The Book of the Ocean

by Ernest Ingersoll

Wherever it may have been that man first appeared upon the earth, the period must certainly have been incalculably long ago, for he had time to spread to all parts of the habitable globe long before any sort of record begins. Little, if any, part of the world has yet been found where the evidences of man’s residence in the long-forgotten past do not exist. So long ago that all tradition of it is forgotten, and only the imperishable stone implements they used remain as traces of their presence, mankind had reached and settled the farthest northern and eastern coasts of Europe and Asia, and the southern extremities of Africa and India. These might have been reached by land; but similar traces exist in many islands which, so far as we can see, could never have been connected with each other or with any continent by lands now submerged (as perhaps has been the case in some other islands) since man originated. Such places, then, could have been reached and colonized only by means of boats, and that at an exceedingly remote time.

Some hint of what these prehistoric navigators might have been able to do may be gathered from the performances that we know of in the South Sea, where almost every island and coral atoll that could support a colony has apparently been inhabited, since long before even tradition begins, although some of them, like the Hawaiian group, are separated from all others by hundreds of miles of open sea.

It is exceedingly interesting and suggestive to read in a work like Professor Friedrich Ratzel’s “History of Mankind,” of the dispersion of population over the islands of the South Pacific Ocean, where a mixed population of black and yellow races possessed themselves of the whole of Oceanica long before white men had even heard of that part of the world. This astounding fact gains in significance when we remember that wide tracts of very deep ocean divide these islands, many of which are so small that they were found by exploring navigators only with difficulty. Cook and Beechey and other early voyagers note finding upon certain islands people who had come thither in their own boats over distances of six or eight hundred miles; and there are many instances of castaways surviving voyages of one thousand or fifteen hundred miles, even against the trade-winds. But these involuntary voyages were no longer than many others undertaken for war or trade, or because of famine or a mere love of wandering. Over-population of the limited spaces of most islands and groups led to the colonization of others; and it must often have been necessary to go far away to seek unoccupied or thinly peopled refuges. This could not have been done had men not been good shipwrights, not only, but careful students of the heavens by whose sun and moon and stars they steered, aiding themselves with charts made of sticks. The remotest groups, like the Sandwich Islands and Easter Island, were found and settled too long ago even for tradition to retain more than a fabulous story about it. “These Vikings of the Pacific,” says Ratzel, “continued to discover even small and remote islets. In the whole of the Pacific there is not one island of any size of which it was left to Europeans to demonstrate the habitability.” It has even been argued that the continent of America was peopled by Pacific Islanders, who made their way to it from Polynesia; but of this there is no direct evidence, and it seems unlikely, because the prevailing winds and currents flow from South America, rather than toward it, in this part of the Pacific.

But leaving these dim old times when barbarous men voyaged far and wide over seas, and races mingled that were born on opposite sides of wide waters, let us note what traveling our civilized ancestors did.

The evidences of ruined walls, graves, carvings, and stone tools show that that earliest of civilized races of which we now have any knowledge—the Hittites—were acquainted not only with the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, but had boldly rounded the headlands of Spain, skirted the stormy Bay of Biscay, and settled colonies in England and France. Who were these Hittites? They were an Asiatic people, dwelling in the Taurus Mountains of the eastern part of Asia Minor, who increased into the most powerful nation of that part of the world about two thousand years before Christ, and carried on wars with the Egyptians, among others, until at last they were overcome by the rise of the empire of Assyria, north of them, about eleven hundred years before Christ. Doubtless they explored the African coast somewhat south of the Red Sea, and very likely knew the Persian Gulf and the route to India. My own opinion is that we are likely to give the people of antiquity too little credit rather than too much in the direction of a knowledge of geography.

Meanwhile there was rising along the Mediterranean from Palestine northward the most able commercial race of antiquity, who styled themselves Canaanites, as in the Bible, but whom the Greeks called Phenicians, the name by which we know them best. Their capitals were the cities Tyre and Sidon, the ruins of which are still to be seen on the Syrian coast a little way south of Beirut, and the wealth and commercial power of which will give us some interesting paragraphs for a future chapter. Suffice it here to say that their rulers were foremost among the loosely organized “nations” between the Nile and the Euphrates, and that they maintained their power through a long period, not only by their wealth and enterprise as traders, but mainly through their skill and energy as navigators. As we shall see when we come to consider their commerce in Chapter VII, they excelled in the building of ships, in an understanding of how to steer long courses by the heavenly bodies, and in sea knowledge generally. It is well known that the Phenicians traded in their ships down the west coast of Africa to and beyond the Canary Islands, which they also visited; made repeated voyages to the French coast and the British Islands; and may very likely have gone around into the Baltic, for they knew of its amber, though this might have been obtained by the overland trade routes. It is believed that they ascertained that Africa was, in fact, a huge island; for it was to prove this supposition that Pharaoh Necho (or Naku or Neku) II, an enlightened Egyptian monarch who reigned in the sixth century before Christ, hired a crew of Phenician seamen to man an expedition whose purpose it was to circumnavigate Africa. These men started down the Red Sea in 611 B. C., and in 605 B. C. came sailing home through the Strait of Gibraltar, to the delight of their friends and confusion of a kingdom full of I-told-you-sos.[1] Just twenty centuries elapsed before any one else repeated that feat, so far as I know;, and no wonder it was forgotten. This same Necho II did even more for maritime commerce, for he attempted to complete the canal, begun long before his time, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and seems to have made a passage along which barges and small boats might be towed, which remained open for many centuries, and in part followed the line now covered by the Suez Canal. Earlier than that Darius, the Persian conqueror of Egypt, had dug a navigable canal from the Nile to the Red Sea; and this shows that there must have been large traffic in both seas at that time to justify such tasks.

AN EARLY ROMAN BIREME.

By this time the power and prosperity of Tyre and Sidon had declined, and Carthage, originally a colonial city, had become the most important center of Phenician influence; and from this port there sailed a century later (perhaps about 500 B. C.) an exploring expedition under a Carthaginian king named Hanno, intended to study and establish trade with the West African coast. It was a large and powerful fleet, said to number sixty galleys; and that women were taken as well as men shows that it was intended to form settlements at suitable points, as, indeed, was done. The account of it has been preserved in a short writing called the “Periplus,” by an ancient but unknown Greek; and this inscription is regarded by most scholars as entirely authentic, since all its details conform to modern knowledge, even though it is impossible to identify surely the various points mentioned. It tells us that the terminus of Hanno’s exploration was an island beyond a gulf called Noti Cornu, in which he found a company of hairy women, whom the interpreters called gorillas. It was in memory of this that the manlike apes which a few years ago were discovered on the west coast of Africa received the same name; but they are not known anywhere north of the Kamerun Mountains, while the farthest point any critic is willing to believe reached by Hanno is the Bight of Benin, some distance north of the Kameruns. It is easy to believe that the inquiring Carthaginians might have heard of these apes,—or perhaps of chimpanzees, now found as far north as the Gambia River,—and reported actually seeing them, in order to add glory to their name. At any rate, this expedition increased largely the ancient knowledge of the sea in that direction; and navigators now knew the shores of the Atlantic from the Gulf of Guinea to the North Sea; but there the knowledge of the world seems to have rested for more than a dozen centuries, principally, no doubt, because there seemed nothing beyond, either north or south, to invite the merchants who then, as ever since, have been the principal promoters of discovery. It is only within the past century that voyages of discovery have been undertaken purely for the sake of the increase of knowledge. Previous to that the object was always either military conquest or the extension of trade.