[189] No ancient or modern European language affords an etymology for the nautical designation of a fire-place—Cabouse. It is Arabic, and means “a thing consecrated to a mosque.” In Pagan times it would be the temple or the sacrifice. The Phœnician vessels had their altars and their gods, Patacoi. Nautical terms, of which the etymology is unknown, are generally traceable to the Phœnicians—for instance, Davit in Arabic, a bent piece of wood. Cabouse and Davit have disappeared from the Mediterranean, and must have been left amongst us by the Phœnicians.
[190] See the chapter on the land trade of the Carthaginians in Heeren’s Researches, the most valuable portion of his comprehensive work.
[191] Strabo makes the Caspian Sea, a gulf of the Northern Ocean.
[192] “Geographical knowledge had existed and ceased before the classic age of Greece arose.”—Grover’s Voice from Stonehenge.
[193] “That Africa is clearly surrounded by the sea, except where it borders on Asia, Necho, King of the Egyptians, was the first, we know, to demonstrate. That prince, having finished his excavations for the canal leading out of the Nile into the Arabian gulf, despatched certain natives of Phœnicia on ship-board, with orders to sail back through the Pillars of Hercules into the north, (Mediterranean) Sea, and so to return into Egypt. The Phœnicians consequently, having departed out of the Erythræan sea, proceeded on their voyage in the Southern Sea: when it was autumn, they would push ashore, and, sowing the land, whatever might be the part of Lybia they had reached, await there till the harvest time: having reaped their corn they continued their voyage. Thus, after the lapse of two years, and passing through the Pillars of Hercules in the third, they came back into Egypt, and stated what is not credible to me, but may be so, perhaps, to others,—namely, that in their circumnavigation of Libya, they had the sun upon the right hand.”—Heeren, ii. c. 44.
[194] The following passage from Heeren well illustrates, in the incoherence of each sentence, the consciousness that the people he described was too large for his grasp. “But, leaving these distinct voyages of discovery out of the question, the extent to which this enterprising people carried their regular navigation is truly wonderful. Though voyages across the open seas have been the consequence of our acquaintance with the new world beyond the Atlantic; yet their hardy and adventurous spirit led them to find a substitute for it, in stretching from coast to coast into the most distant regions. The long series of centuries during which they were exclusively the masters of the seas, gave them sufficient time to make this gradual progress, which perhaps was the more regular and certain in proportion to the time it occupied. The Phœnicians carried the nautical art to the highest point of perfection at that time required, or of which it was then capable.”
[195] A vessel proceeding from the Bight of Benin to any point of the coast, northwards, has first to make and pass the equator, steering south and west till she has done so. She then hauls up to the west and north, and runs eastward only after she is to the northward of her port.
[196] In the north the coast is sufficiently dangerous. In my cruise along it in 1845, I had in company, or saw only four vessels: two of these went ashore, the other two were wrecked, the one an English brigantine, the other a French steamer of war. Eighty souls perished.
[197] The supposed anterior discovery of the Canaries by a Norman rover would be no argument, for these islands may be reached without encountering the principal difficulties of the enterprise. And further at the time of the alleged discovery, the compass may have been in use in the north of Europe. The coins of the Baltic show the intimacy there of the Saracens from the first century of the Hejira, and African settlers in England are entered in Doomsday Book. The use of it in the north, long before its employment by the Portuguese, has been asserted by various writers, not only as derived from the Arabs, but also as original, or derived from the Chinese.
“Il’ est certain que les marins des côtes de Normandie et de Bretagne employaient dès le xiii siècle l’aiguille aimanée sous le nom de marinette.”—Esmenard.