In the times of Homer, when the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic had long been known to the Phœnicians, the geographical knowledge of the Greeks was still circumscribed by the narrow limits of the Eastern Mediterranean and part of the Euxine, and many a century elapsed ere their ships ventured beyond the Straits of Gades. Colæus of Samos (639 B.C.) is said to have been the first seafarer of Hellenic race who sailed forth into the Atlantic, compelled by adverse winds, and was able on his return from his involuntary voyage to tell his astonished countrymen of the wondrous rising and falling of the oceanic tides. It was seventy years later before the Phoceans of Massilia, the present Marseilles, ventured to follow the path he had traced out, and to visit the Atlantic port of Tartessus.
The town of Massilia had the additional honour of reckoning among her sons the great traveller Pytheas, the Marco Polo of antiquity. This far-wandering philosopher, who lived about 330 years before Christ, had visited all the coasts of Europe, from the mouths of the Tanais or Don to the shores of Ultima Thule, which, according to Leopold von Buch, was not Iceland, nor Feroë, nor Orcadia, but the Norwegian coast. His narrative first made the Greeks acquainted with North-western Europe, and remained for a long time their only geographical guide to those hyperborean lands.
While the horizon of the Greeks was thus considerably expanding towards the regions of the setting sun, the conquests of Alexander opened to them a new world in the distant Orient. Greek navigators now for the first time unfurled their sails on the Indian Ocean. The Macedonian, desirous not only of subduing Asia but of firmly attaching it to the nations of the Mediterranean by the bonds of mutual interest, and hoping by this means to consolidate his vast conquests, sent a fleet under the command of Nearchus, from the mouths of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf, to establish if possible a new road for a regular commercial intercourse between India and Mesopotamia. The performance of this voyage was reckoned by the conqueror one of the most glorious events of his reign, but it may serve as a proof of the slowness of ancient navigation, that Nearchus took ten months to perform a journey which one of our steamers might easily accomplish in five days.
After the disruption of the Macedonian empire, the circle of the Greek discoveries in the Indian Ocean was widened by the enterprising spirit of the Seleucidæ and Ptolemies. Seleucus Nicator is said to have penetrated to the mouths of the Ganges, and the fleets of the Egyptian kings sailed round the peninsula of Hindostan and discovered the coasts of Taprobane or Ceylon, the spicy odours of whose cinnamon-groves are said to be wafted far out to sea, so that—
"for many a league,
Pleased with the grateful scent, old Ocean smiles."
But now came the time when earth-ruling Rome called the whole civilised world her own, and her victorious eagles expanded their triumphant wings from the Red Sea to the coasts of the Northern Ocean. What discoveries might not have been expected from such a power, if the Romans had possessed but one tithe of the maritime spirit of conquered Carthage? But even this military empire contributed something to the enlargement of maritime knowledge. Under the reign of Augustus a Roman fleet sailed round the promontory of Skagen, discovered about sixteen years after the birth of Christ the Island of Fionia or Fünen, and is even supposed to have reached the entrance of the Gulf of Finland. In the year 84 A.C. Julius Agricola, the conqueror of Britain, sailed for the first time round Scotland, and discovered the Orcadian Isles.
In Pliny's time the real magnitude of the earth was still so imperfectly known that, according to the calculations of that great though rather over-credulous naturalist, Europe occupied the third part, Asia only the fourth, and Africa about the fifth, of its whole extent.
The geographer Ptolemy, who lived about the middle of the second century, under the reigns of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, describes the limits of the earth as far as they were known in his time. To the west, the coast of Africa had been explored as far as Cape Juby; and the Fortunate Islands or Hesperides, the present Canaries, rose from the ocean as the last lands towards the setting sun.
To the north discovery had reached as far as the Shetland Isles, and the promontory Perispa at the entrance of the Gulf of Finland; while on the east coast of Africa Cape Brava formed the ultimate boundary of the known world. Soon after Ptolemy's time the whole coast of Malacca (Aurea Chersonesus) and the Siamese Sea, as far as the Cape of Cambogia (Notium promontorium), was explored, and the Romans even appear to have had some knowledge of the great islands of the Indian archipelago, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo.
And yet, notwithstanding all this progress towards the East, it may well be asked whether the Phœnicians had not embraced a wider horizon than the Romans in the full zenith of their fortunes. Even though we reject the circumnavigation of Africa under Necho, and the discovery of America by Punic navigators, as not fully proved or fabulous, it is quite certain that they had explored the west coast of Africa to a much greater extent than the Romans, and extremely probable that they knew at least as much of the lands which bound the Indian Ocean. But, as from a narrow-minded mercantile policy they kept many of their discoveries profoundly secret, all knowledge of them perished with their ruin. In ancient times, when the defeat of a people too often led to its complete destruction, or at least to the extinction of its peculiar civilisation, and the difficulties of intercourse rendered the diffusion of knowledge extremely difficult and slow, it not unfrequently happened that useful discoveries were erased from the memory of mankind, a danger which, thanks to the printing-press and the steam-engine, is now no longer to be feared.