Michael’s Mount’, which was formerly identified with Ictis, ‘is a steep rock, and does not form a harbour at all.’ What if it is a steep rock? Does not Thucydides[2359] tell us that the Phoenicians ‘fortified headlands on the sea-coast [of Sicily], and settled in the small islands adjacent, for the sake of trading with the Sicels’?[2360] Nobody who knows St. Michael’s Mount will contend that there would have been the slightest difficulty in conveying tin on to the small plain on its landward side,[2361] or in loading with tin vessels moored beneath it. Diodorus Siculus does not mention any harbour in connexion with Ictis; but, as a writer who knew every inch of the Cornish coast long ago pointed out, St. Michael’s Mount afforded perfect shelter for shipping.[2362] ‘It still,’ says Sir Charles Lyell,[2363] ‘affords a good port, daily frequented by vessels, where cargoes of tin are sometimes taken on board, after having been transported, as in the olden time, at low tide across the isthmus.[2364] Colliers of 500 tons’ burden can now enter the harbour, which is on the landward or sheltered side of the Mount.’
But the Isle of Wight has recently found a new champion,—the eminent geologist, Mr. Clement Reid.[2365] He affirms that at the time when tin was shipped at Ictis, ‘St. Michael’s Mount must have been an isolated rock rising out of a swampy wood.’ By an interesting process of reasoning, based upon evidence which he collected while revising ‘the geological map of the northern part of the Isle of Wight’, and afterwards while mapping ‘the whole of the adjacent parts of the mainland’, he arrives at the conclusion that about 100 B.C. a limestone causeway, over which wagons could pass at low tide, extended from the western side of the river Yar to the coast of Hampshire opposite Pennington Marshes. He explains that the tin was transported by this causeway to the Isle of Wight instead of being shipped in one of the Hampshire harbours because the latter ‘are all more or less exposed to the prevalent south-west wind, and are sheltered by no high land’, and, moreover, ‘the harbours outside the Solent were probably always rendered dangerous by bars of sand and shingle.’ Finally, he contends that the identification of Ictis with the Isle of Wight shows that ‘the ancient writers can be literally depended on, and that their descriptions are thoroughly in keeping with each other’. Pliny was right in saying that Mictis ‘is distant inwards from Britain six days’ voyage’, for ‘six days’ coasting from the mouth of the Exe would amply suffice to bring boats to the Isle of Wight’; and since ‘a coasting trade of this sort would go direct to the Isle of Wight side of the Solent’, Pliny’s account, which is based on Timaeus, naturally makes ‘no mention of the causeway alluded to by Diodorus, writing at a later date’. (Mr. Reid presumably means, not that Diodorus wrote later than Pliny, but that Posidonius, whom he assumes to have been Diodorus’s authority, wrote later than Timaeus.) Caesar is right in saying that tin was found in the interior, ‘for he refers to the British part of the trade-route,’ that is to say, the (assumed) overland journey from Cornwall to the Hampshire coast. Diodorus is right because the limestone causeway answers to his description.
I submit that whoever is right, Mr. Clement Reid is wrong, because the only equipment which he brings to the discussion is the special knowledge of the geologist. Doubtless he has proved the former existence of a causeway between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight; but it does not follow that the Isle of Wight was Ictis unless it can be proved that ‘St. Michael’s Mount must have been an isolated rock rising out of a swampy wood’.
Can this be proved? I have searched all the relevant geological and geographical literature, and have failed to find any evidence in support of Mr. Reid’s assertion. The testimony of geologists, except Mr. Reid, is all the other way. Sir Charles Lyell,[2366] Mr. Pengelley,[2367] and Mr. Ussher[2368] of the Geological Survey all hold that since the time when tin was shipped at Ictis, St. Michael’s Mount has undergone no sensible change. But Mr. Reid has recently been revising the old geological survey of Cornwall; and he tells me that he reached his conclusion by calculating the rate at which the sea washed away alluvium which once connected St. Michael’s Mount with the mainland. Moreover, although he does not actually rely upon the hoary fable, demolished by Max Müller, of ‘the Hoar Rock in the Wood’, he laid stress in conversation with me upon the prevalence in Cornwall of a tradition which supported his conclusion,—a tradition which, Max Müller’s readers know, is simply worthless.[2369]
Now I would ask geologists whether it is not dangerous to strive after chronological precision in geological inquiries by reasoning which assumes that nature worked during a long period of remote time at a uniform rate of speed. The calculations by which Sir Archibald Geikie laboured years ago to estimate the time which the Thames occupied in excavating its valley,[2370] the calculations which geologists have made as to the time required for the deposition of the layers of stalagmite in caves,[2371] have been proved to be futile. This much at all events is certain: if Mr. Reid’s calculation is accurate, it stultifies the testimony of the ancient authors to whom he appeals.
For I would ask Mr. Reid how he proposes to reconcile his own statement, ‘that the ancient writers can be literally depended on,’ with the assumption, which he admits that he is compelled to make in order to show ‘the perfect consistency of the accounts’, that ‘Mictis and Ictis were the same island as Vectis’. Is he not aware that in Pliny’s Natural History[2372] [M]ictis and Vectis are distinguished? If he had studied Müllenhoff’s great work, he would not have attempted to reconcile Pliny’s account of the six days’ voyage to [M]ictis with Diodorus’s account, which ‘mentions only the causeway to Ictis’, by assuming that the writer whom Diodorus followed lived two centuries later than Timaeus. For Diodorus’s account was not, as Mr. Reid fancies, based upon Posidonius; he also, like Pliny, derived his information immediately from Timaeus, ultimately from Pytheas. Not less hopeless is Mr. Reid’s attempt to explain Pliny’s account of the voyage to [M]ictis. How could the Isle of Wight be described as ‘distant inwards from Britain six days’ voyage’? Because, says Mr. Reid, ‘the Isle of Wight and more easterly parts of the south of England were politically part of Gaul perhaps even at that early date [300 B.C.]; the tin-producing “Britain” was apparently outside the dominion of the Belgae, and must have been Devon and Cornwall.’ This argument rests upon a doubtful ‘perhaps’, an obscure ‘apparently’, a desperate ‘must have been’, and the baseless assumption that the Belgae had established dominion in Britain in the time of Pytheas: it leaves the word ‘inwards’ unexplained; and it is pulverized by the mere fact that in the very chapter from which Mr. Reid is quoting and everywhere else Pliny uses the word Britain not in the sense of ‘Devon and Cornwall’, but simply in the sense of Britain. To any man who is not obliged to distort the plain meaning of words it is clear that, from Pliny’s point of view, Ictis was six days’ sail from Britain, and that by ‘inwards’ he meant, speaking from the standpoint of an Italian, ‘northward.’ Thus London might be intelligibly described as fifty-two miles ‘inwards’ from Brighton; but to say that Brighton is a day’s sail ‘inwards’ from Portsmouth would be gibberish. As Müllenhoff has pointed out, Pliny confounded the distance of Ictis from Britain with that of Thule.[2373]
Enough of Mr. Reid’s attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. Like Professor Ridgeway, he does not explain why men of business preferred to pay the cost of the long voyage from the Isle of Wight to the mouth of the Loire, when they need only have paid for the shorter voyage from Cornwall, or why they chose to saddle themselves with the cost of the overland transport from Cornwall to Hampshire. Nor does he explain why this imaginary and expensive overland transport was substituted for the imaginary coasting voyage. Nor again does he explain how wagons, loaded with tin (for Diodorus does not speak of pack-horses except in connexion with the journey across Gaul), were able to travel two hundred miles along unmetalled trackways. The rate at which they crawled, the numerous breaks down, the curses of the drivers, and the wear and tear of the cattle I leave to Mr. Reid’s imagination. The eminent archaeologist, Mr. C. H. Read, who accepts Mr. Reid’s conclusions, assures us that a voyage from St. Michael’s Mount to the mouth of the Loire is not to be thought of, for it would have involved a ‘long and dangerous sea passage’.[2374] Is he serious? This long sea passage was far shorter than the passage from the Isle of Wight: why it was more dangerous than a passage which involved navigation in the neighbourhood of the Channel Islands as well as of Ushant no seaman will be able to understand. The passage which seems so terrible to Mr. Read was made by Pytheas.[2375] The passage from Italy to Sardinia was longer: several times longer was the passage from Britain to Iceland, which was made long before the invention of the compass;[2376] as long or longer the passage from Scandinavia to Britain, which was made, according to Mr. Read himself,[2377] in the Bronze Age. That the Veneti should have been quite willing to sail from the Isle of Wight to the Loire, but so afraid of sailing in their stout ships from Cornwall that they deliberately added more than a hundred miles to the length of their voyage, is a mystery which Mr. Read must be left to explain.
But Mr. Reid, in the conversation which passed between us, urged reasons in favour of his theory which are omitted in his paper and to which I shall endeavour to do justice. Archaeological evidence, he remarked, shows that the people of Cornwall were far more uncivilized than those of Hampshire: even supposing that St. Michael’s Mount was an island, it had no real harbour; and it would have been very dangerous for mariners to attempt to get there especially in a fog or a south-westerly gale. I reply that it would also have been dangerous in such weather to attempt to fetch the coast of the Isle of Wight, as the ship would have incurred the risk of running a-tilt against the limestone causeway; that in a fog the skipper would have anchored; and that, notwithstanding the lack of a proper harbour, the ship would have lain snugly in sheltered water under the lee of St. Michael’s Mount. The comparative barbarism of the people of Cornwall is irrelevant: as they wanted to sell their tin, there was no danger that they would molest their customers. Besides, Mr. Reid seems to forget that the people who produced the tin delivered it to the traders at Ictis. The traders transacted business directly with them; and, assuming that Ictis was the Isle of Wight, they were as barbarous when they had crossed the limestone causeway as they had been when they left the tin mines. Mr. Reid’s argument compels him once more to throw overboard the ancient authority, who, as he insists, ‘can be literally depended on’; for Diodorus distinctly states that the tin-mining inhabitants of Belerium were friendly to strangers, and from their intercourse with foreign merchants had become comparatively civilized.[2378] This passage proves that, according to Diodorus, Ictis was in the territory of Belerium, and by itself demolishes Mr. Reid’s theory. For how could the inhabitants have become civilized by their commercial dealings if the merchants never came near Belerium, and the only inhabitants who came in contact with them were wagoners or boatmen?
It is clear then that the case for the Isle of Wight rests upon the geological evidence, such as it is, that at the time when Ictis was a trading station, St. Michael’s Mount was ‘an isolated rock rising out of a swampy wood’. Common sense and the historical evidence are all on the other side. If St. Michael’s Mount had not been available, there would have been nothing to prevent the traders from shipping the tin at Falmouth or in Plymouth Sound; and acceptance of Mr. Reid’s theory involves, besides other insuperable difficulties, the assumption that the tin-merchants were ignorant of the first principles of business.
III. We now come to the question, When did the overland trade in tin between Corbilo and Massilia begin, and how long did it last? That it existed before the time of Pytheas—that is to say, at least as early as the fourth century before Christ—is certain;[2379] for, as we have seen, Pliny and Diodorus Siculus derived their information about Ictis ultimately from him.[2380] Müllenhoff,[2381] indeed, contends for a still earlier date. Only on this hypothesis, he argues, can we explain the remarkable fact that the great Celtic immigration at the beginning of the fourth century B.C. not only did no harm to Massilia but actually increased its prosperity, the profits of the trade being appreciated by the Celts themselves. Still, there is no evidence that it existed (except in the form of intertribal barter) before the foundation of Massilia, or even that it had begun long before Pytheas visited Britain.
Professor Ridgeway insists that it is ‘obvious that when the Belgic tribes ... made permanent settlements on the south-east coast of Britain, the course of trade would pass regularly from Kent into Northern France, and that the old route by Armorica, Corbilo, and the Loire would fall into disuse’.[2382] If anything is ‘obvious’, it is that the course of trade would continue to follow the most convenient route, and that merchants would not saddle themselves with the expense of conveying tin, destined for Mediterranean markets, all the way from Cornwall to Kent. Besides, how was it to be conveyed thither? Certainly not by land; for Professor Ridgeway tells us himself that the barrier interposed by the great forest of Anderida would have rendered this impossible.[2383] Certainly not by sea; for, unless the merchants had taken leave of their senses, why should they have paid for the voyage from Cornwall to Kent, then for the voyage from Kent to Boulogne, and then for the long overland journey to Marseilles, when, by taking the route which led from St. Michael’s Mount to the mouth of the Loire, both the voyage and the land journey would have been considerably shortened? If Caesar does not expressly mention Corbilo, neither does he expressly mention any other commercial port; and he does imply that the Veneti had the lion’s share of the carrying trade with Britain.[2384] Possibly Corbilo had lost its importance by the time of Caesar; but the estuary of the Loire still formed one of the two most important harbours in the west of Gaul, and Strabo mentions it as one of the four principal Gallic ports from which ships bound for Britain set sail.[2385] The argument based upon the fact that the overland journey lasted thirty days implies that the merchants would have deliberately preferred a longer to a shorter route; and as the distance from the mouth of the Loire to Massilia was about four hundred and eighty miles in a straight line, it does not seem incredible that the journey should have lasted thirty days. But what puzzles me most in Professor Ridgeway’s argument is that, while it is partly based upon the testimony of Diodorus, it sets that testimony at defiance. The professor holds that the authority whom Diodorus followed was Posidonius. If so, Posidonius stated that in his time British tin was shipped for the Continent at Ictis. Now Professor Ridgeway identifies Ictis with the Isle of Wight. I have shown that Ictis was St. Michael’s Mount. But, according to Professor Ridgeway, British tin was shipped, in the time of Posidonius, neither at the Isle of Wight, nor at St. Michael’s Mount, but in Kent.[2386] The train of thought which led to this conclusion is one which my poor brain is powerless to follow.[2387]
Professor Haverfield[2388] affirms that the Roman annexation of Gallia Narbonensis ‘secured that trade route by which Diodorus Siculus tells us that British tin reached the Mediterranean, that is the route from Narbo by the “pass of Carcassonne” and Toulouse to Bordeaux’; but I cannot find any evidence that this was the route to which Diodorus referred.
Professor Rhys[2389] has constructed a theory about the course of the tin trade during the maritime supremacy of the Veneti which is even more remarkable than that of Professor Ridgeway. He tells us that ‘at one time they probably landed British tin at the mouth of [the Loire] ... and they fetched some of it at any rate from the south-east of Britain’. In other words, the tin was conveyed at heavy cost by the Britons three hundred miles from Cornwall to the south-east of Britain, in order that the Veneti might add at least two hundred miles to the voyage which they would have undertaken if they had fetched it direct from Cornwall; and this was done although, as Professor Rhys himself assures us, there was ‘communication between the Dumnonii [of Cornwall] and the nearest part of Gaul during the Venetic period’. The professor adds that ‘whatever direct trade in tin there may have been between the tin districts of Britain and the Loire, it must have been utterly unknown to Caesar’. I reply that if, as Professor Rhys holds, there was trade in tin by way of South-Eastern Britain between the tin districts of Britain and the Loire, this trade also must, on Professor Rhys’s theory, have been unknown to Caesar, for he mentions neither the one nor the other; but that the voyage which Crassus made to the tin-producing districts of Cornwall, and about which Caesar is equally silent, shows that Caesar was not ignorant, but merely reticent.
But Professor Ridgeway would assign a different reason for Caesar’s silence. Remarking that ‘when Strabo, writing as a contemporary, is describing the exports from Britain, he omits the mention of tin, whilst from the extract from Posidonius, quoted alike by him and Diodorus, it is plain that when the Stoic explorer visited North-Western Europe, the British tin trade was still of importance’, the professor suggests that in the time of Caesar Britain ceased to export tin.[2390] But did not Strabo write long after Caesar died? Professor Haverfield, on the other hand, has given reasons for the view that ‘the early Cornish tin trade, which Posidonius and Caesar knew, died out about the beginning of our era’; and he suggests that it may have done so because the Romans had just discovered ‘the real site of the Cassiterides in N. W. Spain’.[2391] ‘Very little,’ he remarks, ‘has been found west of Exeter which can be connected with the first two centuries of the Roman Empire.... Plainly the Romans of the conquest period did not care to advance beyond Exeter.... Yet if the tin trade had then been flourishing they would hardly have stopped. We must put the halt at Exeter beside the silence of the writers after Caesar, and suppose that for some reason the tin trade had ceased in Cornwall. Perhaps as iron took the place of bronze in many lands tin was no longer in such demand; perhaps the Spanish ore was cheaper than the Cornish; perhaps the accessible Cornish tin streams seemed exhausted. Whatever the reason, the Cornish tin trade vanished before A.D. 50. It reappears two centuries later.’[2392]
Now the evidence that Professor Haverfield offers of its having reappeared is simply the discovery of one inscribed ingot of Cornish tin, which belonged to the fourth century; and if no inscribed ingots of an earlier date have been found, their absence hardly proves that the Romans had not worked the mines before. This Professor Haverfield admits; but, he insists, ‘it does prove that we have no right to say that mining was going on.’[2393] Possibly: but if so, the absence of inscribed ingots of tin in Spain[2394] equally proves that we have no right to say that mining was going on there. Yet, if it was suspended in Cornwall, it must have been contemporaneously active in Spain. It is true that no Roman antiquities of earlier date than the third century have been found in Cornwall, except some Samian ware and coins of Trajan and Vespasian;[2395] and it may be true that, as the professor says, these discoveries ‘prove no Roman influence or occupation’:[2396] but, on the other hand, Cornwall has very few Roman antiquities even of the third and fourth centuries,[2397] and no Roman or Romanized towns or villas.[2398] Is it not then possible that, as Professor Gowland suggests, the mines were worked throughout the whole period of the Roman occupation of Britain, but not under Roman control?[2399] He points out that ‘the stamps had been impressed [upon the solitary ingot] when the metal was cold, and hence not necessarily at the mine, but very probably by a Roman trader or officer at the coast’.[2400] Professor Haverfield indeed states that the ingot was found not more than a mile and a half from ‘an old working’, which has yielded Roman coins:[2401] but Professor Gowland supports his own view by the argument that ‘at the Roman lead mines in Britain the inscriptions were always cast on the ingots of lead when they were made, and at the copper mines were stamped on the cakes of copper while they were red hot’. ‘The real site of the Cassiterides’ was not, as Professor Haverfield thinks, ‘in N. W. Spain,’ but in the British Isles. ‘The silence of the writers after Caesar’ in regard to the British trade in tin, on which he lays stress, really resolves itself into the silence of Strabo; for although the professor is quite right in saying that ‘later authors [namely, Diodorus, Strabo, and Pliny] merely include it in quotations from earlier literature’, those who are familiar with their writings will admit that there was no reason why any of them, except Strabo, should have expressly added to those quotations the information that the British tin trade continued in their own time. We should certainly have expected that Strabo would have included tin in his list of British exports if it had been exported in his time; and I will not attempt to explain away his silence: but can it outweigh the extreme improbability that for two centuries the civilized world should have been entirely cut off from one of the two sources from which its supply of tin had previously been derived? And when Professor Haverfield suggests that ‘as iron took the place of bronze in many lands, tin was no longer in such demand’, does he not momentarily forget that not only in the lands round the Mediterranean but also in those of Northern and Western Europe iron had taken the place of bronze for many purposes several centuries before the Christian era, and that, on the other hand, those implements and ornaments which were still made wholly or in part of bronze were probably in greater demand than before?
IV. We have now to deal with the Phoenicians. Sir George Cornewall Lewis[2402] and various other writers have endeavoured to prove that the Phoenicians (including the Carthaginians) never traded directly with Britain for tin; and in 1896 Dr. Arthur Evans remarked that ‘the days are gone past when it could be seriously maintained that the Phoenician merchant landed on the coast of Cornwall’.[2403]
Now Dr. Evans’s distinguished father, who holds that the Cassiterides ‘are rightly identified with Britain’, observes that ‘the traces of Phoenician influence in this country are ... at present imperceptible. But,’ he continues, ‘it may well be that their system of commerce or barter was such as intentionally left the barbarian tribes with whom they traded in much the same stage of civilization as that in which they found them, always assuming that they dealt directly with Britain and not through the intervention of Gaulish merchants.’[2404]
Some merchants certainly landed, if not on the coast of Cornwall at all events on that of Ictis: is there any reason in the nature of things why Phoenician merchants should not have done so? To the old-fashioned view there are only two objections worth considering, namely, first, that ‘the tin trade was carried on overland through Gaul’,[2405] and, secondly, that the tin which was shipped to Gades may have come not from Britain but from the mines of North-Western Spain. But, as we have seen, there is no evidence that the overland trade had begun before 600 B.C.,—the approximate date of the foundation of Massilia; nor is there any evidence that the Phoenicians took part in it. From Gades to Cornwall the voyage, as George Smith observes, was shorter than the voyages ‘from Tyre to Malta, Carthage, or Sicily, which they were performing continuously’.[2406] If Desjardins[2407] is right in affirming that ‘the name Corbilo unquestionably looks Phoenician’, and that a Phoenician inscription has been found near Guérande, it may be inferred that the carrying trade between Britain and Corbilo was at one time either wholly or partly in Phoenician or Carthaginian hands. That tin was obtained in ancient times from the mines of North-Western Spain must be admitted: not only is the fact attested by the statements of Strabo and Pliny,[2408] but it has been proved by the researches of Mr. W. C. Borlase.[2409] But there is some evidence that tin also came from Cornwall to Gades. Festus Avienus[2410] tells us, ultimately, it may be assumed, on the authority of the Carthaginian traveller, Himilco, that both the Carthaginians and the people of Gades used to sail to the British seas.[2411] Sir George Cornewall Lewis,[2412] indeed, argues that ‘if the date of the voyages of Hanno and Himilco is correctly fixed, it follows that at a period subsequent to the expedition of Xerxes, the Carthaginians ... had not carried their navigation far along the coasts of the Atlantic; and that they sent out two voyages of discovery—one to the south, the other to the north—at the public expense’. All that we know about the date of Himilco’s voyage is that it was not later than the fifth, probably in the sixth century B. C.,[2413] and, according to Pliny,[2414] its object was ‘to explore the outer parts of Europe’. Anyhow the evidence remains that after Himilco’s time, if not before, the Carthaginians traded by sea with Britain.[2415] Dr. Arthur Evans, I know, warns us that ‘a truer view of primitive trade as passing on by inter-tribal barter has superseded the idea of a direct commerce between remote localities’.[2416] But the testimony of Diodorus, that is to say of Pytheas, proves that traders purchased tin off the Cornish coast from the natives who had prepared it for market, carried it across the Channel, and unloaded it on the coast of Gaul, whence it was conveyed overland to the mouth of the Rhône. If this was not ‘direct commerce’, what was? That there was ‘inter-tribal barter’ in ancient times, no well-informed person would deny; but that there was also ‘direct commerce between remote localities’ is as well attested as any fact of ancient history can be.
Mr. C. T. Newton indeed argues that ‘if the Phoenicians frequented any portion of the British coast, it is probable that they would have given names to the more important harbours and promontories, as they did in Africa and Spain’.[2417] But is it not also probable that they found it sufficient to hold, or even to occupy temporarily, as occasion required, one or more of the Scilly Islands, or perhaps St. Michael’s Mount, and that they may have given names to these places, although the names have not survived.[2418] Their settlements in Africa and Spain were not temporary but permanent.
I freely admit that the testimony of Festus Avienus is not conclusive; but I see no reason for rejecting the statement of Strabo that the Phoenicians traded directly for tin with the Cassiterides—that is to say, the British Isles—and that they originally monopolized the trade.
M. Salomon Reinach,[2419] who supports the view that the Phoenicians traded directly with Cornwall, insists, referring to a well-known passage in Thucydides,[2420] that the overland route must have been earlier than the maritime. ‘Corinth,’ says Thucydides, ‘being seated on an isthmus, was naturally from the first a centre of commerce; for the Hellenes within and without the Peloponnese, in the old days when they communicated chiefly by land, had to pass through her territory in order to reach one another.’[2421] M. Reinach argues that ‘nothing could have suggested to the Phoenicians the idea of going with their ships in search of tin if they had not already known the existence not only of the metal but also of the distant country which produced it ... the Phoenicians of Spain no more discovered the Cassiterides and tin than the Portuguese discovered India and spices’. This may be freely admitted. But the Phoenicians may well have acquired the knowledge upon which they acted long before the direct overland trade which Diodorus describes began. Tin was probably conveyed in very early times from Cornwall to Gaul for the use of tribes who inhabited that country before the immigration of the Celtic-speaking invaders; and, since Gaul was in communication with Britain from the beginning of the Bronze Age,[2422] the knowledge that tin was to be obtained in Britain might have reached Phoenician ears even before Gades was founded.
But the most striking contribution which M. Reinach has made to the literature of this subject is the suggestion that the traders who first sailed from the Mediterranean into the English Channel were not Phoenicians but Phrygians. Speaking of the well-known passage, which I have already quoted, in which Pliny says that Midacritus was the first who imported tin from ‘the tin island’,[2423] he argues that the generally accepted identification of Midacritus with the Phoenician Melcarth is erroneous. He points out that in Pliny’s list of discoverers all except the most famous names are accompanied by a complementary designation, for example (Toxius), Caeli filius[2424]. Therefore, even if, as has been supposed, what Pliny wrote was not Midacritus but Melicertus (Melcarth), that unfamiliar name would have been followed by some explanatory addition. M. Reinach then quotes two passages from Hyginus[2425] and Cassiodorus[2426] respectively. In the former we read that ‘King Midas, the Phrygian, son of Cybele, was the first to discover lead and tin’ (Midas rex Cybeles filius Phryx plumbum album et nigrum primus invenit); in the latter, that ‘Midas, the ruler of Phrygia, discovered tin’ ([Aes enim Ionos Thessaliae rex], plumbum Midas regnator Phrygiae reppererunt). It is clear then, says M. Reinach, that, as the Jesuit scholar, Hardouin, perceived more than two centuries ago, for Midacritus in the MSS. of Pliny we ought to read Midas Phryx. He adds that from a fragment of the Seventh Book of Diodorus, preserved in the Chronicle of Eusebius, we learn that the maritime supremacy of the Phrygians began about 903 B.C., and that of the Phoenicians in 824.[2427]