This discovery required no high standard of science. It could not have been reasoned to a priori; by accident alone could it have been found out. There is in it, therefore, nothing to flatter the self-love of any, or to militate against referring it to the very earliest ages or the rudest people.
The discovery is claimed by modern civilization, and is one of those upon which it most prides itself. The place, the inventor, the precise date are all known; and though by one section of literary men the honour is referred to China, and by another, indications of some sort of compass are admitted elsewhere, and at anterior dates, still the compass in its present shape, and in its practical use, is next to universally attributed to Flavio de Gioja, of Amalphi, in the year 1302.
The perusal of the catalogue of the Escurial suggested to M. Villemain the remark, that most of the modern discoveries of which the date and the name of the inventor are set down as certain, were no more than inventions of the Arabs, which he had appropriated. Such in this case was the fact. Amalphi, the earliest of European commercial states, arose under the Greeks and the Saracens. To the latter people it owed the lead it took in instruction and navigation. Centuries and generations before Flavio de Gioja, the needle was known at Amalphi.
The magnet,[137] in its attracting power, was well known to the Arabs, from the Greeks, Persians, and Jews. But they gave a new name, which shows that they had become acquainted with its polarity, which indicated the use to which, by them, it was applied, Kiblah Nameh. Finding the direction towards the Kiblah, of course it would serve to direct the caravan through the desert, and the caravel at sea. If additional proof be wanting, the name supplies it.
“Mariner’s compass,” “magnetic needle,” are paraphrases; but in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean, it has a name—Boussole, for which no European etymology can be found.[138] The Arabic afforded none, for by no process could Kiblah Nameh be emended into the root of Boussole. There is, however, an Arabic word, which has escaped our lexicographers. The figure,[139] which designates the north is MOUASSOLA.[140] When Europeans first saw the instrument, this point, the leading one, was doubtless pointed to and named. From Mouassola to Boussola the transition is easy; M. and B., being labials and cognate letters, and in some dialects of the Arabic constantly transposed. The Greeks, the intermediaries between the Arabs and Europe, still possessed Amalfi, which became a maritime state; Arabic and Greek, not Latin and Italian, were spoken there; and in modern Greek the word for compass is written Μπουσσολα.
The Arabic affords another etymology, and while either may have served, both may have concurred to give us our word. The abstract which has been preserved of El Edressi’s “Geography of Spain,”[141] has this sentence, “The outer ocean,” that in which the compass was necessary, “is termed El Bahar el Bossul (the violent), as distinguished from the interior, or El Bahar el Muit.”
European writers derive the compass from the Arabs.[142] The Arabic geographers absolutely decline this honour.[143] They refer the invention to the Chinese. They quote a Chinese name, Kya-poun, meaning, as they assert, a board marked with lines. The Chinese claim the discovery, and have and use the instrument. It is of their own make and fashion, divided according to a rule of their own, and connected with various astronomical and geographic points which we are unacquainted with.
The Jesuits, who have been such judicious observers and accurate describers of China, unanimously support the same conclusion.[144] Klaproth, in a letter to M. Humboldt “Sur l’Invention de Boussole,” argues in the same sense.
Humboldt, in his recent work, “Cosmos,” answers as follows the letter addressed to him by Klaproth.
“Although a knowledge of the attracting power of the loadstone, or of naturally magnetic iron, appears to have existed from time immemorial among the nations of the West, yet it is a well established and very remarkable historical fact, that the knowledge of the directive power of a magnetic needle, resulting from its relation to the magnetism of the earth, was possessed exclusively by a people occupying the eastern extremity of Asia. The Chinese for more than a thousand years before our era, at the obscurely known epoch of Codrus and the return of the Heraclidæ to the Peloponnesus, already employed magnetic cars, on which the figure of a man, whose movable outstretched arm pointed always to the south, guided them on their way across the vast grassy plains of Tartary. In the third century of our era, at least 700 years before the introduction of the compass in the European seas, Chinese vessels navigated the Indian[145] ocean with needles pointing to the south. I have shown in another work[146] what great advantages in respect to topographical knowledge the magnetic needle gave to the Chinese geographers over their Greek and Roman contemporaries, to whom for example, the true direction of the mountain chains of the Apennines and the Pyrenees always remained unknown.”[147]