08 



commerce from Cadiz, (Gades,) concealing their course from every 

 one else, and when the Romans pursued a certain ship-captain, in 

 order to learn the ports of his commerce, the captain, from a jealous 

 policy, voluntarily ran his vessel on a shoal, thereby also drawing his 

 pursuers into the same destruction. He alone was saved from ship- 

 wreck, and he thereupon received, as a national reward for his services, 

 the full value of the cargo which he cast away. The Romans, however, 

 by trial, learned the secret of the navigation." A craft of conceal- 

 ment with which the Phoenicians are also charged by Polybius and 

 Pliny. 



Here then is not only the proof that the commerce of these seas 

 was exclusively confined to the Phoenicians, but also the touchstone 

 why- other countries were kept as much as possible in ignorance of 

 their discoveries; why Quintus Curtius describes them colonizing 

 ''lands unknown to all other nations;"*' why Tacitus talks of the 

 ports of Ireland as familiar to their merchants, yet not to the Romans, 

 to whom he admits Ireland and its people were then wholly unknown,-|- 

 and so completely was this monopoly effected, that until the days 

 of Agricola, the conquerors of the world were even ignorant that 

 Great Britain was an island, as we learn from the same autho- 

 rity. "This was the time," says he, in his Life of Agricola, "that 

 the Roman fleet, doubling the coast of this wholly unknown sea, 

 {novissimi maris,) first affirmed that Britain was an island, and at the 

 same time discovered and conquered islands hitherto unheard of, which 

 they call Orcades."+ And hence it is that Ptolemy himself, who at 

 the close of the first century not only described but delineated the 



• Ante, p. 25. -f " Ignotas ad id tempus gentes." — Taciti Vita Agricolse. 



X " Hanc Oram novissimi maris tunc primum Romana classis circumvecta insulam esse 

 Britanniam affirmavit, ac simul incognitas ad id tempus insulas, quas Orcadas vocant, invenit 

 domuitque."— Taciti Vita Agricolae, &c. See post, Geographic Notices in First Period. 



VOL. XVI. F 



