58 BALCH— EVOLUTION AND MYSTERY 



Africa. They started from Egypt, went down the east coast of 

 Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and returned via the west 

 coast of Africa and the Straits of GibraUar. Their chronicler, 

 Herodotus, unfortunately gives them a very meager notice. Never- 

 theless theirs was the first historic voyage on the Atlantic Ocean and 

 the first recorded step leading to the discovery of America by the 

 peoples of Europe.^ 



The next attempts at exploration in the Atlantic of which we 

 have any record are the journeys of the Carthaginians Hanno and 

 Himilko. Hanno sailed from Carthage about 500 B.C., passed 

 through the Straits of Gibraltar and turned south along the African 

 coast. He reached a country where he found hairy men with some 

 of whom he had fights in which he killed three whose skins he 

 brought back to Carthage where they long hung in one of the 

 temples. These hairy men are by some writers surmised to have 

 been chimpanzees or gorillas. At about the same time as Hanno, 

 Himilko is said to have made a journey beyond the columns of 

 Hercules, to have turned north and to have reached a land where 

 there was much tin. This probably was Great Britain. The 

 Phoenicians, however, may have known more about the Atlantic than 

 has come down to us in any record, for it is said that coins from 

 Carthage and other towns in North Africa have been found on the 

 island of Corvo, the most westerly of the Azores. 



The fourth recorded journey of exploration in the Atlantic is the 

 voyage of Pytheas. A Greek, of Massilia (Marseilles), he sailed 

 through the Straits of Gibraltar about 350 B.C., turned north and 

 reached the shores of Britain. Along these he sailed far to the 

 north, until he arrived in a region where a sort of thickening of 

 the elements, which he said resembled a marine lung, filled all space. 

 It is surmised that he had reached the rains and fogs of northern 

 Scotland and perhaps of the Orkneys and Shetlands. a surmise the 

 more probable as he speaks of the sun dipping under the horizon for 

 only a short time. 



^ A few references are given with this paper in regard to facts only 

 lately brought into prominence. For the other facts mentioned, references 

 by the hundred may be found in Edouard Charton's " Voyageurs Anciens et 

 Modernes"; in Justin Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America": 

 and in the works of A. E. Nordenskjold and Henry Harrisse. 



