Herodotus, the father of history, was a good geographer and an experienced traveler, yet his only conception of the world was as a flat, wide-extending surface. In Egypt he was told how Pharaoh Necho had sent a crew of Phenicians to explore the coast of Africa by setting out from the Red Sea, and how they sailed south till they had the sun on their right hand. "Absurd!" says Herodotus, in his naïve manner, "this story I can not believe." In Egypt, as in Greece or Europe generally, the sun rises on the left hand, and at noon casts a shadow pointing north; whereas in South Africa the sun at noon casts a shadow pointing south, and sunrise is therefore on the right hand. The honest sailors had told the truth; they had merely "crossed the line," without knowing it. If Herodotus had known that the world was spherical or ball-shaped, he could easily have understood that by traveling due south the sun must at last appear at noon to the north instead of the south. A counterpart to the story of the Phenician sailors occurs in Pliny: he tells how some ambassadors came to the Roman Emperor Claudius from an island in the south of Asia, and when in Italy were much astonished to see the sun at noon to the south, casting shadows to the north. They also wondered, he says, to see the Great Bear and other groups of stars which had never been visible in their native land (Nat. Hist., vi, 22).
That there were islands or even a continent in the Western Ocean was a tradition not infrequent in classical and medieval times, as we shall presently see, but to place a continent in the Southern Ocean was a greater stretch of imagination. The great outstanding problem of the sources of the Nile probably suggested this Southern Continent to some. Ptolemy, the great Egyptian geographer, even formed the conjecture that the Southern Continent was joined to Africa by a broad isthmus, as indicated in certain maps. Such a connection of the two continents would at once dispose of the story that the Phenician sailors had "doubled the Cape." In several maps after the time of Columbus, Australia is extended westward in order to pass muster for the Southern Continent.
Imaginary Continent, south of Africa and Asia. [The cardinal points are shown by the four winds.]
Beginning of the fifteenth century. The word Brumæ = the winter solstices.
It is with a Western Continent, however, that we are now mainly concerned. What lands were imagined by the ancients in the far West under the setting sun? The mighty ocean beyond Spain was to the Greeks and Latins a place of dread and mystery.
"Stout was his heart and girt with triple brass," says the Roman poet, "who first hazarded his weak vessel on the pitiless ocean."
Even the western parts of the Mediterranean were shrunk from, according to the Odyssey, without speaking of the horrors of the great ocean beyond. "Beyond Gades," i. e., scarcely outside of the Pillars of Hercules, the extreme limit of the ancient world, "no man," said Pindar, "however daring, could pass; only a god might voyage those waters!"
In spite of the dread which the ancient mariners felt for the great Western Ocean, their poets found it replete with charm and mystery. The imagination rested upon those golden sunsets, and the tales of marvel which, after long intervals, sea-borne sailors had told of distant lands in the West. The poets placed there the happy home destined for the souls of heroes. Thus (Odys. iv, 561):
No snow
Is there, nor yet great storm nor any rain,
But always ocean sendeth forth the breeze
Of the shrill West, and bloweth cool on men.
So far Homer. His contemporary, Hesiod, thus describes the Elysian Fields as islands under the setting sun: