Not much, indeed, can be said with certainty of what the Phenicians did truly discover. Some observations they must have made of the heavenly constellations; and the Pole-star at least must have been known to them, otherwise it is impossible to imagine how they could have steered their vessels at night, in an age when the Mariner’s Compass was unknown. They are supposed to have sailed far south on the west coast of Africa, if they did not actually round the Cape of Good Hope.
It does not appear that their knowledge was passed on to the Greek nation. Either they were curiously reticent of what they knew, or else such records as they may have left were destroyed and forgotten.
In after times the Carthaginians, descendants of Phenician Colonists, were, like their forefathers, sea-lovers, sea-explorers, searching the main, not as travellers search now from pure love of knowledge, or from a liking for adventure, but for the sake of commerce. The Carthaginians, however, instead of being able to make use of previous discoveries, and to work onwards from a point already gained, had to start afresh and to find their way—just as if it had never been found before—to and beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
To the Greek imagination that wide mysterious Ocean, opening out from the narrow Strait, was unattractive and terrible. It was a sea of limitless distances, of fog and gloom, of blackness and death; not an unexplored Ocean of possible glory and beauty and wealth.
Time glided by, and man advanced in his acquaintance with Land and Sea; but with the latter slowly. It was not until five centuries ago—and five centuries are but as a day, compared with the full stretch of history—that two weighty steps were taken.
One step was southward. One step was westward.
The African Continent, all along its northern region, had been the scene of very old-world history. But the south was shrouded in darkness. A brief glimmer of light, perhaps thrown there in Phenician days, had been long long lost sight of.
In the year A.D. 1486, a far leap from Phenician and Grecian days, Bartholomew Diaz made discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and one year later Vasco da Gama sailed round it. These two explorers were only a little in advance of two greater voyagers. In 1492 Christopher Columbus started on his first cruise into the unknown West—and touched Land. Less than thirty years later, Magellan’s famous voyage was accomplished to those Straits, between Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, which bear his name. By that time the existence of the American Continent had become an established fact.
But that Continent had to be searched out. And the Ocean, though its limits were widened in men’s imaginations, was very far from being mapped and fenced around with definite boundaries. Years of exploration still lay ahead; and many a valiant explorer had to fall a martyr in the cause of Science, before mystery should yield to knowledge.
Doubtless, in those days as in these, there was always somebody to ask, “But what is the use? What good can it do to us to learn that there are lands beyond the sea? What shall we gain by it all?”