The proposition naturally arouses a host of contradictory suggestions. “If the ancients had it,” it will be said, “we could not have failed to have known it; we are acquainted with everything connected with their seamanship, their voyages,[126] &c. It never could have been lost. If any one people had it, it must have become known to the rest. Our pre-eminence in navigation, discoveries, and commerce is essentially associated with the compass. Why did they not reach America?[127] How did it remain for us to make the discovery?”
These are all the objections I have been able to discover: they are all preliminary, and are adjusted to a mark which I do not present, viz., the word “ancients.” Substitute the word “Phœnicians,” and they fall to the ground.
The “ancients,” are to us Greeks and Romans. Very different men were those traders, whose acute and vivid genius, flexible to all things, could cover up, and conceal, what the brain had devised, or the hand acquired. Those traders had no Penny Magazine, and published no Price Current. Undenying at home, they were selfish abroad; they kept to themselves what they knew, and did not overreach one another for the profit or pleasure of strangers. Even in our own times, secrets are kept by large bodies of men, about nothing, and for no end. The needle would have been a talisman to the state exclusively possessing it; to a few entrusted, not as an instrument, but as an oracle or a god.[128]
Of all factitious props, secretive habits are the most powerful. The art of the Thaumaturgist, calculated in all other countries merely to strike the vulgar with awe, became to them an element of political greatness and commercial profit. They were ready to shed blood for indiscretion or mischance. Patriotism, the mysteries, and natural science formed, by their interlacing fibres, that strong yet flexible tissue which enveloped and concealed the Phœnician polity, and remained unchanged from the time when it served as swaddling-bands to an infant community, to the hour when it wrapped as cerecloth the clay from which fate, and not malady, had driven life. Reveal the polarity of the needle! Tyrians suffer the secret of the compass to be extorted! He who could conceive such a thing, may be learned in books, or perhaps learned in history, but not in men. Yet this is the sole argument of the sceptics. “It could not have been concealed.” Who was to find it out? Was curiosity of Greek or Roman to beat Punic astuteness? Were stripes, or chains, or death, to conquer Punic endurance? and who had the thought of exerting the one, or employing the other?
The sceptics are no less ignorant of seamanship: nothing was more easy than concealment. We must not start by picturing a binnacle, exposed by day, and lighted by night—a quartermaster conning by it, and a steersman looking at it, second by second, in presence of ship’s company, passengers, and strangers. We must bring before us habits of navigation formed without this aid; mariners guiding themselves by night by the stars, and lying to, when these could not be seen; or perhaps with the instinct of the islanders of the Pacific, finding their path through darkness, by watching the angle of incidence of waves and wind, rating the effect of one on the direction of the other, and thus by approximation holding on till the lights reappeared. The heaven or the ocean was the binnacle. They would seek from the needle what we seek from the Sextant,—conference and counsel. The instrument so used by master or mate, is to our sailors as unknown as the astrolabe or divining-rod. The navigator works out his place upon the surface of the globe, and lays down the course; but the formulæ are to him as much a secret as the instrument is a mystery to the crew. The Phœnician skipper might refer to his magic Cup in secret: an approximation was all that, without the sextant and dead reckoning, could be desired, and that only in case of doubt or difficulty arising from bad weather.
Modern writers make a sad jumble whenever they touch ancient navigation. They transfer—but not as a sailor would do—the ideas derived from our practice, which in most things is changed, in some reversed. Men-of-war now exceed merchantmen in dimensions, as much as the merchantmen formerly exceeded the men-of-war. A Phœnician vessel was able to stow 500 emigrants, with provisions for a long voyage, and required for masts the cedars of Lebanon. They carried, in the earliest period, heavy substances from the farthest points; the timber of India is found amongst the tombs of Egypt. To apply to their navigation, the passages descriptive of the row-boats of the Greeks and Romans, is a solecism and an anachronism:[129] they neither made their way by the speed of oars, nor sheltered themselves by hauling up their vessels upon the beach; their craft stood in the same relation to the μάκρη ναυς the longa navis, as the trading vessels of Spezzia and Hydra during the Greek war to the pirate Mysticoes: one of these darting from under a low reef, would scatter a convoy of the largest vessels, like a wolf among a flock of sheep. How could commerce have been carried on in vessels that required oars to pull them, at the rate of ten men to a ton, the crews of which had to land for their meals?
It is only by collecting the local traditions of distant regions, by comparing the records of various nations, the writings of different times, by analyzing the names of places,[130] and reasoning upon all these various data at an interval of twenty centuries, that we are discovering the extent of the settlements of the Phœnicians. They had hidden their footsteps and concealed their ways from the wise[131] alike and from the simple: who can tell how many secrets lie buried in their tomb?
If I have shown that the ignorance of “classical writers” is neither an argument nor an objection, the other objection that, “if known, it could not have been lost,” falls to the ground, for if concealed, it must have perished with the possessors. It is strange that, having regained it, we do not detect its ancient vestiges, and are unable to interpret the words, names, and phrases which, to the initiated, unmistakably reveal it. After Galileo, we detected in antiquity, by a passage of Pythagoras, the knowledge of the science of music. From similar indications, we found out, after we possessed the knowledge ourselves, that the whole scheme of the heavens was understood by them.[132] After Franklin had drawn down lightning, we apprehended, for the first time,[133] what chance had befallen Salmoneus, Servius Tullius,[134] and Sylvius Alladus.[135] Yet, if any discovery might be supposed to be notorious and incapable of concealment, and therefore not liable to perish, it would be the calling down of thunder and lightning, signalized, too, by the catastrophes of a prince of Greece, a lucumon of Alba, a king of Rome, and an eastern legislator.[136]
Although the great ancient states did not pursue the sea trade, the Phœnicians were not without competitors. The Pelasgi, the Etruscans, the Greeks were their equals in seamanship. The two latter were far more powerful. They reserved the long voyage by no navigation laws, and must have been in possession of some exclusive knowledge. The compass, however it might aid, is not absolutely required in many long voyages. The Pacific was peopled without it. Within the Mediterranean the land served to guide, weather shores to protect. These, and the tides, aided the navigator all round Europe. The monsoons wafted him along on the Indian Ocean. But there was one voyage, which, with none of these aids, the Phœnicians, and they alone of all antiquity performed,—that of Western Africa. It was upon that coast, and in sight of its insurmountable natural difficulties, that the idea, here developed, first occurred to me. I then turned to the records of antiquity, and to those first and best pages of history, the myths, and found confirmation, and what rocks and reefs, blasts and currents had taught me.
Seated at the water-shed of the East and of the West—at the fountain of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf—the Phœnicians passed down both, and issuing into the Indian and Atlantic oceans, visited the furthest regions of the earth. It was their province to gather the produce of every land; so must it have been their aim to collect the inventions of every people. If anywhere the magnetic needle had been discovered, they would have been sure to find it; and if applied only to the land, most certainly would they adapt it to their own element.