THE LOST ATLANTIS. 11511 
that in that remote era the eastern Mediterranean was a centre of maritime enterprise, such 
as had no equal among the nations of antiquity. Even in the decadence of Pheenicia, 
her maritime skill remained unmatched. Egypt and Palestine, under their greatest rulers, 
recognised her as mistress of the sea; and, as has been already noted, the circumnaviga- 
tion of Africa—which, when it was repeated in the fifteenth century, was considered an 
achievement fully equalling that of Columbus,——was accomplished by Phceenician mariners. 
Carthage inherited the enterprise of the mother country, but never equalled her achieve- 
ments. With the fall of Carthage, the Mediterranean became a mere Roman lake, over 
which the gallies of Rome sailed reluctantly with her armed hosts ; or coasting along 
shore, they “committed themselves to the sea, and loosed the rudder bands, and hoisted 
up the mainsail to the winds;” or again, “strake sail, and so were driven,” after the 
blundering fashion described in the voyage of St. Paul. To such a people, the memories 
of Punic exploration or Phcenician enterprise, or the vague legends of an Atlantis beyond 
the engirdling ocean, were equally unavailing. The narrow sea between Gaul and Britain 
was barrier enough to daunt the boldest of them from willingly encountering the dangers 
of an expedition to what seemed to them literally another world. 
Seeing then, that the first steps in navigation were taken in an age lying beyond all 
memory, and that the oldest traditions assign its origin to the remarkable people who 
figure alike in early sacred and profane history—in Joshua and Ezekiel, in Dius and 
Menander of Ephesus, in the Homeric poems and in later Greek writings—as unequalled 
in their enterprise on the sea, what impediments existed in B.C. 1400 or any earlier 
century, that did not still exist in A.D. 1400, to render intercourse between the eastern 
and the western hemisphere impossible ? America was no further off frcm Tarshish in 
the golden age of Tyre, than in that of Henry the Navigator. With the aid of literary 
memorials of the race of sea-rovers who carved out for themselves the Duchy of Nor- 
mandy from the domain of Charlemagne’s heir, and spoiled the Angles and Saxons in 
their island home, we glean sufficient evidence to place the fact beyond all doubt that. 
after discovering and colonising Iceland and Greenland, they made their way southward 
to Labrador, and so, some way along the American coast. How far south they actually 
explored the New England shores is matter for dispute, but that does not, in any degree, 
affect the present question. Certain it is that, about A.D. 1000, when St. Olaf was intro- 
ducing Christianity by a sufficiently high-handed process into the Norse fatherland, 
Leif, the son of Eric, the founder of the first Greenland colony, sailed from Ericsfiord, or 
other Greenland port, in quest of southern lands already reported as seen by Bjarni Herjulf- 
son, and did land on various parts of the North American coast. We know what the ships 
of those Norse rovers were: mere oared galleys, not larger than a good fishing smack, and 
far inferior to it in deck and rigging. For compass they had only the same old “ Pheenician 
star,” which, from the birth of navigation, had guided the mariners of the ancient world 
over the pathless deep. The track pursued by the Northmen, from Norway to Iceland, and 
so to Greeniand and the Labrador coast, was, doubtless, then as now, beset by fogs, so that 
“neither sun nor stars in many days appeared :” and they stood much more in need of 
compass than the sailors of the “Santa Maria,” the “ Pinta” and the “Nina,” the little fleet 
with which Columbus sailed from the Andalusian port of Palos, to his first discovered land 
of ‘“Guanahani,” variously identified among the islands of the American Archipelago. 
Yet, not withstanding all the advantages of a southern latitude, with its clearer skies, we 
