ANCIENT VOYAGES. 7 



their claims to the latter construction. 1 They were doubtless an accidental, and 

 not unnatural, though very felicitous stretch of a poet's fancy. 



Another remarkable passage is in the " Varia Historia" of Aelian, where Silenus 

 is represented as saying to Midas, King of Phrygia, that Europe, Asia, and Africa 

 are surrounded by the ocean ; and that beyond there is a great continent sustaining 

 huge animals, and men larger and longer lived than their own. There were, he 

 said, great states, various institutions and laws, unlike those of Phrygia, and the 

 land possessed an abundance of gold and silver, which the people regarded less 

 than the Phrygians did iron. 



To these ancient references to lands in the Atlantic, far removed from the Euro- 

 pean shores, may be added the story of the mythological Hesperides, which Lescar- 

 bot believed to be the Antilles of the Gulf of Mexico ; the island called Antilla, 

 mentioned by Aristotle as having been discovered by the Carthaginians ; the very 

 large island described by Diodorus Siculus as many days' sail from Africa, abounding 

 in mountains and navigable rivers, which the Carthaginians wished to conceal 

 from the rest of the world, as a place of retreat in case of misfortune to their city ; 

 and the story of Pomponius Mela of certain Indians being cast on the German coast, 

 who were given to Metellus Celer by the King of the Suevians. 2 Nor must the 

 tradition of the island of the Seven Cities be omitted, where, on the conquest of 

 Spain and Portugal by the Moors, seven bishops, and a multitude of followers, 

 escaping in ships, accidentally landed, concerning whom rumors reached Portugal 

 in the time of Prince Henry. 



There are records, bearing marks of authenticity, of voyages made by the com- 

 mercial inhabitants of the African shores of the Mediterranean, that are deemed to 

 indicate a degree of maritime skill and enterprise rendering possible a knowledge 

 on their part, not only of the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Azores, 

 but also of the Antilles, and even the continent of America ; and many theories of 

 the origin of population here have been based upon them which are adhered to by 

 various recent writers. 



The first in order of time is that, so celebrated, of Hanno, the Carthaginian, 

 many centuries before Christ, and related by himself in what is called " the Peri- 

 plus of Hanno." Efforts have been made to prove the Periplus a spurious produc- 

 tion ; but Robertson considers its authenticity established by unanswerable argu- 

 ments. 3 According to Pliny, Hanno sailed from the Straits of Gibraltar around 

 Africa to Arabia. Bougainville, Gosselin, and other commentators, have endeavored 

 to trace his course, step by step ; and the latter affirms that all the authorities, not- 



' Examen Critique, I. 162, el seq. ; Horsley's Sermons, II. 44. Yet Humboldt says:— 

 " When Strabo tells us that in the Atlantic Ocean, in that part of the northern hemisphere which is 

 not occupied by our habitable land, there may exist another habitable earth, or even many, above all in 

 the parallel of Thinne, which is that of the widest part of the continent of Europe and Asia, he prophesies, 

 that is to say he divines, as seems to me, the discovery of America, and the Isles of the South Sea." — 

 Humboldt, Examen Critique, I. 165. 



2 Aristotle De Mirabiles Auscultationes, Cap. 84, p. 836 ; Diodorus Siculus I>e Fabulosis Antiquo- 

 rum Gestis, Cap. 84, Lib. 6, p. 331 ; Humboldt, Exam. Critique, I. 130-131. 



3 Hist, of America, I., note to p. 13. 



