The index in this electronic text was not printed in the original book.

The index was copied from Volume II of the series.

IN NORTHERN MISTS

IN NORTHERN MISTS

ARCTIC EXPLORATION IN EARLY TIMES

BY FRIDTJOF NANSEN
G.C.V.O., D.Sc., D.C.L., Ph.D., PROFESSOR OF OCEANOGRAPHY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHRISTIANIA, ETC.

TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR G. CHATER

ILLUSTRATED

VOLUME ONE

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN: MCMXI

PRINTED BY
BALLANTYNE & COMPANY LTD
AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
LONDON

PREFACE

This book owes its existence in the first instance to a rash promise made some years ago to my friend Dr. J. Scott Keltie, of London, that I would try, when time permitted, to contribute a volume on the history of arctic voyages to his series of books on geographical exploration. The subject was an attractive one; I thought I was fairly familiar with it, and did not expect the book to take a very long time when once I made a start with it. On account of other studies it was a long while before I could do this; but when at last I seriously took the work in hand, the subject in return monopolised my whole powers.

It appeared to me that the natural foundation for a history of arctic voyages was in the first place to make clear the main features in the development of knowledge of the North in early times. By tracing how ideas of the Northern World, appearing first in a dim twilight, change from age to age, how the old myths and creations of the imagination are constantly recurring, sometimes in new shapes, and how new ones are added to them, we have a curious insight into the working of the human mind in its endeavour to subject to itself the world and the universe.

But as I went deeper into the subject I became aware that the task was far greater than I had supposed: I found that much that had previously been written about it was not to be depended upon; that frequently one author had copied another, and that errors and opinions which had once gained admission remained embedded in the literary tradition. What had to be done was to confine one’s self to the actual sources, and as far as possible to build up independently the best possible structure from the very foundation. But the more extensive my studies became, the more riddles I perceived—riddle after riddle led to new riddles, and this drew me on farther and farther.

On many points I arrived at views which to some extent conflicted with those previously held. This made it necessary to give, not merely the bare results, but also a great part of the investigations themselves. I have followed the words of Niebuhr, which P. A. Munch took as a motto for “Det norske Folks Historie”:

“Ich werde suchen die Kritik der Geschichte nicht nach dunkeln Gefühlen, sondern forschend, auszuführen, nicht ihre Resultate, welche nur blinde Meinungen stiften, sondern die Untersuchungen selbst in ihrem ganzen Umfange vortragen.”

But in this way my book has become something quite different from what was intended, and far larger. I have not reached the history of arctic voyages proper.

Many may think that too much has been included here, and yet what it has been possible to mention here is but an infinitesimal part of the mighty labour in vanished times that makes up our knowledge of the North. The majority of the voyages, and those the most important, on which the first knowledge was based, have left no certain record; the greatest steps have been taken by unknown pioneers, and if a halo has settled upon a name here and there, it is the halo of legend.

My investigations have made it necessary to go through a great mass of literature, for which I lacked, in part, the linguistic qualifications. For the study of classical, and of mediæval Latin literature, I found in Mr. Amund Sommerfeldt a most able assistant, and most of the translations of Greek and Latin authors are due to him. By his sound and sober criticism of the often difficult original texts he was of great help to me.

In the study of Arabic literature Professor Alexander Seippel has afforded me excellent help, combined with interest in the subject, and he has translated for me the statements of Arab authors about the North.

In the preparation of this work, as so often before, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my old friend, Professor Moltke Moe. He has followed my studies from the very beginning with an interest that was highly stimulating; with his extensive knowledge in many fields bordering on those studies he has helped me by word and deed, even more often than appears in the course of the book. His intimate acquaintance with the whole world of myth has been of great importance to the work in many ways; I will mention in particular his large share in the attempt at unravelling the difficult question of Wineland and the Wineland voyages. Here his concurrence was the more valuable to me since at first he disagreed with the conclusions and views at which I had arrived; but the constantly increasing mass of evidence, which he himself helped in great measure to collect, convinced him of their justice, and I have the hope that the inquiry, particularly as regards this subject, will prove to be of value to future historical research.

With his masterly knowledge and insight Professor Alf Torp has given me sound support and advice, especially in difficult linguistic and etymological questions. Many others, whose names are mentioned in the course of the book, have also given me valuable assistance.

I owe special thanks to Dr. Axel Anthon Björnbo, Librarian of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, for his willing collaboration, which has been of great value to me. While these investigations of mine were in progress, he has been occupied in the preparation of his exhaustive and excellent work on the older cartography of Greenland. At his suggestion we have exchanged our manuscripts, and have mutually criticised each other’s views according to our best ability; the book will show that this has been productive in many ways. Dr. Björnbo has also assisted me in another way: I have, for instance, obtained copies of several old maps through him. He has, besides, sent me photographs of vignettes and marginal drawings from ancient Icelandic and Norwegian MSS. in the Library of Copenhagen.

Mr. K. Eriksen has drawn the greater part of the reproductions of the vignettes and the old maps; other illustrations are drawn by me. In the reproduction of the maps it has been sought rather to bring before the reader in a clear form the results to which my studies have led than to produce detailed facsimiles of the originals.

In conclusion I wish to thank Mr. Arthur G. Chater for the careful and intelligent way in which he has executed the English translation. In reading the English proofs I have taken the opportunity of making a number of corrections and additions to the original text.

FRIDTJOF NANSEN

Lysaker, August 1911

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

In the beginning the world appeared to mankind like a fairy tale; everything that lay beyond the circle of familiar experience was a shifting cloudland of the fancy, a playground for all the fabled beings of mythology; but in the farthest distance, towards the west and north, was the region of darkness and mists, where sea, land and sky were merged into a congealed mass—and at the end of all gaped the immeasurable mouth of the abyss, the awful void of space.

Out of this fairy world, in course of time, the calm and sober lines of the northern landscape appeared. With unspeakable labour the eye of man has forced its way gradually towards the north, over mountains and forests, and tundra, onward through the mists along the vacant shores of the polar sea—the vast stillness, where so much struggle and suffering, so many bitter failures, so many proud victories, have vanished without a trace, muffled beneath the mantle of snow.

When our thoughts go back through the ages in a waking dream, an endless procession passes before us—like a single mighty epic of the human mind’s power of devotion to an idea, right or wrong—a procession of struggling, frost-covered figures in heavy clothes, some erect and powerful, others weak and bent so that they can scarcely drag themselves along before the sledges, many of them emaciated and dying of hunger, cold and scurvy; but all looking out before them towards the unknown, beyond the sunset, where the goal of their struggle is to be found.

We see a Pytheas, intelligent and courageous, steering northward from the Pillars of Hercules for the discovery of Britain and Northern Europe; we see hardy Vikings, with an Ottar, a Leif Ericson at their head, sailing in undecked boats across the ocean into ice and tempest and clearing the mists from an unseen world; we see a Davis, a Baffin forcing their way to the north-west and opening up new routes, while a Hudson, unconquered by ice and winter, finds a lonely grave on a deserted shore, a victim of shabby pilfering. We see the bright form of a Parry surpassing all as he forces himself on; a Nordenskiöld, broad-shouldered and confident, leading the way to new visions; a Toll mysteriously disappearing in the drifting ice. We see men driven to despair, shooting and eating each other; but at the same time we see noble figures, like a De Long, trying to save their journals from destruction, until they sink and die.

Midway in the procession comes a long file of a hundred and thirty men hauling heavy boats and sledges back to the south, but they are falling in their tracks; one after another they lie there, marking the line of route with their corpses—they are Franklin’s men.

And now we come to the latest drama, the Greenlander Brönlund dragging himself forward over the ice-fields through cold and winter darkness, after the leader Mylius-Erichsen and his comrade, Hagen, have both stiffened in the snow during the long and desperate journey. He reaches the depot only to wait for death, knowing that the maps and observations he has faithfully brought with him will be found and saved. He quietly prepares himself for the silent guest, and writes in his journal in his imperfect Danish:

Perished,—79 Fjord, after attempt return over the inland ice, in November. I come here in waning moon and could not get farther for frost-bitten feet and darkness.

The bodies of the others are in the middle of the fjord opposite the glacier (about 2½ leagues).

Hagen died November 15 and Mylius about 10 days after.

JÖRGEN BRÖNLUND.

What a story in these few lines! Civilisation bows its head by the grave of this Eskimo.

What were they seeking in the ice and cold? The Norseman who wrote the “King’s Mirror” gave the answer six hundred years ago: “If you wish to know what men seek in this land, or why men journey thither in so great danger of their lives, then it is the threefold nature of man which draws him thither. One part of him is emulation and desire of fame, for it is man’s nature to go where there is likelihood of great danger, and to make himself famous thereby. Another part is the desire of knowledge, for it is man’s nature to wish to know and see those parts of which he has heard, and to find out whether they are as it was told him or not. The third part is the desire of gain, seeing that men seek after riches in every place where they learn that profit is to be had, even though there be great danger in it.”

The history of arctic discovery shows how the development of the human race has always been borne along by great illusions. Just as Columbus’s discovery of the West Indies was due to a gross error of calculation, so it was the fabled isle of Brazil that drew Cabot out on his voyage, when he found North America. It was fantastic illusions of open polar seas and of passages to the riches of Cathay beyond the ice that drove men back there in spite of one failure after another; and little by little the polar regions were explored. Every complete devotion to an idea yields some profit, even though it be different from that which was expected.

But from first to last the history of polar exploration is a single mighty manifestation of the power of the unknown over the mind of man, perhaps greater and more evident here than in any other phase of human life. Nowhere else have we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step cost so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages—and nevertheless, new forces have always been found ready to carry the attack farther, to stretch once more the limits of the world.

But if it has cost a struggle, it is not without its joys. Who can describe his emotion when the last difficult ice-floe has been passed, and the sea lies open before him, leading to new realms? Or when the mist clears and mountain-summits shoot up, one behind another farther and farther away, on which the eye of man has never rested, and in the farthest distance peaks appear on the sea-horizon—on the sky above them a yellowish white reflection of the snow-fields—where the imagination pictures new continents?...

Ever since the Norsemen’s earliest voyages arctic expeditions have certainly brought material advantages to the human race, such as rich fisheries, whaling and sealing, and so on; they have produced scientific results in the knowledge of hitherto unknown regions and conditions; but they have given us far more than this: they have tempered the human will for the conquest of difficulties; they have furnished a school of manliness and self-conquest in the midst of the slackness of varying ages, and have held up noble ideals before the rising generation; they have fed the imagination, have given fairy-tales to the child, and raised the thoughts of its elders above their daily toil. Take arctic travel out of our history, and will it not be poorer? Perhaps we have here the greatest service it has done humanity.

We speak of the first discovery of the North—but how do we know when the first man arrived in the northern regions of the earth? We know nothing but the very last steps in the migrations of humanity. What a stretch of time there must have been between the period of the Neanderthal man in Europe and the first Pelasgians, or Iberians, or Celts, that we find there in the neolithic age, in the earliest dawn of history. How infinitesimal in comparison with this the whole of the recent period which we call history becomes.

What took place in those long ages is still hidden from us. We only know that ice-age followed ice-age, covering Northern Europe, and to some extent Asia and North America as well, with vast glaciers which obliterated all traces of early human habitation of those regions. Between these ice-ages occurred warmer periods, when men once more made their way northward, to be again driven out by the next advance of the ice-sheet. There are many signs that the human northward migration after the last ice-age, in any case in large districts of Europe, followed fairly close upon the gradual shrinking of the boundary of the inland ice towards the interior of Scandinavia, where the ice-sheath held out longest.

The primitive state—when men wandered about the forests and plains of the warmer parts of the earth, living on what they found by chance—developed by slow gradations in the direction of the first beginnings of culture; on one side to roving hunters and fishers, on the other to agricultural people with a more fixed habitation. The nomad with his herds forms a later stage of civilisation.

The hunting stage of culture was imposed by necessity on the first pioneers and inhabitants of the northernmost and least hospitable regions of the earth. The northern lands must therefore have been first discovered by roving fishermen who came northwards following the rivers and seashores in their search for new fishing-grounds. It was the scouting eye of a hunter that first saw a sea-beach in the dreamy light of a summer night, and sought to penetrate the heavy gloom of the polar sea. And that far-travelled hunter fell asleep in the snowdrift while the northern lights played over him as a funeral fire, the first victim of the polar night’s iron grasp.

Long afterwards came the nomad and the agriculturist and established themselves in the track of the hunter.

This was thousands of years before any written history, and of these earliest colonisations we know nothing but what the chance remains we find in the ground can tell us, and these are very few and very uncertain.

It is not until we come far down into the full daylight of history that we find men setting out with the conscious purpose of exploring the unknown for its own sake. With those early hunters, it was doubtless new ground and new game that drew them on, but they too were attracted, consciously or unconsciously, by the spirit of adventure and the unknown—so deep in the soul of man does this divine force lie, the mainspring, perhaps, of the greatest of our actions. In every part of the world and in every age it has driven man forward on the path of evolution, and as long as the human ear can hear the breaking of waves over deep seas, as long as the human eye can follow the track of the northern lights over silent snow-fields, as long as human thought seeks distant worlds in infinite space, so long will the fascination of the unknown carry the human mind forward and upward.

Ship of the Egyptian Punt expedition, 17th century B.C. (J. DÜMICHEN)

CHAPTER I

ANTIQUITY, BEFORE PYTHEAS

The learned world of early antiquity had nothing but a vague premonition of the North. Along the routes of traffic commercial relations were established at a very early time with the northern lands. At first these ran perhaps along the rivers of Russia and Eastern Germany to the Baltic, afterwards along the rivers of Central Europe as well. But the information which reached the Mediterranean peoples by these routes had to go through many intermediaries with various languages, and for this reason it long remained vague and uncertain.

What the people of antiquity did not know, they supplied by poetical and mythical conceptions; and in time there grew up about the outer limits of the world, especially on the north, a whole cycle of legend which was to lay the foundation of ideas of the polar regions for thousands of years, far into the Middle Ages, and long after trustworthy knowledge had been won, even by the voyages of the Norsemen themselves.

Origin of the word Arctic

Long before people knew whether there were lands and seas far in the north, those who studied the stars had observed that there were some bodies in the northern sky which never set, and that there was a point in the vault of heaven which never changed its place. In time, they also found that, as they moved northwards, the circle surrounding the stars that were always visible became larger, and they saw that these in their daily movements described orbits about the fixed point or pole of the heavens. The ancient Chaldeans had already found this out. From this observation it was but a short step to the deduction that the earth could not be flat, as the popular idea made it, but must in one way or another be spherical, and that if one went far enough to the north, these stars would be right over one’s head. To the Greeks a circle drawn through the constellation of the Great Bear, which they called “Arktos,” formed the limit of the stars that were always visible. This limit was therefore called the Bear’s circle, or the “Arctic Circle,” and thus this designation for the northernmost regions of the earth is derived from the sky.

The world according to Hecatæus (BUNBURY)

Œcumene and Oceanus
Herodotus on the ocean

According to the common Greek idea it was the countries of the Mediterranean and of the East that formed the disc of the earth, or “œcumene” (the habitable world). Around this disc, according to the Homeric songs (the Iliad was put into writing about 900 B.C.), flowed the all-embracing river “Oceanus,” the end of the earth and the limit of heaven. This deep, tireless, quietly flowing river, whose stream turned back upon itself, was the origin and the end of all things; it was not only the father of the Oceanides and of the rivers, but also the source whence came gods and men. Nothing definite is said of this river’s farther boundary; perhaps unknown lands belonging to another world whereon the sky rested were there; in any case we meet later, as in Hesiod, with ideas of lands beyond the Ocean, the Hesperides, Erythea, and the Isles of the Blest, which were probably derived from Phœnician tales. Originally conceived as a deep-flowing river, Oceanus became later the all-embracing empty ocean, which was different from the known sea (the Mediterranean) with its known coasts, even though connected with it. Herodotus (484-424 B.C.) is perhaps the first who used the name in this sense; he definitely rejects the idea of Oceanus as a river and denies that the “œcumene” should be drawn round, as though with a pair of compasses, as the Ionian geographers (Hecatæus, for example) thought. He considered it proved that the earth’s disc on the western side, and probably also on the south, was surrounded by the ocean, but said that no one could know whether this was also the case on the north and north-east. In opposition to Hecatæus[1] and the Ionian geographers (the school of Miletus) he asserted that the Caspian Sea was not a bay of the northern Oceanus, but an independent inland sea. Thus the “œcumene” became extended into the unknown on the north-east. He mentions several peoples as dwelling farthest north; but to the north of them were desert regions and inaccessible mountains; how far they reached he does not say.

The world according to the ideas of Herodotus (J. MURRAY)

He thus left the question undetermined, because, with the sound cool-headedness of the inquirer, which made him in a sense the founder of physical geography, he trusted to certain observations rather than to uncertain speculations; and therefore he maintained that the geographers of the Ionian school had not provided adequate proofs that the world was really surrounded by sea on all sides. But nevertheless, it was, perhaps, his final opinion that the earth’s disc swam like an island in Oceanus.

Division of the ocean

This common name for the ocean was soon dropped, and men spoke instead of the Outer Sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules in contradistinction to the Inner Sea (i.e., the Mediterranean). The Outer Sea was also called the Atlantic Sea after Atlas. This name is first found in Herodotus. South of Asia was the Southern Ocean or the Erythræan Sea (the Red Sea and Indian Ocean). North of Europe and Asia was the Northern Ocean; and the Caspian Sea was a bay of this, in the opinion of the majority. Doubtless, most people thought that these various oceans were connected; but the common name Oceanus does not reappear as applied to them until the second century B.C.[2]

Homeric ideas of the universe

According to the Homeric conception the universe was to be imagined somewhat as a hollow globe, divided in two by the disc of the earth and its encircling Oceanus; the upper hemisphere was that of light, or the heaven; the lower one Tartarus, hidden in eternal darkness. Hades lay beneath the earth, and Tartarus was as far below Hades as the sky was above the earth. The solid vault of heaven was borne by Atlas, but its extremities certainly rested upon Oceanus (or its outer boundary), or at least were contained thereby. According to Hesiod (about 800 B.C.) an anvil falling from heaven would not reach earth till the tenth day, and from the earth it would fall for nine days and nine nights and not reach the bottom of Tartarus until the tenth. This underworld is filled to the brim with triple darkness, and the Titans have been hurled into it and cannot come out. On the brink the limits of the earth, the waste Oceanus, black Tartarus, and the starry heaven all coincide. Tartarus is a deep gulf at which even the gods shudder; in a whole year it would be impossible to search through it.[3]

So early do we find three conceptions which two thousand years later still formed the foundation of the doctrine of the earth’s outer limits, especially on the north: (1) the all-embracing Oceanus or empty ocean; (2) the coincidence of sky, sea, land and underworld at the uttermost edge; and lastly (3) the dismal gulf into which even the gods were afraid of falling.

Spherical form of the earth

These or similar ideas still obtained long after the mathematical geographers had conceived the earth as a sphere. Pythagoras (568-about 494 B.C.) was probably the first to proclaim the doctrine of the spherical form of the earth. He relied less upon observation than upon the speculative idea that the sphere was the most perfect form. Before him Anaximander of Miletus (611-after 547 B.C.), to whom are attributed the invention of the gnomon or sun-dial, and the first representation of the earth’s disc on a map, had maintained that the earth was a cylinder floating in space; the inhabited part was the upper flat end. His pupil Anaximenes (second half of the sixth century B.C.) thought that the earth had the form of a trapezium, supported by the air beneath, which it compressed like the lid of a vase; while before him Thales of Miletus (640-about 548 B.C.) was inclined to hold that the earth’s disc swam on the surface of the ocean, in the middle of the hollow sphere of heaven, and that earthquakes were caused by movements of the waters.[4]

Doctrine of zones
The abyss

Parmenides of Elea (about 460 B.C.) divided the earth’s sphere into five zones or belts, of which three were uninhabitable: the zone of heat, or the scorched belt round the equator, and the two zones of cold at the poles. Between the warmth and the cold there were on either side of the hot zone two temperate zones where men might live. This division was originally derived from the five zones of the heavens, where the Arctic Circle formed the boundary of the northern stars that are always visible, and the tropics that of the zone dominated by the sun. Pythagoras seems to have been the first to transfer it to the globe, the centre of the universe.[5] This idea of the earth’s five habitable and uninhabitable zones was current till nearly the end of the Middle Ages; but at the same time one finds, often far on in the Middle Ages, the former conceptions of the empty ocean encircling all, and of the “œcumene” swimming in it as an island. Occasionally we meet with a vast unknown continent beyond this ocean, belonging to another world, which no one can reach.[6] Together with these theories, though not very conspicuously, the belief in the immeasurable gulf at the edge of the world also persisted; and this became the “Ginnungagap” of our forefathers.

The conception of the earth’s form and of its uttermost limits was thus by no means consistent, and on some points it was contradictory. We must always, and especially in dealing with past times, distinguish between the views of the scientific world and those of ordinary people, two aspects which were often hopelessly mixed together. And again in the scientific world we must distinguish between the mathematical-physical geographers and the historical, since the latter dealt more with descriptions and were apt to follow accounts and legends rather than what was taught by physical observations.

The Rhipæan Mountains
Læstrygons and Cimmerians

The world which the Greeks really knew was bounded in the earlier period on the north by the Balkans. These again gave rise to the mythical Rhipæan Mountains, which were soon moved farther to the north or north-east[7] as knowledge increased, and so they and the Alps were made the northern boundary of the known world. As to what lay farther off, the Greeks had very vague ideas; they seem to have thought that the frozen polar countries began there, where it was so cold that people had to wear breeches like the Scythians; or else it was a good climate, since it lay north of the north wind which came from the Rhipæan Mountains. But that some genuine information about the North had reached them as early as the time of the Odyssey seems to be shown by the tale of the Læstrygons—who had the long day, and whose shepherds, driving their flocks in at evening, could call to those who were setting out in the morning, since the paths of day and night were with them so close to one another—and of the Cimmerians at the gates of the underworld, who lived in a land of fog, on the shores of Oceanus, in eternal cheerless night. It is true that the poet seems to have imagined these countries somewhere in the east or north-east, probably by the Black Sea; for Odysseus came from the Læstrygons to the isle of Ææa “by the mansions and dancing-places of the Dawn and by the place where the sun rises.” And from Ææa the Greek hero steered right out into the night and the mist on the dangerous waters of Oceanus and came to the Cimmerians,[8] who must therefore have dwelt beyond the sunrise, shrouded in cloud and fogs. It might be supposed that it was natural to the poet to believe that there must be night beyond the sunrise and on the way to the descent to the nether regions; but it is, perhaps, more probable that both the long day and the darkness and fog are an echo of tales about the northern summer and the long winter night, and that these tales reached the Greeks by the trade-routes along the Russian rivers and across the Black Sea, for which reason the districts where these marvels were to be found were reported to lie in that direction. A find in the passage-graves of Mycenæ (fourteenth to twelfth century B.C.) of beads made of amber from the Baltic,[9] besides many pieces of amber from the period of the Dorian migration (before the tenth century) found during the recent English excavations of the temple of Artemis at Sparta,[10] furnish certain evidence that the Greek world had intercourse with the Baltic countries long before the Odyssey was put into writing in the eighth century, even though the northern lands of this poem seem to have been limited by a communication by sea between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, running north of the Balkan peninsula. Perhaps this imaginary communication may have been conceived as going by the Ister (Danube), which, at any rate later, was thought to have another outlet in the Adriatic. We may also find echoes of tales about the dark winter and light summer of the North in Sophocles’s tragedy, where we are told that Orithyia was carried off by Boreas and borne over

... the whole mirror of the sea, to the edge of the earth,
To the source of primæval night, where the vault of heaven ends,
Where lies the ancient garden of Phœbus[11]

—though images of this sort may also be due to an idea that the sun remained during the night beyond the northern regions.

The Hyperboreans

According to a comparatively late Greek conception there was in the far North a happy people called the Hyperboreans. They dwelt “under the shining way” (the clear northern sky) north of the roaring Boreas, so far that this cold north wind could not reach them, and therefore enjoyed a splendid climate. They did not live in houses, but in woods and groves. With them injustice and war were unknown, they were untouched by age or sickness; at joyous sacrificial feasts, with golden laurel-wreaths in their hair, and amid song and the sound of the cithara and the dancing of maidens, they led a careless existence in undisturbed gladness, and reached an immense age. When they were tired of life they threw themselves, after having eaten and drunk, joyfully and with wreaths in their hair, into the sea from a particular cliff (according to Mela and Pliny, following Hecatæus of Abdera). Among other qualities they had the power of flying, and one of them, Abaris, flew round the world on an arrow. While some geographers, especially the Ionians, placed them in the northern regions, beyond the Rhipæan Mountains,[12] Hecatæus of Abdera (first half of the third century B.C.), who wrote a work about the Hyperboreans, collected from various sources, and more like a novel than anything else, declares that they dwelt far beyond the accessible regions, on the island of Elixœa in the farthest northern Oceanus, where the tired stars sink to rest, and where the moon is so near that one can easily distinguish the inequalities of its surface. Leto was born there, and therefore Apollo is more honoured with them than other gods. There is a marvellous temple, round like a sphere,[13] which floats freely in the air borne by wings, and which is rich in offerings. To this holy island Apollo came every ninth year; according to some authorities he came through the air in a car drawn by swans. During his visit the god himself played the cithara and danced without ceasing from the spring equinox to the rising of the Pleiades. The Boreads were hereditary kings of the island, and were likewise keepers of the sanctuary; they were descendants of Boreas and Chione. Three giant brothers, twelve feet high, performed the service of priests. When they offered the sacrifice and sang the sacred hymns to the sound of the cithara, whole clouds of swans came from the Rhipæan Mountains, surrounded the temple and settled upon it, joining in the sacred song.

Theopompus (Philip of Macedon’s time) has given us, if we may trust Ælian’s account [“Varia,” iii. c. 18; about 200 A.D.], a remarkable variation of the Hyperborean legend in combination with others:

Europe, Asia, and Africa were islands surrounded by Oceanus; only that land which lay outside this world was a continent; its size was immense. The animals there were huge, the men were not only double our size, but lived twice as long as we. Among many great towns there were two in particular greater than the rest, and with no resemblance to one another; they were called Machimos (the warlike) and Eusebes (the pious). The description of the latter’s peaceful inhabitants has most features in common with the Hyperborean legend. The warlike inhabitants of Machimos, on the other hand, are born armed, wage war continually, and oppress their neighbours, so that this one city rules over many peoples, but its inhabitants are no less than two millions. It is true that they sometimes die of disease, but that happens seldom, since for the most part they are killed in war, by stones, or wood [that is, clubs], for they are invulnerable to iron. They have such superfluity of gold and silver that with them gold is of less value than iron is with us. Once indeed they made an expedition to our island [that is, Europe], came over the Ocean ten millions strong and arrived at the land of the Hyperboreans. But when they learned that these were the happy ones of our earth, and found their mode of life bad, poverty-stricken and despicable, they did not think it worth while to proceed farther.

Among them dwell men called Meropians, in many great cities. On the border of their country is a place which bears the significant name Anostos (without return), and resembles a gulf (“chiasma”). There reigns there neither darkness nor light, but a veil of mist of a dirty red colour lies over it. Two streams flow about this place, of which one is called Hedone (the stream of gladness), the other Lype (the stream of sorrow), and by the banks of each stand trees of the size of a great plane-tree. The fruit of the trees by the river of sorrow has the effect that any one who eats of it sheds so many tears that for the rest of his life he melts away in tears and so dies. The other trees that grow by the river of gladness bear fruit of a quite different kind. With him who tastes it all former desires come to rest; even what he has passionately loved passes into oblivion, he becomes gradually younger and goes once more through the previous stages of his existence in reverse order. From an old man he passes to the prime of life, becomes a youth, a boy, and then a child, and with that he is used up. Ælian adds: “And if the Chionian’s [that is, Theopompus of Chios] tale appears credible to any one, then he may be believed, but to me he seems to be a mythologist, both in this and in other things.”

There can be no doubt that the regions which we hear of in this story, with the Hyperboreans, the enormous quantities of gold, the gulf without return, and so on, were imagined as situated beyond the sea in the North; and in the description of the warlike people of Machimos who came in great hordes southward over the sea, one might almost be tempted to think of warlike northerners, who were slain with stones and clubs, but not with iron, perhaps because they had not yet discovered the use of iron.[14]

The legend of the happy Hyperboreans in the North has arisen from an error of popular etymology, and it has here been treated at some length as an example of how geographical myths may originate and develop.[15] The name in its original form was certainly the designation of those who brought offerings to the shrine of Apollo at Delphi (perhaps also in Delos). They were designated as “perpheroi” or “hyper-pheroi” (bringers over), which again in certain northern Greek dialects took the forms of “hyper-phoroi” or “hyper-boroi;” this, by an error, became connected in later times with “Boreas,” and their home was consequently transferred to the North, many customs of the worship of Apollo being transferred with it [see O. Crusius, 1890, col. 2830]. This gives at the same time a natural explanation of their many peculiarities, their sanctity, their power of flight and the arrow (Apollo’s arrow), their ceremonial feasts, and their throwing themselves from a certain cliff,[16] and so on, all of which is derived from the worship of Apollo. Apollonius of Rhodes (about 200 B.C.) relates that according to the legends of the Celts (in North Italy ?) amber originated from the tears of Apollo, which he shed by thousands when he came to the holy people of the Hyperboreans and forsook the shining heaven.

When, after the conquests of Alexander, the Greeks became acquainted with the mythical world of India, they naturally connected the Indians’ legendary country, “Uttara Kuru,” beyond the Himalayas, with the country of the Hyperboreans. “This land is not too cold, not too warm, free from disease; care and sorrow are unknown there; the earth is without dust and sweetly perfumed; the rivers run in beds of gold, and instead of pebbles they roll down pearls and precious stones.”

The mythical singer Aristeas of Proconnesus (sixth century ?)—to whom was attributed the poem “Arimaspeia”—is said (according to Herodotus) to have penetrated into the country of the Scythians as far as the northernmost people, the Issedonians. The latter told him of the one-eyed, long-haired Arimaspians, who lived still farther north, at the uttermost end of the world, before the cave from which Boreas rushes forth. On their northern border dwelt the Griffins, lion-like monsters with the wings and beaks of eagles;[17] they were the guardians of the gold which the earth sends forth of itself. But still farther north, as far as the sea, were the Hyperboreans.

But the learned Herodotus (about 450 B.C.) doubted that the Hyperboreans dwelt to the north of Boreas; for, said he, if there are people north of the north wind, then there must also be people south of the south wind. Neither did he credit the Scythians’ tales about goat-footed people[18] and Sleepers far in the North. Just as little did this sceptic believe that the air of Scythia was full of feathers which prevented all seeing and moving; it was, he thought, continuous snowfall that the Scythians described thus. On the other hand, he certainly believed in the Amazons, though whether they dwelt in the North, as later authors considered, he does not say.

The idea of the Sleepers, who slept for six months, may very probably be due to legendary tales of the long northern winter-night, the length of which was fixed at six months by theoretical speculations, these tales being confused with reports that the people of Scythia slept a great part of the winter, as even to-day the peasants are said to do in certain parts of Russia, where they almost hibernate. Nor must the possibility be overlooked of stories about the winter’s sleep of animals, bears, for example, being transferred to men.

Later learned geographers, in spite of the scepticism of Herodotus, occupied themselves in assigning to the Hyperboreans a dwelling-place in the unknown. The founder of scientific geography, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (275-195 B.C.), declared that Herodotus’s method of disproving the existence of the Hyperboreans was ridiculous. [Cf. Strabo, i. 61.]

Even so long as five hundred years after Herodotus, Pliny declared the Hyperboreans to be a historical people, whose existence could not be doubted; and on the maps of the Middle Ages we always find them in the most northern inhabited regions, together with the Amazons and other peoples; we even find the Hyperborean Mountains (“Hyperborei Montes”) in Northern Europe and the Hyperborean Sea (“Oceanus Hyperboreus”) to the north of them. Adam of Bremen (eleventh century) thought that the Scandinavians were the Hyperboreans.

Trade-routes between the Mediterranean and the North

Trade-routes between the Mediterranean and the North

Archæological finds show that as long ago as the Scandinavian Bronze Age, or before, there must have been some sort of communication between the Mediterranean and the northern lands. One of the earliest trade-routes between the Mediterranean and the Baltic certainly went from the Black Sea up the navigable river Borysthenes (Dnieper), of which early mention is made by the Greeks, thence along its tributary the Bug to the Vistula, and down the latter to the coast. We also find this route in common use in later antiquity. When we first meet with the Goths in history they are established at both ends of it, by the mouths of the Vistula and of the Borysthenes. The Eruli, who came from the North, are also mentioned by the side of the Goths on the Black Sea. What the wandering nation of the Cimmerians was we do not know, but, as before remarked ([p. 14]), they may have been Cimbri who in those early times had migrated to the northern shore of the Black Sea by this very route. This trade-route was well known in its details to our forefathers in Scandinavia, which likewise points to an ancient communication. Somewhat later it is probable that men travelled from the Baltic up the Vistula and across to the March, a tributary of the Danube, and so either down this river to the Black Sea or overland to the Adriatic. A similar line of communication certainly ran between the North Sea and the Mediterranean along the Elbe to the Adriatic, and up the Rhine across to the Rhone and down this to the coast, or across the Alps to the Po.

Cromlechs: on the right, in Portugal (after Cartailhac); on the left, in Denmark (after S. Müller)

But very early there was also communication by sea along the coasts of western Europe between the Mediterranean and the North. This is shown amongst other things by the distribution, about 2000 B.C., of cromlechs over Sicily, Corsica, Portugal and the north of Spain, Brittany, the British Isles, the North Sea coast of Germany, Denmark and southern Scandinavia as far as Bohuslen [cf. S. Müller, 1909, p. 24 f.], and perhaps farther. Somewhat later, in the middle of the second millennium B.C., the passage-graves or chambered barrows followed the same route northward from the Mediterranean. That this sea-communication was comparatively active in those far-off times is proved by the fact that cromlechs, which originated in the grave-chambers of the beginning of the Mycenæan period in the eastern Mediterranean, reached Denmark, by this much longer route round the coast, before the single graves, which were an older form in the Mediterranean countries, but which spread by the slower route overland, through Central Europe.

That as far back as the Stone Age there was communication by one way or another, perhaps along the coast between Spain and the shore of the North Sea or the Baltic, appears probable from the fact that amber beads have been found in the Iberian peninsula containing 2 per cent. of succinic acid, a proportion which is taken to indicate its northern (Baltic) origin [cf. L. Siret, 1909, p. 138].

On account of the many intermediaries, speaking different languages, through which it passed, the information which reached the Mediterranean by these various routes was very defective. According to Herodotus [iv. 24] the Scythians on their trading journeys to the bald-headed Agrippæans required no fewer than seven different interpreters to enable them to barter with the peoples on the way. Their first more direct knowledge of northern and western Europe must certainly have reached the Mediterranean peoples through the tin trade and the amber trade. It is worth remarking that it was precisely these two articles, representing two powerful sides of human nature, utility and the love of ornament, that were to be of such great importance also as regards knowledge of the North.

Ancient Egyptian ship; from a grave in western Thebes (after R. Lepsius)

Tin in antiquity

We do not know when, where, or how tin first came into use, the metal which, together with copper, was as important in the Bronze Age as iron is in our time. In Egypt it is found in the oldest pyramid-graves, and in the third millennium B.C. bronze was in general use there, though we know not whence the tin came to make it. Tin-ore occurs in comparatively few places on the earth, and if China, which formed a world by itself, be excluded, the only places where we know that the metal was obtained in ancient times are north-west Spain, the Cassiterides (probably in Brittany) and Cornwall,[19] which still possesses rich deposits; and as far as we can trace history back, the civilised peoples of the Mediterranean and the Orient obtained their tin from western Europe.[20] If the first tin in Egypt and in the valley of the Euphrates also came from there, the civilisation of western Europe, implied by regular working of mines, would be given a venerable age which could almost rival the oldest civilisations of the Mediterranean. But this is difficult to believe, as we should expect to find traces of this early connection with Egypt along the trade-routes between that country and the place of origin of the tin; and no archæological evidence to prove this is at present forthcoming.[21]

This possibility is nevertheless not wholly excluded: finds of beads of northern (?) amber in Egyptian graves of the Fifth Dynasty (about 3500 B.C.) may point to ancient unknown communication with the farthest parts of Europe. In Spain, too, neolithic objects have been found, of ivory and other substances, which may have come from Egypt [cf. L. Siret, 1909]. It is certain that the earliest notices of tin in literature mention it as coming from the uttermost limits of Europe. In his lament over Tyre the prophet Ezekiel says [xxvii. 12]: “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs.” Herodotus [iii. 115] says that it came from the Cassiterides. As Tarsis was the starting-point of the tin-trade with the Cassiterides,[22] these two statements are in agreement.

Figures and thin rods of tin have been found in association with stone implements on the sites of pile-dwellings in Switzerland. Tin rings have also been found at Hallstatt. In barrows (of the Bronze Age ?) in the island of Anrum, on the west coast of Sleswick, there were found a dagger or arrowhead and several other objects of tin, besides a lump of the metal, and in Denmark it is known that tin was used for ornament on oak chests of the earliest Bronze Age, which again points to coastal traffic with the south-west.

In the Iliad tin is spoken of as a rare and costly metal, used for the decoration of weapons, and it appears that arms were then made of copper, bronze not being yet in general use, as was the case in the later time of the Odyssey. But in the excavations at Troy, curiously enough, bronze objects were found immediately above the neolithic strata, which would seem to show that the Bronze Age reached the Greeks from Egypt without any intervening copper age.

The Homeric songs do not allude to tin as a Phœnician commodity, like amber. This may mean that the Greeks even in the earliest times obtained it through their own commercial relations with Gaul, without employing the Phœnicians as middlemen.

Possibly the Greek word for tin, “kassiteros,” and the name of the tin-islands, “Kassiterides,” themselves point to this direct connection. The same word is also found in Sanscrit, “kastîra,” and in Arabic, “qazdir.” Professor Alf Torp thinks that the word both in Greek and in Sanscrit “must be borrowed from somewhere, but whence or when is not known. ‘Kassiteros,’ of course, occurs as early as Homer, ‘kastîra’ is in Indian literature much later, but as far as that goes it may well be old in Sanscrit. I do not know of any Celtic word one could think of; a ‘cassitír’ (woodland) is hardly to the point; it is true that ‘tír’ means ‘land,’ but no other ‘cass’ is known to me except one that means ‘hair’” (in a letter of November 9, 1909). We may therefore look upon it as certain that “kassiteros” is not an original Greek word; it must in all probability have come from the country whence the Greeks first obtained tin (analogous cases are the name of copper from the island of Cyprus, that of bronze from Brundisium, etc.). That this country was India, as some have thought, is improbable, since it is stated in the “Periplus Maris Erythræi” [xlix.], confirmed by Pliny [xxxiv. 163], that tin was imported into India from Alexandria in exchange for ivory, precious stones and perfumes; we must therefore suppose that the name reached India with the tin from the Greeks, and not vice versâ. It is very possible that the word consists of two parts, of which the second “-teros” may be connected with the Celtic word “tír” for land (Latin “terra”). The first part, “kassi,” occurs in many Celtic words and names. Ptolemy [ii. 8] mentions in Gaul, in or near Brittany: “Bidu-kasioi,” “Uenelio-kasioi,” “Tri-kasioi,” and “Uadi-kasioi.” As mentioned by Reinach [1892, p. 278], there was a people in Brittany called “Cassi” (a British king, “Cassi-vellaunos,” an Arvernian chief, “Ver-cassi-vellaunos,” etc.). It may be supposed that the country was named after these people, or was in some other way referred to by such a word and called “Kassi-tír.” In this case the Cassiterides might be sought for in Brittany, and this agrees with what we have arrived at in another way. But this would entail the assumption that the Celts were already in Gaul at the time of the Iliad.

Professor Alf Torp has called attention to the remarkable circumstance that “the Cymric word for tin, ‘ystaen,’ resembles ‘stannum,’ which cannot be genuine Latin. I am inclined to think that both words are derived from an Iberian word; the Romans would in that case have got it from Galicia, and the Cymri doubtless from a primitive Iberian population in the British Isles. In some way or other our word ‘tin’ must be connected with this word, though the ‘i’ is curious in the face of the Cymric ‘a’” (letter of November 9, 1909). In connection with this hypothesis of Professor Torp, it may be of interest to notice that in the tin district of Morbihan in Brittany, by the mouth of the Vilaine, is “Penestin,” where the deposits still contain much tin, and the name of which must come from the Celtic “pen” (== head, cape) and “estein” (== tin).[23] It is conceivable that the Latin “stannum” was derived from Brittany rather than from Galicia.

In ancient Egyptian there is no word for tin; as in early Latin, it is described as white lead (dhti hs), which may point to a common western origin for these two metals.

There has been great diversity of opinion as to where the Cassiterides of the Greeks were to be found. Herodotus [iii. 115] did not know where they were: “in spite of all his trouble, he had not been able to learn from any eye-witness what the sea is like in that region [that is, on the north side] of Europe. But it is certain that tin comes from the uttermost end, as also amber.” Posidonius mentioned the islands as lying between Spain and Britain (see above, [p. 23]). Strabo says [iii. 175]:

“The Cassiterides are ten, and lie near to one another, in the midst of the sea northwards from the harbour of the Artabri [Galicia]. One of them is unoccupied, while the others are inhabited by people in black cloaks, with the robe fastened on the breast and reaching down to their feet, who wander about with staves in their hands like the Furies in tragedy. They live for the most part as herdsmen on their cattle; but as they also have mines of tin and lead they barter these metals and hides for pottery, salt, and articles of copper with the merchants. Formerly the Phœnicians alone carried on this trade from Gadir and kept the sea-route secret from every one else; but as the Romans once sailed in pursuit of one of their vessels with the object of finding out the position of their markets, the captain intentionally allowed his ship to be stranded on a sandbank and brought the same destruction upon his pursuers; but he saved himself from the wreck, and was compensated by the State for the value of his loss. Nevertheless the Romans discovered the sea-route after repeated attempts, and when Publius Crassus [under Cæsar] had also traversed it he saw the metals dug out from near the surface and that the inhabitants were peaceful, and he proved this sea-passage to be practicable, if one wished to make it, although it is longer[24] than that which divides Britain [from the continent].”

Places where tin is found in western Europe (marked with crosses),
and routes of the tin-trade in ancient times (after L. Siret, 1908)

It is unlikely that the Cassiterides were Cornwall, as has been commonly supposed, since this peninsula can with difficulty be regarded as a group of islands; moreover this would not agree with the descriptions which always mention them as separate from Britain, and usually farther south. The Scilly Isles, lying far out in the sea, where tin has never been worked to any great extent, and whose waters are dangerous to navigate, are out of the question. On the other hand, it may almost be regarded as certain that the Cassiterides are the same as the “Œstrymnides” (see below), and these must be looked for on the coast of Gaul. Furthermore tin is mentioned as “Celtic” by several Greek authorities; in the “Mirabiles auscultationes” of Aristotle or Pseudo-Aristotle [i. 834, A. 6] it is so called, and Ephorus (about 340 B.C.) speaks [in Scymnus of Chios] of Tartessus [i.e., Gadir], “the famous city,” as “rich in alluvial tin from Celtica [Gaul], in gold, as also in copper.”[25] It may further be mentioned that Mela referred to the Cassiterides[26] as “Celtican,” which would mean that they belonged to the north-west coast of Spain, unless it is confused with Celtic; and in his description of the islands of Europe, going from south to north, he puts them immediately before “Sena,” or the Île de Seine at the western extremity of Brittany, which means in any case that they would be to the south of that island. Everything points to the islands being situated on the south coast of Brittany, and there is much in favour of Louis Siret’s assumption [1908] that they are the islands of Morbihan (“Les Îles du Morbraz”), west of the mouth of the Loire, exactly where “Penestin” is situated. This agrees very well, as we shall see later, with the description of Himilco’s voyage to the Œstrymnides. The free alluvial deposits along the shore in this district, near the mouth of the Vilaine, still contain a good deal of tin, together with gold and other precious metals; but in those distant times they may have been very rich in tin, and as they lie on the very seashore they were naturally discovered early and became the most important source of tin until they were partly exhausted. In the meantime the rich tin deposits of Cornwall had begun to be utilised, and they became in turn the most important, while the Cassiterides were gradually forgotten.

Diodorus [v. 22] alludes to the tin trade in the following terms: “On that promontory of Prettanike [Britain] which is called ‘Belerion,’ the inhabitants are very hospitable, and they have become civilised by intercourse with foreign merchants. They produce tin, by actively working the land which contains it. This is rocky and contains veins of earth, and by working and smelting the products they obtain pure metal. This they make into the form of knuckle-bones and bring it to an island which lies off the coast of Britain and is called ‘Ictis.’ For when the intervening space becomes dry at ebb-tide they bring a quantity of tin to the island in waggons. A curious thing happens with the islands near the coast between Europe and Britain; for when the dividing strait is filled at high water they appear as islands, but when the sea recedes at the ebb and leaves a great space of dry land, they look like part of the mainland. Here the merchants buy it from the natives and bring it across to Gaul; but finally they journey on foot through Gaul, and bring the goods on horses to the mouth of the river Rhone.” In another place [v. 38] he says that the tin is conveyed on horseback to Massalia and to the Roman commercial town of Narbo.

Bunbury [1883, ii. p. 197] thinks that “this characteristic account leaves no reasonable doubt that Ictis was St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall (Belerion), to which the description precisely answers, and which contains a small port such as would have been well suited to ancient traders.” The description decidedly does not fit, as some have thought, the island of Vectis (Wight); moreover the tin would in any case have had to be brought to the latter by sea from Cornwall, and not in waggons. It is, however, also possible that we have here some confusion with the original tin district in Brittany, where such places as Ictis, with the change between flood and ebb tide, are well known, from Cæsar’s description among others. But as Diodorus did not know the tin-mines of Brittany, which in his time had lost their importance, and had heard of tin-mines in Belerion, he transferred to the latter the whole description which he found in earlier writers. This supposition may be confirmed by Pliny’s statement [Hist. Nat. iv. 16, 104]: “The historian Timæus says that in six days’ sailing inwards from Britain the island of ‘Mictis’ is reached, in which white lead (tin) occurs. Thither the Britons sail in vessels of wicker-work, covered with hides.” Originally the passage doubtless read “insulam Ictis,” which by transference of the “m” became “insula Mictis,” and this again has been amended to “insulam Mictis.” It is impossible to identify the description with Vectis, which moreover has just been mentioned by Pliny, and it is also difficult to understand how it could be a place in Cornwall, but it is consistent with the tin district of Brittany.

We do not know how or at what period this tin industry first developed. Perhaps it was as early as the end of the neolithic period; but it is improbable that it should have been independently developed by the Iberian aborigines who lived in the tin districts of Iberia, and doubtless also of Brittany; it is far more likely to be due to communication with the Mediterranean through a seafaring, commercial people, and we know of none other than the Phœnicians. How early they began their widespread commerce and industry is unknown; but they must have reached this part of the world long before Gadir was founded by the Tyrians about 1100 B.C. It is conceivable that in their search for gold and silver they discovered these deposits of tin and knew how to take advantage of them. As already remarked, there was as early as 2000 B.C. a continuous communication by sea along the coasts of western Europe, and it is probable that there arose at a very early time efficient navigators on the coasts of northern Spain and Brittany, just those districts which are rich in tin, where there are many good harbours. For a long time the tin trade was carried on by sea, southward along the coast to Tarsis in southern Spain; but by degrees an overland trade-route also came into use, going up the Loire and down the Rhone to the Mediterranean. This route became known to the Greeks, and the Phocæan colony Massalia was founded upon it about 600 B.C.; later the Greek colony of Corbilo was possibly founded at its other extremity, by the mouth of the Loire (?). Later still another trade-route ran along the Garonne overland to the Roman Narbo (Narbonne). On the development of the Cornish tin industry, the same routes by sea and land continued to be used. Thus it was that the tin trade furnished one of the first and most important steps in the path of the exploration of the North.

Amber in ancient times

When Phaëthon one day had persuaded his father Helios to let him drive the chariot of the sun across the sky, the horses ran away with him and he first came too near the vault of heaven and set fire to it, so that the Milky Way was formed; then he approached too near the earth, set the mountains on fire, dried up rivers and lakes, burned up the Sahara, scorched the negroes black, until, to avoid greater disasters in his wild career, Zeus struck him down with his thunderbolt into the river Eridanus. His sisters, the daughters of the sun, wept so much over him that the gods in pity changed them into poplars, and their tears then flowed every year as amber on the river’s banks. “For this reason amber came to be called ‘electron,’ because the sun has the name of ‘Elector.’” In this way the Greeks, in their poetry, thought that amber was formed. The mythical river Eridanus, which no doubt was originally in the north (cf. Herodotus), was later identified sometimes with the Rhone, sometimes with the Po. Herodotus [iii. 115] says of northern Europe: “I do not suppose that there is a river which the barbarians call Eridanus, and which flows into the sea to the northward, from whence amber may come.... For in the first place the name Eridanus itself shows that it is Hellenic and not barbarian, and that it has been invented by some poet or other”; and in the second, he was not able to find any eye-witness who could tell him about it (cf. [p. 27]); but in any case he thought that amber as well as tin came from the uttermost limits of Europe.

Places where amber is found (marked with crosses)

The most important sources of amber in Europe are the southern coast of the Baltic, especially Samland, and the west coast of Jutland with the North Frisian islands. It is also found in small quantities in many places in western and central Europe, on the Adriatic, in Sicily, in South Africa, Burmah, the west coast of America, etc. Northern amber, from the Baltic and the North Sea, is distinguished from other kinds that have been investigated, by the comparatively large proportion of succinic acid it contains, and it seems as though almost all that was used in early antiquity in the Mediterranean countries and in Egypt was derived from the north. Along the coasts of the Baltic and North Sea the amber is washed by the waves from the loose strata of the sea-bottom and thrown up on the beach. When these washed-up lumps were found by the fishers and hunters of early times they naturally attracted them by their brilliance and colour and by the facility with which they could be cut. It is no wonder, therefore, that amber was used as early as the Stone Age for amulets and ornaments by the people on the Baltic and North Seas, and spread from thence over the whole of the North. In those distant times articles of amber were still rare in the South; but in the Bronze Age, in proportion as gold and bronze reach the north, they become rarer there, but more numerous farther south. In the passage-graves of Mycenæ (fourteenth to twelfth centuries B.C.) there are many of them, as also in Sparta at the time of the Dorian migration (twelfth to tenth centuries B.C.; cf. [p. 14]). It is evident that amber was the medium of exchange wherewith the people of the North bought the precious metals from the South, and in this way it comes that the two classes of archæological finds have changed their localities. The neolithic ornaments of amber at Corinth, already referred to, the amber beads of the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, and those of the neolithic period in Spain, show, however, if they are northern, that this connection between South and North goes back a very long way. But the Greek tribes among whom the Iliad originated do not appear to have known amber, as it is not mentioned in the poem, and it is first named in the more recent portions of the Odyssey (put into writing in the eighth century B.C.). Among the jewels which the Phœnician merchant offered to the Queen of Syria was “the golden necklace hung with pieces of amber” [Od. xv. 460]. We must therefore believe that the Phœnicians were the middlemen from whom the Greeks obtained it at that time. But it was not so much esteemed by the Greeks of the classical period as it became later, and they rejected it in their art industries, for which reason it is seldom mentioned by Greek authors. Thales of Miletus (600 B.C.) discovered that when rubbed it attracted other bodies, and from this important discovery made so long ago has sprung the knowledge of that force which dominates our time, and which has been named from the Greek word for amber, “electron.”

Among the Romans of the Empire this substance was so highly prized that Pliny tells us [xxxvii., chap. 12] that “a human likeness made of it, however small, exceeds the price of a healthy living person.” This was both on account of its beauty and of its occult properties; when worn as an amulet it was able to ward off secret poisons, sorcery and other evils. It therefore naturally became an article that was in great demand, and for which merchants made long voyages.

It has been thought that the North Sea amber came into the southern market before that of the Baltic, and as the Eridanus of the myth was sometimes taken for the Rhone and sometimes for the Po, it was believed that in early times amber was carried up the Rhine and across to both these rivers, later also up the Elbe to the Adriatic [cf. Schrader, 1901, “Bernstein”]. It was thought that the archæological finds also favoured this theory; but it must still be regarded as doubtful, and it is scarcely probable that the Phœnicians obtained it from the mouths of the Rhone and the Po, while they may have brought it by sea at an early period. By what routes amber was distributed in the earliest times is still unknown.

Phœnician warship, according to an Assyrian representation

Voyages of the Phœnicians

Even though the Phœnicians were for the most part a commercial and industrial people, who were not specially interested in scientific research, there can be no doubt that by their distant voyages they contributed much geographical knowledge to their age, and in many ways they influenced Greek geography, especially through Miletus, which from the beginning was partly a Phœnician colony, and where the first Greek school of geographers, the Ionian school, developed. Thales of Miletus was himself probably a Semite. How far they attained on their voyages is unknown. Hitherto no certain relics of Phœnician colonies have been found along the coasts of western Europe farther north than south-west Spain (Tarsis), and there is no historically certain foundation for the supposition that these seafaring merchants of antiquity, the Phœnicians, Carthaginians and Gaditanians, on their voyages beyond the Pillars of Hercules and northwards along the coasts of western Europe, should have penetrated beyond the tin country and as far as the waters of northern Europe, even to Scandinavia and the Baltic, whence they themselves might have brought amber.[27] But a hypothesis of this sort cannot be disproved, and is by no means improbable. Everything points to the Phœnicians having been uncommonly capable seamen with good and swift-sailing ships; and a seafaring people who achieved the far more difficult enterprise of circumnavigating Africa, and of sailing southwards along its west coast with whole fleets to found colonies, cannot have found it impossible to sail along the west and north coast of Europe, where there are plenty of natural harbours. It would then be natural for them to try to reach the North Sea and the Baltic, if they expected to find the precious amber there, and on this point they certainly had information from the merchants who brought it either by land or by sea. It has already been remarked that it is first mentioned in history as a Phœnician article of commerce.[28] It may be supposed that the Phœnicians at an early period obtained amber from their harbours on the Black Sea;[29] but after having pursued this prosperous carrying-trade from their harbours here and in the west, it is not improbable that they themselves tried to penetrate to the amber countries with their ships.[30] The Phœnicians, however, tried to keep their trade-routes secret from their dangerous and more warlike rivals the Greeks, and it is therefore not surprising that no mention of these routes should be extant, even if they really undertook such voyages; but it is undeniably more remarkable still that no certain trace of them has been found along the coasts of western Europe.

Himilco’s voyage, 500 B.C.

The only thing we know is that about the year 500 B.C. the Carthaginians are said to have sent out an expedition under Himilco through the Pillars of Hercules and thence northwards along the coast. This is the first northern sea voyage of which mention is to be found in literature. At that time Tyre, the mother-city of Gadir, had been destroyed. Until then she had controlled the trade of the west. It was natural that Gadir in her isolated position should seek support from Carthage, which was now rising into power. To strengthen her trade communications, therefore, this flourishing city sent out Hanno’s great expedition along the west coast of Africa, and Himilco to the tin country in the north. Himilco seems to have written an account of the journey; but of this all that has been preserved is a few casual pieces of information in a poem (“Ora Maritima”) by the late Roman author Rufus Festus Avienus[31] (of the end of the fourth century A.D.). The only other place where Himilco’s name is mentioned is in Pliny [Hist. Nat. ii. 67, 169], who merely says that he made a voyage to explore the outer coast of Europe, contemporary with Hanno’s voyage to the south along the west coast of Africa, and in addition he names him in the list of his authorities. But Pliny himself probably never saw his work; it cannot be seen that he has made use of it.

It is true that Avienus makes a pretence of having used Himilco’s original account, but certainly he had never seen it. He may have utilised a Greek authority of about the time of the Christian era [cf. Marx, 1895]. This again was a compound of Greek tales, of which a part may have been taken from a Punic source, but of the latter no trace is found in any other known classical writer, with the exception of Pliny. Unfortunately the information given us by Avienus shows little intelligence in the use of his authorities, and his poem is often obscure.

In the description of the coast of western Europe [vv. 90-129] we read:

“And here the projecting ridge raises its head—the older age called it ‘Œstrymnis’—and all the high mass of rocky ridge turns mostly towards the warm south wind. But beneath the top of this promontory the Œstrymnian Bay opens out before the eyes of the inhabitants. In the midst of this rise the islands which are called Œstrymnides, scattered widely about, and rich in metals, in tin and in lead. Here live a multitude of men with enterprise and active industry, all having continually commercial interests; they plough in skilful fashion far and wide the foaming sea [‘fretum,’ literally, strait], and the currents of monster-bearing Ocean with their small boats. For these people do not know how to fit together [literally, weave] keels of fir or maple; they do not bend their craft with deal, in the usual way; but strange to say, they make their ships of hides sewed together, and often traverse the vast sea with the help of hides. Two days’ voyage from thence lay the great island, which the ancients called ‘the Holy Island,’[32] and it is inhabited by the people of Hierne [i.e., Ireland] far and wide, and near to it again extends the island of Albion. And it was the custom of the men of Tartessus to trade to the borders of the Œstrymnides, also colonists from Carthage and the many who voyage between the Pillars of Hercules visited these seas. The Carthaginian Himilco assures us that these seas can scarcely be sailed through in four months, as he has himself related of his experience on his voyage; thus no breeze drives the ship forward, so dead is the sluggish wind of this idle sea. He also adds that there is much seaweed among the waves, and that it often holds the ship back like bushes. Nevertheless he says that the sea has no great depth, and that the surface of the earth is barely covered by a little water. The monsters of the sea move continually hither and thither, and the wild beasts swim among the sluggish and slowly creeping ships.”

It may be difficult to decide how much of this is really derived from Himilco. The name “Œstrymnis” is not found elsewhere in literature, and may be taken from him.[33] The supposition that it was Cape Finisterre and that the Œstrymnic Bay (“sinus Œstrymnicus”) was the Bay of Biscay is improbable; a bay so open and wide could scarcely have been described in terms which a Latin author would have rendered by “sinus”; besides which there would be difficulties with the Œstrymnides which were widely spread therein. Œstrymnis is certainly in Brittany, and since it “turns chiefly towards the warm south wind,” we may suppose it to be a headland on the south coast. That the Œstrymnic Bay opens out beneath this headland (“sub hujus”) agrees with all that we know of it. As already stated, the tin-producing Œstrymnides are undoubtedly the Cassiterides, which may probably be the islands in the bay by the mouth of the Vilaine and Quiberon, on the south side of Brittany, where tin occurs.

It is just in this district, at the mouth of the Loire, that we find the Veneti as the only people famous for seamanship in ancient times in these parts. But, according to Cæsar’s valuable description, they had strong, seaworthy ships, built wholly of oak and with leather sails. This seems scarcely to tally with the statement that the people of the Œstrymnides sailed the sea in boats of hide, the coracles of the Celts, which is also confirmed by Pliny’s statement [xxxiv. c. 47] that “according to fabulous tales tin was brought in ships of wicker-work sewed round with hides from islands in the Atlantic Ocean.” Either the Veneti must have acquired the art of shipbuilding after the voyage of Himilco—perhaps, indeed, through their intercourse with Carthaginians and Gaditanians—or else we must believe that the statement in Avienus rests upon a misinterpretation of the original authorities, and that the flowery language really means that the ships were not built of fir, maple or spruce, but of oak, the omission of which is striking.

Thus a comparison of the various statements points definitely to Brittany as the place where we must look for the tin-bearing islands. That it was two days’ voyage thence to the holy island of Hierne, and that near to it lay the land of Albion, also agrees; but too much weight must not be laid upon this, as we do not know for certain whether this is really derived from Himilco.

The sea-monsters may be taken as accessories put in to make the voyage terrible; but on the other hand they may be the great whales of the Bay of Biscay, of which there were many in those days, before whaling was undertaken there. The exaggerated description of the length and difficulties of the voyage fits in badly with the information that the men of Tartessus and the Carthaginians were in the habit of trading there. How much of this is due to misunderstanding of the original, or to downright interpolation, we do not know. With the universal desire of the Carthaginians and Phœnicians to keep the monopoly of their trade-routes, Himilco may have added this to frighten others. It is also possible that he made a longer voyage in four months, but that Avienus’s authority gave an obscure and bungled account of it.

The description of the shallow water, and of the seaweed which holds the ships back, etc., seems to correspond to the actual conditions. In another part of the poem something similar occurs, where we read [v. 375]: “Outside the Pillars of Hercules along the side of Europe the Carthaginians once had villages and towns. They were in the habit of building their fleets with flatter bottoms, since a broader ship could float upon the surface of a shallower sea.”[34] One is reminded of the shallow west coast of France, where the tide lays large tracts alternately dry (covered with seaweed) and under water, so that it might well be said that “the surface of the earth is barely covered by a little water.” Ebb and flood were, of course, an unknown phenomenon in the Mediterranean. In this respect also the description suits the voyage to Brittany, where the sea is shallow. It has been asserted that the expression “seaweed among the waves” might show that Himilco had been near to or in the Sargasso Sea; but there is no reason whatever for supposing this; the explanation given above is more natural, besides which the Sargasso Sea could hardly be described as shallow and as lying on the way to Œstrymnis.[35]

On the Atlantic Ocean Avienus has the following [vv. 380-389]:

“Farther to the west from these Pillars there is boundless sea. Himilco relates that the ocean extends far, none has visited these seas; none has sailed ships over these waters, because propelling winds are lacking on these deeps, and no breeze from heaven helps the ship. Likewise because darkness [‘caligo’ == darkness, usually owing to fog] screens the light of day with a sort of clothing, and because a fog always conceals the sea, and because the weather is perpetually cloudy with thick atmosphere.”

If we may believe Avienus that this description is derived from Himilco, it possesses great interest, since here and in the description (above) of the voyage to Œstrymnis we find the same ideas of the western sea and of the uttermost sea which appear later, after Pytheas’s time, in the accounts of the thick and sluggish sea without wind round Thule, and in this case it shows that already at that early period ideas of this sort had developed. Müllenhoff [1870, pp. 78, 93 f.], it is true, takes it for granted that these descriptions in Avienus cannot be derived from Himilco, but his reasons for so doing do not appear convincing. Aristotle says [“Meteorologica,” ii. 1, 14] that the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules was muddy and shallow, and little stirred by the winds. This shows clearly enough that ideas of that kind were current among the Greeks even before Pytheas, and they must doubtless have got them from the Phœnicians.

That some very ancient authority is really the basis of the description of the west coast of Europe as far as the Œstrymnides, which we find in Avienus, is proved again by the fact that the regions farther to the north or north-east are clearly enough represented as entirely unknown, when we read [vv. 129-145]:

“If any one dares to steer his boat from the Œstrymnic Islands in the direction where the air is cold at the axis of Lycaon,[36] he will arrive at the country of the Ligurians, which is void of inhabitants. For by the host of the Celts and by numerous battles it has lately been rendered void. And the expelled Ligurians came, as fate often drives people away, to the districts where there is hardly anything but bush. Many sharp stones are there in those parts, and cold rocks, and the mountains rise threateningly to heaven. And the refugees lived for a long time in narrow places among rocks away from the sea. For they were afraid of waves [i.e., afraid to come near the coast] by reason of the old danger. Later, when security had given them boldness, peace and quietness persuaded them to leave their high positions, and now they descended to places by the sea.”

Müllenhoff thinks [1870, pp. 86 f.] that this mention of the expulsion of the Ligurians by the Celts is necessarily a late addition by a man from the district of Massalia where the Ligurians lived; but it seems more probable that the name is here used as a common designation for the pre-Celtic people who dwelt in these north-western regions; and if it is the north side of Brittany which is here spoken of, the Ligurians of southern Gaul will not be so far away after all. It is clear that in ancient times the people of west and north-west Europe were called “Ligyans.” Hesiod mentioned them as the people of the west in contradistinction to the Scythians of the east [cf. Strabo, vii. 300], and in the legend of Phaëthon occurs the Ligyan king Cycnus at the mouth of the amber-producing river Eridanus, which doubtless was originally supposed to fall into the sea on the north or north-west. We may interpret it as meaning that the aborigines, Ligyans or Ligurians, were driven by the immigrant Celts up into the bush-covered mountainous parts of Brittany. In any case this passage in Avienus, which assumes that the districts farther north are unknown, is a strong proof that his information is ancient and derived from Himilco, and that the latter penetrated as far as the north coast of Brittany, or the south of Britain, but no farther.

CHAPTER II

PYTHEAS OF MASSALIA

THE VOYAGE TO THULE

Among all the vague and fabulous ideas about the North that prevailed in antiquity, the name of Pytheas stands out as the only one who gives us a firmer foothold. By his extraordinary voyage (or voyages ?) this eminent astronomer and geographer, of the Phocæan colony of Massalia (now Marseilles), contributed a knowledge of the northern countries based upon personal experience, and set his mark more or less upon all that was known of the farthest north for the next thousand or fifteen hundred years. Even though later writers like Polybius and Strabo declared themselves unwilling to believe in his “incredible” statements, they could not neglect him.[37]

Pytheas wrote at least one work, which, if we may believe Geminus of Rhodes, was called “On the Ocean”; but all his writings have been lost for ages, and we only know him through chance quotations in much later authors (chiefly Strabo and Pliny) who have not even read his work themselves, but quote at second hand; and several of them (especially Polybius and Strabo) tried to represent him as an impostor and laid stress upon what they thought would make him ridiculous and lessen his reputation.[38] The scraps of information we possess about him and his voyages have thus come down on the stream of time as chance wreckage, partly distorted and perverted by hostile forces. It is too much to hope that from such fragments we may be able to form a trustworthy idea of the original work, but nevertheless from the little we know there arises a figure which in strength, intelligence, and bold endurance far surpasses the discoverers of most periods.

Personal circumstances and date of the voyage

Of Pytheas’s personal circumstances we have no certain information, and we do not even know when he lived. As he was unknown to Aristotle, but was known to his pupil Dicæarchus (who died about 285 B.C.), he was probably a contemporary of Aristotle and Alexander, and his voyage may have been undertaken about 330-325 B.C. So little do we know about the voyage that doubts have been raised as to whether it was really a sea-voyage, or whether a great part of it did not lie overland. Nor do we know whether Pytheas made one or several long journeys to the North. According to a statement of Polybius, Pytheas was a poor man: for he finds it (according to Strabo, ii. 104) “incredible that it should be possible for a private individual without means to accomplish journeys of such wide extent.” If it be true that he was poor, which is uncertain, we must doubtless suppose that Pytheas either had command of a public expedition, fitted out by the merchants of the enterprising city of Massalia, or that he accompanied such an expedition as an astronomer and explorer. At that time the city was at the height of its prosperity, after it had expelled the Carthaginians, as the result of the successful war with them, from the rich fisheries of the Iberian coast, and had also succeeded in establishing commercial relations there, whereby its ships were able to sail out beyond the Pillars of Hercules; a thing which cannot have been so easy for them during the former sea-supremacy of Carthage in the western Mediterranean, which was re-established in 306 B.C., whereby the western ocean again became more or less closed to the Massalians. It is very probable that the flourishing city of Massalia desired to send out an expedition to find the sea-route to the outer coasts of the continent, from whence it was known that the two important articles of commerce, tin and amber, were obtained. But it is evident that Pytheas had more than this business motive for his journey. From all that we know it appears that with him too the object was to reach the most northern point possible, in order to find out how far the “œcumene” extended, to determine the position of the Arctic Circle and the Pole, and to see the light northern nights and the midnight sun, which to the Greeks of that time was so remarkable a phenomenon.

Astronomical measurements

We know that Pytheas was an eminent astronomer. He was the first in history to introduce astronomical measurements for ascertaining the geographical situation of a place; and this by itself is enough to give him a prominent position among the geographers of all times.

By means of a great gnomon he determined, with surprising accuracy, the latitude of his own city, Massalia,[39] which formed the starting-point of his journey, and in relation to which he laid down the latitude of more northerly places.

Gnomon

Sundial

Pytheas also made other astronomical measurements which show him to have been a remarkably good observer. He found that the pole of the heavens did not coincide, as the earlier astronomer Eudoxus had supposed, with any star; but that it made an almost regular rectangle with three stars lying near it.[40] The pole of the heavens was naturally of consequence to Pytheas, who steered by the stars; but it is nevertheless striking that he should have considered it necessary to measure it with such accuracy, if he had not some other object in doing so. He may have required the pole for the adjustment of the equinoctial sun-dial (“polus”), whose pointers had to be parallel with the axis of the heavens;[41] but it is also possible that he had discovered that by measuring the altitude of the pole above the horizon he obtained directly the latitude of the spot on the earth, and that this was a simpler method of determining the latitude than by measuring the altitude of the sun by a gnomon. Nor is it likely that he possessed the requisite knowledge for calculating gnomon measurements unless they were taken either at the solstice or the equinox. To judge by quotations in various authors he must have given the latitude of several places in numbers of parts of a circle north of Massalia.[42] These results of his may perhaps be partly based on measurements of the polar altitude. Whether Pytheas was acquainted with any instrument for the measurement of angles we do not know; but it is not unlikely, since even the Chaldeans appear to have invented a kind of parallactic rule, which was improved upon by the Alexandrians, and was called by the Romans “triquetrum” (regula Ptolemaica). The instrument resembled a large pair of compasses with long straight rods for legs, and the angle was determined by measuring, in measure of length, the distance between these two legs.[43] As the pole of the heavens did not coincide with any star, such measurements cannot have been very accurate, unless Pytheas took the trouble to measure a circumpolar star in its upper and lower culmination; or, indeed, in only one of them, for he may easily have found the distance of the star from the pole by his earlier observations to determine the position of the pole itself. It is also quite possible that by the aid of the rectangle formed by the pole with three stars, he was able to obtain an approximate measurement of the altitude of the pole. Another indication used by the Greeks to obtain the latitude of a place was the length of its longest day. To determine this Pytheas may have used the equinoctial dial (“polus”), or the water-clock, the “clepsydra” of the Greeks.

Greek trading-vessel and longship (warship), from a vase painting (about 500 B.C.)

Pytheas’s ship

It is not known what kind of ship he had for his voyage; but if it was equal to the best that Massalia at that time could afford, it may well have been a good sea-craft. As it was necessary to be prepared for hostilities on the part of the Carthaginians and Gaditanians, he doubtless had a warship (longship), which sailed faster than the broader merchantmen, and which could also be rowed by one or more banks of oars. It may have been considerably over 100 feet long, and far larger than those in which later the Norsemen crossed the Atlantic. It has been asserted that Pytheas must have gone on foot for the greater part of his journey, since, according to Strabo [ii. 104], he is said to have stated “not only that he had visited the whole of Britain on foot, but he also gives its circumference as more than 40,000 stadia.” But, as Professor Alf Torp has pointed out to me, it is not stated that he “traversed” it, but “visited” it on foot. The meaning must be that he put in at many places on the coast, and made longer or shorter excursions into the country. That a man should be able to traverse such great distances alone on foot, through the roadless and forest-clad countries of that period, seems impossible.

Pytheas’s probable routes

We do not know what previous knowledge Pytheas may have had about the regions visited by him; but it is probable that he had heard of the tin country through the merchants who brought the tin overland through Gaul and down the Rhone to Massalia. In a similar way he had certainly also heard of the amber country. Besides this, he may have been acquainted with the trading voyages of the Phœnicians and Carthaginians along the west coast of Europe, and with the voyage of Himilco. Although it is true that the Phœnician sailors tried to keep the secret of their routes from their dangerous rivals the Greeks and Massalians, they cannot have been altogether successful in the long run, whether their intercourse was hostile or friendly; a few sailor prisoners would have been enough to bring the information.

The voyage northward

When Pytheas sailed out through the Pillars of Hercules he soon arrived, in passing the Sacred Promontory (Cape St. Vincent), at the limit of the world as known to the Greeks. He sailed northward along the west and north coast of Iberia (Portugal and Spain). He made observations of the tides, that remarkable phenomenon to a man from the Mediterranean, and their cause, and was the first Greek to connect them with the moon. He proceeded farther north, and found that the north-western part of Celtica (Gaul) formed a peninsula, Cabæum (Brittany), where the Ostimians lived. He supposed that it extended farther west than Cape Finisterre; but errors of that sort are easily understood at a time when no means existed of determining longitude.

Britain

Farther north he came to Brettanice (Britain), which he appears to have circumnavigated. The Sicilian historian Diodorus, an elder contemporary of Strabo, says [v. 21]: “Britain is triangular in form like Sicily; but the sides are not of equal length; the nearest promontory is Kantion [Kent], and according to what is reported it is 100 stadia distant (from the continent). The second promontory is Belerion [Cornwall], which is said to be four days’ sail from the continent. The third lies towards the sea [i.e., towards the north] and is called Orkan.[44] Of the three sides the one which runs parallel to Europe is the shortest, 7500 stadia; the second, which extends from the place of crossing [Kent] to the point [i.e., Orkan], is 15,000 stadia; but the last is 20,000 stadia, so that the circumference amounts to 42,500 stadia.”

These statements must originally have been due to Pytheas, even though Diodorus has taken them at second hand (perhaps from Timæus). But Pytheas cannot very well have acquired such an idea of the shape of the island without having sailed round it. It is true that the estimate attributed to him of the island’s circumference is more than double the reality,[45] a discrepancy which is adduced by Strabo as a proof that Pytheas was a liar;[46] but neither Strabo nor Diodorus was acquainted with his own description, and there are many indications that the exaggeration cannot be attributed to himself, but to a later writer, probably Timæus. Pytheas in his work can only have stated how many days he took to sail along the coasts, and his day’s sail in those unknown waters was certainly a short one. But the uncritical Timæus, who was moreover a historian and not a geographer, may, according to the custom of his time, have converted Pytheas’s day’s journeys into stadia at the usual equation of 1000 stadia (about 100 geographical miles) for one day’s sailing.[47] Timæus served to a great extent as the authority for later authors who have mentioned Pytheas, and it is probably through him that the erroneous information as to the circumference of Britain reached Polybius, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny, and Solinus. In this way geographical explorers may easily have gross errors attributed to them, when their original observations are lost.

Astronomical measurements in Britain

From statements of Hipparchus, preserved by Strabo [ii. 71, 74, 75, 115, 125, 134], we may conclude that Pytheas obtained astronomical data at various spots in Britain and Orkan. Hipparchus has made use of these in his tables of climate, and he was able from them to point out that the longest day in the most northern part of Britain was of eighteen equinoctial hours,[48] and in an inhabited country, which according to Pytheas lay farther north than Britain, the longest day was of nineteen equinoctial hours. If the length of day is fixed in round numbers of hours, a longest day of eighteen hours fits the northernmost part of Scotland,[49] while the country still farther north with a longest day of nineteen hours agrees exactly with Shetland.[50] These data are important, as they show that Pytheas must have been in the most northerly parts of the British Isles, and reached Shetland.[51]

Thule

But the bold and hardy explorer does not seem to have stopped here. He continued his course northward over the ocean, and came to the uttermost region, “Thule,” which was the land of the midnight sun, “where the tropic coincides with the Arctic Circle.”[52]

On this section of Pytheas’s voyage Geminus of Rhodes (1st century B.C.) has an important quotation in his Astronomy [vi. 9]. After mentioning that the days get longer the farther north one goes, he continues:

To these regions [i.e., to the north] the Massalian Pytheas seems also to have come. He says at least in his treatise “On the Ocean”: “the Barbarians showed us the place where the sun goes to rest. For it was the case that in these parts the nights were very short, in some places two, in others three hours long, so that the sun rose again a short time after it had set.”

The name of Thule is not mentioned, but that must be the country in question. It does not appear from this whether Pytheas himself thought that the shortest night of the year was of two or three hours, or whether that was the length of the night at the time he happened to be at these places; but the first case is doubtless the more probable. At any rate Geminus seems to have understood him thus, since in the passage immediately preceding he is speaking of the regions where the longest day is of seventeen or eighteen hours, and he goes on to speak of those where the longest day is of twenty-three hours. If on the other hand it is the length of the night at the time Pytheas was there that is meant, then it seems strange that he should require to be shown by the barbarians where the sun rose and set, which he could just as well have seen for himself; for it is scarcely credible that after having journeyed so far his stay should have been so brief that the sky was overcast the whole time.[53]

If the longest day of the year was determined by direct observations of the points at which the sun first appeared and finally disappeared in places with a free horizon to the north, then days of twenty-one and twenty-two hours at that time will answer to 63° 39′ and 64° 39′ N. lat. Calculated theoretically, from the centre of the sun and without taking refraction into account, they will be 64° 32′ and 65° 31′ N. lat. respectively.[54]

In addition to this there are two things to be remarked in the passage quoted in Geminus. First, that the country spoken of by Pytheas was inhabited (by barbarians). Secondly, that he himself must have been there with his expedition, for he says that “the barbarians showed us,” etc. Consequently he cannot, as some writers think, have reported merely what he had heard from others about this country (Thule). Statements in Strabo also show clearly that Pytheas referred to Thule as inhabited.

Other pieces of information derived from Pytheas establish consistently that Thule extended northwards as far as the Arctic Circle. Eratosthenes, Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, Cleomedes, Solinus, and others, all have statements which show clearly that Pytheas described Thule as the land of the midnight sun.

If we now sum up what is known of Pytheas’s voyage to the North, we shall find that it all hangs well together: he first came to the north of Scotland, where the longest day was of eighteen hours, thence to Shetland with a longest day of nineteen hours, and then to a land beyond all, Thule, where the longest day was in one place twenty-one hours and in another twenty-two, and which extended northwards as far as the midnight sun and the Arctic Circle (at that time in 66° 15′ N. lat.). There is nothing intrinsically impossible in the supposition that this remarkable explorer, who besides being an eminent astronomer must have been a capable seaman, had heard in the north of Scotland of an inhabited country still farther to the north, and then wished to visit this also. We must remember how, as an astronomer, he was specially interested in determining the extent of the “œcumene” on the north, and in seeing with his own eyes the remarkable phenomena of northern latitudes, in particular the midnight sun. It is not surprising that he was prepared to risk much to attain this end; and he had already shown by his voyage to the northernmost point of Britain that he was an explorer of more than ordinary boldness, and equal to the task.

Nevertheless it has seemed incredible to many—not only in antiquity, but in our own time as well—that Pytheas should have penetrated not only so far into the unknown as to the islands north of Scotland, but that he should have ventured yet farther into the absolutely unexplored Northern Ocean, and found an extreme country beyond this. He would thus have pushed back the limit of the learned world’s knowledge from the south coast of Britain to the Arctic Circle, or about sixteen degrees farther north. As a feat of such daring and endurance has appeared superhuman, a great deal of ingenuity has been employed, especially by Müllenhoff [1870, i., pp. 392 f.], to prove that Thule was Shetland, that Pytheas himself did not get farther than the Orkneys or the north of Scotland, and that he heard from the natives of the country still farther north, which he never saw. But in order to do this almost all the statements that have been preserved on this part of Pytheas’s voyage must be arbitrarily distorted; and to alter or explain away one’s authorities so as to make them fit a preconceived opinion is an unfortunate proceeding. Unless, like Polybius and Strabo, we are willing to declare the whole to be a freely imaginative work, which however is remarkably consistent, we must try to draw our conclusions from the statements in the authorities as they stand, and in that case it must for the following reasons be regarded as impossible that Thule means Shetland:

Thule is not Shetland

(1) It is improbable that (as Müllenhoff asserts) so capable an astronomer as Pytheas should have made a mistake of several hours when he gave the length of the night as two or three hours. There is little intrinsic probability in the conjecture that he had overcast weather all the time he was in the north of Scotland and Orkney, and therefore relied on the approximate statements of the natives, which he did not fully understand, and which when translated into Greek measures of time might produce gross errors. But it is worse when we look at it in connection with Hipparchus’s statements from Pytheas, that in Britain the longest day was of eighteen hours, and nineteen hours in a region (i.e., Shetland) farther north, where the sun at the winter solstice stood less than three cubits above the horizon. Unless he has given the latter region a long extension to the north, he must have made several conflicting statements about the same region. It will be seen that this leads us to a violent and arbitrary alteration of the whole system of information, which is otherwise consistent.

(2) The assertion that Pytheas did not himself say that he had been in the country where the night was two and three hours long, conflicts with the words of Geminus. Cleomedes also tells us that Pytheas is said to have been in Thule.

(3) The definite statements in a majority of the authorities that Thule lay within the Arctic Circle and was the land of the midnight sun, also exclude the Shetland Isles. The astronomer Pytheas cannot have been so far mistaken as to the latitude of these islands.

(4) That it was six days’ sail to Thule from Britain[55] will not suit Shetland, even if we make allowance for the frequently obscure statements as to the day’s journeys that are attributed to Pytheas (e.g., by Strabo).

(5) That Strabo in one place [ii. 114] calls Thule “the northernmost of the British Isles” cannot be used, as Müllenhoff uses it, as a proof of its belonging to these islands and having a Celtic population. There is not a word to this effect. To Strabo, who also placed Ierne (Ireland) out in the sea north of Britain, it must have been natural to call all the islands in that part of the world British. Indeed, he says himself in the same breath that Thule, according to Pytheas, lay within the Arctic Circle. How little weight he attached to the expression British is additionally apparent from another passage [ii. 75], where he says that “Hipparchus, relying on Pytheas, placed these inhabited regions [Shetland] farther north than Britain.”

(6) Pliny [Nat. Hist. iv. 104] mentions among islands north of Britain as “the greatest of all, ‘Berricen,’ which is the starting-place for Thule.” Berricen, which in some MSS. is written “Nerigon,” has been taken for Mainland of Shetland,[56] while others have seen in the form Nerigon the first appearance in literature of the name of Norway (“Noregr”),[57] though with doubtful justification, since this name was hardly in existence at that time. But whether the island be Shetland or Norway, this passage in Pliny puts Thule outside the Scottish islands. And the reference to that country makes it probable that the statements, in part at any rate, are derived from Pytheas.

(7) Finally, it may perhaps be pointed out that Thule is nowhere referred to as a group of islands; the name rather suggests the idea of a continuous land or a single island. To this it may be objected that neither is Orkan referred to as an archipelago in the oldest authorities; but it is uncertain whether in Pytheas, as in Diodorus, Orkan was not used of the northern point of Brettanice, and only later transferred to the islands lying to the north of this. Thule, on the other hand, always appears as a land far out in the ocean, and it is moreover uncertain whether Pytheas ever expressly described it as an island.

Thule is not Iceland

But if none of the statements about Thule answers to Shetland, it becomes a question where we are to look for this country.[58] The Irish monk Dicuil, who wrote about 825 A.D., regarded it as self-evident that Iceland, which had then been discovered by Irish monks, must be Thule, and called it so. After him Adam of Bremen and many others have looked upon Iceland as the Thule of the ancients. The objections to this hypothesis are: first, that Thule was inhabited (cf. Geminus, Strabo, and others, see [pp. 54-55]), while Iceland probably was not at that time. Even in Dicuil’s time only a few monks seem to have lived there (see below on the discovery of Iceland). Nor is it likely that Pytheas should have continued his voyage at haphazard across the ocean, unless he had heard that he would find land in that direction. To this must be added that Iceland lies so far away that the distance of six days’ sail will not suit it at all. Finally, if Pytheas had sailed northward at haphazard from Scotland or from Shetland, the least likely thing to happen was for him to be carried towards Iceland; neither the currents nor the prevailing winds bear in that direction; but, on the other hand, they would carry him towards Norway, and it would be natural for him to make the land there, perhaps just between 63° and 64° N. lat. or thereabouts.

Thule is Norway

All the statements about Thule which have been preserved answer to Norway,[59] but to no other country; and even if it may seem a bold idea that there should be communication over the North Sea between the Scottish islands and Norway 300 years before Christ, or 1000 years before the age of the Vikings, we are compelled to accept it, if we are to rely upon our authorities as they stand, without arbitrarily altering them; and Pytheas will then be the first man in history to sail over the North Sea and arrive on our coasts.[60]

That Thule, according to Strabo, lies six days’ sail “north of” Brettanice is no objection to its being Norway. “North of” can only mean “farther north than,” in the same way that Brittany and places in Britain are described as being so many stadia north of Massalia. It also looks as though Eratosthenes, according to the latitudes and distances which he has taken from Pytheas, actually puts Thule to the north-east of Britain (see his map, [p. 49]), or precisely where Norway lies. Besides, Pytheas had no means of determining his course in overcast weather, or of fixing the longitude, for which reasons he supposed, for instance, that Cabæum (the extreme point of Brittany) lay farther west than Cape Finisterre.

That Thule is often referred to as an island by later authors is of little weight. In the first place we do not know whether Pytheas himself so described it; according to all the geographical ideas of the ancients about the north a land in the ocean farther north than the British Isles must necessarily have been an island, even if Pytheas did not say so. In the next place, if a traveller sails northwards, as he did, from one island to another, and then steers a course over the sea from Shetland and arrives at a country still farther north, it would be unlikely that he should believe himself back again on the continent. Besides, Pytheas made another voyage eastwards along the north coast of Germany, past the mouth of the Elbe, and then he had the sea always to the north of him in the direction of his Thule. In order to discover that this land was connected with the continent, he would have had to sail right up into the Gulf of Bothnia. It would therefore have been illogical of Pytheas if he had not conceived Thule as a great island, as in fact it was spoken of later. It is mentioned indeed as the greatest of all islands. When the Romans first heard of Sweden or Scandinavia (Skåne) in the Baltic, they likewise called it an island, and so it was long thought to be.

According to what has been advanced above we must then believe that Pytheas had already received information in northern Brettanice or in the Scottish islands about Thule or Norway across the sea. But from this it follows that in his time, or more than a thousand years before the beginning of the Viking age, there must have been communication by sea between North Britain and Norway. It may seem that this is putting back the Norsemen’s navigation of the high seas to a very remote period; but as we shall see in a later chapter on the voyages of the Norsemen, there are good reasons for thinking that their seafaring is of very ancient date.

Pytheas may have sailed from Shetland with a south-westerly wind and a favourable current towards the north-east, and have arrived off the coast of Norway in the Romsdal or Nordmöre district, where the longest day of the year was of twenty-one hours, and where there is a free outlook over the sea to the north, so that the barbarians may well have shown him where the sun went to rest. From here he may then have sailed northwards along the coast of Helgeland, perhaps far enough to enable him to see the midnight sun, somewhere north of Dönna or Bodö; this depends upon how early in the summer he reached there. On midsummer night he would have been able to see a little of the midnight sun even at about 65½° N. lat.; or south of Vega.[61]

It is nowhere expressly stated that Pytheas himself saw the midnight sun; but a passage in Pomponius Mela [iii. 6, 57] may perhaps point to this. He says of Thule: “but at the summer solstice there is no night there, since the sun then no longer shows merely a reflection, but also the greater part of itself.” It is most reasonable to suppose that this statement is due to actual observation; for if it were only a theoretical conclusion it seems extraordinary that he should not rather mention that the whole of the sun is above the horizon in northern regions, which was clearly enough grasped long before his time (cf. for instance Geminus of Rhodes). Now it may, of course, be thought that such an observation was made by people who came from northernmost Europe later than Pytheas’s time and before Mela wrote; but so long as we do not know of any such authority it is doubtless more reasonable to suppose that like so many other pieces of information it is derived from Pytheas.

The inhabitants of the northern regions

Strabo has a statement about what Pytheas said of the peoples of the northernmost regions. In a special section wherein he is speaking of Thule, and, as usual, trying to cast suspicion on Pytheas’s veracity, he says:

“Yet as far as celestial phenomena and mathematical calculations are concerned, he seems to have handled these subjects fairly well. [Thus he says not inappropriately that] in the regions near the cold zone the finer fruits are lacking and there are few animals, and that the people live on millet [i.e., oats] and other things, especially green vegetables, wild fruits and roots; but among those that have corn and honey they make a drink thereof. But because they have no clear sunshine they thresh the corn in large buildings after the ears have been brought thither; for it becomes spoilt on the open threshing-floors by reason of the want of sunshine and the heavy showers.”

As Diodorus [v. 21] says something similar about the harvest in Britain, it seems possible that Strabo is here thinking rather of what Pytheas had said in a more general way about the peoples near the cold regions, than of his observations on the actual inhabitants of Thule, though, as already remarked, the passage occurs in a section devoted to the latter. The mention of honey may strengthen this view; for even though bee-keeping is now practised in Norway as far north as Hedemarken, and also on the west coast, it is doubtful whether such was the case at that time, though it is not impossible. That wild honey is alluded to, or honey imported from abroad, is improbable.

In the MSS. of Solinus there is a statement about the people of Thule which will be referred to later. Even if the passage were genuine it could hardly, as some have thought, be derived from Pytheas; in any case it does not agree with what he is said by Strabo to have related of the people of the North. In particular it may be pointed out that while the inhabitants of Thule according to the Solinus MSS. lived principally as herdsmen, and are not spoken of as agriculturists, Strabo says nothing about cattle, but on the contrary calls them tillers of the soil. In both accounts they also live on herbs and wild fruits; but, in spite of that, these two passages cannot be derived from the same description. It is true that Strabo was not acquainted with Pytheas’s original work, in which other northern peoples may have been referred to; but this is not very likely.

Length of the voyage

Most writers have thought that Pytheas completed his voyage in comparatively few months, and that he was only some few days in Thule; while others have considered that he spent many years over it.[62] There is no cogent reason for assuming this. As regards the first hypothesis, it is by no means impossible that he should have sailed from Spain to Helgeland in Norway and back again in one summer. But as the greater part of the voyage lay through unknown regions, and as he frequently stopped to investigate the country and the people, he cannot have proceeded very rapidly. To this must probably be added that he often had to barter with the natives to obtain the necessary provisions, since he certainly cannot have carried stores for so long a time. It therefore seems doubtful whether he was ready to return the same summer or autumn, and it is more reasonable to suppose that he wintered at some place on the way.

Whether it be Thule or Britain that is referred to in the passage quoted above from Strabo, it seems to imply that he was in one of these countries at the harvest, and saw there the gathering in of the corn; but, of course, there is also the possibility that the people may have told him about it (through interpreters): and more than that we can scarcely say. It might be objected that if Pytheas had spent a winter in Norway it is probable that he would have furnished many details, remarkable at that time, about the northern winter, of which we hear nothing in any of our authors. But it must always be remembered how utterly casual and defective are the quotations from him which have been preserved, and how little we know of what he really related.

The sea beyond Thule

Pytheas also furnished information about the sea on the other side of Thule. This may be concluded from the following passages in particular:

Strabo says [i. 63]: “Thule, which Pytheas says lies six days’ sail north of Brettanice, and is near to the congealed sea (πεπηγοῖα θάλαττα, i.e., the Polar Sea).”

Pliny [iv. 16 (30)]: “After one day’s sail from Thule the frozen sea (‘mare concretum’) is reached, called by some ‘Cronium.’”[63]

Solinus [22, 11]: “Beyond[64] Thule we meet with the sluggish and congealed sea (‘pigrum et concretum mare’).”

Finally we have a well-known passage in Strabo [ii. 104] which says that Pytheas asserted that in addition to having visited the whole of Britain ...

“He had also undertaken investigations concerning Thule and those regions, in which there was no longer any distinction of land or sea or air, but a mixture of the three like sea-lung, in which he says that land and sea and everything floats, and this [i.e., the mixture] binds all together, and can neither be traversed on foot nor by boat. The substance resembling lung he has seen himself, as he says; the rest he relates according to what he has heard. This is Pytheas’s tale, and he adds that when he returned here, he visited the whole ocean coast of Europe from Gadeira to Tanais.”

This much-disputed description of the sea beyond Thule has first passed through Polybius, who did not believe in Pytheas and tried to throw ridicule upon him. Whether Polybius obtained it directly, or at second hand through some older writer, we do not know. From him it came down to Strabo, who had as little belief in it, and was, moreover, liable to misunderstand and to be hasty in his quotations. The passage is evidently torn from its context and has been much abbreviated in order to accentuate its improbability. It is, therefore, impossible to decide what Pytheas himself said. As it has come down to us the passage is extremely obscure, and it does not even appear clearly how much Pytheas asserted that he had himself seen, and how much he had heard; whether he had only heard of the stiffened and congealed sea (the Polar Sea), while he had really seen the condition that he compared to a lung. As to the meaning of this word there have been many and very different guesses. Some have thought that a common jelly-fish may have been called a sea-lung in the Mediterranean countries at that time, in analogy to its German designation, “Meerlunge.” It may also be thought that Pytheas merely wished to describe a spongy, soft mass, like an ordinary lung.[65] In both cases the description may mean a gelatinous or pulpy mass, and what Pytheas himself saw may have been the ice sludge in the sea which is formed over a great extent along the edge of the drift ice, when this has been ground to a pulp by the action of waves. The expression “can neither be traversed on foot nor by boat” is exactly applicable to this ice-sludge. If we add to this the thick fog, which is often found near drift ice, then the description that the air is also involved in the mixture, and that land and sea and everything is merged in it, will appear very graphic. But that Pytheas should have been far enough out in the sea north of Norway to have met with drift ice is scarcely credible.[66] If, on the other hand, he wintered in Norway, he may well have seen something similar on a small scale. Along the Norwegian coast, in the Skagerak, there may be ice and ice-sludge enough in the late winter, and in the fjords as well; but in that case it is probable that he would also have seen solid ice in the fjords, and would have been able to give a clearer description of the whole, which would have left no room for such misunderstandings on the part of Polybius and Strabo. It may also appear unlikely that Pytheas should not have known ice before; he must, one would think, have seen it on pools of water in the winter even in Massalia, and from the Black Sea ice was, of course, well known to the Greeks. But then it is strange that he should have given such an obscure description of such a condition, and have said that the land was also involved in the mixture; unless we are to regard the whole passage as figurative, in which case the word land may be taken as an expression for the solid as opposed to the liquid form (the sea) and the gaseous (the air).

It appears most probable that Pytheas himself never saw the Polar Sea, but heard something about it from the natives,[67] and his description of the outer ocean has then been coloured by older Greek, or even Phœnician, ideas.[68] It may suggest the old conception, which we find even in Homer, that at the extreme limits of the world heaven, earth, ocean, and Tartarus meet. To this may possibly have been added Platonic ideas of an amalgamation of the elements, earth, sea, and air; and this may have led to a general supposition that in the outer ocean everything was merged in a primeval chaos which was neither solid, liquid, nor gaseous. It is further legitimate to suppose that Pytheas in the course of his voyage in northern waters may have thought in some way or other that he had found indications of such a state of things as pointed out by Kähler [1903], for example, when he arrived at the flat coasts of Holland and North Germany (die Wattenzone), where the sea at high water pours in over the swampy land through a network of innumerable channels, which might suggest the idea of a lung, and where the peat bogs are sometimes impossible to traverse, being neither land nor sea. If Pytheas said that this was like a lung, he can only have used the word as a figure of speech, for it is incredible that he should have really regarded this as the lung of the sea, whose breathing was the ebb and flood, as he had discovered the connection between the tides and the moon.

Other interpretations are also possible; but as we do not know what Pytheas really said, a true solution of the riddle is unattainable, and it is vain to speculate further upon it. In any case one thing is certain: his description of the outer ocean gave rise to an idea in the minds of others that it was sluggish and stiffened, or congealed, a conception which is current with most later authors who have written on it, far down into the Middle Ages. It is the same idea which we recognise as the congealed (“geliberôt”) sea in the “Meregarto” and under the name of “Lebermeer” in German mediæval poetry, “la mar betée” in French, and “la mar betada” in Provençal poetry. Seafaring peoples between the Red and the Yellow Seas have similar tales,[69] but whether they are due to Greek influence or the reverse is not easy to decide.

The voyage along the coast of Germany

Since Pytheas, as mentioned above, was probably acquainted with both the east and west coasts of Britain, we must assume either that on his way back from Norway he sailed southwards along the side which he had not seen on his voyage northwards, or else that he made more than one voyage to Britain. From Strabo (see above, [p. 66]) we know that Pytheas also asserted that he had visited “the whole ocean coast of Europe from Gadeira to Tanais,” and that he had furnished information “about the Ostiæi[70] and the countries beyond the Rhine as far as the Scythians,” all of which Strabo looks upon as imaginary. As Thule is never alluded to as lying north of these regions, but always as north of Britain, we cannot believe that he went straight from Norway south or south-eastwards to Jutland or the north coast of Germany. The meaning of Strabo’s words must be that he claimed to have sailed along the west and north-west coast of Europe (which looks towards the ocean) as far as the borders of Asia, since Tanais (the Don) was generally used as defining the frontier of the two continents.

We do not know when Pytheas undertook this voyage; but the passage quoted from Strabo [ii. 104] points to some time after the journey to Thule. There is no sufficient reason for believing that it was all accomplished at one time, or even in one year, as some will have it. It is more probable that a discoverer and explorer like Pytheas made several voyages, according as he had opportunity; and the rich commercial city of Massalia was greatly interested in the communications with the tin and amber countries, and in hearing about them.

Abalus and Balcia

On his voyage along the coast beyond the Rhine, Pytheas must have come to an island where there was amber, for according to Pliny [Nat. Hist., xxxvii. 2, 11]: “Pytheas relates that the ‘Gutones,’ a Germanic people, dwelt on a bay of the sea (‘æstuarium’) called ‘Metuonidis,’[71] the extent of which was 6000 stadia. From thence it was one day’s sail to the island of ‘Abalus.’ Here in the spring the waves cast up amber, which is washed out of the congealed sea [‘mare concretum,’ the Polar Sea]. The natives use it instead of wood for fire, and sell it to the neighbouring Teutons. This was also believed by Timæus, but he calls the island ‘Basilia.’”

It is possible that this island, Abalus, is the same as the amber island mentioned in another passage of Pliny [iv. 13, 27], where he says of the Scythian coast that there are reports of “many islands without a name, and Timæus relates that among them is one off Scythia, a day’s sail away, which is called ‘Baunonia,’ and on which the waves cast up amber in the springtime.” In any case they are both mentioned in very similar terms [cf. Hergt, 1893, pp. 31 f.]. In the same place we read that “Xenophon, of Lampsacus [about 100 B.C.], mentions that three days’ sail from the Scythian coast there is an island called ‘Balcia,’ of immense size. Pythias calls it ‘Basilia.’” This conflicts with the passage quoted above from Pliny, and here there must be a misunderstanding or confusion of some kind, either on the part of Pliny or of his authority. A possible explanation may be that Pytheas referred to his island of Abalus as a βασίλεια νῆσος, i.e., an island with a king [cf. Detlefsen, 1904, p. 18]. This would agree with the statement of Diodorus Siculus (1st century B.C.) [v. 23], which he gives without quoting any authority: “Just opposite Scythia, above Galatia [Gaul], an island lies in the ocean called ‘Basilia’; upon it amber is cast up by the waves, which is otherwise not found in any place on the earth.” It is probable that this is taken from Timæus and originally derived from Pytheas, and that the island is the same as Abalus. It is to be noticed that in Pytheas’s time the name Germania was not yet used; northern Europe, east of the Rhine, was counted as Scythia, whereas the name Germania was well known in the time of Diodorus.

Pytheas may also have heard of, or visited, a country or a large island (Jutland ?), which lay three days’ sail from the coast he was sailing along, and he may likewise have referred to it as a king’s island (βασίλεια). Timæus, or others, may have taken this for a name, both for Abalus and for this larger and more distant island, which has later been assumed to be the same as Balcia, a name that may be derived either from Pytheas or from some later writer.

As the Gutones resemble the Gytoni (Goths) of Tacitus, who lived on the Vistula, and as further Basilia and Balcia were the same country, the name of which was connected with that of the Baltic Sea, and as this country was identified with the south of Sweden, it was thought that Pytheas must have been in the amber country on the south coast of the Baltic, and even in Skåne. This view may appear to be supported by the fact that Strabo says he lied about the “Ostiæi,” who might then be the Esthonians. But as already remarked this word may be an error for “Ostimians”; and Gutones may further be an error for Teutones, since a carelessly written Τευ may easily be read as Γου [cf. Hergt, 1893, p. 33], and immediately afterwards it is stated that the Teutones (not Gutones) lived near Abalus. Whether Pytheas really mentioned “Balcia” or “Baltia” is, as already remarked, extremely doubtful; but even if he did so, and even if it lay in the Baltic, it is not certain that he was there, and he may only have been told about it. We need not therefore believe that he went farther than the coast of the North Sea. “Abalus” may have been Heligoland [cf. Hergt], or perhaps rather one of the islands of Sleswick,[72] where beach-washed amber is common, as along the whole west coast of Jutland. The statement that the natives used amber as fuel is a misunderstanding, which may be due to a discovery of Pytheas that amber was combustible. If he had really sailed past the Skaw and through the Belts into the Baltic, it is unlikely that he should only have mentioned one amber island Abalus, and another immense island farther off. We should expect him to have changed the ideas of his time about these regions to a greater extent than this. It is true that he might have travelled overland to the south coast of the Baltic; but neither is this very probable. It must nevertheless be borne in mind, as will be pointed out later, that until Strabo’s time no other voyages in these regions were known in literature, and it is, therefore, possible that much of what we find in Mela and Pliny on the subject was originally derived from Pytheas. If we did not possess this one chance passage in Pliny about Abalus and the amber, we should not know that Pytheas had said anything about it. But of how much more are we ignorant for want of similar casual quotations?

Importance of Pytheas

Little as we know of Pytheas himself, he yet appears to us as one of the most capable and undaunted explorers the world has seen. Besides being the first, of whom we have certain record, to sail along the coasts of northern Gaul and Germany, he was the discoverer of Great Britain, of the Scottish isles and Shetland, and last, but not least, of Thule or Norway, as far north as to the Arctic Circle. No other single traveller known to history has made such far-reaching and important discoveries.

But Pytheas was too far in advance of his time; his description of the new lands in the North was so pronouncedly antagonistic to current ideas that it won little acceptance throughout the whole succeeding period of antiquity. His younger contemporary, Dicæarchus, doubted him, and Polybius and Strabo, who came two hundred and three hundred years later, endeavoured, as we have seen, to throw suspicion upon Pytheas and to stamp him as an impostor. The two eminent geographers and astronomers, Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, seem to have valued him more according to his deserts. Polybius’s desire to lessen the fame of Pytheas may perhaps be explained by the fact that the former, a friend of Scipio, had taken part in many Roman campaigns, and claimed to be more widely travelled than any other geographer. But as his farthest north was the south of Gaul, he did not like the idea that an earlier traveller, who enjoyed great renown, should have penetrated so much farther into regions which were entirely unknown to himself. Men are not always above such littleness.

The World according to Strabo (K. Kretschmer, 1892)

CHAPTER III

ANTIQUITY, AFTER PYTHEAS

There was a long interval after the time of Pytheas before the world’s knowledge of the North was again added to, so far as we can judge from the literature that has come down to us. The mist in which for a moment he showed a ray of light settled down again. That no other known traveller can have penetrated into these northern regions during the next two or three centuries appears from the unwillingness of Polybius and Strabo to believe in Pytheas, and from the fact that Strabo pronounces him a liar [i. 63], because “all who have seen Britain and Ierne say nothing about Thule, though they mention other small islands near Britain”; furthermore, he says expressly [vii. 294] that “the region along the ocean beyond Albis [the Elbe] is entirely unknown to us. For neither do we know of any one among the ancients who made this voyage along the coast in the eastern regions to the opening of the Caspian Sea, nor have the Romans ever penetrated into the countries beyond Albis, nor has any one yet traversed them by land.” If any other traveller had been currently mentioned in literature it is incredible that the well-read Strabo should not have known it. He therefore ascribed all that he found about these regions to Pytheas.

There are nevertheless indications that the Greeks had commercial relations with the coasts of the Baltic and North Sea, and fresh obscure statements, which may be derived from such a connection, appear later in Pliny, and to some extent also in Mela. It may be supposed that enterprising Greek traders and seamen, enticed by Pytheas’s accounts of the amber country, attempted to follow in his track, and succeeded in reaching the land of promise whence this costly commodity came. And if they had once found out the way, they would certainly not have relinquished it except upon compulsion. But it must be remembered that the voyage was long, and that they had first to pass through the western Mediterranean and the Pillars of Hercules, where the Carthaginians had regained their power and obtained the command of the sea. The overland route was easier and safer; it ran through the country of tribes which in those distant times may have been comparatively peaceful. The trade communication between the Black Sea and the Baltic countries seems, as mentioned above, to have developed early, and it may be thought that the active Greek traders would try it in order to reach a district where so much profit was to be expected; but no certain indication of this communication can be produced from any older author of note after Pytheas’s time, so far as we know them, and even so late an author as Ptolemy has little to tell us of the regions east of the Vistula.

Eratosthenes, c. 200 B.C.

The founder of scientific geography, Eratosthenes (275-circa 194 B.C.),[73] librarian of the Museum of Alexandria, based what he says of the North chiefly on Pytheas. He divided the surface of the earth into climates (zones) and constructed the first map of the world, whereon an attempt was made to fix the position of the various places by lines of latitude and meridians. He started with seven known points, along the old meridian of Rhodes. They were: Thule, the Borysthenes, the Hellespont, Rhodes, Alexandria, Syene, and Meroe. Through these points he laid down lines of latitude (see the map). He also made an attempt to calculate the circumference of the globe by measurement, and found it 250,000 stadia (== 25,000 geographical miles), which is 34,000 stadia (== 3400 geographical miles) too much. He placed the island of Thule under the Arctic Circle,[74] far out in the sea to the north of Brettanice. This was to him the uttermost land and the northern limit of the “œcumene,” which he calculated to be 38,000 stadia (== 3800 geographical miles) broad,[75] which according to his measurement of the circumference of the earth is about 54° 17′, since each of his degrees of latitude will be about 700 stadia. His “œcumene” thus extended from the latitude of the Cinnamon Coast (Somaliland) and Taprobane (Ceylon), 8800 stadia north of the equator, to the Arctic Circle. South of it was uninhabitable on account of the heat, and north of it all was frozen.

Eratosthenes was especially an advocate of the island-form of the “œcumene,” and thought that it was entirely surrounded by the ocean, which had been encountered in every quarter where the utmost limits of the world had been reached. By a perversion of the journey of Patrocles to a voyage round India and the east coast of the continent into the Caspian Sea, he again represented the latter as an open bay of the northern ocean, in spite of the fact that Herodotus, and also Aristotle, had asserted that it was closed. The view that the Caspian Sea was a bay remained current until the time of Ptolemy. Eratosthenes also held that the occurrence of tides on all the outer coasts was a proof of the continuity of the ocean. He said that “if the great extent of the Atlantic Ocean did not make it impossible, we should be able to make the voyage from Iberia to India along the same latitude.” This was 1700 years before Columbus.

Reconstruction of Eratosthenes’ map of the world (K. Miller, 1898)

With the scientific investigator’s lack of respect for authorities, he had the audacity to doubt Homer’s geographical knowledge, and gave offence to many by saying that people would never discover where the islands of Æolus, Circe, and Calypso, described in the Odyssey, really were, until they had found the tailor who had made the bag of the winds for Æolus.

Hipparchus, 190-125 B.C.

Hipparchus (circa 190-125 B.C.) also relies upon Pytheas, and has nothing new to tell us of the northern regions. Against Eratosthenes’ proof of the continuity of the ocean, to which allusion has just been made, he objected that the tides are by no means uniform on all coasts, and in support of this assertion he referred to the Babylonian Seleucus.[76] But it is not clear whether Hipparchus was an opponent of the doctrine of the island-form of the “œcumene,” as has been generally supposed; probably he merely wished to point out that the evidence adduced by Eratosthenes was insufficient. Hipparchus calculated a continuous table of latitude, or climate-table, for the various known localities, as far north as Thule. He introduced the division into degrees. It is also probable that he was the first to use a kind of map-projection with the aid of converging meridians, which he drew in straight lines; but as he was more an astronomer than a geographer it is unlikely that he constructed any complete map of the world.

Terrestrial globe, according to Crates of Mallus (K. Kretschmer)

Polybius, 204-127 B.C.

Polybius (circa 204-127 B.C.), as we have seen, pronounced against the trustworthiness of Pytheas, and declared that all the country north of Narbo, the Alps, and the Tanais was unknown. Like Herodotus, he left the question open whether there was a continuous ocean on the north side; but he appears to have inclined to the old notion of the “œcumene” as circular.

Crates of Mallus, 150 B.C.

The Stoic and grammarian Crates of Mallus (about 150 B.C.), who was not a geographer, constructed the first terrestrial globe, in which he made the Atlantic Ocean extend like a belt round the world through both the poles, and with the Stoic’s worship of Homer he thought he could follow in this ocean Odysseus’s voyage to the regions of the Læstrygons’ long day and the Cimmerians’ polar night. Since the school of the Stoics considered it necessary that there should be ocean in the torrid zone, so that the sun might easily keep up its warmth by the aid of vapours from the sea—for warmth was supported by moisture—Crates placed a belt of ocean round the earth between the tropics, which formed the limits of the sun’s path. These two belts of water left four masses of land of which only one was known to men.

Posidonius, 135-51 B.C.

The physical geographer Posidonius of Apamea in Syria (135-51 B.C.), who lived for a long time at Rhodes, took the Rhipæan Mountains for the Alps, and speaks of the Hyperboreans to the north of them. He thought that the Ocean surrounded the “œcumene” continuously:

“for its waves were not confined by any fetters of land, but it stretched to infinity and nothing made its waters turbid.”

A ship sailing with an east wind from the Pillars of Hercules must reach India after traversing 70,000 stadia, which he thought was the half-circumference of the earth along the latitude of Rhodes. The greatest circumference he calculated at 180,000 stadia. These erroneous calculations were adopted by Ptolemy, and were afterwards of great significance to Columbus.

He made a journey as far as Gadir in order to see the outer Ocean for himself, to measure the tides and to examine the correctness of the generally accepted idea that the sun, on its setting in the western ocean, gave out a hissing sound like a red-hot body being dipped into water. He rightly connected the tides with the moon, finding that their monthly period corresponded with the full moon; whereas others had thought, for instance, that they were due to changes in the rivers of Gaul.

Cæsar, 55-45 B.C.

Cæsar’s Gallic War and his invasion of Britain (55-45 B.C.) contributed fresh information about these portions of Western Europe; but it cannot be seen that they gave anything new about the North. Cæsar describes Britain as a triangle. This is undoubtedly the same idea that we find in his contemporary Diodorus Siculus, and is derived from Pytheas. Cæsar merely gives different proportions between the sides from those of Diodorus. He puts Hibernia to the west of Britain, not to the north like Strabo, and makes its size about two-thirds of the latter, from which it is separated by a strait of about the same breadth as that between Gaul and Britain. Between Ireland (Hibernia) and Britain is an island, “Mona” (Anglesey), and scattered about it many other islands. In some of them there was said to be a month of unbroken night at the winter solstice; but of this Cæsar was unable to obtain certain information. This must be an echo of the tales about Thule, which he had got from older Greek or Roman authors.

Cæsar is a good example of the Romans’ views of and sense for geography. In spite of this military nation having extended their empire to the bounds of the unknown in every direction, they never produced a scientific geographer, nor did they send out anything that we should call a voyage of exploration, as the Phœnicians, Carthaginians, and Greeks had done. They were above all a practical people, with more sense for organisation than for research and science, and in addition they lacked commercial interests as compared with those other peoples. But during their long campaigns under the Empire, and by their extensive communications with the most distant regions, they brought together an abundance of geographical information hitherto unknown to the classical world. It is natural that it should have been a Greek who, in one of the most important geographical works that have come down to us from ancient times, endeavoured to collect a part of this information, together with the knowledge already acquired by the Greeks, into a systematic statement.

Strabo, Christian era

This man was the famous geographer Strabo, a native of Asia Minor (about 63 B.C.-25 A.D.). But unfortunately this critic has nothing to tell us about the North, and in his anxiety to avoid exaggeration he has, like Polybius, been at great pains to discredit Pytheas, of whose statements he will take no account; nor has he made use of the knowledge of the northernmost regions which we see, from Pliny among others, that other Greek authors possessed. He has not even made use of the geographical knowledge which was gained in his own time during the Roman campaign in Northern Germania under Augustus, if indeed he knew of it. To him the Ister (Danube), the mountainous districts of the Hercynian Forest, and the country as far as the Tyregetæ formed, roughly, the northern boundary of the known world. He thinks it is only ignorance of the more distant regions that has made people believe the fables “of the Rhipæan Mountains and the Hyperboreans, as well as all that Pytheas of Massalia has invented about the coast of the ocean, making use of his astronomical and mathematical knowledge as a cloak.” “Ierne” (Ireland) was placed by Strabo out in the ocean to the north of Britain. He took it for the most northern land, and thought that its latitude (which would have to be about 54° N.) formed the boundary of the “œcumene.”

“For,” he says [ii. 115], “living writers tell us of nothing beyond Ierne, which lies near to Britain on the north, and is inhabited by savages who live miserably on account of the cold.” He says further [iv. 201] of this island at the end of the world: “of this we have nothing certain to relate, except that its inhabitants are even more savage than the Britons, as they are both cannibals and omnivorous [or grass-eaters ?], and consider it commendable to devour their deceased parents,[77] as well as openly to have commerce not only with other women, but also with their own mothers and sisters. But this we relate perhaps without sufficient authority; although cannibalism at least is said to be a Scythian custom, and the Celts, the Iberians, and other peoples are reported to have practised it under the stress of a siege.”

Strabo evidently attributes to a cold climate a remarkable capacity for brutalising people, and he considers that the reports of the still more distant Thule must be even more uncertain.

The breadth of the “œcumene,” from north to south, he made only 30,000 stadia, and thought that Eratosthenes, deceived by the fables of Pytheas, had put the limit 8000 stadia (== 11° 26′) too far north. Of the countries beyond the Albis (Elbe), he says, nothing is known. Nevertheless he mentions the Cimbri as dwelling on a peninsula by the northern ocean; but he has no very clear idea of where this peninsula is.

No one can believe, he thinks [vii. 292], that the reason for their wandering and piratical life was that they were driven out of their peninsula [which must be Jutland] by a great inundation, for they still have the same country as before, and it is ridiculous to suppose that they left it in anger at a natural and constant phenomenon, which occurs twice daily [i.e., the tides], etc. But it appears from Strabo’s statements that there had been many reports of a great storm-flood in Denmark, which the Cimbri escaped from with difficulty.

Of the customs of these people Strabo relates among other things that they were accompanied on their expeditions by priestesses with gray hair, white clothes, and bare feet. “They went with drawn swords to meet the captives in the camp, crowned them with garlands and led them to a sacrificial vessel of metal, holding twenty amphoræ [Roman cubic feet]. Here they had a ladder, upon which one of them mounted and, bent over the vessel, they cut the throat of the prisoner, who was held up. They made auguries from the blood running into the vessel; while others opened the corpse and inspected the entrails, prophesying victory for their army. And in battle they beat skins stretched upon the wicker-work of their chariots, making a hideous noise.” This is one of the first descriptions of the customs of the warrior-hordes roving about Europe, who came in contact with the classical world from the unknown north, and who in later centuries were to come more frequently. But the description is certainly influenced by Greek ideas.

Strabo thought that besides the world known to the Greeks and Romans, other continents or worlds, where other races of men dwelt, might be discovered.

Albinovanus Pedo

In a work called “Suasoriæ” (circa 37 A.D.) of the Spanish-born rhetorician Seneca there are preserved fragments of a poem, written by Albinovanus Pedo (in the time of Augustus), which described an expedition of Germanicus in the North Sea. It has been thought that this may have been the younger Germanicus’s unfortunate campaign in 16 A.D., when he sailed out from the Ems with a fleet of a thousand ships. This supposition is strengthened by the fact that Tacitus mentions a cavalry leader, Albinovanus Pedo, under the same commander in 15 A.D., and it is easy to believe that he was the poet.[78] But as this unhappy fleet did not get far from the coast, and the poem describes a voyage into unknown regions, others have thought that it might be an expedition undertaken by Drusus, the elder Germanicus, in some year between 12 and 9 B.C.[79] How this may be is of less importance to us, as the poem does not mention any fresh discoveries. It is interesting because it gives us a picture of the ideas current at that time about the northern limits of the world. Where the fragments commence, the travellers have long ago left daylight and the sun behind them, and, having passed beyond the limits of the known world, plunge boldly into the forbidden darkness towards the end of the western world. There they believe that the sea, which beneath its sluggish (“pigris”) waves is full of hideous monsters, savage whales (“pistris”), and sea-hounds (“æquoreosque canes” == seals ?), rises and takes hold of the ship—the noise itself increases the horror—and now they think the ships will stick in the mud, and the fleet will remain there, deserted by the winds[80] of the ocean—now that they themselves will be left there helpless and be torn to pieces by the monsters of the deep. And the man who stands high in the prow strives with his eyes to break through the impenetrable air, but can see nothing, and relieves his oppression in the following words: “Whither are we being carried? The day itself flees from us, and uttermost nature closes in the deserted world with continual darkness. Or are we sailing towards people on the other side, who dwell under another heaven, and towards another unknown world?[81] The gods call us back and forbid the eyes of mortals to see the boundary of things. Why do we violate strange seas and sacred waters with our oars, disturbing the peaceful habitations of the gods?”

This last conception is clearly derived from the “Isles of the Blest” of the Greeks (originally of the Phœnicians), which were situated in the deep currents of Oceanus and are already referred to in Hesiod.

Seneca, on the other hand, says of the outer limits of the world: “Thus is nature, beyond all things is the ocean, beyond the ocean nothing” (“ita est rerum natura, post omnia oceanus, post oceanum nihil”), and Pliny speaks of the empty space (“inane”) that puts an end to the voyage beyond the ocean.

Augustus, 5 A.D.

In the year 5 A.D. the emperor Augustus, in connection with Tiberius’s expedition to the Elbe, sent a Roman fleet from the Rhine along the coast of Germania; it sailed northward by the land of the Cimbri (Jutland), past its northern extremity (the Skaw), probably into the Cattegat, and perhaps to the Danish islands. Augustus himself, in the Ancyra inscription, tells us of the voyage of this fleet, and says that it came “even to the people of the Cimbri, whither before that time no Roman had penetrated either by land or sea,[82] and the Cimbri and the Charydes (Harudes, Horder), and the Semnones, and other Germanic peoples in those districts sent ambassadors to ask for my friendship and that of the Roman people.”[83] Velleius [ii. 106] also gives an account of this voyage, and Pliny [ii. 167] gives the following description of it: “The Northern Ocean has also been in great part traversed; by the orders of the divine Augustus a fleet sailed round Germania to the Cimbrian Cape, and saw therefrom a sea that was immeasurable, or heard that it was so, and came to the Scythian region and to places that were stiff [with cold] from too much moisture. It is therefore very improbable that the seas can run short where there is such superfluity of moisture.” Müllenhoff thinks [iv., 1900, p. 45] that on this voyage they saw the Norwegian mountains, the immense “Mons Sævo” (see later under Pliny), rising out of the sea. This is not impossible, but we read nothing about it; nor indeed is it very probable. On the other hand, it is likely that the voyage resulted in fresh knowledge about the North, and that at any rate some of the statements in Mela and Pliny may be derived from this source.

Mela, c. 43 A.D.