6 THE SEAS 



their accounts of floating seaweed it has been thought that 

 they may have been drifted by easterly winds as far west 

 across the Atlantic as the Sargasso Sea. 



But few of the Phoenician records have been preserved 

 and we have no maps showing what they imagined the 

 extent of the oceans to be. It seems that the Phoenicians 

 whose business lay on the sea were unwilling to part with 

 their knowledge and kept many of their trade routes secret. 

 Any knowledge handed on from them to the Greeks was 

 small and even that was vague. 



In the days of Homer it was thought that the world was 

 flat and that surrounding the Mediterranean was the land 

 of the few countries they knew, but outside the land flowed 

 an ever-running river which they called the ocean (Plate 4). 

 In the sixth century b.c. Pythagoras considered that the 

 earth was a sphere and in the fifth century Herodotus 

 recorded further advances in knowledge. He, however, 

 considered that the south and west of the then known 

 world were bounded by the ocean, but could say nothing 

 of the north and east (Plate 4). By the third century the 

 idea of parallels of longitude and latitude had been intro- 

 duced by Eratosthenes, and seventy years later Hipparchus 

 instituted a method of map projection. This ancient era 

 in map-making culminated in the description of the world by 

 Ptolemy in a.d. 150, who imagined that the Atlantic ocean 

 and Indian ocean were great enclosed seas, and that if one 

 sailed into the Atlantic from the westernmost point of land 

 the countries of the east would soon be reached (Plate 7). 



Thus we see that the world of these ancient civilizations 

 consisted of the lands to which they had access on foot 

 and a few countries separated only by short distances of 

 sea, and the two oceans, the Atlantic and Indian, that 

 bathed the shores of the known land. They bad no know* 

 ledge of the Pacific. 



