The pillars of Hercules

by David Urquhart

Gosselin was perfectly right in his second work, when he said that the circumnavigation of Africa was impossible without the compass, as he was right in his first, when he asserted that it had been circumnavigated. There is no contradiction between the two propositions.

Such difficulties surround, and such dangers attend that navigation, that I do not understand how we to-day could navigate that coast, were the magnetic needle to lose its virtue. Impelled by the eddy from America, the Atlantic draws down the African shore. There is below Mogadore a night breeze from the sea; the land is low, and stretches in a line of sand-banks or breakers. There are no inlets and no shelter, and certain destruction awaits the mariner on a lee shore, on which a current sits. Their vessels did not lie closer to the wind than seven points, and could never get off. Is this a navigation to be performed by creeping along the shores and dragging up vessels on the beach at night? and for five hundred miles of the northern coast, there is a continuous range of breakers without shelter of any kind, and no port which can be entered except over a bar, and in fine weather, so that there is a wholly inaccessible coast, equal in length to the Mediterranean sea.

Major Rennell, in his work on the “currents of the Atlantic,” estimates the daily easting of a vessel at seventeen miles, so that between the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Madeira islands, a vessel is carried out of her dead reckoning to the eastward, according to the length of the voyage, from eighty to two hundred miles. It is thus, that so frequently vessels with chronometer, quadrant, charts, and log, besides compass, have been wrecked on the African coast, when believing themselves to be in the longitude of Teneriffe, or even further to the westward. One of the sufferers, Ryley, master of an American vessel, has given us a lively description of such a scene, and of the shore on which it occurred;[196] and has assigned as the cause of his misfortune, the indraught both of current and wind, and the impossibility of getting off the coast when once thus got upon it. Even after his vessel had struck he could see no land.

And what is the fate of the survivors? Death by thirst or slavery. The nature of the inhabitants has no more changed than that of the shore:—what the one spares, the other will devour.

The land of Europe is high: its coasts are provided with harbours, tides run along it, and vessels can tide their way; but the African coast is unseen till you are upon it; there is no escape when within reach of it. It lies all along the course of the voyage; it presents certain destruction to the vessel, and if evitable death, inevitable slavery to the crew. The coasters of the Mediterranean, the circumnavigators of Europe, the monsoon traders of India, were not matched with the difficulties of such a sea; they were unacquainted with the terrors of such a land.[197]

After the Phœnician time every endeavour to navigate this coast failed, and amongst the adventurers, one Eudoxus seems to have been a man of extraordinary resources, energy, and perseverance. For nearly two thousand years, the coast south of the Straits of Gibraltar remained unvisited by the traders of the seas, who were constantly entering in at, and issuing from, these straits, and thence pursuing voyages for thousands of miles within and without. The passage—if I may so call it—along the coast, was re-opened only after the compass had been re-discovered, and then only after long and persevering efforts; but as soon as the westernmost cape was doubled, all the world lay open, and there was no further difficulty in reaching India on the East, and the new continent on the West, the discovery of which was in reality effected as a consequence.

The opinion which I had formed on the spot respecting the navigation of the coast, is entirely confirmed by all naval authorities. I never met an officer, knowing the coast, who, on the question being put to him, did not answer of Africa, “without the compass it is impossible to navigate the coast.” The statements of Herodotus, the Periplus of Hanno, the sea traffick of the Carthaginians on the Gold Coast, present no difficulty, if you admit the stone of Hercules, the cup of Apollo, the arrow of Abaris, and the Batylia to have any meaning; and you must reject several of the most authoritative statements of history if you will not.

I must apologise for the space I have devoted to this antiquarian subject. The matter is so incidental to the spot, and interwoven with the patron of these volumes, that, however at variance my conclusions may be with the host of the Olympus of history, I could not omit them.

Whatever be the verdict of the reader on other parts of the case, it can only be favourable as to the objections which our highest authorities have raised. I have proved its case to be compatible with secresy;—and if it was secret it could be lost. I have shown in the method first practised by the Arabs, the instrument to which the otherwise meaningless myths of Greece refer. I have identified the stone of Hercules, the cup of Apollo, the arrow of Abaris, the Batylia of Sanchoniathon, the Abadir of the Temple of Hierapolis. That the “Stone of Hercules” was the magnet no one contests. I have shown from extrinsic evidence, that our instrument is not Chinese, and that it was associated with ancient augury; and I have found a people stretching through that chasm of years,—from pagan Rome to Christian science,—a people of Phœnicians, who, away from Europe, preserved the faith and industry of their sunk metropolis, and could transmit the magnet from Hercules to Flavio de Gioja.

The polarity of the needle, the art of manufacturing gems, which did not die with them,—were of the secrets not hidden from Tyre. Her story, by their aid, ceases to be a vision, and becomes a state;—her greatness descends from its cloud, and walks the earth.