354 THE RENEWAL OF ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION. 



1)6 destinod to succeed or supplant us on the ocean ? That is a ([ues- 

 tion which this geiiei'ation must answer. 



The civilized nations at the birth of navij;ation were most probably 

 in the same pliase of development as the Pacific Islanders of the pres- 

 ent day. Yet it is a most remarkable fact that at the very dawn of 

 history we find a commercial people who were able to conduct voyages 

 which rival those of the fifteenth century. Long l)ef()re the oldest 

 Hebrew and Greek records, the Pheniciaus had settled all over the 

 Mediterranean; they were in the ^Egean fourteen — and at Gades on the 

 Atlantic eleven — centuries before the Christian era; they made long 

 voyages in the Erythra'an Sea or Indian Ocean, as well as on the 

 Atlantic beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Herodotus tells us that, 

 about six hundred years before Christ, Phenician sailors reported that, 

 in rounding Africa, to the south, they had the sun on their right hand. 

 "This, for p.iy i)art, " says Ileordotus, '-I do not believe; but others 

 may." This observation as to the position of the sun is however 

 good evidence that the expedition of Neclio really took place. At all 

 events this is the first hint to be found in literature of a visit to the 

 Southern Hemisphere, auvl we do not meet with any more definite and 

 satisfactory information till the time of the Kenaissance. 



For all practical purposes, the views of the later Greek philosoi)hers, 

 with reference to the figure and position of the earth, did not differ 

 from those of the modern geographer, exce])t in the dift'erence between 

 the geocentric and heliocentric stand[)(>ints. Eratosthenes estimated 

 the circumference of the earth at U5,000 niiles, a very renuirkable 

 approximation to the truth, and we find him speculating, eighteen 

 centuries before Columbus a id Magellan, on the possibility of circum- 

 navigating the globe. The ancients divided the surface of the earth 

 into five zones. The torrid zone was uninhabitable from heat; the two 

 frigid zones toward the poles were uninhabitable from cold, and in the 

 Southern Hemisphere there was a temperate zone similar to that of the 

 Northern Hemisphere in which the known world w as situated. Aris- 

 totle does not say that the soutliern temperate zone is inhabited, but 

 Strabo admits that there may be other worlds inhabited by a difierent 

 race of men. Poinponius Mela, who lived in the first century of our 

 era, speaks as an undoubted fact of the existence of the autochthones 

 inhabiting continental land in the Southern Hemisphere, although this 

 land was inaccessible owing to the heat of the intervening torrid zone. 

 Mela, held (like most of his predecessors) that the habitable world of 

 Europe, Asia, and Africa formed a single island surrounded by the all 

 encircling sea. Marinus of Tyre, who lived in the second century, 

 rejected this view, and returned to the less correct notion of IIipi)ar- 

 chus, who had maintained that the known continents were united to 

 other similar masses of laud still unknown, and that the Atlantic and 

 Indian Oceans were separated from each other, thus forming great 

 iuclosed seas, such as the Mediterranean. Ptolemy adopted the views 



